In Which Someone Loses a Soul and Charlotte Finds One
Jane decides.
What if Charlotte’s disappearance is the puzzle piece that will make sense of everything else?
“Okay,” Jane says to Kiran, starting down the stairs. “I’ll walk with you, and you can tell me about Charlotte.”
But Kiran doesn’t respond right away. She’s cupping her ear and frowning as if she’s trying to hear something. “Did you hear that?”
“I can’t hear anything but the world’s most anxious dog,” says Jane, who’s reached Jasper’s landing. Jasper’s now butting his head against her boots, whimpering. She reaches down and rubs his neck in a spot he can’t reach with his short legs. He tries to climb into her lap, which nearly topples her.
“Come with us, Jasper,” Jane says, disentangling herself. Still whimpering, he follows her down the steps, crowding her feet.
*
Kiran walks Jane through the Venetian courtyard and the east arcade. “These rooms are all relevant to Charlotte’s story,” she says. “We’ll end up in the winter garden, where we can play chess if we like.”
Next she leads Jane into a green room with floral wallpaper, brocaded settees, and a fussy green carpet. “May I present the green parlor,” Kiran says. “Charlotte redesigned it in the style of Regency England. Like, Jane Austen,” she adds, when Jane crinkles her forehead.
“Ah,” says Jane, understanding. Linked arm-in-arm with Kiran, taking a turn about the room, she feels like they could be Elizabeth Bennet and Caroline Bingley. If Mr. Darcy were composing a letter at the elegant writing desk, he’d be aghast at her striped jeans and sea-dragon top. “My favorite parts of the house are the parts where everything seems to fit together,” says Jane. “Like this room, or like the Venetian courtyard with its matching tile and marble. You can imagine a whole story here. In the hallways where nothing matches, I just get kind of confused.”
“Yeah,” says Kiran, pulling Jane across the room toward a door. “The matching parts, that’s all Charlotte’s doing. She had weird theories that the house is suffering, because it was built from pieces that were torn from other houses.”
“What do you mean, suffering?”
“Oh, you know,” Kiran says. “From its troubled origin.”
“Charlotte thought houses suffer?”
“Charlotte always talked like houses were people,” says Kiran. “As if they have souls, or at least, as if they should have souls.”
“That’s kind of nice,” Jane says. “But, as an idea. Are you saying she actually believed it?”
Kiran shrugs. “She thought that Tu Reviens had been deprived of a soul because of its origin story. ‘Its parts are bleeding,’ she said. ‘Can’t you see them bleeding?’”
“Um,” Jane says, then pauses. “Can you see them bleeding?”
Kiran smiles. “I know how it sounds. But that’s just how she talked. You know, I realize I’m not supposed to like the lady who takes my mother’s place, especially the blond, skinny, too-young, white lady, but I really do like Charlotte, even if maybe she started to get kind of obsessive about the house. She’s from Vegas, but she hated it there. She told me the city had a lost soul. She said she could hear the voices of centuries of suffering.”
“So, cities have souls too.” Kiran has pulled Jane into a sort of rec room, composed of soft blues, with wraparound couches, built-in media shelves and cabinets, and a gigantic fish tank. A huge painting, taking up an entire wall, shows a scene of an old harbor city at night with two moons glowing in the sky. The double moonlight makes trails across the sea. The painting reminds Jane of Aunt Magnolia’s coat, with its purple sky, silver moons, and candles gleaming gold in the windows of towers. Jasper seems to like the painting. He flops onto his stomach, rests his chin on his paws, and sighs up at it with fondness.
“Charlotte is very sensitive,” says Kiran. “She suits Octavian so much more than Mum ever did. He’s the kind of person who needs a devoted companion, and Charlotte really loved—or loves—being with him. Though it did get to the point where Charlotte seemed more wound up in the house than she was in Octavian, but even then, Charlotte shared all her house thoughts with him. He was even trying to help Charlotte find the house’s soul.”
“How?” Jane says, then frees her arm from Kiran’s, absently, because she needs to touch her ears, and pull at her earlobes, and try to alter some sort of air pressure problem she’s having. Her ears feel stuffy, bloated, as if they’ve eaten too much.
“Charlotte kept saying that the house is made of orphaned pieces,” says Kiran.
“Orphaned pieces?” I’m an orphaned piece, aren’t I?
“Yeah. Charlotte said the only thing unifying all the parts is pain. That the house is in constant agony. Charlotte wanted to find another way to unify the house, to bind its pieces. So the house can rest.”
“Rest?” Jane says. “What does that even mean?”
“I have no idea,” Kiran says, taking Jane’s elbow again and pulling her into another, smallish room. This one has showy chairs and tables inlaid with gold filigree and complicated gold-and-garnet fabric on the walls. It’s another cohesive little world, a tearoom in the Beaux-Arts style, but Kiran tows Jane on to the next room before Jane can ask more. She’s beginning to notice her own disorientation. It’s a sort of sleepy distraction. It’s because each room feels like a new world, a new era, she thinks.
“My impression,” says Kiran, “is that Charlotte thought the house needed some kind of glue to unify its parts, something positive and healing, and whatever that thing was could be the house’s soul.”
“That sounds nice, really,” says Jane. “And so she tried to unify each individual room? Or something?”
“That was the start,” Kiran says, “but unifying the design of each room does nothing for the unmatching parts of the house’s basic structure, you know? The foundations, the skeleton. And Octavian was happy for Charlotte to add things and move things around, but he wasn’t okay with Charlotte getting rid of anything. Like, they had an argument about the shelving in the library, because it came from the libraries of lots of different houses around the world. Charlotte wanted to rip out all the shelving and rebuild it with wood sourced from local, sustainable forests. That was too extreme for Octavian. He was trying to convince Charlotte that the house’s disparate origins were part of its charm, and therefore part of its soul. Charlotte kept saying, ‘It can’t be, it can’t be,’ then finally she stopped talking about it. ‘I’ll make a soul,’ Charlotte said.”
“Out of what? Duct tape? Or . . . glass,” she adds, with wonder, because Kiran has pulled her into a room that seems fashioned out of light. Enormous and L-shaped, this is the winter garden. The base of the L is a greenhouse, unruly and magnificent, while the long part is yet another space with armchairs and card tables, bathed with natural light and the shadows of green leaves. This room, Jane realizes, is where the hanging nasturtiums are cultivated, and the lilacs and daffodils too. A woman is cleaning the moldings with a duster.
“I think she tried to make the soul in a lot of different ways,” says Kiran, stopping at a small, square table with a chessboard, its pieces lined up and ready to go.
“Your move,” Jane says.
Kiran leans down and advances a pawn. Walking to the other side of the table, Jane does the same, noticing how expansive this board feels, how smoothly the pieces move, compared to the tiny magnetic travel set Aunt Magnolia had owned. The light through the glass walls is warm on her back.