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Dewey Denouement is a myth, until Kit happens across a young man neither Frank nor Ernest in the lobby of the Hotel Denouement. This is during her very last holiday with both Lemony and Jacques, and before she starts finding Olaf’s eyebrow attractive. Lemony is radiant with joy simply for having spent three afternoons the week before with Beatrice, and Jacques’ moustache is coming in nicely - thankfully, his sideburns are less successful. Kit has recently learned how to pilot a submarine, and feels quite pleased with herself about it.
The young man who is neither Frank nor Ernest, both of whom Kit has met several times and only one of whom she likes, is sitting on one of the ugly green couches in the hotel lobby. His hair is parted the same as Frank and Ernest’s, his suit the same immaculate charcoal grey, his tie the same bright red against the crisp white of his shirt.
“You’re neither Frank nor Ernest,” she says, coming to a stop in front of him. “Although I suspect you could be both frank and earnest, if you wanted to be.”
“You’re R’s friend,” he says. “K. I’m D.”
“Interesting,” Kit says. “Everyone says you’re a myth. They say that your brothers are twins, and that they came up with you to protect the person who organised the hotel.”
“I organised the hotel,” Dewey Denouement says. “I’m a natural librarian.”
There is a library.
It isn’t the one at headquarters, high up in the Mortmain Mountains. It isn’t the one in Bertrand’s parents’ house, or the cool, shaded one at the Montgomerys’. It isn’t Anwhistles’, hanging on stilts out over the gloom of Lake Lachrymose. It isn’t even the wonderful, overflowing, frequently updated library at Prufrock Prep.
Oh no. Kit didn’t even know this one existed, and she thought she knew about every library in the city. Even the ones she doesn’t know about, she can depend on her brothers to find. Between the three of them, they aren’t likely to lose track of a book.
Instead, this time, they seem to have lost track of hundreds of books.
“First edition,” Dewey says, when Kit skips her fingertip down the spine of a very old, very loved copy of Moby Dick. “It’s always been a favourite of mine.”
“Melville was a truly gifted writer,” she agrees. “His use of metaphor in particular has always thrilled me.”
Dewey passes her a cup of tea - black tea, without sugar or milk but with a twist of sharply bitter lemon, just as she likes - and settles behind his desk. In the shifting light that pours through the fountain above their heads, his dark eyes shine silver, like lucky coins.
Kit’s never had a best friend before. She’s lucky to have found Dewey, she knows.
“What would he make of me?” Dewey asks, turning himself neatly between ten and two o’clock on his swivel chair. “A third twin. A hidden twin.”
“A triplet,” Kit corrects him, perching on the edge of his desk, crossing her legs high and firm, just as Jacqueline showed her. “Don’t let your own legend confuse you, D, you’re just as important as Frank and Ernest - your merit does not depend on your presence in the hotel.”
He slides a plate of delicate little sugar cookies across the table for that, and she tries to eat one in the elegant, dainty way Beatrice manages without trying. Her black sweater is covered in sugar and crumbs by the time she’s finished, but Dewey is smiling, so she supposes a little extra laundry is a small price to pay. It can be difficult to draw a smile from Dewey these days. Even without the strange tensions rising within the association, Dewey’s been pushed more and more into the shifting shadows beneath the fountain, where there should only be plumbing and secret tunnels. Kit does her best to bring a little sunshine with her when she descends to visit, but she fears that it will not be enough.
The world would be a darker, noisier place, if it lost Dewey. So she decides she’ll just have to try harder from now on.
“When is O coming to pick you up?” Dewey asks, finishing his cookie without dropping a single grain of sugar on his suit, which today is a sleek navy blue over a duck-egg shirt, with a lemon yellow tie. Frank and Ernest were wearing the same upstairs in the lobby, and Kit does wonder a little if they don’t hate wearing the same all of the time. She can’t imagine wearing one of Lemony’s terrible pale grey numbers, or Jacques’ roll neck-and-leather jacket combinations.
“He said he’ll be here around two. So about half past three.”
“Always late,” Dewey says in that mild, completely neutral way that means he’s angry on her behalf. He’s never met Olaf - he’s met so few people that Kit sometimes thinks it’s cheating, to have claimed him as her best friend - but he doesn’t like him very much. Timeliness is close to godliness in Dewey’s extensive and very interesting book, and Olaf is never on time for anything.
It probably doesn’t help that Olaf is generally the one meeting her at the hotel, to take her away from the mornings she spends with Dewey. Sometimes it’s Lemony, but Lemony insinuated himself into the library somehow, surprising them both and charming Dewey with his droll, subtle humour and extensive understanding of the library catalogue system in all its variations, so Dewey doesn’t mind Lemony picking her up. Just Olaf.
Maybe it’s because Olaf doesn’t read very much, or because he sometimes forgets to wash his hands. Who can say? Kit herself has her doubts about an actor who’s never read Shakespeare or Shaw, but Olaf has such enthusiasm for his craft that even his distaste for reading will surely be overcome by the necessity to hone that same craft.
“He’ll be here,” Kit says easily. “And besides - his loss is your gain. The later he runs, the longer I stay.”
Dewey nudges the plate of cookies toward her, smiling just a little.
“I suppose there’s light to be found even in the darkest times,” he says, and that will do for today.
“Why do you always want to stay at that hotel?” Olaf asks. “Is it because of the stupid layout? I know you like weird things like that.”
Dewey’s identity remains shrouded in layers of deception, and so of course Kit can’t explain the real reason she visits the Hotel Denouement. Luckily, Olaf finds her fascination with reading amusing, at least for now, and she’s always been good at solving puzzles. Maybe he really does find the arrangement of the hotel confusing, and thinks she’s trying to solve Dewey’s catalogue system.
“I like all kinds of things,” she says, pinching his bony hip and dodging away from his answering punch, aimed at her shoulder and instead hitting the wall behind her. “Mysteries most of all.”
Kit’s always been a singularly talented detective, able to root out secrets and hidden things that evaded even Lemony, surely the nosiest man in the world. She enjoyed solving the puzzles people left behind, particularly when they didn’t realise they were creating neat little mazes in their wakes. Olaf was always leaving hints and clues - he often runs away from his parent’s house, and it never takes Kit longer than a day to find him.
If Dewey ever runs away, Kit doesn’t think she’ll find him - not unless he wants her to. Dewey never will, though, because he has too strong a sense of duty, and because he loves his library too much.
He loves Frank and Ernest too much to ever abandon them, either. Not that he’d ever admit it.
“How about the mystery of how I was passed over for the leading role in C’s play?”
“The lead role in C’s latest work is for a woman, O,” Kit laughs, pushing away from the wall and taking his hand. “And you can’t dance, either.”
“I could dance if I wanted to,” he says, with the blind confidence of someone who’s never done a Charleston swivel. “And I can sing, too!”
He opens his mouth to launch into something Kit doesn’t doubt is beyond his capabilities - oh, no, by those warm-ups he’s going to try opera - until she kisses him. That works for a time, but she’ll have to watch him for the rest of the evening now, in case he breaks into song, if it can be called that.
“Alright, alright,” he grumbles, rolling his ever-so-expressive eyes and smiling as he straightens up. “Let’s get a move on or we’ll miss whatever opening entertainment Bert’s got planned.”
“I hear he’s renovated the foyer,” Kit says, “to include a Very Fine Decoration.”
Olaf gives a noise of very false delight at the idea, but he’s never been one for interior design.
Bert is probably the love of Kit’s life, if one can have such a thing in an utterly non-romantic way, and it’s all because of his party planning.
He’s a genius researcher - so much so that he’s one of the few people who’s been allowed under the hotel fountain - and he puts it all into people. He knows that Lemony can’t abide anything but a silk lining in a suit jacket, and that Frank is allergic to lemons. He knows that while Beatrice trained as a soprano, she can sing mezzo-soprano just as well and dislikes that she gets the chance to do so only rarely. He knows that Jacqueline can’t use oil-based face or body paint in her costumes, because it brings her out in painful red hives, and that Olaf can’t use face or hair powder with talc in it for the same reason. He knows that U can’t abide a dress code that doesn’t allow for trousers, and that V can’t abide one that doesn’t allow for skirts.
He knows that Kit loves sweet cookies, but that she can’t eat sugared ones without getting sugar all down her front - the only other person who seems to understand that is Dewey. That’s why the plate he’s offering her contains only neat cookies with the sugar baked in, and three different coloured macarons.
“Olaf had to run off, it seems,” Bert says, bright brown eyes apologetic behind the thick lenses of his glasses. He wears peculiar round frames, old-fashioned and a little out of style, but they pair well with his vast collection of ugly sweater vests and his movie-star hair. “Something about a call-back? He mentioned a film audition, I think. It can be hard to follow when he starts talking about being an ack-tore.”
Kit laughs with her hand over her mouth, keeping the crumbs in check, and shakes her head. Olaf ducks out of parties like this as often as he can, and a call-back is always his excuse. Kit knows quite well that it’s usually his parents sending for him, and if not his parents then his very mysterious mentors.
“Be kind, Bert,” Kit chides. “He really thinks he can make a career of this - a legitimate one.”
“A public one,” Bert agrees. “Well done him, if he can - it’s a tougher business than he seems to believe.”
“Aren’t they all?”
Bert sets the plate of cookies on a neat little end table that fits so well with the room that Kit hadn’t even noticed it - that’s G’s work, no one else has such a perfect eye for spatial relations. Then he adjusts his glasses, which usually means he’s going to offer some advice that he thinks is unwanted.
“Has he told you about his mother?” he asks, which isn’t what she expected at all. “She’s ill - did you know?”
“How ill?”
“She was hospitalised two weeks ago,” Bert says. “Hospice. Did he tell you?”
“He never mentioned it, no. How long?”
“No more than another two weeks, as far as Doctor Montgomery knew. She and Doctor Montgomery and Monty were here last night for dinner, and you know how my mother is on the opera committee with O’s mother, so she asked after her.”
“He’s opening a new play in two weeks,” Kit says, because he is - she’s been to rehearsals for this one and everything. “I can’t believe that he’d ignore something like this just for a play, though. Perhaps Doctor Montgomery was wrong?”
“Has Doctor Montgomery ever been wrong before, K?” Bert asks, and he’s right. Doctor Monteen Montgomery is the finest physician in the city, and that she’s in charge of the Countess’ care speaks volumes as to just how serious her situation is.
“Consider, Katerina,” Bertrand says, in the soft light of the full moon through the beautiful blue stained glass window above the front door as it cuts through the candlelight, in his soft, serious voice, “that Olaf is not the man you thought he was.”
He slips his arm around her shoulders and guides her away across the room, to where Larry is nervously enthusing about the minimum wage hike to Jacques, who is sincerely interested in the way only he can be about Larry’s fretful storytelling.
“I know that no one really likes him that much,” Kit says, because if Bert feels strongly enough about this to have called her by her full name then he’s really serious. “But I do!”
“And we like him for your sake, but that doesn’t mean we have to trust him. Be careful - that’s all I ask.”
Bert’s party is a runaway success, rounded out by Beatrice’s rendition of a mellow, mezzo jazz number, accompanied by Jacqueline painted all in bright zigzags of blue and silver doing one of her peculiar dance numbers. No one else has Jacqueline’s natural grace, not that Kit’s met yet, and even if her dancing is often strange, it’s always fascinating.
Bert’s party is a runaway success. Kit might be the only person who doesn’t enjoy it.
“How’s your mother?” she asks, when she and Olaf are strolling through the Financial District the following Wednesday afternoon. She’s due to meet her father for lunch, and Olaf insisted on walking her. He was ten minutes late to meet her at the library doors, and so now he’s out of breath from having run to catch her up.
She even told him to meet her with fifteen minutes extra, so she wouldn’t be late to meet her father, but she’s been so on edge over what Bert said the other night that she couldn’t even give him the full fifteen minutes. It doesn’t make sense for him to hide his mother’s ill health, no more than it makes sense for him to ignore it.
Dewey, when his parents died in the fire that left him and his brothers living in the hotel, cried for two hours while Kit made tea. Cup after cup of sharp, bitter tea, brewed strong and black the way Dewey likes. Dewey has always been an open book to Kit, right from the first day she found him in the hotel lobby, and she has returned that freedom in kind.
Olaf has never let her comfort him about anything at all, and she’s wondering at that now. If he doesn’t trust her with his vulnerability, what does he trust her with?
“She’s fine. I haven’t seen her in a while-”
“I thought you had dinner with your parents last week,” Kit says, not slowing her pace even when he stumbles - he might stumble less if he wore socks.
“Oh, no, that was with my mentors. You know them, Kit. They’re volunteers. You know their names-”
“Oh, I know their names,” Kit agrees, because everyone knows Olaf’s mentors, and no one really likes them. Much like Olaf himself, Kit knows. “I- did you know that your mother is ill, Olaf? I heard talk at Bert’s-”
“There’s always talk at Bert’s, isn’t there?” Olaf grouses. “I know exactly what kind of talk Bert and Beatrice and your Lemony exchange when they think I can’t hear, Kit. Don’t think I don’t!”
“If you’d just be more honest, and timely-”
“Timeliness is not close to godliness, Kit!” he snaps. “You’re as good as to the bank - I’m going home. Telegram me when you’re feeling a little less… high and mighty.”
Kit thinks she’s being more haughty than high and mighty, but Olaf is gone before she can dispute this.
“My mother’s dying, truth be told!” he shouts back down the street. “Should be gone by the weekend!”
And then he’s truly gone, and Kit, for the first time in her life, feels lost.
Esmé is training with Kit’s father at the bank during the week and with Bert’s mother at the costumier on weekends. She’s as remarkable with a ledger as with a needle, and Mrs. B credits Esmé hugely for her help in redesigning the Vernal Flitting Devices. Bert’s mother is a master of her craft, and while she is always fair, true praise is a rarity - Kit can’t wait to try out a new gown, if they really are so improved.
Esmé also fancies herself something of an actress, and takes every chance she gets to cozy up to Olaf. Kit minds this less than she probably should, and might mind it a little more if she and Olaf weren’t fighting. She’s never really fought with anyone before, and so she isn’t sure what she’s supposed to do with Olaf, whose mother died two weeks ago and who had to be gotten up out of bed the morning of her funeral.
Kit can’t imagine a world without her mother in it. As editor of the Custodian until their offices burned down six months ago, Mother has always been a bastion of good sense and fact-checking in a world too eager to believe scaremongering and nonsense. She also makes the most delicious puttanesca sauce, and is always sure to make it when she knows all three of them are coming to dinner so that the house smells warm and homely.
Whenever Mother makes puttanesca, Father makes the pasta by hand. He also makes focaccia bread - heavy on the rosemary, as a special treat for Jacques - and his hands are always a little shiny with olive oil when he waves them into the kitchen.
Kit cannot imagine being unable to telegram her brothers to arrange dinner at home in their parents’ house, but Olaf seems unruffled by the sudden absence of his mother from his life. He opened his new play the night before she died, and hasn’t missed a single performance yet - unheard of. Usually he manages three nights before he gets bored and loses the role to his understudy, but this seems to be sticking. It isn’t a very good play, in Kit’s opinion. A strange immorality play dreamed up by one of Olaf’s beloved, benighted mentors, the whole thing seems to hinge on the villains winning, and Olaf’s character in particular wins through highly suspect means.
Esmé has had a box every night so far. She says she’s taking acting lessons from Olaf, but Kit - even at her most generous, even at her most besotted - never rated Olaf as an actor of such merit as to justify his giving anyone else instruction.
“Do you know, Kitty,” Esmé says, crowding in beside Kit in the Baudelaire box at the opera house - a shame Bert is missing this, but his father needed him for some kind of marvelous mechanical array or other at the house. Still, the Baudelaires’ box is second only to Olaf’s father’s, and since the Fire Chief is in attendance himself tonight, here they are - and absolutely reeking of an awful perfume heavy in tuberose. No doubt it’s very en vogue, but Kit can’t stand any of Esmé’s rotation of scents. “Do you know, I’ve never really understood the fuss about opera? But it’s so very in to be seen here at the moment that I just couldn’t stay away.”
Lemony is sitting on Esmé’s other side, levering her manicured talons from his thigh, and he meets Kit’s eyes over Esmé’s fantastically upholstered shoulder. He seems just as thrilled by Esmé’s opinions as Kit is, and just as disinclined to speak up, too.
Olaf is toying with his spyglass, fiddling with it because he’s bored. No doubt he’d speak up about his distaste for the opera, except he’s here at his father’s request, and he isn’t speaking to Kit anyway.
Lemony’s portable typewriter serves as worthy armour against the assault of Esmé’s claws, and the gentle click of his work neatly underscores the first hum of the orchestra below warming up. Jacques is down there, first bassoon, and Bert’s sisters as well, Adeline and Cressida. Adie is conducting, the best the city’s seen in years, and Cress has such a delicate hand for timpani that there’s never been competition for her position, not since she was fifteen. Between them, and Bert’s good work on the sets, Esmé’s handiwork under Mrs. B’s watchful eye on the costumes, and Beatrice… Well, it’s all tied up, and neatly at that.
She puts her hand over Olaf’s, stilling the tinkering noise of his spyglass, as the lights dim. Lemony’s ignorance of Esmé is complete, his eyes forward as only Beatrice can draw them, and Kit feels like her coral silk evening gown was more effort than it’s worth.
Esmé passes Kit a cup of tea, which is generally not a good thing. Esmé’s got no sense of taste generally, but even less so when it comes to tea - her sweet tooth rules all.
“I think you’ll find this sugar plenty bitter,” Esmé says when Kit tries to demure, and Kit would question that if Olaf hadn’t settled his hand on her thigh, gentle and firm. He hasn’t touched her that way in weeks, not since they’ve started arguing, and it’s so unexpected that for a moment, she forgets to be angry with him. She forgets about Esmé and that grating, cloying sweetness, and she forgets to be mortified by how openly Lemony adores Beatrice.
“What is it?” she asks, sotto voce .
“Oh, nothing,” he says, squeezing a little and looking smug. “Just reminding you I’m here.”
Hmm. Quite.
Beatrice is, as always, magnificent - the clarity of her voice is sublime - and Kit just about manages to keep Lemony from rushing down to the dressing rooms after she takes her bow. He’s always rapturous, but never more so than when Beatrice is fresh from the stage and glowing in her triumph.
Esmé settles in to prepare more tea, and Olaf gathers Kit close under his arm. Why is he being so proprietary? He’s been busy kissing her temple, too, and running his fingers up and down her bare arm, and she’s a little disappointed by how unaffected she is by it all. Not so long ago, she would have been curling as close as she could without being improper, and returning his touches with caresses of her own.
Now she’d quite like for the lights to go down again, so she can have the excuse of focusing on the music to ignore him. Is it terrible that she wants to ignore him? Probably it is, but it’s hard to feel guilty for it when he’s been ignoring her for so many days now.
“Things are changing, Kit,” he says, while Lemony taps away at his typewriter and Esmé tinkers away with her tea set. “Can you feel it?”
“I’d say that they’ve already changed, don’t you think?”
Olaf’s arm tightens a little around her shoulders, and she frowns.
“I’d say,” he says, “that you haven’t seen anything yet, Katerina.”
There are five people in the world who call Kit by her full name. Four of them are also Snickets, and the other is Bert, who is as much her brother as Lemony and Jacques in all the ways that count except, obviously, biology.
Olaf has never called her Katerina, and she doesn’t like that he wants to start now. Not tonight, with Esmé flouncing back into her place at Kit’s side, not with Lemony and Beatrice whispering in the shadows, not with Olaf’s father making a sincere, heartfelt speech that has Olaf tensing from top to tail, and certainly not with the tiny spiral of smoke rising from the drapes just beyond Olaf’s foot, right in line with the lens of his spyglass.
There have been rumours. Kit has not wanted to believe them.
It may be that she has no choice.
“Please, excuse me,” Beatrice says, just as the curtains raise on Ursula and Victor. “I won’t be long.”
Ursula, resplendent in her bullfighter’s regalia, drops to one knee as she begins her work. Zarzuela is only starting to take off in the city, and it is through Ursula’s particular efforts that it has gained a stage here in the opera house. Victor is always delighted to indulge her interests, and has discovered something of a talent for the style.
A paper plane - tiny and the colour of a moth’s wings, so it won’t draw attention as it soars from box to box - lands in Kit’s lap, and she unfolds it to discover Frank’s handwriting. Glancing to her left, she can see him sitting with Ernest and Jacqueline, waving just a little before returning his gaze to the stage.
Catalan! the note reads, and she smiles a little. Frank’s talent for languages has been invaluable in growing the hotel’s business, and almost as helpful to Dewey in growing his catalogue.
Kit wishes, with a sudden, aching intensity, that Dewey were here with her. If Dewey were here, she’s sure that there would be no worrisome little spirals of smoke. Esmé wouldn’t be running her knuckles up and down the back of Olaf’s arm, and Lemony wouldn’t be muttering to himself in that particular way that means something bad is happening.
If Dewey were here, she’d feel safe. She always feels safe with Dewey.
“Excuse me,” Lemony says, and his back is already turned when Kit glances his way. This must be very serious if he’s keeping her out of it, because there’s never been anything he’s kept from her or Jacques.
What is going on? What hasn’t she been told? And-
“Where is my sugar bowl?!” Esmé hisses, loud enough to cut the silence left in the trembling silence of Ursula’s pause on the stage below. The slam of her kicking open to door throws the orchestra off a touch - save for Cress, of course, who never wavers - and Olaf is up in an instant, following Esmé and her ruffles out into the corridor.
Kit follows too. She just hopes it isn’t too late to diffuse whatever this is.
Beatrice is still in her damselfly gown, and with her hair loose over her shoulders, she looks very young - as young as Kit feels. She and Lemony both look twenty-one for once, and that is perhaps the most frightening thing about all of this, more even than the thick, razor-edged pin Esmé takes from her hair and throws at Beatrice, because Lemony and Beatrice are the truest adults of them all, and the only ones who seem to be adults consistently. Beatrice’s wise eyes now are only wide, and maybe afraid.
Esmé’s dart hits the wall, but it only misses by a hair’s breadth. Knowing Esmé - and Kit does, better than she’d like - the next will strike true.
“This is ridiculous,” Kit says, trying to catch Esmé’s arm. Failing that, she reaches for Olaf-
Who backhands her across the face without looking away from Lemony.
“Not now, Kit,” he snaps, but it isn’t him she’s looking at as she clutches her face. It’s stinging, but at least he hadn’t hit her with the hand he wears his ring on.
She’s looking at Lemony, whose face has gone very still, and abruptly pale.
“This isn’t one of your stupid little detective games. This is real,” Olaf says, sounding foolish.
Olaf’s fists are raised just a little, just enough, and Lemony has eased into a fighting stance - even Beatrice looks ready to get physical, with a bright pink dart poised in her dominant left hand.
She’s heard rumours. They all have. But she never thought they were true.
“Olaf, please-”
“Not now!” he snaps, shoving her away this time so she hits the bannister, and hits it hard. “Give us back the sugar bowl, Snicket, or I swear-”
There’s a muddle, and Kit can never be sure what happens exactly, but she thinks it goes something like this.
Lemony, livid as she has never, ever seen him in her entire life, throws a dart similar to Beatrice’s and Esmé’s.
Olaf steps back in surprise, as if he is as shocked by Lemony’s temper as Kit.
Olaf’s father steps out from the grand box into the corridor, looking toward Olaf, and the dart catches him just under the ear.
But Beatrice also threw a dart, and so did Esmé, and as Olaf’s father spills down the steps, Kit doesn’t know what to think or what to do.
Lemony and Beatrice are already fleeing, so she follows them.
Bert’s house is warm and safe, and he ushers Kit and Beatrice into the library as soon as they arrive. His parents are there as well, and Mr. B parks a little heater that spreads just a hint of lavender scent into the air near the couch where Bert has parked Kit. It soothes her some, but she’s so shocked by everything that’s happened tonight that it isn’t really calming that she needs.
Lemony is on the lam. Jacques is gone with him, for now, driving for him because what could be more nondescript than a yellow taxi cab? Lemony is a murderer, except it was not his intended target who died. Or perhaps Beatrice is the murderer, also of the wrong person, and Lemony is being Lemony by taking the blame.
If Lemony is a murderer, he did it because Olaf hurt Kit. So really, it’s Kit’s fault.
Bert tucks a sugar cookie into her hand and sets a cup of dark black tea on the little table by her side, and then he leaves her alone. Beatrice keeps trying to approach her, but Kit needs a while to panic in the quiet of her own mind. Bert is absolute in leaving her alone, and occupies Beatrice with gentle, relentless conversation to give Kit a chance at catching her breath. Surely she’ll be alright then.
She eats the sugar cookie and drinks the tea to make sure she doesn’t go into shock. She’s distantly aware of Mrs. B wrapping her in something exquisitely soft and cosy, and Doctor Montgomery appears from nowhere, peers into her eyes, and presses another sugar cookie into her hand.
Someone mentions that Mother and Father have been telegrammed. Kit’s glad she didn’t have to do it.
An indeterminate amount of time later, someone hammers on the front door of the house. It echoes through the halls to the library, and Kit raises her head for the first time since Bert positioned her here at the distant sound of Dewey’s voice. It’s high with what sounds very much like panic, answering the flutter that’s been strangling her breath somewhere near her diaphragm all evening, and if she had the use of her legs, she’d go to him.
Instead, she waits on her perch, shaking all over, and holds out one hand when Dewey stumbles through the door. He’s wrestling out of a big coat and a bigger hat, pink-cheeked from the wind and from arguing with Bert, but none of that matters when he pelts the length of the library, folds himself carefully around Kit, and tucks her against his warm chest.
She cries then. It isn’t even a little bit shameful now that Dewey is there, not like it would have been had she cried alone.
Jacqueline arrives on his heels - R, for regal, because only a duchess’ daughter could command a room the way Jacqueline does - and shepherds everyone out, even Bert and Beatrice, even Mr. and Mrs. B. Kit clings to Dewey’s soft sweater and cries and cries, and he says nothing. He only holds onto her, one hand at her nape and the other splayed over her back.
“Why?” she asks, once she’s calmed down.
“Bert told me you were hurt, Kit,” he says, nudging his nose against her temple. “You didn’t think I’d stay away if you were hurt, did you?”
There is a schism.
It is a nightmare.
Kit stays at the hotel for three weeks after Lemony goes on the run, at Mother’s behest. She doesn’t want Kit caught up in the horror of it any more than she must be, and even that is more than either she or Father would like.
She stays at the hotel, but really she stays in the library below the fountain. Dewey has a whole apartment down there, with three bedrooms and its own kitchen. Presumably, it’s meant as a bunker for himself and his brothers if anything happens to the hotel, but Kit is quite content to hide in Dewey’s sitting room, tucked into her favourite armchair, while he bustles about at his work.
He stops in every hour or so. Kit prepares their meals as thanks for his putting her up, and so they eat lunch together every day around noon, and dinner around five. Dewey has an endless supply of sugar cookies, and he always makes sure her little plate of them is full when he checks on her, just as he always puts the teakettle on to boil.
Sometimes they talk. Sometimes he just sits with his arm over her shoulders, and they don’t talk. Kit almost likes that better. Dewey is always warm, and he holds her just tight enough that the constant fear inside her ribs stills for a while when he’s nearby.
The fourth night she wakes up crying, he’s standing in the door of her bedroom with two cups of cocoa in his hands, wearing a ridiculous blue and pink striped dressing gown. He sits on the side of her bed while they drink their cocoa, and when he stands to leave, she catches his hand.
Their cups remain on the nightstand, and Dewey settles himself over the covers. Kit turns her face into his throat, and while neither of them sleeps after that, she feels better and more refreshed the next morning than she has since her arrival.
So they continue.
When Kit turns nineteen, Jacques smuggles Dewey from the library under the fountain to the house he and Bert are sharing. Mother and Father send food, more food than all of Kit’s friends between them can eat, but they don’t come along themselves. They do invite her and Jacques to dinner the following night, but that will be much less jolly than this, because Mother remains inconsolable over Lemony’s absence.
Monty brings a snake as his date, and can’t seem to understand why Jacques, easily the most socially skilled of them aside from Beatrice and Jacqueline, is outraged. Kit doesn’t mind, because Monty only ever brings the safe, friendly reptiles with him to parties, but he and Jacques bickering is so familiar and funny that even Larry forgets to be anxious and laughs.
Kit ends up sitting between Bert and Dewey, with sugar all down her front and an array of new, slightly frightening pins and adornments in her hair from Jacqueline. She’s much more enthusiastic about the new boots Victor gave her, which have concealed compartments in the thick soles and malleable steel cord in the laces - although that last is from Mr. B, Kit knows.
“Tell us, Kit,” Bertrand says, tipping just a little gin into her tonic. “What do you hope to do this year?”
She considers this, leaning against Dewey’s side with his arm over her shoulders, with her leg thrown over Bert’s, and hums. She wants to find a way to bring Lemony home, but that simply isn’t possible and will only make everyone sorrowful, so instead she taps her fingers against Dewey’s knee and smiles.
“I’d like to see something beyond the city, I think,” she says, which draws an invitation from Jacqueline to visit Winnipeg before anyone else can say a word.
When Kit turns nineteen, she’s allowed to volunteer for the really dangerous missions.
Well, no one calls them missions, but that’s what they are. She’s allowed to go out on the gung-ho adventures Jacqueline excels at. She’s allowed to create the sort of rip-roaring tales Jacques’ building into a legend. She’s allowed to try one of Beatrice’s delicate interludes, even, although that doesn’t go very well because Kit’s far too straightforward for Beatrice’s brand of subterfuge.
Dewey is sitting at her bedside when she wakes with a freshly-stitched bullet wound in her shoulder, reading a newspaper. Once she stirs, he tips his face up and settles a long-suffering look on her.
“I’m fine!” she protests, because she is.
The look suffers a little longer.
She’s sent to Madam Lulu for training in subtlety, because even Jacques is better at underhandedness than Kit is.
“Don’t mind them,” Lulu says, patting Kit’s hand once they’re tucked away in her tent. “It takes someone very forthright to be sly, I think - just you ask Miss Beatrice. You wouldn’t believe how blunt she was before she came to me, and now look at her!”
Kit can’t imagine Beatrice ever being blunt or direct or forthright, and Madam Lulu laughs when she says so.
“Just you wait and see, kitty cat,” Lulu says, heaving a make-up set of such magnitude that it surely has its own postcode onto the table. “Just you wait and see.”
“What did you do to your eyebrows?” Dewey asks around a stack of books. “Kit! Where did they go?”
“I thought I did quite a good job of drawing them back on,” she says, because she did - Lulu did a terrible job, and then Jacqueline showed her how to do it properly. “I burned them off with a faulty spotlight. Not on purpose, of course.”
“Of course,” he agrees, blushing bright pink when she bounces across to kiss his cheek. He’s grown in a neat moustache, and she likes it much more than she expected she would when he told her of it in his last letter - it makes him look very mature, and just a little debonair. “You enjoyed your time with the circus, then?”
“More than I expected I would,” she says, tilting her head back to look at the world through the fountain, shifting blue-clear and shimmering like the Quagmire sapphires Ursula wore last month at the ballet, when she and Victor announced their engagement. “But I’m glad to be home.”
Dewey kisses her cheek while she’s distracted by the water, and startles her so badly that she almost knocks his stack of books from his hands.
Kit arrives at the library in disguise, hoping to have finally landed on something Dewey can’t immediately see through - she’s dressed as a man today, but that didn’t work two weeks ago, or four months before that. Still, she’s wearing something that might have come from Bert’s wardrobe and a false moustache such as Jacques aspires to, and she’s sure that this is the one that will break Dewey’s perfect record.
However, when she gets to the library, Dewey is not alone - there’s another woman in the library with him.
Kit has been coming to Dewey’s library since she was twelve years old, and she has never arrived to find another woman in the library except for Beatrice, Jacqueline, or Ursula. This woman isn’t as firm and confident as any of those, though, and keeps giggling.
Kit takes off her moustache. Then she opens the door.
“Good morning, D,” she says, crossing the room and slipping past this newcomer to take her place on the corner of Dewey’s desk - the corner nearest his chair, as it happens, which coincidentally puts her firmly between Dewey and the interloper.
“Morning, K,” he says, kissing her cheek as he winds around her to the stranger. “This is Olivia - Olivia, this is Miss Snicket. Olivia’s my apprentice, Kit!”
“An apprentice!” Kit enthuses, turning on the table corner and crossing her legs in the process. Jacqueline taught her how to do that without giving any appearance of effort, and she’s never felt the need to try it until just now. “How nice for you, Dewey. Has she been sent from school?”
“Oh, yes, Miss Snicket!” the woman - she’s only a girl, maybe fourteen, now that Kit actually looks - says, clasping a big leather folder and a small softback notebook to her chest. She’s mostly fringe, with a pair of outrageous glasses underneath, and Kit feels a little more at ease at seeing her very ugly shoes. They’re going to click abominably on the library floor, and Dewey hates it when anyone’s step echoes against the glass ceiling. “Principal Harker sent me to train with Mr. Denouement. Isn’t it exciting?”
“And you know you can’t talk about training here with Mr. Denouement?” Kit asks, because if this girl with her loud shoes and louder glasses even thinks of endangering Dewey-
Well, Kit maybe understands the terrible fury that made Lemony throw that ill-fated dart at the opera house. She’d do the same to anyone who hurt Dewey.
“Kit,” Dewey says, stepping back in front of her and taking her by the shoulders. “Olivia and I have a very busy day ahead of us, but I’ll be back for dinner.”
He kisses her on the brow then, pauses just long enough to nudge his nose against her temple, and then he’s away, bouncing with energy such as she hasn’t seen since Frank and Ernest fell out. She’s done everything she can to bring it back, and it’s more than a little disheartening to see Olivia putting that smile on his face.
“Dewey?” she says, just as he ducks out the door into the library proper. “Just us for dinner?”
He comes back, just two steps, lifts her hand, and kisses the back of it. He’s never done that before, and between that brightness back in his dark eyes and the strangely suave air that his moustache gives him, Kit finds herself blushing.
“ Cara mia,” he says, kissing her hand again and grinning, warm enough for the whole hotel. “Who else could I want?”
Kit makes dinner - her mother’s puttanesca for the main, of course, because Dewey loves pasta and capers in equal measure, with flaky-soft sour cherry and dark chocolate rugelach for dessert. She sets the table with Dewey’s favourite dark blue tablecloth and the silverware he only takes out for birthdays and special occasions, and feels very daring when she sets out two bottles of wine. She has a light red for dinner, a sweet white for dessert, and then there’ll be as much strong, dark tea as Dewey can shake a stick at for afters.
She leaves her hair down. She doesn’t like the way pins feel in her hair, and Dewey’s never expressed a preference for it up, anyway. It suits the soft fall of her dark red dress, too, simple and easy, and her soft-soled dancing slippers that won’t make a sound on the polished wooden floors.
She lights candles. Usually, she and Dewey avoid open flames like their lives depend on it, because the books depend on it, but she likes the way the candlelight catches on the garnets of her bracelet.
Frank gave her that bracelet for her birthday. He said it had been their mother’s, and both he and Dewey had looked so unbearably sad that she’s worn it for every night out and party they’ve had since, just to give it a chance to shine.
Dewey arrives just after six, with his tie undone and a parcel wrapped in brown paper under his arm. The pasta is just ready, and the candles have settled into a pleasing golden flicker.
“Oh,” he says, stopping in the doorway and looking around in surprise. “This all looks lovely, Kit! What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion,” she says, setting his plate on the table, then her own. “I just thought it might be nice for us to have a tasty dinner, that’s all.”
“You’re wearing a dress, Kit,” he says, taking his seat and setting aside his parcel, tugging off his tie. His jaw looks very square above the open collar of his shirt, and his hands look very elegant when he turns back his cuffs.
“I am,” she says. “You aren’t the only one who likes to wear nice clothes.”
“Wine, Kit?”
“We are adults, Dewey,” she says easily, brushing her hair back over her shoulder as she takes her own seat. “We are allowed to drink a glass of wine from time to time.”
He sips the wine before lifting his fork, and Kit crosses her ankles under her chair. She feels a little shy, for some reason. She’s had dinner with Dewey a hundred times!
Never by candlelight, though, while sharing a bottle of wine. Never with cherry-chocolate rugelach. Never while wearing a dress, and the sheer silk stockings Jacqueline had given her with a salacious wink six weeks ago.
“Bon appetit,” Kit says, settling in to enjoy her dinner. Her cooking isn’t quite as good as her mother’s, but her pastry is better than anyone’s save maybe Mrs. Q’s, so she knows Dewey’s going to love that part of the meal, but-
Is that lipstick on his cheek?
“Kit,” Dewey says, “tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing at all!” she says, taking a nice big gulp of her wine and wincing a little against the tartness. “Everything is absolutely fine, Dewey, I’m just wondering why my sauce isn’t as nice as Mother’s-”
“Kit,” he says, taking her hand and pressing it down against the table. “Whatever is the matter? You never usually mind that your sauce tastes different than your mother’s.”
She isn’t really sure what’s wrong, is the problem, so she takes her hand from under Dewey’s and attacks her dinner. He eats as well, but he leaves his hand on the table beside her, and watches her from under anxious brows.
She all but runs into the kitchen with their dishes once they’re done, and her hands are shaking enough that the porcelain clatters into the sink.
“Kit,” Dewey says, right behind her with his hands on her hips. She can feel his heat all along her back, can smell his aftershave and hair oil, and she shivers when he dips his head to press his brow to the curve of her neck. “Sweetheart - talk to me.”
“There’s nothing wrong, ” she insists. “Olivia is perfectly lovely. She is!”
“This is about Olivia?”
He lifts his head and spins her by the hips, so she has no choice but to catch her balance against his chest. His shirt is soft under her fingertips, and his face is so very, very close. He’s laughing, and she’s just about ready to be angry when his eyes go soft.
“Kit,” Dewey says, settling his right hand back on her hip but curling his left around her jaw, drawing her face even closer. “It’s never been about anyone other than you.”
Kit has to meet Jacques for lunch the next day, and arrives twenty-five minutes early. She orders tea and an almond pastry, and neither eats nor drinks. Instead, she sits with her fingers against her lips, more aware of her mouth than she’s ever been.
Dewey was up and about already when she rose this morning, but he abandoned little Olivia to her sorting to share breakfast and twenty minutes of cozying in the sitting room with Kit. She wore another dress this morning just because of how much he’d liked her legs in those silk stockings.
She’ll have to buy more of them. Jacqueline will know where to look.
“Well,” Jacques says, sliding into the chair opposite her with a smile and a black coffee. “ You look as though you had a nice evening.”
She blushes. There’s nothing else to do.
“The Denouement jewels suit you, Katerina,” he says, leaning over to steal some of her pastry. “But I didn’t come here to congratulate you on finally noticing that Dewey’s in love with you. I’ve got something more serious to discuss.”
“Lemony?”
“Lemony.”
“Did you know,” Kit says, taking off her scarf and kicking the door shut behind her, “that everyone thought we’d been- well, very close. For months, Dewey!”
“We’ve been very close for years, Kit,” he says, appearing from the kitchen with a bright white apron over his dark brown suit. “Everyone thought we were intimate, which we weren’t - not as Jacqueline thought, anyway But we are now, so they’ll all have so much to talk about that they’ll forget to tease us.”
“Jacques said there’s been money on us!”
“I won,” Dewey says, and she squawks indignantly at his bright smile. “Well, Frank put the money down for me, because you and I weren’t supposed to be aware of the betting pool.”
“Did you kiss me last night-”
“Not because of the money,” he cuts in. “Because you’d gone to all the trouble of seducing me, and you were going to quit before you’d finished the job because you were jealous of Olivia.”
“I wasn’t- I didn’t! I had no intention-”
“Oh, of course not,” he says, slipping one arm around her waist and tugging her tight against his body. “That’s why you went and bought more of those stockings, is it?”
Kit kisses Dewey to shut him up. It's very exciting, she's found, to kiss a myth.