"Are you trying to tell me someone wants to cause Lady Elizabeth harm?"
"I'm merely saying not everyone is a fan of your lady, Mr. Nash. Garroway, for example..."
Ezra's fingers were cold despite the warmth of the liquor sliding down his throat. "What has he said?"
Cora did her imitation of a shrug, pushing her breasts up so they nearly toppled from the top of her dress. "What does he always say? The Untouched are our enemy. That letting one within our gates and near our children is an outrage." She caught the lodestone in her hand and met his eyes across the desk that separated them. "He speaks as if he's going to call the Oberon out on it. He speaks like a man who believes he should be the Oberon."
So, this was why she was here. Garroway was ready to make his move. Or getting there.
Ezra had been watching Garroway for a while. After living without religion since the Dark Ages, most of the Touched had paid no attention when the man first opened the temple in Corrigan. Yet, the few who did notice and attended the ceremonies had become devout followers not only of the old ways, but of the priest himself. Their devotion would have been admirable if their leader had been more concerned with the balance of nature and their general well being than power and prestige.
For all her flaws, Cora was loyal to the Oberon. It wasn't a trait anyone would expect, which is why Garroway never thought to hold his tongue when she was around. It was Cora who first alerted them to Garroway's more radical beliefs and his dislike of how Jack handled the Touched’s affairs.
"Have you heard any specific plans? Anything I should pass along to Sidhe?"
The lodestone made a reappearance. "Not yet, but it's coming, and I may not be around to give you another warning."
Of her many talents, Cora's ability to drop life-altering news like she was reciting the night's menu was his least favorite.
"I need more time."
Eyes as black as night flashed silver streaked with golden brown. A wave of magic rolled through the house, shaking the pictures on the wall.
"You do not think I would like more time as well? You think I am eager to find what lies on the other side of this life?"
"I'm sorry. That was not well done of me." Ezra raked his hands through his hair, his thoughts so loud and chaotic he had difficulty remembering what he should be saying. Across from him, Cora watched as the lodestone transferred from one finger to another, sadness and fear written large across a face that normally showed few emotions.
Yes, that was what he should be addressing. His own panic and fears could hold off a bit longer.
"There is no way I can ever repay this kindness you are doing for me and my family."
"I'm dying," she said as if the words meant nothing to her when the opposite was evident. "It's been my fate since the moment I was born. An empty heart like mine isn't meant to beat forever."
"Your heart is not empty, Miss Yates. If it was, you would not have come to me and made your offer. You wouldn't be here now."
Cora shook her head, eyes still resolutely trained on the play of her fingers and the stone. "Never forget that I did not do this out of goodness, but to repay a debt. Your sister sacrificed her body to save mine. It was a foolish choice, but she did it, and now I will allow her to have this empty armor of flesh and blood when I no longer have a use for it." The stone missed its mark and landed soundlessly in the cushioning of her skirts. She stared at it for a long moment before picking it up and discarding it on the side table. "You have a month, at the most, to prepare," she said, standing up and shaking out her skirts. "I suggest you don't waste it pining away for a woman who can never be yours, Mr. Nash."
Chapter 21
The sun was rising when Hattie Pearson, the Duchess of Sidhe, signed her final letter. Through the open doorway she could see her husband's large, golden body sprawled in the bed they'd shared until her stomach became so large she found it impossible to sleep without being propped up on all sides with pillows. Despite her absence from the bed, Jack stayed on his side with the exception of one foot, which was kicked out well below where her shorter body normally rested.
Sometimes it scared her how much she loved him.
Often it scared her more how much he loved her.
Her fingers trailed down the stack of envelopes all sealed and ready to deliver. She'd shed at least a million silent tears composing them. She could feel the puffiness around her eyes that resulted from too little sleep and far too much weeping.
A jerking sensation in her stomach stole her breath and told her the time for quiet reflection was over. She stashed the notes in a drawer, the one she'd already told Ida to look in once the time came. Then, she rang for the woman in question. Moments later, as if she'd been anticipating the early morning call, her maid appeared. Her clear blue eyes were set in a face wrinkled with age and filled with concern.
"What can I do for you this morning, Your Grace?"
"It's time, Ida," Hattie said as another pain caused her to curl around the stomach housing her unborn baby. "Send for Mr. Nash."
Chapter 22
"I do hope the Duchess is doing well," Bits said, tilting her face up to the warm midday sun. "I assisted Sarah with the birth of all three of her hellions, and it was a truly terrifying affair. I hope I never have to endure such an ordeal.”
A vision of a line of children with Ezra's blue eyes and curls and her red hair flashed in her head, reminding her that for a person who valued honesty, she had a bad habit of lying, especially to herself.
Something had changed since the day she assisted Ezra on his visits. He'd begun coming home earlier and was spending less time in his study. He drew Bits into conversation when her natural inclination was to sit silently. And sometimes he looked at her as if he too was thinking about the kiss they'd shared on the side of a dusty country road.
It was ridiculous. She knew it was. He was probably kissing the Duchess of Sidhe, the maids, and even the new baby in an effort to burn off whatever Residual he'd accumulated since a boy appeared at the front door this morning saying the duchess was in labor.
"I'm sure all is well," Lily said, attempting to reach a batch of weeds that had sprung up among the parsley. Her fingertips kept skimming the top of the leaves, but she couldn't get her hand low enough to get a firm grip. Bits wanted to help her, but knew her friend didn't want assistance. Since getting her chair, Lily was determined to make her own way. "Ezra has assisted with a hundred births, and really, how hard could it be? Women have been doing it since the dawn of time, even before the University of London opened a School of Medicine."
Bits knew all too well how hard it could be. More than one of the girls who had their coming out with her had not survived the ordeal with both their life and a babe. Yet, she didn't want to be the proverbial rain cloud in Lily's sunny day, so she said nothing.
"I find myself intrigued by the Duke and Duchess of Sidhe," Bits admitted just as Lily finally got a grip on the weeds and yanked their roots from the earth. "They appear so very much in love. It's quite unlike any relationship I normally see among the upper ranks of the aristocracy."
Lily dusted her gloves on the apron she wore and rolled up to the next batch of interlopers in her idyllic garden. "They are. I feel guilty for thinking so, but it's the stuff of faery tales. She, a mere farmer's daughter, engaged to the future duke's best friend. A friendship between the three of them even betrayal could not break." Lily eyed the weeds and readjusted the angle of her chair. "If my brother wasn't the wronged party in all of it, I would say it was the best love story ever told."
The chirping of the birds in a nearby tree, which Bits had barely noticed before, was now much too loud.
"Your brother was the wronged party...? Do you mean to say Ezra was engaged to the Duchess of Sidhe?" Even to an untried miss like Bits, the duchess was the physical embodiment of all that transpired behind closed bedroom doors. She exuded grace with every breath and was the type of beautiful one couldn’t ignore.
And Ezra h
ad once been set to marry her.
Lily quickly snatched this new batch of weeds out of the ground and held it before her like a great prize. "Oh yes. They were quite in love, too. Ezra was absolutely mad about her, and she adored him as well. But madness and adoration can only go so far in the face of a love struck Oberon. I mean, can you really blame her for falling for Sidhe? He's so..." Lily held her hands out to the side of her shoulders and made a fearsome face. "Much. You know what I mean?"
She did. The Duke of Sidhe was large, imposing, fearsome, powerful, and very much a man. However, he was not Ezra.
How could the Duchess of Sidhe discard Ezra and the promise she had made to him so easily?
It would be rather easy for Bits to hate the other woman.
”Sometimes I hate her," Lily said, mirroring Bits's own thoughts. "I know it's uncharitable of me, but I cannot help but think if she hadn't broken her engagement to Ezra, if they'd been married like they were supposed to be, Ezra wouldn't be so alone. He would have had someone to lean on after the accident. He would have had someone to help him through all the things that came after."
Lily was no longer looking for weeds, and Bits wasn't even pretending to not hang on her every word.
"The accident?" she asked.
Lily glanced at the bottom of her skirt where shoes should have been peeping out from below the hem. "I wasn't always like this, you know. I once had the same legs, feet, hopes, and dreams as any other girl."
"But that was long ago, was it not? Were you not a child when you lost your legs?"
Lily's laugh was a hollow sound. "A girl, yes, but not so very long ago. Five years. Less than, really."
Four years. Lily would have been seventeen.
"What do you know of my childhood?" Lily asked, wheeling herself closer to the spot where Bits sat.
Bits tried to recall all that Ezra had told her. "Your mother was skilled with plants, just as you are. You traveled a great deal, and she died when you were young."
"Yes," Lily nodded. "I don't remember her very well. Ezra said it's for the best, and I suppose I'll have to trust him." She folded her hands in her lap and stared off into the distance. "I do remember being scared. The landlord had kicked us out the day after she died, and we had nowhere to go. Ezra took us to the house of some noble person. I remember steps as dark as night and as big as I was. The foyer was so bright I thought I may never be able to see in the dark again." Her eyes blinked as if against that long ago light.
"Ezra had demanded to talk to the master of the house, said he owed us something, but we were turned out. We'd taken as much of mother's jewelry as we could carry, and Ezra sold several pieces of it to get us passage here, to Breena Manor. Mother had worked on the Oberon's gardens, and we had long ago formed a friendship with Jack and Alice.
"I don't know what Ezra expected the former Oberon to do, but he was surprised when the old man offered to put us in school. He sent Ezra off to Eaton, where he could keep an eye on Jack and help his marks improve, and Rose and I were shipped off to Ramsey House."
"Rose?"
One corner of Lily's mouth pulled up. "My sister. My twin."
Bits looked beyond Lily to the house where somewhere a Sally Maid was going about the mundane tasks it had been assigned. She did not like where this story was going, but there was no way she could stop Lily from telling it now.
"What do you know of Ramsey House?" Lily asked.
Bits pulled her attention back to the sister who was sitting before her.
"I know it was a finishing school for Touched girls. Almost all the Touched who serve in houses of quality attended there. I heard that it burned some years back."
Lily nodded. "Yes, that is it. We were sent there with Alice. Several households had expressed interest in acquiring Rose and me, even a few ducal ones. Touched twins are quite rare, you know, and capable of unique and interesting magic. But we were never intended to work anywhere but Breena Manor. Our charge was much the same as Ezra's. We were to take care Alice, take the blame for her misdeeds, do her lessons for her when she could not bother with them herself, and when we were done, we would be able to return to posh, comfortable positions within the Sidhe staff."
"That is very generous," Bits said. She'd seen how Breena Manor was ran. The staff was quite comfortable in their roles, even the lowest of the footmen were quite content. If Lily was promised a posh, comfortable position, then her future would have been a happy one filled with a minimal amount of work and every comfort and ounce of protection the Duke of Sidhe could offer. "What happened?"
"It was nearing Christmas. Rose, Alice, and I were in our last year. We shared a room with Cora Yates. Alice was supposed to have had a room of her own, but she grew lonesome and the three of us helped move her bed into our room.
"It was either late night or very early morning. I'm still not sure which. I only know I woke up to the sounds of screams." The color had bled from her face, making her look like a ghost telling the story of her own demise. "Before I could even determine where the screams were coming from, the door was kicked open. They wore dark clothes and dominos. I can't even remember how many of them there were. Sometimes I think it was only two, and others I believe it was as many as five."
Bits’s heart pounded painfully against her chest as if she too was in that room so many nights ago.
"We didn't know what was happening, but Rose and I knew our job. We were to keep Alice safe at all costs. So we did what we had to do."
"What was that?"
"We came out of our beds chanting. Looking back, we should have slept in the same bed. When Alice decided to move in with us, it would have made more sense for Rose and me to share a bed and let Alice have the other. Four beds made the room much too crowded.
"If we could have made it to one another, it would have been okay. I still believe that. But our beds were too far apart, and I think the masked men must have been warned about us. They attacked before we could clasp hands and magnify our power. But still, our distraction gave Alice and Cora enough time to escape."
"The men, the ones in the masks, they took your legs?" Bits could not imagine how they could have done it, nor why.
"No," Lily said, "the fire our uncompleted spell caused did that. Ezra found me the next morning in the rubble, my legs pinned beneath a heavy beam. If it had not been for my brother and his ability to heal..." She took a deep breath and tried for a smile. "There are some things worse than losing one’s legs."
"And Rose?" Bits thought she understood, but it wasn't adding up. Not exactly.
"Ezra had thought her dead, buried somewhere beneath the charred remains of the school, but my sister and I have always had a special bond. We are two parts of a single whole, and so, just as I knew my legs were no longer a part of me, I knew Rose still was. It took us weeks to find her, and when we did, it was not how we expected."
Rose, the Sally Maid, came out of the door and into the garden, stopping beside her sister’s chair. Lily reached up and clasped one mechanical hand in her own.
"Jack was the Oberon by then, and he purchased Rose from the shop for us. Ezra says that some day he will find the funds to pay him back, but Sidhe insists it was a debt he owed us for saving Alice from the same fate."
Finally, it all made sense. Finally, Bits was able to reconcile the Ezra Nash she knew with the man who owned a Sally Maid.
"How much of your sister remains?" It was the question her father had asked of Mr. Filmore, the question he was going to put before the Queen. When one removed a heart, how much of the soul remained within?
"Everything but the body," Lily said. "A spell compels her to do as ordered, and the lack of a moving mouth or lungs makes her unable to talk, but she remains connected to me. We're able to talk without speaking, and I can assure you, this is my sister. Every memory. Every emotion. Every part that makes Rose Rose is trapped inside this clockwork monstrosity. "
Bits felt as if the bacon she'd enjoyed for breakfast might make a reappear
ance in Lily's carefully sculpted shrubbery.
"Were any other girls taken that night?"
"Seven," Lily said. "Or at least, we think it was seven. There is no way of knowing who was taken and who might have perished in the fire."
"So seven Sally Maids carry the hearts of Touched girls."
Lily's face, which was normally so sunny, clouded over. "No. All of them."
"All of them?" Bits wasn't following.
"All the Sally Maids contain the heart of a Touched. The spell to bind the spirit to the metal and power the Sally Maid's ability to understand and follow direction can only be performed on the Touched. Rose discovered their secret after her transformation and before being placed in the shop."
The porcelain face of every Sally Maid Bits had ever seen flashed through her mind.
"But where do they get them all? Surely they're not stealing them all out of boarding schools. We would have heard something. There would have been a public outcry."
"Would there have been?" Lily cocked a single eyebrow. "Would the people or papers of London cared about the fate of a bunch of servants? The fate of the Touched?"
Bits wanted to deny the accusation, but she knew it was pointless. Lily was right. As long as they were enjoying their luxuries, the upperclass could not have cared less about what was happening to the Touched population.
"I am sorry," Bits said as if she had somehow been a party to what had happened. Maybe in a way, she had. For all of her dislike of the use of Sally Maids, had she ever truly done anything? Had she attempted to find out more about how they were being manufactured or tried to stop their production? "I am so sorry, Lily. And Rose, if I could, I would reverse what they've done to you."
How horrible it must be to have knowledge of everything going on around you but no way to interact with the world other than to bring tea and sweep floors. The pain couldn't be any less for Lily, who not only had to deal with the loss of her legs, but also the burden of surviving where her sister had not.
A Dance Like Flame (Of Magic & Machine Book 1) Page 15
