Chapter 2
“Are ye lost, little fox?” the man asked.
“I am not lost. I am between one place and another.” The words came steadier than she felt.
Rosaline kept her spine near the hedge as she took the measure of the man filling the path.
He was tall. Not the courteous tallness of ballroom lords who bent at the neck to seem agreeable, but a height that made the narrow green corridor feel narrower still, his shoulders broad enough to close it off on their own.
A plain black mask covered the upper half of his face.
No gilt, no feathers, none of the theater the rest of the house had draped itself in.
Below it sat a beard and a mouth already quirking at one corner.
When the torchlight found the eyeholes, the eyes behind them showed green, deep as the yew crowding them on either side.
“Between one place and another.” He gave the words back to her slow, turning them over. His voice was nothing she had heard in any drawing room in England, low and rolling, the r’s burred soft, the vowels pulled wide. “That’s a bonnie way to say lost, lass.”
“I am not lost.” She lifted her chin. “If you will step aside, I will prove it.”
He did not step aside. He tilted his head instead, studying her. “Prove it, then.”
She would not give him the satisfaction of squeezing past. She turned on her heel and walked back the way she had come, back straight, pace even, into the fork she had passed a moment before. She took the left of it. Twenty steps on, the hedge closed into a solid green wall in front of her.
A dead end.
Behind her, unhurried boots crunched on gravel. She did not need to turn to know his mouth had gone from tilting to something wider.
“I tried that one meself.” He came to a stop a respectful pace away, though respect had little to do with the way he looked at her.
“And the two before it. This corner of the beast has been laid to trap. A wee cruelty from whoever built it.” He nodded toward the wall.
“I’ve been at it near half an hour, but perhaps a clever little fox like ye could get us both out of here. ”
“There is no us.” Rosaline stepped around him, careful to leave air between them, and started back toward the fork.
“We are not in this game together, sir. And I am not hunting a prize. I am hunting my friend, who I have lost somewhere in all this green, and I would sooner find her than stand here trading riddles with a stranger.”
“A stranger.” He fell into step behind her. “We’re all strangers tonight. That’s rather the point of the masks, no?”
“Then let us both enjoy our anonymity separately.”
She reached the fork, turned right this time, and walked with purpose. The path bent, bent again, opened onto a little square of clipped grass, and stopped. Hedge on three sides.
Another dead end.
Rosaline stared at it.
A low sound came from behind her. She realized, with heat climbing her throat, that the great brute was laughing at her.
“Oh, aye,” he managed. “A fine hunter ye are. Ye’ve cornered yerself twice now, and the fox is meant to be the one who kens the ground.”
“I am tired.” She rounded on him. “I am tired, and it is dark, and the man who designed this clearly bears a grudge against anyone with sense.”
“Or against anyone too proud to accept a hand when it’s offered.” He canted his head again, and the torchlight slid along his jaw. “Ye’ve the look of a lass who’d walk into the same wall a third time before she’d say the word.”
“And what word is that?”
“Help.” He let it sit between them, unbothered. “It doesnae bite. I’ve said it once or twice meself and lived.”
Rosaline pressed her lips together. She thought of Abigail somewhere in this maze, of the carriage that would carry her into Kent by dusk tomorrow, of every hour of every day back home spent doing precisely what was expected of her and precisely nothing else.
Here, in the dark, behind a fox mask, with a man who did not know her name and could not carry it home, the calculation ran differently.
“If I agree,” she said, “it is only because two heads will find the exit faster than one, and I have a friend to reach.”
“A ringing endorsement.” He swept an arm toward the fork mock-courtly, and the size of him made the gesture absurd. “Lead on, then. Ye’re clearly the brains of this partnership. I’m only here for the muscle.”
“Do try not to sound so pleased about it.”
“I cannae promise ye that.”
She should have found him tiresome. She had spent three Seasons perfecting the art of finding men tiresome, of nodding through their opinions and offering nothing of her own for fear of being thought odd.
Yet as she led him back to the last plaque she trusted and crouched to read it, something in her had gone quiet and quick at the same time.
“Where two roads argue, follow the elder.” She frowned at the two paths ahead, then at the hedges themselves. “There. The left wall is older; the growth is darker and thicker at the base. The right was planted after, to fool the eye. We go left.”
“How d’ye ken the left’s the elder?”
She had opened her mouth to answer before she considered whether she should. “The gardener trains new hedge flat against a frame, so it fills in even. Old hedge grows wild at the bottom, no matter how you cut the top. Look at the roots, and the maze will tell you its age.”
He was quiet a moment. Rosaline braced for the usual thing—the small laugh, the change of subject, the way men reached for a topic they preferred whenever a woman knew something they did not.
“Huh.” He crouched beside her, close enough that she felt the warmth radiating from him, and studied the base of the left wall. “So it does. Where’d a fox learn to read a hedge?”
“Books.” She stood up, brushing her skirts. “It is remarkable what one can learn from books when one is left alone with them often enough.”
“And are ye? Left alone often?”
“Left.” She took the older path. “The alone part, I have arranged for myself.”
He did not push it. He came up beside her, and for a while, there was only the crunch of gravel and the two of them reading the dark.
“Here.” She stopped at a fork where a plaque showed a hare mid-leap. “Every third marker is a moon, and the moons have turned us right every time. This one’s a hare. We ignore it and count on.”
“Left, then.” He stepped toward the left fork.
“No. Right.”
He stopped and did not move, and she caught the small trap in it a beat too late.
“You did that on purpose.”
“Did I?” Nothing gave him away but the corner of his mouth. “Prove me wrong, then.”
“The last moon sent us right, the pattern holds every third turn, and you know it does, because I said so not thirty feet back and you were listening to my every word.” She folded her arms. “You wanted to see whether I’d follow you off a cliff because you happen to be tall and sure of yourself.”
“Aye.” He said it without a scrap of shame, grinning under the black mask, and turned right. “And ye didnae. Right, it is.”
They went on, and the words kept coming without her deciding to speak them, which never happened, not across a dinner table, not in a drawing room, not once in three Seasons of being looked at.
The next plaque stopped them both.
“Trust the path the moon forgets,” she read aloud.
“Then we’ve been wrong the whole way.” He nodded back down the corridor of hedge. “The moon’s been our guide. Now it says forget it.”
“It says trust the path the moon forgets. The fork with no moon on it. There.” She pointed into the unmarked dark. “It changes the rule the moment we’ve learned to lean on the old one.”
“Or the moons were never the key at all, and we’ve been lucky.”
“Lucky. Five turns running.”
He considered her a moment in the thin light. “Aye, fair.”
The two small words landed warmer than any compliment she had been handed across a supper table.
“Ye argue better than half the men in that house,” he said, ducking under a low arch of hedge.
“That is a very small mountain to be the king of.”
His laugh came again, genuine this time, unguarded. “Aye, it is.”
“You do not care for them either.” She said it before she weighed it. “The house. The masks. I watched you decline to bow to anyone the whole way in.”
“I bowed to ye,” He said easily, the plain black mask giving nothing away.
“You did not. You tilted your head at me as though I were a horse you were deciding whether to buy.”
“A fine horse.” She knew he was smiling. “Sound of leg. Sharp of eye. Bit of a temper, which I like in a mount.”
Her cheeks heated. “I am not a mount. I’m a woman. That’s a rather brutish comparison.”
“So I’ve been told. Often. By many.” He held a branch aside so she could pass, and she passed close, closer than she meant to.
The space where the two of them stood shrank down to the width of a held breath before she moved on.
The paths were narrowing now. The hedges pressed higher and blacker, the torches farther apart, whole lengths of the maze lit by nothing but a thin wash of moon.
The plaques changed, too. Their verses coiled in on themselves, becoming harder to unknot.
Twice she stopped and read a clue three times before its meaning became clear.
Each time she solved one, the corridor beyond it seemed to draw them tighter together, until she could no longer walk beside him without her shoulder brushing his arm.
“We’re close,” she said. “The turns are coming faster. Whoever wins reaches the center within the next few.”
“Then read me the last one.”
She crouched to the plaque, he crouched with her, and their heads bent to the same small square of brass.
For a moment, the maze had gone silent around them.
No laughter drifted over the hedge. No music.
Only the hiss of a distant torch and the sound of his breathing, near enough that she felt the warmth of it stir the loose hair at her temple.
She read the words twice and did not take in a single one.
When she turned her face toward his to speak, he had already turned his toward hers, and the distance she had been so careful to keep all this while was simply gone.
He leaned in a fraction. Enough.
She did not move away.
“I’ve watched men cleverer than me lose that whole house tonight,” he said, his voice low, “and none of them once looked as bonnie doing it as ye do losing a maze.” His gaze moved over the fox mask, to the eyes behind it, and held there. “Ye should ken that. Whatever else ye ken.”
Heat climbed her neck. She was glad of the mask, glad of the dark, glad of a hundred things that let her stay in this narrow corridor a moment longer than sense allowed.
Tomorrow, there would be a carriage, a brother, a road out of London, years of drawing rooms where she said nothing anyone remembered.
Tonight, there was only this stranger with the burred voice, the green eyes, the mouth so near her own, looking at her as though she were the most interesting thing the whole staged house had produced.
She should step back. She knew every reason. She could name each one and put it in order, the way she read a difficult page.
She did not step back.
He closed the last of the space between them and kissed her.
His mouth was warm and unhurried, and it asked rather than took. Rosaline answered before the ordered part of her could file a single objection. Her hand found the front of his coat. His fingers rose to the line of her jaw, careful of the mask’s ribbon, tilting her face up to him.
The green wall, the cold, the whole clever cruelty of the maze fell away, and there was only the press of him, the beard against her skin, the low sound he made in his chest that she felt more than heard.
“Fox!” The name cut through the hedges from somewhere off to the left. Abigail’s voice, bright and searching. “Fox, where have you gone?”
Rosaline came back into herself all at once, her breathing ragged, her palm still pressed flat against the man’s chest.
What on earth was she doing? She was in a stranger’s arms in the dark, with her friend calling her name three walls away.
She stepped back so fast that her heel caught in the grass.
“Steady.” His hand shot out, but she was already beyond it.
“I have to go.” She pressed the back of her glove to her lips. “That is my friend. I have to go.”
“Then go.” He made no move to stop her. Through the mask, his green eyes only watched. “Clever little fox.”
She turned toward Abigail’s voice and did not let herself turn back. Left, then right, then toward the sound, threading the hedges by ear now rather than logic, until the path spilled her out into a wider run. And there was Abigail, the white dove mask shoved up onto her hair, hands on her hips.
“There you are.” Abigail seized her arm. “I have been calling and calling. I turned one corner, and you had simply vanished, like something in a fairytale. Where did you go?”
“Out.” Rosaline’s voice came out thin. She steadied it. “I found the way out.”
They followed the last of the torches together.
The hedge opened, and the gardens gave them back to the lawn, where a small crowd had gathered near a raised dais. A woman in a gold gown stood there holding a slim volume aloft, laughing behind her mask while the guests applauded.
“Oh, no.” Abigail stopped short. “No, no, no. Someone’s reached the center.”
“The chase is won,” a footman announced, pleased with himself. “The prize is claimed.”
Abigail’s shoulders dropped. “We were close. I know we were close. I could feel it.”
“We were.” Rosaline took her friend’s hand. “I am sorry. Truly. I lost you, and then I lost the game, and I have made a poor showing of your birthday all around.”
“Don’t you dare.” Abigail turned, her eyes shining despite the droop of her mouth.
“This was the finest birthday I have had. A masked house, a hedge in the dark, and my dearest friend vanishing into thin air. I would not trade one moment of it for a shelf of scandalous books.” She linked their arms together and drew Rosaline toward the drive.
“Though I confess, I am dying to know. How did a girl who has never so much as walked to church without a chaperone find her way out of that maze, alone, in the dark?”
Rosaline glanced once over her shoulder toward the black mouth of the hedge, where the torchlight showed her nothing but green and shadow.
“We must go,” she said. “The hour is dreadfully late, and your grandmother will send out riders. I will tell you everything in the carriage.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
Or nearly. Some of it. As much as she could bear to say aloud without her face giving her away.
Abigail chattered the length of the drive, and Rosaline nodded in the right places, hearing perhaps a third of it. Her mind had stayed behind in the dark of the maze, in a narrow green corridor, on the warmth of a stranger’s mouth and the burr in a voice that had called her clever.
But by dusk tomorrow, she would be a hundred miles and a whole other life away from him.