He shook himself before he could drift into a deeper doze, got up, instinctively grabbed his coat from the wardrobe by the door, and slipped silently out into the darkened hall.
The portrait of the stern-faced Vandergriff patriarch presided over the grand staircase, now dim in the glow of a few remaining candles. The figure was much larger than life, seated in a straight-backed wooden chair and wearing a red top-coat resplendent with medals and epaulettes and rows of brass buttons. Its mutton-chop bearded face was wide and somber, with regal eyes that seemed to own everything it gazed upon. A fat hand with hairy knuckles absently patted a huge St. Bernard dog that sat panting next to the chair, its tongue dangling like a carpet in need of rolling up.
“You’re not going to tell on us, are you?” James whispered up at the huge face as he slipped down the landing.
“You’re not up to something that needs telling on, are you?” the portrait replied consideringly, raising a patient, bushy eyebrow at James.
James shrugged and padded onward, down the carpeted stairs.
He honestly didn’t know what they were up to.
Millie was already waiting for him in the dining room, merely a girl-shaped shadow on the other side of the long, gleaming table. She had changed out of her poofy evening gown into a pair of jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt. Her coat was slung over her shoulder.
“Come on!” she whispered eagerly, and darted toward a rear door. James recognized it as the door Topham and the servants used during mealtimes. She pushed through into a narrow hall, turned toward an equally narrow stairwell, and flitted down, taking the steps two at a time. James followed, trying to match both her speed and her stealth, which was no easy task. She had apparently done this many, many times before, whatever this was.
The downstairs was clearly the domain of the house elves.
Everything was smaller and far more austere. James spied his first house elf as they passed a diminutive kitchen. The elf was scrubbing the top of a wooden butcher block but paused to look up as he and Millie darted past. James sensed more than saw other elves moving here and there throughout the warren of lower rooms. There was a laundry, a pantry, a sewing room complete with an ancient treadle-powered sewing machine, and a wine cellar decked with racks of dusty bottles.
Finally, Millie pulled open a door at the end of a short hall.
Cold air and flecks of snow rushed in with it. She glanced back for the first time, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “Oh good,” she said in a quick, low voice. “You remembered to bring your coat.”
“What are we—?” he began, but she was already gone, vanished into the darkness beyond the door. James darted to follow, tugging the door closed behind him with an impatient thunk.
Millie ran ahead again along a fieldstone path, neatly cleared of snow, which curved down the slope of the rear yard. He heard her laugh faintly on the cold wind and felt a moment of annoyance at her for not explaining what they were up to or where they were going. It occurred to James, and not for the first time, that Millicent Vandergriff enjoyed teasing and mysteriousness just a bit too much.
Like many of the smaller houses on the boulevard that led to Blackbrier Quoit, the manor’s back garden sloped away to a shingle of rocky beach and a boathouse. This one, however, was nestled snug among the boundary of trees, poking through them like a hedgehog through a shrubbery. The building was squat and grey, built of sturdy stone and adorned with deep-set, perfectly square windows. Millie reached the green-painted door and heaved it open onto pearly darkness.
James slowed to a trot as she turned her face back to smile at him. Her lips were very red in the darkness, and her cheeks glowed with color.
“Have you ever ridden a snowmobile before?”
James blinked at her as if she’d just spoken in a different language.
“It’s OK,” she went on, reading his expression. “I hadn’t either until a year ago. Blake showed me how. It’s easy, actually.”
She turned away again, nearly bursting with excitement, and her boots knocked on the wood of the boathouse floor.
“Wait!” James called hoarsely, following her with deepening trepidation. “Did you say a… a snowmobile?”
The interior of the boathouse was dim with the preternatural glow of the snowy world outside, bathing the old shelves and workbench and hanging anchors and coils of rope with a moony softness. The opposite end of the space was a huge garage door, closed and locked tight. The floor was a wooden frame around a huge rectangular hole. A boat hung over the hole, floating by pure magic so that it bobbed slightly, as if haunted by the ghost of swells past. The hull was gleaming varnished wood, long and sleek, with brass portholes, its top wrapped in blue tarp and yellow rope, sealed for the winter, hiding its glory.
Millie ignored the boat, stopping at a railing and leaning over to peer into the dimness beneath the boathouse.
“Blake?” she whispered, her voice suddenly tentative.
“Vroom, vroom, M’Lady,” a voice called up.
“Ugh, I told you never to call me that outside of the house. It’s embarrassing.” As she spoke, she turned back to James, reached to take his hand, and led him to a ladder that ran from the ceiling down through the hole in the floor.
“Millie,” James said impatiently, tugging on her hand to get her attention. “What is this? What are we doing? We’re not going to get into loads of barney for this, are we?”
“Oh, don’t be silly, James,” Millie soothed, returning to him and nestling into his arms. She batted her eyes up at him. “You’ve seen what my life looks like here. A girl needs to escape sometimes. She needs to be reminded that life isn’t all white gloves and cucumber sandwiches. Why, you should hear the dickens my mother says she got up to when she was my age. A little sneaking out is to be expected.
Why, it’s nearly a tradition.”
“So that means if we get caught,” James ventured tentatively, “we won’t be in any sort of trouble?”
Millie’s eyes widened and twinkled with excitement. “Oh, it would be completely scandalous! My father would go absolutely through the roof! It would make the newspapers and everything! That’s what makes it so much fun!”