Page 7

The first time Elfreda saw Georgina Redmayne, she was five or six.

Grandmama was still alive. Mother too, of course, but Mother had been inside, abed, and it was Grandmama who’d taken her out into the park.

While Elfreda was weaving a necklace of dandelions, a little, impertinent girl astride a too-big pony trotted right up to her and asked to see the dragon.

Elfreda hadn’t yet heard the neighborhood gossip that had painted Grandpapa as a dragon breeder, as well as a druid, and only stared at the girl, who went red with pique to the roots of her red hair, and let her pony eat the dandelion necklace before cantering off.

That was the beginning. This was the end.

Elfreda would avoid Georgina like the plague.

Papa was avoiding her like the plague. After his walk, he’d locked himself and his Empress Matilda penny in the library and wouldn’t even open the door to receive his dinner. She’d left the tray in the hall.

Now it was well past eight in the evening. Elfreda sat contemplating a plate of cold pork bones at the kitchen table with her sister Agnes beside her and the housekeeper opposite.

“I’m not going up to bed,” announced Agnes, pulling her chair over to the hearth. “I’m practicing for London. Beatrice says it’s terribly provincial to sleep between dinner and breakfast.”

Beatrice Parker was Agnes’s bosom friend, sixteen years old and out in society.

Every day, Agnes paced the entrance hall, hoping for another of Beatrice’s letters from Mayfair, where her family had taken lodging for the Season.

These letters tended to produce either a storm of weeping, a bout of excessive curtseying, a vociferous craving for frozen punch, or some particularly annoying combination of all three.

“I can’t ride AEthelstan anymore,” continued Agnes. “Beatrice says none of the girls ride donkeys in London.”

You’re not going to London anytime soon. Elfreda almost said it aloud. Papa always had money enough to buy a rare book on Paternoster Row. Not so when it came to things he considered frivolous, like gowns and slippers. He would never pay for a debut. And the other option had been foreclosed.

“You love AEthelstan,” she said instead. “AEthelstan loves you. He kicks everyone else.”

“I want to take AEthelstan to London, of course,” responded Agnes. “But I can’t ride him there. I’ll walk him on a leash, with Beatrice, when she walks her Pomeranian.”

Elfreda put on a vague smile and started clearing and stacking plates. Lately, Agnes showed every determination to style herself like a conventional young miss. The harder she tried, the more peculiar she seemed.

She would admire Anne Poskitt excessively. Perhaps Elfreda should have sent her to dine at Redmayne Manor. An evening of French food in fashionable company. Elfreda wanted that for her. Except, Redmayne Manor. Except, Georgina.

Georgina.

Elfreda slammed the crockery.

“What’s a better waltzing partner?” Agnes stood up from the chair and wandered the kitchen. “A broom? A jug? A bellows?”

Eventually, she did go up to bed, but only after Elfreda resorted to chasing her around the table with an onion, repeating, “Promise me the next two dances!” at the top of her lungs. Agnes hated onions.

Elfreda dropped the onion back into the basket, knowing she’d been silly, even before Mrs. Pegg said to the low rafters, “Did ever anybody see the like?”

She crept to her own bed, dejected, a silly daughter who’d embarrassed herself one too many times.

In the morning, Mrs. Pegg prepared breakfast for Papa and Agnes, while Elfreda cooked porridge for the twins and carried it up to the nursery.

“Heavens,” she said upon entering. “Hilda and Matilda have vanished! Wherever could they be?”

The nursery was a small, dim room, with narrow windows.

Elfreda had done her best to relieve the chill of the stone with carpets and tapestries and whatever upholstered furniture she could drag up the stairs.

This had resulted in a warmer, cheerier atmosphere, but it had also furnished the children with dozens of attractive hidey-holes.

“Are they under this rug?” Elfreda asked, lifting a corner of the rug with her toe.

She heard stifled laughter, and Hilda exploded out of a mound of pillows. The fur tippet was wrapped around her neck, and she’d added a muff on each arm.

“I’m not hungry,” said Hilda. “I ate Hilda for breakfast.”

“Ah,” said Elfreda. “Did you also eat Matilda?”

“I ate Matilda,” said Matilda, crawling out from beneath the bed. She was wrapped in a raggedy shawl and wearing mittens. Grendel, the elderly beagle, waddled after her.

“Hilda and Matilda weren’t very big,” noted Elfreda. “I’m sure you have room for porridge.” She set the tray on the table.

Matilda crawled over to the table, climbed into a chair, and began to lick at a bowl. Hilda followed suit.

Elfreda put her hands on her hips. “Spoons, please.”

Matilda raised her head. “Bears can’t use spoons.”

Elfreda opted for logic instead of silliness.

“Bears can’t speak English either,” she said in a brisk, stern voice. “Therefore, you are not…”

Matilda was looking crestfallen. Hilda raised her head too and pawed sadly at the oats stuck to her cheeks.

Elfreda sighed. “You are, therefore, magical bears. Ready?”

The twins nodded.

“Abracadabra.” Elfreda stretched out her arms and wiggled her fingers. “Now. Try to use a spoon.”

Brow furrowed, Matilda picked up a spoon and held it clumsily in her mittened hand.

“Miraculous,” said Elfreda. “Magical, spoon-using bears.”

Unfortunately, the magical bears followed her up to the bluff, where they transformed into magical, trowel- and sieve-using bears.

They kept stealing hers, which made it difficult to proceed with her dig.

When she brought them back to the house, so Agnes could mind them, all three started crying, so loudly the wails summoned Papa from the library.

He looked distraught and disheveled, with ink on his fingers and smudges on the lenses of his spectacles.

He didn’t meet Elfreda’s eyes as he lined his children up by age on hard chairs and began to read to them from the Venerable Bede.

But he did, when his throat grew hoarse, pass the Venerable Bede to her, so that she could pick up where he’d left off, and he nodded along in a way that signaled his sulk was almost over.

Later that night, he showed her the letter of resignation he’d written to Mr. Clutterbuck, and after she’d begged him to tear it up, he did so, ceremonially, for the good of the Society.

They went back to work, together, on the book that he hoped to publish, Ancient Derbyshire , which expanded upon their pamphlet, Two Dissertations on the Saxon Grave Hills of the Peak District .

By dawn, clouds blew in and deluged. She couldn’t dig in such weather, or get on with laundry day, and so she continued working at Papa’s side, their pens scratching in unison.

It was almost as if Mr. Clutterbuck hadn’t visited, as if she hadn’t found the amulet, and lost it again, at Georgina’s hand.

She was almost relieved by the rain, for the pocket of peace it provided.

The next night, she was less relieved. The rain hadn’t ceased, and the stain on the ceiling of the blue room began to bulge, droplets pattering down onto the threadbare rug, and more upsettingly, onto Grandmama’s writing desk.

She couldn’t ask Mrs. Pegg for help. Mrs. Pegg looked sweet and soft, with her lace cap, white hair, and dimpled face, but she was implacable.

Papa had tried and failed to sack her with the rest of the staff.

She’d boxed his ears. As the sole remaining servant, she acted as cook, nurse, and housekeeper, but within limits.

Her rules stipulated no tower, no library, no blue room.

Elfreda positioned the ash bucket under the leak, wiped off the desk, and pushed it, with difficulty, to the drier side of the room.

“Papa,” she said, tiptoeing into the library, “the ceiling is leaking again, in the blue room.”

He was reading a topographical survey in a wingback chair and didn’t lift his gaze. “Catch it with the ash bucket.”

“I did. But the leak is bigger than before. Don’t you think it’s time I ask Mr. Hibbert to come by?”

Mr. Hibbert was Twynham’s master builder. He employed several stalwart carpenters in his workshop in the village. They could fix the leak in a trice.

“No, I do not think.” Papa raised his head. “I won’t have that villain in my house.”

“But Papa—”

“Not after what he did to St. Alcmund’s.”

“He was responsible for the repairs, not the…” She hesitated. The restoration committee had called the alterations to the church “improvements,” but she knew better than to repeat the word.

Her delicacy made no difference. Papa’s mood turned explosive.

“Desecration!” He thundered it. “That man carted Anglo-Saxon masonry out of an eighth-century nave and used it to mend the road. He should be subjected to rat torture. I won’t have Marsden Hall disfigured by brutes. Better the ceiling collapse. Now, bring me the opodeldoc. My shoulders ache.”

When Papa used that tone, her head ached.

She pressed her lips together and went for the opodeldoc.

The bottle was empty. In the kitchen, she mixed a fresh ointment with extra rosemary oil.

She brought the bottle to Papa, put the twins to bed, gave up on Agnes, and peeked once more into the blue room, to assure herself that the ceiling hadn’t, in fact, collapsed.

It hadn’t. But Grandmama’s desk was still wet.

Or rather, it was wet again. Water dripped from the ceiling directly above.

A new leak. She pushed the desk all the way over to the fireplace.

No drying warmth emanated from the fireplace—Papa forbade fires after May Day—but at least there weren’t any leaks on this side of the room. Yet.

A horrible thought occurred to her.