Tad Williams - Sea of Silver Light

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of himself in the framed mirror above the mantel: an unexceptional man dressed in clothes far more than a century out of date, in the middle of an over-ornamented parlor room that might have come straight out of a Tenniel illustration. Something only a hair more subtle than a shudder passed through him. For just a moment, but in a most unsettling way, he felt that he was trapped in someone else's dream.

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 beginning to feel a quiet rising of panic, despite all good sense. If there was ever anyone less likely to stumble into danger than Avialle Jongleur, it was hard to imagine: she was watched by the most sophisticated surveillance equipment available and surrounded by her father's private army. But she had never simply missed a morning's session, never even been late. Her time with Paul seemed to be the highlight of her day, although he didn't flatter himself that it was due to any overwhelming qualities of his own. The poor child had precious few chances to see other human beings.

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 Finney's very pointed lectures that the surveillance extended everywhere. Still, he could not help feeling he had crossed over some invisible line: this far from the house the trees shouldered together closely and the false sky could only be seen through chinks in the foliage far above. Even the birds kept to the highest branches. The spot seemed strangely isolated. Paul found it hard to keep his earlier folktale impressions out of his head.

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 manners, which dictated perfect decorum on the surface, but by doing so made every exchange even more loaded. A female friend of his back in London had once spent a drunken evening telling him why Regency novels were so much sexier than anything written in the less-inhibited centuries since: "It's all about the tight focus," she had insisted.

Paul was beginning to agree with her.

Seeing his discomfiture, Ava grinned broadly, an expression of unmeasured enjoyment which reminded Paul again that she was little more than a child, and which paradoxically made him even more uncomfortable. "We really should be getting back," he began. "If I had known you wanted your lessons outside today, I would have prepared. . . ."

"All is well." She patted his knee. "It is a surprise."

Paul shook his head. She clearly had something planned, but he was angry with himself for losing control of the situation. It would have been difficult enough, being private tutor to an attractive, lonely, and very young woman, but in the bizarre circumstances of the Jongleur fortress the whole thing became even more of a strain. "This isn't appropriate, Ava. Someone will see us. . . ."

"No one will see. No one."

"That's not true." Paul wasn't sure how much she knew about the surveillance. "In any case, we have work to do today. . . ."

"No one will see us," she said again, this time with surprising firmness. She lifted a finger to her lips, smiled, then touched her ear. "And no one will hear us, either. You see, Mr. Jonas, I have a . . . friend."

"Ava, I hope we are friends, but that's not. . . ."

She giggled. The waves of black hair, confined today by pins and a straw hat, framed her amused expression. "Dear, dear Mr. Jonas—I'm not talking about you."

Puzzled, more worried than ever, Paul stood. He extended a hand for Ava. "Come with me. We can talk about this later, but we must get back to the house." When she did not accept his help, he shook his head and turned to leave.