The mansion had entered full preparation mode at the sixth bell and had not left it since.
This was the organized chaos of a household performing at its maximum capacity in every direction simultaneously — and it was organized, Orreth having seen to that with the comprehensive planning of a woman who considered surprise an administrative failure and had been preventing administrative failures for fifteen years.
Sera had been running since the sixth bell.
Selfi had been running since before that, having arrived at the sixth bell to find that Sera had already started and had been managing the guilt of being the one who slept the full hour since.
Wren had been running since she had briefly stopped running, which was a theoretical interval that had not actually occurred.
At the ninth bell, Sera had issued the prohibition with the authority of someone who had assessed the current state of the household and was prepared to defend her position:
"Third floor. Off limits. The cleaning from yesterday — everything is still damp and slippery up there, the maids have left their equipment everywhere, there are buckets and long poles and things that can fall. Keep Oswin in the east wing. Keep him away from anything that has been recently moved. And keep him," she said, looking at Gerffron with the specific directness of someone who has identified all the variables in a situation, "with you, which means keeping yourself somewhere sensible as well."
"That is a complete and reasonable set of instructions," Gerffron said.
"Yes," Sera said.
"I will follow them."
"Good."
She left.
Gerffron looked at Oswin.
Oswin looked at the door.
The east wing was a perfectly adequate space.
Gerffron had spent the better part of two and a half years in a single room within the east wing and was not, therefore, a man who was unacquainted with the experience of confined domestic space. He had made peace with confined domestic space. He had, in fact, come to regard confined domestic space as an environment that had its own particular virtues.
But the east wing on a full preparation day had a specific quality that was different from its usual character.
It had the quality of a space that was part of something larger and busier and more interesting and was not itself participating in that something, which was a different quality from ordinary confinement.
He sat on the bed.
He looked at Oswin.
Oswin had been on the bed for six minutes, lolling, tossing and turning around restlessly.
He had expressed these opinions with the escalating comprehensiveness of someone who had started with mild observation and had moved, through several rounds of unaddressed communication, toward a fuller statement of his position.
"You are not wrong," Gerffron said.
Oswin paused in his fuller statement.
"I agree with your assessment of the situation," Gerffron said. "It is cooped up in here. We have been told to stay. We are both doing the same amount of interesting things, which is none. I understand completely."
Oswin made the sound he made when he was indicating that the conversation was going in the right direction but had not yet arrived at the destination he required.
"We are," Gerffron said, "absolutely not going anywhere."
He looked at the door.
He looked at Oswin.
"Absolutely not," he said.
Oswin had discovered the corridor.
This was technically Gerffron's responsibility and technically something he had allowed in the specific way of allowing that happened when a person's internal argument between staying and going had been resolved by the simple practical event of Oswin achieving the door before the argument concluded.
Gerffron collected him from the corridor.
He stood in the corridor with a baby on his hip and the east wing at his back and the rest of the mansion's preparation happening at various distances and considered his options.
"Fine," he said. "One circuit. East wing corridor only, nothing above the first floor, and we are back in the room before anyone notices."
Oswin grabbed his lapel.
"This is not a negotiation," Gerffron said. "This is me stating terms."
Oswin made the sound that indicated terms were acceptable.
They began the circuit.
It was, as these things went, an entirely reasonable plan.
The plan did not account for Oswin's recently acquired preferences in the matter of direction, which were upward.
The plan did not account for the specific quality of Oswin's determination when he had identified a goal, which was comprehensive.
The plan did not account for the fact that Gerffron, holding an eight-month-old who was attempting to lever himself upward by the lapel with the single-minded focus of a mountaineer, was functionally unable to maintain a downward trajectory while also maintaining a secure grip on the mountaineer.
They went up.
The third floor had the specific smell of a space that was cleaned but not inhabited — the particular, slightly airy quality of rooms that received maintenance rather than daily life. The maids' equipment was indeed everywhere: buckets, long-handled cleaning poles, folded cloths, the organized interim disorder of a job stopped for lunch.
Oswin surveyed it with proprietary satisfaction.
"We are not touching anything," Gerffron said.
Oswin reached for a cleaning pole.
"We are absolutely not touching anything," Gerffron said, redirecting the hand.
He moved through the corridor.
Storage rooms on either side. The original library. A linen room. The specific geography of a floor that had been used for purposes and was now used primarily for storage of those purposes' remainders.
At the end of the corridor, half against the wall, facing it, covered in a white dust cloth:
A frame.
Large.
Placed with the specific, deliberate care of something that had been decided about — not stored carelessly, but oriented with intention, the cloth covering the front rather than the back.
Gerffron looked at it.
He looked at the size of it.
He looked at the way it faced the wall.
Oswin reached for the white cloth.
"Don't—" Gerffron started.
He looked at the frame.
He looked at the cloth.
He thought: I have been in this house for five years. I have never been on this floor. There is a portrait facing the wall with a white cloth over it.
He thought: I should leave this alone, the lunch hour is nearly over but I have never been a man who left things alone when curiosity was this specific.
It was in fact his curiosity that terrorized him till his last moments...and that was what that made him.......
He breathed deeply and shifted Oswin to his left hip.
He reached out with his right hand.
He took the edge of the white cloth.
He drew it back.
The portrait was large in the way of formal portraits that were intended to fill a specific wall and make a specific statement about the person they depicted and the household that had commissioned them.
The subject was a young man.
Eight, perhaps nine. Dark coat in the Wadee house colours. Formal posture of someone who had been instructed in sitting for portraits and had applied the instruction. The specific quality of a face that a painter had caught — not just the surface arrangement of features but the particular quality of whoever was inside the face, which good portrait painters caught when the subject was complicated enough to have an inside worth catching.
Gerffron looked at the jaw.
He looked at the eyes.
He looked at the specific quality of the expression — carefully composed, slightly guarded, with something underneath the composition that the painter had found despite the composition and had rendered in the way that good painters rendered the things their subjects did not know they were showing.
He looked at this face for a long time.
He looked at it because he knew it.
He knew it the way you knew your own face — not from a mirror, which reversed things and had its own distortions, but from photographs and the accumulated self-knowledge of years of occupying a specific body and understanding, gradually, what that body looked like in the world.
He was looking at a younger version of himself.
Not himself — not Deepak Sehwal, who had been a different person in a different body on a different continent. But Gerffron Wadee at the age this portrait had been painted, before the wedding day on which a soul from Kolkata had arrived to borrow this body and this life.
The original Gerffron Wadee.
Young. Before the Cliff family. Before the terrace. Before the wedding and the east tower and the fever and everything.
Before any of it.
Gerffron looked at the painting for a long time.
Oswin was quiet.
He was quiet in the way he was sometimes quiet when a room had a quality that he was attending to — the full, unhurried attention of someone whose observational capacity had not yet been trained to appropriate and inappropriate objects.
Gerffron said, very quietly, to the portrait:
"I have been living your life."
He said it without drama.
He said it the way you said things to people who could not answer — not expecting a response, only needing the statement to exist in the air of the room where it was true.
"I don't know if I have been living it in the right direction," he said. "I don't know what you would have wanted. I know what was waiting for you when I arrived, and I know that what was waiting for you was not good, and I know that some of the things that have happened since have been—" he paused "—better than that. I think they have been better than that."
He looked at the eyes in the painting.
He thought about a twenty-two-year-old in Tokyo who had not had time to decide anything before the world decided for him.
He thought about a boy on the Cliff family's terrace who had not been given a life worth choosing before the choice was made.
He thought: we were both twenty-two.
He thought: I hope I have been a reasonable tenant.
Oswin made the sound he made when he had been attending to something long enough and wanted to communicate that he was ready for the next thing.
From the far end of the corridor, footsteps.
Multiple. The quick, purposeful footsteps of maids returning from lunch.
Gerffron moved.
He pulled the white cloth back over the portrait — not perfectly, the bottom edge was slightly uneven, but adequately — and picked Oswin up more securely and walked back down the corridor with the specific, unhurried speed of a man who was not running and who was also moving at the fastest possible pace that was not running.
He reached the stairs.
He went down them.
He was in the east wing corridor before the maids reached the third floor passage's end.
He stood in the corridor and breathed.
Oswin looked at him.
"Bwok," Oswin said, helpfully, into the silence.
Gerffron looked at him.
"Yes," he said. "Exactly. Very well remembered."
He carried him back to the east wing.
He sat on the bed.
He sat for a while without reading anything, looking at the window and thinking about the portrait and about the body he lived in and about the five years that had passed and about the things that five years could do to a life if you were patient with it and didn't give up.
He thought: fifth anniversary banquet tonight. I should probably change.
He looked at Oswin.
"Don't tell Sera," he said.
"Ba," Oswin said. Ba again.
Gerffron stood.
He started getting ready for the banquet.