Chapter 18
Ella was sitting in the kitchen—a cup of tea in her hands and a blanket around her shoulders—when Beatrix came in through the back door, humming a waltz under her breath.
“Oh! Are you feeling any better?” she asked, recollecting with a guilty start that she hadn’t thought of Ella even once since leaving that morning.
“Marginally.”
“Could I get you anything?”
Ella glowered. “No.”
Wait … was Ella glowering at her?
“What’s wrong?” She sat at the table. “Are you angry with me?”
“I’m not angry.” Ella paused to blow her nose. “Shocked, disappointed and aggravated, but not angry. No, I take it back—angry, too. Kissing a wizard? Really?”
Beatrix had the brief sensation of falling. “Ella—”
“How can you get involved with someone who’s part of the system that prevents us from living like normal adults?
” She punctuated this whispered tirade by slamming her cup onto the table.
“I never would have expected it of you—of all people! Every day you get a reminder of how wizards keep us from doing what we want to do and force us to do things we don’t. ”
“Yes, but—”
“What do you think will happen after the storybook wedding? Do you honestly believe he’ll say, ‘Oh, go right on trying to reshape the country in a way that will be bad for me personally’?”
“I’m not—”
“And what about your sister? What do you think she’ll say?”
Ella seemed to have finally come to a halt. Beatrix clasped her shaking hands together. “I expect she’d say pretty much what you’re saying. Rosemarie, too. But I’d thought you would understand.”
Ella made a disgusted noise. “What, because he’s tall and good-looking?”
“No,” Beatrix said, now angry herself. “Because I trusted you would give me a chance to explain that he’s good-natured and funny and I’ve never heard him say a negative word about women’s rights. He’s the exact opposite of our omnimancer, and he’s investigating him to boot.”
“Those are slightly better reasons, I’ll admit, but—”
“Every time I see him, I feel happier!”
That came out louder than she’d intended. She lowered her voice and leaned toward Ella.
“You’re telling me to stick it to society because society’s sticking it to me, but if I really love him, how is suppressing that feeling any different than having to stifle my desire to be a medical researcher? Am I to have nothing I want out of life?”
“You have us. You have the League.” Ella sighed. “I know—it’s not enough.”
A minute or perhaps two ticked away as they sat in silence.
“I wanted to build things,” Ella said abruptly. “Skyscrapers. I wanted to leave reminders all over the country that I was there, that I made something lasting and important and powerful.”
Ella had said that once before, though in her usual humorous way—since I can’t be an architect, I figured the next best thing is correcting spelling. This, now, was altogether different.
“Some days I feel I might explode,” Ella muttered at the table.
Beatrix took her hand, wondering how she could ever have suspected her friend of spying. “I know exactly what you mean.”
Ella looked up at her, seeming to consider her words. “Please don’t marry him. He’s a wizard, Beatrix. He may smile and joke, but I don’t think you understand how bad wizards are. There’s—there’s just something about being part of the magiocracy that warps these men.”
“What do you—”
Beatrix paused. Footsteps—someone on the front porch.
“Listen,” she said quietly, “he certainly hasn’t asked me to marry him, and I don’t know that I would accept if he later does. I just don’t know him well enough yet. I’d have to be very sure before I give my rights away like that.”
The front door creaked open. “Hello,” Lydia called out.
“And I’d like to keep this under wraps while I’m figuring it out,” Beatrix added in a whisper. “Please.”
Ella quirked her lips and an eyebrow. “Just don’t kiss certain parties at the edge of the forest where anyone can see you.”
After that, it was as if she had three disconnected lives.
Theo’s Beatrix existed in the woods for about forty-five minutes each morning and afternoon, caught up in his cocoon of good cheer.
Blackwell’s Beatrix slogged through the greater part of the day, angry, fearful, absorbed.
And Lydia’s Beatrix spent evenings and weekends preparing poster-board signs, negotiating to borrow one of Hazelhurst’s public-address systems, checking in on the caterers and wondering when she might ever again have time to herself.
She felt most like Beatrix’s Beatrix with Theo. But as she couldn’t tell him what Blackwell was doing to her and was leery of talking about the League, their conversations reinforced her sense of split personality.
He had the same problem she did, if for a different reason. “I can’t tell you,” he’d said when she asked how he spent his days. “It’s—say it with me—”
“—classified. Of course.”
So they talked instead about his peripatetic childhood, never in the same home for more than four years. And how she had refashioned herself from a pupil to a de facto mother. And why they both thought Schubert’s piano trio in E flat utterly transporting. And which words they loved to say.
“Ineffable,” she said, the flaming red and dazzling yellow of the leaves around them putting a fairy-tale sheen on the moment.
“Oh, that’s a good one.” He tapped his chin. “Mellifluous.”
“Evocative.”
“Provocative,” he murmured, drawing her free hand to his lips.
Peter could sense his assistant vibrating with impatience behind him, so eager was she to get out of the house. He waited for her final brew to glow green before turning on her.
“Do you have a judgment problem, Miss Harper?”
This seemed to wrong-foot her—she fell back a step, eyes wary—but her response was swift. “I certainly misjudged you.”
“And now you’re making the same mistake with Wizard Garrett, I see.”
Her “what?” was barely audible.
“Your dreams are my dreams.”
He watched her cheeks bloom scarlet. She must have forgotten all about its contents—Garrett waltzing with her in a forest clearing, then kissing her—when she woke in the morning.
“Has it occurred to you that he’s stringing you along in hopes of getting something other than your hand in marriage?” he said.
Her reply was as dry as a bleached bone. “That occurs to all women.”
Now he was blushing, damn it. “Information. About me.”
“He knows how I feel about you. I doubt he’d see the need to offer more incentive than the possibility of not having to work for you ever again.”
“Certain about that, are you?”
If he’d had any reason to wonder whether she truly hated him, her scowl would have erased his final doubts. “May I leave, Omnimancer?”
“Unpin your hair,” he said, deliberately leaving off the “please.”
She freed it with violent jerks, as if she wanted to pull it all out. He looked at it more closely than normal, now that he knew Garrett might at any time be pawing through it—hair the shade he took his coffee, with hints of her mother’s auburn.
“What are you doing here?” she asked bitterly. “Why did you come back to Ellicott Mills?”
“To serve the town, of course.”
“Why did you leave your job?”
“Stress.”
She made a disgusted sound. “What’s the point in lying to me when you’ve ensured I can’t repeat a word you say?”
“Those aren’t all my reasons,” he said, “but they’re true. Besides—the Vow can’t make me trust you again.”
“No, it’s very good at killing trust. Respect, too.”
He’d reached out a hand to gather her hair so he could lift it and check the underside, and his fingers brushed the nape of her neck just as she finished delivering this insult. She flinched.
That, more than the words, pushed him over the edge.
“It also allows me to order you to tell Wizard Garrett that he should take his attentions elsewhere,” he said.
She gasped. Low though her opinion of him was, she had not, apparently, thought him capable of that.
“To allay any suspicions, you’d have to give a little speech about how you’re simply too different and your sister would never forgive you,” he said, dropping her hair and stalking around to face her.
Her mouth worked open and closed without a sound escaping.
“I could, but I won’t.” He crossed his arms. “Remember that, would you, the next time you tally my faults.”
Her reaction was not so much relief as a different sort of tension. She was waiting for the other shoe.
Fine, then. He delivered one.
“You may spend your own time with whomever you please, but you are mine from eight until five for the next three years. And if Wizard Garrett asks you why, you will tell him you’re doing it of your own volition. You did, after all, choose to sign that contract.”
“I’m not my mother,” she whispered. “I would never have done what she did.”
He was thrown by the change of topic. He took a calming breath and said, “I know.”
“Don’t you think it’s unjust to punish me for her sins?”
Ah. Not a change of topic at all. “That has nothing to do with it,” he said.
“Oh? My ancestry had nothing to do with your decision to drag me kicking and screaming from the general store after you learned who I was?”
“I wanted someone smart, someone capable, someone so driven to do magic that she pretended to be a boy to get into the wizardry exam.” He looked straight into her widening eyes. “Beatrix Harper, I wanted you.”
He’d rendered her speechless a second time.
“Now you may leave,” he muttered, and he exited the room without waiting for a reply.