Another thoughtful frown. "Well, there's a lot of noise in the walls for the past two days. That's why I think they have babies. I wouldn't say they show signs of distress... But they must be quite afraid of mama." A few days ago, her stepmother had seen a mouse and had flung a book at it. Sadly, it was a hit and she had smashed the poor creatures brains out. Lynette had cried herself to sleep and was all the more determined to support the mice as much as she could before she went back to school.

  

“Most people try to get rid of mice,” he said quietly. “I’m sure they have their own... mouse lives, but they also carry diseases.”

  

Lynette sighed. That was a dilemma. "Maybe if I catch them, I can bring them to a safe place." Just then a mouse shot from behind a cupboard towards a crack in the wall.

  

His eyes flicked momentarily to the movement, though he figured it was just settling flour in the air.

“A good idea, young lady. What will you need to catch them?”

  

Lynette wanted to run after the mouse, but it already found cover. She folded her arm across her waist and put her finger up against her lip as she thought for a moment. "I would need some food. And then some kind of trap that they could get into, but not out of... And then I would need to smuggle them out of the house..." That would be the biggest challenge. She would never be allowed to leave the house unattended, except for a walk in the gardens, and the mice would easily find their way back from there. But there was no way she would be able to bring a caged mouse if her stepmother or a governess was attending her. "Do you think you could do that, sir?" Lynette knew she was pushing her luck now, but she gave him her most innocent, angelic look. "The mouse family would be eternally grateful."

  

Gourmet mouse food: this hadn’t been in the job description. In fact, Ahmet was pretty certain this was one of those unspoken rules he could get fired for breaching.

Merlin. All he’d had to do to keep his last job was show up.

His brows rose and there was a hint of a smile at the notion of an indebted mouse family. Yes, they’d remember for a lengthy two years or however long a house mouse saw. He cupped his chin in thought mostly in regards of how to avoid disgracing his human family.

“How are you at transfiguration, young ma’am?”

Mouse transfiguration was a thing by her age, right?

  

Lynette bit her lip for a moment. "Not terribly good, I'm afraid. And I'm not allowed to use magic outside of school. That complicates things." She would have asked Alex, but her sister could not afford getting into any more trouble. And Flo was already a rose, but she was afraid of mice. "Can you help me with that?" she asked. The thought that he could get into worse trouble than either her or her sisters never crossed her mind.

  

Haha, hahaha, hahahahaha. Ahmet chewed the inside of his cheek, visions of Arthur scolding some line cook from Baudelaire’s about the last cook who got caught smuggling mice out of the kitchen and corrupting his sweet, innocent daughter.

“Do you get along with your older sisters?” he suggested ‘helpfully’.

Not like a Miss McPadraic was going to get thrown out on the street with a ruined reputation, right?

  

"My oldest sister, Alexandra, might be willing to help... But she tends to get in trouble." Lynette said thoughtfully. Suddenly she blushed red, realizing that she was talking inappropriately in front of their family staff. "Oh but she's good-natured." she corrected herself.

  

He took his wand out with his left hand, swapped it over to his right, and cast a cleaning spell on the floured counter space.

“Getting into good-natured trouble,” he repeated with an amused look. “Sounds like just the person you’re looking for.”

  

Lynette frowned, thinking. "I might ask her to help..." She said slowly. She really did not want her sister to suffer any more. Their stepmother was particularly harsh on Alex, and it upset Lynette every time there was a fight. But she was thinking of that poor family of mice, torn between their babies starving or going out to look for food and encountering Evaine.

  

“Siblings got to stick together,” he said warmly, blissfully unaware of what evil stepmothers and well-meaning assholes got up to when it came to their kids.

Whew! Social execution block dodged.

  

"I suppose..." she said quietly. She would ask Alex. They would need to find a moment Evaine was out of the house. Lynette looked back up at Armel. "Oh please don't tell anyone I was here," she begged him. "I meant no harm to anyone."

  

He smiled and shook his head.

“Just be quiet as a mouse, and it’s as though you were never here.”

He summoned a bowl of tomatoes and slid out a chopping board, attention returned to the work before him.

“Take care, little miss.”

  

Lynette gave him a small grateful smile. "Thank you, sir." And she slipped out of the kitchen, quiet as she had come.