“Yes, Madame,” he said.
Madame acknowledged him with a gracious nod. “You graduate to your own suite today. Simon will take you to it.”
Simon did so, through the main hall, past the low-ceilinged dining room with its open hearth and smell of sausages, up the broad marble stairs onto the wide landing with its tall windows overlooking the street between great swags of wine-colored fabric and its equally tall doors leading to the apartments of the staff, and up a flight more, through the deeply carved doors that led into Consort Country.
“No galloping on these stairs,” warned Simon. “Madame’s orders. You gallop on these stairs, Madame may rethink letting you go up.”
“I didn’t think I’d go this year,” said Mouche in wonderment. “I thought you had to be veiled first.”
“Ordinarily, yes. But the way you’re growing, you will be veiled by the end of the year. Fact is, Mouche, we need to increase dormitory space for the younger students, but we’ve several empty suites in Consort Country.”
Something funny in Simon’s voice when he mentioned increasing dormitory space, Mouche thought. Something a bit tentative and uncertain. He didn’t have long to think about it, for Simon pushed upon the door, revealing a table set with tapers and a long, narrow, very dark hallway. At Simon’s direction, Mouche lit them each a candle before the door swung closed.
The front part of House Genevois, so Simon said, had been rebuilt and added to during the last century in accordance with modern rules of architecture, and that was the part people saw when they visited. Once through the door into Consort Country, however, one went back into a sprawling maze made up of many separate buildings, some of them dating back to the first settlement, that had been acquired, remodeled, and joined together in stages and in accordance with no overall plan or direction. The suites of the Consorts presumptive were scattered throughout this labyrinth, like lumps of fat in a black pudding, for though windows and skylights had once lit the corridors, most of them had been built over, leaving the passageways in darkness.
Mouche followed Simon, bearing his own dim sphere of light, through which he could catch only a glimpse of the dark, velvety runners on the corridor floors, the carved wagon-panel along the walls, the shadowed ceilings high above with the gilded cornices, the gold of the ornate frames surrounding huge, dark pictures that lined every wall. The subject matter was at first indiscernible, but then, when the light caught one such painting at the right angle, all too obvious.
Mouche grunted, not sure whether to laugh or gag.
“Pay no attention to them, boy,” said Simon. “Some persons wish to be immortalized in this fashion, though the Hagions know why. Perhaps they use these images to titillate themselves. Perhaps the paintings stir them to unaccustomed lust.”
“I wouldn’t lust over that,” said Mouche, indignantly. “And their faces are bare! “
“Faces are usually bare in the bedroom, boy. I wouldn’t lust over such activities either, but there are some who will, and that’s a matter for us all to keep in mind, Mouche. There are always some who will.” His voice resonated with that same tentative unease Mouche had noticed earlier. “Madame collects these paintings, from estate sales, mostly. If there is material of this kind, the auctioneers call her in before the public viewing. She regards such stuff as cautionary, not erotic.”
The paintings did serve as landmarks. He had only to go past the flagellation, averting his eyes from certain terrible details, turn at the corner where the undines were busy at their putrid liquefactions, go on past several debasements too awful to contemplate, and up the stairs nearest the serial sodomites, turning the corner at a depiction of a particularly nasty machine doing indescribable things to a struggling young man at the direction of a gloating woman.
This last picture stopped Mouche in his tracks, possibly because he could see it clearly. It was newer than the others; the varnish had not yet yellowed, to obscure the details. “This is fantasy, right?” he asked. “This did not really happen.” He leaned forward to see the label, which read, Mantelby, at her pleasures.