The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 36

I slept.

It is the strangest thing that has happened to me since I came here. Seven nights I had lain in that bed going through it, hour by hour.

None of it let me alone. Then somebody told me a person had done it to me on purpose. I went up those stairs, got into bed, went out like a candle.

I did not dream. I did not turn over. I woke with my hand still curled the way it had been when I put my head down.

I lay there a while working out why.

It was the guilt. That was the whole of it. The guilt had been the thing standing over that bed. It went somewhere else in the night. The fear that came in to take its place does not keep you awake in the same way. Fear lets you sleep. Fear is patient. It waits until the morning, when you have to go downstairs.

I went down.

Two days I had not been in that room, and I have thought since about what I expected. I think I expected to be looked at.

Nobody looked at me for more than a moment. Isabelle said something about my hair. Clara moved her chair along without being asked. It was a Thursday morning with eggs on it.

The people serving were not the same people.

I saw it before I had got to the table. Not one of them was a face I knew. There were four of them where there are usually three. They were older. They moved the way people move on their first day in a room they have been told is important.

Somebody had taken every servant off that duty and put new ones on it.

Nobody had told me. I sat down and worked out that nobody was going to. I was not supposed to know it had happened at all.

One of them came round with the water and I watched her hands the whole way down the table.

That is what the room was for now.

I had not understood, until I sat down in it, that I was never going to be able to eat in company again without doing this. It is not a decision. It is the same as hearing a branch go behind you in the woods. Your ears do it whether you have agreed to it or not.

So I sat there and did it.

Rosalie was across and two down, with her back to the window. She always sits there. It is the best light in the room, and she knows it.

"They have changed the servants," she said.

She said it to nobody in particular. She was looking at the toast.

"Have they?" said Isabelle.

"There was a girl with red hair who did the mornings. She has gone. All of them have gone."

And that was all of it. She went back to her plate.

I sat there with my hands in my lap and my whole body ringing like a struck pot.

Out of eight women in that room, she was the one who knew who carried the water. She had counted them without being asked.

She had noticed on the first morning. She had said it out loud.

I have gone over it since. I have gone over it more times than it can hold. Rosalie has a memory for who is in a room the way I have one for what is on a plate. She has never once pretended otherwise. There is nothing in any of it.

I know that.

I did not know it at that table. At that table, I watched her eat her toast. Something in me went quiet, level, cold, the way it goes when I am looking down a shaft at something in the brush. I thought it could be you.

That is what has been done to me. I have known that woman for four weeks. She has been rude to me. I have been rude back. I rather enjoyed it.

Now I look at her and my hands go still.

I made myself go back over the night instead.

The eight of us, with the family at the top. The King and Queen. Amara on the far side. Cassian four places up on the left. Julian opposite him. Eliza was on my left the whole evening. Rosalie down at the end near the door, with Celeste beside her.

The first pour came round with the soup, and it was mine, the dry one, the one I have had every night since somebody decided I did not like the sweet.

Then the plates went out and came back. Then people got up. Somebody always gets up. Somebody wants a different chair, somebody goes out to the passage, somebody stands to let a dish through.

I cannot tell you who stood up that night.

That is the part I keep arriving at. I could tell you every dish. I could tell you the soup had too much pepper in it. I have no idea who was behind my chair.

There was food in front of me the entire time I was doing this. I picked up a piece of bread and put it down. I did that twice. I got some egg onto a fork and my mouth would not open for it.

I could smell everything on that table. It all smelled exactly as it should.

That is the trouble. It smelled right that night too. It tasted wrong. I told myself it was a mistake with the jug. The only thing I have ever been able to trust about myself is a witness I have already caught lying.

Eliza put a plate of the little dark bread in front of me, the one they only do some mornings.

"You are grey again," she said.

"I'm all right."

"You have eaten nothing in two days. I came up and knocked, you know."

So it had been her.

"I know. I heard it."

"Well then." She was not angry. She never is. She pushed the plate an inch nearer. "Eat that, it is the good one."

I looked at her. She looked back with her whole face open. There was nothing behind it except a girl who had gone up two flights of stairs to knock on my door.

I ate one piece to make her stop.

It went down like a stone into a well.

Julian was not there.

Cassian was. He came in halfway through with two men behind him, papers under his arm. He sat at the top with his father, ate almost nothing, and left before the rest of us.

He did not look at me once.

It took me most of the morning to work out that it was on purpose, and that it was for me. That man had a glass thrown against a wall ten hours ago. You would not have known it to look at him. He sat there four places from where somebody had put something in my cup, and he was somebody's son at breakfast.

I could not have done it.

I could not have sat there and done that. I am the one it was done to.

⸻

I did not sleep that night.

I lay a long time and got nowhere. In the end, I got up. At home, when I cannot sleep, I go outside. That is the whole of my method.

Go out, do something with your hands, come back tired.

You cannot do that here.

The garden is where I stood against a wall with a man's hands on me and no way to say anything about it. Before that it was where I stood in the dark watching Eliza with Julian, unable to look away. There is a fountain out there with dead women's names on it.

I am running out of places in this palace to be.

I opened the window instead.

The cold came in over my arms. I stood in it and looked at the sky. It is the one thing here that is the same as it is at home. That is the whole of what I have in common with this house at present. We are under the same sky as my mother's roof, and hers leaks.

My mother used to tell me that one of those was my father.

I never believed her. I was fifteen. I had watched them carry him back through the door. I knew exactly where he was. He was in the ground behind the church with everybody else from that autumn.

I would like to believe her tonight.

I stood at that window and waited for something to happen up there. I knew I was waiting. Nothing did.

"If you are anywhere at all," I said, without saying it out loud,

"I could do with you down here."

He would have known what to do about this. He would have asked four questions, gone quiet, then known.

That is not true either.

He was a tenant farmer who could not read, and he would have been as frightened as I am.

I have made him into somebody else since he died.

Everybody does that.

Tears came. I let them.

Then somebody knocked on my door.

I got it open with my face still wet and did not have time to do anything about it.

Cassian was standing in the passage with a plate in his hands.

There was a cloth over it. He took the cloth off. It was hot enough that I could see the steam come off it in the cold of that corridor, some sort of stew with bread on the side of the plate.

"I watched it made," he said. "From the pan to this plate. Nobody else came near it."

I did not say anything.

He put it into my hands, and it was almost too hot to hold.

"Good night," he said.

Then he went back down the passage.

I stood in my doorway holding it until I could feel my fingers again.

Then I sat down on the floor with my back against the bed, and I ate all of it.