by Jessica Grey
“What are you planning to do once you find Lady Beaumont?”
“Confront her of course, and ask how to change you back.”
Marcus shook his head. “That’s too dangerous. What’s to stop her from turning you into a frog as well? Or hurting you in some way?”
Lucinda gave an unladylike snort. “Because unlike you, I’m not planning to confront her in a dark, deserted garden. I doubt she’ll be able to kill me in the middle of a ballroom. Too many witnesses. If there’s one thing Lady Beaumont likes more than her terrier, it’s her position in society. She won’t risk public exposure.”
“I don’t like putting you in danger.”
“Marcus, we don’t have a lot of options here, unless you’re planning to remain a frog for an extended amount of time. I thought not.” She grinned as he shook his head again. “Then the time to strike is now.” She set the reticule down on the stone rim of the fountain and opened the top. “I’ll be careful not to jostle you too much,” she promised.
He glared at her for a moment and then, with a resigned sigh, hopped into the bag.
“If you run out of air or anything, just kick. Discreetly.” Lucinda titled her head toward the new strains of music coming from the ballroom. “Oh! I’ve been out here too long. My mother is going to start looking for me.”
She tucked the reticule into the crook of her arm and ran back toward the ballroom. She was able to slip back through the glass doors unnoticed, but she knew her mother, and likely her partner for this set, would be looking for her.
Lucinda scanned the ballroom, hoping to catch sight of Lady Beaumont, but she couldn’t see the lady’s signature black curls anywhere among the quickly moving dancers or among the ladies who sat or stood in small groups along the outskirts of the dance floor.
“Where could she have gone?” she muttered.
“Oh, Miss Beacham, there you are! I feared you had forgotten our dance.”
Lucinda stiffened and turned toward the voice. “Mr. Parker,” she said as sweetly as possible as she smiled at one of the ton’s most eligible and, in her opinion, most boring bachelors. He’d probably be shocked to hear himself referred to as such; most of the young misses were fascinated by his elaborately tousled curls and intricately tied cravat. Lucinda had summed him up as a rogue within the first two minutes of their first dance, or more precisely, as someone who desperately wanted to be thought a rogue. Lucinda was pretty sure there wasn’t actually anything under that crop of curls, and thus dancing with him was near the top of her ballroom torture list. He was eligible, though, and wealthy, so her mother insisted she dance with him. “How could I forget a dance with you.”
She wasn’t sure if the slight kick from Marcus meant her tone had been as insincere as it felt, or if he thought she was serious and was chastising her for looking forward to a dance with Mr. Parker. Or maybe he just wanted her to get on with the business of finding Julia Beaumont.
Or perhaps he just couldn’t breathe in the small confines of the reticule. Lucinda smiled and batted her eyelashes at Mr. Parker as she attempted to loosen the opening of her small bag without drawing attention to it.
Mr. Parker blinked a bit dazedly. Lucinda wasn’t interested in the flirting games all the other debutantes enjoyed playing, but that didn’t mean she was completely clueless about the effect her large blue eyes and dark lashes had on men. “The set has already started, as you see. I do believe we still have time to join, however.” He offered her his arm.
“I find I am feeling a bit fatigued, Mr. Parker. I was actually going to...” her voice trailed off as she spotted Lady Beaumont’s dark curls across the room. She was heading toward the lady’s retiring room.
“Miss Beacham?” Mr. Parker’s voice prompted her.
Lucinda glanced back toward the empty-headed rake and tried not to wince when she saw her mother bearing down on them from the opposite direction. “I am so sorry to delay our dance, but I must...excuse myself. Pardon.” Lucinda turned and fled toward the ladies’ retiring room. A glance over her shoulder showed her mother closing the distance between them at a rapid rate, a determined expression on her face. If she caught up with Lucinda, all bets were off. She’d be forced into her dance with Mr. Parker and Marcus would be confined in her reticule for the duration. She’d also likely not have another chance at Lady Beaumont.
Lucinda quickened her pace, trying not to look like she was flat out running, but the heads turning as she whizzed past testified to the fact that she was failing. She ducked behind a potted plant, waited for her mother to walk by, and then doubled back toward the ladies’ retiring room.
Lady Beaumont sat in front of the large mirror, replacing a few pins in her hair. She looked up as Lucinda burst through the door, then back to the mirror.
“Lady Beaumont,” Lucinda said conversationally, sitting on the chair next to the older woman and setting her reticule gently on her lap.
Lady Beaumont’s dark eyes flicked back to Lucinda. “Miss Beacham, how do you do?”
“Quite honestly, I have a bit of a problem, Julia...may I call you Julia?” At the lady’s surprised and affronted look, Lucinda leaned in with a reassuring smile. “I do feel as if only you can help me with this little problem. We have a mutual friend in Marcus Sutton, and I would be ever so grateful if you could let me know how to deal with the problem of his current amphibious state.”
The other lady schooled her features into a blank mask of polite disinterest, but Lucinda had seen the shock skate across her face at the mention of Marcus. “I’m sorry, Miss Beacham, but I do not have the pleasure of understanding you.”
“Oh, I think you do.” Lucinda kept her tone chatty, as if they were discussing nothing more interesting than the best place to buy ribbon. “I know that you have turned Marcus into a frog. Not only that, I know about your friendship with the French. I would so hate for that little bit of information to find its way into the wrong ears. There are so many well-connected people at tonight’s soiree, are there not?”
The color drained from Lady Beaumont’s face. “Are you threatening me?” she hissed through clenched teeth. “You? A little chit barely out of the school room?”
“Threatening is such a strong term. I am merely trying to reach an understanding with my new friend.” Lucinda smiled again. She could feel Marcus struggling inside the bag. She’d hate for him to hop out and confront Lady Beaumont. There was no telling if they’d be able to restore him if he got himself crushed.
“I promise not to tell anyone of your actions if you tell me how to undo the spell.”
Julia’s eyes narrowed. “You might not tell, but Sutton would.”
“Well, it is his job to catch traitors. But I would think he might be willing to forget all about it for a day or two. Enough time, perhaps, for you to prepare to visit the continent?”
Marcus kicked her, rather too viciously Lucinda thought. She wasn’t actually giving the woman a pass, she’d only made promises for herself. Marcus could turn in the traitor as soon as he wasn’t a frog anymore. She’d been very careful with her wording. Lucinda gave into the urge to flick him through the soft cloth of the reticule.
The lady looked as if she were considering it for a moment, but then she stood up with a bitter laugh. “Good luck with breaking the spell, my dear. The only thing that can do it is a kiss from a princess. No one will believe you that I am guilty of any wrongdoing.” She turned and swept out of the retiring room.
Lucinda’s mind was racing too fast to worry about chasing her. “A princess.” She opened the reticule and let Marcus hop out onto the counter in front of the mirror. “You heard? We need to find a princess to kiss you. Is Princess Charlotte still at Cranbourne? I don’t know how we’d get there. Or how we’d convince her to kiss a frog.”
Marcus let out a frustrated croak. “I somehow doubt you’d be able to do either, though you’re proving to be more resourceful than I’d imagined.”
“She didn’t say it had to be an English princ
ess...” Lucinda closed her eyes, trying to recall all of the recent gossip she’d heard about any European royalty who might possibly fit the bill. “It would mean you’d have to stay a frog for a bit; I could smuggle you home—”
“Lucinda, that would hardly be appropriate. It isn’t really your problem. You have been more than helpful so far. Perhaps you could tell your brother where I am and he could...retrieve me.”
“My brother would be hard pressed to believe in magic,” Lucinda reminded him. “He never even wanted to play a knight to my—” she broke off with a gasp. The memory of a much younger Marcus kneeling before her eight-year-old-self and kissing the hand she’d imperially held out to him as her brother laughed uproariously in the background had suddenly flashed into her mind.
Before she could change her mind, and before he could question her, Lucinda leaned forward and kissed him. She felt the cool dampness of his skin against her lips and fought against the urge to pull back. She thought only of Marcus, how he made her feel as if she were beautiful as well as smart and precocious, even when she was a gangly girl years away from growing into herself.
There was a blinding flash of light. Lucinda blinked her eyes. Marcus sat on the counter before her, tall and broad-shouldered, and looking every bit the hero of her childhood fantasies. He also looked confused.
“I’m your princess!” she gasped. “You pledged your fealty to me when I was eight!”
He laughed down at her. “So I did, my lady.” Still laughing, he reached down, grabbed her hand, and pulled her up so that she was facing him. His long legs stretched all the way down to the floor on either side of her, but she was too relieved to feel any embarrassment at the inappropriateness of her current situation. “Now, allow me to thank you properly.”
Lucinda closed her eyes as his mouth descended on her. She must have died when the bright light had gone off. There was no other explanation for the sensations coursing through her as Marcus’s warm lips moved over hers. She was most definitely in heaven.
There was a gasp from the door way.
“Marcus Sutton! What are you doing in the ladies’s retiring room?” Her mother’s voice cut through Lucinda’s reverie. Lucinda pulled back, looking at Marcus with wide eyes, and heard her mother gasp again. “And kissing my daughter!”
Marcus didn’t look up at her mother, but kept his eyes trained on Lucinda’s upturned face. He looked as if he were still trying to hold back laughter. “Well, princess, how do you feel about being married to a spy?” he asked in an undertone.
Lucinda leveled a stern look at him. “You probably should have asked before you compromised me.”
He grinned at her. “I believe you compromised me! You were the original kisser, if you recall.”
Lucinda giggled in spite of herself. She could hear her mother stage-whispering frantically behind them, something about propriety and her father, but she ignored it and lifted her mouth up for another kiss from Marcus.
Something told her that “boring” wasn’t a term she was going to be using much in the future.
Mountain Rose
My mother always said there are two types of people: those who grow roses and those who don’t. The obsession of the former cannot be properly understood by the latter. My mother was a magician with roses; coaxing them to flourish in the stony, dry soil of the Montana mountains was her pride, joy, and frustration. She used to talk, in a dreamy far away voice, about the way roses grew back east. When she’d come out west with my father, she’d given up a lot, including that garden. But she’d brought seeds with her and had fought against the long, harsh winters and the just as long and harsh summers and triumphed. Two bushes flourished outside our little cabin, one with flowers as crimson as freshly spilled blood, and the other with blooms as icy white as a Montana January.
So it was no surprise, when she gave birth to twin girls, one with soft red hair and green eyes and the other with pale skin and ebony curls, that we were named after her prize rose bushes. Luckily, we lived high enough on the hills that we only went into town a few times a year, which gave all the Marys and Susans a limited number of opportunities to make fun of the little mountain girls Rose Red and Snow White.
While mother always used our full names, my sister always called me Rosie, and to me she was always Snow. We were close—twins usually are—but Snow and I always felt as if we were two halves of the same whole. As children we’d wander all day hand in hand around the little meadow surrounding the cabin and up into the dense forest. We could be silent for hours together, somehow knowing just what the other was thinking without having to waste words.
Father died when we were young, too young to properly mourn his loss. We lived in a hard land, and surviving with just three of us was difficult work. I’m not quite sure why mother never moved us back to be closer to her family in the east. I think she had grown to love the mountains; they’re harsh, but they’re beautiful. Snow and I knew every rock, every tree, every wild thing for miles around and were as much a part of them as they were of us. Perhaps mother knew that taking us off our mountain would have been like ripping us out by the roots. We could be transplanted, but the shock might wither us.
The winter we turned seventeen was one of the harshest we had ever known. Snow drifts piled up almost to the roof of our little cabin. It was all Snow and I could do to keep the path between the cabin and our stable shoveled. By late January, when the nights were the most bitter, we hadn’t seen another living soul in well over three months. On a blustery night, when the wind screamed through the mountain passes and tossed the snow up off the ground so violently that you couldn’t tell it apart from the flakes that fell from the sky, a pounding on the front door of the cabin woke us all from a sound sleep.
The three of us, clad in our nightgowns, crept quietly into the front room. We looked at each other with wide eyes as the pounding became fiercer. Mother was holding father’s gun and had it leveled at the door.
“Please,” a deep male voice shouted, though the words were muffled by the thick door and the strong wind. “Please let me in to sit by your fire or I shall freeze to death.”
Mother nodded slowly and Snow crept forward to undo the latch. Father’s shotgun was a good one, and mother was a decent shot, but I also took down my hunting rifle from over the fire and aimed it at the door. The odds were whoever was outside our cabin was too cold to pose any real threat, but we hadn’t survived on our own in the mountains this long by taking risks.
The door swung open and at first all we could see was a great, black space where there should have been swirling snow. Slowly the empty space resolved itself into a large black bear. My mother gasped.
“Please do not be afraid,” the bear said. “I mean you no harm. May I warm myself by your fire? The night is bitterly cold.”
His voice sounded like that of a man. My mind raced, trying to reconcile the humanity of that voice with the beast I saw in front of me. I wasn’t afraid of the bear—I’d met too many of them in the woods, and I had enough faith in my rifle and my own aim—but I was afraid of what evil a man’s voice rumbling out of a bear’s body portended.
My mother recovered herself quickly. “Come in by the fire and warm yourself.”
Snow stepped to the side, watching with wide, dark eyes as the bear lumbered in out of the storm. After a moment of consideration and a quick look at my gun, which had tracked with the bear’s movements, she closed and latched the door against the biting wind. The bear’s fur was covered with snow and ice. As he lay down near the hearth with a deep sigh, it began to melt off of him, running in little rivulets onto the bare wooden boards of the cabin floor.
“Snow White, Rose Red, fetch the broom so that we may help our visitor divest himself of all this snow.” My mother had already set my father’s shotgun down against the wall. Something about the bear must have convinced her that he would not harm us.
Snow raised an eyebrow at me and I nodded at her. She went to fetch the broom and I stayed
where I was, my gun still trained on the bear.
He raised his eyes to mine. They were deep, dark pools and completely unlike the eyes of any other bear I’d seen. They seemed to look straight into my soul, as if the bear saw past everything that strangers first notice about me—past the red hair and too light eyes, past the freckles that the town girls made fun of, and straight to the very essence of what made me who I was. He looked at me as if he somehow knew me more intimately than I had ever been known.
My hands shook slightly, even though I willed them to be steady, hoping that he didn’t notice the slight movement of the rifle.
“I will not hurt you,” he said again in his too human voice.
“I do not know you enough to trust you.” I replied steadily as Snow returned with the broom. She helped my mother brush all the remaining snow off the bear.
“Rose Red,” my mother said in a low voice to me. “The bear has shown no aggression toward us; perhaps you could put the rifle away? Or at least lower it?” she amended when I shook my head.
“Rose Red is right to wish to protect her family. These mountains are filled with many dangers. I do not take offense at her caution.” The bear’s eyes had yet to leave mine.
“A wild animal such as yourself must understand caution.” There was no denying that he was different from all of the animals that roamed our mountain, but the gleam in his eye told me he wasn’t going to rise to my bait and explain why he could speak.
“I do understand the need for caution.” It seemed that was all the answer I was going to get.
It was obvious that some magic was at work. But whether that magic had made a bear speak like a man or a man appear as a bear, I had no way of knowing.
After she had brushed him off, Snow asked in a low voice. “You know our names, sir. But what are we to call you?”
The bear looked sad for a moment, if a wild animal can be said to express emotion. “If I had a name, I have lost it. You may call me Bear.”
