Casually, Phoebe reaches under her skirt and extracts a gun. “Don’t give yourself an aneurysm,” she says. “We’re tracking him. You need to leave. This is no place for kids. You should go to your rooms and stay there.”
The door opens again and Ivy sticks her head out. She grabs Jane’s arm and Jane says, “Wait,” irrationally, waiting for the dog, who then appears on cue, shouldering his way toward them, gasping for breath. Jane is impressed. He must have made a heroic effort on that last stretch of stairs.
“Quick,” says Ivy, hustling Jane and Jasper into the servants’ wing.
“Where are we going?” Jane asks.
“Out of the way.”
It’s a humiliating answer, coming from Ivy. I’m like Ravi, she thinks, when he was a child, “helping” the gala staff.
“Is Mrs. Vanders mad about Kiran?” she asks.
Ivy shoots Jane a cautious look, as if trying to gauge whether she’s friend or foe at the moment. “Mrs. Vanders has been going back and forth about telling Kiran the truth for some time now,” she says. “She thinks Kiran would be really good at our work.”
“She would,” Jane says fervently.
“Personally, I’m relieved she finally knows,” says Ivy. “It’s been hell being around my brother.”
For a moment, a wave of dizziness fuzzes Jane’s brain. Ivy is shepherding her along quickly and it occurs to her that she’s been holding her breath. “Wait,” she says. “Can I have a second?”
“Yes,” Ivy says with immediate concern. “Are you okay?”
It’s impossible to breathe deeply and deliberately without thinking about a jellyfish. Jane tries to think of a dumbwaiter instead, her own internal dumbwaiter, air moving up, air moving down. Her body is a microcosm of this house. This corridor is a path toward . . . toward something. Toward the next step; toward however Jane will get through this night.
“Why do I trust you?” Jane asks.
“I don’t know,” Ivy says. “I trust you too. And I’ve been trying to imagine finding out that my aunt, who was basically my mom, was an operative. You’ve been so cool about it. I’d be furious.”
“You have no idea.”
Ivy hesitates again. “I think,” she says cautiously, “you should let Mrs. Vanders tell you whatever she knows. All the details, whatever they are. It might not help right away. But maybe it’ll help eventually.”
Jane gives up on her dumbwaiter metaphor. As a tear slides down her face, Ivy takes her hand.
Aunt Magnolia? Jane thinks, then remembers, with a sad tug, that she’s no longer speaking to Aunt Magnolia.
“Come up to the attics,” Ivy says. “You’ll be safe up there.”
*
In the west attics, Jane finds Kiran and Mrs. Vanders standing on opposite sides of a long table, arguing.
“You understand this was over a hundred years ago?” Mrs. Vanders is saying in a voice of exasperation.
“What does that matter?”
“The first housekeeper of Tu Reviens had a son,” Mrs. Vanders says. “Her son had gotten mixed up in the Spanish-American War some years before and became an American operative. He’d also fallen in love with a Cuban agent.”
“How romantic,” says Kiran caustically.
“It ended with both of them dead.”
“Of course it did,” says Kiran, “or it wouldn’t be so romantic.”
“They were Mr. Vanders’s grandparents,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Afterward, Espions Sans Frontières approached his great-grandmother, the housekeeper, about secretly using her employer’s house. Given that such an organization might have saved her son, can you really blame her for saying yes?”
“Yes to lying to my great-great-grandfather, who trusted her?” Kiran says. “Yes to endangering everyone in this house, which wasn’t hers, for generation upon generation? For making the family liable?!”
Another pitched battle that’s been taking place behind Kiran finally erupts into something no one can ignore. It’s a quarrel between Patrick and Grace Panzavecchia, who’s refusing to get into the dumbwaiter. “Why don’t you make me?” the little girl yells. “Why don’t you stab me with methohexital, again? I hate you!”
“Yeah,” responds Patrick reasonably, “I know you do, Grace, but Christopher’s down there all alone with Cook.”
“Because you brought him down there!”
“Yes. I know it’s unfair,” says Patrick. “Now, do you want to be awake to look after your little brother, or do you want to be asleep?”
“I hate you!” Grace yells. “You ruined my life! You left Edward Jenner behind!”
Ivy pulls out a chair at the table, then nudges Jane toward it. Numbly, Jane sits, Jasper settling in around her feet. Then Ivy moves to the end of the table and begins wrapping something with long sheets of bubble wrap. Vaguely, Jane recognizes it as the Brancusi sculpture, which is complete again, a flat, oblong piece of marble—the missing fish—attached to the pedestal. Ivy takes great care, as if she’s winding sticking plaster around a broken bone. The fish is pale and smooth, bonelike. It soothes Jane to watch.
“It’s your decision, Grace,” says Patrick calmly. “Awake or asleep?”
“It’s not my decision!” Grace says. “I didn’t decide to go away from home! I didn’t decide to leave Edward Jenner behind!”
“It’s true, she didn’t,” says Ivy quietly. “The least we could’ve done was collect Edward Jenner.”
“Ivy,” says Mrs. Vanders sharply, “that’s enough.”
“Okay,” says Kiran, “I give up. Isn’t Edward Jenner the guy who developed the smallpox vaccine? Like, two hundred years ago?”
“Edward Jenner—” Patrick begins.
“I was not talking to you,” says Kiran behind bared teeth, not looking at Patrick.
“It’s the dog,” Jane realizes.
Mrs. Vanders clears her throat. “Yes,” she says, “that’s correct. When Ivy, Patrick, and Cook collected the children from school and the park, the dog was at home. They had to leave him behind.”
“You left him alone in the house,” Grace says. “Now some mean people probably have him. He’s living with strangers. He’s a German shepherd! That means he’s genetically predisposed to degenerative myelopathy! Who’s going to take care of him?” Grace’s eyes are swollen and crying, her fists are held tight, and her small body is taut with the fury of despair. In Grace’s eyes, Jane sees something she recognizes. Grace Panzavecchia has been betrayed.
“Why is this necessary?” Jane hears herself asking, with real indignation. “She’s eight years old!”
With a sigh, Mrs. Vanders pulls a chair out and, heavily, sits down. “Because she’s in danger and we intend to help her.”
“But not my dog!” says Grace. “You don’t intend to help my dog! I hate my parents! They drugged me with a diuretic so I’d have to go to the bathroom so you could grab me! What kind of parents drug their kid? You’re all kid-snatchers!”
“Christopher is downstairs alone,” Patrick reminds her.
“I hate you!”
Jasper has stirred from Jane’s feet. He steps out from under the table tentatively. He walks a few steps toward Grace and stands before her.
“That’s not my dog!” says Grace. “That’s the stupidest dog I’ve ever seen! What’s wrong with his legs!” Then she drops down onto the floor and holds out her arms and Jasper climbs into her lap and she starts yelling “Ow! Ow!” because he’s heavy, and then she wraps her arms around him, presses her face into his neck, and starts howling. Jane is proud of Jasper. Possibly he’s the most sensible adult in the attics.
“I am never,” Ivy mutters from her end of the table, “ever, involving myself in anything like this again.” She’s now turned her attention to a painting. It’s the picture of the man in the feathered hat, the Rembrandt Jane saw on her first day in this house, sitting on a table inside Mrs. Vanders’s glass restoration room. It’s large and seems heavy. Ivy labors to move it around.
Grace throws her head back from Jasper and yells, “Someday I’m going to kill you all!”
“This is the last time I’m asking, Grace,” says Patrick. “Awake in the dumbwaiter or asleep in the dumbwaiter?” Patrick remains calm; he might be giving her the choice of broccoli or peas for dinner.