The Staff

Lena's POV

Mara came at noon precisely.

I heard her before I saw her-a gentle rap at the door, unhurried, and then a small, compact woman in her mid-fifties with hair like a silver-streaked bird’s nest pulled back from her face and the sort of calm competence in her movements that signaled she had been doing whatever this was for a long time.

She was carrying a tray: soup, bread, a tiny teapot. She placed it on the writing desk without fuss, straightened once, and looked at me.

Her eyes were warm, and that more than anything else that had happened to me since arriving had surprised me.

"You must be Lena," she said.

"That's me."

She nodded, as though verifying something she had already known. "I'm Mara. I keep the house." She said it simply, with no art to it, no pride. Fact.

"He mentioned you."

"He mentions very little." She drew the chair away from the desk and nudged it toward me with her toe, as though for an unwilling child. "Sit down. Eat while it's warm."

I sat, because I was genuinely hungry, and because Mara expected it. The soup was good-thick, seasoned properly, the kind of soup that tasted like someone had paid it careful attention. I ate for a minute or two, Mara moving about the room without being a presence or a hindrance, smoothing curtains, examining a hook on the wardrobe.

"Did you make this?" I asked.

"Yes."

"It's very good."

She glanced at me over her shoulder. "You sound as though you were expecting it to be less good."

"I didn't know what to expect."

She made a small noise, something like a sigh of understanding. "Nothing here is really what you expect. It will get less startling." She walked toward the wardrobe again.

I watched the surety in her hands. "How long have you been here?"

"A long time," she said. And after a beat of silence, "Eleven years."

Eleven years. I tried to envision eleven years inside these walls and felt the soup churn in my stomach.

"Do you ever leave?"

"When it is necessary." She shut the wardrobe door and looked at me properly then, her hands loose at her sides. There was an appraisal in her eyes, not unkind but critical, the look of someone who knew better than to trust anyone until they had seen them for herself. "You will have questions," she said. "Many of them. I will answer all I can."

"And the others?"

"Those you will have to answer for yourself." She turned and moved to the door. "Finish your meal. This afternoon I will show you which rooms you are permitted to enter. It is preferable to know the house to discovering it inadvertently."

She said the last sentence with a warning in it, like all sentences should.

"What happens if you discover it inadvertently?"

Mara stopped at the door, her hand on the frame. Her expression was one of careful consideration; I knew Mara had learned that very few people deserved more than one or two well-chosen words. "You open a door you should not have, and then spend the rest of the day wishing you had not."

She left before I could ask any further questions.

The afternoon tour was thorough and silent.

Mara moved through the mansion like someone who owned every aspect of it, a silent ghost with keys. She showed me the sitting room off the hall-large and comfortable, a fireplace and bookshelves, a pair of tall, bright south-facing windows. She showed me the dining room, formal and too large for one person and then another informal dining room adjacent to the kitchen, a room that actually felt human.

The kitchen was large, well-stocked, and warm. Two other people moved about-a young man chopping vegetables on the counter and a woman wiping down the stovetop. They looked up as Mara and I entered.

Mara introduced us plainly. "This is Lena. She will be in the house." There was no further explanation. No one inquired further.

The young man gave a quick nod. "Eli. I am Eli." He looked about twenty-two, and his eyes were intelligent but cautious.

The woman at the stove offered a small, neutral smile. "Rosa."

I said hello to both of them and felt the unnerving strangeness of being integrated into the household without knowing what it was that I was a part of. Both Eli and Rosa were wary, the way anyone is toward a new and unasked-for element in their established world. I recognized the look in Eli's eyes; he was taking me in, processing me, filing me away for future reference. Rosa was simply contained; contained like someone who did not have the luxury of asking questions or expressing curiosities.

And I understood their responses. I was a curiosity to them; another disruption in a place where disruption was usually a harbinger of bad things.

The library was the last room Mara showed me.

It was upstairs, at the end of a long, shadowed corridor lined with the black-and-white photographs-landscapes, all of them, none personal. The library door itself was heavy, dark wood, and it swung inward with an unnervingly smooth, silent movement on well-oiled hinges.

The air changed the instant I stepped through the door. It was dry and musty and smelled of paper and old leather, and something about it made my shoulders relax. Floor-to-ceiling, wall after wall filled with books, hundreds and hundreds of them, or perhaps thousands. Fiction on one side, reference and history and science on the other. A long, dark reading table with two brass lamps and a window seat facing the front lawn.

"You are free to use this room at any time," Mara said, her voice hushed as though she was respecting the quiet.

I ran my fingers along a spine. "Does he read?"

A beat of silence before she said, "Yes."

There was something in Mara's face when she said it, something complicated that wasn’t affection. It was understanding, and resignation, and perhaps something like weary acknowledgment. It was the look you give something you understand implicitly but could never articulate in human language.

"Mara," I said, choosing my words carefully. "What kind of man is he?"

The silence was longer this time, but when she finally answered, she didn’t look at me. She walked across the room and adjusted a volume that didn't need adjusting on the shelf. "He is a man who built a very large wall around himself and then was genuinely surprised when no one could get through it."

She turned and met my gaze again, her eyes steady and knowing. " I would keep that in mind."

It wasn’t an answer. But it was something-something like a map, however small and inadequate.

I turned back to the bookshelves.

And for the first time since the great iron gate had clanged shut behind me, something else, something other than dread, began to fill the space in my chest.

It wasn't hope, not exactly.

It was something smaller.

Something else.