The Ten Thousand Doors of January(13)

Jane was watching him warily. “Don’t worry, he doesn’t bite,” I assured her. Well, he didn’t bite often, and the way I saw it the people he bit were probably secretly untrustworthy and had it coming to them. Mr. Locke did not find this argument compelling.

“Miss Irimu—” I began.

“Jane will suffice.”

“Miss Jane. Could I see my father’s letter?”

She considered me with clinical coolness, like a scientist evaluating a new species of fungus. “No.”

“Then could you tell me, uh, why he hired you? Please.”

“Julian cares very deeply for you. He does not wish you to be alone.” Several nasty things leapt to my lips, including Well, that’s news to me, but I kept them locked behind my teeth. Jane was still watching me with that fungus-identification expression. She added, “Your father also wishes you to be kept safe. I will ensure that you are.”

I surveyed the gentle green lawns of Locke’s estate and the placid grayness of Lake Champlain. “Uh-huh.”

I was trying to think of a polite way to say My father’s gone mad, and you should probably leave, when Bad stretched toward her, sniffing with an appraising, to-bite-or-not-to-bite expression. He considered briefly, then bucked his head against her hand in a shameless request for ear scratches.

Dogs, of course, are infinitely better judges of character than people. “Uh. Welcome to Locke House, Miss Jane. I hope you like it here.”

She bowed her head. “I’m sure I shall.”

But for the first several weeks Jane spent at Locke House, she gave no sign of liking it—or me—very much at all.

She spent her days in near-silence, prowling from room to room like something caged. She regarded me with stony resignation and occasionally picked up one of my discarded copies of The Strand Mystery Magazine or The Cavalier: Weekly Stories of Daring Adventure! with a dubious expression. She reminded me of one of those Greek heroes doomed to some endless task, like drinking from a disappearing river or rolling a stone up a mountain.

My early attempts at conversation were blighted, abortive things. I asked politely about her past and received clipped answers that discouraged further inquiry. I knew she was born in the central highlands of British East Africa in 1873, except that it wasn’t called British East Africa then; I knew she spent six years in the Gospel Society Mission School at Nairu, where she learned the queen’s English and wore the queen’s cotton and prayed to the queen’s God. Then she found herself in “considerable difficulty” and took the employment opportunity my father offered her.

“Ah. Well,” I said with pained cheeriness, “at least it’s not so hot here! Compared to Africa, I mean.”

Jane did not respond immediately, staring out the study window at the greenish-gold lake. “Where I was born, there was frost on the ground every morning,” she answered softly, and the conversation died a merciful death.

I don’t think I saw her smile a single time until Mr. Locke’s annual Society party.

The Society party was identical every year, with slight updates in fashion: eighty of Mr. Locke’s wealthiest collector friends and their wives would jam themselves into the downstairs parlors and gardens and laugh overloudly at each other’s witticisms; hundreds of cocktails would be transmuted into ether-scented sweat, ascending on cigarette-smoke spirals to hang above us in a heady fug; eventually all the official Society members would slink off to the smoking room and stink up the entire first floor with cigars. Sometimes I pretended to myself it was a grand birthday party for me, because it was almost always within a few days, but it’s hard to pretend it’s your party when drunken guests keep mistaking you for a serving girl and asking for more sherry or scotch.

My dress that year was a shapeless froth of pink ribbons and frills that made me look like a rather sulky cupcake. I have proof, unfortunately—that was the year Mr. Locke hired a photographer as a special treat. In the picture I am stiff and vaguely hunted-looking, with my hair so brutally pinned I might be bald. One of my hands is wrapped around Bad’s shoulders, and it is unclear whether I am clinging to him for strength or restraining him from eating the photographer. At Christmas Mr. Locke presented a small framed print to my father, perhaps in the charming belief that he’d take it with him on his travels. My father had held it in his hands, frowning, and said, “You do not look like yourself. You do not look like… her.” Like my mother, I assumed.

I found the picture facedown in a drawer of his writing desk a few months later.

Even in that wedding cake of a dress, and even with Bad and Jane standing on either side of me like glum sentinels, it wasn’t hard to disappear at the Society party. Most people regarded me as either a vague curiosity—having heard the rumors from Locke that I was the daughter of a Boer diamond miner and his Hottentot wife, or the heiress to an Indian fortune—or an overdressed servant, and neither group paid me much attention. I was glad, especially since I’d seen that slinky red-haired fellow, Mr. Bartholomew Ilvane, creeping along the edges of the crowd. I pressed my back to the wallpaper and wished, briefly and uselessly, that Samuel were there with me, whispering a story about a ball and a magic spell and a princess who would turn back into a serving girl at the stroke of midnight.

Mr. Locke was greeting each guest in a jovial, slightly accented boom; he’d gone to school somewhere in Britain as a young man, and liquor tended to burr his r’s and slant his vowels. “Ah, Mr. Havemeyer! Thrilled you could make it, just thrilled. You’ve met my ward, January, haven’t you?” Locke gestured at me, his favorite jade glass sloshing scotch over the rim.