Page 35

Dawn came and went. When Georgie woke, the room was gray with dingy light, less to do with residual cloudiness than with the grime on the windowpanes.

They were alone. Elf had set a pair of house slippers by the door—her father’s, or grandfather’s, perhaps. This thoughtfulness did nothing to shrink or toughen their too large, too tender heart.

They stepped into the slippers, big and worn to holes at the heels, and shuffled to the staircase. The number of steps seemed to have trebled overnight. All their joints felt like rusty hinges, and they descended haltingly, legs moving, not automatically, but by argument.

They couldn’t remember the way to the kitchen and hobbled along a series of unpromising corridors.

Tapestries puffed dust. Strands of spider silk trailed from the webbed ceiling.

The air was stubbornly cold. It would take a great retinue of servants working around the clock to reverse Marsden Hall’s long-unchecked natural tendency toward disintegration.

Mr. Marsden didn’t seem to worry that his daughters risked constant sneezing fits, fevers, chilblains, flea infestations, and spider bites, but there’d come a point at which this neglect jeopardized his collections.

Would he act then? Maybe not, given that the books were already getting chewed up by rats.

They turned a corner into the kitchen.

“Ha,” they said. “What do you know.”

“There you are!” Agnes greeted them excitedly.

“Will you join me for breakfast?” She was sitting at the end of the table, a large strawberry positioned at the center of her otherwise empty plate.

As Georgie stared, she picked up her knife and fork and began to slice it like a sirloin.

She forked a red sliver daintily into her mouth.

It was no larger than her pinkie nail, but she chewed and chewed, lips sealed in a half smile.

She seemed to be savoring her self-conscious refinement as much as the strawberry, so they pressed their lips together as well, mirroring her smile, lest they laugh.

Finally, she swallowed. “Beatrice breakfasts each day at noon, on a single strawberry. She says it is a graceful repast.”

“It’s not a repast at all.” They couldn’t restrain themself. “It’s a strawberry. Is there any bacon? My God, is it noon?”

“Noon,” nodded Agnes. “Mrs. Pegg took the twins to market in the village, and Elfreda is in the blue room, and I’ve been waiting here for you, but I’m feeling—I’m feeling awfully faint.” She wavered, fingertips to her temple.

“Stay right where you are.” Georgie clattered around the kitchen, managing, after several more ambitious efforts, to transform half a loaf of bread into toast.

“Do you know what happened to my gown?” they asked, when the toast had done its work and Agnes was crunching with restored animation. “Was it laundered?”

“Cut up for rags.” Agnes studied them, looking big-eyed and winsome with her shorn hair. “Is Elfreda your friend now?”

“She is.” Georgie nodded matter-of-factly, as though it were merely that, a matter of fact, and not also a matter of dreams and fancies, of yearnings that enchanted reality itself.

Agnes’s genuine smile showed charmingly crooked teeth. “Will you write to her from London?”

“I will.” Georgie considered the crumbs on their plate, suddenly bereft. They took another piece of toast.

“Will you invite her to go with you?”

“No.” Georgie stuffed too much toast into their mouth. Invite Elf? To share a shabby room in a boardinghouse inhabited by singers and dancers, artists and radicals? Perhaps if there was a desk, a place to put her books…

“Beatrice hasn’t invited me .” Agnes drooped. “My clothing isn’t right for London.”

Georgie washed down the toast with a swig of lukewarm tea. “Your gown is lovely. You look like an orchid.”

“Do I?” Agnes held up her arms, showing off the pale purple sleeves, which boasted three tiers of flounces. “It is lovely. But I wore it to dinner once at Beatrice’s and overhead her mother telling Mrs. Alderwalsey that I looked like I’d escaped from a lesser Gainsborough.”

Thomas Gainsborough had painted ladies in similar attire, in the mid-1700s. All those lace fichus peeping over the low necklines. All those embellished stomachers.

Georgie coughed. “No one who wasn’t trying too hard to be witty could ever compare you to a lesser Gainsborough.”

“Thank you.” Agnes lowered her arms. “I don’t believe the Parkers want any Gainsborough with them in London.

I hope Aunt Susan sends me some pretty muslin soon, so I can have a gown made.

She promised she would, once I turned fourteen, and I am fourteen, but perhaps she’s confused, because I was born on leap day. ”

Aunt Susan’s well-meant meddling had been rebuffed.

No muslin was forthcoming. Knowing the truth, and looking into Agnes’s big, guileless eyes, made Georgie squirm in their seat and mentally review the items in their own wardrobe for something that might suit.

They hadn’t a Season’s worth of gowns to donate, and even if they had, the girl would need a modiste.

They could help her, much more substantially, in a year’s time.

If they stayed in Twynham themself, learned the ins and outs of the estate, read some agricultural journals, they might come to understand how to manage the land in nonbeastly fashion, to increase profit and prosperity for everyone.

They’d turn five and twenty in the best possible circumstances.

They could let something less shabby in London for the Season and invite Elfreda and Agnes, and Rosalie and Anne, and ask along, too, as chaperone, an older woman who’d shop and gamble and drive about and largely ignore the goings-on. Mrs. Alderwalsey?

Clearly, they’d gone staring mad.

They were staring, they realized, at Agnes, who didn’t seem disconcerted in the least.

“I do have something for you to wear,” she said, and hopped up. “Follow me.”

She flew before them, along corridors and passageways, and up a spiral stair to the room at the top of the tower.

“This is my music room,” she said. “And my dressing room.”

The room was cluttered with trunks and musical instruments, most of which Georgie couldn’t identify, except as oddly shaped guitars and trumpets.

They blew into a trumpet until it produced a passably trumpetlike noise, akin to that of a sonorous goose.

Meanwhile, Agnes tore through a trunk, heaping the floor with garments.

The garments did not, at first glance, bode well. Rigid, tightly structured gowns sized to a smaller frame. At least nothing crawled visibly with mites.

“This one will fit,” said Agnes, holding it up. “Grandpapa’s druidic vestment. There are antlers to wear with it.”

“The robe will do nicely.” Georgie took it. “I’ll pass on the antlers.”

As they changed, awkwardly, behind a unicorn wall hanging, Agnes strummed upon her lute.

“I don’t know any songs,” she said. “So I compose my own. This one is called ‘Beatrice.’?”

Georgie emerged, druidically clad.

The song was melancholy, beautiful, and very, very long. Endless even.

“Bravo.” They began clapping.

Agnes stilled her fingers, blushing. “Thank you.”

“I should go down to—”

Before they finished speaking, she began to play. “This one is called ‘I Have Not Forgot—Has She?’?”

“Bravo,” they said weakly. “Bravo.”

“Thank you. This one is called…”

“Would you tell me how to get to the blue room?” they interrupted.

“This one is called ‘How to Get to the Blue Room.’?” The plaintive strains of the lute once again drifted through the tower room. The melody sounded a great deal like “Beatrice.”

Agnes turned to the window, and Georgie backed slowly toward the stairs.

Eventually, they found the blue room. Furniture lined the hall outside, and through the open door, they could see blue walls, and then Elf, dragging an elaborately carved oak armchair across the checkerboard floor.

“What are you doing?” they asked, although it quickly became obvious, what with all the wet rags mounded about. Elf had been mopping. Mopping and moving furniture out of the way of…

They looked at the ceiling. “That’s not good. Will it stay up like that?”

Thunk.

Elf had let the legs of the chair bang down. She stood beside it, gazing at them with those bottomless eyes, seemingly at a loss for words.

Because of all that had passed between them last night?

Her brows met. “You’re wearing Grandpapa’s druidic vestment.”

Ah. That.

“Yes.” They flapped the heavy folds of roughly textured fabric, which flowed over their arms like ungainly wings. “Druids wore pink?”

“Pliny the Elder said they wore white. Something went awry with the laundry.” Her smile flashed at them, the smile they’d glimpsed more frequently over these past weeks and wanted to spend forever summoning forth.

Not that they were thinking in those terms. Forever.

The smile had already vanished. “Papa wouldn’t want anyone wearing it.”

“I’m not just anyone.” They stood tall. “I am Georginion, the archdruid, keeper of the sacred oak chair.” Her smile returned as they flung their aching body into said sacred chair, pulling her onto their lap, and a moment later, that smile was pressed to their mouth, as her arms circled their neck.

She was kissing them through her smile, kissing and kissing them.

All at once, Georgie’s heart burst. There was pressure in their chest, a sudden release, and they laughed.

What had they been afraid of? Too-big feelings sweeping them away.

But why fight it? Why not tumble and explode?

Elf’s kisses were remaking them anyhow. If they weren’t smothered in an absurdly voluminous robe, and she weren’t buttoned up to the neck in a wool pelisse, and the door wasn’t open to the hall, they’d be slotting their mouth over other regions of her body, the very thought of which made them light in the head and heavy between the thighs.