Chapter Eleven #2
“Oh, I’m aware that to your mother it was a dirty word,” she said disdainfully.
“She despised the very idea. She always wanted to be a scholar, of course. I suppose she got her wish, after all, locking herself away in that Tower for twenty years. So strange to think that the pair of you were holed up in that draughty old place all this time! It belongs to our family, did you know that? Part of an old holding given to us, oh, centuries ago. It was too marshy to be of any real value, and so no one really ever went there.”
“I didn’t know that,” I whispered, still recovering from the idea of marriage.
She cupped my cheek. “So unfair to you, my dear. You are young and pretty and nobly born. She had no right to keep you from the family and lock you up away from the world. Why, you were no better than a sort of servant to her!”
My little helpmeet. “It wasn’t like—”
“And your clothes!” She interrupted me, looking me up and down in distaste. I flushed. “Please don’t be embarrassed, my dear. None of this is your fault. No, you had no say in any of it. But you are home now, and I will make sure to outfit you as befits a lady.”
“But I don’t want to get married,” I said. “I have to find my mother. I can’t …”
“Oh, of course we will search for your mother! Together. And when we find her, and that book she is so passionate about, we will bring her here, and she can continue her work on it in comfort. Don’t you think she would like that, my dear?
I’m sure that, deep down, she wants the best for you—a comfortable life and a family. ”
I did want a family. Perhaps not in the way she meant, but … I had only just found my home, my name. My aunt. She watched me with those wide, iridescent blue eyes as I thought.
“Do you promise me that we will keep looking for her?” I hedged.
A flash of something in her face, quickly smothered again by a smile.
“Of course. I will continue making inquiries.” She tapped her fingers on the bed frame, her face creasing in a pretty frown. “It is terribly inconvenient to lose the Book Man. No one had a network quite like his.”
My stomach dropped. I stared at her. She met my gaze and laughed a little.
“How insensitive you must think me! Of course I am just heartbroken to hear of his demise. But I am afraid a selfish part of me is also heartbroken that we have lost his wealth of knowledge. Never you mind. There are others. I think you said your mother corresponded with many other bookmakers?”
“Yes, but I don’t know …”
“Now that I know where she has been hiding, I will send someone to the Tower to retrieve her things. Perhaps some of her notes and letters remain.”
Why did this make me feel so uneasy?
Milady seemed ready to turn and go, but I stopped her.
“Milady …”
“There is no need for such formality. Please call me Aunt Sybil.”
That was going to take a lot of getting used to. She simply looked too glamorous and remote for such a name.
“Aunt Sybil,” I said with some effort, “do you know of someone named Patrick?”
She went very still, all smiles gone. “I beg your pardon?”
“Patrick? I met …”
She turned, and her eyes were ablaze, making me take an involuntary step backwards. “Where did you meet him?”
I was taken aback by her reaction. “On my way to Quell, and then … tonight, at Plaguenight …”
She took several rapid steps towards me and grasped my hands. “My dear,” she said, “you must stay far, far away from Patrick Foley.”
A fluttering against the window. Was it just the rain outside?
“Who is he?” I whispered.
“An ambitious little weasel,” she said coldly. “Who works against me at every possible opportunity.”
I frowned. “But he’s just a traveling magician, and I think some kind of … criminal? A black market dealer of some kind?”
She scoffed. “Is that what he told you?”
“Not exactly, I just …”
“I did not know that he had found you,” she said as if to herself.
“Who is he?”
“Let me tell you about Patrick Ladran Foley,” she said. There was a venom in her voice, all the more powerful for being quiet. “He was our foster brother.”
“Patrick was …” I couldn’t even finish my sentence out loud. Patrick was the foster brother Mother had told me about?
“Father brought him in when your mother and I were sixteen and thirteen, to be his male heir. Even as a child, he was cunning. He stayed for barely three years before Father sent him away again, and he has never forgiven us.” She snorted. “Now, of course, they call him Ban Foley.”
Ban was the usual honorific used to address those of high rank.
“So he’s a nobleman, then?”
“Given a title and lands by the king, after he wormed his way into the royal family’s good graces.
His own family is nothing. He plays at being a high lord, but he is no better than a merchant.
He was using you, my dear, in yet another attempt to hurt our family.
Nothing more.” She cupped my cheek in her gloved hand.
“You must trust my judgement on this, child.”
“I’m not a child. I’m twenty years old.”
“Ah, but twenty years spent living in a ruin? With no one to speak to but your mother, whom I adored, of course, but I’m afraid to say was …
eccentric, at best? My dear, you might have lived for twenty years, but your experience is that of a child’s.
I must insist that you accept my guidance, as your aunt … and, I hope, your friend.”
She drew me into an embrace. My thoughts were swirling white, a blizzard that I couldn’t penetrate.
Patrick had lived with Mother and Milady (I could not bring myself to think of her as Aunt Sibyl).
If the story Mother had told me was true, something had happened to make him hate and resent them.
He had betrayed them in some way. Why would he then have anything but contempt and malice towards me?
I was so tired of holding myself taut, of bracing myself for the next disaster.
It was so tempting to trust her. I relaxed into her arms, inhaling her scent.
I could still smell the heady scent of roses, but there was something else there: something that seeped from her skin, sharp and medicinal—like eucalyptus or witch hazel, but not quite.
I heard a distinct tap at the window now and looked over my shoulder. It was still pitch black and raining, but there was a smaller, blacker shape outlined against the sky. Baldbeak had found my room.
“Now my dear, I will leave you to get some rest,” Milady said.
She held my face in her hands and kissed me on both cheeks.
“Just one thing: I will give you a proper tour of the place in the morning. Please stay in your room until I send for you. I want to be there when you see your family home for the first time. Yes?”
I nodded.
“Good night, my dear,” she said, and finally, finally, I was alone. I waited a few moments after my door closed, long enough for her to be out of earshot, and then opened the window a crack. Baldbeak was there, shivering the light rain off his feathers.
“You can come in,” I whispered. “But you’ll have to leave before morning, just in case.”
He hopped in.
This room smells bad, he said.
“The flowers? I know, it is quite strong.”
Not just flowers. There is something else. It smells like old things. Bad ones.
He made a raark of distaste and started investigating the curtains around the bed.
How long must we stay?
It was a good question. I had barely had time to think about it, with everything that had happened that day, but Milady clearly thought I was here permanently.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
I lay awake for a long time that night, Baldbeak in the crook of my arm.
Once again I heard the papery crackle of the flames that had engulfed the bookshop, saw those five perfectly formed fingernails lying on the stone floor.
When I tried to turn my thoughts away, all I could picture next was Patrick in his bird skull mask, telling me he wanted to help me, while all along he wanted nothing but the downfall of my family.
I rubbed my hand violently against my mouth, trying to erase his kiss, light and quick as it had been.
I might never see him again, but if I did, I would demand an explanation.
I wondered how often my mother had lain awake in this very house. I would have thought that I would feel closer to her here, in her girlhood home, but she had never felt further away.
When I woke in the morning, it took me a moment to remember where I was. The flowered curtains around the bed looked at first like a thicket of real roses, and I wondered if they had grown up around me while I slept, as if I were a girl in a fairytale.
Marriage. I hoped we would find Mother and the book before Milady could put that particular plan into motion.
In all the stories Mother had read to me when I was a child, the princess ended up married.
Happily, for the most part, although in some of the more sinister tales—which Mother always read with relish, I had noted—she might end up opening some forbidden doorway or casket, or sneaking out at night against her husband’s directions, or putting her eye to a keyhole or crack in the wall.
This curiosity inevitably led to some kind of disaster: She would discover her husband had been turning into an owl by night (or a frog, or a deer, or a swan), or had a room stuffed with the bodies of his previous wives, or had some other nefarious plan brewing all along that probably involved a curse of some kind.
At any rate, the princesses in these stories usually ended up dead.
Curiosity, my mother said, was only profitable for the highly educated.
Empty-headed little madams like the princesses, my mother said, found nothing but heartache and trouble when they went sticking their noses into matters better left alone.
Such mysteries, I was left to conclude, were better left to women like Mother, who had the intellectual fortitude and scholarly rigor to investigate without tumbling headlong into catastrophe.