Chapter 32 #2
“On a walk with me,” Ella said, leaning out of the doorway. “You’ll keep watch over Lydia, won’t you? Hang on, Beatrix—I need to get my boots.”
“Well.” Rosemarie returned to the beets. “All right, then. But please do recall whose turn it is to make dinner tonight.”
Beatrix wished Rosemarie would recall which of them was the landlady.
Ella rushed out, saying “sorry!” in a way that suggested they really had agreed to go for a walk and she’d delayed them. Into the woods they went, dried leaves crunching under their feet. Beatrix caught Ella’s mischievous expression and laughed.
“Thank you,” she murmured. “Extremely well-timed.”
“I left my grade book at the schoolhouse. Figured I might as well walk you most of the way to your destination.”
Beatrix linked arms with her. “I had no idea I needed to start accounting for myself to Rosemarie.”
“I’m not the only one who’s noticed you’re spending a lot more time with our omnimancer.”
She groaned. “Honestly.”
“You must admit it looks suspicious.” Ella elbowed her. “And is.”
“He’s got an excellent library,” Beatrix whispered.
Ella smiled. “Temptation indeed.”
They walked along in silence for a stretch until Beatrix noticed that all the humor had drained from Ella’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh.” Ella laughed self-consciously. “Nothing. I got a letter from my father yesterday and was just stewing over it.”
“Not bad news, I hope?”
“It was a letter from my father. That in itself is bad news.”
Beatrix winced in sympathy and guilt. Ella spoke so infrequently of her life before Ellicott Mills that it was easy to forget she had a family, let alone one that caused her pain.
“I’m sorry,” she said, squeezing Ella’s arm. “That’s even worse than I’d imagined your relationship to be.”
“Don’t be sorry—I’m delighted that all I have to put up with is the occasional haranguing by mail.” Ella shook her head. “I was so happy to get out of his house.”
“Would you like to talk about it?”
“No, but thank you.” She snorted. “I would, however, like to tell you about Marty Brocknell and the frog he smuggled into class on Friday. Pardon me—frogs.”
Beatrix let Ella deflect the conversation without objection. Some things were better left unsaid. Like dreamside.
When they reached Ella’s towpath to the school, Beatrix trudged on alone toward Peter’s house, thinking about possible futures.
He might fall in love with another woman, which presumably would free her—from these feelings, if not from their sleeping bond.
Or he might not, and she would go on like this, unable to form a connection with another man.
Or he might be killed.
As she shuddered over this thought, a stick snapped somewhere behind her. She turned, expecting Ella—back to tell her something—but nobody was there. Nobody she could see.
Her arms goosepimpled under her layers of clothing. The possible future this suggested was extraordinarily easy to imagine.
Garrett, standing invisibly a few yards away. Slipping into the mansion behind her. Seeing her break the law, hearing too-revealing conversations. Arresting Peter. Arresting her. Torpedoing her sister’s efforts—and Peter’s.
She had to shove down the instinct to run. Instead, she walked on to the Victorian at a sedate pace, never once looking over her shoulder. When Peter responded to her knock, she squeezed in before he’d fully opened the door and pressed it shut with her shoulder. Hard.
“What—”
“I think Wizard Garrett followed me,” she whispered.
His eyes nearly popped out of his head. Leaning in, he murmured, “Close every door in the house.”
Receiving room. Brewing room. Cellar. Bathrooms. Bedrooms. Attic. She dashed back to the second-floor landing and found he’d demarcated the stairwell, hallway and kitchen and cast the spell detector. The handful of white areas were all too small to be human, but he put a hand through each one.
He repeated the process in every room she’d closed off.
“Not here, thank God,” he said finally, deactivating the spell.
It was only as they walked back to the first floor that she thought of the locket around his neck. Hers was set only to her own property. His would pick up an intruder’s spell anywhere in town.
“Did your charm go off?” she asked.
“No. That’s why I was caught off guard.”
She felt foolish. “I’m sorry—I heard a twig snap, and I jumped to conclusions.” She pushed a stray hair from her eyes with shaking fingers. “When I thought about the consequences if he did get in ...”
“Yes.” He rubbed his arms as if he’d had an attack of gooseflesh, too. “He hasn’t cast a spell in Ellicott Mills since the night you sent him packing, but I’m worried that teleporting here doesn’t register because the actual casting happens elsewhere.”
She stared at him. “So if he spelled himself invisible first and then made the trip—”
“—we’d have no idea. And whenever he teleports away, if he happens to be just outside town, outside the area I demarcated, we wouldn’t even get an after-the-fact warning.”
An awful thought. She made a beeline for the receiving room and sank into a chair, rubbing her temples.
He slumped into the one on the other side of the desk. “It gets worse. There’s apparently a highly classified spell to silence the sound of footsteps, and he knows it.”
“Wait—then the snapping twig I heard couldn’t have been him.”
“The spell might mute that sound, or it might not.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t have any idea what spell he’s using or how it works.”
She sat up straight, a thought occurring. “Would he know to avoid casting here? Is your alarm spell common knowledge?”
“No—no one knows about it except us and your compatriots.” He shook his head. “Still—we can’t risk him picking the lock and slipping in. From now on I’m casting scield on the house so no one can get by without taking it down.”
After he followed through on that, he considered her. “Are you all right?”
She ran a hand along the arm of the chair. “I suppose I keep waiting for them to make their next move ...”
“And the longer it takes, the more anxious you get.” His laugh had a black edge to it. “Don’t I know it.”
Someone knocked on the door.
They looked at each other. Peter strode into the hall, projecting a calmness she knew he didn’t feel, and peered through the peephole.
“Miss Knight,” he murmured, undoing the spell.
“Wait.” Beatrix positioned herself to ensure that no one could get in before or after Ella. “OK, go ahead.”
Ella, walking in with a merry “hello” on her lips, stopped, eyebrows raised, as Beatrix immediately slammed the door shut.
“That’s ... unnerving,” she said to Beatrix as Peter reset the protection spell.
“I had the feeling that Wizard Garrett was following me after you left. It might have been my imagination,” she hastened to add as Ella gasped, “but I’m not in the mood to take chances.”
“No kidding.”
Peter cleared his throat. “Could I do something for you, Miss Knight, or are you here for Miss Harper?”
“I was hoping to look through a spellcasting primer, actually.” Ella’s smile seemed a bit forced. “I’ll read quietly—you won’t even know I’m here.”
Peter went to the brewing room with its wall-to-ceiling bookcases and returned with several texts.
“Perfect.” Ella took them to the receiving room.
Beatrix suspected her friend was at least as interested in observation, but Ella had to know this was a clear case of the scientist affecting the experiment. If she actually had been giving into temptation with Peter, she certainly wouldn’t show any evidence of that while Ella was watching.
“I’ll be upstairs,” Peter said, and left them to themselves.
Beatrix picked out a tome on runic characteristics and settled in the remaining chair.
Half an hour or so passed. Then the telephone rang.
She got it—Peter usually couldn’t hear the phone from his lab—and extracted herself from the conversation with the man on the other end of the line after only a minute, which had to be a record.
“Mr. Freelow for you on the phone,” she said, poking her head into the lab.
Peter closed his eyes. “Lord give me strength.”
“He’s a sweet man.”
He laughed. “Yes, very. But please manufacture an emergency if I’m not off the call in an hour.”
She’d just sat down when another knock on the door interrupted.
“Good grief,” Ella said.
Beatrix stuffed the books into a desk drawer, looked through the peephole and relaxed at the sight of the petite woman outside. She murmured the counter to the protection spell, so quietly even she could barely hear it, and unbolted the lock.
“Mrs. Clark,” she said, ushering her in and shutting the door as quickly as she could without attracting note. “How is Anna? No more earaches, I hope?”
“No—she’s much improved. I’m very grateful.”
Sue Clark, on the other hand, looked wan, face pinched with either pain or exhaustion. She glanced at her hands, apparently hesitant to explain why she’d come.
“Would you like to speak privately with the omnimancer?” Beatrix gestured toward the receiving room. “He’s on the telephone but should be available soon, if you’d care to wait. I’ll let him know you’re here.”
“No, I … think I’d rather speak with you.”
Ella was pulling on her coat as they stepped into the room. “Go ahead, I’ll let myself out.”
Mrs. Clark sat, still focusing on her hands, now tucked in her lap. She’d been four years behind Beatrix in school, a quiet child blossoming into beauty. Now she looked—not exactly old, but older than she ought.
“I’m expecting,” she blurted.
“Oh!” Beatrix said. She was about to add the customary “congratulations,” but she feared that was not the right sentiment in this case. “Ah—how are you feeling?”
This opened the floodgates. “Terrible. Even worse than the other times—stomach, back, feet—I can’t sleep—I’m so, so ...” She struggled for words and ended up sobbing.