Mr. Keeper gave her a thin, cold smile.
“Nothing at all,” he said.
“You know, Az has a sharp point,” said Bramble as she and Clover gathered the sleepy younger ones together. “We hardly know a guinea’s peep about you. Where did you learn how to dance like that?”
Mr. Keeper’s thin, cold smile became even colder.
“I once knew a lady,” he said, “who could dance the Entwine nearly as well as your sister.”
Delphinium, lifting Ivy to her feet, perked up. Of all of them, she read the most romantic stories and drew the fluffiest of ball gowns on her stationery, and Azalea knew she wouldn’t leave until she had turned Mr. Keeper’s heart inside out, begging for details of romance.
“Were you in love?” she said. “Oh, do tell us about it. We only hear ghastly things about that time, with the revolution and everything. I want to hear something romantic.”
“Delphinium,” said Azalea.
Mr. Keeper held up his hand, silencing her.
“It is all right,” he said. He turned to Delphinium, his cloak brushing the marble. “I will tell you about the lady I loved.”
The girls settled together on the entrance steps, not even breathing, for fear it would rustle the rosebushes about them and mask Mr. Keeper’s words. Mr. Keeper stood unmoving on the dance floor.
“Once upon a time,” he said. His voice dripped in silk strands. “There was a High King, who wanted more than anything to kill the Captain General who incited a rebellion against him. It consumed him. The desire to kill the Captain General filled him to his core, and he spent every breath, every step, thinking of ways to murder the Captain General.
“But he was old, and time passed, as it always does.”
Mr. Keeper paused. Bramble cast a slightly bemused glance at Azalea, her eyebrow arched.
“So,” Mr. Keeper continued, “he took an oath. He filled a wine flute to the brim with blood. And he swore, on that blood, to kill the Wentworth General, and that he would not die until he did.
“And then, he drank it.
“The end.”
There was a very ugly, naked silence after that. The girls’ mouths gaped in perfect Os.
“Sorry?” said Delphinium. “I missed the part about the lady?”
“Ah,” said Mr. Keeper. “The blood. It was hers.”
The girls pushed one another through the fireplace wall, stumbling over skirts and tripping over untied slippers in a frenzy. They swarmed to the lamps on the table and by the door, turning up the oil as high as it could go.
“For the last time,” said Azalea as the girls flocked about the lamps, the younger ones gripping Azalea’s skirts, “it’s not true! Settle down!”
“Aaaah! Oh, ha ha, Ivy, it’s just you, ha ha ha.” Delphinium shakily sat on the edge of her bed, her hands fumbling with her slippers as she pulled them off.
“It really sounded true!” Hollyhock squeaked. “It really did!”
Azalea hesitated.
Unlike the rest of them, she had heard this story before. Only in snippets, sometimes in hushed tones when the maids walked by, or reading in Tutor’s Eathesbury Historian when he had dozed off. No one ever spoke it aloud.
Those hundreds of years ago, the High King had captured Harold the First’s daughter, in the gardens. Back then the gardens had been made of thornbushes that grasped at persons’ hands and necks of their own accord, pulling them into their prickly branches. He took her into the palace, and several days later, a box appeared at Harold the First’s manor. Among the tissue papers lay a hand. It belonged to her.
The story then echoed Keeper’s, with the High King drinking her blood, swearing to kill her father. Her body was found later, in pieces in the thorny garden. Azalea shuddered. She hated thinking of the next part of the story.
At night, the palace windows lit with a weird, bright yellow light, Harold the First’s daughter could be seen wandering the halls, feeling her way about with both of her hands. The High King had somehow kept her soul. And she felt about with both hands—because…because…Azalea couldn’t bring herself to think of it in a complete sentence, but it involved a needle, a thread, and the soul’s eyelids.
Azalea nearly dropped the lamp she held, her hands shook so. She managed a smile, set it on the round table, and began to help the younger girls undress.
“It’s only partly true,” she said firmly. “Yes, he drank blood, but it didn’t do anything. You know the picture of Harold the First, in the gallery? He died of old age. He killed the High King. The blood oath didn’t work. Drinking blood can’t do anything more than if you’ve pricked your finger and sucked on it. It’s all tosh.”
“He made it sound so vivid,” said Flora, huddled with Goldenrod under their bedcovers. They hadn’t bothered to undress.
“The High King did a lot of awful things,” said Eve as Azalea pulled the twins gently from their bed and helped them into their nightgowns. “He trapped people in mirrors. They died there.”
“That’s—not—as bad as—capturing souls, I should—should think,” said Clover, stammering more than usual.
“What a great load of rot,” said Bramble. She threw her slipper at the wall. It hit the wainscot next to the door and fell into the basket. “And what a rot of Keeper, telling a story like that. Didn’t he realize it would scare the tonsils out of the younger ones?”
Azalea rubbed her skirts, still feeling Keeper’s hands against hers.
No one slept well that night. Azalea brought up two steaming kettles of tea for everyone, cooing and soothing them when they awoke with a cry. The younger girls crawled into her bed, burying their noses into her sides, patting her cheeks each time they stirred.
When Azalea awoke, it was late and she was cranky. She became doubly so when she discovered that Mr. Bradford’s pocket watch had been left at the pavilion.
“I didn’t mean to leave it,” said Bramble, in the same beastly mood. “It wasn’t my fault—we were in such a hurry to leave, after that ghastly story!”
“Mr. Bradford trusted us,” said Azalea, angry with herself. “He trusted me.”
Bramble looked at Azalea up and down, an odd light in her lemon-green eyes.
“Go to it, then,” she said, herding the girls out the door. “I’ll start the wee chicks on their lessons.”
Several minutes later, toes curling in her boots, Azalea rubbed her handkerchief against the mark until it burned and the light burst. She had never been to the pavilion in the day. Descending alone into the silver brilliance felt different. Everything was muffled, and Azalea’s boot clacks left no echo.
When she reached the pavilion, it stood dark, shadowed in the silver mist. Keeper was not there. Azalea knocked, lightly, on the arched doorframe.
“Sorry, hello?” she said.
Knocking made her feel less intrusive. She slipped onto the dance floor, and nearly jumped out of her boots when the orchestra burst into a lively jig.
“Shh!” she seethed. “Quiet! Hush!”
The orchestra cut off, except for a violin that screeched a happy solo. When it realized the rest of the orchestra had quit, it slowed with an embarrassing rosined whine.
Azalea searched the pavilion for a sign of the watch, and as she turned, felt the prickly, uncanny sensation of someone’s eyes on her. She looked up, and let out a cry.
There, on the ceiling like a big, black spider, was Keeper.
Azalea’s heart nearly leaped out of her corset. She stumbled back.
Keeper pushed off from the ceiling and flipped to the ground in a swoop. He landed, catlike, on his feet, and straightened. His cloak settled around him.
Azalea darted for the entrance. Keeper was there in an instant, blocking her way. He smiled a long-dimpled smile.
“My, you startle easily,” he said.
“You—it—on—ceiling…” Azalea choked.
“Oh, do calm down, Miss Azalea.” In a silky movement he brought Azalea’s shaking hand around his arm, smoothing her quaking fin
gers over his black suitcoat sleeve. “Living in such a small pavilion for so many years makes one, ah, creative. And you, Miss Azalea, I am pleased to see you here. Even if you are here for another gentleman’s watch, and not for me.”
Azalea tried to pull her arm away, but Keeper only smiled, pressed his long fingers over hers, and escorted her to a sofa next to the dessert table.
“Do sit down. You are trembling. It is my fault; I know it. That story last night. I hope you can forgive me for it.”
He produced a cup of streaming tea from nowhere, it seemed, and offered it to her, but Azalea waved it away.
“Where is the watch?’ she said.
“Ah, so quickly to the point. That is bad manners, you know.”
He set the teacup on the table, and next to it, lifted the lid from a small platter. Instead of housing a tiny cake, the plate held the pocket watch. Azalea reached for it.
Keeper closed the lid with a clink.
“Mr. Keeper,” said Azalea.
Keeper had no hint of a smile as he set the covered plate aside and lifted the lid off a larger tureen.
Azalea gasped. On the platter lay an assortment of odds and ends. A pair of lace gloves, a needle with a scarlet thread, one of Jessamine’s stockings, Ivy’s spoon, Eve’s pen, all among other things of the girls’. Azalea was aghast.
“Those are ours!” she said.
“I know,” said Keeper. “I like to keep things.”
“That’s stealing!” said Azalea.
“You must forgive me,” he said. “But I am desperate. I need a favor from you, and your sisters. A great favor indeed, and I don’t believe any of you would help me unless I did something, ah, unconventional. I want to be freed, Miss Azalea.”
Azalea frowned. Keeper was—well, Keeper. Magical and beautiful and part of the ethereal pavilion. She shifted on the velvet sofa, feeling both consternation and guilt.
“I…hadn’t thought of it,” said Azalea.
“I know,” said Keeper. He smiled, but not bitterly. “Perhaps you will now?”
“Oh, honestly,” said Azalea. She stood up and strode to the entrance with a click click click. The familiar hotness had begun to run through her, and she felt she needed a breath of real air. “I can’t believe you would just—just steal!”
“Step out of that entrance,” Keeper called, “and you and your sisters will never be welcome here again.”
Azalea stopped so abruptly her skirts swished the threshold. She glanced back at Keeper to see if he was in earnest. A touch of a smile graced his lips, but his face was deadly serious.
Azalea’s toes curled in her boots. She suddenly hated Keeper.
“Don’t—” she stammered. She couldn’t manage to meet his eyes. “It’s…just…We’ve got to keep dancing here, Keeper. It’s all we have. Don’t take it away. Please.”
“Then you will help free me?”
Azalea gripped the side of the arched entrance, wishing to feel some sort of silvery texture beneath her palms. Instead she felt a strange glassy smoothness, and it frustrated her.
“Fine,” she said, her nails clicking against the post. “For the dancing. And the watch. What do we have to do?”
Though she couldn’t hear Keeper’s footfalls behind her, she felt his presence draw near to her, until she could almost sense his sleekness, and his eyes on her back.
“The High King magicked many things,” he said, in his smooth voice. “Your palace. This pavilion. And I. He was fascinated with magic. It was, to him, a science, dealing with force and matter and auras. There are different sorts of magic, too. Some are much stronger than others.
“Miss Azalea, there is an object in your palace that has been magicked so strongly, it keeps me weak. Confined.”
Azalea recalled Keeper raising the gushing, foaming water to the top of the bridge. He had been panting when he stood. Breathless and drawn, taxed almost to illness. Azalea scuffed her boot on the marble.
“A magic object?” she said. “Here, in our palace?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“I do not know. But here is a thought: Until earlier this year, I was hardly more than brick and mortar. Something happened to the magic object—it was partially broken. Broken enough that I have my magic back, at least in part.”
Azalea’s eyebrows knit. They hadn’t anything magic, unless it was the tower, and that wasn’t broken, only stopped. They had the old, dented magic tea set, one of the few remnants of the High King. Although—Azalea’s brows knit further—she hadn’t seen that tea set for quite some time.
“I need you to find the magic object, and destroy it,” said Keeper. “Your period of mourning ends in but three months. Surely that is enough time?”
Azalea tapped her toe against the ground, the misty air stifling her.
“We…don’t have much magic left in the palace,” she managed to say. “We could probably find it, if I had all the girls search—”
Keeper took Azalea’s hand from the silver doorframe into both of his, and pressed his lips against it.
“He did what?” Bramble cried.
“I know, I know,” said Azalea. She sliced bread with a vengeance.
It was afternoon, and Azalea had just finished telling them the entire story at tea in the kitchen. The girls’ eyebrows had risen and furrowed with each part of the telling, and at the end, their eyes were circles. Their muffins and tea had been forgotten as they stared at Azalea across the scrubbed servants’ table.
“What a rotten shilling punter!” said Bramble, tearing her bread to bits. “I can’t believe he stole our things! Especially the watch! We stole that watch first, fair and square!”
“Something magic?” said Eve, passing out the sliced cheese. “But what’s left? I suppose there was the harpsichord—although that broke before the King was even born.”
“Well,” said Azalea, “there’s the wraith cloak—”
“The what?”
“The cloak that would make you invisible. The High King would use it to slip into the city unseen. That wasn’t unmagicked, but it was given away. No one knows where it is now, but surely it’s fallen to pieces. So, that just leaves—”
“The tea set,” said everyone in unison.
Azalea sighed and dipped a piece of her bread in her raspberry tea. “Right. But I haven’t seen that for ages. Even the sugar teeth—they disappeared after that first night. Does anyone know what happened to it?”
No one had.
Clover, who had been feeding Lily sips of tea with a shaking teacup, remained flushed and silent through the entire exchange, her rose red lips pursed. Now, all of a sudden, she burst into sobs.
“It was my fault!” she cried. “I did it!”
Everyone exchanged glances before turning back to Clover, who sobbed into her napkin as though she had unbottled her heart. She even looked pretty with a dribbling wet face.
“Um, sorry?” said Azalea.
“I broke it!” said Clover. “I broke the tea set!” Hiccupping, she raised her chin, defiant. “With a fire poker!”
The story spilled from her between stutters and shuddering breaths. It seemed as though she had been aching to confess.
Several months ago, when she had been ill, Mrs. Graybe set the magic tea set to tend to her. It kept pushing at Clover and nipping at her to taste the nasty-smelling tea, and finally, when she couldn’t take it any longer, she took the fire poker and bashed the tea set in. And not just once—repeatedly. There were still dents in the wall.
The girls gasped at this part.
The story became even more scandalous. Clover gathered up the pieces of the tea set in Lily’s baby blanket and, late at night, slipped out and dumped the tea set into the garden stream.
“And the pieces—the pieces—they were still wriggling, and—oh! It was like I had drowned them alive!” Clover hiccupped. “But I am not sorry! I hated that horrid tea set!”
By this time, all the girls were laughing so
hard they could hardly breathe. Bramble laughed so hard tea almost came out of her nose. Azalea laughed, more in shock that honey-sweet Clover could do something so violent.
“The teeth must have escaped while you murdered the rest of it,” said Bramble, cough-laughing into her napkin. “Ha ha ha! You know, sometimes I think Clover is harboring some deep, dark shocking secret. Fire poker! Ba-hahahahaaa!”
The girls laughed all over again. Even Clover managed a small, wobbly smile. Azalea rubbed her thumb, remembering how the sugar teeth had nipped her fingers.
“I suppose that settles it,” she said. “We’ve got to find the sugar teeth.”
That night, in their newly mended slippers from the shoemaker’s, Azalea had the girls search for the sugar teeth where she last remembered having them—in the silver forest. They had never properly explored the silver bushes and prickly pines off the path, and the girls searched back and forth, setting ornaments swaying and upsetting the bushes with a rustling fabric sound. Flora and Goldenrod even brought sugar cubes, in case they found them.
Thoroughly late for dance practice, the girls emerged from the sparkling foliage displeased, black dresses coated in silver dust.
“It’s like looking for a needle in a stack of hay,” said Delphinium as they made their way to the bridge. “Silver hay.”
“The sugar teeth aren’t down here, let’s face it,” said Bramble. “They would have attacked one of us by now. They’ve probably run away. I’d bet a harold they’ve thrown themselves off the garden bridge to join their beastly comrades. Anyway, who cares if we set Keeper free or not? He’s creepy.”
“I certainly don’t,” said Azalea. “And if you don’t either, maybe we should forget dancing and go back to the room.”
“Steady on,” said Bramble, two spots of pink on her cheeks. “I didn’t mean it like that. Probably every gentleman was creepy back then. I mean, let’s not be hasty or anything. Anyway, where else are we going to dance?”
“It’s more—than just—dancing,” said Clover. “We’re—doing exactly what the—the High King did to p-poor Mr. Keeper. Dancing and just—just leaving him there. It’s so unkind of us.”
A guilty solemness fell over them all as they realized Clover was right.
Entwined Page 13
