His Love Is a Cage with My Name on It

Chapter Seventeen: What Is Under Vale House

The men took the bricked wall down in forty minutes, and Iris watched them do it with her hands folded, humming.

Lavender's green, dilly dilly. Lavender's blue.

Behind the wall was a stair. Behind the stair was a chamber older than the house above it, brick-vaulted, dry as a lung, and lit by nothing at all until Damian's lamp went in and showed us what a century of Vales had been told to be afraid of.

It was a room full of paintings.

Not a pit. Not an altar. Not a creature. Canvases, stacked and racked in the hundreds, in every size, and on every single one of them, in every fashion of a hundred and forty years, the same woman's face.

My face.

"There," Iris said comfortably. "Now everyone can stop whispering."

I walked into that chamber with my heart going like a hammer and my restorer's eye taking inventory before my mind could catch up. Underpainting. Ground layers. The same hand in all of it, unmistakable, the way a hand is when you have looked at enough of it. Studies of the same face, over and over and over, for a century and a half.

"You painted these," I said. "All of them."

"Every one."

"Why?"

And Madame Iris Vale, who had poured my tea for eight weeks, turned and looked at me with an expression of such enormous, patient tenderness that my skin crawled off my bones.

"Because I loved her," she said.

Nobody moved.

"I was nineteen when I came to Vale House to paint the heir's bride," Iris said. "Elara Ashe was twenty. She had a laugh like a window breaking and she thought my work was better than his money, and for one summer I was the most important person in her life." She touched the nearest canvas with two fingers. "And then that boy's great-grandfather smiled at her over dinner, and she was gone. Not cruelly. She never noticed she'd done it. She simply loved him, and after that I was furniture."

"So you killed her," I said.

"I gave her a tea for her nerves," said Iris. "Every night for a month. And in September she took ill and in October she died in his arms, and he wept, and I painted her from memory for eleven years." She said it the way you'd recite a recipe. "And then, forty years later, a girl came through the gate with that face. And I understood that I had not lost her. I had only been asked to wait."

Damian's voice came out of him like something dragged. "There's no bargain."

"There's no bargain," Iris agreed. "There is a very old woman who does not die, for reasons I stopped questioning long ago, and a family of fools who will believe anything if you tell it to them in a solemn room on their eighteenth birthday. I told your great-grandfather the house wanted her devotion withheld. He was drowning in grief and he'd have believed the moon was a debt collector." She smiled at him almost kindly. "You have all been so obedient, my darlings. Four generations of you, keeping her at arm's length for me. Do you understand what a gift that has been? She comes back, and she is lonely, and there is no one in the house who will be warm to her.

Except me."

I could not breathe.

"That's what the tea is," I said. "It isn't to make me forget the past life. It's to keep me..."

"Docile. Wakeful at the right hours. Grateful for the only kind hand in a cold house." Iris tilted her head. "The forgetting is a mercy I throw in. Do you know what it is like to watch someone remember you and be afraid of you? I have had that three times. I would rather have you blank and fond."

"And when we love each other anyway," Damian said. "When the rule breaks."

"Then I take her back before he can have her," said Iris, "and I begin again. It is not so long a wait, at my age." She turned to the stair. "Bring the lamp up when you're finished, boy. And Elara, do sleep. You look tired.

The fourth month is always the hardest."