Free Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 03 - The School for Psychics by Carolyn Jourdan Page B

ceiling. There are four small rooms off this large central room. They’re evenly spaced to jut out toward the east, west, north, and south. It’s the most perfectly proportioned building I’ve ever seen.”
    “Try the door.”
    Phoebe did. It was locked.
    “There are four sets of tall entrance doors,” she explained. “French doors, that give access to the interior. They’re equally spaced around the central room. And each of the four small rooms off the central area has three sets of long French windows.” She closed her eyes and counted to herself. “That’s sixteen sets of long windows if you count the exterior doors. It’s stunning. We’re at what I assume is the main entrance since it faces the garden and the path and the other house.”
    “There’ s something small and made of metal to your right about two and a half feet off the ground,” said J.J. “What is it?”
    Two large planters sat beside the doors, one on either side, each containing an ornamental tree. Phoebe went to the one on the right and felt around in the dirt behind the trunk of the tree. There was small box jammed into the loose soil. She pulled it out and opened it. Inside it was a key. She laughed and told J.J. what she’d found.
    “It’s the same the world over,” J.J. said. Then he quoted from Shakespeare’s Henry V , “What have kings that commons have not, too, save ceremony?”
    She used the antique key to unlock the door and they went inside, closing the door behind them. It was a lot warmer once they were out of the wind. She described the building to J.J. “There’s an elaborate marble floor with different colors of stone radiating in a pointy pattern almost like the face of a compass. I think this might be the floor in the book the Boss showed me, but I’m not sure.
    “ The walls and ceiling are painted white and have a lot of gilded carving. There’s a great deal of decorative trim. It’s all gold leaf or painted gold.” Phoebe tilted her head, there was something wrong about the way the place looked.
    “It’s strange, b ut I know this room used to be green. It was a garden room, for eating lunch and hiding out in peace. I think it must’ve been redecorated by Marie Antoinette. It has a Louis XVI feel to it now. It’s fabulous, but I think they might’ve overshot the mark a little with the white and gold. It’s a bit too formal, a sort of rigid inhuman perfection. It’s not a place you could chillax in any more.”
    J.J. made a slow circuit of the main room inspecting the walls.
    “Can you imagine becoming king of France at the age of five like Louis XV did?” he said. “He was the great grandson of Louis XIV. All of the intermediate heirs had predeceased the great king. They say Louis XV loved cats and, as a little boy, he carried his cat with him into the highest-level government meetings. They had to make his cat a Cabinet Minister because only Ministers were allowed in the meetings.”
    They both smiled at the brief insight into the vulnerable humanity of a little boy who would never know a normal life.
    “ There’s no furniture in here at all,” said Phoebe. “The whole place is empty, but the walls and floor and ceiling are so highly decorated, you hardly notice it.” They walked into each of the side rooms in turn. “There’s a fireplace with a mirror over the mantle on the far wall of this room, so what appears on the outside to be long windows are fake somehow.”
    J.J. walked around the room , stopping a couple of times to examine something only he could see.
    “ If I had to guess,” Phoebe said. “I’d say one of the rooms is a bedroom or a place for napping and one is sitting room. Another might be a kitchen and the last one, maybe a restroom?”
    Th ey went into a room that had a narrow staircase in one corner, going down into an indistinct gloom. J.J. noticed it immediately and turned his head toward it. “What’s that?”
    “It’s a very rickety looking staircase going down