Page 16

Two days later, Georgie knocked on Elf’s heavily studded, profoundly unwelcoming front door.

Rust from the iron knocker left a red smear on their yellow glove.

The sight made them feel like Macbeth, or worse, as if they’d uttered the word Macbeth inside a theater.

Guilt and superstitious dread turned them from the door, just as it creaked open.

“You’re not the post boy,” came a disappointed voice.

“No.” Georgie turned back. “Agnes?”

The last time they’d seen Elf’s younger sister, she’d been a scrawny child of nine or ten hugging a pet rabbit with worrisome enthusiasm. She was much taller now, a waterfall of dark hair rippling to her waist, no rabbit immediately apparent.

“Georgina!” Agnes opened the door wider. “Elfreda said you’d returned and that you were twenty times as terrible as she remembered.”

Georgie winced. “Lovely. Warms the cockles of my heart. Is she in?”

Agnes regarded them. “Did you cut your hair?”

Georgie touched the cropped locks that peeked out from their plumed French bonnet. “I did. They call this style the Titus.”

“Is it fashionable?” asked Agnes. “Beatrice says one must be fashionable.”

“There are two kinds of fashionable.” Georgie stopped fiddling with their hair. “The fashionable everyone agrees on, and the fashionable everyone disagrees on.”

“She didn’t say which.” Agnes looked troubled. “What’s the difference?”

“The former guarantees acceptance, and the latter guarantees attention.”

“And what is the Titus?”

“The latter.”

Agnes pondered with observable vehemence.

“I long for attention,” she said, fervently. “I keep my mother’s pocket mirror in my bedchamber, and some days I stare into my own eyes for hours.”

“Ah.” Georgie rubbed the back of their neck, struggling to hold Agnes’s gaze, which was decidedly hungry.

“Beatrice and I used to stare into each other’s eyes.” She sagged against the doorframe. “Could she have forgotten me? I haven’t received a letter.”

“How long has it been?”

“Twenty hours.” She thrust out her chin. “It feels longer.”

“I’m sure it does,” said Georgie, with sympathy. “Twenty hours can feel like a million years. I’ve felt my heart fossilize while waiting for letters.”

“So have I!” Agnes drew a sharp breath. “You understand me. No one understands me.” She paused. “Except Beatrice. But she’s in London.”

“Beatrice Parker?” Georgie had once spent a lovely evening kissing her older sister on one of the dark walks that wound through Vauxhall Gardens.

“Beatrice Eliza Parker. We were both born in February, but she was born on the first, and I was born on leap day.”

“I doubt she has forgotten you.” Georgie hid a smile. “And I hope the next knock is the post boy.”

“Do you know what?” Agnes lowered her voice. “Neither Beatrice nor I have ever thought you were terrible. When Elfreda says you are the worst person who ever lived, I remind her of Richard III and Caligula.”

Georgie frowned.

“I appreciate that,” they said, their voice a bit too dry.

Agnes nodded. “You fed Rowena rose petals when you came to dinner that time at the Parkers’. That was very kind.” She paused. “How did you know that rabbits like roses?”

Georgie tried to peer around her into the house. “Everyone likes roses.”

“I mean to eat,” she said.

Georgie gave up. “Lucky guess. Is Rowena well? Nibbling spring violets?”

Agnes’s eyes filled with tears, and she threw herself into Georgie’s arms. She was still a worrisomely enthusiastic hugger. Georgie grunted as the pressure on their ribs increased.

“There, there,” they said. “I can come back another day.”

“Will you?” Agnes sniffled into Georgie’s spencer. “No one ever calls now that Beatrice is gone. I’m ever so lonely. Elfreda is always occupied, and the twins aren’t any good for conversation. Yesterday they decided they’re spoonicorns and all they do is gallop down the halls and whinny.”

“Spoonicorn is like unicorn?” Georgie was beginning to feel damp and out of their depth.

“But with a spoon instead of a horn.” Agnes finally ended the hug, stepping back, nose red. “Would you like to attend a concert? If you come up to the music room, I will play my lute.”

Her hopeful expression gave Georgie a pang. You could forget the misery of adolescence until a member of that suffering tribe stood before you, spotty, weepy, and a little bit crazed.

“I’d love to,” they lied. “But I should speak with Elfreda first.”

“Very well.” Agnes heaved a resigned sigh. “She’s in the library.”

Georgie followed her through the granite entrance hall—cold and dark—and through a series of corridors—colder and darker.

Dust lay thick on the floor, and shadows welled from every corner.

The scent of tallow hung in the air. Georgie’s eyes traveled up the great carved staircase as they passed.

The finials on the corner posts were probably pine cones or pineapples but looked like squatting demons in the gloom.

“Georgina Redmayne is here,” announced Agnes upon entering the library. The room was a maze, too many chairs shoved hugger-mugger between tables, chests, and cabinets, all overflowing with scrolls and relics.

“Hwat?” It was Mr. Marsden’s voice. He did not sound hospitable. “The Redmayne girl? Here? Bring her over.”

There was a thud. Elf was poised halfway up a bookcase ladder. A book had just fallen from her hand.

They hurried toward it. Elf jumped down from the ladder, determined to beat them there.

“Allow me,” they said, but she paid no heed.

She spun at the base of the ladder, and as she bent for the book, her elbow struck a clay pot on a stand, bumping it over the edge.

She gasped. Georgie lengthened through their torso, dropped their reticule, stretched out their arms—the pot was just out of reach. Their feet left the ground.

“Elfreda!” Mr. Marsden roared.

“I’ve got it.” Georgie was on their knees on a rug worn almost to nothing, the pot cradled in their hands. They could hear the blood crashing in their ears.

“That is the Finglesham urn!” Mr. Marsden had risen from his chair. “Child, how could you be so clumsy?”

Elfreda’s face paled.

“I distracted her.” Georgie tottered to their feet. The urn was nearly a foot tall, wide around the middle, ornamented with curved lines and indentations. Thank God it had a lid. They shuddered to think what it held. Who it held, rather.

They set the urn back on the stand, picked up their reticule, aimed a smile at Mr. Marsden. He was wrapped in a greatcoat against the chill and did not smile back.

“Miss Redmayne,” he said. “I would not have recognized you, except you so closely resemble your brother. Do you intend to stay in the neighborhood?”

“Oh, no, I intend to go back to London as soon as I can.”

“London,” sighed Agnes. She was communing with a terra-cotta bust and didn’t seem to realize she’d spoken aloud.

Georgie cleared their throat. “The Major has already shipped for France.”

“Very good.” Mr. Marsden made a brief showing of teeth. “I am sure we are safer for it.”

“Yes, indeed.” Georgie pretended to miss the double meaning. “He’s a Waterloo man.”

Mr. Marsden’s eyes were narrow behind his spectacles. “To what do we owe this visit?”

“I wanted to see that Miss Marsden was well.” Georgie’s gaze slid to her. She returned their look with an expression many degrees colder than the room. “The ram’s attack was such a terrible shock.”

It wasn’t the ram that had made her pledge to destroy them. It was the sight of her grandmother’s papers blowing through the air, like huge white leaves.

Shaken from the tree of knowledge.

By Satan.

Who would be Georgie, in this instance.

“She is not entirely well,” said Mr. Marsden. “She nearly shattered the Finglesham urn.”

Elfreda clutched her woolen shawl tightly around her neck. “How is Miss Poskitt?”

Georgie looked from her to Mr. Marsden and back to her. “The doctor said her leg would mend by midsummer. Her father insisted she mend at home, and so she and Miss Mahomed left this morning, for Halifax. They asked me to say goodbye. And to thank you. For fetching help.”

Elf’s face darkened. “All I did was tell a farmer.”

She’d run through the fields, toward Charles Peach, while most of the papers blew in the other direction. She’d caught some on the way and gathered more on the return, but many had flown away entirely.

“I caught a few more pages,” they told her. “I brought them for you.”

“The novel?” Mr. Marsden frowned. “Enough about the novel.”

Georgie tipped their head, confused. “Novel?”

“I found the wolf pit.” Elf glanced at Georgie, as though for confirmation, and for whatever it was worth, they nodded.

Mr. Marsden snorted. “Yes, the wolf pit. My mother should have titled her romance The Wolves of Twynham Abbey .”

All at once, Georgie comprehended. The novel was the translated chronicle. Mr. Marsden insisted that his mother scribbled fantasy, perhaps because he disbelieved women capable of anything else. Or because other people’s accomplishments took attention away from his own. Probably both.

Elf was fighting an uphill battle.

And Georgie had knocked her down, literally and figuratively, at every turn. They hadn’t meant to do so, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was putting it to rights.

“Is the Barrow Prince still coming?” they asked.

“The Barrow Prince?” Mr. Marsden sounded personally insulted. “Did Elfreda call Aubin-Aubrey the Barrow Prince?”

It was almost sweet, his transparent need for preeminence. He reminded Georgie of a stock character from the commedia, one of the old men who played his miserliness and self-importance for laughs. Except he wasn’t acting.

“She said that some do call him that.” Georgie brightened their smile. “And she said that you are called the Barrow King .”

“Am I?” Mr. Marsden stroked his beard. “Well, I’ve opened barrows from Kent to Orkney, and not the piddling grave mounds that satisfy some.

The ones mutilated by the plow in a farmer’s cabbage patch, and all you get is a handful of flint.

No, I am selective about my burial chambers.

As you can see, my collections are remarkable. ” He waved his hand.

“Remarkable,” Georgie murmured, smiling around at the clutter, which brought on the urge to sneeze.

“I suppose Barrow Prince isn’t far from the mark, for Aubin-Aubrey,” conceded Mr. Marsden, with an air of largesse. “He is a bright boy and eager to follow in my footsteps. I shall doubtless pick him, one day, as my successor. Just as Mortimer picked me. He is that talented.”

Georgie rounded their eyes. “As talented as you?”

“I would say so, yes. Or thereabouts.” Mr. Marsden was growing ever more expansive, and he glanced at Elf with kinder eyes.

“He was delayed in Norfolk and decided to travel to the Peak directly. We meet him there on Saturday. Elfreda will assist us. She is not without talent herself. When she isn’t behaving like the silliest girl in Derbyshire, taking fairy tales as gospel and knocking over priceless urns.

” He chuckled. “Well, Miss Redmayne, you are not as deficient in good sense as you might be, and that is to your credit. You are welcome to call again, when next you are in Twynham. Agnes will see you out.” He walked back to his chair and pulled it up to a table covered with maps, open notebooks, and assorted fragments, some of which seemed to be bone.

“Elfreda,” he said. “Where is the book I asked for?”

Elfreda carefully retrieved the book she’d dropped. She had to pass close to Georgie as she walked to her father, close enough for them to catch the rosemary fragrance of her hair, but she didn’t look up.

She set the book before him and pulled her own chair up to the table.

Georgie stared at a point right between her shoulder blades, willing her to turn around.

Five folded pages were burning a hole in their reticule. They had five folded pages, and a plan. But they needed Elf to turn. To rise and follow them from the library. Not forgive them, but at least talk to them, hear them out.

They felt a tug. Agnes had looped her arm through theirs and was looking up at them with those big, voracious eyes. “Instead of a concert, we could go to a banquet. Which do you prefer?”

“One moment.” They stared at Elf’s back so hard their eyes ached.

“Come with me.” Agnes pulled with surprising strength. “We’ll go to the banquet. There’s a wizard you truly have to meet!”