By the time Haidée had put on her gown and had done the necessary absolutions at the toilette that she shared with Renaud—apparently their schedules were so different that she had never had any problems in the few days that she had stayed at the observatory in fighting for the bathroom’s use—it was nine o’clock in the morning. After a peek out the window to confirm her suspicions that the day was going to be filled with gloomy rain, she tucked the circular card into a pocket and thought that it was too bad that everyone else in the observatory was going to be too busy to notice that she was wearing one of her dresses which was now all the rage in Paris—a loose light blue gown with a particularly fresh design of scalloped ribbon at the neckline and the hemline.
The marten was awake as well, and for a wild animal, displayed a startlingly lack of concern that it was not free outside or that it was inside a room. The bad weather could have been the reason for its lack of concern. After all, Haidée wasn’t too keen about keeping any kind of pet, even domesticated ones, but she found herself being far too lax about the entire thing—if the marten wanted to follow her around, so be it.
She finally ventured out of her room and headed down to the dining hall on the first floor. The marten followed her down the stairs and through the halls, tagging along not too far from her skirts.
“You’re finally up, Mademoiselle?”
The dark inquiring voice skittered up her spine and the marten at her hem squeaked in surprised before trying to hide underneath a flounce. Haidée took a step backward from the archway leading out to the hallway to the kitchen and turned her head slightly to see a long shadow slouched at an open doorway with stairs leading down into the depths of the observatory. The weak light from the adjacent room made the rims of his spectacles gleam like old copper.
“Monsieur Renaud.” She was chagrined to discover that her voice had developed a nervous warble over her customary cool reserve. Where was this vulnerability coming from? She was an actress. She was supposed to be able to fake reserve no matter the situation. “A good day to you. What a surprise to see you outside of the depths of your research.”
She noticed that he was holding something in his hands, something rather round and metallic-like. He was rolling it around his palm, idly, and temporarily she was mesmerized by his long fingers that moved and caressed the object as if it were something particularly delicate and fine.
“I have been down in the cellar doing some calibrations,” he hedged. He put the round object into a pocket of his overly large coat. “Since six this morning, in fact. I decided to come up for a small break and perhaps to get something to eat.”
“How fortuitous, Monsieur, since I am going to the kitchen myself to get breakfast.”
Renaud let out a low, sardonic chuckle. “Breakfast? Oh, I forgot. You just got up. Surely, this is too early for you?”
“Are you making fun of my schedule?”
Noticing her stiff tone, he grinned, flashing teeth. This time he appeared more predatory than amused. How strange, Haidée thought. How could an astronomer look predatory? They were supposed to be like bespectacled gnomes hunched over their intellectual treasure trove.
“Ah, my dear Mademoiselle, I would never make fun of you.”
She tilted her chin up in an attempt to give him a haughty cold glare, but she had the suspicion that it worked very little. She was sure it didn’t work at all when she brushed by him to get to the kitchen and she heard his footsteps echoing behind her.
“You look like an ice queen when you do that,” he said behind her back. “Intellectually I know that it is a look that you’ve perfected in your profession, but I am tempted to ask you to do it again. It makes a man feel like a peon to her majesty.”
“I wouldn’t dare try to pretend to be a queen,” she replied, not looking back at him. “Look what they did to the last queen, and she was a real one.”
“Hm. Off with her head. Although it would be a shame if you lost yours. Such a pretty one, even if it is full of lines for plays and meaningless fashion trivia.”
“Don’t forget the gossip,” she replied sarcastically. She wasn’t fooled by his backhanded compliment. She hadn’t bothered to put on a wig that morning and everyone knew that men preferred wigs, not real hair. If they did—well, there was no knowing what other strange things such twisted men preferred.
The door to the kitchen was a large wooden one, polished smooth by time and held together with long iron crossbeams. The handle itself was an iron ring. Haidée had no illusion that Renaud would jump to the fore to open the door for her—if she had asked him, he would have told her that she was a spoiled lady too accustomed to nabobs who jumped to do her every whim.
So she opened the door herself by pulling on the ring and almost came face to face with the cook, Madame Boulanger, as she was sweeping the floor. The stout woman stared at her with a sullen expression.
“Mademoiselle,” the cook said curtly. “How miraculous that you are here this morning. I was just about to feed the rest of the breakfast to the pigs and start on the noon meal.”
Haidée did not feel in a particularly accommodating mood. And she did not like it that the cook not so subtly referred to the leftovers as scraps only fit for pigs. But she was hungry and she didn’t care what the cook called the food as long as she got the chance to eat it. So she said instead, “You don’t have any pigs, Madame. I’ll just heat up the porridge myself if you are not inclined to do so.”
The cook made some disapproving sound at the back of her throat, not liking Haidée’s assumption that she was too lazy to cook anything. Haidée hoped that she had disgruntled the woman by displaying a willingness to cook the meal herself. No matter what Renaud might be thinking, she wasn’t completely spoiled.
“If you do cook some porridge,” Renaud said behind her, “Make sure you make enough for me too.”
Haidée turned her head and was not surprised to see him grinning. She smiled back with a hard edge to her eye. “You prefer your porridge burned?” she said with deadly sweetness.
“Well, now that you put it that way…”
An ear-piercing shriek interrupted Renaud’s reply. The cook was bellowing, her face red and furious. And she was brandishing her broom like a fencing pistol as a small brown body streaked out from between Haidée and Renaud and headed toward a table and some chairs near a cabinet full of dishes.
“A rat! A rat!” Madame Boulanger screamed. Then she let out a string of profanity that would have blistered their ears if they hadn’t been deafened by her initial shouting.
The marten momentarily twisted its head back to look at the cook and Haidée fancied that the creature had a wicked gleam in its beady black eyes as it darted into the small space that the legs of the cabinet allowed. The cook shrieked in rage and with a triumphant swing, whacked the business end of her broom into the lower drawers of the cabinet.
The piece of furniture shuddered and two porcelain soup tureens wobbled precariously on the top shelf. Intent on getting her rat, the cook hit the cabinet again. Haidée didn’t hide her cringe when one of the tureens dropped to the floor and shattered with a sickening crunch. The other tureen landed upside down on Madame Boulanger’s head. She bellowed in consternation, but her shrill voice was muffled by the porcelain. She dropped her broom and used her free hands to yank the crockery off her head.
“What’s wrong? What happened?” the maid, Colette, burst into the room wielding a duster. “Did somebody get murdered?”
“No quite,” Renaud said dryly.
Haidée sighed. “Madame Boulanger thought she saw a rat.”
“And I did!” the cook exclaimed. The marten finally poked its head out from underneath the cabinet to survey the damage and then as swift as lightning, raced back towards Haidée. “There it is! I’m going to kill that rodent. I pride myself on keeping an impeccable kitchen!”
The marten squeaked in alarm as the portly woman advanced on it and grabbed a nearby butcher knife as she stepped forward. The animal tugged on Haidée’s dress, and in pity, she picked the creature up and tucked it into the crook of her arm.
“It’s just a marten,” she told the cook.
“It’s a rat!” Madame Boulanger insisted. “And you are harboring that odious creature.”
“She’s right, Madame,” Colette intervened despite her normally quiet nature. “That is a marten, not a rat. Martens can eat rats, right?”
“I don’t give a damn what it is,” the cook ranted. “I want it out of my kitchen.” She pointed a finger at Haidée. “I want you out of this kitchen as well. You claim to be a lady yet you bring that thing in here!”
“I can’t believe you’re maligning my character,” protested Haidée.
“Out!” the cook shrieked. The knife in her hand gleamed with a dangerous light.
Haidée stepped backward, still somewhat reluctant to follow the woman’s ridiculous command. Annoyed by her hesitation, the cook waved her knife around forcing Haidée to retreat by fleeing out of the kitchen with the marten in her arms. She dared not look back to see the smirking glances of Renaud and Colette. Or even worse, expressions of pity.
Back out in the hallway, Haidée leaned back against the wall and sighed. Her empty stomach let out a protesting growl. She looked down at the marten on her arm. It looked surprisingly unconcerned.
“Ah, the things I do for you,” she murmured. “Now I’m probably going to starve for the rest of this month. And you probably don’t deserve it.”
The marten cocked its head at the sound of her voice and chattered in admonishment. The lady with the knife was bad, it seemed to say.
“A lot of help that would be,” Haidée replied to her imagined conversation with the marten. “That woman with the knife happened to be in charge of the food. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going back to my room and taking two sips of the tonic to forget that I’m hungry. And to forget that this ever happened.”
But as she turned to head back to her room, the door to the kitchen opened. She flinched, almost certain that the cook had followed her out, but it was Renaud instead. He was balancing a tray with bowls and mugs. She quickly glanced at him and then away. It would be just like him to gloat about getting breakfast himself when she went hungry. She was sure he would say something about the situation that it was just as well that she didn’t get breakfast because ladies had to keep their figures.
“Perhaps, Mademoiselle Avenall, you would rather have your breakfast in the dining hall rather than the kitchen?”
Her gaze suddenly shot to his, surprised at his comment. He seemed oddly sympathetic. She couldn’t quite process it.
“The dining hall,” he repeated. “It might be a little formal, but I’m sure it’s far more comfortable than having an angry woman with a sharp instrument standing over you watching you eat.”
“Oh. Well. I’m sure you’re right.”
She followed him back to the dining room. He didn’t offer to pull out a chair for her, but he did set the table, placing a bowl of porridge, a mug of warm milk, and a plate of sliced apples in front of her. Perhaps he wasn’t a complete ogre, she mentally amended. Although one nice deed didn’t completely amend for one person’s customary behavior, especially strange behavior that she had observed the previous day, it went some ways to redemption of reputation.
The only food that he had gotten for himself was an apple, still whole. He bit into it as he watched her eat, the reflection of the light rendering the glass in his spectacles opaque. She found herself wishing that he would take the spectacles off. She was quite sure that he could still see without them. Besides, she liked being able to see people’s expressions. Spectacles hid them and that annoyed her since she did not much like people who deliberately tried to be mysterious outside of acting in the theatre.
The marten peeked at her meal and then crawled up to the table to steal a slice of the apple.
Noticing that she said nothing about the thievery as she slowly ate her own porridge, Renaud said, “I see you’ve made a new friend.”
Haidée shifted a brief, guilty look at the marten who was sedately nibbling at the fruit. The animal didn’t seem particularly concerned that it was sitting only a few feet away from the man it had chattered at the previous day. Did the marten consider the man’s actions suspicious and not the man himself? To Haidée, that did not make sense. To her, man and his actions were inextricably entwined. The marten, however, seemed to forgive and to forget when food was concerned.
“It followed me,” she replied finally.
“I would have predicted that you would have reacted the same way as Madame Boulanger back in the kitchen.”
“I reserve my hysterics for more important things,” she said. “There are far worse things than a single ‘rat’ running across the floor.”
“True. Yet you didn’t scream when we found Legard either. I think you may have hidden depths, Mademoiselle, which you rarely show.”
“You’re wrong. I’m rather apathetic about a lot of things. What do I care if Madame Boulanger’s kitchen is overrun by rats?”
“Yet you defended a ‘rat’. Do you have a soft spot for animals?”
“I am not going to answer that question.”
“Ah.” He tilted his head, pensive as he chewed at his apple. “You don’t like answering even small questions. That’s something to keep in mind.”
Haidée frowned. “That sounded, by far, ominous.”
“Oh, don’t be alarmed. I’m an intellectual, remember? Questions are my stock in trade.”