He gaped at her and let out a long breath. “You’re sure?”
Emmeline squealed.
Elsie smiled. “Who else would go to that out-of-the-way place and ask for me by name? Please, I’ll do anything, but let me go. I must leave immediately. I’ll take the train, make it as far as Reading—”
He worked his mouth. “You just heard of this?”
Fishing out the telegram, Elsie handed it to him. He read it, and as he considered, Elsie passed it to Emmeline.
“This is incredible.” Emmeline grinned. “Oh, Elsie, you’ve waited so long!”
“I’ll pay for temporary help,” she said to Ogden. “Whatever you need—”
Ogden, somewhat baffled, shook his head. A small smile played on his lips. “That won’t be necessary. If you leave now, you can be on a train before nightfall.”
Elsie laughed and kissed Ogden on the cheek. “Oh, thank you, thank you. Goodness, I need to pack.”
Emmeline chirped, “I’ll get your laundry off the line,” and ran from the studio.
Elsie darted to the stairs, taking them two at a time up to her room. Pulling her valise from beneath her bed, she laid it open on the mattress and rummaged through her wardrobe. She liked to take care with how she packed for a trip—especially a trip of an undetermined amount of time—but all she could think of was getting to Juniper Down.
They’d wait for her. Surely they’d wait for her! We’ve waited this long, what is another day? And she could do it in a day if she slept on the train and in the cab. Only a day between herself and her family! Who was it? Her mother? A brother? She dared not hope it would be all of them.
Emmeline came up shortly with Elsie’s laundry, which was mainly underthings. Thanking her, Elsie folded what she thought she’d need and crammed it into the valise. Just as the valise was getting full, Emmeline returned with a cloth-wrapped parcel.
“So you don’t get peckish.” She set it in Elsie’s hands.
“Oh, Emmeline, thank you.” She straightened. “I’ll need my savings passbook.” Money for the train ticket, the travel . . . and she had no idea who had come for her. What if they were destitute and needed help? “Ogden!”
“He just stepped out! To the post office, I think, to inquire about replacing you for the week.”
“Of course.” She barely registered the remark. God help her, she had so many questions and no time to think them.
“I’ll get you some more cheese.” Emmeline hurried back down the stairs, her footsteps eager. Elsie followed after her as far as Ogden’s bedroom, which she entered unabashedly. She used to clean it, after all.
“Passbook, passbook,” she whispered, looking over his sparse furniture. He kept all their savings passbooks in here, often added to them himself, out of generosity. Elsie hadn’t needed to use hers for quite a while. Where is it?
She moved to his desk and opened the top right drawer, searching through the pens and papers within. Several had large scribbles on them, connecting random dots. Something about the drawings seemed almost familiar, but she couldn’t think of why. They lacked Ogden’s usual artistic eye.
The drawer beneath it held various bottles of blue aspector ink, and the third was filled nearly to the brim with old ledgers. In the left drawers, she found receipts—had he given those to her to document yet?—framing tools, and old letters.
Bother. She retrieved his key from beneath his bedside table and went to the cupboard where he kept his drops, opening the door and sorting through the contents of the locked cabinet. No passbook. Where on earth could it be? She needed to get to London before the last train left, or she’d waste an entire day—
Locking up the cupboard, she returned to the desk and checked its drawers once more. She rifled through receipts, lifted ledgers. Pulled open the drawer of inks and pushed them forward and back. Nothing.
She closed the drawer hard and heard a chink! Fearing she’d broken a bottle, she opened it again, ready to find a blue mess staining the wood. But the bottles were fine.
She shut the drawer again, the chink! sounding again, but a little softer this time. She paused. It didn’t sound like glass hitting glass . . . so what was it? Not her passbook, certainly, but curiosity had her opening the drawer again. Nothing but ink bottles, one nearly empty, three full, one half-full. She shifted the drawer back and forth, hearing the high-pitched chink! even though the bottles were not hitting one another.
She shifted each vial, one at a time, until she found one in the back that was empty. It looked half-full, but upon closer inspection, the glass had been tinted blue halfway up the bottle. She shook it, hearing something rattle beneath the glass. What on earth?
Uncorking the thing, she turned it over, and a long, metal-tipped stamp fell into her palm. What purpose would Ogden have for hiding a seal—
She stopped breathing when she saw the image at its end. A bird foot over a crescent moon.
The symbol of the Cowls.
Her jaw dropped. Then, as though the thing were a live ember, she shoved it back into the bottle, corked it, and replaced it in the drawer. She slammed the drawer shut and retreated two steps.
The Cowls . . . Ogden was one of them?
But it made so much sense. How their letters had always found their way into her most personal spaces, without a trace. Like their deliverer knew precisely where she’d find them. Besides which, he’d always been so generous with her time, as if he knew she was putting it to good use.
Had Ogden always been one of them, or had he converted to their cause after hiring her? Had he discovered something she had not, and been inducted into their fold?
He undoubtedly knew one thing . . . He knew she was a spellbreaker.
Gooseflesh prickled her arms and legs. All the questions she’d wrestled with since the night of the workhouse fire flooded back. Why had he kept it a secret? For Emmeline?
It struck her that Mr. Parker probably wasn’t involved at all. Ogden had said, The squire has his hands in all sorts of nefarious affairs. Was that what his steward had been hiding? Not his penmanship, but a letter trying to sort out one of Squire Hughes’s misdeeds?
But of course it was Ogden! He was an artist. It wouldn’t be hard for him to disguise his handwriting . . .
She needed to think on all of this, to decide the best path forward, and yet it felt as if she’d opened a new book with too many pages. She had to get to Juniper Down now.
But the Cowls . . .
“Elsie?”
She jumped at Emmeline’s voice. Smoothed the sides of her hair. “Emmeline. Do you . . . know where Ogden keeps our savings passbooks?”
She considered for a moment. “Did you check under the bed?”
“I . . . no.”
Jittery, she crouched by the bed and pulled out a wooden box of documents. Sure enough, all three of their passbooks were stored near the top. Elsie grabbed hers and held it to her chest. She didn’t know how much money she’d need, so she would withdraw all of it. There were still bandits about—
Juniper Down. The Cowls. Her family. Ogden.
Her head was going to explode.
Hurrying to her bedroom, Elsie stuck the passbook into her chatelaine bag and closed her valise, noting a second cloth package of food tucked within it.
“Thank you, Emmeline.” She hauled the valise into the hallway. She dragged it down the stairs and set it on the table, then worried her hands as she waited for Ogden to return. He came through the door less than a quarter hour later.
“I’ll take you to London,” he said the moment he stepped into the dining room. He took her valise in hand. “Send us word as soon as you can.”
Elsie nodded, unsure of what else to say.
She hoped he didn’t notice her awe.
CHAPTER 20
She could have asked him about it on the way to London. There were so many ways Elsie could have started the conversation. Mr. Ogden, do you know what I am?
Or, I found an interesting knickknack in on
e of your drawers.
Or even, Why didn’t you tell me you were one of the Cowls?
Granted, Cowls was a nickname Elsie had invented. It wasn’t what the group actually called itself.
In the end, she didn’t say a word, knowing the ride to London would never be long enough for all of her questions. And if Ogden was angry that she’d inadvertently snooped and discovered his true identity . . . What if he did something that forbade her from going to Juniper Down?
She had to go. This was more important than . . . anything.
Elsie purchased a hotel room for the night in Reading, the closest train stop to Juniper Down, although she might as well not have bothered. She paced her small room for hours, then failed to sleep on both the chair and the bed. It wasn’t until near dawn she managed to drift off, only to wake to a rain-choked sunrise with a tiny bit of drool on her pillow.
It was just as well.
She dressed quickly, making herself nearly as presentable as she’d been for the duke’s dinner, though she couldn’t truss up her hair the same way Emmeline did. She would see her family today. The very thought made her heart flutter.
She wondered if Bacchus would still be in England when she returned. Would he want to know about this wonderful turn of events?
Someone had found her. Come back for her. This changed everything.
Smiling at herself in the small mirror on the wall, Elsie pinned her purple hat carefully to her hair. Then she packed up her valise and lugged it downstairs, where a concierge kindly hired her a carriage. The driver took her southwest, toward Juniper Down, a tiny village barely worth a dot on a map. She hadn’t been there since she was six. Never visited, only written. She wondered if it still looked how she remembered it . . . though she mostly just remembered the interior of the Halls’ house.
She wrung her fingers together until her lace gloves threatened blisters. Then she practiced what she would say. If it was her mother or her father—or perhaps both!—she’d of course ask why they had left. Why they’d waited so long to come back for her. But that couldn’t be the first thing out of her mouth. She wanted to start on the right foot. She wanted to make them happy they had at last come for her. The questions would follow.
If it was a sibling . . . Where have you been all this time? Do you remember me? Did they leave you, too?
Her throat constricted on that last one.
Surprisingly, Juniper Down came too soon, even with the driver having to stop to ask a farmer for directions. It was a tiny place, with only one carriage-sized road running alongside it, and it was in poor care, judging by the way Elsie jostled about. The horses stopped, Elsie’s heart leapt into her throat, and the driver opened her door.
“Sure this is it?” he asked, lending a hand to help her down.
Coming around the carriage, Elsie scanned the place. There was farmland off in the distance. The houses weren’t too dissimilar from those of the duke’s tenants, though they varied a little more in size and looked to be in worse repair. Each had a small garden. Narrow dirt paths crisscrossed around. An old man in a chair by a beehive near the road squinted at her.
Sensing her hesitation, the driver shouted, “Ho! This is Juniper Down, is it not?”
The man bellowed back, “’Tis! What’s it to ya?”
Drawing in a large breath, Elsie turned back to the driver. “I’ll find it, thank you.”
The man nodded and pulled down her valise from the back of the carriage. “Good luck to you.”
Elsie nodded and stayed on the road until the carriage turned about and pulled away. Then, trying not to chew on her lip, she approached the old man.
“I’m sorry, but do you know where the Halls live?” she asked.
“Henry’s lot?” he repeated, eyeing her. All his clothes, including his hat, boasted at least one hole, and here she was in one of her best dresses. Perhaps she had made a mistake, primping before coming here. But the man lifted an empty pipe and pointed it south. “Down the road, they is.”
He didn’t offer to escort her, which was just as well. “Thank you,” she said, and followed his direction.
The noises of young children—one of them a crying baby—reached her ears. A woman knelt in her garden, pulling weeds. Another drew water from a well, watching her pass. She wore a black hat and black ribbon around her wrists. Was she in mourning? Folk here likely couldn’t afford a special wardrobe for it.
Elsie nodded to her and continued on, soon spying a little girl also in black, and a black-dyed dress hanging on a clothesline. How terrible. What had happened here?
The path forked up ahead, but fortunately a woman perhaps in her late thirties stepped out of her house just then. “Oh!” she exclaimed, looking Elsie up and down. “Are you in from Foxstone?”
Elsie shook her head. “I’m from Brookley, actually. Near London.”
The woman whistled. “What are you doing in these parts?” She shook her head. “Don’t mean to be rude, just curious. Are you lost?”
Elsie’s shoulders began to ache, and she forced her posture to relax. “Only a little. I’m looking for Agatha Hall.”
“Agatha?” The woman stepped onto the path and gestured for Elsie to follow. “She’s just around this way.” They passed an older woman washing clothes. “Here to see Agatha,” the first said, as though the other had asked. They continued along, but Elsie heard the second woman pass the information along to someone else before leaving earshot.
“Right here.” Her guide gestured to a house that looked like all the others. “Need me to come along?”
“Uh, no, thank you.” She nodded her gratitude and, holding her breath, approached the house.
She knocked thrice, feeling eyes on her back.
Footsteps sounded within, followed by a sharp word, likely to a child. The door opened. Elsie barely recognized her—she was working off the memory of a six-year-old child, after all, and the woman had aged since then. Perhaps it was the dress, or the obvious fact that Elsie didn’t belong, but Agatha knew her immediately.
“Elsie Camden!” The words were uttered on a gasp. “Oh goodness, you came. And so fast! Come in, come in.” She put a hand on Elsie’s elbow and ushered her inside.
The home was cozy. Small. An old dining table took up half the room, and the bottom floor had only one room. A narrow set of stairs led up to what Elsie presumed would be one or two bedrooms. A boy of perhaps ten sat by the window, polishing a pair of shoes. There was a fire in the hearth, warming a great iron pot, and the air was overly hot, but it smelled like bread and earth. That smell was more familiar to her than anything else she saw.
Elsie set down her valise, her manners fleeing her. “Where is he? She?”
“He,” Agatha corrected. “And he didn’t stay. I mean, he’s here, but he ain’t here.” She turned and ventured toward a wooden shelf. Pulled an envelope from it and handed it over. The edge was smeared with some sort of grease. “Sorry,” she added, gesturing to it, “one of the littles got to it.”
An envelope? Elsie turned it over. No seal. “What’s this?”
Agatha shrugged. “He wouldn’t say much about it. Only to give that to you.”
Clutching the envelope in her trembling hands, Elsie asked, “How old is he?”
Agatha shrugged. “Maybe a bit older than meself. Grew out a beard; swear he was clean shaven when you all came around the first time, but it’s been so long, and it was only the one night.”
Father, she thought, and a chill flowed down her arms. “But he’s still here? In Juniper Down?” She broke the wax on the envelope. It was made of fine parchment. The letter within was delicate, the paper small.
“Said ‘nearby.’ Must’ve been staying round Birmingham, the way he talked.”
Birmingham? That was a ways north of here. Had he been there this whole time?
Elsie held the brief message, written with a fine hand, up to her face.
By the plum where the road turns for Foxstone. Come alone.
That was it.
Elsie turned the paper over, but there was nothing else upon it. Did he want their meeting to be private? Did he intend to wait by the tree day by day until she arrived? It made little sense to her, but Elsie was used to short, direct messages like this.
“Where is the road for Foxstone?”
“That where he is?” Agatha asked, but she pointed toward a corner of the house. “Goes east that way, curves through a bit of a forest. You got to turn right after that, or it’ll send you to Pingewood.”
Elsie turned for the door. Paused. “Thank you so much, Agatha. Might I keep my things here?”
“Of course. Bring him back, if you like, and I’ll see you both fed.” She smiled. “I’m right happy for you, Elsie. Glad it turned out.”
Nodding, Elsie stepped back into the sunlight. A few people, including children, were lurking around the house, likely curious about what had brought a stranger to the Halls’. Ignoring them, she ventured east, searching for a path wide enough to be called a road. After finding it, she glanced over her shoulder once, but no one followed her. Most likely they were pestering Agatha with their questions. Some of them might even remember the little girl who’d been abandoned by her family fifteen years ago . . . but Elsie would worry about that later.
The way was farther than she expected; the woods weren’t close, but she was in a hurry, and she kept up a brisk enough pace that her ribs hurt by the time she reached them. Forcing herself to slow, Elsie scanned the sparse trees, keeping to the center of the road. Father, she thought, disbelieving. She tried to remember the lines she’d rehearsed in the carriage, only to find them forgotten.
Why come back now?
Why did you wait so long?
What is your name?
The woods broke, and Elsie couldn’t help herself—she hurried again, ignoring the stitch re-forming beneath her corset. After another minute of walking, she saw the fork up ahead, as well as a crude, faded sign that pointed toward Foxstone. Sure enough, there was a massive plum tree a short ways to the west. Upon seeing it, Elsie left the road behind and trekked through the long wild grass, crinkling the letter as she picked up her skirts.
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