Chapter Twenty-Six
Rhys stayed on the floor for some time after the lights were raised back to their normal levels and watched with one knee drawn to his chest as Seph held court to a flurry of admiring lantern-bearers.
“Your wife,” said Merlin to his left, “is quite the talent.”
Rhys glanced at him, his dreamy half-smile widening into a full-toothed grin. “Aye, she is, isn’t she?”
The old man nodded, stretching his fingers so that they gave delicate cracks. “You ought to consider making the fiction a truth.”
“I consider fiction and truth very similar at all times,” Rhys replied easily. “Don’t you?”
Merlin huffed. “You had better not say that to her, should she ever ask you about the particular fiction in question. I mean it, boy. Women like that are hard to find. I should know. I’ve scoured the world looking.”
“So have I,” said Rhys, dropping the grin and heaving a deep breath. “So I know that perfectly well.”
Merlin nodded, as though he approved, and then glanced down at his lantern on the carpet in front of him. “Ah, but I’ve mangled my Stingy Jack, haven’t I?”
Rhys gave him a flat look and then reached over to examine the turnip. The eyes were uneven and the mouth was jagged and gaping. “Merlin,” he said, “this is the most perfect jack-o’-lantern I’ve ever seen. It’s terrifying.”
It made the old man pause and then laugh, a deep, belly-shaking laugh that then made him cough and double over, fighting between wheezes and chortles as he batted away any and all attempts at concern.
Once he’d caught his breath, he looked to Rhys, the old man’s pale eyes watering, and asked, “Could you help me to my room, lad? Subtle, like?”
“Do you want me to light your lantern?” Rhys asked, already standing and offering his hand. “You could sleep with it next to you or keep it at your door.”
“Hm,” said Merlin, considering it. “If I light it tonight, is that the only use it will get?”
“They last a while if you want them to,” Rhys told him as the old man’s cool hands locked into Rhys’s warm ones and he heaved him up and to his feet. “I’ve seen them weather the entire month if they’re kept out in the cold.”
“I see, I see,” said Merlin, still peering at the turnips on the ground, like he didn’t quite trust them. “And does it frighten away all spirits, or only the malevolent ones?”
“I … I don’t know, at that,” Rhys said, blinking. “I’m not certain.”
“Well, perhaps at least for tonight,” Merlin allowed. “For the novelty, if nothing else.”
Rhys took both his and Merlin’s lanterns to the fire and dropped embers into them, jostling them a little to get the glow nice and roused, and then came back, turnips in one hand, and the other extended to assist the ailing man to his bed.
They walked quietly out of the room, avoiding notice as Seph’s laugh tinkled at something the uptight footman had asked her, proffering an offensively beautiful carved turnip to her for inspection.
Rhys might have had thoughts about that some other time, but just now, he was turning over what Merlin had said in his mind. Ruminating upon it. Trying to find the right way to ask.
“You want to know what spirits I’ve been seeing,” the man guessed as they took the stairs very carefully, one at a time. He didn’t look at Rhys as he said it, his gaze on his own feet, placing them carefully and leaning when he needed to. “None, of late, and much to my sorrow.”
“‘None of late,’” Rhys repeated, wrinkling his brow. “They came and went, did they?”
“They came and went,” Merlin agreed, and then he took a shallow breath, as though the stairs were taxing him.
Rhys did not press further while they were still attempting locomotion. “I’ve never met an English Catholic before,” he said of Father Wheeler. “Unless his accent’s a ruse like the medium’s.”
Merlin shook his head, huffing. “Recusant,” he managed between breaths. “Northampton. Stubborn bastards.”
“Really?” said Rhys, immediately more interested in Father Wheeler than he had been before. “And did he help you today? Did any of it work?”
Merlin nodded, gripping the banister as they took the final step.
The old man let out a wheeze and a little self-conscious chuckle.
“It did, in fact,” he said. “He ran his hands along the bones in my back and jolted them back where they’re supposed to be.
Then he gave me a salve for my mouth and a little prayer to say over my tea at nighttime. ”
“That doesn’t sound very magical,” Rhys commented, frowning.
“He also gave me a candle to hold and burn away my pain,” Merlin added, raising his gray brows. “And it worked.”
Rhys blinked a few times. “Oh.”
“Indeed,” said Merlin. “Let us hope it continues to do so.”
Rhys led him to the end of the hallway, to the room that was last on the left. Merlin had taken a guest room for himself, which seemed odd, in his own house.
But of course, he and Seph had been given the master suite. Hadn’t they?
“The only other woman I’ve ever met like that one you have here with you,” Merlin was saying as he was shuffled over to sit on the corner of his bed, watching Rhys place the lanterns on the wooden table at its side, “was your mother, the Baroness Selwyn.”
Rhys hesitated, his throat squeezing in surprise. “What?”
“She wouldn’t have had me,” Merlin said fondly, giving a little sigh as he kicked his shoes off and climbed backward on the pillows, still fully clothed.
“Even if I’d been brave enough to ask. But oh, how I admired her.
She was the best part of visiting Brighton in the summers. The absolute pinnacle.”
“Willa?” Rhys repeated stupidly, turning to squint at Merlin. “I didn’t know you were friends.”
“Oh, yes, yes,” the old man said, nodding. “She was a vibrant and untamable creature, your mother.”
“She wasn’t my mother,” he replied. “I had a mother, but she died. She was my … patron?”
“I know she didn’t birth you, boy,” said Merlin, his pale irises wide and shiny as he stared past the room and into something else, a time that came before.
“But she always called you her son. She wouldn’t say it of some of the others.
The ones who already had parents or who wouldn’t like it.
She called two of the girls daughter, and only one boy son.
Only you. And oh, she spoke of you often.
She was so proud of you. My son, Rhys, whose cleverness burns so bright, it will not let him sleep. ”
Rhys was frozen in place, his hands still hovering over the stupid turnips as his heart had fallen sideways and was thumping in protest.
She had said that?
About him?
“I have been dying for about a year,” Merlin continued, blinking away the reverie and turning his focus onto Rhys.
Onto the present. He gestured at the foot of the bed, inviting him to sit, and did not speak again until Rhys had complied.
“I found out in Brussels, last October. It might have been All Hallows’ Eve, come to think of it.
Obviously, the festival was not my focus at the time. ”
“Cancer,” Rhys said softly. “That is what Father Wheeler called it.”
“Yes, how did he know?” Merlin mused, shaking his head.
“In your stomach?” Rhys guessed. “Is that why you eat the ice?”
“In my whole body by now, I’d wager,” Merlin said with a sigh.
“Down to the blood and bones. But yes, it started in my stomach. I thought I’d caught a bug.
But I knew in short order it was worse. They put me in a ward and filled me with laudanum and cut me and argued and fussed.
And while I was in that state, I started to get visitors. ”
“‘Visitors,’” Rhys repeated, unable to articulate anything else.
“It was odd,” said Merlin, frowning. “I know for a fact some of them were real. Nini came to see me because her circus was also in Brussels at the time. She was there. She was real. She remembers it too. But then people who died under a guillotine twenty years ago were there too, sitting at my bedside, telling me tales, chuckling over old follies. I couldn’t tell which was which. And that was when I saw your mother.”
Rhys could only stare. He could not speak because if he’d opened his mouth, his heart would surely leap out of it.
“She sat by my bed and sketched pictures on her keepsake cards. Cards she’d sent and received between us for many years, and she told me about you.
About how I reminded her of you and you reminded her of me,” he said dreamily.
“She drew that timepiece I sent you. She showed it to me and let me hold it and then put it next to my bedside and sketched its impression on a little card of vellum. I’m sure of it.
Carpe noctem. But the surgeons told me no lady had come by.
No lady could have drawn it and I must have done it myself in my fugue.
They showed me the charcoal on my own fingers.
They pointed out that I had other cards, just like that one, still blank in a pile. ”
Merlin shifted, frowning and shaking his head. He looked at Rhys and asked, “So was she real? Was that the living Willa Selwyn? Or was she a spirit? Do you know, Rhys Caradoc? Can you tell me that?”
He shook his head, his throat flexing over a difficult swallow. “Did you ask Madame Ivanova? How to tell the difference?”
“Of course I did, boy,” Merlin said wearily. “She said she doesn’t see them. She only hears them. But that you have seen one before. A spirit. And you told her so.”
“Hughes,” Rhys murmured. He tried again to swallow, as he had failed the last time. “I did. When I was small. She said it wasn’t him.”
“She said that what you saw wasn’t your uncle,” Merlin corrected. “She said the same thing to me. If you really are a changeling, lad, then that man wouldn’t have been your real relative. Would he have? Because you are an imposter in the human world.”
Rhys startled, a surprised little chirp of laughter escaping his throat, which he reached up to touch as the moisture found its way back through the pipes inside again.
“Hughes always said he was a changeling. That all people like us are,” he told Merlin.
“Look for the vagabonds and vagrants, the odd ones and the unusual. Those are the changelings. If he were here tonight, he’d claim everyone in this house is one, except maybe that prig footman of yours with the golden hair.
Or perhaps him too. Fae are sometimes a bit too precious and proper to hide their true nature. ”
“Well, then, there you have it,” Merlin said with a nod. “You saw Hughes. But you did not see your uncle.”
“Ivanova …” Rhys began, wincing. “I thought she was a complete fraud. I’ve seen her act.
Twice. It was cold reading and letter guessing and nonsense with knocking and lodestones.
But when she said that to me … she … I don’t know.
” He shook his head, running his hands over his hair.
“She knew things she shouldn’t have known. ”
“Perhaps her gift is sporadic,” Merlin suggested, “but her expenses are not.”
Rhys chuckled and gave an acknowledging quirk of his head. “Point well made.”
He could almost hear Hughes in the room with them just now, gloating over being agreed with by someone as regal and respected as Merlin.
“Ha! Twpsyn! I told you so,” Hughes would say.
Perhaps he was saying it, just now, and only Madame Ivanova could hear it, several rooms away.
“You know,” said Rhys, reaching out to fluff the pillow behind the old man’s head, “if Hughes was a changeling, if I am, and if you are, then it isn’t death that waits for you when this body expires.”
“No?” Merlin said, leaning forward to allow for the gesture and then falling back on his refreshed pillow.
“No,” said Rhys. “You will only return home, enriched with new intelligence for your fae brethren, garnered over the life you stole.”
“Surely, changelings know they are changelings,” Merlin argued, his lips twitching at the corners.
“Perhaps,” said Rhys. “Do cuckoos know they are cuckoos? I don’t think they do.
They know they are strange. They know they are bigger, hungrier, driven sometimes to wickedness so that they have room in the nest to survive.
But I don’t think they ever look at mother blue jay or father sparrow and suspect an alien origin. ”
“Perhaps not,” Merlin agreed, and then he stifled a yawn. “Once I am gone, and I know for sure, I will endeavor to report back, if indeed we are secret brethren.”
“Much appreciated,” Rhys said, pushing himself to his feet. “But for tonight, let the father’s candle do its work. And let Jack o’ the Lantern keep your room quiet and free of visitors so that you may enjoy that hard-won sleep, whether it is magical or not. Good night, Merlin.”
“Good night, Rhys Caradoc,” said the old man. “You’re a good boy. Just like your mother always said.”