Weekly Writing – October 12 2024

A guest in the manor. Trina paced and fretted outside the door to his room, where her mistress had left her like a lost train of thought. Stranded completely outside of routine now, like a clock’s lost cog rolling away across the floor, useless and free.
Not completely, of course. Not useless or free. Her mistress had left her there to tend to the guest’s needs, if he should have any beyond the food she had already brought him. He had thanked her for that, looking straight and sincerely in her eyes, and she had almost panicked to think of what he might see there. Or what he might not – what might be missing in her that he would have seen in an ordinary person. She was practically a piece of clockwork, after all, driven so long by her mistress’s will.
Her voice, without any of her will attached to it, had told him her mistress would gladly host him at breakfast. He hadn’t looked very pleased, but had thanked her for that as well.
Why would her mistress, so secretive and content to be surrounded by servants as predictable as the bricks of her manor, have welcomed a total stranger in from the storm? Why would she be so generous to him, giving him the attention of her servants and a room on the second floor, just one spiralling staircase below her own?
It wasn’t for Trina to know, of course, or even to wonder. But how could she not? That knock on the front door had dashed her world apart. She had closed the door to that guest room behind her, and had shortly after heard the click of the lock inside, but she knew the manor’s chambers and hidden connections better, perhaps, than anyone but her mistress. The painting in the next room over, which looked to be a whirling scarlet landscape of battle and blood, was only solid in the light. In the dark, it could be seen straight through, like a tinted window.
Was it her mistress prompting her towards that other door? Or was she really being granted such heady freedom to explore? Nothing stopped her from slipping into the dark room she dusted every week, polishing its brass fixtures and turning its sheets as needed to keep it perfectly ready for guests she had never thought would come. She closed the door behind her, cutting off the light she didn’t need to cross to the bureau and that violent painting above it.
In the dark, she couldn’t make out any details of the battleground it depicted. Only the vaguest outlines of rearing horse and dying man, burned to translucent amber by the light of the lamp next door. The guest hadn’t gone to bed, as she would have expected. Nor had he taken off more than his travel-stained coat – he sat in the fine oak chair almost directly opposite her hidden watching place, still wearing his soaked black clothes and staring at the locked door.
His face was as grim as any of those in the painting she was peering through. On his thigh, gripped in his fist, lay a long silver dagger.
Trina sank back from the painting as if he had struck her a blow with that blade. Not just a guest in the manor, but one who had brought killing tools with him. Yet he wasn’t stalking the halls, slitting the throats of servants like ripping cogs from a clock. He sat there as if he trusted his knife more than the locked door – as if he expected the manor to bring danger to him, and not the other way around.