Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Nineteen
An hour later, I was lying on Duke’s bare chest in my bed, exhausted but smiling.
“I don’t think you’re a detective at all,” I said, yawning luxuriously under the covers. “I think you escaped a romance novel.”
“ The Witch and the Duke ?” he asked.
“ The Wicked Witch, ” I corrected, “ and the Dashing Duke. Don’t forget your adjectives.”
“I won’t argue with the dashing part, but you’re hardly wicked, my love. Well, you were twenty minutes ago but not generally speaking.”
He rolled over so that we lay face-to-face, eye to eye.
Duke looked resplendent in his suits, perfectly coiffed, and impeccably put together.
How lucky was I that I got to see him like this—naked, dark hair mussed, five o’clock shadow before lunch.
As he said… real. A real man with a heart of flesh and blood beating steadily under my palm.
“If Dr. Fanshawe saw me now, I’d never step foot in another book again,” I said.
“If Dr. Fanshawe saw you now, we’d have her arrested for breaking and entering and voyeurism. So there.”
“We probably shouldn’t have done this. It’ll only make saying goodbye harder.”
“Then let’s not say goodbye,” Duke said. “Let’s stay together, rules be damned.”
“Duke, I can’t—”
“You can, ” he said. “You won’t.”
“If you leave your book series, your books will cease to exist. You get that, right?”
“I’ll still be here in this world, won’t I? I’ll join your reality and live and grow old and die here.”
“Exactly. You hear the problem with that? The grow old and die part? The no books anymore part?”
“I’ll be with you. I’ll have a life with you. Isn’t that worth a few books?”
He was talking as if it were nothing to him, as if he were simply moving from Chicago to Oregon and not leaving the realm of imagination for the stone-cold world of rock-hard reality.
I opened my mouth to make another argument but knew I couldn’t win, not this way.
“You want tea?” I asked, changing tactics.
“Always and forever.”
“Stay here and put on your pants.”
“I will do one of those two things.”
I got out of bed, put on my bathrobe, and went out to the top of the stairs. “Mrs. Turner?” I called.
She appeared at once at the bottom of the stairs. “Yes, Miss March?”
“Duke wants tea. Do you mind serving it up here?”
“In your bedroom?”
“Yes, please.”
“Unorthodox, but anything for His Grace.”
I returned to the bedroom, where Duke was at the mirror, tying his tie. Fictional detectives did seem to have a miraculous ability to get dressed in mere seconds.
“Where would you like to get married?” Duke asked. “Here or in Chicago?”
“You’ve actually never been to Chicago,” I reminded him. “ Real Chicago.”
I went into the bathroom and started running hot water in the tub.
“We’ll do it here, then,” he said when I came back into the bedroom. “June wedding in the Pilcrow House garden?”
Mrs. Turner knocked discreetly on the bedroom door.
“Come in,” I said.
Mrs. Turner, with Koshka at her heels, entered holding the tea tray. She set it on my desk and poured.
“Thank you, Mrs. Turner,” Duke said. “You are a saint. Rainy and I are discussing marriage. What do you think of a June wedding in the garden?”
“Only heathens get married outside of the Church. But whatever you prefer, Your Grace.”
She gave Duke his cup first, of course, then served me mine. “Is that all, miss? I’ll be going out if so.”
“That’s all,” I said. She started to leave, but then I launched my offensive.
“Wait, Mrs. Turner, can I ask you something?” I said. “Who did you work for before me and Pops, back when you were in London? Can you remind me?”
She blinked, then cocked her head to the side as if trying to recall an ancient time shrouded in the mists.
“Two boys,” she said. “Long, long time ago.”
“Rainy,” Duke said to me, his tone chiding.
I ignored him. “Go on, Mrs. Turner. Two boys in London?”
“Brothers? I think. One was very clever, and one was…very kind. Clever and kind. And brave. Yes, two boys. Always getting into scrapes.” She sighed. “Then they grew up and didn’t need me. John and…hmm…something that starts with an ‘S.’ Been too long. Yes, troublemakers but good lads.”
“Would you like to go back?” I asked her. “To your old job, I mean?”
“Oh, dear me, no. I’m too old to work with rambunctious boys.
I wouldn’t say no to a change of scenery, however.
I do miss the big city. I miss…I miss the way it used to be.
Sometimes it feels like I don’t quite belong here.
Can’t say why…I’m being silly, I suppose.
” She smiled to herself, possibly the first time I’d ever seen the woman smile.
Then she composed her face and shook her head.
“But not until you’ve grown, Miss March. ”
“I’m twenty-seven, you know.”
“Age is only a number. Now I must be off. I’ll save your lunch for later.”
She left then, and a deep uncomfortable silence filled my bedroom.
I looked at Duke. He didn’t look at me.
“Well?” I finally said.
“That was uncalled for, Rainy. I know perfectly well who and what Mrs. Turner is.”
“Then you should know that is your future if you stay here.”
“That is not my future. And you’re being unfair.”
“Sherlock Holmes. She couldn’t even remember Sherlock’s name. People all over the world know who Sherlock is, but in her addled mind, he’s a kid she used to babysit a million years ago.”
Duke turned away and stared out the window, down to the garden, where we would never have a June wedding.
I’d made a devastating counterattack. Mrs. Turner, as Duke knew, was a fictional character herself.
Or had been. Once upon a time, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson had a housekeeper at 221B Baker Street named Mrs. Turner.
But somehow—perhaps it was a Burner, perhaps she simply wandered off in a London fog and got lost—Mrs. Turner escaped her story, and by the time a Book Witch found her, it was too late.
She’d been replaced in almost all the Sherlock stories with a character named Mrs. Hudson.
Over the years, various Book Witches had taken her in, given her a place to live, a job to do.
She was a housekeeping machine. Because all her character had ever done was make tea and tend house, all she could do now was make tea and tend house.
She was living proof of what could happen to a fictional character who stayed out of their story too long.
“She wants to be back in a story,” I said. “You can tell how much she misses her old life. But it’s too late. There’s no place for her in those books now.”
“That would never happen to me,” Duke said, sounding as if he were trying to convince himself.
“You don’t know that. And I’m not the only reader in the world in love with you.”
“But you’re the only one I love back.”
“I know,” I said. “But I don’t want you to stop being the Duke of Chicago. The Duke of Fort Meriwether doesn’t have the same ring to it,” I teased, trying to make him smile.
“The only case I’ve never been able to solve,” he said. “How you and I can be together.”
“Maybe some mysteries,” I said, “aren’t meant to be solved. So let’s focus on the one we can solve, all right?”
It wasn’t all right. I could tell that from his face, but he also knew when to drop it, if only for the moment.
“If you insist,” Duke said. “I do have some questions for you.” He picked up his notebook and flipped through the pages.
“Fine,” I said. “You can interrogate me in the bath.”
—
“Have you ever owned a hare or even a troubled-looking rabbit?” Duke called out. He sat at my desk outside the bathroom door while I soaked the soreness out of my muscles.
“Not a one. We Marches have always been cat people.”
“Hare statues? Hare artwork? Painting? Tapestry? Anything that could be in the house that is a hare belonging to the March family?”
“Nope.”
“I recall,” Duke went on, “that hares have some meaning in mythology. When I was a boy, our groundskeeper was a rather half-mad, half-pagan Irishman named Oisín. He always warned us boys that when we were out stalking to never lay a finger on a hare.”
“Why not?”
“If you followed one through the mists, you might find yourself in the Otherworld,” Duke continued.
“One myth tells the story of a hunter who wounded a hare in the leg, then followed the hare through a magical door into another kingdom. There he found a beautiful young woman on a throne with a wound in her leg.”
“You’re saying we shouldn’t follow hares?” I asked as I washed the back of my neck.
“Well, you simply don’t know where they’ll lead you.”
“Interesting, but not helpful,” I said.
“Did your mother ever have a case involving a hare? Stop that. I’m trying to take notes and this is not helping.”
I couldn’t see what was going on, but I could guess. “Is Koshka eating your pencil?”
“This is an outrage. Desist, feral beast.”
“Use a pen. He never eats pens.”
I heard Duke drop the pencil into my pen cup and pull out a pen. “Now back to my question.”
“Not that I know of. Her case notebooks were taken by the coven when she died.”
“Yes, you mentioned that. Is that normal practice?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe?”
“Who took them? Did your grandfather say?”
“Dr. Fanshawe. She had just been put in charge of the Ink and Paper Coven.”
“She took your umbrella. She took your mother’s notebooks.”
“Almost twenty-seven years apart,” I said. “This is so frustrating. I really do feel like the answer is staring us in the face, but I can’t see it. Why couldn’t the teapot have been a little more helpful?”
“I’d say it’s because the story would end too quickly,” Duke said, “but we’re not in one of my stories.”
“Feels like it,” I grumbled.
Duke was quiet a moment, then I heard my desk chair squeak. He stood in the doorway with a hand over his eyes, a pointless courtesy considering what had been going on less than an hour ago.
“What’s the bubble situation?” he asked.
I moved my arms through the warm bubbles covering me like the lightest of blankets. “I’m at full rolling boil.”