Kiran advances another pawn. A couple of minutes pass while each of them contemplates the board and shifts things around in turn. Kiran is better at chess than Jane is. Zugzwang, she thinks suddenly, remembering the word for a situation in which one’s obligation to make a move in chess puts one at a serious disadvantage. Ivy will love it; Jane’ll have to remember to tell her.
“I guess we should sit,” Kiran says, “if we’re going to play.”
There’s something about the feeling of the air against Jane’s ears that stops her from wanting to sit. It’s an inchoate instinct, to keep moving and find a more comfortable place. “We could,” she says doubtfully, advancing one of her knights. “How did Charlotte try to make a soul for the house?”
“Mostly she just got more intense,” Kiran says. “She would talk about listening to each room and letting the room tell her what it wanted to be. She was working so hard, day and night; she was letting it run her ragged. And then she disappeared.”
“Yes, I heard she disappeared.”
Wind pushes at the glass and the house makes a rumbling sound around them, stone pressing back at the wind. Then another noise, a sort of laughter, unstable and faint, like a faraway train whistle. As Lucy St. George and Phoebe Okada walk into the room, Jane’s skin is prickling. She’s starting to wonder if she’s getting an ear infection. The pressure in her head seems to be growing.
“There,” Lucy says, pursing her lips at the walls. “Did you guys hear that?”
“Hear what?” says Phoebe. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“The house made a noise,” says Lucy. “It sounded like a word. ‘Disappointed.’”
“I heard ‘disappeared,’” Jane responds.
“The two of you are being weird,” says Kiran, walloping one of Jane’s bishops with her queen. “I said ‘disappeared,’ and then you said it back to me, Janie. Charlotte disappeared one night, about a month ago. She just . . . left. Octavian was the last to see her. She was sleeping on the divan in the library. As far as he could judge, she didn’t take anything with her, no change of clothes, not even her diary. She left a note behind that said, ‘Darling, there’s something I need to try. Please don’t worry. If it works, I’ll come back for you.’”
“What does that mean?” says Jane. “What did she need to try?”
“No clue.”
“‘If it works, I’ll come back for you,’” Jane repeats. “How did she leave? Seeing as it’s an island?”
“Someone must’ve come and picked her up,” Kiran says, “because no boats were missing. She must’ve arranged it beforehand, which I think really hurt Octavian—that she trusted someone else with her plan, but not him.”
“People were talking about it at breakfast,” says Jane. “Colin told me Octavian hired investigators and everything.”
“Yeah,” says Kiran. “They were real muckrakers; they dug some stuff up about Charlotte’s family, like that her mom had a criminal record, but Octavian said he already knew about that and it was irrelevant. I think he really believes she’s coming back for him. I think he’s put his life on hold until she does.”
Jane thinks of how her aunt died, all alone. Luckily, the people at the research station had known where she’d gone. Because people do disappear sometimes, and if there’s no one around to witness it, how can the people left behind, waiting, ever know?
“At the time she went away, she’d remodeled this entire wing,” Kiran says, sweeping a hand out. “Green parlor, blue sitting room, tearoom, this room, the bowling alley, the swimming pool, the gun room, and she was almost done with the library. Octavian was definitely worried, but he had no idea she was planning to take off. She wouldn’t talk about anything but the cataloging system.”
“The cataloging system?”
“Charlotte decided to catalog the library books by color,” Kiran says. “Completely impractical. Impossible to find anything.”
“What do you mean, by color?”
“Color of the spine,” Kiran says. “The library is at the back of the house and it’s two stories high. Charlotte started talking about how it was the house’s spine, the nerve center, the place of greatest power. Then she started assigning body parts to all the other rooms, like the Venetian courtyard was the heart of the house, and the kitchen was the stomach, and the receiving hall was the mouth, and the east spire where Mum lives was the brain, and the bowling alley was, like, the vagina. It got a little creepy. And it would’ve looked like the worst kind of Picasso if you’d painted it.”
“Well, the library sounds pretty amazing,” Jane says. “Organized by the colors of the spines. I’ve never heard of that before.”
“I don’t really go in there anymore,” Kiran says. “It’s Octavian’s haunt. It’s depressing.”
“Don’t you want to see it?” Jane says. “I kind of want to see it.”
“I’ve seen it,” Lucy says, raising the copy of The House of Mirth she holds in one hand. “I got my book from it. It’s really pretty in there, like waves of color. It’s almost like being underwater. It’s an ocean, and we’re the fish.”
A bead of sadness bursts open inside Jane.
“Let’s go to the library,” she says.
*
Someone has scrawled the word PRIVATE on a ratty piece of paper and hung it on a fat velvet rope that blocks the entrance to the library.
“That’s Octavian’s handwriting,” says Kiran. “Not to mention his level of craftsmanship. He must be trying to protect his precious haunt from the gala cleaners.”
“Does it mean we can’t go in?” asks Lucy St. George.
“Of course not,” says Kiran. “Only that he doesn’t want us to go in.”
“Hmm. But it is his house,” says Phoebe Okada.
Briefly this strikes Jane as funny, that Phoebe is advocating respect for Octavian’s pathetic rope barrier when last night Phoebe was skulking through the servants’ quarters with her husband and a gun. But then she loses track of that thought, because it’s irrelevant, because she needs to go in and see the ocean of color. If she doesn’t go in with Kiran, Lucy, Phoebe, and Jasper now, she intends to sneak in later.
“Someday Octavian will croak. Then it’ll be my house,” says Kiran. “And it’s the freaking library. He can’t hold the books ransom. If you want to go in, go in.” This last part is directed at Jane, who’s craning her neck and gazing with moon eyes.
Jane unhooks one end of the velvet rope and steps into the room.
The color is singing.
The books of any library are colorful. But these books undulate and pulse with color. It’s not a straightforward matter of all the blues turning to all the purples turning to all the reds. There’s an earthy section, with oranges and greens turning to reds and browns. There’s a serene section with cool yellows turning to cool greens to cool blues, and an energetic section with bold, bright tones of every hue. The sections also blend into each other, bright books fading to more muted books, gradually infiltrated by glimmering metallics, and so on. The room feels alive; it’s like being inside a living thing. And each book, each colorful spine, is the container of a story. It reminds Jane of Aunt Magnolia’s underwater dream worlds, and of her own work too, or of what she wants her umbrellas to be. Yes, Jane thinks. If this house has a soul, its soul is here in this room.
She finds herself looking around for Octavian, expecting to find him in some corner, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Jane remembers Ravi calling him a creature of the night.
French doors look out onto a terrace and Jasper asks to be let out. When Jane opens the doors for him, she can hear the roar of the sea. He shoots outside and turns back to Jane, hopping eagerly, looking longingly into her face, but she’s only just arrived in the library. Nothing about the terrace excites her. “Have fun, Jasper-bear,” she says, closing the doors in his face and turning back to the room. Aunt Magnolia? Is this how you felt in your underwater universe? I wish you could see this.
“What if you don’t know the color of the book you’re looking for?” she asks.
“Card catalog,” Kiran says, pointing to the dark wooden cabinet with little drawers near the entrance. “Like in the days of yore.”