The Changeling Bride (33 page)

“Saw. You were crying.” He tilted his head curiously, looking at her.

“Yes, I was. I’m very unhappy.”

“Not to cry. My job. Make you happy.”

“Your job? Why?”

“Condition. You happy here must be.”

So there was an unwritten contract that was not being fulfilled? Her heart beat a little faster. “It’s not working out that way. My life here is miserable. Henry’s going to have me locked up in a room with only a tiny window, and he’s going to leave me there for years, because he thinks I’m crazy. Does that sound happy to you?”

The fairy’s eyes widened in alarm. “Oh, no! You to
be happy!” He began to shift from side to side in his squatting position, bouncing on his feet in distress. “What to do? What to do?”

“Are there others watching me?”

“My job. Easy job, easy, easy, easy. No trouble, no crying, no fighting.”

Elle snorted. “Where do you get your ideas about human relationships? They’re never easy.”

“No? Maybe this one work?” He stopped his rocking, looking hopeful.

“No, this is an especially bad relationship. Very, very bad. There is no hope for it. None.”

“Ooh,” he crooned in distress. “How to fix?”

She took a step forward. “Take me back home.”

“No, no, no. Too hard start over, make them angry.”

“Make who angry?”

He waved his hand in the air behind him. “Others. Too hard to find you. You fit.”

“No, I don’t fit. I need to go home.” She took another step towards him.

“Think, think, think.” He pounded the heels of his delicate hands against his forehead.

“Take me home.”

“No, must stay.”

She lunged, grabbing him by the arms. His bones felt fragile beneath her hands, and his weight was insubstantial as she hauled him off the windowsill. Tatiana, on cue, chose that moment to wake up, and stood on the sofa, her head appearing over its back. She gave a hearty woof.

The fairy seemed to shrivel into himself at the sound. He shook in her hands. Feeling both heartless and grimly determined, she dragged him over to the sofa.

“Tatia! Kitty cat! Where’s the kitty cat!” she asked, knowing the reaction she would get.

Tatiana fell into a frenzy of barking and growling, leaping off and on the sofa. It was a spectacular display
of sham ferocity. The fairy was limp with fright.

“I have to go home,” Elle said into his ear. “If you won’t take me, I see no reason not to make Tatiana eat you.”

His hands fumbled at his waist, and then gold dust flew into her face.

“Release me!” the fairy ordered.

Elle tightened her grip on his arms and laughed with delighted malice. “I put pearlwort in the milk,” she said, and snatched the little pouch of powder away from him. He was small enough that she could pin him against her with one arm. “You can do nothing against me.”

She held the pouch out of his reach, then tilted it upside down, shaking. A fine shower of gold dust sprinkled out. “Children shouldn’t have such toys,” she said sourly. “They might hurt someone. Tell me your name.”

“Noooo!”

“Your name, fairy boy.”

He shook his head in wild denial.

“Kitty cat! Where’s the kitty cat!”

Tatiana indulged in another cat-killing frenzy, topping it off by jumping upon the fairy and snapping her jaws inches from his nose.

He screeched in terror.

“Good girl, Tatia. What a good dog.” Tatiana gave a low growl of happiness and wagged her tail, panting moist dog breath on the fairy’s face. “Now, my little friend, what is your name? Or would you like me to dress you in scraps of iron? I hear fairies love iron.”

The fairy sobbed. Elle shook him. “Your name?”

“Mossbottom.”

“Thank you, Mossbottom. Now how do we get home? You’re going to take me.”

He nodded weakly. Elle knew he could do nothing else. By revealing his name to her he had become her slave for as long as she held him.

Mossbottom feebly gestured out the window. “Closest hill close enough.”

“Then let’s to it.” With the powder pouch in one hand she dragged Mossbottom over to the open window and looked out. It was only about four feet from the sill to the ground. She was about to climb onto the sill when she paused.

She looked down at the wedding ring on her hand, which had looked to her like a golden shackle such a brief time before. She hadn’t expected freedom. There was a catch in her heart at the thought of removing it. Doing so meant the end of possibilities.

The tears in her eyes surprised her, as she pinned Mossbottom to the sill with her hip and pried the ring from her finger. Her hand shook as she gently set it beside the bridal necklace. When she reached home, Henry would be two centuries dead. All this would be as a dream, and equally as beyond reach.

She shut her mind to the thought. This was her only chance, and if she hesitated, it would be lost.

“Up we go, Mossbottom.” She hauled him with her onto the sill, and together they dropped to the ground on the other side. Tatiana leapt onto the wide sill, looking after them, whining and pacing. Elle began to walk away with the forlorn fairy, and fearful of being left behind, Tatiana jumped the short distance and joined them.

The gardens at this side of the house had not yet been touched by the new complement of gardeners. The grass was tall and lush, the shrubberies overgrown. Small burrs caught in Elle’s skirt, and her shoes quickly grew damp. Small insects buzzed and whirred in the warm air.

She was sweating by the time they had left the grounds and crossed the distance to the first low hill. They climbed to its summit, which was no great height, but upon turning and looking back Elle had a glorious view of Brookhaven, the lake, and the farmland that stretched in gently rolling folds to the near horizon. Sunlight glittered
on the lake. The small windows in the cupola-topped towers of the house reflected light like diamonds in a red stone crown.

This could have been her home. Henry, with his mask of self-control and his goodness and warmth underneath, could have been her husband. If she had been Eleanor Moore, she could have been happy here.

She turned her back on the view and gave Mossbottom an unkind jerk of his arm. “What now? And don’t try to fool me.” Her voice was harsh with threatening tears. “Tatiana will find you if you do, and I don’t have to tell you what it’s like to be attacked by a vicious hunting dog, do I?”

“Thought you were nice,” Mossbottom blubbered. “But not!”

“That’s right, I’m not. Women are dangerous when they don’t have what they want, and I am a very, very unsatisfied woman right now.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Henry sealed the letter to his longtime friend Dr. Joseph Samuelson. He watched the wax cool from glistening red, bright and shiny like blood, to matte hardness. He lifted the letter, weighing it in his hand, feeling a weight far heavier than paper and ink. In a sudden fury of motion he tore it in half, then again, and again, until it was nothing but scattered confetti and broken wax.

His head dropped down into his hands, and he felt a tightness in his chest that he had not felt since he had been a boy. The unfamiliar, unwelcome sting of tears came to his eyes, and he held his breath against the pain that filled him.

He did not know when or how it had happened, but he had fallen in love with his wife. There was no rhyme or reason to it, only the truth that held him tightly in its grip. He could not send her away, or put her under the care of physicians who would be blind to the magic of who she was. He loved her, and she would stay with him
here at Brookhaven. It was her home. Their home.

A weight slid from his heart with the decision. He had to tell her. He scooped the fragments of the letter into his hand and tossed them in the grate as he left.

He jogged up the stairs and down the hall to her room. As he approached her door, he could hear pounding from within, and ripping and tearing. He threw open the door, and then rushed through her bedroom to the source of the noise. He stopped short at the entrance to her dressing room.

Workmen were tearing down the wall that divided Elle’s dressing room from his own, and debris was scattered across the floor. Several crates were stacked against the back wall, one of which was open, revealing a porcelain toilet such as he had seen in the houses of a few wealthy friends in London.

One by one the workmen stopped what they were doing, their eyes shifting nervously to each other, and then seeking out Lawrence, who at the silence had looked up from the plans he was studying.

“Oh, dear me, Henry.” He fumbled with the papers, then rushed to Henry, trying both to shoo him away and somehow hide the room behind him at the same time. “You were not supposed to see this. Not yet, anyway. It was to be a surprise, when it all was finished.”

“It will still be a surprise. I have no idea of what is going on here.”

Lawrence smiled. “Your wife will be so glad to hear it. A remarkable lady, if I may say so. I would not have liked to disappoint her.”

Henry let Lawrence back him from the dressing room and could not find the heart to be offended when, with a little shrug of apology, Lawrence shut the door in his face. So this was what Elle and Lawrence had been whispering about for weeks: a flushing commode. And he had accused her of infidelity. Guilt rushed through him.

He was an idiot, blinded by his own preconceived beliefs.
He had not once given her a fair hearing. He was as bad as Freddie, condemning her on speculation. No, he was worse than Freddie. He had had several weeks to know her and to know that she was honorable.

He felt the firm shell of logic over his heart, already cracked by love, split apart and fall away under the force of the possibilities that now appeared. Elle
was
different from her sister, and not just in temperament. She spoke differently, she knew vastly different things. They could not have grown up in the same house.

Elle did not quite look like—and certainly did not act like—an eighteen-year-old girl. She had a dog no one had seen before the wedding. And he himself had often felt there was something foreign about her.

The night she had run into the woods to talk to the fairies came back to him in stunning clarity. He had avoided thought of that night, ignored the otherworldly even as it was occurring, blanking it all from his mind. He had not wanted to understand, he saw that now. Even when an entire night passed in three sips from a spiced cup, he did not allow himself to believe the truth was other than he made it.

Marianne came into the room and sucked in a loud breath when she saw Henry standing so still in front of the closed door.

“Milord! You gave me a fright, you did.”

He blinked, coming out of the fog of his thoughts, and turned. “Have you seen Elle about?”

“I believe she is in the library, milord.”

He made his way there, his heart beating in his chest, loud with what it had learned. The door latch was cold on his palm as he turned it, the chill stealing up his arm. The usual musty scent of the room was gone, replaced by sweet spring air.

“Elle? I need to talk to you,” he said, coming in and scanning the vacant room. The windows were open, and the open door behind him created a course through which
the breeze rushed, rustling papers and flipping pages of open books on desk tops and chairs. The edges of the open curtains billowed, the room in cool shadows that touched him with an uneasy foreboding.

The sun slipped out from behind a cloud, casting yellow rectangles upon the floor in front of the windows. He came into the room, looking for signs of Elle’s recent presence and saw the empty plates and bowls on the table. The sun sparkled over the necklace that lay there, and he ran to it, scooping it up in his hand, and then saw the ring lying on the dark wood. He felt a cold rush run through him.

A moment later he noticed the fine gold powder on the floorboards, and knelt down on one knee to examine the sparkling substance. He touched the powder with his fingertips and brought it up to his eyes. The skin on his fingertips began to tingle and go numb. “What the hell . . . ?” he muttered under his breath, and quickly brushed the powder off on his breeches.

He stood up. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong. His eyes went back to the traces of food on the dishes. Bread, milk, honey, butter. She had brought similar foodstuffs into the woods with her that night. Any child knew that they were fairy gifts, especially if left on a windowsill.

And any child knew that a fairy wife always returns to the fairies when her husband has done the forbidden—asked her who she really was.

She had left him.

It took only a clear-eyed look at the ground outside the window to see the obvious path she had taken. The tall grass was pushed down in a trail that a simpleton could follow, which was fortunate considering how dense he had been. He put the ring in his jacket pocket and vaulted over the sill, following her trail at a run.

He broke free of the last of the overgrown shrubberies at the edge of the gardens, and got his first clear look up
ahead. There was a hill before him, and a couple hundred yards away, up at the summit, he saw her, and a fresh chill went through him. She was not alone. The figure at her side looked to be a child, dressed in some flimsy garment.

He knew, immediately and illogically, that this was not an ordinary boy. He remembered the gold dust with its odd effect on his skin.

“Elle!” he shouted. “Elle, stop!”

He saw her turn as his voice reached her, her red hair glowing in the sunlight. He could not read her expression from that distance, but she made sudden frantic gestures at the boy. Tatiana trotted toward him until her mistress snapped an order that the dog obeyed, returning to her side.

He sprinted the last hundred yards up the hill. She would not escape him, and she would not be taken from him. He did not know why, but he was certain that the boy had the power to take her from him forever.

“Henry, stop!” Elle commanded as he approached. She was pale, her eyes filled with the sorrow of her soul. He felt sick, knowing at that moment that she had abandoned all hope of him.