The Duke of Snow and Apples (22 page)

Moreover, he kept looking at Charlotte as he read it, instead of Snowmont, his unsettling green eyes rarely blinking. Charlotte felt strangely heavy whenever he looked at her, as if his gaze sought to confine her, but not in a lecher’s glance. His look spoke nothing of passion or lust—but of cold possession. As if he wanted to eat her up, in the literal rather than metaphorical sense.

To quiet her unease, Charlotte tried to focus on her lines, but she no longer found the story of a gentlewoman in love with a ratcatcher as hilarious as everyone else. She tripped over the line where Fiona said, “The scratchiest pallet of straw became a featherbed/ because that’s where her lover laid his head.”

Did she love Frederick enough to live in a garret with him? She had no idea—her experience of the world had never strayed above the third floor and below the first. Her parents possessed sufficient means without ostentatious wealth. While the luxuries of the upper Pure Blooded were beyond her, she’d never been in want.

A glance toward Sylvia reminded her that she wasn’t exactly starving from the lack of her sister’s good opinion, but could she manage if she lost her father’s respect? Her stepmother? Society?

If anyone other than Sylvia—whose own reputation depended, in part, on Charlotte’s—had caught her with Frederick, she could very well have lost everything she’d ever known, lose everything this Fiona character willfully threw away with a three-paragraph long speech detailing her husband’s fair features and muscular thighs.

Am I only making a fool of myself? Chasing dreams that can only come true in melodramatic comedies? After all my attempts to be graceful and ladylike, am I hopelessly ridiculous at heart?

The questions careening through her mind only heightened her desire to have Frederick again. The world, and all of its worries, rules, and disapproving voices ground to a halt when he looked at her with those eyes deep enough to fall into. Around him, she could think for herself, without worrying about what Sylvia or Stepmama might think. She could think, and pin down the fevered spinning of her brain to extract the answer she needed.

Am I in love? Or am I ridiculous?

Charlotte closed her book with a dry clap. “I hope you’ll excuse me. I feel suddenly unwell. I don’t think I’ve completely recovered from last night.”

“You would hardly be the first to regret indulgences made last night,” said Sylvia, a fine dusting of sugar over venom.

Charlotte surprised her sibling by nodding. “Too true. Perhaps you would join me later this afternoon to go over the rest of my lines with me?”

Her reconciliatory tone brought Sylvia short. She hesitated, her relief at being denied a public confrontation warring with natural wariness.

Back in her chambers, Charlotte summoned Frederick with the bell-pull, and sat down by the fire to wait. She fiddled with a listless scrap of embroidery she’d started in a failed bid to appeal to the domestically minded gentlemen at the house party. She’d never liked embroidering—why had she thought attracting a man who liked it was a splendid idea? She looked up from her musings to discover how far the minute hands on the mantel-clock had traveled. She spoke Frederick’s name and pulled the rope again.

She stared at the gold-and-green braid of the bell-pull with growing distaste. How easy it was to call Frederick to her side, like a dog, with that wretched bell on his shoulder jangling as shrilly as a nagging fishwife. There had to be a better way, a more dignified way, to request a meeting. Notes could be intercepted, however. Whispers could be overheard. Hand signals spotted and remarked upon. Any attention at all would spell dismissal for Frederick, which was worse than the simple loss of dignity.

Charlotte started, glanced at the clock again.
That long, already?
Maybe Frederick was truly ill, but struggling through the day anyway, the bell on his shoulder ringing and ringing…

A soft knock at the door.

“C-come in,” Charlotte said.
Fifteen minutes all told
, looking at the clock a third time.
Fifteen minutes to fly completely to pieces
.

Frederick entered, crisp and neat in his gold braid and blue velvet. “You rang.”

Charlotte smiled, trapping her frantic, instinctive apology behind her teeth. “I’m glad to see you.”
Could I be more inane?

“I come when I’m called.”

Charlotte bit back a retort when she realized she hadn’t been insulted, not really. The bare neutrality of his voice only felt like a dash of cold water in comparison. “I didn’t mean to…that is, I just…I wanted to see you.” She scanned his face, looking for some indication of annoyance or amusement, pleasure or pain. His face remained as lovely and unresponsive as a statue’s.

“I wanted to see you, as well,” he said, with a posture that revealed nothing of wanting, or desiring, or anything stronger than gravity.

“I’ve insulted you.”

“No. You haven’t done anything.” A sharpness in his tone, a flicker of heat. A small victory for Charlotte. “I wanted to come here. We do need to talk. I’ve thought about this at some length, and I came to say that this attachment we’ve formed, it needs to end.”

He might have hesitated before the word
attachment
. Perhaps he blinked more quickly as he said it.
Maybe. Perhaps. Could be
. Charlotte raked her eyes across his figure, down his face, past his waistcoat, down to the shiny buckles on his pumps, sifting for some hint of emotion, some small sparkling fragment of life that could give meaning to the meaningless words he said.

Charlotte tried to speak, but found her mouth too dry, her tongue too thick. At last, she managed, “What have I done?”

“You haven’t done anything,” he said. “But we were caught last night, and almost caught a dozen times before that. It’s better for both of us if we stop, before it ends badly.”

“You can’t. You’re not. You’re not ending this, not now!” Belatedly, Charlotte realized she was yelling.
Good. Someone
in this room needed to yell, needed to exhibit something other than cool efficiency.

“I had hoped we would both be able to see the necessity of this,” said Frederick, his eyes pretty chips of doll-glass. “How long did you think we could last?” He didn’t raise his voice, or betray any inflection. A calm voice. A governess’s voice. A parent’s voice. A voice that made Charlotte want to stomp and shriek and hit something.

What right did he have to be so reasonable? So insufferably realistic? She had nowhere to run, nothing to do but shake from head to foot with the effort of keeping herself from flying apart.

“I don’t want you to go,” she said. Her pride cost her nothing. She could throw it away if need be. “I don’t care that you’re a footman.”

“Your sister cares. Your great-aunt would care. The world would care. It’s not all about you, and what you want,” he said, as soft and bland as condolences from a distant relative. “I should go.” He took a step back and bowed.

“I love you,” she blurted.

Frederick stiffened halfway up. A muscle twitched in his jaw. He straightened without a word, not looking at her.

“You shouldn’t be surprised, you can see everything about me. Everything I hid from everyone else. And don’t imagine I don’t know who you are, too, beneath the cold walls you hide behind. You’re as ridiculous as I am, if not more so. I would love that about you even if I lived in an attic. Or sewed handkerchiefs for coppers. I could. Lots of gentlewomen weave charms for pin money. I would, I…”

“You want, you would, you love,” Frederick snapped in a voice like ice breaking. “You don’t seem to factor what
I
want into your plans.”

Charlotte flinched, as if beneath the snow she’d discovered a wall of stone.

“You didn’t even consider that, did you? That I might have a mind of my own. Desires of my own. I’ve always just been a footman to you. A pet. Oh, but such a
beloved
pet.”

Charlotte stared at the carpet, mouth dry again. Everything about her dry and brittle as kindling.
I am in love, and I am ridiculous
. A moth fluttering toward a candle was only consumed with how beautiful the light was. It never remembered that, to the candle, it was only a dull, drab moth. What, after all, could she offer Frederick? What a silly, pampered wife she’d make, a wife who danced at the pleasure of an expensive carpet and lost her head during mud hunts. She couldn’t even manage to satisfy as a woman of her own class. What hope had she with underfolk?

“I came here to end this, because I wanted to end this,” Frederick said. “If ever you lo—cared for me as a man, then you’ll let me end this while I still have some self-respect. In time, I hope you’ll see I made the right choice.” His words struck each other like flint on steel, and the little sparks settled into Charlotte’s dust-dry heart and set it alight.

“Charlotte?”

“Get out.” A whisper was all she could manage. The burning inside her sucked up all the air.

“Yes, miss.”

Without lifting her head, she watched Frederick’s polished pumps turn around and walk out the door. The rising flames inside the parched wreckage of her heart ate and ate with a growing roar, burning her up, leaving nothing but ash.

She waited some minutes, then shuffled to the door. She didn’t want to stay, but she had nowhere to go. It hurt too much, it burned too much. Everything was just
too much
. Her feet took her down a flight of stairs, through a stone corridor, and out a side door—on which side of the house, she knew not. She didn’t care. She stepped outside, into an abandoned garden of lifeless hedgerows and nude statues temporarily clothed in snow, and let the cold wind hit her full in the face. Melted snow seeped into the soles of her thin indoor slippers.

Even as her skin stiffened and chafed in the wind, humiliation and heartbreak raged through her like a fever. What had she been to him, this whole time? A task to complete? An order to fulfill? Another distasteful aspect of a footman’s position?

“Miss Charlotte, you shouldn’t be out here.” She turned at the sound, and caught a glimpse of a square, imposing face before the piercing green of his eyes overwhelmed her.

“You’ll catch a chill,” said Sir Bertram. He reached out and cupped her chin so she couldn’t look away. His eyes widened, and Charlotte experienced the queer sensation of falling even though the damp ground remained firmly beneath her feet.

One moment, her entire world was green—the next it was gray.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“What do you think of this one?” Aunt Hildy draped the dress over Charlotte’s front. It was a gay little peasant costume, with a bodice that laced up the front over white puffed sleeves. The morning light streaming in through the windows of the viscountess’s dressing-room snagged, sparkling, on the beadwork down the front. “Fiona would wear this to escape with her ratcatcher, wouldn’t she?”

Charlotte had no idea what a woman would wear to be with her lowerclass lover. The dress provided no understandable advantage. The heavy skirts, fancifully embroidered in folk designs, would make running difficult, and she imagined speed to be of importance in an elopement.

She looked up to find Aunt Hildy and Sylvia staring at her, waiting for a response. Elopements in general seemed confusing, illogical things. A small part of her gave a twinge of remembrance, that there might be some
other
reason for elopements and useless beadwork and heavy peasant skirts, but an examination of her mind revealed nothing but smooth, featureless walls of calm. What other reasons could there be?

“It’ll suit as well as any other,” she said. She had no desire to try on the dress that overcame the desire to continue wearing what she already wore, but at the same time no harm could come from acceding to her great-aunt’s request. To refuse seemed unnecessary, a wrinkle in the calm, and to remain calm seemed more reasonable than any other option.

“Excellent,” said Lady Balrumple, although her smile faltered for an instant. “However, I do have an exceedingly pretty red velvet cloak tucked away somewhere that, paired with my garnet brooch, would look very mysterious. Like you were running away.”

Manners dictated that Charlotte should ruminate over her choice, but any attempt to consider the worth of a bright red cloak over an over-decorated peasant dress ran up against those smooth gray walls again. They seemed to surround the perimeters of her thoughts on all sides. Perhaps what Aunt Hildy wanted was on the other side. Maybe Charlotte wouldn’t like what was on the other side. It seemed easiest to leave the walls in place.

She allowed herself a pause, then said, “I’m sure the gown will be fine. No need to trouble yourself, Aunt Hildy.”

That brought out the little not-quite-frown in Lady Balrumple again, but this time Charlotte didn’t waste too much time thinking about it. Aunt Hildy’s mind was her own business, and trying to decipher it seemed to Charlotte to be a fruitless and exhausting endeavor.

In truth, the peasant gown suited her admirably well, with a few alterations by Lamonte. She wore it while practicing her lines with Snowmont in the early afternoon, and in truth the impracticality of the skirts never came up since she and Snowmont did not actually elope, but only pretended to.

She remembered that, a few days ago, the duke’s presence had troubled her, though she could no longer recall why, for she found him relatively pleasant now. He did not disturb her with questions or requests she had no answer for, or expect anything of her that took place outside the smoothness in her mind. Their conversations proceeded with a swift, unblemished ease that Charlotte much preferred over the strangeness she encountered with everyone else.

Sylvia remarked upon it after the rehearsal, as they refreshed themselves with tea by the large window in the green drawing-room. “I notice you and His Grace got along well today. He seemed particularly interested in your conversation.”

Charlotte noticed no such thing, but saw no reason to dispute Sylvia’s opinion. “I find his company quite pleasurable.”

“I’m glad to see you’re taking my advice so much to heart,” Sylvia said. “He could make you a very fine husband.”

Snowmont would be able to provide for her, that much was true. As a duke, one couldn’t reach any higher socially unless one married into the Royal family, which was an unlikely scenario in Charlotte’s case.

“I cannot come up with a reason not to wed him, should he ask,” Charlotte said.

Sylvia lowered her voice. “Not even for a footman?”

Frederick
. Charlotte found it—a notch, a crack, a rough patch across the smooth walls of her mind. The gray calm around her was so familiar, she knew nothing of this flaw or the roiling emotions threatening behind it. The calm was easier, it didn’t challenge or threaten, and some instinct that called from beyond the walls, sang that she wouldn’t like what she found beyond them. Not at all.

“His Grace is infinitely preferable to a footman,” Charlotte said. “In all ways, His Grace is a splendid match. Far higher than Mr. Peever.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” said Sylvia, but her face dimpled, as if she found Charlotte’s statement amusing, “or you might tempt me into stealing your suitor away.”

“Once wasn’t enough?” said Charlotte, mildly curious.

Sylvia’s features froze halfway open. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Charlotte wondered why Sylvia seemed so surprised. “I only meant that you courted Mr. Peever at the same time he courted me.” She paused. “I suppose ‘winning him’ is more accurate than ‘stealing’ him.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Sylvia’s hand shook, causing her teacup to rattle against its saucer. Charlotte kept her own hands steady, not wanting to spill as she sipped.

“Oh? Well, at one point I thought he did.” She struggled to remember, but the gray walls around her mind made interpreting her memories somewhat difficult, as if shaded with a veil. “I mean, he was very polite to me, and asked me to dance, and took me on outings, which was more than any other gentleman in Glenson did. He never even looked at any of the other village girls. Besides, I always thought you would tell me when you developed an attachment.”

Sylvia’s mouth opened and closed without saying a word, looking a great deal like a trout. Charlotte sensed Sylvia wouldn’t appreciate being apprised of the resemblance.

“So you…you thought…”

“I thought he would propose to me,” Charlotte said, puzzled Sylvia would demand more information about an event that clearly troubled her. “I remember standing there at Lady Gershwin’s ball, in the pink dress that was too small at the waist, expecting him to ask me, and then he asked you. I think I was terribly surprised, although looking back on it I can’t imagine why. You’ve always been the prettier one, and as the eldest you’ll inherit Papa’s estate. It makes perfect sense why he would ask you instead.”

Sylvia finally regained enough sense to set her teacup down on the side table before it clattered onto the carpet. “You…were hurt?”

“Hurt?” Charlotte rolled the word around on her tongue, but could find no corresponding feeling amidst the gray. “I might have been. I remember being. It all seems so long ago, and besides, as you’ve said, a duke is a far better catch than a mere gentleman. If you do try for the duke, I fear I might be put out with you, although I won’t fault your reasoning.”

“Stop it,” she hissed.

“Stop what?”

“Sarcasm makes you ugly,” Sylvia said. Her hands balled into fists. “It’s ugly and it’s cruel. How can you just sit there and talk to me like that?”

“Like what?” Charlotte hadn’t intended to be sarcastic.

“You sit there, with your cold little voice, saying that you don’t care that I didn’t…that I never…” She resumed her earlier imitation of a landed fish, her face crumpling inch by inch. “How can you t-tell me that you feel nothing at all? No anger? No h-hatred? Ever since I arrived at Charmant Park, that’s what it’s been. And now…?” Her face drooped, like a marzipan subtlety in the rain.

“Now?”

“Now you c-can’t even be angry w-with me?”

Charlotte drew her thoughts inward.
Rage. Disappointment. Humiliation
. She searched for those sentiments, for she remembered them, albeit dimly. Her forays met only smooth, cool walls, too slick to climb, too hard to break. Was it such a bad thing after all? For once, the rampaging thoughts in her head were quiet.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think I can.”

Under the weight of some emotion Charlotte could no longer feel, Sylvia’s face lost its last inch and dissolved into tears. She rose from her chair so quickly it jarred into the table, oversetting her teacup and spilling its last few drops after all. While Charlotte spared some thought over her sister’s dramatic exit from the room, she righted the teacup as soon as she left.

Such a waste.

…

During the ten years Frederick had spent in the Seven Dowagers’ employ, he’d often shored up the walls of his cold place with thoughts of snow. Glaciers. Icebergs jutting out of the water like enormous teeth. A thousand mornings waking up to a chilled garret and a washbasin rimed with ice.

However, after Charlotte had told him she loved him, only the memory of the Basca river had kept him from cracking like an eggshell beneath the weight of her misery. Snowdrifts and frost were cold in theory, but the Basca river was a cold of personal experience.

She loved him.

He grew up around the Basca—it sprang down from the northern mountains of God’s Wall and carved a silver line around the eastern boundary of Snowmont before cutting into the thick Whitewood Forest to the south. He fished its waters in the fall, and splashed in its shallows in the summer.

She loved him.

His mother often accompanied him to the river on his fishing trips. Grubs would bring a blanket for her to sit on, and she’d read in the sun in her drab black gowns, still in perpetual mourning for her husband. Frederick never knew his father as anything but the reason they lived in the country, tucked away from reminders of loss. He always tried to make his mother laugh, instead, coaxing sunrises of gold and purple out of the storm cloud hues of her grief. Whenever he smiled, shades of pink and cyan and orange would bloom, and thus a little boy knew that his mother loved him.

Charlotte loved him.

Lady Alderley’s carriage struck a pothole as it rattled back toward Charmant Park after a morning spent making calls, and Frederick tightened his grip on the footboard at the back to keep from tumbling off face-first. The metal railing bit into the bare palms of his hands, but he welcomed the small pain.

Charlotte loved him
. He clenched his teeth together so hard he feared his jaw might crack. Why had she said it? Didn’t she know what happened to Pure Blooded women who loved servants? Didn’t she know what happened to people who loved
him
?

He dug his chin into his chest to shield his face better from the hard scrape of the wind. How could she know? He’d never told anyone. He’d thought hiding himself away, escaping the Entailment, would have been enough. Not nearly.

Then Sir Bertram arrived. A strange man, dark and quiet, seemingly unperturbed by life, except for a tendency to flinch when sparrows fought outside the windows in spring. The first day he came to officially court the duchess, he shook Frederick’s hand and stared him straight in the eye. Perhaps it was meant as a show of respect, but his glance sent spiders of discomfort and unease crawling down Frederick’s neck.

Sir Bertram proposed to his mother on the Basca. He rented a tenant’s boat for the occasion, asking for the dowager duchess of Snowmont’s hand amidst the burble of water and the lazy chiming of undines, while eleven-year-old Frederick waited on the bank, confused and uncertain exactly what to think of him.

Of course Frederick wanted his mother to be happy, but until then the idea of marriage had only been an idea. He’d grown used to living in a world of two, with servants and tenants and villagers spinning in their proper orbits but never coming close to the core he and his mother inhabited.

He closed his world of colors to Sir Bertram. He didn’t want to see, didn’t want to care whether his new stepfather was annoyed or haughty or obsequious. At the same time he wanted his special, unnamed magic to remain a secret only he and his mother knew, one last thread that bound the two of them alone. He didn’t want to compete with some strange man for his mother’s affections. That was when the resentment started building in his heart, the rage and petulance that ended up revealing the darker side of his magic.

Charlotte loved him. He swayed with the carriage, fighting to keep his seat along roads grown uneven with mud and ice.
Fool. More fool, me.

The ordinary tempers of an eleven-year-old seemed an insignificant enough way to revenge himself upon those who turned away from him. He stopped asking his mother to accompany him to the Basca. Sir Bertram was always around her now, his hand on her arm, staring at Frederick as if he was some unsolvable equation, so he couldn’t invite his mother without inviting him as well.

Footmen started bringing him the salt at dinner, for he chose to sit at the other end of the long mahogany table from his mother. She and Sir Bertram sat together, their heads drawn close, staring into each other’s eyes.

Eventually, his mother stopped asking to accompany him to the Basca. She left him alone at the enormous dining-room table and took her meals in a private parlor with his stepfather. She stopped reading to him from the classics of Belarch, or teaching him the easier spells in Benine and Kelok, and started talking about sending him away to school.

When he first saw the glimpse of Gray about his mother’s features, he thought it his imagination, or some new heart’s hue that his mind hadn’t found an answer for. Boredom, perhaps, or contempt. Some indication that she was intentionally raising the stakes in their petty emotional war.

Suddenly, the game, the revenge, didn’t seem so satisfying to twelve-year-old Frederick. He decided to endure Sir Bertram’s constant presence to bring new japes and firework-charms and cheeping bell-frogs from the Basca to cheer his mother, to repair the rift he’d caused, but her sunrise never rose for him again. Despite everything he tried, nothing seemed to get through to her.

His fault. He tightened his grip on the carriage, letting the cold wind wash over him.

One afternoon, in frustration, he stormed into her parlor and tore the book she was reading from her listless grip.