Filaria - Brent Hayward [34]
Amber suns’ light, alive with spiralling dustmotes, fell to lie across her, the worn flags of the floor, and across the dozing cat (who had never been named, twitching now, in her sleep, mewling softly, and batting her forepaws), before ending in a sunny oblong at the feet of a decorative but hopelessly tarnished suit of armour.
For the cat, constructed a mere few months ago, this day was like most others so far in its easy life: languid, pleasant, and warm. But for Miranda and her sisters, events were far from pleasant. “What could have happened?” This, asked for perhaps the tenth time since she had been standing by the window, crying steadily. Her sobs, at least, had subsided for the moment. Her breathing, though, remained ragged and audible, her voice breaking. “What could possibly have happened?”
Reclined uneasily on the red velvet divan, not as frightened as she had been earlier, yet still upset, Deidre rocked her head from side to side and did not answer; she had no theories to offer. She kept thinking about the gram she’d seen in her sanctum and could not help wondering if, by witnessing it, she had somehow precipitated the present situation.
Her two older sisters sat back to back on the harpsichord bench. Unconcerned, as always, with problems of people other than themselves, they did not seem afraid in the least. To them, this recent confinement was just another inconvenience, another injustice. Voluminia and Estelle were always angry and bored. Fun, for them, was to loiter with the stable hands, smoking cheroots, cussing and spitting. Deidre had spied on her sisters as they did these things (and a few other unmentionable ones) but had not yet told their father: the information was her trump card. If the Orchard Keeper knew about the indiscretions of his two eldest daughters, he would dismiss the hands forthright, banish them from the estate. Or have them beaten. Or locked in a cell.
Neither girl offered Miranda a compassionate response: Estelle mimicked a crying face, knuckles to her eyes, while Voluminia sneered and pouted and said, “Boo friggin hoo.”
The answer, of sorts, to Miranda’s query did come, but supplied by Lady, which surprised all four sisters, since Lady seldom spoke — certainly not without first being addressed. Deidre had even forgotten, momentarily, that the servant was in the room. Yet, standing in the shadows at the wooden door, and wringing her huge hands together, Lady offered her response in a voice that sounded like gravel rolling down a sloped rooftop: “The Orchard Keeper,” she said, “shall disclose in due time.”
The girls had turned, a uniformity of grace and motion, the only hint so far this afternoon that they were born into the same family: physically, the sisters looked in no way alike.
“What would you know, Lady?” Voluminia sneered, one dark eyebrow cocked, an expression of disdain she practised often. “And what kind of ominous crap is that, anyhow? Shall disclose in due time? You’re nothing but one of his trained idiots. A homemade monkey.”
“True,” Lady answered. When the servant moved forward, a thin column of suns’ light caught her profile, making her prominent brow even more of a dark cliff and casting deep shadows under her eyes. Impossible to read her expression, if she were hurt by the comment or not. “That may be true,” Lady repeated slowly, “but I do know about Orchard Keepers. And I know about children.”
Voluminia scowled.
But then Lady smiled — a mouthful of jumbled teeth, large and yellow — as surprising as her cryptic answer.
Deidre never liked the tone her eldest sisters used when speaking with servants. Lady had been Deidre’s wetnurse, her nanny, her only companion for the first ten years of life. Like most staff of Elegia, Lady was a