And here was the boy. He stood at the end of the grand salon, staring at her. He held nothing in his hand, no apple or carrot, but she walked over to him anyway, and smelled his shirt.
Étienne hadn’t really thought beyond the moment when the horse might come into the house. He hadn’t thought that the horse would come into the house, and so he had made no plans for what he would do with the horse. He had never known a horse—only read about them, and in nothing that he had read did any author say that a particular horse had entered a house and gone to sleep beneath the window. He was a little frightened, but Étienne, a small but determined boy, had been frightened before; he did what he always did, he smiled, looked the horse in the eye. After a moment, he felt comfortable petting her. First he petted her cheek and the side of her nose; then, when she lowered her head, he put his hand under her bushy forelock and tickled her white star. Pretty soon, he was running his hand down her neck.
Paras had a thick coat, smooth and fluffy, not like the wool of the sofa or of a sweater. Étienne let his hand stroke her shoulder. She seemed to enjoy it. She dropped her head and closed her eyes.
But as she was standing there, she smelled that through a nearby doorway there was food and water. She hadn’t eaten a real meal since her last visit to the bakery and café on the Avenue de Suffren. And she was thirsty, too, though she had licked and eaten plenty of snow earlier in the day. She walked toward the cuisine. Étienne saw where she was going, and went ahead of her.
In fact, there was quite a bit of food in the cuisine. Madame de Mornay had a horror of running out of provisions, because she had, indeed, run out of provisions several times in the course of her long life, and she remembered those occasions in some ways better than she remembered the years of plenty. The question, for Étienne, was not whether there was food, but what does a horse eat?
The answer, as far as Paras was concerned, was “Let’s try it and see.” She went through the doorway, which was old and wide, and she clip-clopped first to the sink, where she licked the porcelain in a way that invited Étienne to put in the plug and run some water. He did so, and Paras took a long drink. When she was well and truly finished, Étienne pulled the plug. The next thing she did was to smell the remainder of a baguette that Étienne and his great-grandmama had purchased the day before. Étienne tore it into pieces; they were not especially hard, and Paras chewed them up and swallowed them down. They were not delicious, however, unlike the kale that Étienne pulled out of the refrigerator, which tasted to Paras of sunshine and summertime. There was a lot of it, and she enjoyed it very much, which was fine with Étienne, since he didn’t like kale at all, and his great-grandmama made him eat it because she said it was very nutritious.
They moved on to carrots, parsnips, turnips, sweet potatoes, all of which Étienne was glad to see disappear from the larder (which was deep and wide, half a story dug into the ground, cool enough for extended storage; Etienne went up and down the steps several times, each time bringing up a surprise). Finally, he got to the potatoes. Paras sniffed them, and in other circumstances she might have eaten one, but now she left them alone and looked out the window. The window gave onto the courtyard. She could tell by the light that the day was coming to an end. Without really intending to, Paras continued through the cuisine, which, like the other rooms in the house, was a large space. At the far end was what had once been the door to which purveyors of food and wine had come, bringing everything Madame de Mornay or any other Mornay might need for suppers and parties. It was a large door, the same color as the wall, but Paras could smell that it led to the outside. She stood in front of it for a moment or two, investigating it, and then, by mistake, really, she bumped it with her knee and her hoof. After she did this, Étienne stepped in front of her and opened the door. This courtyard was different from the other one, not quite so large, and because of where it was situated, it contained hardly any snow, though it was somewhat gloomier and more overgrown than the courtyard outside the front door. Paras went outside and got rid of the water she had drunk from the sink. But it was still cold, so, after walking about for a few moments, she presented herself at the door again, and Étienne, who really quite liked her, stepped back and invited her in. He also gave her a lump of sugar.
And that was how the two of them agreed upon what the house was for and what the house was not for. That she had made a small mistake in the grand salon was fine with Étienne. He found himself a bucket, threw the manure out the window into the berry patch, and did a little mopping.
THE MANURE WAS not unnoticed, except by Madame de Mornay, who was still sleeping soundly. If Paras had looked closely, she would have seen, in the corner of the grand salon where she’d made her deposit, a small hole in the wall where the floor molding had chipped and broken away. That hole was the entrance to a rather large estate belonging to Conrad and Kurt, father and son, two black rats who were part of a family of rats who had been living in the walls since long before the Mornays had ever been heard of. The rat family had once been quite extensive, with connections all over Paris, but some years before, a prolific tribe of cats had moved into the Champ de Mars, and reproduced to such a degree that most of the local rats, especially the smaller black ones, had either been wiped out or moved on to the Place des Invalides. Conrad and Kurt sometimes went for days without seeing, or, more important, hearing another rat in the neighborhood. The two main entrances to the rat estate were in the very storeroom where Étienne had gotten the kale and the carrots—one opening was not far from the flour bin (this one was larger, and normally used to carry provisions into the estate), and the other opening was down the wall a ways, behind the lentil bin. Kurt and Conrad and their predecessors had long since given up trying to chew their way into the various bins, barrels, crates, and even bags, because Étienne was not much good at cleaning up spilled provisions, and going down the short staircase had been too much for Madame de Mornay for years now. Kurt and Conrad were fat and lazy, though still much more stylish than brown rats. Many times every day, they went out the exit and in the entrance, picking up whatever Étienne left behind. This was largely the reason why Étienne didn’t realize that the place was such a mess—Kurt and Conrad worked as his cleanup crew.
The estate was an enormous maze that ran all through the walls of the house and had several exterior openings as well. Conrad had sometimes gone out into the world in hopes of finding a rat or two, preferably black, preferably female, to join them in the estate. But the cat tribe was as avid and skilled as they had always been—they were everywhere, Conrad could sense them, he did not want to run into a lean and hungry feline when he was just trying to find a friend. Kurt was thus rather pleased to see, out the second-story window (his own aperture was a hole in the wall just below the sill), a certain canine pacing back and forth in front of the house. She had come at dusk, and now she walked for a moment, paused, lifted her head, sniffed, gave a single, urgent bark, then walked some more. Kurt knew which dogs were ratters and which dogs considered rats beneath them. This dog was just the sort who wouldn’t look at a rat—all about birds, these dogs were. Even though Kurt had never heard of its happening, he could imagine taking such a dog on as a protector. Conrad said that this was a ridiculous idea, but Kurt thought that it was merely “imaginative.” And Conrad agreed that, once you had a horse in the house, just about anything was possible. Conrad was old; Kurt was young. He knew that there were young female rats out there, and he thought of female rats more and more as he matured. He did not intend to give up on finding one of his own until he had at least tried something.