by K.N. Lee
Anais thought back to the day she and Aethelu went on the tram. Obviously Alex didn’t know about the tree branch they climbed over. She wondered if that was the way Jago had gotten in, and she wondered if she should say anything about it. She decided not to. With everyone under house arrest, the branch was the only way she could get out, should she need to. She would tell Aldrich about it if anything else happened.
Just then the door opened, and Andrew walked in. He seemed surprised to see them. In one hand, he carried a tool box and the other held a laptop bag.
“Hey.” He put both bags down. He looked extremely uncomfortable upon seeing Anais.
“I’m really sorry, I didn’t want to be the father.”
He faltered and looked at Alex who was making some gesture behind Anais head.
She looked around and caught the gesture.
“What?” She was confused.
Both men were silent until Anais demanded to know what they were keeping from her.
It was Alex that broke the silence.
“My father asked both of us and Rafe to ‘volunteer’” he made quotation marks with his fingers as he said it, “to be the father of your baby. Andrew flatly refused.”
“No offence meant,” said Andrew “I just really have no desire to father a child, not with anyone, ever, and I have Judith to consider now.”
“He’s not a baby person, our Andrew.” Alex put his arm on Andrew’s shoulder.
“Don’t worry; I’m not sure I’m a baby person either. How is Judith by the way? Is she settling in well?” Anais quickly changed the subject, partly to get past the awkwardness and partly because she really didn’t want to think about the whole baby thing.
Andrew brightened up immediately. “She is fine, better than fine, wonderful. I wish I could see more of her, actually.”
“More of her? Isn’t she staying here?” asked Anais.
“Yes, but I seem to be spending all my time here or in my room sorting out the security under Aldrich’s strict orders.”
“Isn’t she sharing your room?” Alex joined in the conversation painfully indiscreetly.
“No, actually,” replied Andrew, turning red in the cheeks.
“Everything is proper and above board. She is residing in Abel and Amber’s old room.”
“We were discussing how Jago got into the house to drop the letter off on Boxing Day morning,” said Anais, once again changing the subject to avoid causing Andrew any more embarrassment.
Alex continued, “He can’t have got in through the main house because a camera would have picked him up somewhere along the line. He can’t have got in through the kitchen, because all the doors and windows were locked, with no sign of forced entry. And, he can’t have come through the tunnels, as he’d need a passcode and the fingerprint of a family member. On top of that, he somehow deactivated the alarms and got through an electric fence, which was operational at the time.”
“That about sums it up,” added Andrew “although I now know how he got past the alarms. He found the alarm wire at the side of the house and cut it, which stopped the alarms from going off. I’ve mended the wire and put a failsafe on now. If the wire gets cut again, that will automatically set the alarms off.”
“Anais looked at the screens again. Mrs Smithson was still dusting in the library, but now Baker was darting around her ankles.”
“What about Mrs Smithson?”
“Mrs Smithson has worked here for years. There is no way she would let anyone in,” Alex said
“She couldn’t, even if she wanted to,” added Andrew “We all have key fobs that activate the main gate. Visitors have to use the telecom by the gate and the postman posts his letters in a post box by the entrance. Mrs Smithson is no exception. When she arrives, she presses the intercom, and one of us goes down to meet her and accompanies her up to the house. When she has finished for the day, she is, once again, accompanied down to the gate and seen out.”
“That’s not entirely the case though,” Anais remembered opening the door to the pizza delivery boy the day of the snowball fight. “I opened the front door for the pizza boy. I didn’t go down to the gate.”
“No, In that case, the front gate was opened remotely. It’s only since the letter was found that we have changed procedure,” Andrew said.
“So the letter was placed before the change of procedure, so Mrs Smithson could have put it there after all.”
“For Mrs Smithson to get through the gate, someone in the house would have had to remotely let her in, even before Boxing Day. She’s never had a key fob of her own.”
“I’ve already said it’s nothing to do with Mrs Smithson,” Alex cut in, “Why are you so keen to implicate her?”
Anais realised she’d pushed it too far. She wasn’t trying to implicate anyone, she was just working all the scenarios through her head, and Mrs Smithson seemed a likely option.
“Sorry,” she said, and then to get back to the matter in hand, she continued.
“So if Jago had one of these key fob thingies, then he could have got through.”
“He would need a key fob for the gate and the keys to the house,” said Andrew. “On Boxing Day morning, upon discovering the letter, Aldrich demanded we show him all our key fobs and keys. We all had them. None was misplaced. It does remind me, though. He handed her a set of keys and a key fob. These are for you. You are one of the family now. They will be pretty useless to you at the moment, as Aldrich has put us all under curfew, but I’m sure they’ll come in handy at some point.”
He got a funny-looking machine out of his toolbox and asked her to put her thumb on it. He then plugged it into the console which beeped and he typed something in.
“Ok, you can now use our passageways if you should need to. The code is 2103.”
“Thank you.”
“Now, please excuse me, I need to work on some other plans in regard to the safety of the house.”
Anais and Alex made their way back to the lift. It had gone back up to the larder, so they had to call it and wait.
“The security of this place is amazing,” said Anais.
“Not amazing enough though. This Jago is like a magician. It’s like he can walk through walls.”
Eventually, they reached the kitchen where Winnie was making dinner. A cake she had baked was now sitting on the table. Arcadia was gone, although she’d left a ring from her coffee cup on the table. Alex tried to steal a bit of cake, but he was too slow for Winnie, who hit him with a tea towel.
“Get out.” She warned, but had a smile on her face. “Anais love, you can stay.”
Alex left, and Anais sat down at the seat Arcadia had vacated.
Winnie sat next to her and cut her a large slice of cake.
“Don’t tell Alex,” she whispered and then smiled.
“How are you feeling, love?”
Anais couldn’t put into words how she was feeling, although miserable, fed up and depressed were certainly contenders.
Winnie understood Anais’ lack of words and came around the table to give her a hug.
“I can’t begin to imagine what you are going through. I know Aldrich wouldn’t put you through this if he thought there was any other way.”
“I know.” Tears began to form in her eyes.
“How can I have a baby, Winnie? I don’t know anything about babies. We don’t even know if I can conceive. Even if I do, who’s to say it will have the right amount of DNA.”
“It is a dire situation that we are all in. We can only pray for a good outcome.”
It was not the answer Anais was looking for. If prayer worked at all, they would not be in this mess. Actually, if prayer worked, Winnie’s youngest daughter would have survived, her father would not have drunk the Elixir and she would not exist in the first place. It was all very confusing, so she tried not to think about it.
She thanked Winnie for the cake, although she’d not touched it and headed back to bed.
Back in the room, she sat
straight on the bed as she had done countless times before. The gold painting still stood against the wall, where she had put it when she opened it. The pain and joy she usually felt at seeing it were as intense as always, but now the painting stirred a memory in her mind. The image of herself looking out at herself reminded her of another image of herself. The photographs! The ones that had been left on her pillow the day Aethelu had taken her on the tramway. At the time, she had dismissed them as a prank and had since forgotten about them. That was before she knew Jago was threatening them all. Now she realised that the photos were more than likely taken by Jago. That meant he had been in the house before--in her room. She prayed that she was wrong. She put her hand under her pillow to retrieve the photos. She would show them to Alex or Aldrich in the hope that they really were the prank she had originally thought them to be. Her hand felt cool cotton, but no photos. She picked up the pillow. She tried to remember where she had left them. She thought back, she’d dropped them at the side of the bed. Looking down, she could see that they weren’t there either. She dropped to her knees and lowered her head until she could see under the bed. It was dark under there, but there was enough light to see that there were no photos there. Trying to keep calm, she methodically searched her bedroom. Eventually, she came to the inevitable conclusion that they were gone. She never locked the room, but she knew that no one in the family would go through her private things. Jago had not only been in her room to plant the photos, but he had been in it a second time to take them away again.
She no longer felt as safe in the house as she had before. She moved the heaviest piece of furniture, a mahogany chest of drawers, behind the door and lay on the bed.
Sleep eluded her until the early hours, when she finally drifted off into a fitful slumber.
Chapter 14
Anais had spent so much of the last week feeling miserable and missing Aethelu that she’d not really put much thought into actually having to have a baby. More honestly, she was actively trying to forget it, in the hope that Andrew would somehow miraculously find Jago, and she wouldn’t have to go through with it at all. Andrew seemed too preoccupied with Judith to actually be working on anything save the bare minimum, despite what he had said in the security room. He was the only one who seemed happy in the house. Not even the prospect of the whole of civilization being wiped out could dampen his spirits. Anais caught him grinning a number of times, although he had decency to stop when he caught her looking at him.
She wished he wouldn’t. It was nice to see someone happy. A sombre mood was affecting everyone else in the house. It was actually uplifting to see someone cheerful. She did feel pangs of jealousy when she occasionally looked out her window and saw Andrew and Judith walking hand in hand in the grounds, but it was nice he had found love. He deserved it.
At Aldrich’s request, Judith had been kept in the dark about Jago and everything going on, a request that Andrew was only too happy to fulfil.
Judith must have wondered why everyone was so unhappy, but she seemed to only notice Andrew--Andrew and the snow. She was as fascinated by the snow as Anais was and dragged Andrew outside as much as possible, although she complained about the cold even when she was inside.
Anais kept away from everyone, but when Aldrich came to find her one afternoon whilst she was reading in the library, she knew that she couldn’t get away with ignoring it any longer. He asked her to accompany him to his surgery, where he sat her down in the seat she’d sat in the one time she was there before.
“We cannot put this off any longer Anais. I am sorry, but we are very limited for time, as it is. I have let you have some time for yourself since Aethelu left on the insistence of Winifred, but I’m afraid we cannot wait any longer. You must be pregnant within the next few weeks to give us any chance of success at all, the sooner the better, really. I will need time, once the baby is here, to try to make a cure.”
He was talking about the baby as if it were a certainty. It was a long shot, at best.
She suddenly wondered how, exactly, she was going to become pregnant in the first place. She’d been so busy trying not to think about being pregnant, that she’d not considered the mechanics of it.
Of course, she knew about the birds and the bees. Her forward thinking mom had had that particular talk with her many years ago. She suddenly felt sick. As much as she liked Alex, she just couldn’t imagine hurting Aethelu in this way. Aethelu was going to be heartbroken enough, as it was, when she discovered what was going on behind her back. Surely Aldrich was not expecting her to conceive naturally?
Thankfully, Aldrich put her out of her misery pretty quickly. He explained that he was fully acquainted with IVF procedures and intended to go down this particular route. He talked a lot in the next half hour, mostly about the mechanics of the whole procedure, and he managed to make the act of having a baby seem very clinical.
He calmed her fears slightly by telling her that Winnie would be assisting him in many of the scans and other intrusive procedures.
He then asked her some extremely personal questions about her periods which made her very uncomfortable, but she tried to act maturely and answer him as accurately as possible. He wrote all her answers in a little red notebook.
“Excellent, Excellent. By some fortuitous luck, we may be able to start this procedure right away. A scan will very quickly tell us.
Now I can do this scan quite ably by myself, but am I right in assuming that you’d prefer Winifred to do this?”
“Yes Please.” It was embarrassing enough having to answer the personal questions. Having him prodding around with a scanner was more than she could bear. She was extremely grateful that he’d let Winnie do the scans. It would still be embarrassing, but less so with another woman, and one she trusted so much.
Aldrich picked up the phone on his desk and dialled a number on an old-fashioned dial, the like of which, Anais had only ever seen before in period dramas and history books.
“Hi...Yes, please...Yes, now, we’ve been lucky so far.”
He placed the phone back in the cradle, and within a minute, Winnie appeared at the door, complete with her usual smile on her face.
She ushered Aldrich out of the door and told Anais to hop up onto the bed.
Winnie seemed very proficient in using the medical equipment. The scanner she used showed them both Anais’ uterus, which, although it looked like a map of outer space to her, Winnie proclaimed perfect.
Anais was very much emotionally torn. She was terrified of the whole idea of having a baby, and it was happening much faster than she’d expected. But at the same time, she could be saving millions, possibly billions, of lives.
Aldrich, who’d obviously been waiting just outside the door in the snow, was brought back in once Winnie had finished.
Winnie and Aldrich had a quick whispered discussion, whilst Anais looked at the jars on the wall. They were the same as they had been when she first came to the surgery a week ago. How her life had changed since then!
“Anais,” Aldrich addressed her, making her jump “We are at a time that we can proceed, but despite the consequences if you do not agree, I will only do this with your permission.”
Anais thought it was very unfair. She didn’t want to do this at all, but she had no choice, despite Aldrich telling her that she did. She felt Aldrich was shifting all the responsibility onto her, and it was a responsibility she didn’t want.
“Ok, Do it.”
“Thank you, Anais, I know this is difficult, but you made the right decision.”
Easy for you to say, she thought.
“The embryos will be created here, using your eggs. A week or so later, if they are viable, we will implant them. Once that is done, there is nothing more to do but wait.
“They?”
“There is only a 40% chance of an embryo surviving, and that is with a normal healthy woman. In your case, I do not know what the percentage will be, so we are going to create more than one embryo. We are going to cr
eate as many as we can. If we get more than three, we will pick the three most likely to survive and implant them. We will start by giving you some hormone injections today and collect the eggs in a week’s time. A week after that, we will implant the embryos.
Anais should have been shocked, but she’d had so much thrown at her in the last few weeks, that a triplet pregnancy was just one more thing to add to the ongoing nightmare she was living through. She left the surgery in a daze.
Misery coursed through her. How much she wished that Aethelu was with her right now.
She looked over to her right and saw the door to Aethelu’s painting studio. It gave her an idea. She ran into the main house and bumped into August in the kitchen.
“August. Do you have a spare key to Aethelu’s painting studio?”
“As it happens, I do.” He pulled a huge keyring of keys from his pocket and sorted through them until he found the one he was looking for.”
He handed the whole bunch to Anais, but she took the one she needed and handed the rest back.
“Can I keep this?”
“Yes, of course, may I ask why?”
“You may. I’m going to live in the studio until Aethelu gets home. I need space for myself.”
“Ok, love, if that’s what you want.”
“It is, August, thanks.”
Entering the studio felt like going home, even though she’d only ever spent one night there.
Everything about it was Aethelu. It was almost like she was here. It was very cold compared to the house, so Anais turned the heating up to its highest setting. She hoped it wouldn’t damage the paintings, but she’d turn it down as soon as the space became warm. She climbed the little wooden ladder and lay down on the bed. Sniffing the duvet, she hoped to smell Aethelu’s fragrance but then she remembered the sheets had been changed and they smelled of fabric softener. She curled up in them and tried to sleep, but sleep was impossible. She’d suffered terrible insomnia all her life, but something about this place and being with Aethelu had meant that she’d slept like a baby in the previous weeks. She guessed it wouldn’t last with Aethelu not here with her. It was still early in the day, though, and no matter how much she wanted to fall into the blissful oblivion of sleep, it was too much to hope for, so she got back out of bed.