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The elevator door glided open, revealing another portal. Paul keyed in his code and pressed his hand against the palm-reader, then waited for long seconds while the reader and other less obvious safeguards did their job. When the security door slid out of the way with a little suck of air, Paul stepped through and pushed open the secondary door, this one on metal hinges and of decidedly old-fashioned design. The smell of Ava's house washed over him, a combination of scents so evocative of another era as to be almost claustrophobic—lavender, silver polish, sheets kept in cedar chests. As he stepped into the foyer he moved in a few strides from the smooth, edgeless efficiency of the present into something that, were it not for the vibrant young woman at the heart of it, could be a museum or even a tomb.
She was not waiting for him in the parlor. Her absence startled him, an unexpected thing that made the whole strange ritual suddenly seem as mad as he had thought it to be in his first weeks on the job. He checked the glass and ormolu clock on the mantelpiece. A minute after nine, but no Ava. He wondered if she might be ill, and was surprised by the stab of worry that came with the thought.
One of the downstairs maids, capped and aproned in white, silent as a ghost, slid past the hall doorway with her arms full of folded tablecloth.
"Excuse me," he called. "Is Miss Jongleur still in bed? She's late for her lessons."
The maid looked at him, startled, as though merely by speaking he had broken some ancient tradition. She shook her head before disappearing.
After half a year, Paul still had no idea whether the household help were trained actors or simply very strange.
He knocked at her bedroom door, then knocked again, louder. When no one answered, he cautiously pushed open the unlatched door. The room, half-boudoir, half-nursery, was empty. A row of porcelain-faced dolls stared at him dumbly from the mantelpiece, glassy eyes wide beneath the long lashes.
On his way back across the parlor he caught a glimpse of himself in the framed mirror above the mantel: an unexceptional man dressed in clothes far more than a century out of date, in the middle of an over-ornamented parlor room that might have come straight out of a Te
It was bizarre, of course, even a little frightening, but he still could never quite get over how much cleverness had gone into it. From the house's front door his view across the formal garden and its maze of paths, past the hedges and over the woods beyond, was exactly what he would have expected to see surrounding the country house of a reasonably well-to-do French family of the late nineteenth century. The fact that the sky overhead was not real, that rains and morning mists came from a sophisticated sprinkler system, that the shifting of daylight into evening or the Bo Peep wandering of clouds were created by lighting and holographic illusion, almost added to the charm. But the idea that this entire house and grounds had been built on the top floor of a skyscraper largely for one person, a sealed time capsule in which the past was simulated if not actually returned, was more disturbing.
It's like something from a story, he thought—and not for the first time, by any means. The way they keep her up here. Like the giant's wife in that beanstalk story, or . . . who was the princess with the hair? Rapunzel?
He spent a short while exploring the garden, whose formal, old-fashioned French design was softened by what he could only think of as that woody, overgrown English influence that was almost indistinguishable from neglect. There were several places where the high hedges hid benches, and Ava had told him that sometimes she liked to bring her sewing out and work on it while she listened to the birds sing.
At least the birds are real, he thought as he watched a few of them flitting from branch to branch above his head.
The winding paths were all empty. Paul was begi
He turned off the gravel-strewn paths onto the narrow track that led into the overgrown orchard Ava called "the wood." Here the ground became as uneven as real terrain, and the plums and crab apples that ringed the garden gave way to stands of silver birch and an increasing tangle of oaks and alders, which were thick enough to hide the house when he looked back and provide at least the illusion of privacy, although Paul knew from one of Fi
He found her sitting on the grass beside the stream. She looked up at his approach, smiling her secretive smile, but said nothing.
"Ava? Are you all right?"
She nodded. "Come here. I want to show you something."
"It's time for your lessons. I worried when you weren't waiting for me at the house."
"That was very kind of you, Mr. Jonas. Please, come here." She patted the grass beside her. He saw that she was at the center of a wide ring of mushrooms—a fairy ring, as his Grammer Jonas had called them—and the sense of being in some sort of unfolding tale crept over him again. Ava's eyes were wide and full of . . . something. Excitement? Anticipation?
"You'll get your dress wet, sitting on the grass," he said as he reluctantly moved forward.
"The trees kept the rain off. It's quite dry here." She pulled her hem aside and tucked it beneath her leg, making a space for him to sit, and accidentally—or was it?—revealing a bit of the petticoat beneath, as well as a pale gleam of ankle above her shoe. He found himself struggling not to react. He had discovered the first day of lessons that Ava was a flirt, although it was hard to tell how much was genuine and how much was simply her anachronistic ma
Paul was begi
Seeing his discomfiture, Ava gri
"All is well." She patted his knee. "It is a surprise."
Paul shook his head. She clearly had something pla