Chapter Five

Disclaimer: This is a retelling of the story of The Luxe by Anna Gobberson, using the characters and locations of Vampire Diaries, that belongs to L.J Smith. In other words; I own NOTHING.

The ideal ladies' maid will be awake before her mistress, with warm water for washing the face, and will not go to sleep until she has undressed her mistress for bed. She may require a nap during the day, when her mistress does not need her.

-Van Kamp's Guide To Housekeeping For Ladies Of High Society, 1864 EDITION

Caroline Forbes rearranged her elbows on the still and stared out into the tranquil darkness surrounding Gramercy Park. She had been sitting this way for many hours, in the bedroom where she had dressed the elder of the Misses Bennett in layers of chemise, poplin, whalebone, and steel earlier that evening. Miss Bennett –no longer Katty as she had been called in childhood, or Kat, as she let her sister call her, but Miss Bennett, the junior lady of the house. Caroline was not looking forward to her return. Katherine had been away for so many months that her personal maid had almost forgotten what it felt like to serve. But from the very moment that morning when Katherine had returned to the house, she had gone about reminding Caroline precisely what was expected of her.

She scrunched up her shoulders and sighed as she dropped them. She was not like her older sister, Lexi, an altogether softer person, content to read the latest Cite Chatter in the narrow attic bedroom that they shared, gazing at drawings of the Worth gowns she herself would never wear. Lexi was twenty one, only four years older than her sister, but acted as though she were Caroline's mother. Since their real mother had been dead for years, in many ways she was. But Lexi was also childlike in her gratitude for every little trinket the Bennetts bestowed upon her. Caroline could not bring herself to feel the same way.

She shifted in her simple black linen dress, with its boat neck and low dowdy waist, taking in the luxury of Katherine's bedroom: the robin's egg blue wallpaper, the wide mahogany sleigh bed, the shiny silver bathtub with heated water piped through the walls, the perfume of peonies erupting from porcelain pitchers. Since Katherine had come out, she had begun to fancy herself an expert of decoration of interiors and if asked, she likely would have said that the Bennett rooms were really rather modest. Well, compared to the ridiculous mansions of fifth avenue millionaires, perhaps they were. I seemed to Caroline, sitting under the small Dutch paintings of the domestic scene in the big gold frame, that Katherine had become blind to her own extraordinary privilege.

But Caroline could not hate Katherine. Could not hate her, no matter how much she distanced herself with elaborate clothing and fine manners. Katherine has always been Caroline's model for how to act and be, a glimmer of hope that she would not always live a life so simple and plain. And it was Katherine who had convinced her, one night ten years ago, that they must go downstairs –all the way to the carriage house- to find out who was wailing in the middle of the night. Caroline had been scared, but Katherine had insisted. That was when Caroline had first come to love Stefan Keller, who was beautiful even then.

Stefan had been an orphan at the age of eight by one of those fires that blew through the tenements like they were kindling, trapping men and babies in dark closets. Stefan, who had been taken in by his father's former employers with the understanding that he would serve, even at that tender age, had wailed when he dreamed of fires. Though it didn't matter very long after that, because he stopped dreaming of those things when Caroline and Katherine became his friends.

There was a difference between them even then, of course, but they were all children and as such equally banned from the Bennetts' grown up world of dinner parties and card games. During the day they were all under the care of Caroline's mother, Liz Forbes, who had been the Bennett girls' nurse, and she never made any distinctions among her charges. She had often scolded Stefan and Katherine equally for their many schemes. Lexi was too timid to join theses pranks, and Bonnie too young. But Caroline had always hurried along with them, desperate to play a part. At night they would crawl about the darkened house giggling at those great portraits of Katherine's forefathers, sneaking sugar from the kitchen and silver buttons from the morning room. They stole old Mr. Bennett's playing cards with the pictures of ladies in undergarments on the backs and wrinkled their noses at them. They really were friends back then, before Katherine's sense of self-importance swelled and she stopped having time for her old playmates.

Caroline wasn't sure when things changed. Maybe around the time her mother died and Katherine began her lessons with Mrs. Bertrand, the finishing governess. Caroline had been almost eleven then, awkward in body and eager to find fault in everything. She didn't often like to think back on those years. Katherine. A little less than a year older than she, had become suddenly absorbed in her lessons in civility, in how to hold a teacup and when the proper time to return a call from a married female acquaintance was. Her every gesture seemed intended to convey to Caroline that they were not of the same cloth, that they were no longer friends. And now Katherine was the sort of girl Lexi read in her magazines.

For years Caroline existed quietly, and practically alone, despite attending to Katherine all day and night and sharing sleeping quarters with her sister and the other young woman on the Bennett staff. She'd been too shy to maintain her childhood friendship with Stefan without the buffer of Katherine. So she had watched him grow taller and finer looking from afar. There had been dark years for him too –she had heard stories if his drinking and fighting from the house keeper, Mrs. Faber, and had wondered what dissatisfaction lived in his heart. It was only summer–when, with Katherine gone, she was temporarily and gloriously freed from her regular duties -that was when she and Stefan became friends again. They shared cigarettes after his long days were done and jokes at the expense of Mrs. Faber. They imagined aloud what their lives would be like if they were free to do what they wished. Before, she always wondered where he always disappeared to. Now she knew that he want dangerous at all, that he spent every moment he wasn't working with a book. Books about the excesses of the leisure class, and the theory of democracy, about politics and literature, but most of all about the West and how everybody with drive could make his way over there. Now the summer was almost over, and she still hadn't found a way to tell him that she wanted to go out West too. With him. That she was in love with him.

Caroline was brought back from her thoughts of Stefan by the actual sight of him. One of the Bennetts' broughams came to a stop in front of the house, and Stefan leaped down from his perch to hush the horses and open the door for the ladies. She looked at his back, wide at the shoulders and long at the torso, with the poignant X of black suspenders across it. Katherine came first, holing up her arm for Bonnie, who, for all her big talk, was looking rather fatigued. And then Stefan put his arm out for Mrs. Bennett, whose small black figure came quickly to the ground. Then the women walked after the other through the still night and up to the door. Caroline could hear Lexi welcoming them as Stefan walked the horses around the carriage house.

She knew Katherine would soon be advancing up the main stairs, and she felt a rebellious instinct to rise up in her. Once she arrived, Caroline would have to undress her young mistress and wouldn't be in bed until after morning's light. Just imagining the very task she had performed thousands of times but escaped for months, caused her body to flush with resentment. She pushed herself up from the sill and shuffled hurriedly out of Katherine's room and down the long carpeted hall. She reached the back servants' stairs in a few moments and then hustled down two steps at a time.

As Caroline moved towards the kitchen she could hear the Bennett women on the main stairs going up. She paused and considered whether she would be punished, and how, for abandoning her duties on Miss Bennett's first night back in Mystic Falls. But she wanted to tell Stefan about all the French airs her mistress had acquired. She wanted to see him laugh and know she had caused it. And maybe… maybe she would find a way to tell him how she felt. So she gave herself a little nod and dashed through the kitchen and out the near pantry door which Katherine had installed last fall for facilitate deliveries from the grocer.

Then she stepped lightly onto the hay covered ground of the carriage house. Stefan had been removing the equipment from the horses. It lay there on the ground in neat rows so that he could clean it before putting it away. The threadbare cotton of his blue collared shirt clung to his skin from working with those gleaming black animals. His sleeves were rolled above his elbows and his hair was damp where it hung beneath his ears.

He took a step forward and met her eyes, and then stopped as though he had realized something.

"Hey," He greeted her quietly. He looked over her shoulder toward the door, and then smiled tightly as he refocused his eyes on her. "Shouldn't you be upstairs, helping the Misses Holland?"

Caroline stood still near the door and smiled uncontrollably. She hugged herself and waited for him to invite her in like usual, but then he turned his gaze away and spoke in a very different tone from the one she had grown used to over the summer. "You know you're testing your luck, sneaking around at night. Now that Miss Kathy… I mean Miss Katherine is back. You shouldn't. You…can't."

Caroline's heart was startled in her chest and time stretched slowly in front of her. She was so confused by the way he was acting. It was as though all the closeness that had grown between them over the summer had disappeared in an instant, or had only ever existed in her imagination. She blinked, wishing that he would just look at her for a moment.

Then he did finally bring his gaze to meet hers. His face was frozen and his mouth was set and his eyes were blank. The horse nearest his shifted, prancing in place and shaking its head. A moment passed, and then Stefan reached up and quieted the large animal.

"Stefan," She said, her voice rising with an unpleasant pleading quality that she could not control. She desperately wanted him to say something familiar and encouraging, to make some kind of joke that would eclipse the awkwardness she was feeling now. "Why can't I visit with you like usual? The ladies do it during the day, with tea, but because we're who we are, we have to do it at odd hours and in-"

"Caroline," Stefan interrupted. She was jarred by the name, which he rarely used. Over the summer he had always used her childhood nickname, Caro, to address her. He looked to the ground and sighed. Then, without meeting her eyes he moved towards her. He gently took both of her hands, and for a second Caroline thought her heart might stop. But then he pushed her back towards the kitchen. "I'm sorry Caroline," he said softly as he moved her up those four wooden steps and into the house. "Not tonight. You can't be here tonight."

"But why not?" she whispered.

Stefan stared at her. His brow was tense and his eyes seemed very green and very serious. He just shook his head, like whatever he was thinking was something she wouldn't understand. "Just not tonight, all right?"

And then she was in the kitchen and the door had closed in her face. Caroline reached out for a wall in the darkness. She slid down to the floor, which smelled of cooked onions and dirt, and there she remained. She sat like that for a long time, feeling lonelier than perhaps ever. Outside, the sky began to turn from black to the darkest purple.

She was still there when the door to the servants' stairs opened, and a figure in a white silk wrap hurried across the floor. The girl was as darting and iridescent as a ghost, and she kept her head down as she moved.

She had already pushed through the door to the carriage house when Caroline realized that the girl was Miss Katherine Bennett.

A/N: That's chapter 5 for you, hope you liked it. Sorry it took so long. One think I would like to say is that I know this is labeled a Bamon story and so far no Bamon at all. But in a few chapters that will change. Major Bamon action but first I have to set up the plot line or whatever. So stay tuned and don't forget Review!

Thanks!