D-035: Mansion Carriage House

No one is entirely sure when Sol moved out of the house. Yes, he stayed away for a good measure of time while in boarding school, but he was home over the holidays and long breaks. True, too, that he was gone for extremely long stretches while training to be a member of the St. James militia. But again, his room in the east wing was slept in more often than not, and he was a common sight in the hallways and parlors (though admittedly mostly after dark). But sometime between his promotion to Detective and the winter festivities, it occurred to Temperance that she had not seen her brother in a great many days. She happened to spot Sol's valet on the front porch one morning and inquired.

The valet averted his eyes and murmured something about the carriage house, so Temperance trooped to the end of the drive and was greeted by Harrow's excited bark. The canine dragon tumbled out of the carriage house and spun around her in elated circles. She could hear her brother swearing, and when she stuck her head through the door she was surprised to see him curled up on a cot, one arm thrown up to block the sun slanting through the windows.

"But why?" she asked, when they were seated on the bench by the door, watching Harrow chase the doves roosting in the rafters.

"Easier," he explained, and easier than what he never said. Harrow whined low in his throat.

"But it's so old and dank," Temperance said, wrinkling her nose.

"Only one that's empty," he said, followed quickly by. "And it doesn't matter, Tempe. I'm hardly ever here-"

But somehow he was not surprised to trudge in after the end of his shift and find that all the doors had been thrown open and the inside cleaned from floorboards to ceiling. He scoffed and tumbled into his cot...only to find that it had been replaced with a serviceable bed, and that hay no longer drifted down from the loft. Over the course of a few weeks he came back to find various improvements: a bed for Harrow, a small cook stove for water, a small but nice armoire (and his uniforms cleaned and hung within). It was only when he came back and found workmen measuring for additional windows that he gently told Temperance: "No more."

She pursed her lips, but she did not venture down to the carriage house again. Not unless she was invited; it was the polite thing to do, and it was a way to avoid the peculiar twist below her ribs that her brother would rather live in a home for beasts than in the house where they had grown up together. Perhaps it was the thing that went unsaid between them, the sound of a familiar tread on the stairs; the house had its share of beasts as well.