714 Bridle Path Ch. 01

"Yes, ma'am," the seneschal said, nodding. "Very much so. Miss Prospero was not the only one gushing about it, even David was very happy, vocally so."

"Well, if Mr. Malmsten was pleased, then clearly we did something very right," the matriarch said with a nod. "Moving on from that, I am wondering if I need to apologize for this morning."

Tatyana knew exactly what her employer was referring to, and didn't beat around the bush about it. "This is your family's domicile, ma'am, we all work here and happen to reside here. Our employment should not impact your family's lifestyle dynamic."

"Very tactful, Miss Orlova," Karen said with a smirk. "However, I am aware that things can get... crazy around here, to say the least, and strange as it may seem, states of rampant undress are not uncommon. They never have been, even though I took over."

"It's hard to imagine Mr. Winson having survived that sort of thing in years gone by," Tatyana mused. "He seems so proper."

"And he is, he just always turned a blind eye to it where he could," Karen said. "My father somehow endured it, but clamped down tightly when there were visitors of note, not always successfully."

"I find myself somewhat at a loss for words, ma'am, since I don't know how to say what I want without seeming indelicate," Tatyana confessed.

Karen gave a mild shrug. "By saying what you mean, I imagine. Please, speak freely and unreservedly. It's what I need from you, after all."

Tatyana nodded. "My staff, mostly Miss Prospero or Miss Kachelmeier, seem prone to similar wardrobe mishaps, gleefully so. We are used to, or perhaps inured, to seeing your younger sister and her friends in states of undress, often at what would be awkward moments anywhere except here. Even you, ma'am, are guilty of this, if 'guilty' is the right term for it. I doubt I need to remind you that I was one of the recipients of that errant selfie of yours a few weeks back. "

"That's fair, and yes, feel free to not remind me..." Karen muttered, trying not toscowl at the surface of the desk. That had definitely not been her finest hour.

"But we are a well-paid staff, and even if this sort of thing was unexpected, it's hardly the end of the universe," Tatyana pointed out. "Like I said, it is your home. You live here. None of us are under obligation to work here, yet we happily do so. I have never once had a complaint from a staff member about things. About anything, really, not just the surprise nudity around the place."

"And even Michael and I seem powerless to stop it," Karen almost sighed. "That means that nobody short of the Almighty could. We're going to have an onsen put in place come early summer, and outdoor pool party season is coming, meaning the situation is likely to not only continue, but intensify. Alli is something of a nudist, and Alex is little better, I swear. I was never able to keep clothes on the little twerp when he was younger."

Tatyana stifled a snicker.

"So, since I cannot solve the situation, I'll do what any obscenely wealthy person does with a problem and throw money at it," Karen concluded. "To ease my conscience, I was thinking I would simply raise everyone's annual salary by ten thousand, effective immediately, not to buy their silence about this, but simply as compensation for putting up with it. Because frankly, I don't have what it takes to fight it."

Tatyana raised an eyebrow. "Ma'am, that is very generous, but like I said, they're already paid well."

"Tatyana, between all of you, it's an extra hundred grand a year for me," Karen pointed out. "And not to be crass, but I have antique telephones strewn around the place worth a lot more that that when sold at Sotheby's. Instruct the staff that they're being given a hazard pay bonus or something comical, for dealing with this. It's not like anyone will sexually harass them, but putting up with more gratuitous nudity than an Eighties teen sex comedy requires some compensation."

"I doubt anyone will object to the pay raise, ma'am, I'll simply have to figure out how to explain to Miss Prospero that this still requires her to have clothes on while she works," Tatyana said, nodding.

Karen laughed. Sometimes, throwing money at a problem really was the solution.

***

D-Day...

"We're gonna miss you, boss," Val sighed, waiting with everyone while Glenda brought around a car for Tatyana. Rather than take her own vehicle, she'd allowed their employers to rent a nice vehicle for her. Nothing too posh on the outside, but nicely kitted out on the inside. And since she was Slavic, Mr. DeBourne seemed to think it was amusing to make sure the windows were tinted to the legally allowable maximum.

At least he hadn't bought her an Adidas track suit to wear.

"I will only be gone some five days, it's not like I'm going on a sabbatical or safari," the seneschal pointed out. "Roughly ten of those hours driving there and back, and it's all highway. I'll be fine."

"I checked the route, and you'll run into some delays and construction between Belleville and Kingston," Dave said, handing her some pages he'd printed off. "And then again between Prescott and Smith Falls. You can take the-"

"David, thank you," she said, smiling and nodding. "And even though my car has one of those GPS things, I prefer paper in hand and instructions I can read, rather than some automated woman telling me I just missed my turn. I appreciate you doing this for me."

She knew her way to and from Ottawa in her sleep, of course, and every single possible route to get there. She was happy that they were all concerned for her, like a family. It was the staff standing outside with her now, since their employers had said their goodbyes already and left her co-workers to see her off. It was appropriate.

They all waited while Glenda pulled up in a Camry Hybrid, hopping out while Dave and Tunde put Tatyana's luggage in the trunk. She said a quick goodbye to each of them, making sure they knew what the week would entail, and then nodded in satisfaction. She got into the driver's seat, waving at them as she pulled away.

"Bubbles, are you crying?" Trilby asked, seeing Val wipe at her eyes. "Y'know she's comin' back in less than a week, right?"

"Yeah," the little Italian girl sniffled, still waving as the car reached the end of the long driveway. "I'm jus' not good with g'byes. I used to cry when mama put my teddy bear in the washer."

"Gonna be weird around here without Tatyana to keep us in line," Andrea said, watching the car disappear around a corner and onto the Bridle Path. "I mean, she's the expert at it. Now what's gonna happen?"

They all heard a throat get cleared behind them, and turned to look. Up at the top of the white marble stairs, Jordan was looking down at them all levelly, his posture ramrod-erect, his hands behind his back. He was wearing a black suit, crisp and perfect, his eyes keen and alert. He raised one eyebrow as he assessed them.

"I assume you people all remember your contracted duties, yes?" he asked.

Everyone stampeded past him to get back into the manor and look busy, even Dave. Val hurried by, but skidded to a stop on the Cararra marble landing, turning and curtsying hastily to him before dashing inside. Jordan waited quietly, simply gazing out at the front of the property until he could no longer hear anyone.

"This should be a fun week..." he mused with a smirk as he turned and went inside, closing the giant doors behind himself.

***

Sub-basement 1, the chilled storage, later that day...

Val trotted down the hallway, instructed to find Theresa. Last she'd heard, the chef was doing something down here in one of her storage rooms. Val never ceased to be impressed by the rooms where the food was kept. There were what looked like acres and acres of meat in one of the chilling rooms, hanging from hooks or kept in freezers and cases. Entire sides of beef, venison, and pig were suspended from the ceiling. It reminded her of her zio's storage room at the supermarket he owned back in Modena, just on a smaller scale, and not full of Italian men yelling at one another.

It seemed an absurd amount of meat to have in a private residence, but then, she wasn't responsible for keeping Michael and Alex DeBourne fed either, so what did she know?

She shivered as the chill of the room washed over her, having entered to find Theresa. She wasn't here. And while she was glad that Mr. Winson didn't mind if she wore her habitual scandalous maid's outfit, it was always a minus to be wearing it when she was down here, because Val was about as resistant to cold as a snowball was to an oven. She shivered and rubbed her arms before backing out and closing the door.

Another chilled room followed. Vegetables and dairy products were kept cool down here. Val had no idea how much electricity it cost to keep these rooms running constantly, but the bill for each room must've been more than her monthly rent at her last apartment, so, yikes. She also knew that the place was converting to solar, so maybe it wasn't a total nightmare. She had faith in her employers that way.

She opened the door and stepped into the room, hearing Theresa humming some tune to herself. "Heya, Theresa, I..."

Val stopped dead and her face scrunched up as a smell hit her. She turned away and bent over, making an absurd choking sound, her eyes watering.

"Gesù Cristo, Madre Maria, Giuseppe e quel maledetto asino!" she gasped, still holding her throat while she stood up and looked at the chef again. "What is that smell?!"

"Oh, this?" Theresa said cheerfully, holding up a wheel of something she pulled out of a deep metal bowl. The wheel was dripping wet. "It's Stinking Bishop, or my facsimile of it, actually."

"The name suits, for reals," Val wheezed, shaking her head. "A cheese?"

The chef nodded. "Been learning how to make it. It's very hard to get a hold of, so our lord and master got me some info on how to do it. This has been in the pipes for a while, seemingly. I'm learning how to make all sorts of weird things."

"Do they all reek?" the maidservant asked, clamping her hands over her nose and scowling like a little kid. She noticed that Theresa was wearing a tight mask that no doubt allowed her to avoid the worst of it.

"I mean, not all of them," Theresa answered with a shrug. "At least I'm not required to make that Icelandic shark, or that Sardinian rotting cheese."

"Ugh, casu marzu," Val muttered, shaking her head. "Fly shit cheese, gotta wonder whose genius idea that was. What other treats're you workin' on?"

"Curing and smoking a few meats new ways," Theresa said, going back to washing the rind of the cheese wheel in the amber liquid. "Apparently we're making room for some Sicilian lemon trees upstairs in the produce greenhouse, next to the Neretva Valley tangerines. I've been taught the secrets of the Penrose Bronze fennel."

"Ooh, fancy," Val said. She may not have cared for Sicilians, but she did love the lemons from Sircusa and Catania. "Anyway, I'm getting cold, so... Marie wanted to confer with you about something in the herbs and spices greenhouse and sent me to fetch you. Her little watch beeper-thingy is outta order while Ari works on it, so consider yourself informed."

"Thank you, honey," Theresa said cheerfully. "I've got two wheels left to wash, and then I'll be along. Go ahead, you must be freezing in that getup."

Val nodded and left the room, no doubt heading for warmer climes more suited to her attire. Theresa sighed happily and kept working. This job had been very good to her, and there was much more room to expand and grow in her skills. It was unusual, for sure. At least with a private employer, she got to flex her creative muscles, she wasn't tied down by necessity to a menu beyond allergies.

She'd worked with most meats at one point or another, up to and including such exotic things as kangaroo and rattlesnake. Alligator, shark, wild boar, jellyfish... she'd served these over the years. But now she was honing her skills with foods from specific regions of the world- la bonnotte potatoes from France would be arriving for the housewarming. So would jamón ibérico, which she'd always heard of, but never worked with before. What a delightful opportunity!

She finished up her work, braced the wheels inside their beechwood moulds, and set them on their racks. She was simply experimenting as yet, and she'd been told it was the Lady Penrose who would ultimately tell them if Theresa had gotten it right. She was as close to an expert on the subject of the cheese as they had available. Apparently she owned property in Gloucestershire?

She closed the chilling room and headed down the hall, stopping for a moment in the commercial kitchen. As much as she enjoyed using her personal space upstairs, she was looking forward to the challenge of feeding over a hundred people at the housewarming, and she had these facilities to work with. The equipment gleamed in the dim light, rarely used in recent years, and not in the last three, since the former master of Blackwell Manor, Jonathon Blackwell, Karen's father, had passed. It was all just waiting quietly and patiently to be woken up.

Back upstairs, she heard Mike and Alex in the arcade, laughing and playing some game while talking about the apiaries they were going to be starting right after the housewarming. Theresa loved the idea of learning how to make honey (and with it, mead), and some of the bees would have a hive inside various greenhouses, allowing them access to blossoms that didn't grow in this zone. The results would be interesting. Perhaps a unique honey, produced only here in all the world.

Tonight was the night that the games room on the second floor opened up, right next to the employee lounge. It would feature a full-size pool table, apparently an antique from the basement, along with an air hockey table, a foosball table, ping-pong, and a dart board. Val hadn't been kidding when she said a lot of rooms still needed to find new uses, and this games room for the staff seemed to have been almost an afterthought.

She stepped into the temperate greenhouse and smiled as she saw Marie working away on some flowers, getting them ready for eventual planting outside.

"You wanted to see me, darling?" she asked cheerfully.

***

A new bedroom, the second floor...

Dave looked around the room idly while he sat in a comfortable chair with his phone to his ear, waiting for someone to pick up. The room was certainly spacious enough for his needs, and he was getting some things out of storage to decorate with. He'd made use of the funds available to get a new bed, deciding to donate the stored one. This one was much nicer. He'd opted for of the endless ornate chairs the DeBourne family seemed to have packed away to use here. He also had a desk, on which sat his computer. It wasn't much, but it did what he needed, and Ari had helped configure it through the firewall.

He didn't have much in the way of decoration yet, just a few pictures on the wall and a Victorian vase he'd inherited from his grandmother. On the desk sat a framed photograph of him with his daughter, Lil, who was much younger in the picture than she was now; she would never deign to take a picture with her father these days, he was fairly sure.

Someone picked up finally, and there was a sigh. "Hi, dad."

"Hi, Lil," he said, forgetting the room and concentrating on talking to his daughter. The last time he'd talked to her, he'd had a priceless artifact stolen from between his legs because he'd been distracted. This time he had nothing to do but talk to her. "How are you?"

"Fine, I guess," the young woman replied in a blasé tone. "Just thinkin' about going out, if mom'll let me. Not lookin' forward to the negotiations."

Normally it had been Dave who was the hardliner in the household, and his wife the softie. It was probably one of the reasons his daughter resented the Hell out of him. He decided to try a different tack. "I think you're old enough to be making your own decisions. If you want to go out, shouldn't you?"

"Hey, mom just wants what's best for me," Lilith seemed to protest, standing up for her maternal progenitor. "I may not always agree with her, but she's just looking out for my well-being. How's it any different from when you used to- oh, well played, old man."

"I wasn't playing, Lil," Dave said, sighing inwardly about being right. No matter what he said, he would be wrong on principle. "I really do think that now that you're older, you should be able to-"

"And if mom had said it was okay for me to, you would've been saying I shouldn't, right?" the contrarian teen almost demanded. Dave closed his eyes, wondering what he could have done differently to keep this from happening. It drove him crazy that his ex-wife had poisoned their daughter against him so badly. If Marla had told Lilith that Dave burned down orphanages, there would be no way for Dave to prove he didn't, since no evidence of him burning down orphanages just meant he was hiding the fact that he was burning down orphanages. He could do no right in her eyes, no matter what he did.

"Well, I still think you should be able to go out when you like, regardless of whether your mom or I say yes or no," he said finally, not willing to get into it. "I wanted to know if you'd like to come and see where I work sometime soon, we're having a family weekend where relatives can come over. Now that we've all been hired on permanently, it'd be nice to have you visit."

"Oh, y'mean your menial labour job for the bourgeoisie?" she almost sneered. "Come and watch my daddy bow and scrape for rich people?"

He ignored the flare of anger in his stomach, and his eyes stung, but he composed himself. He would not raise to the bait. That nonsense was his ex-wife at work. Marla was an executive at a medium-sized advertising firm downtown. The pay was decent, but she hadn't been making much more overall than he was as a landscaper when they were together. She made money all year round, he made about the same amount in eight months, and then was more or less off for four. The fact seemed lost on his daughter. Marla had been a spendthrift, and made Dave look like a miser when it suited her.

"I'm the senior landscaper on a huge property," he reasoned. "Best-paying job I've ever had, with room, board, medical, dental, 401K, I can take courses for new skills on their dime..."

There was a pause on the line. "Huh. Guess that doesn't sound too bad."

"I haven't found a drawback to this job yet," he said, hoping she was at least somewhat intrigued. "And they gave me the senior position without a second thought. I-"

"Heya, Dave!" Val chirped as she walked by his open door, smiling and waving. He waved back.

"Who was that?" his daughter asked.

"One of my co-workers, Val," he replied, thankful that the bubbly little woman hadn't stopped to talk. "She's part of the housekeeping staff here at the Manor."

"The place is big enough that it has live-in housekeeping?" Lilith almost exclaimed.

"If they're gonna have two live-in landscapers, it makes sense the housekeeping lives here," he said reasonably. "There's ten of us living here."

"Place must be fucking huge," his daughter mumbled, almost to herself. He resisted the instant urge to chide her for using vulgar language. It wasn't his decision anymore. "So what's that Val girl like?"

"She's the exact opposite of your old man, she's bubbly, energetic, and fun," he quipped, smirking. He could hear Lil restrain a snicker. Laughing because her father said something funny was no doubt verboten. "Her nickname is 'Bubbles', in fact. Just about all of 'em are fun, really. I'm the grumpy old man of the group."