“ ‘lay roon?” asked Mouche, apprehensively.
The old man shivered. “Call it a dungeon, you’d be closer on. Down in the old wine cellars. Playroom is what she calls it. There’s machines in there, and sometimes when the machines are through, all that’s left is grease.”
“I don’t understand,” said Ornery.
Mouche did understand, all too well. He whispered to Ornery of the picture at House Genevois.
Ornery turned back to the old man. “You’ve seen it a hundred times, gardener? Truly?”
The old man shrugged and pursed his lips. “Well, no, boys, not strictly, no. That’s liar’s license, that is, to make the story ring right. I’d say she does for at least three or four men a year, most of ‘em Consorts, but some just plain folk, like a footman at table she takes a dislike to or some cook that spoils the roast. And nephews, o’ course. She loves disposin’ of nephews.”
“Why does she do it?” breathed Ornery.
Madame had explained psychotic sadism to her students, but Mouche could not yet speak without considerable pain, so he made no attempt to pass that information on. Madame had said some people were made that way, and they did it out of vengeance, and some were born that way, and they did it because hurting and killing made them feel powerful. Either way, there was no cure for it, for each act led to the next with no way to retreat.
“Whatever reason Mistress Mantelby is like she is, you keep tight to what I told you,” said the old man. “I’m trusting you to keep out of the way and be silent. Just like those things we used to have that never existed. You understand?”
By the time the Questioner and her entourage arrived, affairs at Marool Mantelby’s mansion were as calm and usual as it was possible to make them. The only change for the household was that Bane and Dyre were to be housed in a suite at the far end of the servants’ quarters during the Questioner’s stay, because of the stink. So the old gardener said. For that reason and others, everyone was more or less holding their breaths until the visitation was over. It wouldn’t be long. So everyone had been told.
37—An Intimate Disclosure
On the evening the Questioner arrived ornery asked the gardener if they might make use of the washhouse in the compound, and he gave his permission, so long as it was after everyone else had gone to bed, provided they were stingy with the firewood in the boiler and mopped up after themselves. The stone-floored little building was near the wood stove and the pump and was furnished with wooden tubs of various sizes. Ornery took herself and her clothing inside, locked the door, lit the boiler, and heated a good quantity of water.
Mouche, however, on learning that Ornery had gone to commit an act of cleanliness, stopped scratching himself and decided it was long past time for himself to have a bath also, to rid him of vermin if nothing else, so he went along to the room, jiggled the latch, and walked into the place. She was standing in the tub, washing her hair. She was Ornery, no doubt of that, but she was also unmistakably female.
Ornery seized up a towel and covered all pertinent parts while stammering a long exposition of how she had been turned into a chatron as a boy. Mouche smiled as politely as his wound would allow. His studies at Madame’s had exposed him to women’s bodies in all varieties of age and inclination; he had seen chatrons and hermaphrodites as well, and he knew Ornery was physiologically a girl and he said so, intelligibly.
Ornery protested.
Mouche shook his head, bewildered. He knew Ornery was a girl, and moreover, he knew she had a body that was sleek and lovely. He liked the looks of her very much, though he felt no desire toward her. He had been trained not to feel desire until and unless desire was wanted, and, if he had thought about it, he would have realized that he had felt no spontaneous desire since he first saw Flowing Green.