Page 23

The twins were indeed gone. Vanished. Elfreda surveyed the street, panic gripping the back of her skull.

“They can’t have gone far,” said Sir Graham, wrongly. He didn’t understand anything about the twins. Hilda and Matilda had uncanny abilities. They’d reach the North Pole by midnight.

“Best check the cottages.” William Aubin-Aubrey turned to do just that. The group fanned out, calling to the girls by name, circling into back gardens.

But wolves didn’t answer to girls’ names, and they didn’t play in back gardens like cosseted family spaniels. In recent memory, Elfreda had been a wolf herself, with a wolf’s wildness.

A shadowed alleyway caught her eye, angling between cottages. She took it. Beyond the cottages, the alleyway turned into an uneven path, sloping up onto the moor through stone outcroppings.

She began to run, clumsily.

“Careful.” It was Georgie, catching her elbow as she slid on the loose rocks.

She jerked away, ankle twisting, and tripped. This time, they caught her hand. She let them. They’d let her , in the carriage, after Sir Graham spoke about their mother, every word draining more color from their face.

“I’m sure they went this way,” she said.

“It’s the wildest, most rugged, dangerous, desolate direction.

They are unruly. Mrs. Pegg can’t keep up with them, and Agnes won’t be bothered.

But this—this is my fault.” She gasped for air.

“I put the idea in their heads, making up stories about wolves in the Dark Peak. This is why Papa discourages make-believe, and plays, and novels, and poetry. He says it all leads to heightened feelings, and women are too emotional in the first place. I’m supposed to rise above the limitations of my sex, and use my intellectual faculties properly.

But I’m not rational, or objective. I lapse constantly into folly.

I embarrassed him, and I embarrassed myself, and spoiled the excursion, and my chance with William Aubin-Aubrey, and my sisters are going to fall off a cliff.

And now, my God, now—now I might cry.” She broke off in horror, eyes stinging, throat clogged. She hardly ever cried.

“Cry on my shoulder,” offered Georgie, stopping, tugging her toward them. “I know you don’t want to lose too much time, but storms of violent weeping are usually brief, and you’ll feel much better. I always do.”

She shook her head and ran, but slower than before, because the ground sloped more steeply, and the pressure in her chest made it difficult to breathe. Georgie seemed to jog with no exertion at all, speaking easily as they bounded through the heather.

“I don’t see how feeling is a limitation,” they mused.

“Heightened feelings prompt people to transcend limitations. That’s not always a good thing, of course.

We shouldn’t just succumb to impulse. We should think.

But thinking isn’t something abstract that happens in the ether.

It’s a physical process that happens in the body.

Doesn’t that mean that objectivity is always subjective?

And that no one can really separate thinking and feeling?

You’re not a glass brain, and if you were, someone like Sir Graham would stick you in a cabinet. ”

“Don’t be absurd,” she said, stopped, and burst into tears. Georgie folded her into a tight embrace. She muffled her wet face on their shoulder, clinging to them, the release of pent-up fear and misery and shame so ferocious she didn’t care that she was making a fool of herself.

The storm of violent weeping passed quickly.

She stepped back, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry.

” She meant for dripping all over them, and also for Sir Graham bringing up their mother’s tragic death, for their mother’s tragic death itself, for Papa and the Anglo-Saxons, for everything, and most of all, for allowing them to believe that she thought friendship with them impossible because she couldn’t like them, when really, she was frightened that she could.

Too much. Ever since they’d kissed her, she’d been possessed by the urge to feel their mouth on hers.

She felt it now, standing before them, wrung out, with the taste of salt on her lips.

“No need.” They shook their head.

She set off, the wind cooling her cheeks, drying them. The moor kept rising, rucked up here and there by strangely shaped boulders. She climbed, and climbed, and when the ground leveled, she turned, scanning the hills.

The village lay below, in the tree-scattered valley.

She looked over as Georgie approached, then away.

“Can we still try?” she asked. “Being friends.”

“Friends who like each other?” They were suddenly beside her.

“You said it wasn’t impossible.” Bilberry bushes grew at her feet, flowering pink. A bird’s warble was the only reply.

She lifted her gaze. They were looking back at her, narrowly, the black of their lashes startling against those crystalline irises.

“No,” they said. “It’s not impossible.”

She drew in a breath, some strange force thrumming through her. It took all her strength to turn from them, to turn north.

The North Pole. Hilda and Matilda. Her sisters were disappearing more irrevocably every moment.

She came around a boulder, and there, like magic, in the near distance, gray heaps of stone resolved into ruins. Ragged bailey. Square tower.

It was a castle. Norman, but it might as well have been timeless, a fairy-tale figment.

She went weak with relief. Was there a more tempting destination on earth for wayward children?

She hurried forward, Georgie falling into step with her.

“We’re friends, then,” they said, with evident satisfaction. “Should we apologize for past offenses? So we can start afresh? I’m sorry I pestered you. It was because I wanted you to play, and thought I could badger you into it. And then it was comeuppance for your unbearable haughtiness.”

“That’s your apology?” She hit upon a wide footpath, perhaps a coffin road, which meant fewer spiny plants tearing at her skirts, and sped up, putting distance between them.

They closed it quickly. “There’s more.”

“Spare me the rest, please.”

They didn’t. “You aren’t unbearably haughty. I misjudged you. You’re a bit uppish, it’s true—”

She glared.

“But you’re also a bit impish,” they went on, undeterred, “and that makes up for it. Impish, or maybe Elf-ish. Either way, I’m incredibly glad your father hasn’t succeeded in stamping it out.

I’ve mocked your devotion to old books and old bones.

But you’re just as devoted to your sisters—admirably so.

If I get the French to their Latin, I’ll feel lucky indeed. ”

Gratification unfurled inside her. She had to fight a very silly smile.

“Oui,” she managed. The sudden brightness of her mood was two parts twins—she was certain they were at that castle—and one part Georgie.

Her friend, Georgie Redmayne.

“And I like the way you howl,” they added. “You’re magnificent at a picnic. And—”

She grabbed their arm, shocking them into silence.

Wolves didn’t answer to girls’ names. But all at once, she knew what they would answer to. Of course. It should have occurred to her before.

A tickle built in her chest, a laugh, but not exactly a laugh. She tipped up her chin, opened her mouth, and howled. It echoed back from the hills. Georgie looked bemused.

“You don’t have to howl on my account,” they told her. “Just because I like it.”

She howled again, louder.

The answering howl was so thin and faint that, at first, she couldn’t distinguish it from the echo of her own. But another howl sounded, and another. And then she saw two small figures detach from the long shadow at the base of the castle tower.

“Oh,” said Georgie, looking impressed. “Well done.”

“I’m going to kill them,” she vowed, but once she’d reunited with her sweaty, rumpled little sisters, both frisking through the heather and yipping excitedly, the remnants of her fear and anger dissipated in a rush of endearments. Her mood darkened, though, on the walk down to the village.

She didn’t blame Hilda and Matilda—what was the point? But to have come all this way, only to be sent immediately home again—it was a cruel disappointment.

Georgie seemed to sense her thoughts.

“There’s still tonight,” they said, consolingly, hoisting Matilda higher on their back. “We can talk to the Barrow Prince at dinner.”

“ You can talk.” Such dinners for her were always a trial. She wouldn’t manage a word.

“I will focus on cajolery.” Georgie stopped to reel Hilda out of the gorse. “You will furnish the details.”

Why press the issue when they knew it brought her pain? Would a friend do such a thing?

“I won’t furnish any details.” Elfreda stopped too.

“Why not?” They seemed perplexed.

“Because I get tongue-tied in groups. I lose my capacity for speech. Completely.” She frowned. “Don’t pretend you’re unaware.”

“I’m aware that you’re reserved in company. Too fastidious for drawing room conversation. Icy enough to freeze the tea if anyone persists in a pleasantry.” Georgie’s voice changed. “ Oh. ”

“You didn’t know.” Unbelievable. “You thought I was silent out of contempt and self-consequence.” Maybe social agony wasn’t so easy to distinguish from unbearable haughtiness. Mortified, she clutched Hilda’s hand and started walking again, picking her way through the gorse.

“I’m not fastidious in drawing rooms,” she said at last, without turning to Georgie, who’d come up on her left. “I’m not there. People look at me, and I become a hum. Everything goes out of my head but a kind of humming.”

“You become a hum.” Georgie repeated it slowly.

Instantly, she regretted her confession. She shouldn’t have revealed even more .

“All right, then,” they said. “Leave it all to me.”

She glanced over. They gave her an easy grin and hoisted Matilda with a bouncing step that made her squeal. “The Barrow Prince will pledge to you his shovel before the waiter serves the chops. Trust me.” They winked. “I won’t let you down.”

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