Chapter 11 — Diana Lang
Diana Lang appeared the next morning in a pale blue dressing gown, moving through Victor’s house like a woman trained to make silence look graceful.
I was polishing the silver handrail near the landing when she came down without shoes, jewellery, or the public smile rich wives use beside rich husbands.
For one second, she looked nothing like the woman in Victor’s charity photographs.
She looked like a prisoner who had learned to walk beautifully between locked rooms.
Her eyes went to my apron, then to my face.
“You’re new,” she said.
“Yes, madam.”
“I know. Victor complains when people are new. It lets him feel observant.”
She said it without bitterness, which made it worse.
Bitterness at least proves a wound is still alive.
Diana sounded as if she had buried hers under silk and perfect manners years ago.
I lowered my eyes and kept polishing, because wives in houses like this were not automatically allies.
Sometimes they guarded the cage because they had mistaken it for shelter.
Diana stopped by the landing window and looked down at two gardeners cutting hedges into shapes nature never meant to hold.
“Did you serve dinner last night?”
“Yes, madam.”
“Then you heard things.”
My cloth moved once along the rail, slow enough to look obedient.
“I heard plates, glasses, and instructions.”
Diana’s mouth curved, not quite into a smile.
“That is a careful answer.”
“It is a working answer.”
She looked at me longer, measuring what I had not said.
Victor’s wife was elegant in the way neglected women sometimes become elegant: not from ease, but from discipline.
She had fine lines at the corners of her eyes and hands that stayed still even when her face did not.
From the west corridor, Lila Monroe’s laugh floated towards us.
Too bright. Too comfortable.
Diana’s expression did not change, but one finger pressed hard against the silver rail.
Lila appeared a moment later in cream trousers and a jacket far too expensive for an assistant’s salary.
She saw Diana, then me, and smiled as if she owned both the hall and the air inside it.
“Oh good,” Lila said. “You are doing the rail.”
She removed a white glove from her handbag and brushed it across the silver.
There was no dust, but she held it up anyway.
“Again,” she said. “Victor hates dull metal.”
Diana watched, and I understood this was not the first performance she had been forced to witness.
Ryan had taught me what silence meant in a marriage; Victor’s house was teaching me what silence meant in a kingdom.
I dipped my head. “Of course, miss.”
Lila’s smile sharpened at miss, as if even borrowed rank tasted sweet.
Then she walked past Diana without greeting her properly. Not rude enough for a scene.
Rude enough for a wound.
When Lila disappeared, Diana took a folded cloth from the side table and handed it to me.
It was clean, warm from the sun, and completely unnecessary.
“You don’t have to answer her like that,” she said.
“I am paid to answer.”
Diana looked towards the corridor where Lila had gone. “In this house, everyone is paid somehow.”
The sentence carried more truth than she had meant to give away.
I took the cloth. “Thank you, madam.”
She stepped closer, lowering her voice. “This house has no harmless people in it.”
I kept my face blank. “Not Victor. Not Miss Monroe.”
Her eyes moved to the closed study door below us. “Not your Mr Hart either.”
My fingers tightened on the cloth before I could stop them.
Diana noticed, and for the first time, her expression changed. Not surprise.
Recognition.
Then she said the line that stayed with me all day.
“This house is full of people pretending not to know each other.”
I looked up despite myself.
Diana’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Including me.”