After a moment, his hands returned, moving more carefully.
“What about you?” Clare tried again to see his face. His dark eyes met hers then glanced away. “What will you do if your mother is spending all of her money?”
“Truthfully, I do not yet know. I would like to work. I would like to be responsible for something. But that is not an option as long as I live here.”
“Why don’t you leave?”
He closed his eyes. The muscles in his jaw twitched. Before she could identify the emotions he was trying to conceal, he opened his eyes and his features returned to neutral. He dipped the comb into the water before answering. “I cannot.”
His tone made it clear he didn’t want to continue that line of conversation, but Clare was too curious to stop. “Why not?”
“The world is not particularly welcoming to someone like me.”
“Someone like you?”
He poured fresh water over her hair, holding one hand across her forehead to keep it from running into her eyes. “Strange.”
“What? You’re not strange.”
“You are being kind. I know what I am.”
Clare bit her lip. She wanted to argue, but he was odd. She hadn’t been able to get a read on him at first, and it had terrified her. She had preferred to chance the snow than spend the night in his house. But that had been before she’d talked to him.
She thought she was starting to understand Dorran. He wasn’t strange in a bad way. He was just stilted and uncertain. He buried his discomfort under formality. And he was sad. That was what bothered her the most. He tried to hide it, but it slipped out occasionally, hidden in his expressions and movements. The tilt of his eyes. The way his smiles never seemed truly uninhibited. How methodical he made every motion. It seemed as though all of the life had been crushed out of him somehow.
He gently nudged her to sit upright and used the towel to squeeze the moisture out of her hair. Clare wanted to say something else, to find a way to tell him that he wasn’t too strange for the world and that he didn’t need to spend the rest of his life hiding in his secluded mansion. But she couldn’t find the right words.
“I think I fixed it well enough.” The towel dabbed across her forehead, catching the last drips. “No hair dryers, I’m afraid, but we can sit you beside the fire to dry it.”
“Thanks.” She touched her hair, relieved to finally feel clean again.
Dorran tipped the dirty water down the sink and left the towels in the empty basin. “Before you return to your room, would you mind taking a detour? I would like to show you something.”
“Sure.”
He lit two candles in the stove top, fixed them into candleholders, and gave Clare one. Then he led her to the door, switching off the kitchen’s lights as he passed them.
Clare pulled the coat tighter as they crossed the empty room and approached one of the doors in the back. Since he’d given her his coat, he only wore a shirt. “Aren’t you cold?”
“A little. But I don’t mind it. Careful here.”
He led her down five steps and into a stone room. A large bolted bronze door opposite them caught in their candlelight. Unlike the main parts of the house, the area hadn’t been well maintained. The bronze was tarnished, and dirt had accumulated between the stones lining the floor. Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling to light the walls.
“Is this part of the house for the staff?” Clare guessed.
He gave her a quick smile. “Correct.”
A tall stone archway to Clare’s left drew her attention. She could see a step down but no farther. Shadows clustered inside the entryway, and she thought she could hear a very faint dripping noise coming from the space.
Dorran was focussed on the door ahead, though. The small window in it was too fogged for Clare to see through. Dorran put the candle on the ground while he unbolted the door and pulled it open. Then he motioned Clare into the room.
As she stepped through the doorway, lights flickered to life, starting right above her and reappearing every four feet down the long, rectangular room. The space was warmer than the rest of the house, enough that the cold no longer bit at Clare’s face. Shelves lining the walls were full of metal and wood implements. At least twenty raised garden beds were spaced evenly throughout the area, and organic smells filled her nose. After spending so long in the house’s stuffy hallways and rooms, being surrounded by something natural was like a breath of fresh air.
“Is this…”
“Our garden.” He stepped in behind her and closed the door. The lights were warmer than the kitchen’s, and they highlighted Dorran’s dark eyes and the line of his jaw. “It is expensive to have food delivered to the property, so most of what we eat is grown on-site. The gardens were dug up shortly before the family left. Sadly, the chickens and goats are gone too.”
She leaned over one of the garden beds. The soil looked rich and dark.
“If we have nothing but tinned vegetables and rice to eat, we will soon start craving fresh food. I thought it would be wise to restart the garden. It will use up our fuel faster but will help extend our food stores.”
Clare thought it was probably a smart move. She brushed her hand over the dirt. “It’s still warm.”
“It was heated until a few days ago. The insulation has protected it from the worst of the cold.” He pointed to the lights above them. “They’re full-spectrum bulbs, which imitate sunlight. They will need fuel to run. But we can save petrol by heating it through the furnace. That is my main motive for being cautious with the lights. If we budget carefully, we should have enough fuel to keep the garden lit and warm for a while.”
“It’s heated by a furnace? Like a real, wood-burning furnace?”
“Yes. In the basement, below our feet.” He paced along the garden beds, examining the freshly turned soil. “We have plenty of seeds. I thought we could start with plants with a short harvest time. Lettuce. Beans. Some of the seeds can be eaten as sprouts too. I will come back later and begin work.”
“Why don’t we start now?” Clare tilted her head. “I had a garden at my cottage. I can help.”
“I would appreciate it. But your arm is still healing, and you must be tired. Perhaps another day.”
She laughed. “You don’t have to worry about me so much. And I want to help. I think I’d go crazy if I had to stay in bed all day.”
“Hm. As long as you’re not too tired.” His eyes warmed. “I’ll see to reviving the furnace. You could begin planting. Gloves are on that shelf. Seeds are on the bench. I will be back within twenty minutes.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Clare pulled on a pair of thick gloves as she watched Dorran leave through the tarnished door. He seemed familiar with the staff’s areas of the house. Something told her that he was used to working in the garden. If she’d been stuck in the mansion with no freedom and no real job, she probably would have started looking for chores to do too.
The seeds were arranged in large labelled glass jars on a bench running across the back wall. The quantity surprised her. She was used to buying packets with a hundred or two hundred seeds for her own garden. Winterbourne had tens of thousands.
I guess the garden has been running for a long while. Feeding a large family and sixty staff three times a day would be no small feat.