Chapter 6 #2
Peter shook his head as she helped him up his long driveway. “I never thought … I mean, I know they must have missed the omnimancing, but …”
“They missed you,” she said.
She unlocked his door, grinning at him. But the happy bubble popped as they walked into his house and he got his first look at the magiocracy’s mess.
He took in the state of the receiving room, the brewing room and even his bedroom without comment.
But she saw his wince when his eyes landed on his grandmother’s quilt, ripped open by someone checking to see whether anything had been hidden inside. She wished she’d fixed it.
He shrugged on an older version of his wizard’s coat, the same midnight blue as the one he nearly died in but fraying at the edges, and made short work of packing. Once his suitcase was in his car trunk, however, they had to face the fact that they still had not decided where he ought to go.
“I know it sounds ridiculous,” he murmured, leaning on his car, “but I might do best to go back to D.C. I wouldn’t stick out there.”
She shuddered. He wasn’t wrong, but the thought of him there—alone—was deeply unpleasant.
“Let’s go to Reed’s first, though,” he said, taking her arm. “I think we both could use an early dinner.”
He was predictably swamped when they walked into the diner, but she was eventually able to maneuver him past the well-wishers—“who does she think she is,” she heard someone mutter—and into a booth.
She watched him relax, the tense rigidity seeping out of his neck and shoulders, and give Mr. Reed an honest-to-goodness grin when the sandwiches arrived.
“Don’t go,” she said quietly, once they’d finished. “We can figure something out—I mean, anyone here would gladly have you for a night, and you can rotate around. We’d just explain that you shouldn’t be alone while you’re recovering.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think that would be—”
“Beatrix!”
She turned to find her sister, out of breath and agitated.
“Hello, Omnimancer, lovely to see you, so wonderful you’re all right,” Lydia said in a rush. “I wonder if I could borrow you both for a moment?”
The image was hardly artistic. But as a political smear, it was devastating.
Their kiss, frozen in time. His hand about to cup her face.
Her hair spilling down her back, looking for all the world as if he had unpinned it.
Just enough of the surroundings to make clear they were in a bed, but not to identify it as a hospital.
With the photograph was a typewritten, unsigned note: “This is how Lydia Harper’s unmarried sister behaves with wizards. Thought you deserved to know.”
He stared at it, aghast. “Who gave you this?”
“Dot Yamaguchi—one of the League leaders from Hazelhurst,” Lydia added for his benefit, though he could hardly forget, having uncovered Plan B in the young woman’s dormitory room. “She heard a knock on the door and opened it to find this in an unmarked envelope.”
Beatrix, sitting to his right, raised a hand to her forehead. “How many of the League leaders have copies?”
“I think we’d better assume all of them,” said Rosemarie Dane, squeezed next to him on the left. “Certainly every one of the state-chapter leaders who were already predisposed to dislike Lydia.”
Beatrix’s sister sighed. “We’ve already heard from five of them.”
“All calling for her immediate resignation.”
They were huddled together on the couch in the Clarks’ apartment. It was the only nearby place they could think to go that would be guaranteed to have no bugs or watchers, as much as anything could be a guarantee, and Beatrix had assured them that Mrs. Clark would do whatever she could to help.
“But this is outrageous,” said Mrs. Clark, who’d bustled her older children into her bedroom with promises of later treats and now sat in the lone chair by the couch with baby Will in her arms. “You’d just miraculously recovered from a coma, Omnimancer—this kiss was an honest expression of relief and love!
If you explain the circumstances, they will see they’re being manipulated. ”
“No,” Miss Dane said. “They won’t.”
Having watched some of the dynamics at work during the League’s national convention last fall, he was inclined to agree.
“The League is split,” Lydia explained. “There’s the new guard who sees things the way I do—that magic is here to stay, and what we should be fighting is the ban on typics running the country. Then there’s the old guard.” She sighed. “They see magic as evil incarnate.”
“They’re equally expressive about inappropriate behavior between an unmarried woman and an unmarried man,” Miss Dane said. “Let alone an unmarried woman and an unmarried wizard.”
Beatrix squeezed her eyes shut. “It was my fault. I did this.”
“We can see that.” Miss Dane, dry as death.
“No, I mean—I initiated it. I wasn’t thinking, I was just so—so—”
“I kissed you back,” Peter said, casting an irritated glance at Miss Dane.
Lydia put up a hand. “We need to decide what to do, and fast.”
“I think,” Miss Dane said, “that the time has come to go to the press.”
He stared at her. Beatrix said, “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
“Of course it is.” Mrs. Clark’s words were shot through with quiet assurance. “Romance and intrigue—they’ll eat it up, and think of the sympathy you’ll get. Have them call me, and I’ll tell them your behavior was so proper that no one in town even suspected.”
“Except you,” Beatrix said, smiling for the first time in the conversation.
“It wasn’t how you behaved with each other. It was how shattered you were when he was in the hospital—that’s when I knew you loved him.”
His heart pounded loudly in his ears. Then he turned and kissed Beatrix in front of everyone. Miss Dane yanked them apart, glaring.
“None of that, thank you,” she said. “You will be models of propriety until you are married, do you hear me?”
He was tempted to argue simply because he was annoyed with her. But Beatrix gave a dutiful, “Yes, Rosemarie.” Sliding a glance his way, she added, “Every second of every waking hour.”
Thank God for dreamside.
“Now, kindly listen,” Miss Dane said. “You will talk about your engagement: how you suddenly realized you were in love and planned to marry quickly because it would be wholly inappropriate to be alone together otherwise. Then disaster struck. The coma.”
Strategic. Smart. Not altogether true.
“You will also discuss your assistance to us,” Miss Dane concluded, giving him a look he last recalled seeing when he had the temerity to groan at a grade-school assignment in her classroom. You WILL complete this, Mr. Blackwell, whether you like it or not.
“Well—I don’t see that we have any other options,” Lydia murmured. “Peter, are you willing?”
He let out a long breath. Outing himself was an irrevocable step. But if the magiocracy already knew he was helping the League, what benefit did he get by staying quiet?
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
And that was that. Mrs. Clark offered good wishes and a sympathetic look as they left. After Miss Dane gave his car the evil eye for any sign of invisible bugs and they ran their hands over the surfaces to feel for unseen objects, they were off to Baltimore.
They spent the trip talking about what they would and would not say, keeping their discussion as quiet and cryptic as possible in case they’d missed a recording device.
He itched to cast a spell and find out for sure.
For twenty years, he hadn’t gone a single day without using magic. How could he last two weeks?
Beatrix pulled into a parking space a block south of the newspaper building. Even at six thirty on a Sunday night, two floors of windows were lit up.
“Are we ready?” Lydia asked.
Miss Dane cleared her throat meaningfully. “What day did you get engaged?”
That effectively answered Lydia’s question. No, they were not ready. They needed to get their story straight.
Beatrix glanced at him. He gestured at her—go ahead, you make it up.
“The day before Peter’s coma started.” She bit her lip. “The day that Garrett …”
He had yet to get the entire story about that, but the police had been at his bedside to update her several times during the period he was comatose while also able to hear what was said around him.
He knew they had jumped to the wrong conclusion about Garrett, as he’d feared, but an entirely different one than he’d expected.
He knew police thought Garrett had drugged them and left them for dead.
He knew he was not expected to remember much if anything about it, so when Detective Tanner took his statement before lunch, his lies to that effect were accepted as truth.
Had Garrett’s body not disappeared, things would be very different.
“Should we mention what the police told us Garrett did?” Lydia murmured.
“No,” he and Beatrix said at the same time, and with the same level of conviction. The less said about that, the better.
“Anything else we ought to go over?” Miss Dane asked. “Why Beatrix isn’t wearing an engagement ring, perhaps?”
“Because—because I wasn’t prepared when I asked her,” Peter improvised. “It just slipped out.”
“And you will be remedying that soon.” Miss Dane did not say this in the form of a question.
“I don’t want a ring,” Beatrix said, quiet but firm.
He turned to look at her, surprised.
“Beatrix,” Miss Dane said, “we must respect all the reasonable expectations of society—”
“—in the interest of abolishing the unreasonable ones,” she said wearily, and he wondered how many times she’d heard that before.
“Why don’t you want one?” he asked.
She clasped her unadorned hands in her lap. “We don’t know how much your care will cost. If you buy jewelry for me, it will make me sick to see it.”
Not once since he’d recovered from his coma the day before had he thought about the coming hospital bill. His stomach twisted. How bad would it be?
Still, it hardly seemed fair that she should have to forgo visual proof of engagement.
“Wait a minute,” he said, realizing that he had another option at hand.
He took the keys from the ignition, struggled out of the car and opened the trunk.
Inside his suitcase, he found the small drawstring bag he was looking for and emptied its contents into his palm.
He put back the brooch and tiny ruby earrings he’d seen every day of his life until he went off to the Academy, their presence enough to bring back memories of his nan.
He closed his hand around her decades old, speck-of-a-diamond ring and hobbled back to the car.
As he sat next to Beatrix, the to-do list mindset—ring, check—evaporated. This was their true engagement day. The very moment, in fact. He should say something more meaningful than “here, have this.”
“Beatrix,” he said, unaccountably flustered. Well—accountably flustered, because he hadn’t prepared for what he thought could never be.
He got as far as “this is my grandmother’s ring” and trailed off, glancing down at it in his hands.
On some level he still couldn’t believe this was happening.
At the height of Beatrix’s despair over the Vows, she’d sworn she would never love him.
In their first conversation as adults, right before he abducted her from her somewhat simpler life, she said she saw marriage as a loss of what little self-determination she had.
It was amazing that now, here they were—
He looked back at her, stricken. Now, here they were, and she couldn’t say no.
Her eyes were watchful, her muscles tense. If only he could still feel what she felt, he would have noticed before that she was upset. God damn it, they’d just escaped a relationship built on coercion. He didn’t want to marry her like this.
“Omnimancer,” Miss Dane said impatiently, “do you intend to give that to Beatrix or not?”
What choice did he have? What choice did any of them have at this point?
“Beatrix,” he choked out, “will you marry me?”
She said nothing for a moment, the silence deafening. Then she lifted her chin in precisely the way she had on another night—when she’d looked him in the eye and lied about Plan B.
“I will.”