The Settee’s Secret

Fiction Psychological Thriller / Futuristic Science Adventure fiction, short story JC Milan January 29, 2025 0 Comments

It was raining sawdust

A fine, pale haze suspended in the afternoon light. Aaron Casmir, his work-shirt rolled to the elbows and stained in patterns of sap and resin, stood in a cramped corner of his workshop. His hands gripped the handle of a wooden block plane so tightly that his knuckles turned white, smoothing the curve of a mahogany armrest. Outside the workshop windows, the world was still—too still—and the silence pressed against the wooden walls like a held breath.

The armrest had been part of something much larger once—a 17th-century Louis Quinze settee that Aaron had painstakingly disassembled the day before. He was not restoring it, as most would have expected. Not anymore. Instead, he was unmaking it, piece by deliberate piece, undoing the work of a master woodworker known only as “La Feuille,” a cabinetmaker so revered that one of France's most prominent families had built a wing of their estate around the settee.

And now Aaron had a contract to destroy it.

The light in the room pulsed unevenly as if to mirror Aaron’s own heartbeat. He could still recall the moment Marcelline Dufrain, heiress to the Le Faucheux lineage, had stood in his workshop, her silhouette sharp against his clutter of scroll saws and chisels. She had come with a proposition: “Break it down. Keep it quiet. No one can know.”

“Why me?” Aaron had asked, squinting at her. His hands unconsciously rested on the surface of his latest project, a meticulously crafted rocking chair destined for a Manhattan boutique. Even then, it felt like an inadequate shield against her presence.

“Because,” she replied, her voice like cold glass, “no one knows how a master builds like you do. I’ve seen your work. You understand not just the grain of the wood but the intent of the maker. You know how to reverse art.”

Now, as his plane struck a stubborn knot in the armrest, he wondered once again what had prompted him to agree. Maybe it was her eyes, ancient and demanding, or the way she’d let slip the word “legendary,” a term seldom associated anymore with modern carpenters. Or maybe it was just the money, silent and heavy once she’d dropped an envelope on his workbench.

See also Shadows of the Obsidian Order

Aaron wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve, glancing at the pieces of the settee strewn across the floor. Pierre-Jeanne "La Feuille" Gautier—if he’d been alive—would be preparing to haunt Aaron by now. The chair’s dismantled embellishments were maddeningly intricate: carved garlands of grapes and ivy that seemed to climb on their own, as if the wood had grown into the pattern rather than having been shaped by hand. Even the joints, hidden beneath veneer, were impossible to reproduce with modern tools.

The secrets of La Feuille’s techniques had long been lost to time—except to Aaron. Somewhere, deep in his soul, there had been a resonance, an eerie familiarity when he'd touched the piece. Every groove, every dovetail and mortise, seemed to speak to him, as if whispering, Here’s how it’s done.

Marcelline was more than clear about her reasons for wanting the chair destroyed: its existence implicated her family in a centuries-old blood feud with another dynasty, the Bellévues, a rivalry over accusations that Gautier used his craft to smuggle messages and conspiracies during the reign of Louis XIV. And now, modern eyes would scrutinize the Le Faucheux fortune, courtesy of an aggressive investigative journalist.

Destruction was the simplest way to keep those secrets buried.

But Aaron had become obsessed. He sat at night in his workshop with a lamp turned low, tracing over the dismantled pieces like a lover, pouring over patterns and markings in ways that felt compulsive. It wasn’t just the skill. It was something that went deeper, thicker, like ichor running through veins.

The settee wasn’t merely beautiful. It was hiding something.

It was sometime after midnight when the first piece revealed its secret. Beneath a small section of veneer on one of the front legs, a pattern of geometric grooves appeared. Aaron bent forward, his heart racing, and began mapping the incisions with charcoal and paper. It was a cipher—an impossibly elegant one, invisible to the untrained eye unless you knew how to break apart a settee made by one of history’s greatest figures.

La Feuille wasn’t merely smuggling messages. He was telling a story.

He pulled apart more and more of the settee, against both his better judgment and Marcelline’s explicit instructions. The patterns repeated—sometimes under the frame, hidden like knots—sometimes carved in places that only another master woodworker would ever have reason to look. It became an obsession. He barely ate. His tools bent to a familiarity with the project as if they had once been used for an identical task hundreds of years earlier. Aaron didn’t know why, but touching the wood gave him clarity—movement, sound, the sensation of someone else's hands.

And then he saw her: Maríelle Gautier. La Feuille’s only daughter, locked in exile for charges of treason and witchcraft. The legend, scattered across dusty French court documents, suddenly came alive through his work. The entire armrest, disassembled, became a map of secret meeting points, many of which still existed beneath rebuilt cities. He ran his fingers over them, traveling through a history of betrayals, artistry, and quiet rebellion with every knot and groove.

There was something buried out there—something Marcelline would likely kill to protect. Or eliminate.

On the fifth day, Aaron received another envelope. No words. Just a blindfold tucked into folded vellum.

Still holding it, he turned back to the pieces of the settee. Its final secret waited.

Was he prepared to lose his life unearthing it? The scent of timber, ancient and honeyed, filled his nose as his fingers grazed a carved sigil—not French. Older.

Genre: Psychological Thriller / Historical Mystery Mashup

The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: What do you call a master woodworker

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