Chapter 8
“What was that about?” Maddox asked as he followed me outside.
“Another job for the Witch Committee,” I said, adjusting the strap of my satchel. It was rather heavy now that my entire life had been packed into it.
“But I thought you weren’t a part of that anymore,” Maddox said. “You quit last spring.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t have much of a choice anymore,” I said, pressing my palm against my forehead.
Across the street was the little inn where I took my meals, and also where Mrs. Lewis had sent me to steal soap. Perhaps they had rooms available, at least through the weekend. Luckily, I had enough coin to survive for two days.
“Let’s go to Greenwood Abbey. My horse is at the nearest stable,” Maddox said.
I blinked. “I can’t. I’d be imposing.”
Maddox hooked his thumbs into his coat pockets and shrugged. “You won’t be. We have fifteen unoccupied bedrooms.”
We began walking down the street toward the stable before I could think of anything to say. The stableboy saddled Maddox’s horse, a glossy black gelding, and Maddox led it back out into the street. He mounted with one smooth motion and held his hand out to me.
“You’ve ridden before, right?”
“Only once.” I looked down at my skirts. Two rows of buttons held the front panel in place. I began undoing them.
“What are you doing?” Maddox sputtered, shielding his eyes.
“You’re lucky I’m wearing split skirts,” I said, looking up at him. “Because riding astride behind you in regular skirts would be far more scandalous.”
He muttered something under his breath that I didn’t quite catch. I stuck my tongue out at him, though I was secretly pleased that we were back to our bantering. At least something was back to normal.
Once I had converted my skirt to wide-legged trousers, I settled on the saddle behind him, though it took a few tries. The sky was overcast and gray. Luckily there were only a few passersby about—the fewer people to witness this, the better.
“Alright. Hang on,” Maddox said.
I gingerly held onto his shoulders, then we broke into a canter.
The motion nearly threw me to the pavement. I lurched forward and wrapped my arms around Maddox’s waist. He smelled faintly of straw and honeydew. I thought I heard him chuckle, but I couldn’t tell with the wind rushing past my ears and the clip-clopping of hooves on cobblestone.
***
GREENWOOD ABBEY WAS far draftier than Mrs. Lewis’s building, though it was probably due to the gaping holes in the stone wall where windows ought to be.
“We’re renovating,” Maddox explained as we climbed up a winding stairway, his voice echoing in the cavernous stairwell. “Narcissa wanted bigger windows.”
I shivered as a gust of wind blew in. “I thought she moved into the palace in the summer.”
“She comes back from time to time,” Maddox said. “Besides, she can’t have all nine of her cats in the palace for fear of gossip, so three of them stay here.”
“Like six cats would be any better for gossip,” I said, raising my brows as a cacophony of meows sounded from the chamber above.
When we reached the top of the stairs, Maddox knelt to greet three kittens, one a gray tabby, and the other two black as night. “Meet Sol, Stormi, and Dima,” he said, pointing to each one respectively. “Greenwood Abbey’s current wards. You’ll be joining the ranks.”
“Until Monday,” I said. I knelt beside him and surveyed the felines. “So are these Narcissa’s least favorite or what?”
Maddox gasped and covered Dima’s ears. “Not in front of the kittens!”
I rolled my eyes as Maddox scooped two of them up. He plopped the third kitten onto my lap, which I had already forgotten the name of.
“Let’s get you to the nursery,” Maddox cooed at the creatures.
It seemed that Crown Prince Bennett hadn’t been the only one affected by Narcissa’s kitten infestation.
I took the remaining kitten and followed Maddox into a pastel room that looked very much like a nursery, but was apparently for cats.
“Wealthy humans,” I murmured under my breath. Christabella would’ve laughed with me. Perhaps I’d see her sooner than both of us realized.
The kitten in my arms mewed. She was extraordinarily soft and had a rather sweet, winsome face. I set her down immediately, refusing to fall victim to her feline wiles.
Maddox set the cats into their respective baskets, each luxuriously cushioned, then gave them all a scratch behind the ears with a dutifulness that almost made me laugh. After he finished attending to them, he turned to me and spread his arms. “Ready to move in?”
Within fifteen minutes, a whirlwind of servants had selected a chamber for me, dusted it, and spread clean sheets on the canopied four-poster bed just as someone sent up a tray of tea.
I stood in the middle of the room, mildly appalled by the size of it and the lush furnishings within. As some of the servants passed, I thought I heard the phrase “Young Lord Greenwood’s lady friend” followed by a bout of giggling.
“How do you take your tea, milady?” a serving girl asked, hovering over the silver tea tray.
“With...” I stared at the frosted cubes of sugar and the boat of cream inside achingly lavish vessels. “Water. Thank you. And it’s just Giselle. Or Miss Giselle, if you must.”
The serving girl looked on with something akin to horror as I gulped down half the tea in the cup. Strongly steeped and smooth. Just how I liked it. I patted my mouth dry with my sleeve. “Say, is there any mending that needs to be done? I’d be happy to help during my stay.”
***
IF THERE WAS ANY MENDING, I didn’t see any of it.
I spent the rest of the day unpacking my things and taking inventory of the belongings I managed to recover from Mrs. Lewis’s building: packets of needles; a set of crochet hooks; scraps of fabric, hardly a yard of each; spools of brightly colored cotton thread; and a folio of paper pattern pieces, nearly bursting at the seams.
I pulled out an armful of white silk satin—the skirt portion of Narcissa’s wedding dress. I smoothed my hand over it in relief. At least I still had this. The wedding was five months away; there was plenty of time to redo the bodice.
I thought about the poor unfinished garment in Mrs. Lewis’s clutches. There was no saying what she’d do with it. Stick it in her dusty stash? Sell it to another dressmaker for a profit?
In any case, the design was compromised. I’d have to start from scratch.
The rest of the afternoon was spent doodling new dress concepts, none of which were good enough.
After a few attempts that resulted in a pile of crumpled paper, I tossed everything back into my satchel and endeavored not to think about it until I was in a more creative headspace—whenever that might be.
There wasn’t much to do when dusk fell. A peek out the window confirmed that Maddox was down in the stables, no doubt preparing for a ride through the expansive fields behind Greenwood Abbey.
I considered going to find him, but wandering through someone else’s massive home on my own held very little appeal, and it seemed Maddox didn’t intend on playing tour guide.
So I stayed in my room until a tray was sent up to me for dinner.
It seemed that family meals were a rarity, since both Narcissa and Captain Greenwood were in the palace. Lady Vanessa Greenwood was absent too, said to be out traveling. I watched the sunset as I ate, until the last rays disappeared past the horizon, plunging my room into darkness.
Maddox, I decided, was a rather inconsiderate host.
In the morning, he burst into my chamber without warning. I had completely forgotten where I was until he threw open the curtains and set the room ablaze with white light.
“I’m going to be a novelist!” Maddox exclaimed. He threw himself on the edge of my bed, squashing the mattress with his dirt-streaked breeches.
I winced, though more so at the light than the impact of his landing. “What?”
“I was out riding and it hit me! Remember that romance novel we read this spring?” Maddox pulled out the massive volume seemingly from out of nowhere. “A Sailor’s Seduction: Tales of Romance at Sea by Erasmus Lenard. I could do something like that!”
“Erasmus?” I rubbed my eyes. “Isn’t that the royal inspector?” I recalled the overenthusiastic old man who had greeted each witch in the Witch Committee.
Maddox gaped, dropping the anthology with a thud. “Is he? Then that’s proof! Anyone can write a romance novel,” he crowed. “Now. All I have to do is find a publisher. Oh! I’ll have to have it printed by Sternfeld Press—they’re the biggest in the business...”
His excited ramblings faded as I buried my head under the covers.
“...perhaps four volumes, or five!”
I sat up and threw the covers off. It was far too early for this. “Is this about your father again?”
Maddox shook his head, then paused. “Well, partly. He has been not-so-subtly mentioning the Royal Guard to me more.”
I gave a noncommittal grunt.
“Maybe you can help me brainstorm next week,” Maddox said, leaning back on his elbows. He didn’t seem to notice that I was still half asleep and in my nightgown.
“I won’t be here next week. I have an assignment,” I said.
“The Witch Committee assignment? That shouldn’t take too long, right?”
I sighed. “It’s going to take two weeks.”
“And then what? You’ll reopen your shop?”
“I don’t think that’s likely. I hardly have any customers.”
“But you were the royal seamstress!”
“No one remembers my name.”
“How is that possible?” Maddox asked. “It’s only been a few months!”
“Because people believe what they want to believe,” I groaned. “Maddox. Why are you wearing shoes on the bed?”
I kicked his legs off.
“Hey!” He reached for a pillow and threw it at me.
I was about to throw it back when the door creaked open. The serving maid from yesterday stood at the threshold, a pitcher of water and a towel in her hands.
“Oh! Miss Giselle,” she said, wide-eyed as she took in the scene before her. Maddox was still reclined on the bed beside me, shoes and all. Her eyes flicked to the incriminating romance novel on the floor. “I-I’ll come back later, miss.”
She bobbed a quick curtsy and scampered off down the hall.
I shoved the pillow in Maddox’s face.
By the time dinner rolled around, I had heard enough bits of servant gossip to string together the story that had been circulating about me: I was a farm girl turned courtesan who caught Maddox’s eye, and he had swept me away from an unwanted marriage and planned to make me his mistress.
“That’s a fantastic premise for a romance novel,” Maddox said brightly when I told him.
I rolled my eyes.
A part of me wondered whether becoming a nobleman’s mistress would be a better life after all. There would be few worries and plenty of comforts. But there would be a man to contend with, and who knew if any of them would want a witch as a mistress? I sighed. What a shame.
“So what is this assignment, anyway?” Maddox asked, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cat nursery.
For some bizarre reason, he had proposed we take dinner there, cat hair and all.
The kittens were in the corner having their own meal in porcelain bowls, which were color coordinated to the silk ribbons tied around their necks.
I forked a piece of potato and ate it slowly. The abbey’s cook was certainly skilled. The vegetable was buttery and perfectly seasoned, crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. “Showing an emissary Witch Village,” I mumbled through my mouthful.
Maddox paused. “Really? I thought you said you were never going back.”
I pursed my lips, surprised that he had remembered what I’d said in passing when I first opened my dress shop.
“Things didn’t go as planned, clearly,” I said, looking around the pastel green walls of the nursery. A line of cats was painted underneath the scalloped wainscotting all along the perimeter of the room.
Stormi and Dima had finished their dinner and made their way to Maddox’s side. He petted them each attentively, then returned to his meal. It seemed he knew a few things about kitten rearing after all.
“You never told me why you don’t want to go back,” he said.
“No. I didn’t.” I wasn’t comfortable sharing that with anyone.
He blinked. After a beat, he said, “So, human emissary. Do you know who it is?”
“Probably some old man.”
“Maybe I can be the emissary,” Maddox said. “I want to see Witch Village.”
“They already chose someone.”
Maddox blew a breath. “Narcissa and Father never tell me anything.”
“That’s because you probably won’t care,” I said. Royal business wasn’t something I thought Maddox would be interested in. From what I knew about him, he’d joined the Royal Guard against his will rather than from his own curiosity.
“Would a member of the Guard need to accompany you during the assignment?” Maddox asked.
“Hardly! Witch Village is the safest place you could go.” The only attack one might expect from the village was an old neighbor asking nosey questions or a jinx on a reclusive witch’s property, the latter of which would be far more traumatizing to a human than to a witch.
“Perhaps the emissary might be more comfortable with a guard,” I amended.
“Perfect! Then I’ll go,” Maddox said.
I sat back. “You’re not in the Royal Guard anymore.”
“I can be again,” he said readily, surprising me. “I’ll just ask Father. He’ll be thrilled. And as a newly proclaimed writer, I should expand my horizons, don’t you think?”
“I thought you hated being a guard! And how are you supposed to write if you’re watching the emissary?” I asked, growing increasingly wary. Horsefeathers, the last thing I wanted was to run into my family and have to introduce Maddox to Ma.
“You said Witch Village is the safest place anyone can be. There’ll be plenty of time,” Maddox said, polishing off a forkful of brussels sprouts. “So it’s set! I’ll join you on Monday.”
Taking one human stranger down to Witch Village would draw enough attention. But two? And Maddox, of all people. Ma would hear our bickering the moment we stepped through the passageway.
Panic rose within me like a wave; I struggled to keep it under control. Then, it settled into a thought.
What if I didn’t give a proper tour? What if I found someplace in the village to stay, away from prying eyes and ears, and bunkered down with the emissary and Maddox until two weeks were up?
Humans were easily impressed by the most minor of magic.
Perhaps simply being in the village would occupy their interest for the entirety of the tour.
I’d simply have to show the emissary some local places when no one was around, then leave without notice.
A quiet entrance, a quiet exit. I forked another potato.
It was the perfect plan.