Sleeping Helena (4 page)

Katza had bit her tongue (she recalled the pain well) and laid a hand on his elbow. “Do not keep yourself away from me,” she had said.

He’d taken her hand in his. “I am right here.”

She had nodded. She had believed she understood. Her brother would soon come to his senses.

All she had to do was wait.

Kitty shifted in her chair as she remembered that day and the look on her brother’s face. It was a natural gift of age, to be better able to recall the far past than what had happened a moment ago. Kitty’s memory was sharp as a needle. Every detail was enshrined there and she visited almost daily. She thought she’d grow used to the pain over time, but she hadn’t. It remained fresh as ever, a wound she could not let heal. Louis, her brother, had not come to his senses. Instead, he had lost them all.

The winter following their reunion, Louis and Katza had spent many fine hours sharing a seat, talking and reading and watching the snow fall beyond the wide windows of the house. Despite his strange mood, she had been overjoyed to have Louis to herself again.

They were together the night a terrible blizzard had swept in. Louis had said the wind was the result of a giant roaring on top of the Alps. Katza had laughed; no fell or fantastic creature could harm her with Louis at her side. They had watched as the snow clumped on the branches and filled up the sills, ice spreading, root-like, on the glass. Louis had tucked a blanket around Katza’s knees before going into the kitchen to fetch two steaming cups of cocoa. The house had been quiet; everyone was in bed, where all good people belong at such an hour. Katza had snuggled into the settee. At that moment, her life was painfully perfect.

When Louis did not return as soon as she thought he should, Katza had unwillingly pulled herself up and gone in search of him. The house had groaned around her. The night lamps made small crescents of light in the hall, but did nothing to dispel the ghosts lurking in dark corners and doorways. A heavy feeling had grown in her stomach. Though it teased and tugged at her, she could not discern its source.

She had reached the entrance to the kitchens and stopped. From beyond the door she’d heard the sound of men talking quietly among themselves. Their voices were deep and calm, but she could not make out the words. As she pushed open the door, shock had rippled through her body and caught her there on the threshold. Three faces had turned toward her. Louis’ features fell readily into place, but she could not believe in the man who had been in the room with him. Even had she
Seen
this, she would not have believed.

There, at the great table where Cook prepared the food, stood their mercurial monarch, King Ludwig II. Behind him an attendant cast his eyes around the room, but Katza saw only the king. Snow had melted from their cloaks and slid down their boots, creating little lakes of fresh water on the stone floor at their feet. Katza had stuttered and coughed and then fled, running as though a monster was chasing behind her. She knew who her brother loved and it was impossible.

Katza had flailed through the corridors, her white dressing gown billowing about her legs, turning her into one of the fleeting ghosts she had so recently imagined. She had run blindly until she came to a stop, trembling, before the curtains concealing the hidden stair. Her hands had run down the edges of the fabric as she parted them. She turned the cold, brass doorknob. Each action had brought another shock to bear on her shaking frame. The years with Louis, the years without him, and the short time she’d had him again all jerked like badly made marionettes in front of her eyes.

She could not recall her feet landing on any step, but Katza would never forget what she had Seen in the mirror that hung in the secret room. A face, old and lined, with great waves of silver hair falling down around it, had peered out from the spotted glass. The eyes had stared into Katza’s own, as though the old woman had known she was there.
It must be one of my spells
, Katza had thought,
the Sight upon me again.
She had been caught in time, frozen in place by the sound of the woman’s voice.

Break the spell
, the woman in the mirror had said.

The small room had spun. Strips of faded and peeling wallpaper seemed to wave about as though a wind gusted through the walls. Katza lost her balance, felt her feet turn in and a sharp pain as her hip hit the floor. As she slipped into unconsciousness, the last thing she’d seen had been the old woman’s weary face. She was smiling.

When Katza woke the next day, she might have thought she had dreamt the scene except she was prone on a cold floor with that voice still in her ears.
What spell?
It was easier to think about that than the other thing she had seen. Louis could not love another and he certainly could not love Ludwig. He was supposed to love her, his devoted sister, not their lunatic king.

She had eased herself upright and shook out her gown, run a hand over the remains of her braid and taken a painful step toward the door. She did not know how to face that new day, but it could not be ignored.

She had reached her room, where the bed’s four posters seemed to mock her: they stood at attention, perfectly vertical, while she slouched past, bent with shame. She had felt heavy and hollow—both at the same time—as though she might faint again at any moment and crash through the floor to land on some poor soul below.

Katza had refused to give in to it. She’d found her robe and thrown it over her shoulders, ripped out her braid in a fury of combing and drawn a very deep breath.

Louis had caught her just as she was leaving her room.

“Katza,” he said.

“Louis.” What else could she have said? Her eyes had narrowed as she noted the changes the night had wrought in her brother. Her name on his lips meant nothing. He had reached out a hand, cold as bone, for one of hers.

“Please don’t tell anyone who you saw here last night. He has requested our silence.”

Katza had looked away from her brother as she let his hand go. “I’ll say nothing, but not for his sake. For yours.”

Damn Ludwig’s midnight rides anyway. They were not peasants! Why had he chosen to darken their door that night? Katza had closed the door to her bedroom and left Louis alone in the hall.

I was a fool
, Kitty thought, returning her mind to the present. There was still much to be done and while the renovations of the main house were well underway, Kitty had one final thing to attend to. She roused herself and waved at Karl, who stood nearby.

“Have you hung it?”

Karl’s face was like stone. “Yes, I have.”

The task had not been easy to complete, for he was no longer so young himself, but she’d insisted he handle it alone. A spare lantern had gone first and then his tools, and then finally he’d hefted the mirror up the hidden, narrow stairwell. Karl, ever a practical man, had begun to think the stairway might be haunted. Each time he’d traveled the passage it appeared to end in a different place. The door was the same, but when he opened it he swore he saw mountains, or a lake, or even fields of golden wheat spread out beyond the walls. It had unnerved him. Though not prone to hysteria, Karl had done the unthinkable and broken one of Kitty’s laws.

Disturb nothing in that room,
she had said.
Not one speck of dust should be moved.
He dared not tell her, but he’d opened a small window set high in the wall. It had been sealed and boarded over long before for reasons forgotten by now.

It had been the most difficult thing he’d ever done.

As he’d begun to pry at the piece of wood covering the single-paned window, he’d been overcome by an intense feeling of déjà vu, as though everything he was about to do, he’d already done. Karl had
known
that within moments, he would find himself unable to go against Kitty’s wishes. He had known the argument he would have with himself. He had known how the fears raised by that strange, little room would war with his loyalty toward his employer and that he would step away from the window, leaving it sealed.

Karl had found himself shaking as the moment passed. He had taken a deep breath to steady himself when, with a horrible abruptness, a large and oddly marked spider appeared on the windowsill in front of him. His heart, he later claimed, had nearly stopped.

That’s it
, Karl thought.
Kitty will never know.

He simply had to let in some light to dispel the ghosts in that room and yet, the more he thought of removing the wooden barrier, the more his sense of déjà vu had worked against him.

Finally, in a moment of mental anguish, he’d ripped the old wood away from the glass with a grunt and a twist of his arms. As light found its way through the old, dirty window, Karl had sighed with relief. He’d hung the mirror and fled the room and he never wanted to go there ever again.

“Well?”

Karl blinked. “Excuse me, did you say something?”

Kitty glared. “Have you locked the door?”

“Oh, yes.” He fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out a small, silver key. “Here you are.”

Kitty took the key, held it in her hand, turned it over and smiled.

Clenching the key in her fist, reassured by its hard metal, she dismissed Karl with another wave and then stomped off to her room. The brass lamp on her vanity table gave off a wan light as she dumped a box of jewelry out onto its hardwood surface. Her fingers sifted through pearls and garnets until she found the thin chain she sought. She threaded the key onto it and clasped it around her neck, and then sat. The dim light revealed stacks of books piled randomly about the legs of her dressing table. She pulled a blue-bound volume from the heap beside her chair. She knew its contents well, for she’d read it far into many nights, until her eyes ached, memorizing the passages contained in its brittle pages.

A portion of the family’s genealogy was recorded in the book, along with a description of the gifts each person had received and in some cases, how those gifts had manifested. This volume covered her generation and those younger. She frowned to see her own name there, faded with age, her gift of
time
beside it with a question mark, as though whoever recorded her gift had not quite understood what it was. Kitty penned in Helena’s date of birth
—
13 June 1970. She cackled to herself as she listed Helena’s gifts beside her name, and then she shut the book and put it aside.