We corrected our posture immediately, apparently not enough to satisfy Madame Dragon. She jabbed her stick in the direction of the clock. “Enough lazy. Change clothes. Help Cook. Now!” She chased us out of the drawing room, scuttling along behind, chasing us up the stairs with her stick like a giant crab nipping at our heels.
In the privacy of our dormitorium we changed into work dresses. Jane said, as she helped untie my tapes, “Sera was telling the truth. Miss Stranje expects us to learn to cook. She believes every young lady ought to understand the work of the house. We learn by doing.”
“Rather convenient, don’t you think?” I muttered. “This way she saves money on servants.”
“That’s not why.” Sera brushed out her flaxen hair and quickly plaited it. “Miss Stranje says we must always be prepared to adapt ourselves to any situation in life. Besides, we may not always be able to depend upon servants.” She tied a ribbon around her braid. “One never knows what the future might bring. Tess has foreseen awful things in her dreams. London in flames, cannonballs falling from the sky, buildings crumbled, and—”
“Well, I don’t mind domestic chores.” Jane cut off Sera with a cautionary frown and a quick shake of her head.
“What an odd school this is.” If it was a school at all. I had serious doubts on that score. I knew three things for certain.
One—Stranje House was no ordinary finishing school.
Two—nor was it the cruel reformatory gossip purported.
Three—Miss Stranje was up to something and we girls were to be part of it. Although, I had yet to lay hold of exactly what that something was.
I hung Jane’s beautiful dress in her wardrobe, giving the lush striped fabric one last smoothing, and decided to try procuring information via a different tactic. With a forlorn sigh I said, “I suppose household chores are not so bad. At least we aren’t being horsewhipped or locked inside a mummy case.”
Jane rolled off her stockings and pulled on a pair of serviceable woolen socks. “You do realize that was all a ruse?”
“But I saw blood. Your blood.”
“Yes. I suppose you did.” She slid her feet into a pair of brown work boots. “Those tines are rather sharp and, on occasion, I might be a bit clumsy.” Jane smiled with a little too much sympathy.
I froze. Watching her, feeling like a complete ninny, because I had a fairly good idea of what she would say next. “It wasn’t, was it?”
“No. I’m afraid that was a wax packet of beet juice and paint.”
“Burst for my benefit.” What a gullible little fool I’d been.
“No,” Sera said. “For your parents’ benefit.”
“My parents? But why? They would’ve been perfectly satisfied knowing Miss Stranje planned to slap my wrists with a ruler if I got out of line. Or cane me with a willow branch.”
“Not good enough.” Jane slipped a blue work pinafore over her shoulders. “Miss Stranje had to be certain they wouldn’t interfere. At all. For any reason. No poking their noses in to see how you’re coming along. She had to make sure they wanted to be thoroughly rid of you.”
“Jane!” Sera scolded.
“Well, it’s true.”
“A little kindness in the telling wouldn’t hurt.”
Jane blew air through her lips. “You should talk, Miss-gloom-and-doom-cannonballs-falling-from-the-sky. I’m sorry but cod liver oil tastes fishy even if it’s taken with a spoonful of sugar—fishy and confusing. May as well take the facts as they fall. I prefer the truth, plain and straightforward. I’m sure you feel the same way, don’t you, Georgie?”
Did I?
Yes. Wasn’t I the one always wanting answers? If so, why did those answers suddenly feel so difficult to accept? I sank onto the bed and tried to look at the facts without feeling dizzy.
“I never get a simple answer from any of you.” I stared at Jane, waiting until I had her full attention. “If you like straightforward truth, I believe you’ve come to the wrong school.”
“Touché.” A smile played at the corner of Jane’s mouth as she finished lacing her boots.
I didn’t feel triumphant, just weary. It had been a tiring few days. I wanted to crawl under the bedcovers and stay there for a good long while. Instead, I silently slipped into a work dress.
“Come along,” Sera tugged on my hand. “You’ll like Cook.” Her eyebrows lifted as if she was letting me in on another private joke.
Everything was humorous to them. Duping me. Skeletons in dresses. A torture chamber that wasn’t a torture chamber. Our school that wasn’t a school. Or maybe it was a school, only not for reforming us into marriageable misses. No, Miss Stranje was transforming us all right, but the question was, into what?
“Look at us, headed to the scullery. You, Jane, she has you meeting with a steward. Does she intend for you to become a scullery maid or a farmer? What is Miss Stranje planning to make of us? Scientists? Thieves? Spies?”
Sera let go of my hand. She and Jane stopped and turned to me.
For once, Jane’s normally flippant manner was gone. “Yes.”
“Which?” I scoured their faces praying for the truth.
Sera nodded at Jane. “Tell her.”
“All of those things.” Jane stood taller, every inch of her solemn. “And more.”
“More? What more?” It was incomprehensible. What kind of life was I embarking upon? “No more roundaboutation. Tell me!”
Jane huffed. “She’s teaching us how to navigate in society.”
“Because we’re different,” Sera explained with considerably less agitation than Jane. “Miss Stranje teaches us how to manage polite society—”
“So we don’t stick out like odd ducks flapping about atop the beau monde’s plum pudding.”
Sera shot Jane a quelling look. “Miss Stranje believes we can adapt to society’s strictures, blend in, while secretly improving our talents and unique abilities. The fact that many of our skills might prove useful for poking around in foreign affairs—”
“Phfft.” Jane scoffed and rolled her gaze to the ceiling.
“Is merely an added bonus. Most of us think the challenge is—”
“A great deal more intriguing than needlepoint.” Jane grabbed my arm. “There. Is that plain enough for you? Now we have to get down to the kitchen or Cook will fillet us in place of the fish.”
“We’ll explain more later, but for now we must hurry.” Sera genially took my other arm and we hurried down the hall. “It will be all right.”
Would it? It felt as if I were tumbling in the ocean again.
One thing I knew for certain. My life would never be the same. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. I glimpsed something, something shimmering with possibilities. Maybe, just maybe, Stranje House would be a way out of the tight-lidded box into which I’d been born.
“I find cooking quite relaxing.” Sera patted my shoulder. “You’ll enjoy it.”
Cooking. Yes. That, at least, was something predictable, normal, something with which I felt reasonably familiar.
At home, the kitchen had been my favorite place in the house. A warm cozy room, it always smelled of fresh-baked bread and simmering soups. Florrie, our cook, was a congenial little Cornish woman who insisted on pristine white walls and plenty of windows for light. She had always been ready with warm buttery shortbread or a steaming bowl of savory stew and dumplings when I snuck into her kitchen.
Similarities between the two kitchens ended at good smells and ample sunlight. Stranje House’s cook was the most terrifying woman I’d ever seen. Well over six feet in height, she probably weighed twenty stone. A burly, double-chinned woman, with snow-white hair and heavy black eyebrows set in a permanent scowl. She wore a bloodied apron cinched tight around her waist, which only emphasized the fact that she was built like a hay wagon.
With a mighty thwack, Cook brought her cleaver down and severed the bone of a lamb shank. She pointed the bloody cleaver at us and shouted, “Yer late! If ’erself hears about this they’ll be hell to pay.”
She waved her weapon at Jane. “You—fetch leeks and slice ’em for soup.”
Next, she aimed it at Sera. “Potatoes, peeled and quartered.”
Oh, yes, this was quite relaxing.
They hurried off and Cook stared down her steel blade at me. Lamb’s blood oozed off the broad blade and dribbled onto the cutting board. “An’ who ’ave we here?”
Despite her coarse dialect, she commanded my full attention. I bobbed a quick curtsey. “Miss Georgiana Fitzwilliam, ma’am.” I cringed, thinking I’d sounded like a cowering parlor maid.
“Georgie, is it? Well, I don’t like the look of you. Too green about the gills. Yer as gray as month-old bread. Take yerself off.” She waggled the cleaver at Madame Cho. “Away with ’er. I’ll ’ave no sick ’uns in my kitchen.” She followed this edict with a series of bone-splitting staccato whacks as she chopped up the rest of the lamb shank for stewing.
I blinked, astonished to see Tess in the far corner of the room. She, who not an hour earlier had appeared in the drawing room with all the dignity of a duke’s daughter, stood at the scullery performing the lowest of tasks, scrubbing out a large pot.
Sera rounded the corner, her arms laden with potatoes. “Go on, Georgie, rest. We’ll bring you a bowl of soup later.”
“Out,” ordered Cook.
Madame Cho didn’t whack the floor with her stick the way she would have done elsewhere. She waved her arms, shooing me out of the kitchen as one would shoo a crow out of the garden.
I followed orders and trudged back to the dormitorium, my head spinning, only I had no time for sleep. Whatever else was going on in this madhouse I had a responsibility to Sebastian. I focused on the one constant in my life at the moment—the ink.
As soon as Madame Cho left the bedroom I pushed back the covers and dug out a sheet of parchment and a graphite stick from my armoire. I needed to calculate the ratio of iron salts to water, and figure out what temperature to heat the green vitriol before it would turn clear. I had to figure this out as quickly as possible, lives depended on it. I pictured Europe’s leaders gathered in a room discussing economics. Suddenly cannonballs explode the walls. Assassins burst in and slaughter everyone. The room becomes a bloody horror of severed limbs and heads.
What if Sebastian got captured or killed because I failed to solve this problem? I shook the sickening images out of my head.
Ink. I concentrated on making ink. I scratched through hypotheses proven wrong, calculated ratios, and jotted notes on a new formula. If only I had my textbooks from the laboratory so I could double-check my figures.
My eyes drooped and my head ached. Perhaps if I rested for only a few minutes I might feel well enough to sneak out later, retrieve my books, and complete the calculations. A short nap, that’s all I needed. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, then when the others went in to dinner, I would wake and steal out to the laboratory.
I laid my head on the pillow and surrendered to oblivion.
* * *
I awoke to a faint gray light filtering through the gaps in the drapery. I blinked, trying to get my bearings. A bowl of leek soup rested on the night table. Surely I hadn’t slept straight through to morning, and yet there was no other explanation.
Tess tiptoed beside the bed and scooped up the white rat tickling my cheek. I didn’t scream this time, but I did awaken fully, sit up, and push back the covers. She deposited Punch behind the secret panel and headed to the door to leave.
“Wait,” I called, rubbing sleep from my eyes. “I want to go with you.”
She seemed surprised at that. “Why?” she whispered.
“I need to hunt for oak galls.”
“Galls?” She frowned at me as if I had gone completely mad.
“You know, those round ugly growths on an oak branch.” I curved my fingers showing her the approximate size. “They’re caused by wasps and—”
Jane moaned and pressed a pillow over her ears.
Tess shushed me with a finger to her lips and whispered, “I don’t have time to wait for you to dress.” Lifting the edge of the draperies, she peered out. Rays of dove gray and kitten-tongue pink wafted into our room. Heralds of dawn. “It will be sunup soon. This is the only time I’m allowed to run.” She seemed agitated and tense. “I’m going. Don’t wake Sera and Jane.”
“But—”
Sera stirred in the bed next to me. I glanced across the room and noticed Maya’s bed was empty. When I turned back, Tess had already vanished from the room.
I dressed, gulped down the cold leek and potato soup, slipped on my shoes, and hurried outside. Wisps of morning fog twirled and eddied through the garden like dancing ghosts, brushing each blossom with cold droplets of moisture. Morning larks trilled their hodgepodge symphony, punctuated by croaking frogs and sleepy crickets.
I rounded the corner and there was Maya, sitting cross-legged in the center of the veranda. Her eyes were closed, her face tilted east, where the sun nipped at the gray fading edges of night. She appeared to be deep in prayer or meditative thought. The wolves lay stretched out beside her. They raised their heads and watched me approach. As I tiptoed past, Phobos got to his feet and trotted to my side.
“Good dog,” I said softly, grateful he hadn’t raced toward me with teeth bared. I hoped he really was a dog and not a wolf. I also hoped someone had fed him recently, preferring that he not make a meal out of my leg. Thoughts yammered through my head because that’s what always happens when I’m nervous. “Um, thank you for keeping me warm after I hit my head.” And not eating me. “Awfully good of you. Probably saved my life.”
The ruddy animal grunted as if he understood and walked alongside me. We traveled across the grounds in companionable silence. I headed for the nearest copse of trees. In the dim light, I noticed the outline of an oak deep in the thicket. I plunged into the heavy undergrowth with Phobos right behind me. As I pushed deeper, thorns scratched my arms. The brambles grew so thick I couldn’t wriggle between them to reach the oak tree.
We backed out and went farther north to a more promising stand of oak. This time Phobos didn’t follow me. He lay down and waited while I pushed aside elm saplings, dodged nettle, and plowed through scrub alder, only to meet a roadblock of prickly holly so dense not even a weasel could squeeze through. I tore the hem of my dress getting out.
I smacked my hand against pink blossoms on a hawthorn bush, sending up a spray of dew and petals. “A few measly galls—that’s all I need.”
Phobos grunted in agreement. We hunted farther north where I spotted a large old oak in the distance. It grew near the hedgerows marking the property line. We walked nearly a quarter mile to the far corner of the property, slogging through tall grass, following a muddy sheep path. In retrospect, I realize it must’ve been on the line of Lord Ravencross’s property. It stood beside a tall, neatly groomed hedge, and, unlike the Stranje House grounds, which were largely unkempt and left in a natural state, someone had taken a scythe to the tall grasses and weeds at the base of this tree.
There weren’t any galls on the lower branches, but I noticed several promising specimens on a limb about fifteen feet above my head. My mother would have applied a switch to my backside if she knew I was about to scramble up a tree. “I simply cannot tolerate such unladylike behavior,” I could hear her say. “Why must you be so impulsive, Georgiana? These outlandish experiments of yours must stop. No more jumping out of windows. You shame me. You shame your entire family.” Then Mother would nod and direct the housemaid to go at my legs again with the switch while she continued to scold me.
Ah, well, what did it matter? I’d endured the switch for less important reasons. What choice did I have? To make the ink I had to have those galls. To get the galls I needed to climb the tree. Ladylike behavior would simply have to wait. The lives of European leaders were at stake. Sebastian depended on me.
I glanced around. The early hour and the dim light would keep me safe from prying eyes. Stranje House stood in the distance, so obscured by bushes and trees that I couldn’t even see the garden porch. Nor could I be seen clearly from any other house round about.
Curiosity peaked Phobos’s ears as he watched me slip off my shoes. I wiggled my bare toes against the tickly grass, and grabbed hold of the lowest branch. Using my feet to push against all the grooves and crevices of the knobby bark, I pulled myself up and scrambled onto the first branch. Pleased with my progress, I maneuvered to a standing position and tucked my skirts up into my stays so that they hung just above my knees, and scaled another branch.
Phobos put his forepaws on the trunk and issued a quick yip. Ordering me down I supposed. “Hush.” I ordered. “Sit.” He dropped back.
I succeeded in hoisting myself up onto the next bough, but it looked a very long way to the ground. I stayed on my belly. All I needed was to go out five or six feet to that promising clump of leaves, where I counted at least four large galls. With my legs hugging each side of the gnarled branch, I inched along on my belly out to the smaller branches and that cluster of leaves.
That’s when I saw Tess on the other side of the hedge. Running. And Lord Ravencross galloping his horse across his neatly mown grounds on a dead run collision course. Just as I was about to shout a warning, he pulled up short, swung off his brown stallion, and marched up to her like a great growling bear. “I warned you not to run on my land!”
Tess stopped and leaned forward to catch her breath. “You knew full well I would be here. I always run here. The grounds at Stranje House are too wooded.”
He pointed his riding crop at the fields stretching beyond the hedges. “Then run on the sheep pasture at the back.”
“Can’t. Lambs start chasing me and that upsets the ewes.” She straightened and planted her fists on her hips. “Aside from that, you practically dared me.”
“I did no such thing. I told you to steer clear of my property.” He slapped his riding crop against his palm threateningly.
“I distinctly remember you saying, or else.”
“Or else next time you might not be so lucky,” he recited. “It was a warning—not a dare.”
“Was it?” Tess didn’t even flinch. Nor did she back down. “Suppose I draw a line right here.” She dragged the toe of her shoe across the grass between them. “If I say, don’t step over that line or else I might do terrible things to you, what would you do?”
“I wouldn’t put up with such nonsense.” He promptly stepped over the line.
She glanced down at his feet. “Exactly my point.” Ravencross’s horse pranced over and nuzzled Tess’s neck. She stroked the big brown’s nose and gently pushed him aside. “You would want to know exactly what I planned to do about it, wouldn’t you?”
The stallion pushed between them again. This time he whickered and thrust his muzzle into her hair.
“Zeus! Stand down.” Ravencross shortened his hold on the reins and stepped his horse back. “What in blazes have you done to him? Either you’ve got apples hidden in your hair or you’ve bewitched the animal.”
Tess shrugged. “You’re far too jaded to believe in magic, my lord.”
“At least you’ve got that much right,” he grumbled, but then in a louder, angrier voice he demanded, “Are you going to get off my grounds or not?”
“If I were you, my lord, I would not shout or make any sudden movements.” She nodded toward Zeus who had arched his neck and was blowing through flared nostrils. “Your stallion is taking a defensive attitude on my behalf.”
“What the devil?” He turned to Zeus. “Maybe I ought to rethink that witch idea.”
“Maybe you ought.” She shook her head and stared off into the distance, away from him and his horse. “I’ve been accused of it before, on several occasions. And, I might add, by men older than you. Men who ought to have been long past silly bedtime stories.”
Frowning, he led his agitated horse to the nearest tree and looped the reins into a clove hitch. The stallion tossed his head and pawed the ground. Warily, Ravencross returned to Tess and the line she’d drawn. He stood far too close to her. “Well then, what am I to do with you for trespassing?”
She glanced down to his feet, standing just barely on his side of the line. “How should I know, my lord? It was you who dared me.”
“I’ve a good mind to take my riding crop to your backside.”
She tilted her head speculatively. “Now, there’s an amusing idea.” She glanced around his shoulders at Zeus pawing the ground. “If I promise not to cry out, there is a slim chance your horse won’t dash you to pieces.”
“Stand down, Zeus,” he called at his stamping horse. “You agitate him.”
“It is you I agitate, my lord. Your horse is simply confused by your anger, because he senses something else.”
A wary stillness fell upon both Zeus and Lord Ravencross.
“He senses what I can see plainly writ on your face, my lord. That scowl does not hide your feelings so well as you might think. I know what you want from me.”
I covered my mouth to silence a sharp intake of breath and nearly slipped from the branch. How did she have the nerve to say such a bold thing to him? Perhaps she didn’t realize what she’d said. Or how flirtatious it sounded. Either way, if my mother had heard it, she would’ve condemned Tess as a brazen hussy and given her the cut direct for the rest of eternity. As for me, I felt a growing admiration for her and could not look away. Tess had pluck. I couldn’t wait to see what she would do next.
Ravencross studied her for the longest time. “Now it is you who is daring me.”
“No.” She stepped back. “I am merely doing what I do every morning. Running.”
“No, you’re not. You, my girl, are playing with fire. And I suggest you stay well back.” He dragged the heel of his bad foot across the grass, emphasizing the line between them.
She shook her head. “You ought not tell lies, my lord. In your heart you are begging me to cross that line.”
I could not believe it. Tess did precisely that—she stepped across it. They stood only a hairsbreadth apart. Exactly as a wolf strikes, with a growling flash, Ravencross grabbed her shoulders and pressed his mouth over hers.
Tess eagerly kissed him back.
I gasped, and clutched the bark of my tree so tight some of it broke off into my fingers.
Lord Ravencross pulled away abruptly, still gripping her shoulders, and straightened to his full height. “You see,” he snarled in a rough voice, “I never beg for anything.”
“Not out loud,” she answered calmly.
“Never.” He let go of her. “Not even silently.”
“Then you believe your own lies, for I have never seen a man so hungry for love.”
He paced sideways and glared at her. “You know nothing of such things. What can you know of anything? You’re just a child.”
“We’re nearly the same age. I’m seventeen, and if ever I was a child, my lord, that childhood ended long, long ago.” She said it quietly and with such profound sadness that even Zeus whickered sympathetically.
Lord Ravencross softened his tone. “Nevertheless—”
She interrupted him. “And I learned all those many years ago to stop listening to what people said, and listen instead to what they mean. Some people speak with honey and intend to serve us poison. You, my lord, speak with thorns but yearn for cake.”
“You don’t know anything about me.” He backed away from her, his chest heaving as if she’d punched him. “You”—he pointed his riding crop unsteadily—“are a witch.”
“More lies,” she said, and took off running.
As Lord Ravencross watched her go, he brought the crop down, slapped it hard against his thigh, and slowly limped to his horse.