Page 8 of The House of Quiet

Chapter Five

A Bird Puzzled

“Nimbus!” Birdie rushes toward her old friend, buzzing with joy at this unexpected reunion. He knows what Magpie means to her. He can help her, and they can—

His expression doesn’t change as she gets closer. He remains motionless, his gaze tracking movement somewhere behind her. She looks over her shoulder, confused, but there’s nothing there. Something is wrong. Something is really, really wrong.

Why is he here ? She sits carefully on the edge of his bed and takes one of his hands in hers.

Nimbus is the same age as Magpie. He turned thirteen just before Birdie left his house six months ago, but he’s still as small and delicate as a child.

His brown cheeks are round with health, and his coiled black hair surrounds his head like a halo.

But his eyes, so lively and warm, don’t settle on her. It’s like Birdie isn’t there at all.

“Nimbus?” she prods. He turns his head slowly toward her, like one of the automatons his father collected. Birdie always hated them, animals and clowns and sad children pantomiming life in a creepy, endless cycle. Each costing more than she would make in a lifetime.

“What happened to you?” Birdie whispers. She wants to cry. To rush back out and demand someone tell her what’s wrong with Nimbus and why he’s in the House of Quiet.

But that’s not what a maid would do. She was given work, and she’ll do it. Both because she has to be a perfect maid and because she always feels better with a task. Besides, maybe it’ll help snap Nimbus out of whatever this is.

She retrieves his breakfast and sets the tray over his lap. Nothing changes in his demeanor. When Birdie takes the spoon and lifts it to his lips, he eats with rote, mechanical movements, sometimes pausing, frozen, for nearly a full minute at a time. Just like one of his father’s toys.

Birdie bites the insides of her cheeks to keep from showing how upset she is.

Most employers and their families are indifferent to maids—some even cruel—but Nimbus was always kind.

They were as close to friends as two people in their opposite stations could be.

It’s because of Nimbus that she knows how to read.

In more than one way, it’s because of Nimbus that she’s here at all.

Nimbus’s tutor, Hawthorn, never so much as looked at Birdie, but Nimbus saw her interest and left out all his workbooks so she could learn alongside him.

When she found out Magpie’s name had come up for the procedure, Nimbus smiled as big as she’d ever seen him and made her promise to come back and tell him what ability Magpie had gotten.

He knew how hard Birdie had worked to save up for it, and how much it would change her life.

He even hugged her the day her parents sent for her to live with them again, which wasn’t something Nimbus had ever done.

But the house Birdie’s parents had was too large and too empty, and they wouldn’t explain how they could afford it or where Magpie had gone. They looked nearly as empty and lost as Nimbus does now, telling Birdie to leave it alone and be grateful for what they’d received.

Birdie went back to Nimbus’s house. But not to celebrate. To beg for an audience with Nimbus’s wealthy father, her only connection in the city. To plead for someone, anyone, to help her find out what happened to Magpie and where she was sent.

That was where Hawthorn found her, weeping on the steps after being denied a meeting.

And that was how she came to meet Dr.Bramble, an employee of the Ministry of Health and Progress.

A man obsessed with getting into the House of Quiet, who set Birdie on this path as his own private spy.

He was the one who got her a position in the minister of finance’s house.

Not even Dr.Bramble could pull enough strings to get her a job in the House of Quiet. It took extorting a minister.

Nimbus is so central to her presence here—he taught her to read, and he introduced her to Hawthorn—but she never thought she’d see him again, much less in the House of Quiet.

After Nimbus eats the last bite with the same lack of energy or attention as the first, Birdie carefully wipes around his mouth.

“I’ll come back soon, okay?” It’s more a promise to herself than to him; she doesn’t think he can hear her.

His room is still cold, though, so she lights the fire.

She hopes he doesn’t mind the smell. Then she hurries back toward the kitchen, desperate to talk to Cook.

Rabbit passes her with a tray of food. This one features the full range of breakfast options, plus a teapot and teacup.

Rabbit’s eyes are wide with alarm, her trembling arms held straight out in front.

“Use your hip, like you’re carrying a heavy laundry basket,” Birdie advises.

Rabbit adjusts, then shoots her a grateful smile. “At least with laundry, if I dropped it nothing was going to shatter.” She juts her chin toward a room down the hall. “Apparently, we have a spoiled brat who can’t be bothered to come to the kitchen for breakfast.”

“Careful what you say about them,” Birdie cautions. Minnow getting too friendly with a rich girl, and now Rabbit calling an employer a name. Who are these girls?

“I’m only repeating what Cook said in front of everyone else!” Rabbit widens her eyes like she can’t believe it, either.

Birdie wonders what the condition of Rabbit’s charge will be, and if they’re someone from a wealthy family, like Nimbus.

Dr.Bramble was vague when he rubbed his hands together and said things were “shaking loose” at the House of Quiet, presenting an opportunity for Birdie to slip through the cracks and get in.

Maybe what was shaking loose was the old use of the house.

The government finally realized it was uncharacteristically generous to take care of afflicted poor children, and they’ve started taking in wealthy invalids now, too.

Maybe Nimbus was in some sort of accident or had a terrible fever.

Sometimes those can burn so hot they damage the mind if they don’t end up killing you.

Mare lost both of her children to a season of fever that swept through Sootcity before Birdie was born.

Still, why use the House of Quiet, out in the middle of nowhere, cloaked in secrecy, and surrounded by a deadly bog? Surely Nimbus would be more comfortable in his own bed with a nurse using abilities to soothe him.

And the room Nimbus is in isn’t new. It’s lavish enough to belong in a minister’s home, but the backside of the drapes was bleached by the sun and there were smoke stains around the fireplace.

These rooms have been here for a long time, and Birdie can’t imagine anyone from her quarter of Sootcity surrounded by velvet curtains, sleeping in a sea of silk pillows.

If wealthy families have been using the House of Quiet as a way to tuck away ill relatives they’re ashamed of—the only explanation that makes sense to Birdie—the locked rooms upstairs must be where the poor people stay.

But before Birdie can try to sort through all this new information, she’s back in the kitchen.

Cook has barricaded herself beside the oven. Minnow stands near the door with her hands clasped, waiting to be needed. At the table are four teens. Birdie desperately searches their faces. No Magpie.

No Magpie. She wants to sink to the floor in despair. But she can’t let herself. There’s still a chance. She’s about to volunteer to deliver food to the upstairs residents, but a look around kills the last of her hope.

Kitchens really are the best place to learn how a house works. And the food here makes it obvious: There aren’t any unaccounted-for residents. No bowls set aside, no plain fare prepared to feed plain kids. Maybe it’s going to be made later, but she sees no evidence to give her that hope.

Birdie always knew there was a chance Magpie wouldn’t be in the house anymore. A reunion was never going to be as simple as walking through the door. But just getting to the door was so hard and took so long and cost so much, Birdie almost felt she deserved an easy resolution.

She should know by now she doesn’t deserve anything, and that nothing will ever be given to her.

Birdie steels her spine and wills tears not to fall.

Time to figure out how the house actually works, so she can find out where those who have finished treatments are sent.

And to hope—there it is again, that cruel hope—that Dr.Bramble and Hawthorn will keep helping her.

They were so interested in Magpie’s plight and vowed to help Birdie run away with her sister once they were reunited.

Birdie needs to be as useful to them as possible so they’ll extend that promise now that it’s going to take longer.

Cook messed up, though. There are plates for only three on the table. Birdie fixes one more and sets it in front of the tallest boy. Then she moves next to Cook and leans close. “Can I speak with you?”

“Introductions,” a dreamy voice says from the doorway.

The woman from last night stands on the threshold of the kitchen, as though there’s an invisible line she can’t cross.

She’s tightly buttoned into a red dress with a high collar and a skirt like a bell swishing to the floor.

“I am the House Wife. At the table we have Sky, River, Lake—”

“I already know Birdie,” Lake, a pale girl of twelve or thirteen in a simple white nightdress, interrupts. She wrinkles her cute, upturned nose.

“I don’t believe we’ve met, miss,” Birdie says.