I did not sleep.
I told myself this was a choice, that I was keeping watch, cataloguing the room the way my father had taught me to catalogue any unfamiliar space. Exits first. Then surfaces. Then what belongs to the space and what has been placed there recently. The window faced east and had a latch that turned but opened onto a drop of twenty feet onto stone. The door had no lock on my side. The wardrobe held clothes that were not mine, all in my size, arranged by colour in a way that suggested someone had given the task serious thought. The vanity held products I used at home. Specific ones. The kind you would only know about if you had asked someone who knew me, or had someone go through my bathroom before the auction cleared the house.
I stood at the vanity for a long time looking at a bottle of face oil I had been using for two years. Something tightened low in my chest, the specific kind that happens when the body understands something the mind is still refusing to finish.
His.
Who had told him? Who had been asked, and what exactly they had been asked to provide, and how long before last night someone had stood in my bathroom cataloguing me?
Then I sat on the edge of the bed and waited for the morning, because that was the only productive thing left to do.
Mara Conti knocked at seven.
I knew her name by then because she introduced herself the way people introduce themselves when they are performing a function rather than making an acquaintance. Mara Conti, she said. I am responsible for your schedule and your instruction. She placed a single printed page on the vanity beside the face oil and took one step back.
She was small and neat and dressed in grey, and she looked at me with the particular expression of someone who has already formed an assessment and seen no reason since arriving to revise it. Efficient was the better word. I was a variable she had accounted for and would now proceed to work with.
The schedule was a single page, single-sided, printed in a clean serif font. I picked it up.
Six forty-five, rise. Seven, breakfast in the east dining room, alone. Seven forty-five, morning walk, grounds only, east wing perimeter. Eight thirty, what was listed as Protocol and Conduct, location given as the study on the second floor. Ten, what was listed as Observation, no further detail. Twelve, lunch. One through three, what was listed as Personal Study, materials provided. Three thirty, a second session of Protocol and Conduct. Five, free period. Seven, dinner, format to be specified per evening. Nine thirty, lights.
I read it twice.
Then I said, "What is Protocol and Conduct."
"Foundational instruction," Mara said. "House codes. Behavioural expectations. Presentation standards."
"Presentation standards."
"Yes."
I set the page down. "And Observation."
"You will be told what you need to know at the relevant time."
She said it without apology and without any particular edge. A statement of operational fact. I noted that she was not going to be manipulated through irritation. She did not have enough investment in me to be irritated.
"Who prepared this," I said.
She looked at me for a moment. "It was prepared in advance of your arrival."
She did not say by whom. She did not need to.
I looked back at the page. The morning walk covered the east wing perimeter only. Not the grounds. Not the gate. The east wing perimeter, which meant someone had looked at a map of this estate and drawn a line around what I was allowed to see, and that line had been drawn before I was here to need drawing around.
The free period was five to seven. Ninety minutes. Long enough to feel like a concession. Short enough to be contained.
"The clothes in the wardrobe," I said.
"Are yours to use."
"They're not mine."
Mara picked up the schedule from where I had set it, aligned its edge with the vanity surface, and placed it back down. The adjustment was unnecessary. It was already straight. "They are yours to use," she said again, and left.
I sat with the page for another ten minutes before I made myself move.
The Protocol and Conduct session was conducted by Mara in a study that smelled of old paper and something floral I couldn't name. She sat across a narrow table and explained, in the flat register of someone reciting a document they had written themselves, the codes of conduct expected of someone in my position within a household of this kind. She used the phrase someone in my position three times. She did not say wife. She did not say prisoner. She did not say acquisition. She said someone in my position the way you say a word you have chosen in place of the word you are replacing.
I sat with my hands in my lap and my spine straight and listened to every word.
Not because I was obedient. Because information is the only currency I currently possessed, and she was spending it freely, and I was not going to miss a single denomination.
There were rules about the east and west wings. About which rooms required accompaniment and which did not. About the dining schedule and its variations. About interactions with household staff and with personnel I had not yet met. About appearance standards, which were specific and unambiguous and covered everything from attire to the angle of engagement in public-facing situations.
Each rule was presented without a reason. No explanations were offered. I did not ask for them because I already understood that asking why was not a door that would open in this structure.
When it was over I walked the east wing perimeter as the schedule prescribed. The grounds were large enough that the walls were not visible from the path. Someone had thought about that. If you could not see the boundary, you could not spend the walk cataloguing it. You could only experience the space between start and finish, and the space was kept pleasant enough that experiencing it was not itself a punishment.
Whoever designed this had studied what makes containment bearable so that it would be borne longer.
I thought about that for the rest of the day.
That evening, after dinner, I picked the schedule up one more time and looked at the header.
There was a date in the upper right corner. Something in my chest went very still.
Four days before the auction. Four days before I arrived. Four days before anyone asked.