Chapter 18
Thornwood collapsed as soon as they reached Hyde Park. Blades of grass wove through his hair and clothes as an invisible wind flowed about him. Mouse perched nearby, taking in city dwellers strolling along the path.
Londoners peeped out from their holes into the sunny afternoon.
Close by, a smiling couple and three roughhousing children shared a picnic.
As she watched, the plants around Thornwood grew.
The tension that had pulsed through him since they emerged from the Underground melted away.
None of the other humans noticed nature’s infatuation with the Faerie.
Mouse pulled the photograph from the box of Bertie’s belongings.
Recorded in sepia, Bertie lounged on the bench in Thistlemarsh’s rose garden.
He grinned at the camera. Leaning against him, a young Mouse stared out at her older self.
Her arms were wrapped around Bertie’s shoulders.
Roger stood at her side, leaning forward to avoid the reach of the thorny bush behind him.
Even with his back rounded, he was clearly taller than anyone else, his head barely scraping under the top edge of the photograph.
John was there, too, his smile sheepish as he leaned toward Bertie.
Mouse tucked the photo carefully between the pages of Blakeney’s.
She leaned back in the grass, resting her head next to Thornwood’s.
“Feeling better?” she asked.
“Yes, much.”
She paused, biting her lip. “Well enough to summon Mickelwaithe?”
Thornwood stirred. “Why?”
Mouse clutched the box to her chest like a shield. “I would like to bury this box. It is not much, but they could not bring Bertie’s body back from the Front. I thought, perhaps, Mickelwaithe could pick it up for me, so I do not misplace it on our way back to Thistlemarsh.”
Thornwood did not speak, but he pulled the acorn from his pocket and rubbed the cap. She sat up. Mouse was expecting Mickelwaithe to appear out of midair, but instead he sauntered off the path toward them, materializing out of a crowd of pedestrians.
He was still dressed all in black. His movements were otherworldly, as though choreographed by some unseen hand.
“You called?” he asked.
“Everything went surprisingly well,” Thornwood said, not rising from his sprawl on the grass. “No disasters or butterflies transformed into angry unicorns. Mouse has something to ask you.”
Mickelwaithe turned to her.
“I am sorry to trouble you,” she said, suddenly aware that he must have used an enormous amount of magic to get to London in the span of a second. How did Mickelwaithe’s magic work, anyway? It seemed he was more powerful than Thornwood, but here he was, bound.
“It is no trouble.”
Mouse hesitated. Thornwood shifted beside her, his leg pressing into her thigh.
Mickelwaithe’s eyes landed on the line where their legs met, and his eyebrow twitched.
The touch paired with the look jolted her into action.
“Please take this back to Thistlemarsh and put it in the Matchbox. It is delicate.”
Mickelwaithe took it, nodded, then was gone. For a moment, Mouse thought she caught sight of him in the crowd before someone moved and he vanished again.
Thornwood cracked open an eye. His pupil contracted in the sunlight, and his iris colored his entire eye gold.
“We’d better go. It’ll take a while for us to get back to the station.” The grass clung to him as he rose, and he pulled up the stray stalks woven between the threads of his jacket. He winced, plucking them out one by one. “It seems I will still need your help to walk.”
Instead of speaking, Mouse offered her arm.
He took it gratefully.
They paused at a slanted tree a few streets away.
Mouse helped Thornwood disentangle his arms from around her.
As soon as he touched the tree, a layer of tension fizzled out of him.
He draped against it, smiling at the passersby as they went about their business on the street.
Despite it being London, a city inhabited by stony faces and brusque businessmen, everyone who passed by had a smile for them.
A woman even offered Thornwood a peppermint from her purse as she held back a boisterous grandchild.
“Do people always react to you like that?” Mouse asked when the woman and child were gone.
“Yes,” he said, without a trace of his usual pride. “When I take the trouble to put up a proper glamour.”
“Is that why you put it up before we came here?”
He flushed. “Ah, you noticed, did you?”
“How could I miss it?”
“Well, honestly, I did not think you noticed much about my appearance. You’ve been immune to my charms since we met.” He shrugged. “I assumed that you would prefer me with it up anyway.”
“No!” Mouse said, too loudly. “No, quite the opposite. I’ve grown accustomed to your look without the glamour.”
Thornwood smiled, and a touch of the gray tint to his skin lifted.
A man stopped in front of them, mustache and sideburns bathed in plumes of smoke from a cigarette.
“You are kind to stop and offer, but I do not smoke,” Thornwood said to the man before he had a chance to speak.
“Of course you don’t. I’ve never met a High Fae who smoked before, but you all drink like fish,” the man said, a laugh burbling around his words.
Mouse gasped, and Thornwood went rigid.
“No need to look so alarmed. I just stopped to get a look. Haven’t seen a High Fae since I was a little sprite.”
“How did you know he is a Faerie?” Mouse asked. “Have you seen them before?”
“ ’Course I have, every time I look in the mirror,” the man said, his voice like a sputtering fire.
“You are a common Faerie,” Thornwood said at last, his eyebrows arched high.
“Catchin’ on, are you? More surprising to find one of your lot ’round here than mine. You are the first I’ve seen in more than a century. Too much of the wild in your kind, and too married to tradition,” the common Faerie sneered.
“Your kind are house spirits,” Mouse said, recalling the common Faerie stories from her mother’s book, like “The Elves and the Shoemaker.”
He scoffed. “That life’s far away now. I used to be a Brownie, but there’s no place for house spirits when mortals are bundled into tenement buildings, stacked on top of each other without a drop of milk to spare.
We don’t have the privilege to step back into Faerie whenever we like, though, as the High Fae do.
No, we must do as all creatures must and adapt. ”
“Are the old ways lost to all your kind, or just you?” Thornwood asked, his tone light.
The Brownie caught the barb anyway. “Ah, so living among the mortals is only fashionable when highborn lords and princes do it?” the Brownie snapped.
“The moment honest creatures start looking to survive it becomes a betrayal of values. There’s a reason my kind remains.
What will you do, O mighty lord, when all the trees are gone and there is only smog to feed on? ”
The Brownie turned his attention back to Mouse, plucking up her hand and pressing it to his lips. His touch tingled, a low stream of electricity buzzing on her skin.
“It’s been a pleasure, miss,” he said.
Then, with a puff of smoke, he vanished. The cloud drifted into Thornwood’s face.
Thornwood scoffed and reluctantly accepted her offer to help him walk the rest of the way to the station.
Now, the people hurrying from shop to shop hardly spared either of them a glance except to dodge out of their way.
Mouse wondered for the first time if the mortal reaction had more to do with Thornwood’s image of himself than their perception of him.
“I wouldn’t take too much of what that Brownie said to heart,” Mouse said, breaking the silence at last.
“I do not intend to,” Thornwood replied, then sighed before continuing. “But you agree with him.”
“Agree with him?”
“About adaptation. You are a prime example of adaptation for survival yourself. Attempting to turn from an unwanted orphan to a great lady.”
Mouse frowned. “My main ambition is not to be a great lady, but I suppose I’ve never thought of it that way.”
Thornwood continued speaking as though she had not said anything. “My question is, should I adapt to the modern world? Should I run on steam, or gasoline, or electricity? Won’t I lose part of myself that is essential?”
“I’m not sure.”
“That’s the trouble! Will I lose the beehive of my heart?
Will I lose the rain in my veins and the roots in my lungs?
One day, will I wake up with no magic at all?
” He paused, his eyes beseeching. Under his gaze, she felt like an animal with her tail caught in a trap ready to gnaw and rip to free herself. “Have you?”
Mouse did not answer, as she did not know.
Their pace was quicker the rest of the way to the station, but time dragged in the thick tension between them.
They were silent during the train journey back to Tithe. All the compartments in their carriage were empty, and Mouse could feel the dimming of Thornwood’s glamour after the ticket inspector moved on to the next carriage.
Every few minutes, Mouse glanced at Thornwood through her eyelashes. Each time she found him looking sightlessly out the window, his mouth pulled into a grim line and his eyes dark. She noted the grayness receding from his skin as they traveled further from the city.
Thornwood’s driver was waiting for them at the station when they arrived, and Mouse whispered a thank-you to him as they pulled onto the road. The driver clicked in return in what Mouse could only hope was a polite response for whatever manner of Faerie he was. Thornwood did not break his silence.
When they reached Thistlemarsh, he slid out of his seat and helped her from the car. His expression was as far away as it had been on the train when Mickelwaithe greeted them in the entrance hall, with Smudge trailing behind him.