Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
“Louisa!”
Winston was already running before the name had left his throat. His heart leapt to his mouth, the breath in his chest burning as he took the stairs in two strides and cut along the corridor like a bull through hedgerows.
Adeline was ahead of him; he did not know how she had got there so swiftly, barefoot, her hair unbound, a shawl snatched about her shoulders.
A candle guttered in her hand and threw the long sweep of her shadow along the wainscot as she flew.
Later, he would remember the pale flash of her ankle and the soft thud of her small feet on the runner.
Now there was only his child, the open door, and the night.
He crashed into the vestibule at the same instant Adeline flung the outer door wide. Wind pressed the house as if it meant to push the walls inward. The flame went out at once, and darkness cloaked them.
“Hold,” Adeline said sharply, turning to shove the candlestick at the footman who had stumbled after them with a tinderbox.
“No light. And no shouting.”
Winston’s fists clenched. “She is in the grounds…”
“She is asleep,” Adeline answered, already down the steps, her voice low and quick as a physician’s. “If we startle her, if you call to her, she could run. Or wake in terror and fall.”
He did not understand anything except the shape ahead, small and white as a dropped handkerchief against the darker night. Louisa moved with her arms loose at her sides, her head tilted as though listening to a distant voice.
She should never be barefoot; the gravel will bruise. The cold will bite.
Adeline glanced once at him. Whatever she saw in his face steadied her.
“We will flank. I will go nearer. You keep to her right. Not too close. Let us turn her very gently.”
He swallowed the roar that wanted to tear free and followed.
The wind was a living thing, flinging his hair into his eyes.
The clipped yews on the front lawn hunched like watchful sentries, and beyond them the first trees gathered, beech, ash and blackthorn.
Louisa stepped between the gateposts without looking, the white of her nightgown a dim moth’s wing as it slipped under branches.
He heard the soft hiss of her hem through fallen leaves.
His every sense strained forward. He remembered a different night, a different white gown. The long reeds lean in. The mist. The hush when the water took her.
No. Not again.
“Louisa,” Adeline murmured, as if to the air rather than the girl, “my darling, you are very clever. We must turn here. Yes…this way. The path is kinder.”
Her hands did not touch, not quite. With each word, she edged herself between Louisa and the deeper dark where the trees thickened.
Winston matched her on the other side, a wall if need be.
They moved in this fragile formation beneath interlaced branches.
The wood smelled of damp bark and soil. Small noises were very loud.
Somewhere a fox barked, a short, rude note.
The leaves rasped a little with each step.
Louisa’s breath sighed in and out, no faster than if she lay upon her pillow. Adeline’s voice poured like warm milk.
“There you are, dear. Always where you mean to be, that is what I have noticed. You go exactly where you intend. And now you intend to turn to the right, see? Because that's where I am…”
Even in his terror, something in Winston’s chest eased at the calm absurdity of it.
She is speaking to keep herself steady as much as to guide Louisa. Brave little storm-bird.
Isn’t that what I have heard my mother call her?
A twig cracked under his heel. The sound ricocheted. Louisa’s head tilted. She paused.
“Good,” Adeline whispered at once. “We pause because the wood has greeted us. Did you hear it, poppet? It said, ‘Hush.’ We’ll be polite and hush in return.”
Louisa’s lashes did not lift. Her lips parted a little, breath clouded in the cold.
She began to move again. They had left the main drive entirely.
The ground fell away gently and then less so.
The path, if it could be called that, curved as if by ancient habit toward the lower land where the mere lay cupped like a dark hand.
He felt the pull as a fisherman feels his line tug, steady, inexorable. The mere pulled at him.
As it pulled at Sarah.
“Not the mere,” he said before he could stop himself. “Anywhere but there!”
Adeline cut him a look that sliced his breath. Not anger. A command. A maternal command.
She warns me to be silent. To keep my composure. And she would be as direct to the Regent himself if Louisa’s safety were at stake.
He lifted his hands and pressed them against the rough skin of a birch.
Louisa descended a little slope scattered with exposed roots.
Winston moved to catch her if she stumbled, but she did not.
Her little feet found the places children find by instinct.
The soft patch, the safe hollow. He remembered her at three, solemnly stepping along the rim of rug borders as if they were sea cliffs.
He remembered her at five, balancing on a fallen branch and declaring it a bridge to fairy kingdoms. He wanted to laugh and weep and howl. Adeline hummed.
That melody again. The one that my mother played. The one that I ordered Adeline not to play. Now it might be a lifeline for Louisa.
It wound and unwound, a simple thread of sound. Louisa’s head tipped, the way a flower follows the light.
“Good girl,” Adeline murmured, “we’ll change roads now. We prefer the one that goes up. There’s warm bread at the end of that road. There’s Mrs. Hardcastle, who scolds because she loves. You can’t let me face her alone. It wouldn’t kind.”
A breath that might have been a laugh slipped from Winston in spite of himself. Adeline’s shoulder brushed the branch of a young beech and shook a wash of droplets onto her hair. They glittered and were gone.
The trees thinned. The ground grew slick with mud.
Winston could hear the mere now without seeing it.
It was a stillness that was almost sound.
The years fell away. The wood opened onto the small clearing that dipped toward the shore.
Mist lay low, a shawl thrown across the grass.
The mere itself was a circle of night darker than the sky around it.
Even the heaven’s few stars did not dare look at their reflections there.
Reeds murmured. Louisa’s pace quickened.
“No,” Winston breathed.
His hands curled without his permission into boxer’s fists.
The birch bark’s sting had not been enough.
He wanted to tear the world in two. Adeline stepped half a pace closer to Louisa, still not touching, and shifted herself so that if Louisa took three more steps, she would meet Adeline’s body and not the slope.
“Listen,” Adeline said very quietly. “The ducks are sleeping. They will be very vexed if we wake them, and you do not wish to vex ducks. They are great gossip. They will tell your grandmama you came out without a shawl.”
If there had been any other witness to that utterance, Winston would have expected mockery. There was none. The wood held its breath to hear what the small white figure would do. Louisa paused. She raised her hand as if to lift a veil and then let it fall.
“Turn, sweetheart,” Adeline coaxed. “We can still hear them sleeping when we turn. We will not lose anything by turning, only gain something. A piece of cake, perhaps. A new ribbon. The knowledge that we have been clever and kind.”
Clever and kind. As if technique could be a virtue. Louisa’s right foot turned. Not much. But a pivot, as when a dancer remembers the proper direction after starting wrong. Adeline breathed out, barely a sound. Winston did not dare breathe at all.
Adeline used that inch, then another, then another, so gradually that Winston could not have said when they began to climb.
Mist thinned around their knees. The reeds’ whisper died.
The dark behind them stayed where it was.
He moved with them like a moon shadow, always there, never leading.
He felt hopeless and understood that his usefulness tonight consisted in agreeing to be useless.
It’s the first suitable thing I have done.
A cold thought, and true. When at last the trees rose thicker and the ground leveled, Adeline altered her voice, just a hair warmer, a hint more cheerful, as if the house’s walls had already clasped them.
“Almost home,” she said. “Almost done with adventures for the evening. We’re being very good, the three of us. A secret league. I hope you like being in a league. It has rules. Rule the first: do not get your feet wet when there is cake waiting.”
“Rule the second,” Winston said before he had decided to speak, his voice soft as the moss underfoot, “do not terrify your father into an apoplexy.”
Adeline’s head turned. In the dimness, he saw her mouth, quick and small, flicker toward a smile and away again.
“That rule,” she murmured, “applies to more people in this house than one.”
“Name them,” he said, with a voice that did not sound like his, because it held a thread of laughter.
“Later,” she returned, “when I am emboldened by cake.”
They emerged from the woods’ edge to the first rank of yews again and the worn stones of the back terrace.
The house rose enormous and pale, its many eyes watching them without blinking.
A footman waited, as Adeline had instructed, with the door open but not brightened, the lamps shaded so the hall was a half-place between worlds.
Louisa slowed at the threshold, as if the act of crossing were an intricate choreography. Adeline hummed twice more, the little air turning on itself like a child’s toy top, and Louisa stepped in.
“Upstairs,” Adeline said, as much to the house as to the child, “and straight to bed. There will be warm bricks and milk and honey if Mrs. Hardcastle approves.”