If We Were Villains: A Novel

I gave Colborne a five-minute head start because I didn’t want him to catch me leaving the Castle. I stashed my cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink, pulled my coat and gloves on, and left through the back door. I ran the whole distance to the FAB without stopping, frost crunching under my feet. By the time I arrived my limbs were numb, my eyes watering from the sting of the sharp February air.

I let myself in through a side door and listened carefully. The third-years were in the auditorium, stumbling through the second act of Two Gentlemen of Verona. Hoping not to run into anyone loitering backstage, I hurried into the stairwell, one hand skating along the railing as I took the steep steps to the basement two at a time.

A sprawling undercroft lurked beneath the Archibald Dellecher Theatre and all of its tributary hallways and anterooms. Usually only the technical crew ventured into that low-ceilinged, dimly lit warren, to unearth old props and furniture long ago deemed irrelevant and doomed to eternal storage. I hadn’t planned to go there, hadn’t even thought of it until I was halfway to the FAB, desperate at first just to get the hell away from the Castle. But as I crept down two or three shadowy corridors crowded with theatrical refuse, I realized my own accidental brilliance. Nobody could ever find anything in the undercroft, even if they knew exactly what they were looking for. Before long I stumbled into a cobwebbed corner where a bank of lockers (probably ripped out of the crossover sometime in the eighties) leaned tiredly against the wall. Rust leaked from their gills like old dried blood and crept across their gaping, sharp-edged doors. It was as good a place as any.

I shoved a battered trestle table out of my way, then waded through the rubbish piled up in my path. The first locker had a padlock hanging on the door, the catch spotted with rust like a bad tooth. I removed it, pulled hard on the handle, and swore as loudly as I dared when the door sprang open and cracked against my shin. The locker was empty except for a chipped mug bearing a faded Dellecher coat of arms, a black ring of coffee clinging to the bottom. I reached into my pocket to find the scrap of fabric I’d plucked from the fireplace. I squinted at it in the dim light, and that ominous red stain glared back. I wasn’t even sure it was blood, but my own paranoia dragged me back to the day of Richard’s memorial service, when I’d found Filippa alone by the fireplace. I thrust the thought away with alarm. There were no locks on the library doors, so it might have been any one of us. The air in the undercroft felt frigid. Any one of us might have done what? Suddenly nauseous and impatient to get the thing out of sight, I bent down and stuffed it into the mug. If anyone else found it there, they’d just think it a rag—stained with paint or dye or some other innocuous thing. For all I knew, it was. I chastised myself for being excitable. Alexander was right about that much: if we didn’t keep our wits about us, everything would come undone. I slammed the door, then hesitated. I didn’t know the lock’s combination. I didn’t want to return to it, ever, but just in case, I left it dangling, open.

I shoved the trestle table back in front of the lockers, hoping that maybe nobody else would bother moving it, that nobody would even know I’d been there. I stepped back and stood staring at the small wheel of the lock, the tiny gap between the shackle and case. How tremendous the agony of unmade decisions.