by P. J. Fox
“I know enough to know that you’re doing what you think you have to.”
“Don’t we all?”
“I don’t.”
Her laugh was small and bitter. “I know that.”
“Is that what you truly want, to slave all hours at a job you hate? To be someone else’s drone?”
“But….” She bit her lip, afraid to finish the thought.
“But what?”
He was so close to her. “But it would be my choice,” she whispered.
He stepped back. The spell was broken. Leaving her where she was, he walked over to a sideboard and poured himself a drink. “Would it?” he said, almost casually. He sipped the brown liquid. As always, alcohol appeared to have no effect. She wondered if he drank this much all the time, or only after he’d kidnapped people.
He rang a bell and seconds later someone appeared: a small woman with a round face.
“This is Diana,” he said. “She’ll show you to your room.”
SIXTEEN
Fresh from that awful encounter, Belle said nothing as Diana led her down one hall after another and then up a flight of steps. Glancing through the enormous window that dominated the landing, she saw that they were now facing the inner courtyard. It, like the rest of the castle, was strange. Tromp l’oeil decorated the smooth plaster of the first two stories; the third and final floor was half-timbered like the exterior, each beam a masterpiece of the carver’s art. Directly across from them, a gallery looked down on the garden.
“The courtyard used to be paved,” Diana said.
Belle started. Diana had a strong accent, but she was perfectly understandable.
“I speak English.” Pausing, Diana regarded her knowingly. Her smile was brief and not entirely pleasant, a slight upturning of the lips. “So I can answer any questions you might have.”
“Who are you?”
“Your servant.” Diana turned and kept walking.
Belle stayed rooted to the spot. “I want to leave,” she said.
Diana stopped. A strong beam of light bisected her middle, but her face was in shadow. “You are an honored guest,” she said. “But you are not the master.”
“Are there others?” she asked. “Like me?”
Diana’s expression turned speculative. “Like you? No. Now come.”
Belle had no choice but to follow her. The so-called hall seemed to stretch on and on forever, a broad gallery that ran the length of the east wing. With the sun now moving toward the west, the walnut paneling was in shadow. Belle didn’t know where the time had gone. Her stomach growled. It had been around mid-morning, she’d thought, when they arrived. She estimated that it was now close to one or two. And she hadn’t eaten since the night before. The hall was creepy, too; suits of armor stood at intervals, a row of ghostly soldiers from all different eras. She stared into their visors, and saw nothing but black.
She didn’t think she could sleep, knowing those things were under the same roof. She didn’t think she could sleep at all. She was afraid of what might happen, of what she might wake up to.
Diana stopped before a door. Taking out a set of keys, she fitted one in the lock.
“So you’re my jailor?” Belle asked.
“I am the housekeeper.” She opened the door. “Is there anything you need?”
Freedom.
But Belle decided, instead, to ask for something she might actually get. “Soap. A razor. Tweezers. Some clothes.” She paused. She didn’t want to antagonize this woman. “Please, I need something to wear. I can’t…be naked like this.”
Diana regarded her evenly. And then, “the bathroom is yours. Let me know if it is in any way deficient. If it please you, make a list of what you require: any medications you take, specific items of clothing. Books. I will do my best to see that whatever you ask for is provided. Within reason, of course.”
So no satellite phone. Belle sighed inwardly. She followed Diana through the door and was confronted with what could only be described as some fantasist’s nightmare of medieval history. Most of the room was dominated by carved wood panels that reached well over her head; above them, Adam and Eve frolicked in the Garden of Eden in a series of frescoes. Gnomes and other imaginary creatures peered down at her from the columns separating sitting from sleeping areas. The canopied bed, the twin couches near the fireplace, the long bench at the foot of the bed, the chair and matching ottoman in the reading nook, all were upholstered a bilious shade of green.
“Oh,” was all she could manage.
“There is paper in the desk,” Diana said, pointing toward the baroque edifice that claimed that title. “Make your list.” And then she turned to go, as though this were the most normal thing in the world. Was everyone in this castle crazy? Belle was beginning to think so.
Stopping at the door, Diana added, “I will send up lunch. Then, I suggest that you rest.”
The door closed, and she was alone.
Rest? Rest for what? Belle didn’t want to rest. She wanted to escape. She paced the room, back and forth, until she knew when to turn with her eyes closed. As large as it was, it was still a cell. Her cell. She hadn’t tried the door; what was the point? Even if Diana had left the door unlocked, which she doubted, there was nowhere to go. And she had no clothes.
Then, pivoting on the enormous Persian rug, she castigated herself for not doing enough to escape. As though she had to prove to herself, constantly, that she didn’t want to be here. She didn’t, Ash had told her; he knew. But if she didn’t, why wasn’t she hurling herself at the door? Why wasn’t she dashing into the woods, clothes or no clothes? Surely, death of exposure in the Carpathian Mountains was preferable to rape at the hands of this—this monster.
Which, her reasonable voice countered, was dramatic. Ash, the odious beast, was right: she’d said no, and no was enough. She’d gain nothing by killing herself to prove a point. She had no money, no identification, and no panties. No friends. No means of calling for help. Alec, his driver, had made it perfectly clear through his own actions that the staff was loyal. They either loved Ash or feared him. It was hard to decipher which.
And what did Diana mean, like you? Was she admitting that there were, in fact, other women? Was her captor married? Did he keep some sort of harem? If he did, would she meet these other women? Belle had read enough bad erotica to know that many people fantasized about keeping the kind of harem that had never actually existed; the kind depicted in Raj-era oil paintings. Lowering guards keeping watch over gorgeous and mostly naked women, swanning themselves on pillows while they waited for their lover. A heroic lover he must have been, too, to satisfy so many.
Belle might be a virgin, but she wasn’t dead. She had her fantasies. Being one of a crowd wasn’t among them. Neither was being used for pleasure, while her mind went to waste.
She sat down. Immediately, she began fidgeting. What was she supposed to do? Books crowded the shelves on either side of the fireplace, but she hardly wanted to read. She didn’t think she could keep her mind on something as simple as Clifford the Dog. Diana had promised her lunch; maybe she could grill whoever appeared with whatever passed as lunch around here. Or at least bribe her for some panties. But bribe her with what? Belle had nothing.
She crossed her legs and uncrossed them.
Without thinking about it, she got up and started to pace again.
She stopped in front of the window. The upholstered benches would’ve made it a nice spot to sit, in other circumstances. And if someone had chosen a better fabric. Ash had admitted that he wasn’t responsible for the decoration. She wondered who was. One of these mysterious other women? But no, she had a hard time picturing him married.
Or was that just because she didn’t want to accept the possibility that she truly did mean nothing? As romantic as it sounded, having come here in the dead of night to this castle, she was just a thing—an object he’d purchased at an auction. He no more saw her as a human being, with the same rights and privileges that he enjo
yed, as he saw a dog.
Again, she saw the cage.
She shivered.
If he was married, did his wife know? Did she care? Or did she content herself with the life he provided? Despite his protestations that an entire castle cost less than a loft at Des Artistes, he was obviously very rich. This was the kind of money she’d seen pictures of in Forbes, but still had trouble crediting. Growing up, rich had meant a house on the water, or an imported car. Rich, to her mother, meant paying off her credit cards and being able to choose whatever she wanted at the supermarket.
Could she understand this hypothetical woman, Belle asked herself? Money like this meant the freedom to fulfill all of your dreams. It meant freedom from the kind of worries she had: about finding a job, any job, so she wouldn’t be out on the street. It meant the end of the dilemma, about whether one should follow one’s passions or be responsible.
And even if people weren’t in love when they married, they could fall in love. They certainly fell out of love. Her parents had.
But no, she decided. She still wanted the dream. The happily ever after. She always would. Even now, as hopeless as she felt, she thought about the future and all it might hold. She felt a stab of regret that she wouldn’t be turning in her paper the next morning. Being truant like this made her feel like a failure.
She didn’t know why she was blaming herself. It wasn’t her fault. Except it felt like her fault.
Why?
She should want, wholeheartedly, to be in her dorm room right now. Writing and drinking coffee and feeling unfulfilled. But she didn’t. A small part of her, a part she didn’t want to admit existed, wasn’t entirely sorry that she’d been freed from this particular obligation. Of course she didn’t want to be here, either, but—
Where did she want to be?
She stared out the window. Adding to the feeling of being in a cage was the fact that she didn’t even have a view of the outside world. No mountains, no grass. Just the courtyard. The balcony she’d noticed before was on the wall to her right. Beneath her, a lone gardener worked in the flower beds. She couldn’t hear him; the world, in here, was strangely silent. So instead she watched as he winterized what in spring must be a truly magnificent fairy garden. Water would flow from the now-dry fountain, into a series of perfectly aligned trenches. From above, she saw that they formed a quatrefoil pattern. Each was no more than a foot across and their bottoms were lined with river stones. A manmade brook, bisecting a doll’s forest of dwarf Japanese maples.
Still, it was a cage.
Turning, she decided to investigate the bathroom.
She needed a shower. She felt disgusting, like her skin had been coated in grime and her hair was about to walk off her head in protest. And his cologne still clung to her, making her feel invaded. She wanted to be clean: of him, of this situation, of the memories that haunted her.
SEVENTEEN
Ash sprawled in his chair, brooding. Before him, the fire crackled merrily in the fireplace. Fuck fire, and fuck merry. He hated the world and everything in it.
His chair was overpriced, overstuffed leather and comfortable. Brass nail heads lined the seams, and the feet were carved to look like eagles’ talons grasping globes about the size of tennis balls. The fireplace was a baroque thing, too, a hundred cherubs’ eyes glinting evilly in the light. A log burst, breaking apart, and they all seemed to wink at him.
The room was one of the smallest in the castle, his personal office when he was home. Bookcases lined the walls. His desk dominated the wall behind him, and to his left was a window. Tall and narrow, looking out onto the courtyard for security reasons. He would have preferred a view of the mountains. Mountains he’d yet had time to really investigate.
When he’d moved here, it was with the idea that he’d put down roots. Do something he hadn’t done since he was a child, something ridiculously wholesome like go camping. He’d loved the outdoors, back then. Not profiting from it, simply spending time in it. He wasn’t getting any younger, and he had little to show for his life except a fat bank account. But instead of making this place some kind of real home, he’d found himself traveling even more. To all corners of the world, all the time.
If he was really honest with himself, he didn’t want to be here.
He’d filled his home with beautiful furniture and beautiful women, all manner of acquisitions, but it didn’t help. He still felt alone. He thought about the woman upstairs; almost directly above him, he calculated. Woman? Girl. Her passport might be lying about her age; she wouldn’t be the first girl to use doctored identification, to get into a club.
Even now, he couldn’t understand why he’d done it. Only that, as bad as he was, he couldn’t let her fall into the clutches of something worse. But was he giving himself too much credit? He was bad enough. He’d called his tastes exotic and that was certainly the kindest way to describe them. Not that he was in the habit of being kind to himself; he’d been nothing but accurate when he’d said that he valued honesty.
In the club and again, watching her eat, he’d felt a strange kind of possessiveness. He didn’t want to see her ruined, unless she was his to ruin. And what sense did that make? She was a child, in every way that mattered. Vulnerable. When he’d first spoken with her, he’d felt like he’d cornered a kitten. And she, scratching at him with her little claws, trying so hard to prove that she was a force to be reckoned with.
But he’d known then, as he knew now, that that wasn’t the person she was. He thought he’d gotten a glimpse of that person when, much against her better judgment, she’d uncurled just enough to examine the dinner he’d bought her. He’d never bought a woman pub food before, although he’d eaten enough of it himself. The places he went, where he actually lived his life, had nothing in common with the places where he took women for dinner.
He’d watched her eyes narrow, and then open in surprise when she’d realized that she liked it! It had been there and gone in a flash: one split second of pure, unadulterated pleasure as she bit into the dumpling.
He wanted to see that expression again.
He wasn’t used to the feeling and wasn’t certain how to label it. All he knew was that it made him uncomfortable. He sipped his drink. Another log popped. He wanted to pull out his gun and shoot the thing. He was in a foul humor. His current line of thinking didn’t help.
He supposed that there was no reason he couldn’t work from home more; that had been the original intention, after all. If he wanted to, he could spend most of his time here. A great deal of his business was conducted via the internet, and his business trips needn’t be as long as he made them. He still had a flat in London, in Battersea. He hadn’t migrated far from Harrow, he supposed, which was a forty minute cab ride from the Tower of London. Battersea was just down the Thames.
Harrow had been built back when London’s alternate name, The Square Mile, was accurate. Founded in 1572, the school had been granted its charter personally by Queen Elizabeth I. Less than a quarter of Harrow’s pupils were from overseas and very few of those were from India. Ash had spent his early childhood thinking himself as the center of a world that was essentially kind. A spoiled little prince who’d never known true hardship. But when he’d arrived at Harrow, his pedigree hadn’t mattered.
Small and dark, he hadn’t come into his true height until much later. And while he—correctly—thought of himself as an aristocrat, no one else did. His classmates made fun of him for being backwards and asked if he fucked monkeys. A child who’d been brought up Hindu did not fare well, either, in an Anglican school.
The Church of England was old and uncompromising. Like England itself, and like his headmaster. Some of the instructors were alright, and he’d had his own friends in the end. His father had attended Harrow, also, but that had been a different time. Ash had discovered, at eleven, that things were quite different outside of his father’s walls. And the relationship between England and her former colony was one thing that had changed.
An Indian child, born to British citizens, fit in nowhere.
The door opened. He didn’t acknowledge the person who entered. He didn’t feel like talking, even to be civil.
Finally though, that person spoke. “I, ah…would like some direction concerning our guest.”
It was Alec. Alec, in addition to moonlighting as his driver, was also Ash’s head of security.
He liked Alec well enough, he supposed, and he trusted the man. Although he’d worked hard to cultivate the air of distaste that clung to him now at all times, he didn’t truly view his servants as less. He wasn’t dim-witted enough to think that not seeing other people as people gave him any sort of leg up. Those he knew, who did, had been endlessly plagued with cheats and other scandals. No one cared to protect their interests, because everyone—including their own peers—resented them.
Ash finished his drink. Alec waited. “The lady is our honored guest,” he said finally. “If a reluctant one. Treat her with every courtesy that you would extend me, but within reason. No access to telephone or internet. No access to the road, or to the woods beyond the grounds.”
“She has requested clothes.”
The question was implied in the statement. “Yes,” Ash said, irritated.
“Yes,” Alec repeated. He paused. “Should she be provided with…something from the, ah, harem wardrobe?”
No one in the house knew exactly how to refer to the plush apartments in the west wing and so, generally, they tried not to. Alec, even referencing the place’s existence, blushed a deep red.
Which, for some reason, Ash found profoundly annoying. “No!” he thundered. “God, man, what are you thinking?” He glanced down at his glass, remembered that it was empty, and resisted throwing it across the room. The resulting explosion would be extremely satisfying but then he’d be short one glass and this set dated back to George III.
“She’s a guest.”