Kitty's Choice

Kitty had been in Milady's service eleven months before she understood that the household she'd entered was not, whatever the neighbors assumed from its handsome furnishings and its mistress's exquisite manners, a household at all. It was an operation, run with the same cold precision a general might bring to a campaign, and Kitty's position within it was not lady's maid so much as junior officer, trusted with logistics, briefed only on what she needed to know, and expected to understand, without ever being told outright, that failures of discretion would not be forgiven twice.

She had learned this the hard way, in her third month, when she mentioned to a baker's daughter, idly, the way girls talk, with no thought of consequence, that her mistress kept a locked cabinet in the small sitting room that no one but Milady herself ever opened. The conversation had seemed innocent enough at the time. It was three days before Kitty understood that Milady somehow knew of it, and the manner in which Milady let her know she knew, not through anger, never through anger, but through a single unhurried question, asked over breakfast, about whether Kitty found her position agreeable, or whether she thought she might prefer a different sort of household, taught Kitty more about the actual shape of her employment than a year of open instruction could have.

After that, Kitty watched, and said nothing, and became, by increments she could not afterward locate precisely, very good at both.

What she watched, mostly, was the traffic of men through rooms Milady arranged with the care of a general arranging a battlefield: which chair caught the afternoon light in a way that flattered a particular complexion, which wine was poured for which visitor, which of Milady's several voices, each pitched to a different register of warmth or wit or wounded feeling, was deployed for which caller. Kitty came to think of her mistress's beauty the way she imagined a locksmith might think of a fine set of picks: not as an attribute so much as a tool kit, maintained with professional rigor, each piece kept sharp for a specific kind of door.

She watched, too, what happened to the men once the doors had opened for them, and this was the part of her employment Kitty found hardest to hold at the comfortable distance she'd trained herself to maintain for everything else. They did not, as a rule, come to harm in any way the law would recognize. They simply became, over weeks or months, instruments, sources of money, or information, or access to some further door Milady wished opened, and when an instrument had served its purpose, it was set aside with the same unhurried indifference Milady brought to everything, no cruelty in it, exactly, because cruelty would have required Milady to register the men as anything more than what they were being used for, and Kitty had come to understand, with the particular clarity of a servant who has spent a year in close quarters with someone, that her mistress did not.

Kitty herself, she suspected, occupied a similar category, one rung further down the same ladder. A maid was also an instrument: for dressing, for managing correspondence, for the thousand small logistics that let a woman like Milady move through the world unencumbered by the practical details other women had to manage for themselves. Kitty did not resent this, exactly. It was simply the shape of the job, understood clearly enough by the time she'd held it a year that resentment would have been as pointless as resenting the shape of a spoon for being suited to soup rather than meat.

The young Gascon who began climbing through her window instead of her mistress's arrived, therefore, as something Kitty had never encountered in her time in the household: a man who looked at her, Kitty, the maid, as though she were a person with her own weight in a room, rather than an obstacle to be managed on the way to the person who actually mattered.

She knew, of course, exactly what he wanted, and exactly why he wanted it, and she was neither so young nor so flattered as to mistake his interest in her for anything other than what it was: a means of getting closer, by whatever crooked route presented itself, to a woman he'd apparently convinced himself he loved, for reasons Kitty, who had spent a year watching that woman operate at close range, found difficult to follow. But she let him climb through the window anyway, and she went on letting him, for longer than professional self-interest could entirely account for, and it took her some weeks to admit to herself what the actual reason was.

It was this: for the first time in eleven months, someone in that house wanted something from her that had nothing to do with what she could do for Milady. It was a small thing to build an entire private rebellion on: a young man's clumsy, transparently self-interested attention, offered to the wrong woman for entirely the wrong reasons, and Kitty was under no illusions about how small it was. But smallness, she had learned, watching her mistress work, was not the same as unimportance. Milady had built an entire career on the principle that small things, correctly used, could move very large ones. Kitty found she had absorbed the lesson more thoroughly than she'd realized, and was prepared, when the moment came, to apply it against the very woman who'd taught it to her.

The night she took d'Artagnan's letter and put herself in her mistress's bed in the darkness rather than deliver it, Kitty told herself several different stories about why she was doing it. That she loved him, which was true in the diminished, hopeless way a person can love someone who has made it clear from the first afternoon that his heart belongs elsewhere. That she owed Milady nothing, after eleven months of being managed like a piece of furniture with opinions. That the whole arrangement, the letter, the rendezvous, the deception layered on deception, was Milady's own method turned back on its architect, and there was a rough justice in that Kitty found satisfying, separate from anything to do with d'Artagnan at all.

All of these were true. None of them, Kitty suspected even at the time, was the whole of it. The whole of it was smaller and harder to admit: that for one night, in the dark, she wanted to be the woman a man reached for, rather than the woman who dressed the hair of the woman men reached for, and she was willing to steal the shape of that experience through deception because eleven months in that household had taught her, with brutal clarity, that no other route to it was likely to present itself honestly.

What it cost her, in the end, was everything: the position, the household, whatever fragile safety came from being useful to a woman who did not forgive discovered disloyalty. Kitty had understood this was the likely price before she ever took the letter, and she paid it without, in later years, the regret she might have expected to feel. She had spent eleven months as an instrument in someone else's design. For one night, briefly, dishonestly, entirely on her own account, she had been the one holding the tool.

It was not, she reflected afterward, from whatever reduced and uncertain circumstances the choice eventually left her in, a good bargain by any accounting a sensible person could defend. But it had been, for the first time in longer than she could comfortably remember, a choice that was actually hers, made for her own reasons, in her own interest, in a house where she had otherwise wanted for almost nothing except exactly that.