A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 1

Manor Dorn

“Avante! The curtain!”

I paused just past the dusty ribbon of light streaming through the window and sighed, laden with dishes, before doing as I was bade. I set the rusty tray carefully across the corner of the nearby bookshelf so I could tend the lackluster curtains. The stream of sunshine bent onto my face as I stepped up to the window and wistfully snicked the peaking drapes closed again. The older slave that barked the order was only seeing that things stayed as they should, but as one who went into the city, I was not afraid of a little sunshine peaking through the window. Was a taste too much?

The room became dim again, but I could still see the floral pattern of the wallpaper where an angelic glow circumferenced the window. The edges still leaked.

It wasn't as if the room was a glorious thing to behold, by any account. But there was a hominess in the peeling wallpaper and crudely-patterned floorboards, the stained lacy tablecloths and bleached furniture fabric. And in the corner, of course, my pride: the handiwork of makeshift tiles – different shapes, sizes, patterns and colors – that were slowly replacing the diminished floorboards.

Hominess was not a luxury we afforded, though. It was part of Manor Dorn's religion in this time, to keep the curtains drawn – especially those where the shutters on the other side had been stripped away by the recurring winds.

I moved to retrieve my tray, and the dishes rattled as I raised them. Then I continued on my quest to deliver lunch to the Masters, where they stayed cooped up in their rooms upstairs. That was also part of the religion here at Manor Dorn; the Masters never came out. They stayed huddled amongst themselves behind closed doors, as if in a state of hibernation, waiting for the strangeness of our days to blow over. The rest of us held down the fort and scraped together the daily means of survival – essentially running the country, because it was like this everywhere. If the country had not been in ruins, we might have recognized the value in that very convicting point: that this land was run by slaves, and we could easily revolt. We could take it. We would remove the backbone from the ranks of the masters, and what was left of their reign would crumble into submission.

But there was nothing of value to take for ourselves. Who would fight for a sick land?

I would still just as soon leave the Masters to rot, but the others wouldn't have it – at least, not the ones with chocolate skin, from Serbae. It was not their way. Even after all they had been forced to endure, they would not act on resentment.

And so I took the Masters their lunch, because I respected the Serbaens and loved their ways, in general context. They were frightfully compelling with their code of kindness. I felt guilty if I didn't match it.

I tripped over the stairs as I hazarded their climb. They were nothing but a dark, creaking ascension. Soup lapped over the edge of a bowl, a warm glop on my knee. I cursed. We couldn't afford to spill what little we had. But never mind. It was out of the Master's bowl, and I wasn't going to bother with it. They certainly did not own my sympathy that far.

I continued on, counting the stairs to the landing. I skirted a mouse hole that I knew by habit, and turned into the equally-dark hall. On the left was the locked door to the library. In its prime, it had been that warm glow of a room, teeming with old books just waiting to be cradled in the hands that loved them. Now, it was as good as empty. It was locked because we shut off all the rooms we didn't need, hoping their disease would not spread, that we could starve out the disease in the small places we used – but we kept the key for when we needed books to burn. We had orders to always burn the ones I looted first, but supplies often ran low. The library had slowly dwindled to a devastated shell, with a scant few victims lined up on death row.

Next, on the right, was Victoria's room. Respectively, her old room. The Masters kept themselves all safe inside a single chamber now – the master bedroom at the end of the hall. But a decade ago, in the first years of the mischief that crept into the woodwork, they had maintained a civilized arrangement as a family. Back then the incidents had been fewer and farther between – stories, mostly, or nuances that caused concern, but nothing to obsess over.

How swiftly that way of life had changed and become consumed was astonishing. How quickly the symptoms had evolved.

I passed Lesleah's room next, the jealous middle sister, and then Christopher's. He was the little brat of the family, or had been last I had seen him. I hadn't laid eyes on him in six years.

Aunt Felicity's room passed next. As far as I was concerned, she had infected this poor house herself. She was the sternest of them all – the one who whipped us when we erred, who slapped Christopher cold on his cheek when no one was looking, who spoke down to Lesleah like she would never compare to her sister, who uttered terrible grievances to Victoria's suitors in secret to chase them away. Whether or not I was fond of the family, the latter of these things grated on me like nothing else. To hear Felicity dishing out offenses in Victoria's oblivious name, or bad-mouthing Victoria herself, almost undid me as a docile slave. The injustice boiled up inside me where I eavesdropped. When you were an invisible slave, you could do that. Eavesdrop, that is.

But that's what stayed me, in the end: that I was an invisible slave. I had no authority. I had no conviction. I didn't exist, except to do as I was told. Victoria would never take my word for it. After all, a slave and his master were not on favorable terms. So why would I warn her of treachery, unless I had ulterior motives? I would not be trusted to look after her interests.

So I maintained that I was a creature of silence.

And became a tormented creature of silence.

It was maddening, now, knowing they cohabited behind the same door. I longed to reveal the beast in their midst. Whether or not that particular urge was aimed at their best interests, I couldn't rightly say. In a sense, it felt purely mischievous. A way to see to wicked Felicity's humiliation and downfall, or simply a way to stir something up.

Stirring things up was the last thing one should dream of dabbling in at a time like this, but when there was scandal abroad it was human nature to meddle, to put in my two cents. To tip the balance because I knew something. It made me feel important. The unexpected informant, rather than a mere slave. Someone who could become a friend to one of them, instead of a nobody.

It was all fantasy, though. They stayed behind that locked door, only communicating as a voice through the crack. When I delivered food, I was to lay it by the door and rap a code on the old wood, and only after they heard my footsteps recede would someone throw back the latch and open the barricade long enough to whisk in the offering.

We had phantoms for masters.

Good riddance, though, really. Who missed that wicked aunt, that bratty child, that jealous sister, and that brooding Mr. and Mrs. Dorn? Victoria was really quite agreeable, but the irony of the situation lay in the fact that matters were better for the slaves in these times. We may have been charged with danger-riddled tasks, but it was because of the unorthodox arrangements in the household that we had the run of the house, for once. For the first time, we had established a homey dwelling downstairs. It lay in shadow more often than not, but the only reason I could miss that hominess when the drapes were drawn was because we had been allowed to develop an uninhibited connection to the place in the first place. For what slave was known to be fond of his home?

I retreated downstairs, where my fellow slaves were huddled seeing to the mending. There was a fire going, a stack of books on the hearth.

Enda – the eldest woman with dark skin – sat by the window, stealing its tentative traces of superior light. The dark children, Dani and Viola, sorted thread in the middle of the floor. Dani, the boy, was ten. Viola was eleven. They had been bought, with their mother, just months before the Masters went into hiding – and when the Masters shut that door against the rest of us, they kept the mother with them. Of all the slaves to designate to waiting on them behind closed doors, I thought disapprovingly – she was in there, separated from her children, when it could have been one of us instead.

Dashsund tended the fire. He was a middle-aged Serbaen. Always stoic, but in an amused way. Quiet but very lighthearted.

Henry was like me – white. But he was old. He had been with the Masters a long time, longer than the rest of us. He was also a very kind soul, but wouldn't tell of how he came to be a slave. It was a curious thing, but I didn't wonder too much. He was likely the same as me.

I was a slave because I was an illegitimate child, and nobody wanted me. A victim of a moment of thoughtless, selfish passion.

In the beginning, the young ones told me I was awfully beautiful for a slave. The older ones didn't see things in terms of physical beauty. They thought everything was beautiful, in its own way. It was a lovely perspective – part of their culture, I assumed, when I saw the sadness (yet agreement) in their eyes when the youngens made these claims; the culture here was rubbing off on them, changing them. I wished they wouldn't call me beautiful, because I didn't like the sadness in those eyes. I didn't want to lend to what was changing them. I liked them the way they were, and wished I could have known them the way they first came to this country. So I rubbed soot around my eyes, hoping to look beaten and bruised, but they said it only made my eyes more beautiful. I left it sometimes, though, because the color likened me to them. Them whom I admired and looked up to, in our arrangement.

The older ones did not resent me being beautiful – they knew it to be true, by the white man's standards. I was well-bred, just scandalously so. Illegitimate by matters of matrimony, but not by blood.

Such a shame, such waste, my people had said of me. I was exquisite, yet I was trash. They might even have kept me around because I was so pleasant to look at, or could have warmed a bed like a queen for someone in their circle, but when they fell on hard times there was no question as to the greater benefit I would be to them as a profit, and a mouth taken off their hands.

Of course, for them 'hard times' meant dusty chandeliers and a lack of the finest wine for their suddenly 'quainter' banquets. I fell below all those things. I was not worth the dust on their chandeliers.

I folded myself onto the ground in the slaves' midst, and picked up an article that needed mending. We worked together in silence today. Sometimes, we took turns telling stories. The Serbaens told wonderful stories. We would sit around with the fire crackling its friendly tune and even get to laughing once in awhile. But today, all of our bones seemed to agree on weariness. Even the bones of the house, creaking around us.

I finished mending my article, and then put it aside. I reached for another, but Enda stopped me:

“It's getting dark, minda.” Minda was their native word for 'dear', or 'love'. A term of endearment.

My eyes went to the window. Only the barest whisper of twilight seeped through around the edges. My fingers hovered over the material of Victoria's dress.

Twilight was the hour I lived for, by design. The hour for which I had been bought.

The hour in which, every day, I was to come out of the woodwork.