“I am not so far from it myself,” Clarice said, rubbing ineffectually at a teardrop on the front of her bodice.
Felicia put her hands on her young sister’s shoulders and looked her full in the face. “I don’t care what Mrs. Chappel thinks. Anyone who looks at you and only sees your fortune is a fool. Don’t you dare to marry her profligate son.”
“Don’t fear for me. I shan’t. Nor any other man who cannot see past the end of his purse.”
Impossible to express all she felt for Clarice even in a hug of considerable length, so a brief one was all she gave her. Then out of the house to be handed with exquisite care into the cart. She rode beside the hunched back of the old carter and did not turn her head to wave goodbye, though she knew the curtain of the morning room had lifted.
Mary sat in the tail of the cart, her arms resting on a small barrel filled with china and straw. “The weather’ll hold off, eh, ol’ Griff?”
The carter grumbled something over the edge of his faded red muffler. His hat, once a dark tricorne but now a shapeless, faded thing, was set tight as a skullcap upon his head. The brim flipped and flopped with the vagaries of the deeply rutted road. He hardly seemed to watch the road, but kept his head tucked down between his shoulders.
Beyond the boundaries of Hamdry Manor, they rode along the narrow track, high hedgerows blocking any view over the fields. Despite the damp chill in the air, the green hedges were busy with birdsong as birds prepared nests for the fledglings to come. Felicia concentrated her thoughts upon the things she saw, sooner than look behind her.
Mary sighed heavily. Sitting where she did, she had little choice but to look behind her. “ ‘Tis the moor I’ll be missin’. My Joseph used to come a-walkin’ over hill and down t’spend an hour or zo at my father’s fire. Then I’d go as far as t’water with him and zee him on his way. Gi’ him a kiss or two to last the week on.” She laughed a little, reminiscently.
“Joseph?” Felicia asked.
“Yiss. My man that was. Dead now all of — Lord save us. Twenty years or more it must be now zince he went off t’Exeter and niver come home n’more.”
“What became of him?”
“Pressed. More ‘n likely, that is. Niver heard a word more from him. Pressed and zent away to fight in one o’ His Majesty’s ships. Killed, maybe. He niver did like zailin’.”
As if to mark the utter depression Mary’s tale cast over them, a weeping rain began to fall. Felicia sighed, resigned to the destruction of her hat and a damp and miserable journey. The horse raised its tail and dropped steaming “buns’’ in the road as a final addition to the discomfort of the trip.
Felicia’s lips quivered as a laugh, utterly inappropriate under the circumstances, came bubbling up from her heart. She became aware that the carter had opened one eye in her direction and was looking at her with alarm. Fighting down a shaking voice, she said, “All’s well. Never fear.”
In a low voice, the driver said, “Are you ill? Should I stop?”
“No. Drive on.” She held on to the edge of the padded wooden seat and let herself be shaken by gusts of silent laughter. Her ribs hurt from the effort of keeping it all in.
She was free.
She had not realized until that moment how oppressed she had felt living at Hamdry. Even though she had seen Lady Stavely only in the evening, her presence had been like a fog creeping into every room. Felicia could not speak or move naturally. Every time she needed to pass Lady Stavely’s door, she had crept by, as wary as a beaten dog.
Now she could do as she liked. Oh, not burst into noisy laughter without obvious cause, perhaps, for that would alarm her friends and serve no purpose. Still, it was as if her mind had been in bonds and was now liberated. No need to wonder if Lady Stavely stood just inside her door, her ear pressed against the panels.
The giddiness did not last long. Within the hour, as Mary dozed in the rear, Felicia had grown weary unto death of the jouncing cart and the sullen driver. The scenery, dreary under the low clouds, was not entertaining. They passed no one, not even a shepherd. The hedgerows dripped and even the birds were now silent.
Her thoughts were weary too with dwelling on one point: Should she have told Clarice about her mother and Mr. Ashton? If the doctor was wondering, then it would not be long before others of greater social status would begin asking questions amongst themselves. Was it right to leave Clarice unprepared to meet the rumors that, sooner or later, some well-meaning friend would be sure to mention?
The carter, feeling perhaps the melancholy of the morning, began to whistle through his teeth, of all vague noises the most irritating. Felicia didn’t like to be so autocratic as to tell him to stop, but the bodiless thread of sound interrupted even her thoughts. She shot him a disapproving glance, hoping he’d interpret it correctly.
She could see little of his face, just the lobe of his ear and the sweep of his jaw. Put together with the nagging notion that the eye that had fixed on her when she’d begun to laugh was of a green that she’d seen before and ...
With a sudden snatch, she knocked off his hat. It fluttered away over the end of the cart, leaving Blaic lifting his grinning face, free of the concealing muffler. He’d drawn his thonged hair high for concealment, and now it fell down into its accustomed place.
“What are you doing?’’ Felicia asked, her boredom leaving her. The sun had not come out from behind the clouds, yet she felt warmed.
“I told you I am going with you to Tallyford. The gardens need looking after and I have found that I have an unexpected talent in that direction.”
“Oh. And how do you know the gardens are in disarray?”
“I was there yesterday.”
“Were you? Then you can tell me what I want to know. The information Lady Stavely deigned to offer me was sketchy at best. She could not even tell me how many children there are. I could not find my father’s account of the place in the library.”
“Children? Oh, a dozen or so.”
“So many?”
“I think so. It’s not easy to count them —they don’t seem to ever stand still.”
Felicia should have had a thousand questions. She could think of no more. She looked at Blaic, his eyes squinting slightly as he watched the road, his hands firm and easy on the traces. How could she have seen his hands and not known him? Felicia asked herself. They had haunted her dreams all the night before.
She felt her cheeks grow red as she remembered, in his presence, all that she had dreamed. In the world of the night, Blaic had no reason not to touch her. The Ancient Law of his People had no counterpart in her dreams, so he had woven patterns of desire on her skin without hindrance. She had never known such a vivid dream before, the details still clear even hours later.
“You shouldn’t stay with me,” she said, the words overmastering her control. “It’s too dangerous.”
“No one knows who or what I am. There’s no danger.”
“Yes there is. You may be whatever you like; I’m only a mortal. We suffer from temptation.” She tried to keep her mind clear, but she couldn’t help seeing the muscles flex in his thigh beneath the much-washed-and-shrunk breeches he’d adopted. The tiny hairs on his wrists glinted as he controlled the horse. His hands possessed strength and a kind of blunt beauty. She wanted her dream to be reality. If he’d just touch her once...
“Lead me not into temptation,” she whispered, letting her words fly up into heaven.
“I’m suffering too,” Blaic said. “Do you think I don’t want what you want?”
“Have there been many women like me? You can tell me. Have you spent your life seducing mortal women?”
“No. Nor mortal men, for all that I knew Socrates. Not that he didn’t try.... Do you know the Greeks had three different words for love? Eros was the least important to them. Odd, how it seems to be of first importance among mortals now.”
“I never studied Greek. My father wanted me to but I was already too old to learn.” She stripped off her gloves
to put her cool hands on her face. “Never mind the Greeks.”
“I believe I told you once that I don’t find mortal women desirable.”
“I’d forgotten.”
“So had I. When I look at you, I forget that and much more. If the Queen of the Snow showed me her naked body right now, I’d yawn at it.”
“Who? What would she do to you?”
“Pierce my heart with an icicle, most likely. She’s not very understanding. But, I tell you, one look from you and the icicle would melt in a cloud of steam.”
Blaic had let the horse drop into the slowest of walks. Now he shook the reins over the bay’s back. “Come up,” he said commandingly.
Felicia had now, at any rate, more scope for her thoughts. When he said he had not seduced women throughout his life, she wondered if he ever had. Was he a virgin too?
“Blaic....” she began, then her face flamed anew. There was simply no delicate way to ask a man who, by all visible clues, seemed to be about thirty whether or not he was an experienced lover or a tyro. Though she’d been thoroughly drilled in etiquette from age ten, she did not believe such a subject had ever been addressed.
“What is it?”
Felicia began to consider writing an etiquette book that would cover awkward situations like this. There had to be a polite, evenhanded way to ask a man to take one to his home. She recalled a passage she’d read once suggesting that a woman should never take the initiative from the man. The author had been critical of girls who anticipated a formal proposal with an eager ‘yes’ and equally censorious of girls who were too coy to answer the first time.
Relying on her native good sense didn’t seem to help matters much either. She folded her hands in her lap and asked civilly, “If you take me to your home, can you touch me there?”
“Where? In Mag Mell?”
“Yes.”
Once again he let his hands drop. “I suppose...it's possible. Sometimes, long ago, women of the mortal realm were brought across by their lovers.”
Hearing the word on his lips seemed to constrict her heart for a moment. She literally could not catch her breath until he took his vivid gaze off her. “Were they?” she gasped idiotically.
“Yes. Some of them. It was always frowned upon. It’s not...desire isn’t something... We don’t make love among ourselves. Not the way mortals do, with their bodies. We think yours is a most inefficient method.”
Felicia’s mind boggled. If the Fay were immortal, then they didn’t need to replace themselves by having children. Yet at some point, surely they must wish for that intimacy. Another point to be addressed in that mythical book of proper behavior.
“What happened to those humans who crossed over?”
“Some stayed with their lovers. But I’ve never so much as met one. It’s a great risk they took. To leave everything, everyone you’ve ever known. To wake in a world where you know nothing and where you will lose your humanity. The risk was on both sides. Those who couldn’t face it returned, rejecting their lovers, and finding misery because time had not stopped for them. Their lovers became bitter. There’s no happiness either way.”
Before she could censor her tongue, Felicia asked, “Will you risk it? Will you take me with you when you return there?”
There was no mistaking the expression he had after hearing this proposition. He was revolted by the very notion.
“Never mind,” she said hastily, withdrawing the suggestion before he could answer. Her shame threatened to swallow her. But even with the horse at a walk, she could not very well jump down and run away out of embarrassment, not without turning her ankle. And she knew she would not be fortunate enough to die making a grand gesture.
“Felicia....”
“I believe the rain is stopping,’’ she said, raising her hot face to the sky.
“Felicia, look at me.”
She did, giving him a cool and distant look, as though she’d been hailed by name in the street by a stranger. He bore a dusky flush on his cheekbones and a look of pleading in his eyes. “Things have changed in Mag Mell since the last mortal came over. My king hates your kind since his daughter married a mortal, and he was none too fond of humans before that. He turned me into stone for helping her. What kind of reception would he offer you? He’d kill you, or worse.”
“Worse?” Felicia decided she really did not care to know any more. “I see. So it isn’t that you don’t...want me?”
“Never that. Never that.” His hands tightened on the reins. “If I could, I’d be with you tonight. I’d walk over iron plates for you barefoot or bring a flame-feather from the wing of a dragon just to see you smile.”
She gave him the smile, sweet and furtive, without any such daring deeds. “I don’t understand why you don’t like iron. It’s so useful.”
“This is why.” His hand sought a nail, slightly protruding from the side of the seat. As his finger touched it, his face twisted into a grimace of pain. Felicia cried out as a faint sizzle came to her ears. When Blaic raised his hand, the finger was blistered as though by the heat of the forge that shaped the nail.
“It’s not so bad so long as we don’t touch it. But we can never be at ease. Even now, sitting here, I can feel the iron in this cart like an overhanging threat.” He raised the burned fingertip to his mouth. Felicia wasn’t certain if he breathed on it or muttered an incantation, though she watched closely. When he took the fingertip away, it was still reddened, but no longer puffy.
Without her prompting him, he told her some of the tales of his past. “I have always been something of a lawbreaker. It used to be that Boadach was not nearly so strict when it came to transgressions. But over the centuries his dislike of mortals grew, until it was nearly an obsession. He warned Sira against them, doing everything in his power to stop her infatuation with the mortal who won her.”
“Everything? Yet she defied him?”
Blaic shook his head as if in disbelief. ‘ “The king could not control her. She had too much of her mother in her. The Sea is controllable by no force, neither mortal nor of the People.”
“The Sea? We control it now, in our ships. England rules the waves, they say.”
“Do you? You never lose a ship? There are no more storms? No more tsunamis?” When she looked blank, he translated. “No more tidal waves?”
“Oh. Yes. There are those things, I suppose. But perhaps when you were last taking notice, the ships were not the way they are now.”
“Undoubtedly not.”
Felicia mulled over the things he’d told her. “Her mother was the Sea?” she asked at last.
“I told you, we do not mate as you humans do. When it is time for a couple to bring a child into the Wilder World, they ask one of the great forces to give it to them. The Sea, the Sky, or in my case, the Wood That Covers the Earth. We carry these attributes throughout our lives.”
“The Wood That Covers the Earth,” she said softly. Then she laughed. “Yes, I can see that. You are stubborn. Hard to move. I think too....” She paused, hesitating over whether to add the last observation. She saw him wriggle, as though made self-conscious by her gaze. She realized she was staring at him as if she would look into his soul, provided he had one.
“You think what?”
She took the risk. “I think you search for a place to take root, Blaic. I wonder if you’ll ever find it.”
His tone light, he replied, “If I did not take root in your garden after six centuries, I doubt I shall ever bloom. Here’s Tallyford.”
Felicia looked up to see a small village, now her home. There was no clock tower, but the gaol and the local tavern stood in close proximity. There was a grocer, a butcher, a blacksmith, and a leather-worker’s shop. Felicia was glad to see that there was also a milliner and mantuamaker’s shop, somewhat dusty-looking but with a neat sign swinging overhead. “Good,” she said in satisfaction. “Just between us, Mary, though a fine servant in many ways, is not a very good seamstress. She can mend linen so that you’d
never know it had been torn, but she has no eye for gowns.”
They had hardly any distance to travel down the increasingly muddy road, yet they had been observed by the inhabitants. The innkeeper stood in his doorway, a short pipe wreathing his countenance in smoke, while several bodiless heads seem to levitate behind him in an attempt to see over his shoulders. The blacksmith raised his hammer high and paused, his head turning as the cart passed by. Several women, shawls clutched over their aprons, had hardly glanced at her before putting their heads together. Felicia could only be glad that the rumors from home about her could not have reached Tallyford just yet. With luck, they’d not come until long after she’d established herself as a decent and God-fearing woman. Of course, having a preternaturally handsome man beside her on the box was not likely to add to that impression.
When she glanced at Blaic, she saw with a shock that he’d conjured up a shapeless, greasy hat the very spit of the one she’d knocked off into the road. Under its concealing brim, she saw him laughing at her.
“Is it far to the orphanage?”
“A mile or so farther on. Perhaps you should wake your maid.”
Chapter Thirteen
In the end, it was left for Mary to sum up Tallyford Beneficial Asylum for Children. “There’s nowt wrong here that a mess of zilver wouldn’t cure, but I can just zee you gettin’ it from her ladyship.”
Miss Dravoget had retired to her quarters on the floor above. Felicia had refused the other woman’s halfhearted offer to turn herself out for the new directress, saying that as she had but one night before her wedding she should at least sleep in her own bed one last time. Miss Dravoget, fair, forty, and a careful collector of any h’s she might accidentally drop, had sighed a great deal over the necessity of her forthcoming marriage.
“It’s not every girl who ‘as—has—the opportunity to marry in these days, Miss Starret. So when Mr. ‘Umphrey—Mr. Humphrey—asked me, natchurally, I jumped at it. Otherwise, I shouldn’t dream of leaving my charges. They’re dear to me, h’every last one.”
Kissed by Starlight Page 18
