Ruling with a New Frame novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The House Is a Court

Back home under guard, Linnet reads the house like a court, wins Felix, and finds her grandfather behind a locked door staring at nothing.

We came home on the third day, and my grandmother was waiting in the front hall.

She had not moved the whole time.

That was how it looked to me.

She stood on the black-and-white tiles with her hands folded and the keys of the house hanging from a ring on her belt.

My father stood beside me with his hand on my shoulder.

His fingers shook.

"You will have to stay under this roof until the Founders' Dinner," Marguerite said. "The trust does not allow otherwise."

She said it.

I filed it away.

"The child will keep the Rules," she went on. "She will eat after the household. She will speak when asked."

"She has pneumonia, Mother," my father said. "She's on antibiotics."

"Then she can take them quietly."

I looked past her at the wall.

Beside the staircase hung six framed rules on yellowed paper, in a hand so old the letters leaned.

The sixth frame was thicker than the others, and it hung a little crooked.

I had walked past them every day of the child's short life without understanding why they made my chest ache.

Now I stood in the hall and understood what I was looking at.

I could read the first line, and I could read the second.

My mouth was already saying the third before my eyes reached it.

"A child speaks when she is asked," I said softly, "and answers in as few words as truth allows."

My grandmother's head turned.

"You have never been able to read that frame," she said. "It is in the old script."

I closed my mouth.

Careless, I told myself.

This body is six, and you are the only one who has ever read that hand.

"Felix read it to me," I said. "He's clever."

She looked at me for a long moment.

I looked back with the flat, innocent stare of a very small girl.

At last she turned and walked away, and her keys rang down the corridor.

My father let out his breath.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'll talk to her. I'll try."

I didn't answer.

A man who tries is not yet a man who does.

Felix found me an hour later in the small room at the top of the back stairs.

It had been mine since my mother died, and it had a single bed and a window that faced the lake.

He closed the door behind him.

"Your lips are pink again," he said. "I thought you were going to die."

"I did," I said. "A little."

He stared at me through his taped glasses.

"You talk different."

"I'm tired."

"No, you talk like a teacher. Or a judge."

I considered the boy.

He was ten, and he had carried bread down a dark stair for three nights against his own mother's orders.

I did not need to be a court spy to know what that was worth.

"Felix," I said. "Tell me about the house. Who holds the keys?"

He blinked.

"Grandma Marguerite. And the housekeeper has a set."

"The housekeeper?"

"Yes, she's nice. She leaves the pantry open."

"Who goes where, at what hour?"

He sat on the end of my bed and began to talk.

It was a pleasure to listen.

Marguerite breakfasted at six and walked the grounds at seven and again at three.

Joanna slept until nine and took her own tray.

My father left for the mill office at eight and came home at six.

The doctor came on Tuesdays and Fridays.

"And Grandpa's room?" Felix said, lowering his voice. "On the east side. It's always locked."

"Mom says he's very sick, and we're not supposed to go near."

I felt something go quiet inside me.

"Grandpa Alistair," I said.

The child's memory showed me a big man with white hair who used to carry her on his shoulders through the orchard.

"He used to sing," I said. "He doesn't, anymore."

"He doesn't do anything anymore," said Felix.

"Where is the key?"

"I don't know."

I stood up from the bed.

I had been a ruler for thirty-one years, and the first law of rule is that the person who holds the sickroom holds the house.

A house that locks up its master has a reason.

At three that afternoon a quiet knock came at my door.

The woman outside was round and gray-haired in a plain apron, with flour on her sleeve.

She put a finger to her lips, took my hand, and led me along the east corridor without a sound.

At the last door she pulled a key from her apron and turned it in the lock.

"Ten minutes," whispered the housekeeper. "She walks the garden at three, and the doctor is not due until Friday."

She opened the door a hand's width and let me slip through.

The room was warm and smelled of stale tea.

A man sat in a wing chair by the window, with a blanket over his knees.

His white hair had grown long.

His hands lay palm-up on the arms of the chair, loose as dropped gloves.

I walked around in front of him and looked up into his face.

His eyes were open.

The pupils had shrunk to black pinpricks, as small as seeds.

He did not see me at all.

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