Gilded Cage Read online

  ‘Might that be true?’ Abi said, unsure whether or not this was dangerous territory, but too curious not to ask. ‘And could a difficult birth be the answer for you, too?’

  Jenner smiled again, but still didn’t look at her.

  ‘Mother pushed me out in about five minutes flat, if that’s what you’re asking. Apparently Gavar was an enormous baby, so Sil and I came into the world very easily.’ He pulled a face. ‘I’ve never felt the need for more information on that.

  ‘The funny thing is, no one noticed at first – about me, I mean. Some babies show their Skill very early. Silyen apparently set the nursery curtains on fire when he was just a few days old. And Nanny was constantly finding birds perched on his crib singing to him. They had to watch him every minute. But it’s also perfectly normal for there to be no strong showing until the age of four or five.

  ‘Mother swears I did a few things that resembled Skill, but they must have just been accidents, because by my fourth birthday – nothing. Nor by my fifth. Nor my sixth. Apparently, though I don’t remember this, I then announced that I wasn’t going to have any more birthdays. I must have understood that each one was an important milestone that I kept missing.’

  He had finished fussing with the box. The painting had been swaddled, the lid closed, the tape secured. Jenner’s hands rested on top of the box, curled around nothing. He lifted his eyes. They were suspiciously bright.

  ‘The wall still recognizes me, because I have the family blood. The gate appears for me, but I can’t open it. It’s the same for little Libby. When I was younger, there was even some hoo-ha about whether I was my father’s son. As if that could ever be doubted.’

  Jenner pushed his fingers through his hair, the exact same colour as his father’s. Tugged, as if he wanted to tear a bit out and show her, as proof of his parentage.

  ‘Anyway, I know you’ve wondered about it all. I’ve seen it in your face. So now you know. No great mystery.’ He forced a smile. ‘In my own way, I’m even more remarkable than Silyen.’

  Abi felt like her heart had been replaced with one that was several sizes too big for her chest. She took a step closer.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ she told him. ‘Remarkable. Amazing.’

  ‘Amazing?’

  She touched his cheek, feeling guiltily grateful he didn’t have Skill. If he did, he would surely blast her through the bookcases for her impertinence. But he didn’t move, only raised his own fingers to cover hers, as if to confirm that her gesture was real.

  Then Abi practically slapped him as she recoiled at the sound of the library door opening.

  The box was knocked off the table and Jenner bent to pick it up. That left Abi, cheeks flaming like the Parva salamander, to face whoever had interrupted them.

  It could have been worse – but it could have been a lot better. Lady Thalia was walking towards them, the hem of her silken housecoat swinging, while in the doorway waited Lady Hypatia Vernay.

  As Lady Thalia cooed at her son over how smoothly the deep clean was progressing, the older woman stared flintily at Abi. She extended her arm and, with a sinking feeling, Abi saw that the elderly Equal’s leather-gloved claw held the end of a leash.

  ‘Girl, take this animal to the kennels,’ she commanded. And when Abi hesitated, ‘Now.’

  Abi didn’t dare look at Jenner, merely bobbed a curtsey. Keeping her head down, she went to take the leash. The dog-man lay on the carpet in the corridor outside. Abi stepped out and heard the door close firmly behind her.

  She’d seen Lady Hypatia’s hound several times since that first day, but only ever from a distance. Being confronted with him like this almost froze her with shock.

  He was crouched awkwardly, his back forced lower than would be natural for a human on all fours, as if trying to replicate the gait of a dog. His torso was emaciated, and though his legs and arms were sinewy, the muscles looked all wrong. He was entirely naked, coarse dark hair covering much of his legs, buttocks and lower back. The hair on his head was thin and flowed down his neck in a greasy pelt. His age was entirely unguessable.

  ‘Hello,’ Abi tried, when her voice was back under control. ‘What’s your name?’

  The man whined and trembled. If he really had been a dog, his ears would have been pressed flat to his skull, his tail between his legs.

  ‘No? How long have you been like this? Why?’

  His hands pattered against the carpet, the nails snagging audibly. He ducked his head and slung back his haunches, just like a dog in distress.

  ‘Can you even speak? What have they done to you?’ Abi’s mouth went dry with horror.

  The whining came again, louder and more urgent, almost gulping. The last thing Abi wanted was to be caught like that, as if she were the one tormenting the man. Fright made her do what reason would not and she tugged on the leash.

  ‘Come on, then. Let’s get you to the kennels.’

  They crossed the Solar, and Abi sensed the other slaves’ heads turning to stare. She stopped by Kyneston’s great front door. Even though it was closed, icy air leaked over the threshold, and she knew that outside frost lay thick on the ground. Surely the man would catch his death of cold?

  She stood uncertainly, until the dog-man himself scrabbled against the door, as if begging to be let out. It hardly seemed possible, but maybe he preferred being in the kennels to the treatment he received at Lady Hypatia’s hands.

  The frost hadn’t lifted and the cold was smothering as Abi stepped outside. When she looked back the house was already hidden by fog, which lay over it like a giant white dust sheet. Even sounds were muted. She and Hypatia’s hound could have been the last things alive.

  Unnerved, Abi hurried in the direction that she thought the stables lay. The temperature wasn’t much above zero, and the man was already shivering so violently that the leash was jerking in her hand. She looked at the leather loop with revulsion. What if she just dropped it? Let him disappear and report that she’d lost him in the mist.

  Except how would he escape? The wall was still there, the gate perpetually hidden without a Jardine to summon it.

  Relief thawed her when they reached the cluster of outbuildings. Crossing the cobbled yard, Abi entered the long, low kennels set at an angle to the stables. It was warmer in here, and the smell of dogs was overpowering.

  A figure appeared from the gloom: the Master of Hounds. He came forward to meet her with no trace of welcome.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t Miss Bossyboots,’ he said, sneering. He saw the dog-man. ‘Lady Hypatia’s back, then.’

  Abi held out the leash, but the man made no move to take it.

  ‘Put it in twenty. I keep it separate on account of the noise it makes.’

  Number twenty was a metal pen, one of four in a dilapidated section of the kennels that appeared otherwise unused. It had a mesh roof and a barred door that bolted on the outside. Inside, dirty straw thinly covered the concrete floor.

  Abi’s hand hesitated over the collar, then she unclipped the lead and the dog-man slunk into the enclosure. He curled up on the straw and buried his head against his naked chest. The soles of his feet were cracked and filthy, and his skin was red and raw from the frosty walk.

  The kennel-master came back with a couple of metal dishes, one containing water, the other a mixture of dry biscuits and a pinkish-brown jelly. Dog food. He put them both down and slid them into the pen with the tip of his boot, before dragging the door shut and shooting the bolt.

  ‘Have you got the leash?’ Abi handed it over, and he hung it on a nail. ‘Can’t leave it with that, who knows what it’d try, eh? Not that I’d blame it, being the dog of a bitch like Hypatia.’

  He spat expressively over the pen. Its occupant was now drinking the water, not lifting the bowl with his hands, but crouched over it slurping as a real dog would. The Master of Hounds saw Abi watching.

  ‘You never seen Lord Crovan’s handiwork before, eh? Lord Jardine reckons the man could teach even me something about brea
king in animals.’

  He laughed unpleasantly and Abi couldn’t hide her disgust.

  ‘Oh, don’t you go looking like that, young lady. This one was Condemned, and rightly so. His mistress may be cruel, but he deserved it.’

  With a final rattle of the cage door to make sure it was secure, the kennel-master threaded a padlock through the bolt and clicked it shut. He took a ring of keys from his pocket, flicked to a small aluminium one which he unpeeled and dropped into Abi’s palm. Then he sauntered off, whistling. As he disappeared round the corner, the foxhound pack started up barking and whining at the return of their king.

  Abi looked at the key, reluctant even to close her fingers around it. She didn’t want to be this creature’s keeper – this man’s, she corrected herself. She would take the key back to the house and deliver it to Lady Hypatia. Let her do with it what she would.

  Maybe the old woman would still be in the library. Maybe Jenner would be, too.

  Abi gratefully let her mind fill back up with thoughts of the Skilless Jardine son. What he had shown her and what it meant. What had passed between them earlier. What might have happened, had they not been interrupted.

  So when the hand seized her ankle, she screamed. The fingers were ice-cold and bone-thin, but strong. Much stronger then she had imagined.

  ‘Shhh . . .’

  The sound was almost unrecognizable as a human voice. If wolves could speak, they’d sound like this after a night of howling. It made the hairs on the back of Abi’s neck prickle up. The grip on her ankle tightened, and sharp nails pierced her sock through to her skin.

  The voice rasped again.

  ‘Help me.’

  10

  Euterpe

  He’d told her his name was Silyen.

  Euterpe couldn’t say for sure how long he’d been visiting her here at Orpen. But he’d been just a boy when he came for the first time.

  On that day she had been sitting in a deckchair in the sunshine, looking around for Puck, who must have scampered off after rabbits again. She heard the soft sound of a violin playing somewhere nearby. It seemed like ages since she’d last seen anyone, so she had called out to the musician, inviting him into the garden. A short while later a dark-haired young boy appeared between the rose bushes, and when she gave him a wave he followed the box-hedged path to where she sat.

  He’d stood there looking at her with some astonishment – and she was no less surprised by him. He was aged about ten, and his resemblance to her and Thalia was startling. It was almost like seeing a male version of herself. For a fleeting, confused instant, Euterpe wondered if this child was her brother. But how could you have a brother and not know it?

  A dull throbbing started up at the base of her skull – she must have been sitting in the sun too long without her hat. But she forgot her discomfort when the strange boy’s glance flicked past her to the house behind. His face lit up with wonder.

  ‘Is that Orpen?’ he’d asked. ‘Orpen Mote?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t you know it?’

  She turned to follow his gaze towards her beloved home. The sky was blue today and the moat was less water than mirror, holding a perfect reflection of the house. Orpen’s lower parts, vanishing into the water, were solid stone; the upper half was plastered and timbered. Small leaded windows were inset here and there, in a crooked line. Sometimes they were stacked up over two storeys, sometimes three. The great octuplet chimney, eight flues all in a row, loomed over the North Range. However, there was no smoke pluming from them today. In fact, the whole place was uncharacteristically tranquil.

  ‘But Orpen is lost,’ the boy said, seeming reluctant to look away. ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘Lost?’ she said, puzzled. ‘Well, you appear to have found it well enough. Did someone let you in through the gate?’

  ‘You did,’ the child said, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Silyen – Silyen Jardine. And you’re Euterpe Parva. But you’re younger.’

  ‘Younger? I’m twenty-four, which makes me quite a bit older than you,’ Euterpe told him. He really was a peculiar child.

  The boy – Silyen – scowled and looked like he wanted to correct her, so she quickly took the offered hand and shook it. It was small and fine-boned but his grip was firm, and she felt the rasp of calluses from his violin bow.

  ‘You’re a Jardine?’ she asked. ‘We are to be relatives, then. My sister Thalia is engaged to marry Whittam, Lord Garwode’s heir.’

  Whittam was a beast and Garwode a bully, Euterpe thought privately, but she wasn’t going to share that opinion with her Jardine visitor.

  ‘They’re not married yet?’ Silyen asked. He appeared disconcerted to hear it, though he recovered his composure quickly. He waved his hand, dismissive of weddings as only a young boy could be. ‘It doesn’t matter. We are relatives already.’

  And Euterpe supposed that was the truth. The Jardines and the Parvas had been connected for hundreds of years, through Cadmus Parva-Jardine himself, and his father Lycus the Regicide. Both men had lived here at the Mote, and their likenesses still hung on the walls. Their faces were as familiar to Euterpe as those of her own sister and parents. In fact, Silyen bore a more than passing resemblance to them – much more so than to his actual family, the red-haired, green-eyed Jardines.

  ‘Would you like to see the house?’ she asked the boy. ‘I think you’d like some of the portraits.’

  His smile, unexpectedly, was just as impish as her sister’s.

  Silyen had been wide-eyed as they’d walked through the house, and had run his hands over everything. He’d rapped his knuckles on the armour in the hall, and picked at threads in the corridor tapestries until she’d told him off. He’d even stopped to smell the flowers she’d had cut that morning and placed in a vase in the dining room. He was clearly a clever child, and she thought she knew what room he’d like most.

  When she opened the nailed-oak doors to the library the boy had actually run in. He stood there spinning in a circle, face upturned with delight, bathed in the muted sunshine that filtered through the protective blinds. He’d gone round the room taking books from the shelves and opening them, holding them carefully by the spine. He’d turn a few pages, before replacing a book and moving on to another.

  She wasn’t surprised when Silyen Jardine had come to visit her many times, after that first occasion. She read to him from beloved books, like Tales of the King. They would walk around the garden and grounds together, and Euterpe would point out plants or interesting bits of architecture. Silyen particularly liked hearing stories of her childhood, and the scrapes she was led into by her bold younger sister.

  ‘Tell me about how you and Thalia would go skating,’ he’d beg.

  So she’d tell again the story of their favourite pastime: midsummer ice-skating. How Thalia would appear at Euterpe’s bedroom door on the hottest days of the year, holding two pairs of bladed white boots, and would drag her downstairs past their amused parents and out to the moat. There, Thalia would anchor her sister, while Euterpe leaned out from the bank and dabbled her fingers into the water. A few tingling moments later it would be frozen down to its bed like thick green glass, and the girls would lace on their skates and spend the August day swooping up and down on the cooling ice.

  As Silyen continued to visit, though, he stopped asking for these childish recollections. Euterpe noticed physical changes in him, too. He grew taller. During several visits his voice squeaked, then one day he spoke to her in a man’s tones.

  Time must be passing, and Euterpe sometimes wondered how it was that so little had happened in her own life. Her sister’s marriage hadn’t yet taken place, nor did her own wedding to darling Winterbourne get any closer.

  She never saw anyone to ask them why that was, though. And whenever she tried to work things out herself, it all became more confused, not less. An ache would swell at the back of her head. It was simpler just to sit and enjoy the breeze, watching the butterflies and wondering where on earth naughty Puck had hidde
n himself.

  She and Silyen fell into a routine. They would walk round the garden and moat, where it was always sunny and warm. Then they’d go indoors and her visitor would sit at the great library table going through some book or another that he’d picked from the shelves. Euterpe would settle into a window seat with a novel or sketchbook.

  Her family was never around during Silyen’s visits. She would have loved to present him to Thalia, who she knew would be as amazed as she was at how much this strange young man resembled them both. And it was such a shame she hadn’t been able to introduce him to Winterbourne either.

  The man she had set her heart on was exceptional, gifted, she told Silyen proudly. He had been top of his year at Oxford and was now at the start of what she knew would be a brilliant legal career. Winterbourne was fascinated by politics, but as a second-born would never sit in the House of Light.

  Silyen had smiled at that, and offered the observation that Winterbourne would make a fine Chancellor. And Silyen also knew – everyone did, he said – how very devoted Zelston was to Miss Euterpe.

  One summer afternoon a little while after – and how long this summer had been – Silyen closed the book he was reading. He sat back in the library chair, raised his arms above his head and stretched. It was the unmistakable behaviour of someone who has completed either a demanding race or a demanding book.

  ‘Finished?’ she asked.

  ‘Finished all of them,’ Silyen said, flexing his fingers. Euterpe heard the fine bones crunch, like a bird in Puck’s little jaws. ‘That was the last.’ He pushed the book away from him.

  ‘The last?’ Euterpe scoffed. ‘Not even a bookworm like you could have read everything this library contains. You’re giving up. I don’t blame you – that one’s rather boring.’

  ‘So I gathered,’ Silyen said. ‘You only managed to get halfway through the first chapter.’

  Euterpe looked at him in astonishment.