Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
Lucie was quite sure she would be dismissed that very day.
She was not.
After the tears had run their course and left her hollowed out, and the light coming through the small window had softened from bright afternoon gold to the deeper amber of early evening, she heard footsteps on the stairs. Measured. Unhurried.
Lucie’s body went rigid.
The footsteps reached the landing. Paused. And then Lady Rivenna’s voice called from the other end of the passage, composed and conversational, as though she were merely passing by and had happened to think of something.
“The event has concluded. You were marvelous. I do not say so lightly, and I shall thank you to believe me.”
Lucie frowned at her knees. Marvelous?
“Your mother is … concerned for you. I have assured her that you are quite well, merely tired, and she does not believe a word of it but is choosing, for the present, not to press.” Another pause, briefer. “The guests have departed. All of them.”
All of them. Did that mean Kazrian as well?
“The shop is locked, and there is no one left below but the pixies and one exceedingly disgruntled cat.”
Ah. No Kazrian, then. It was better that way. Definitely better that way.
“You may, of course, remain here for the evening, should you wish. The Honeycomb, I understand, has been known to offer a rather comfortable night’s rest to those who find themselves in need of one.”
Then the footsteps withdrew, unhurried as they had come, and descended the stairs, leaving Lucie in the deepening quiet.
She sat with her forehead on her knees and could make no sense of it.
Lady Rivenna knew. She knew all of it now, and she could not possibly approve.
Her own grandson—and the human girl who worked in her kitchen?
Whatever damage she had managed in the aftermath of the day’s dramatic revelations—the smooth, unhurried pivot Lucie had heard as she’d made her way back toward the kitchen, the redirection of the story toward Henry and his violence and the storeroom door’s temperament—none of it could erase what every person in that garden had seen with their own two eyes.
And yet she had come upstairs, spoken through a closed door with the tone of someone discussing the weather, and told Lucie she might stay for the night.
Lucie understood, though, that Lady Rivenna could not possibly permit her to stay much longer.
She came down the next morning braced for the worst.
She had rehearsed it, the words Lady Rivenna would likely use, and the apology Lucie would give.
She had decided she would not cry. She would accept it with dignity.
She would thank Lady Rivenna for everything, and she would gather her few things, and she would walk out of The Honeycomb with her head up.
She nearly walked directly into Lady Rivenna in the kitchen.
They both stopped. Lady Rivenna was holding a teacup, and Lucie’s mind was already running ahead, tripping over the small ordinary questions that would have mattered on any other morning and did not matter in the least today.
Was she late? Was Lady Rivenna early? And the tea—the pixies had seen to the tea—
For a terrible, suspended moment they simply looked at one another. And then the words that actually mattered began assembling themselves in Lucie’s mind. I am so sorry, I know what I have done, I understand if you must let me go—
“Well,” said Lady Rivenna. “Yesterday.” She took a sip of tea with an air of brisk consideration, as though yesterday were a problem of inventory or scheduling rather than the wholesale collapse of Lucie’s reputation and possibly the shop’s along with it.
“Do you wish to speak of it, or do you not?”
Lucie stared at her. Of all the things she had expected to hear—you have disgraced this establishment, you have compromised my grandson, you will gather your things and be gone by noon—this had not been among them.
“I … did not realize I had a choice,” she managed.
“Of course you have a choice.”
“Then … no?” It came out as a question. She could hear the disbelief in her own voice, thin and uncertain, as though she were being offered something she could not quite trust was real. “No, I … I would rather not. If that is … if that is permissible.”
“I suspected as much.” Lady Rivenna set her teacup down on the worktable and straightened a stack of paper that did not require straightening.
“Very well. Rosavyn will be in shortly. The shop will be busy today—rather busier than usual, I expect. If they do not come for the confections, they will come to see the source of all the commotion.” The faintest pause.
“And we shall ensure they purchase confections while they do.”
A silence. The first shaft of morning light shifted through the kitchen window and caught the honey jar on the side counter, the gold of it spilling across the worktop in the same warm wash it always did, as though nothing had changed, as though the world had not tilted on its axis the afternoon before.
“So … you are not dismissing me?” Lucie said.
Lady Rivenna gave her a long, steady look. “Now why would I do that? The Honeycomb would not be The Honeycomb without you. I should as soon dismiss the honey light itself.”
Lucie’s mind, never still, was already forming a picture that made sense.
Of course Lady Rivenna was keeping her. For now.
The shop needed its confectioner and, more to the point, it needed its honey light, and Lucie was the only person who could collect it.
Her instructions were written down, and she had walked Lady Rivenna through the process, but training a replacement would take time.
Lady Rivenna was no doubt planning for this already, but until then, Lucie was still here.
She did not let herself think past ‘until then.’
“Now. The caramel will not make itself,” Lady Rivenna said. She picked up her teacup and went upstairs.
She had been right about the patrons.
They came in droves. More than The Honeycomb had ever seen on a single day, a steady stream of silk and gloves and carefully composed faces, and every last one of them ordered something, but not before casting a glance—some subtle, some considerably less so—toward the kitchen doorway, as though Lucie herself were one of the confections on display.
She kept her head down. She worked.
And eventually she had to go home.
As much as some small, desperate part of her wished to take up permanent residence in The Honeycomb’s bedroom and never face her family again, the world did not permit such conveniences, and so at the end of the day she gathered herself and walked home.
In Elmrow Lane she passed Mrs Dunbar and her daughter, and they gave her startled, overly bright smiles before lowering their heads toward one another, whispering something.
And when she was nearly home, Mr Moorfield across the way stood hastily and took himself and his chair inside before Lucie could so much as lift her hand in greeting.
Tears burned hot behind her eyes, because here it was, already happening.
The story spreading outward, people who had known her all her life turning away.
But the high, thin breathing did not return.
Or rather, it flickered at the edges and she breathed through it, and it passed.
It seemed, somehow, that the worst of the dread had lived in the anticipation.
Now that the thing she had feared most had already happened, there were no longer a dozen fragile plates to keep spinning, no performance of perfection left to maintain.
The possibility of perfection was long gone, and there was a strange, bleak liberty in that.
She arrived home and discovered that the confrontation she had been dreading did not materialize, because it turned out that the Fields household had, for the first time in its collective memory, developed a talent for avoidance.
Charlotte, mercifully—astonishingly—seemed to have resolved to give Lucie space, for perhaps the first time in their entire lives.
And over the next several days, Lucie came to understand that it was guilt.
Charlotte had stood up in that garden and accused Henry of lying and hurting her sister, thereby lighting the match that set the rest of it ablaze.
She had done it out of love, to defend Lucie, and Lucie wanted to tell her it was not her fault.
But the moment did not seem to present itself.
Her father, meanwhile, had retreated into the workshop with a thoroughness that suggested he intended to build his way through the crisis.
His daughter might possibly be entangled with a fae lord?
This was, without question, a matter best discussed with one’s mother, and Mr Fields appeared to have made this determination with admirable speed.
He was kind to Lucie when he saw her—the same steady, quiet kindness he had always offered—but he did not raise the subject, and neither did she, and between the two of them a rather impressive wall of mutual silence was constructed and maintained.
And her mother.
Her mother, who would have the most to say about all of this—whose entire career had been built upon the delicate art of existing beside fae families without ever presuming to be among them, who had watched her own sister-in-law’s heart broken by a fae lord and the scandal that followed—her mother was working.
Late. Every night at her dress shop.
The Rowanwood Masquerade was very nearly upon them, and she had gowns to finish.
Commissioned gowns, last stitches, last fittings.
Fae ladies for whom it was too late to make alternate arrangements and find another dressmaker, despite the scandal that now surrounded the Fields name.
Lucie understood—without either of her parents having to explicitly state it aloud—that her mother needed to finish everything so perfectly, so flawlessly, that these fine fae ladies would think twice about taking their custom elsewhere after the masquerade.
It had always been her mother’s strategy. To be too skilled, too excellent, to discard. But it had never before been quite so pointed, quite so much a matter of survival, and Lucie felt the weight of it settle heavily across her shoulders.
And Kazrian?
Kazrian, she did not see at all.
Lady Rivenna, Lucie understood via Rosavyn, had instructed him to keep his distance from The Honeycomb. For Kazrian to be seen loitering about the kitchen anywhere near Lucie would add precisely the wrong sort of fuel to a fire that wanted nothing more than to be allowed to burn out.
And with all the building’s most pressing problems resolved and only one or two stubborn quirks remaining—which did not affect the running of the shop—Kazrian had no reason to be there any longer.
Lucie told herself she was glad of it. It was sensible. It was safe. It was exactly what the situation required. It was, in fact, what she had expected would happen even before the gossip birds had shrieked her name and Kazrian’s across a garden full of fae nobility.
She could not help noticing, however, that the kitchen felt larger and emptier than it had any business feeling.
A week of it, then.
A week of arriving at The Honeycomb each morning, tying on her apron, and beginning the day’s work beneath the low, persistent hum of scandal that had settled over the shop like weather.
It was a steady presence, a consciousness shared by all who walked through the door, that something had happened here, that the confectioner girl and the Rowanwood son had been the talk of every drawing room and every afternoon call for days, and that purchasing a box of honeycomb brittle also afforded one the opportunity to glance toward the kitchen and see her with one’s own eyes.
Lady Rivenna continued as though all were precisely as it should be. She arrived, reviewed the ledgers, drank her tea, and made her observations about the window display.
Rosavyn was a particular grace. She manned the front counter with a brightness that was almost aggressive in its good cheer, as though she were daring anyone to bring up the scandal in her presence.
She praised the confections to every customer with an enthusiasm that left no room for gossip, complimented their gowns, inquired after their families, and generally made herself so relentlessly charming that by the time a patron left The Honeycomb, they likely could not quite remember what they had come to gawk at in the first place.
And at home, the careful avoidance held. Lucie was not in a room with her mother long enough to receive more than a glance—tight, weary, unreadable—and exchange more than a few words. Good morning. There is bread on the table. I shall be late again this evening.
More patrons came to The Honeycomb than ever before. They came for the gossip and stayed for the confections, and Lucie supposed there was a bleak sort of triumph in that, if one were inclined to look for triumphs in the wreckage.
No, I did not see the girl, but the honeycomb brittle—
The honeycomb brittle! Indeed!
Is it not the most marvelous you have ever tasted?
Without a doubt. I find I cannot get enough of it.
It is the honey light, of course. You will not find it elsewhere.
Of course, it is quite unique. I am finding myself partial to Golden Hour.
No, no. Have you tasted Midsummer Night? I am convinced it is the best.
Lucie heard nearly all of it from behind the kitchen doorway—they were never quiet—and sometimes allowed herself a small, private smile because if nothing else, at least they loved the honey light.
And then, at the end of that long week, Lady Rivenna appeared at the top of the staircase and called down to the kitchen.
“Lucie? A word, if you please.”