Page 15 of The Winter Princess
This advice sounds simpler than it is because I’ve never stopped noticing Oskar, first to find him attractive in a remote way—the way you might fancy the male lead on a perfume commercial or a passing stranger with unexpectedly good facial hair—and then, when we decided to loathe one another, I had to notice exactly where he was so I could avoid him efficiently. I’ve trained myself to mark Oskar’s presence when he’s around and to search for him when he’s not.
It’s never too late to begin ignoring him again. Step one: Don’t look at him. I shift my gaze as far as his arm where it rests along the edge of the table, giving me a nice view of the worn elbow patch.
“Furloughing the restoration team is a good plan,” Oskar answers. “What are you going to do about the bacteria? Are we going to furlough them too?”
I turn a laugh into a cough.
Rik gives a dismissive snort. “A five-hundred-year-old painting isn’t going to rot away in a year.”
Oskar brushes the side of his thumb along his jaw. “Maybe not. But the money we save by taking a little care now, will—the British have a phrase.” He snaps his fingers, the gesture nimble.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” I supply, adding a quick metric-based translation that loses idiomatic richness but gets the point across.
Oskar nods.Vede.I’m noticing. I shift my gaze again.
“The roof needs more than a gram of prevention,” Rik counters, still three notches too loud.
It’s time to fulfill my part of the bargain.
“That’s true. But we can’t afford to let national treasures succumb to oxidation or mold. The National Museum isn’t the building, but the art and artifacts.” I lift a hand, gesturing to include the entire museum complex. “We neglect these objects and we run the risk of breaking trust with future generations and losing our cultural heritage.”
I am a prizefighter dancing around the ring, punching her gloves. I am loose. I am ready. Bring it, Rik.
I turn to Oskar, hardly conscious that I’m waiting for his, “Thank you so much. I owe you everything. You are the literal wind beneath my literal wings.” He’s not looking at me but tracing a line of marquetry in slow, easy strokes.
“Rik is right,” he says, glancing down the length of the room. “We do need everyfennigwe can get. Marie–” He gestures to the secretary, thumb and index finger touching, the rest of his palm flat and facing up. That’s not a Sondish gesture. “You’ll sort us out,” he says. “Can you get the numbers? Operating costs, planned expenditures, budget…” His hand loses the Pavian shape and Marie slips out of the room. “We can fix the problem only if we know how bad it is.”
That’s the art restorer in him talking. I’ve seen the results of his work. I’ve carefully inspected it when it returns to the gallery, making sure I do so when he isn’t looking. I grudgingly admit that Oskar is good at fixing things—world-class. If there wasn’t this barrier between us, I would tell him I admire how he works.
Rik snorts, jerking away from the table so that the rolling chair spins into the wall with a crash. If Oskar is proffering an olive branch, Rik has knocked it out of his hands. “You think you’re going to be the boss?” He looks around as though taking a poll. “It’s not going to be you.”
The more tense the room becomes, the more Oskar looks like he doesn’t care. His voice is low, dismissive. “Of course, I’m not the boss. Everyone knows it’s Marie.”
Marie returns, her arms full of packets, and Roland rushes forward to unburden her, passing the materials out.
“I had these ready,” Marie says, slightly confused by the attention her entrance caused. “I don’t want you to imagine I have magical powers.”
Oskar flips through the packet then glances up. “But you do have magical powers.”
I blink. He’s a different man when he’s talking to Marie. His voice is smooth and practiced, his mouth gently amused. She smiles but shakes her head like a woman who’s had five husbands and knows about handsome devils. “Don’t try that with me, Oskar. I know your tricks.”
His mouth turns up, becoming something feline for a second, then he puts away his tricks and begins going over the numbers like a man who studied Battle Accountancy. I give up trying not to notice him as a lost cause. When he’s this close, I can’t be expected to help it.
Observing him at such close quarters gives me a new insight. I’ve been watching my mother run every kind of meeting for over a decade and didn’t expect to find her equal in this taciturn, reclusive man. Again and again, he defers to Marie, the least polarizing figure in the room, and holds his tongue unless he has something to say, merely inserting succinct questions to prod discussion.
“Page two?” he asks, the command couched as a question.
“Page two,” Marie answers, and everyone flips the packet over.
When we dig into the data, we discover that the gap between actual running costs and requested funds is impossibly wide. In each case, department heads haven’t been guilty of outlandish demands. Rik, for instance, requested a new roof and got a small pallet of roofing materials instead.
“It’s obvious what we have to do,” Rik says, after an hour, tossing down his reading glasses.
“What’s obvious,” I say, “is that furloughing Restoration doesn’t get us anywhere near our target.” I close the packet, and he gives me a withering smile.
“But sucking up to the prime minister will. He doesn’t even like the royal family.” He slides me a sidelong glance “That’s what the papers say.”
Words tremble on my tongue.The royal family doesn’t like him back.
