Hex and Hexability

Chapter 12

CHAPTER 12

I n the tower, a woman cried. She was made of silver and tears, tears that flooded an ocean and swelled into tentacled arms?—

Tiffany awoke with a gasp, and fought the tentacles that turned out to be simply bedsheets, damp with sweat and twisted around her. Heart pounding, she stared wildly around the unfamiliar room.

Right. She was at Dyrehaven, and this was the room she’d been assigned for the house party. Before this she had been preparing for her come-out from the nursery, because Elinor didn’t see the point in preparing a separate room for her before they left for London.

It wasn’t the best room in the house, because those were for the guests. Tiffany’s room overlooked the stables, and had an awkward narrow passageway from the main landing. Still, it was private, and that was the main thing.

She sat up in bed, reached for the candle and then remembered she didn’t need to. She shaped her hand around the air the way Aunt Esme had told her to, wished for light, and a small, pale light appeared.

She had learned how to douse them too, now. On the same day Aunt Esme told her she wouldn’t be coming to Dyrehaven.

‘I’m afraid I have a previous engagement,’ she said, as Tiffany perfected the finding spell she’d been learning. ‘In Kent, of all places.’ She looked harassed, and Tiffany decided not to argue.

‘I will miss you,’ she said. ‘Elinor has only invited people whose sons she thinks I could marry. There are hardly any young ladies at all.’

‘But there is a duke?’ said Esme, a knowing smile on her lips.

Had Madhu told her? When Tiffany thought about that evening at Vauxhall—about how Santiago had looked at her like he was about to ravish her, and she’d wanted him to —she realised how close they’d come to ruin. If they’d been found like that, alone and unwatched, by her family, they’d be forced to marry. And Tiffany knew that she never wanted to marry.

She just … really looked forward to seeing Santiago when he arrived.

Once dressed she slipped down the back stairs with Morris and darted away towards the village. Elinor had always considered it inappropriate for Tiffany to spend time playing with the village children, but she hadn’t been able to keep an eye on her all day, and so when Tiffany befriended the boot boy there had been nothing her sister-in-law could do about it.

Henry had always intended to become a footman, and he’d just been accepted as an under-footman when Bonaparte escaped from Elba and the call to arms had raced around the country. Tiffany’s childhood friend had gone off to fight, and she intended to see if there was word of him. His sister had married fairly recently, she thought, and by now there might be children. It would be entirely appropriate to call upon them.

Besides, Elinor’s preparations for the guests were absolutely driving her insane.

The village of Churlish Green was an easy walk from Dyrehaven, and a pretty one too. It ran down an ancient sunken lane alongside the brook and skirted a hill, upon which stood the old ruins of what Tiffany had been told by her governess was once a monastery. Skeletal and forbidding, the windowless arches rose above the treetops and were sometimes cut off if the brook flooded.

She crossed the ancient stone bridge over the brook and made her way along the pretty village street lined with half-timbered cottages and shops.

Tiffany greeted the grocer and the butcher and the postmistress, and made her way to Ivy Cottage. It was set back a little from the road, with a long garden Tiffany recalled as always full of flowers. Now it was full of weeds, and the whole cottage had a sad, neglected look about it. A handcart lay in the long grass, one wheel broken.

Henry’s father had died many years ago, and his mother in the last few years, after which Henry’s sister had married. Tiffany had not seen her since; every attempt to visit had been curtailed by Elinor. She frowned as she reached the front door; the paint was peeling and the wood splintered as if it had been kicked.

‘Hello? It’s Lady Tiffany. I came hoping to see Miss Proudbody, as was? Amy?’

The woman who eventually opened the door a sliver was not, at first glance, the Amy Proudbody Tiffany remembered. She had been a healthy young lady with pink cheeks and round hips. The woman before her now looked as if she had hardly eaten all week, her hair straggling from its cap, a crying baby at her hip.

‘It’s Cotton now,’ she said, her tone colourless. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, my lady. We’re not fit for visitors.’

‘Miss— Mrs Cotton! What happened?’ Tiffany thought she saw bruises on the woman’s arms.

Amy Cotton shrugged tiredly. ‘I got married, my lady. If you’re here asking after Henry, I had a letter Tuesday last. He says the food’s terrible, but he’s all right.’

Another baby screamed inside the house.

‘If you’ll excuse me, my lady,’ said Mrs Cotton, and wedged the door shut.

Tiffany stared at the peeling paint for a moment. Then she nodded and walked back through the unweeded garden to the main street.

‘That is not a happy house,’ she said.

‘No, my lady,’ Morris whispered.

‘We should do something.’ Why hadn’t Elinor done something? As the lady of the house, it was her duty to take care of the residents of the village.

‘What, my lady?’

As a witch, you will encounter a great many people like this . Hadn’t Madhu said it was their duty to help people? Surely there must be a way.

She made her way slowly back along the high street, and after a moment she turned into Mr Sandyman’s haberdashery shop. His wife was behind the counter, a cheerful woman with a riot of curly hair.

‘Lady Tiffany! How well you look. London must suit you!’

Tiffany thanked her for the compliment, and wondered how to broach the next subject. Mrs Sandyman had always been a terrible gossip.

‘I came to hear if there was any news of Henry Proudbody,’ she said, and Mrs Sandyman’s face darkened at the mention. ‘His sister says he has sent a letter.’

‘Yes, and well he seems to be doing. At least someone in the family is.’

And that was all it took. Within five minutes, Tiffany had the story of how Henry’s sister had married the first man to ask, shortly after her mother had died, to try to keep house and home together. Only he was a rotter and a wastrel, Mrs Sandyman confided. Got a couple of brats on her and spent every penny she made taking in laundry on cheap gin. Probably already at the tavern now. Cast out poor Henry, who might not have followed the drum had he not been beaten by his brother-in-law and looking for a way to escape.

‘He beat Henry?’ Sweet Henry, who had run and played with her among the ruins?

‘I believe so,’ said Mrs Sandyman darkly. ‘Everybody knows he beats her. But she will not report him or leave him, on account of the children.’

‘There must be something we can do,’ said Tiffany.

Mrs Sandyman shrugged. ‘I remember my father telling me of the rough music when a man behaved as he has.’

‘Rough music?’

‘Aye. The skimmington ride, he called it. Pots and pans outside his house, dragged through the streets and shamed. Burned in effigy. That man was so ashamed he left and was never seen again,’ she said in satisfaction.

‘Well, that sounds effective,’ Tiffany said.

‘Aye. But we live in different times now, my lady.’

‘More’s the pity,’ muttered Tiffany.

Mrs Sandyman rolled her eyes and lowered her voice as customers came in. ‘I know it is un-Christian of me, but I pray his next drink of gin will have him in a ditch.’

‘From your mouth to God’s ears,’ murmured Tiffany, and took her leave.

All the way back to the house she fumed. How dare such a brute beat Henry’s sweet sister? And Henry himself! The poor boy might go off to war and never come back, and it would all be the fault of this Mr Cotton.

Aunt Esme thought she needed to work on threatening people, did she?

The sky darkened as she walked, as if matching her mood.

‘My lady? We really must get back before the heavens open,’ said Morris, and Tiffany wondered how going home to greet guests could ever be important right now. But she went back to the house, and allowed herself to be washed and dressed as she tried to work out what Aunt Esme would do.

The first guests arrived after luncheon, all of them dashing into the house to avoid the drizzle that had begun to fall. Lady Greensword, of course, with her two insufferable nephews. Immediately upon arrival, they started comparing Dyrehaven to the classical palaces they had seen in Italy.

Santiago never goes on about his travels like that . Tiffany suddenly realised she was thinking of him as Santiago again, and not the Duke. She should stop that, or she might slip up and then Elinor would have them down the aisle before she could blink.

And she didn’t want to marry him. She didn’t want to marry anyone. She wanted to be an independent woman, like Aunt Esme. Once the Season was over, perhaps she could see what funds had been settled on her for her dowry and how she might access them for herself.

The thought cheered her through the rest of the arrivals, nearly all of them couples with sons or nephews, or single gentlemen of Cornforth’s acquaintance. Tiffany was quite sure Elinor’s dinner table would be unbalanced, especially as Esme was not in attendance, but she had thought of that and invited Mrs Belmont with her two plain, shy daughters. No competition at all for Tiffany—at least, no competition if Tiffany actually wanted to find a husband. Which she didn’t.

She was in the saloon—Elinor preferring this appellation to the unpatriotically French-sounding salon—being talked at by the Greensword nephews when something towards the back of the house drew her attention.

Tiffany, who had a view of the front drive from here, hadn’t seen any carriages or riders coming along the drive. Not that she’d been looking out for the Duke. Not at all.

But she felt him coming.

Over the fields, it seemed. The pendant she’d tucked into his hand on a whim she couldn’t explain—he was carrying it. She could feel it coming closer.

There were voices in the hall. The saloon fell quiet as people pretended they weren’t listening. And then Underhill, the butler, was announcing, ‘His Grace the Duke of St James.’

The room fell quite silent as Santiago strode in, and stood framed in the doorway. One of the Greensword nephews murmured something, but Tiffany didn’t hear him.

The reason she hadn’t seen his carriage arrive was that he’d evidently ridden here, and not just from the nearest coaching inn but all the way from London. His boots were coated in mud, his breeches spattered with the same, and the tails of his many-caped greatcoat were heavy with rain. As he removed his hat, he pushed his other hand through his hair. Sweat and dirt mingled on his face. His neckcloth was so loose he might as well have not been wearing it.

He was filthy. He was sodden. He was terribly inappropriately dressed.

Tiffany suddenly, shockingly, wanted to lick his neck.

‘My apologies for the hour,’ he said into the silence. ‘There was an accident at the wharf. I could not leave when I had planned.’

‘Was anyone hurt?’ Tiffany asked, searching him for signs of injury. But he looked well. He looked better than well.

The butler looked ready to escort him away, but Santiago’s gaze found Tiffany. Those dark, melting chocolate eyes met hers for a second that stretched out into hours. ‘One man was hurt,’ he said. ‘I left him in good care.’

She nodded, unable to speak. Her knees felt weak. Her bosom was heaving all of its own accord.

‘Your Grace?’ murmured Underhill, and Santiago nodded and left.

Immediately the noise level of the room rose. Tiffany could hear the shocked whispers.

‘I say,’ said one of the Greensword nephews. ‘If he wasn’t a duke, he wouldn’t have got away with that.’

‘Filthy as a labourer,’ agreed the other.

‘Wouldn’t look out of place digging a ditch,’ said the first, and Tiffany got lost for a moment in a fantasy of Santiago in shirtsleeves, damp linen clinging as it had when she first saw him, muscles straining. Like a labourer. A common, filthy labourer.

‘If you will excuse me,’ she murmured, and made her way to the sideboard, wishing like hell she could pour herself a brandy. She had to keep her wits about her or all the paintings in the room would come to life, and that would be a disaster because they were mostly of disapproving ancestors.

‘What a dreadful apparition,’ Lady Greensword said nearby, making Tiffany’s heart clutch. ‘I had heard he was raised abroad .’ She whispered the last word as if it was a synonym for a circle of hell. ‘But one had assumed breeding would come to the fore!’

‘And that he would magically know how to behave?’ Tiffany found herself saying. ‘That simply because his grandfather was a duke, he would know the correct dress for arriving at a house party?’

‘Well … I mean …’

‘He must have ridden pell mell to get here,’ Tiffany said. ‘And all because he would not leave an injured man at the wharf.’

‘I’m sure he has employees ,’ said Lady Greensword, and apparently that was a dirty word too.

‘And should a man of breeding leave such a thing to his employees? Is it not the responsibility of a duke to take care of those under him—which is practically everybody? What kind of man would see another injured and simply say, “Well, got to be off, I have a house party to attend!” He?—’

‘Theophania,’ said Elinor, quietly and furiously, and Tiffany realised her voice had been raised.

‘I believe it may be time to dress for dinner,’ said Elinor frostily, and Tiffany knew she’d be punished for this.

* * *

Dyrehaven, the country seat of the Earl of Chalkdown, currently occupied by his son and family, was a house approximately the size of a small country.

Santiago had expected a large house. He had seen the royal palaces in London, and of course his grandfather’s house took up one whole side of Grosvenor Square. But out here, barely thirty miles from London in leafy Hertfordshire, there was room for a lot more.

A lot more.

The thought of what awaited him at Castle Aymers was genuinely terrifying.

He had been given a suite of rooms that included a sitting room and bathroom, of all things, with a tub big enough to almost lie in.

‘It would take every servant in the place to fill that,’ he said in wonder. There were stacks of linen towels and a variety of scented soaps. It was barely comprehensible for a man who had spent most of his life either in filthy streets or on filthy ships, where cleanliness tended to come with saltwater.

‘Only a few, sir, and those quite well practised, I should imagine,’ said Robinson, who had been instructed quite firmly that too much Your Gracing would not be kindly met. ‘I can ring for them if you would like?’

‘Good God, no. The basin and ewer will be perfectly fine.’ He strode in that direction, then paused, sniffed himself, and said, ‘Won’t it?’

‘Yes, sir. I have brought your own soap and cologne.’

‘I have my own soap?’ said Santiago, who had been subjected to a visit by a perfumer a few weeks ago, after which he was presented with his own signature scent. It smelled … fine, he supposed. Quite nice. But what about it was worth the extortionate fee, he had no idea.

‘Yes, sir. One never knows what one will find. Will it be straight into evening clothes, sir? I believe I heard the bell just now.’

Santiago allowed Robinson to go on setting out his things, fussing over waistcoats and neckcloths, while he washed. The distance hadn’t looked too far when he’d set out, but his backside was protesting the hours spent on horseback.

Still, at least Robinson had arrived safely, having set out at the crack of dawn with the luggage in order to make sure every ducal need was catered for. He would surely have fretted if he’d had to wait for Santiago to see to the poor fellow who had been bitten by something hidden in the depths of a water barrel.

He’d rushed the man straight to Esme’s house, watching his hand turn purple and his lips turn blue, and panicked when Miss Gwen answered the door and said everyone else was away.

‘But I knows what treats them nasty beasty bites, you see if I don’t.’

She’d given the docker some violently green liquid to drink, and almost immediately his colour had begun to return.

‘What bit him?’ she asked. ‘Some sea beasty?’

Santiago shrugged, his heart hammering. ‘I don’t know. When we emptied the barrel there was nothing but a few dead bugs.’

Gwen made a face. ‘I don’t know no bug turns a man like that,’ she said.

‘You should see the spiders we have in South America,’ Santiago told her.

‘Them think me hopeless, you know,’ Gwen said, patting the hapless docker’s hand. ‘But I knows what’s what. You’ve just enough time so you can change for dinner,’ she added. ‘The duchess looks resplendent in blue.’

‘Duchess?’ said Santiago. ‘I wasn’t aware of a duchess attending.’

Gwen blinked. ‘What? No. Off you go and enjoy yourself. Tell Billy we’ve ham for dinner.’

And now here he was, washed and perfumed and dressed in his finest, descending the grand staircase and following a couple of young bucks into a drawing room.

In his pocket was Tiffany’s necklace, the one she’d inexplicably handed him at Vauxhall. What did she mean by it? Was it a token of her affection? Was there a deeper meaning to it? Had she cast a spell on him?

The drawing room, like the rest of the house, was blandly decorated. He detected the hand of his hostess in this; Lady Cornforth seemed allergic to bright colours or patterns. The whole house looked like someone had forgotten to paint most of it.

‘What an elegant room,’ he remarked to her, after apologising again for his earlier appearance.

Tiffany didn’t seem to mind it , he remembered. She had gazed at him as if he’d been made of chocolate. It had taken all of his composure to leave the room and not rush over and yank her into his filthy, sweaty arms.

He looked around for her as Lady Cornforth prattled on, but she was nowhere to be seen. After a few polite minutes, he asked, ‘And where is the delightful Lady Tiffany?’

‘Alas,’ said Lady Cornforth. ‘She has a headache. Such a shame. I am sure she will join us tomorrow.’

He frowned. ‘She seemed perfectly well this afternoon.’

Elinor’s smile was tight. ‘Yes, well, it came on suddenly. Tomorrow I am sure she will be right as, well, rain.’ She gestured with a small laugh to the drizzle that kept falling.

Santiago smiled politely, and asked her to introduce him to people, which she was only too happy to do. The company did not seem overly enthused by his presence, and he realised that nearly everyone here was a young man looking to marry, or the parent of such. Elinor was clearly desperate to get Tiffany married off.

At dinner, he was seated between a Lady Greensword, who was forthright and incorrect about nearly everything, and a Miss Belmont who was so shy and nervous she barely ate anything and spoke only in an inaudible whisper.

One of the young bucks at the table started droning on about his travels, and Santiago realised half the table was enraptured. Mostly the female half. What had Tiffany said, that first night, that ladies didn’t travel?

Apart from Tiffany’s mother, who from all he could gather had gone abroad shortly after her child was born, and never returned. And for this, she had been vilified. Nobody spoke of her. Barely a line in the Peerage.

There were not even any portraits. He had asked Cornforth, who had simply looked awkward and mumbled something about her not having been here long enough.

He wondered if Tiffany even knew what she looked like.

‘Truly,’ one of the Greensword nephews was droning on. ‘The most spectacular sight. The awe of the ancient world.’

‘It is so exciting to hear of your travels, my dear,’ said Lady Greensword indulgently. To Santiago, she said, ‘Jeremy has travelled quite extensively. Venice, Naples, Rome?—’

‘So, Italy?’ said Santiago.

‘—Florence … why … yes, but also… Dear, did you not travel to … er, Flanders, was it?’

The nephew in question looked over at her. ‘What? Oh. Yes. Ghent, Bruges. Lovely, lovely. But nothing compares to Italy. I have never been somewhere so … remote. So … so very different from everything we have here.’

Santiago thought about the mist over the Yangtze river, the gleaming domes of the Taj Mahal, the man-eating lizards of the South Pacific. ‘What makes it so very different?’ he asked.

‘Oh!’ Clearly delighted to have an audience, and quite neglecting the lady to his left, Jeremy launched into an account of the food—so spicy!—and the architecture—so ancient!—and the culture—so very, very foreign!

Eventually, after a monologue explaining how he overcame seasickness in the Venice Lagoon, he slowed enough for his brother to get a word in edgeways.

‘We did think of visiting Spain, of course, but it was so frightfully dangerous at the time. We were risking enough, travelling as we did.’

Around the table, murmurs went up about their bravery in having travelled whilst Bonaparte was still at large.

‘But of course, you could tell us about Spain, Your Grace,’ said Lady Greensword, and Santiago really really wished Tiffany was here so he could see her face at that comment.

‘I am afraid I have not had the privilege of travelling there,’ he said.

‘But—’ she said, and began to go a little pink. ‘But you are Spa— Are you not Spa?—?’

‘I was born in Chile, my lady,’ said Santiago patiently. ‘Which is currently under Spanish rule, although the situation may have changed lately. I have not been there for many years.’ Not since they were chased away by his father’s debtors, and gone to Argentina, then Peru, then Brazil…

‘Oh. So it’s like Spain, then?’

He shrugged and swirled his wine in its glass. ‘I have no idea. People speak Spanish, yes. But they also speak Mapuche and other local languages.’

‘Do you speak … um, that?’ asked the Belmont sister sitting opposite him.

‘A little. My mother was fluent.’

‘I had heard she was a Mayan princess!’ broke in a man further down the table.

‘No, they are from Mexico. I did travel there, but?—’

‘What’s the other one? The one with all the gold?’

‘Ah, you mean the Aztecs. Actually, she is descended from el Conde de Moctezuma de Tultengo, who is said to be a descendant of Moctezuma—the great ruler of the Aztec Empire,’ he added, when they all looked at him blankly.

‘So she’s an Aztec princess!’ breathed one of the Belmont sisters.

‘If you like,’ he said hopelessly. They might as well enjoy their fantasies.

‘Where is she now? Is she coming to England?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Santiago. ‘She entered a convent when I was eight.’

That silenced the chatter. Sensing some awkward questions about how and when his mother had converted to Anglicanism and then back to Catholicism again to enter the convent, he changed the subject. ‘At which time I began travelling more extensively. I spent many years travelling the Pacific.’

‘The Pacific?’

That turned out to be a mistake. He spent the rest of dinner regaling them with tales of his travels, while the Greensword nephews and their aunt became increasingly sullen. The stories were cleaned up, of course. Fewer cholera-ridden slums and druglords with machetes, and more beautiful islands and exotic foods.

He told the stories as if he was telling them to Tiffany, but most of his jokes fell flat.

After dinner, when the table was cleared and the ladies excused themselves, he knew he was supposed to stay for cigars and port with the gentlemen. But he noticed the glance that went between Lord and Lady Cornforth as she left the room, and he knew something was up.

Tiffany didn’t have a headache. Tiffany was being confined to her room for some other reason, and he didn’t think it had anything to do with her health.

His hand absently patted his pocket, where he slightly fancied her necklace was still warm from her skin.

He excused himself after knocking back one small, quick glass of port. The cigars on offer were flavourless things, so he left his in the ashtray and made vague mentions of having left something in his room.

Halfway up the grand staircase he heard voices. Voices that were somehow raised and hushed all at the same time. Lady Cornforth, berating someone.

‘Well, if she’s not going to even open the door then she can go to bed with no supper.’ Someone else murmured, another female voice. ‘No, Morris. You will not leave it outside the door. And you will tell the kitchen not to send anything up, and if she ventures down, to give her nothing. Do you understand me? If she is going to behave like a child, then she can be treated like one. You will leave her until the morning.’

Footsteps hurried down towards him and he ran downstairs too, grateful for once that his evening slippers were thin-soled and didn’t clomp about like a pair of boots would. He ducked around the side of the staircase, and waited until Lady Cornforth had hurried past in the direction of the drawing room.

Well, that was pretty unequivocal. He hurried up the stairs and caught a maid heading towards the other end of the corridor, where presumably the servants’ stair was. She looked vaguely familiar, probably from the time he’d carried Tiffany home.

‘Excuse me,’ he said softly, and she turned to bob a curtsey and nearly dropped her tray.

‘Your Grace!’

‘Yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘You are Lady Tiffany’s maid, yes? Morris?’ When she nodded, he continued, ‘Is she unwell?’

‘Er,’ said Morris, who was clearly a terrible liar. ‘Yes?’

‘That is very sad to hear. Will she come down this evening?’

‘I … er, I don’t think so, Your Grace.’

‘Oh dear. Perhaps you should leave that for her, in case she is hungry later?’

Morris looked terrified. She had just been told one thing by her uncompromising mistress, and now here he was telling her another.

‘Er…’

‘Look.’ He smiled at her, the smile that had worked on everyone but the pirate queen of the South China Seas, and said, ‘Perhaps I could speak with her? It would lay my mind at rest. I have travelled all this way to see Lady Tiffany…’ he said, and let the implication hang there.

What are you doing? he screamed at himself. Implying that you’ve come all this way to … ask for her hand? Once Morris gets that into her head, she’ll tell all the other servants and then everyone will know!

But he really did want to speak with her. And he had no way of knowing which was her chamber.

‘If you accompany me then there can be no impropriety,’ he added, and Morris looked very torn.

He kept smiling.

‘Well, I suppose…’ she said, and he smiled wider.

She led him towards what he thought was the side of the house, where the windows probably looked out onto the stables, and indicated a door quite firmly closed.

The necklace in his pocket was getting warmer. He wasn’t imagining it.

‘She has locked it,’ Morris whispered.

Santiago nodded and tapped at it gently. ‘Lady Tiffany?’ He hesitated, then for the benefit of the maid, added an endearment. ‘ Mi amor , are you all right?’

No answer.

‘Tiffany? Can you hear me?’

‘Perhaps she’s asleep, sir,’ said Morris, and he nodded.

‘Thank you, Morris. I will perhaps see her tomorrow.’

He watched her go, and then he knocked harder on the door, knelt down and put his lips to the keyhole. ‘Tiffany, open the door right now, before I break it down. You know I am capable.’

Nothing. She wasn’t in there, and probably hadn’t been for hours. Overlooked the stables, eh? Well, then.

It didn’t take him long to escape the house by means of the servants’ stair—startling a few footmen cadging a smoke as he did—and make his way around to the side of the house. The service wing was here, abutting the main house and shielded from the front and back lawns by a high hedge. This time of night, it blazed with light and activity as the servants cleared up after dinner, but everyone was inside, away from the rain.

If anyone saw or heard him scale the walls and climb over the roofs they didn’t challenge him. This sort of thing probably happened all the time at house parties anyway. He’d noticed at least one couple at dinner eyeing each other up—and they were both married to other people.

Yes—there was an open window, approximately the distance from the front of the house he’d calculated. The room within was dark, but the pendant in his pocket was warm. He carefully crept across the slick, wet kitchen roof to the ledge beneath Tiffany’s window, and took a deep breath.

‘Tiffany?’

No response. She almost certainly wasn’t in there. But just in case?—

‘Tiffany, it’s me. Santiago. Are you all right? Answer me.’

Nothing.

‘I’m going to come in now,’ he warned, and raised his head to look inside the room.

There was a shape in the bed. He called again, but it didn’t move, and when he finally swung into the room and crept closer, he saw that it was a bundle of clothes shoved into the approximate shape of a person under the covers.

He sighed. She had run away—but where? Where could she go from here? She had to know it wasn’t safe for her to be on her own at night, even if this was the estate she’d grown up on and she knew it and the village nearby like the back of her hand…

He crossed to the dressing table, where a candle stood half burnt, and lit it to see better by. The room was neat, with an ugly mauve dress hung up as if to be changed into for dinner. But the dressing table itself was what intrigued him.

Written on a piece of paper was a name. Mr Cotton, husband of Amy Cotton née Proudbody, of Ivy Cottage, Churlish Green . That was the village he’d ridden through on his way here. Beside it was a flower, a weed really, already withered and half dead. And beside that a single earring, a pale stone he couldn’t identify in the gloom. When he brought the candle closer to them, it flared.

It flared green.

A spell . She had done some kind of spell on this Mr Cotton, and now… What, she had gone to find him? Why? Who was he?

The necklace in his pocket was warmer than before. He fished it out, afraid it might burn him, and stared at it. It was made of shell, a white cameo of an unknown woman on a pale blue background, strung from a green ribbon, and it was very faintly glowing.

Santiago had seen many strange things in his life, but a green candle and a glowing necklace were stranger than the rest put together.

‘Where are you?’ he whispered, and the cameo woman turned her head slightly to the left. He nearly dropped it. ‘Tiffany?’

He let the pendant drop to the full length of its ribbon, and it strained, ever so slightly, towards the far wall of the room. Towards the back of the house. Towards the village.

‘ Mierda ,’ he muttered.