My father’s house is full of secrets. They cling to the thick, dusty curtains that he keeps tightly drawn all day and night, muffling the sound of his friends’ low, intent whispers and blocking out the sunlight. I can hear the dull echoes of carriages outside, rattling past at all hours, but I never see them. Since I arrived here eight days ago, I’ve become a creature of shadow, as dim and hidden from the outside world as everything else in this house.
Back home in the country, where I lived with my nurse, the sunshine poured in all day long. Bessie’s cottage might have been a tiny, insignificant thing compared to my father’s great house in town, but hers led out onto fields and woods where I could wander to my heart’s content. The local girls were forbidden to talk to me, but the wind brushed against my skin like a caress whenever I stepped into the meadows, and distant bells always seemed to ring in the air whenever I walked in the woods, although Bessie claimed she couldn’t hear them. In the summers, I spent nearly every day outside, coming home only for required meals, or when Bessie managed to pin me down to study my letters.
“You’re the daughter of gentryfolk,” she always told me, “no matter who your poor mother might have been. I’ll not have your father disappointed when he finally summons you to live with him.”
Back then, of course, my father was only a name, scrawled hastily at the bottom of his brief, infrequent letters: William Norton, Esq.
William Norton, Esq., hoped that my health was well and that I was behaving for my nurse. William Norton, Esq., would summon me to town when I was older, for my coming of age.
I always tried to think of that as a promise rather than a threat. Bessie certainly presented it that way, spinning me stories of glamorous society balls and handsome, eligible young men. I might not be invited to the dances in our local village or courted by any respectable young men here, but things would be very different in town, she promised me.
“He’ll want to marry you off proper,” she said, “pretty thing that you are. A fat enough dowry will excuse almost anything with those folk. And he obviously cares for you, or he wouldn’t have sent such lovely cheques all these years, only chucked you into an orphanage like the gentry do when they want to forget their own misdeeds. You, he’s remembered.”
And remember he did, for just eight days before my seventeenth birthday, his dark, polished carriage appeared in front of Bessie’s door. When I first spotted it, on my way back from the woods for our mid-day meal, I actually stopped breathing for a moment.
I was finally going to meet William Norton, Esq.
I hadn’t brushed my hair since I’d first woken that morning, and I hadn’t taken the time to pin it up properly even then. Why would I? There was no one in our village to impress, for I was shunned by everyone respectable and Bessie never allowed me to mix with the rest. I’d ventured alone, as usual, into the woods…and of course my hair had slipped loose of its plaits in a dozen different places by midday, falling in messy brown strands across my dirt-spotted cheeks.
But I needn’t have worried. William Norton, of course, had not come himself to fetch me. He had sent a servant in his place, a young man only a year or two older than me, but with skin that was as dark a brown as my eyes, so that I stopped and stared in open-mouthed surprise when I first stepped into Bessie’s cottage, as if I were the most mannerless of yokels. I caught myself a moment later, slamming my mouth shut, but I could see from his steady gaze that he’d noticed my shock, and I bitterly regretted it.
I knew only too well what it was to be unlike everyone around you.
Stepping forward, I dipped a curtsy and smiled despite my hot cheeks. “Are you a visitor, sir?” I did my best to sound polished and confident as I spoke. The truth was, I hadn’t practice at talking to guests, for we rarely had any. The only people who ever visited our cottage were the occasional older women neighbors who came to gossip with Bessie over tea and study me critically from the corners of their eyes, searching for any evidence of inherited immorality.
“I come from your father, Miss Norton,” the young man said, and he pulled a letter from inside his plain brown coat. “He has sent me to bring you home.”
At that, I went still with my hand already half-held out. Distantly, I heard Bessie’s voice rising in horror.
“By herself, sir? Without a maid, or any other female to accompany her? But surely – ”
“You may read Mr. Norton’s instructions in his letter.” The young man’s deep, soft voice reverberated through the small cottage room. “I do promise to keep her journey safe.”
Stepping forward, he pressed the letter into my hand. There was nothing to do but open it.
Lily, read the letter, in that familiar, impatient scrawl, My man Achilles will see you safe to Manchester. Start at once. Yrs sincerely, William Norton, Esq.
“Achilles,” I repeated blankly as I looked up, the letter hanging off my hand. Something very odd was happening in my stomach.
Ladies weren’t supposed to mention stomachs. I was almost certain I remembered Bessie telling me that, once. I’d never paid much attention to those lectures, though. I had never really believed, until now, that they would ever apply to me.
“What does it say?” Bessie bustled over to join me.
But I was still looking up into Achilles’s dark eyes, trying desperately to keep my balance as my world twisted sickeningly around me. “You…have a remarkable name,” I said inanely. It was all that I could let myself think about, in that moment. Anything else about that letter would have overset me completely and sent me tearing out of the house into the freedom of the woods like a true madcap and a coward, too.
I realized, vaguely, that I was shivering.
Bessie snatched the letter from my hand and let out a gasp of disbelief. “Start at once? But we’ve had no letters of warning, no preparation. Why – ”
“No.” Steeling myself, I turned away from my father’s man, who hadn’t offered any answer to my foolish statement. Just as well. I forced a smile for my good nurse, who had looked after me so well for so long, and I locked my gaze away from the back door of the cottage with its too-tempting pathway to escape. “We have had warning, though, haven’t we, Bessie? He always said he would summon me one day, when I came of age.”
“Yes, but…” Bessie stopped and drew a deep breath through her teeth. “Well! He is your father, so there’s no more to be said about that. But I won’t send you off without a proper meal, at least. Not to mention your hair – your clothes – !”
I put one hand, guiltily, to my disheveled plaits.
For the first time, I thought I glimpsed the hint of a smile on Achilles’s face, if only for a fraction of a second. “I’m certain we can wait that long,” he said gravely.
Of course, it took scarcely five minutes to pack everything I owned and change into my “best” gown – which meant the one gown that had never been ripped by tree branches or stained with mud, because I only ever wore it to church. It could never have been called fashionable even by country standards, and I couldn’t help noticing now, under Bessie’s worried gaze, that I had certainly grown since she had sewn it last year.
Still, Bessie fussed for ages over my hair, pinning it all up into a crown fit for a queen. A queen probably wouldn’t have eaten yesterday’s stew, reheated in the pot over the fireplace, but I devoured two large bowls of it, savoring every bite. My father’s man ate it, too. He said hardly a word, and that only when spoken to, but if he felt a city-dweller’s disdain for country food, he didn’t show it in his demeanor. And Bessie talked enough for all of us.
“Of course you really ought to have more suitable clothing – but then, I’m certain your father will see to all of that, especially before he introduces you to any eligible young men. He’ll take you to a proper dressmaker, no doubt, to fit you out like all the other fashionable young ladies. By next week, you’ll be glittering like a diamond! Why, there’ll be balls and salons and fancy breakfasts, and – and I wager you’ll soon forget all of your time here, and you’ll forget me, too.”
“Never!” I said, and I set down my bowl to wrap my arms around her strong shoulders. “I’ll never forget you. And I’ll visit.” Somehow.
Achilles didn’t say a word. But he bowed to Bessie on our way out as deeply as if she were a fine lady, and he helped me into the carriage with a strong, steady hand.
He didn’t join me inside it, though. He sat with the coachman in front, leaving me to sit in solitary splendor on dark velvet cushions, looking out through windows that were made of real glass, as we rode away from my old life and left Bessie behind.
Life would be far better in town, of course. Bessie had always said so. It would be a glittering, glamorous improvement, and any young lady ought to be grateful for the change in her circumstances…especially a young lady who owed so very much to her father’s generosity already.
I would have to work very hard to repay him and to make him proud of me somehow. I had no idea how I would do it.
But I tried my best to feel hopeful instead of frightened as my father’s carriage rattled along the road, joining more and more vehicles along the way, while my head ached more and more with every passing mile. The thick smoke that filled the air of Manchester, belching from the chimneys of the hulking factories, was not the most promising of welcomes. Tall, grim buildings closed in on us from every side, each house pressed tightly against the next without a single spot of greenery in sight. I had to press my handkerchief against my mouth and nose to stop myself from retching at the foulness of the air. Still, I told myself not to take it as an omen, even as I clamped my hand around the handkerchief, desperately trying to breathe in any final remnants of the clean scent of home.
My father was a man of means. Surely he must at least have a garden that I could escape into, even if there were no fields or woods.
By the time the carriage finally rolled to a stop, four hours after I had entered it, my head was pounding, and my bones ached. When the door swung open, it took me a long, numb moment to blink out at the dark stone house before me and realize what was happening.
We had arrived.
Achilles had been holding out his hand for at least a full minute, by then.
I took a deep breath, fighting through the fog that seemed to have wrapped thicker and tighter around my mind with every moment since we’d entered the dirty city.
“Forgive me,” I said, and lowered my handkerchief. I clenched it in my bare hand – Bessie had moaned in despair at my lack of gloves that fit, but there was nothing to be done about it – as I shuffled forward on the velvet seat cushions, out of the smothering warmth of the carriage.
Achilles helped me out of the carriage just as he had helped me inside it, but this time I had no attention to spare for the feel of his warm skin brushing against mine. An iron gate stood closed before us, and beyond it, stone steps rose up to a house more grand and intimidating than any I had ever seen before, for all that its grim stone sides were covered with soot from the dirty air.
I’d never even seen a house with more than two storeys before today. Every storey in this house was lined by windows…but every single one of the windows that rose level upon level above us was completely closed off by dark curtains, as if it were shutting its eyes tightly against my arrival.
My father wants me, I reminded myself. But my fingers tightened around Achilles’s hand with a convulsive grip.
He removed my hand, perfectly gently, and opened the gate for me, as if he knew my particular weakness. “Miss Norton.”
“Thank you.” I forced a smile, paltry though it was, and moved forward, careful to raise my bare hands high so that not so much as a hint of skin could brush against the gate. Protected by my plain dark skirts and petticoats, I only felt a brief wave of warmth against my legs, quickly extinguished by the lurch of my stomach as the door swung open at the top of the steps.
A tall, grey-haired man looked down at me as if he were measuring me for purchase and finding me wanting.
Swallowing, I came to a halt. “Father?”
The man looked past me to Achilles. “The master has been asking for you.” Then he looked back at me, his grey eyes as chilly as a winter sky. “I will show you to your room, miss.”
“This is Horsham,” Achilles murmured into my ear. “Your father’s butler.”
He moved forward behind me, and automatically, I moved, too, picking up my skirts and starting up the heavy stone steps.
Still, I hesitated at the very opening of the house. The air outside might be thick with soot, but the hallway before me looked as dark as a cave and far less appealing.
“I should go to my father,” I said. “He wanted – ”
“He desired me to show you to your room,” said Horsham, and turned his cold gaze upon me until I gave in and stepped over the brink.
Achilles slipped past me, and the door shut behind me with a thud, closing me in. I blinked and blinked again in the warm, stuffy darkness.
Horsham lifted a candle from a small side-table and pointed to a tall staircase, half-hidden in the shadows. “If you would…”
I looked, somewhat desperately, at Achilles. Unsmiling, he gave me a low bow, then turned and disappeared into the darkness at the end of the hallway. Even his footsteps were muffled by the faded carpet.
Unhappily, I followed Horsham up the steps.
The air outside had made me cough, but inside the house, the taste was almost worse – so old and stale and over-warm, it made my head swim. Inside my third-storey room, at the very back of the house, it tasted worst of all, as close and thick as if the windows hadn’t been opened to air the room out for years.
I started for those windows the moment that I stepped inside. I was nearly suffocating, by then. I reached for the thick, black curtains and yanked hard…with no effect.
Something was holding them in place.
“Ahem.” Setting down the tall candle that he had carried, Horsham cleared his throat. “The master prefers that all of the curtains in the house remain closed during your time in residence.”
“But – ”
“It is the master’s preference,” he said inexorably, and closed the door.
I lasted nearly two minutes before I tried again. But the curtains didn’t budge, and this time, my hand brushed against something hot and agonizingly painful along the way. Gasping, I stumbled back, nursing my injured palm, where a welt was already forming.
The curtains had been nailed shut…and the nails, of course, were made of iron.
Cupping my hand against my chest, I backed toward the canopied bed. Dust puffed up from its covers as I sat down, my gaze still fixed on the dark curtains.
It hurt to breathe.
It hurt far worse to think.
But my father couldn’t know my sensitivity. Of that, I was certain. He knew so little about me, how could he know that odd detail?
Although perhaps Bessie might have written to him about it, when I was a child and she’d first discovered…
No. I would not believe that that cruelty had been intentional. He’d cared for me all these years, seeing to it that Bessie and I had enough for all we needed when any other man would have discarded me. He couldn’t possibly wish me injury now…even if he was too ashamed to let any of his neighbors glimpse his bastard daughter in his house.
And that was the thought that repeated itself in my head as the hours passed and the candle sank lower and lower in its stand.
Perhaps the worst part, as I sat there in that close, dimly-lit room, was my increasing certainty that this room, placed as it was at the back of the house, must overlook a garden. The house was too large, and too far from its neighbors, not to have at least a small green patch behind it. More than that: I felt an itchy sensation tugging at the edge of my awareness, as if I could actually somehow sense the garden tantalizingly nearby, rustling and vibrant and full of everything I needed and couldn’t have.
With my curtains nailed shut, I couldn’t even look at it.
Still, Bessie had raised me to be strong, and I would not let myself disappoint her. I had learned my letters for William Norton, Esq. I had left my home for him, too. Now, it was time to find out what he wanted from me in payment for all his years of cheques and distant fatherly support.
But no matter what Bessie had promised, I was growing coldly, grimly certain that it wouldn’t be balls and dressmakers after all.
I heard male voices underneath the floor of my room at one point, and I tensed, but they moved on after only a few minutes. Horsham brought me a plate of cold meats and a slice of bread some hours later, when the room had grown even darker, with no sunlight left to fight its way through the curtains. Still, I did not change into my nightdress. I was waiting for my father’s summons…and I fell asleep still waiting and still fully dressed, long after the candle had finally worn down to a nub and disappeared entirely.
When I woke, it was still fully dark. But I was finished waiting.
I was glad that I had not undressed. All I had to do was feel my way across the room to escape, as I should have done hours earlier. I had been enclosed in the darkness for so long, by then, that shadows did not worry me.
I remembered my way to the staircase, and down the stairs. But I hesitated at the bottom, one hand clinging to the dusty stair rail.
The thought of meeting Horsham unexpectedly, in the darkness, was unpleasant. The thought of meeting my father…
I hardly even knew how to name the mixture of emotions that churned through me at that idea. But I did know one thing for certain: I would not sit obediently in my room any longer, like a butterfly pinned to a greedy boy’s wall. I had to find my way outside, to breathe.
I started down the pitch-black hallway, one hand brushing against each wall, in the direction of the greenery that had called me from my prison.
I bumped, hard, into a human body less than a moment later.
“Aaah!” I jumped back, my pulse galloping in my throat.
“Miss Norton?”
I was too startled, at first, to even recognize that voice. Then I heard the snick of a tinderbox being lit, and I saw Achilles’s face in the glow of a candle set on the side table. He straightened, setting down the tinderbox. “I beg your pardon, miss. I heard a noise and came to investigate. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“Of course.” I set one hand to my throat, but I couldn’t slow my pulse. The air was too old, too filled with dust. I felt as if I were choking on it. “I was looking for the garden,” I told him. “Would you please direct me there?”
An expression I couldn’t decipher passed over his face. “You needn’t use the word ‘please’ with me, Miss Norton. I am your father’s servant.”
More of the society manners that I hadn’t learned, no doubt. I sighed. “Please,” I repeated.
He didn’t argue against the word, this time. Instead, he paused so long that I had time to note that he, too, was still fully-dressed, despite the fact that it must surely have been the middle of the night.
I pointed past him, into the deeper darkness. “Is the door unlocked?” I prompted him. “Or will I need a key?”
“Forgive me, Miss Norton.” He sighed. “Your father gave me specific instructions that you remain within the house.”
“But…” I stared at him. “I cannot even visit the garden? At night?” My chest was tightening more and more, until I could barely even suck in enough breath for my words. “Who could possibly see me now, to shame him?”
Achilles’s face tightened, as if with pain. “There would be no shame,” he said quietly, “but I owe your father my loyalty…and I would see you.” He met my gaze squarely. “I am sorry, miss.”
I clamped my lips together, before any intemperate words could burst out.
There was clearly no sense in trying to push past him; the hallway was a narrow one, and his wide shoulders nearly filled it.
“I cannot go back to my room,” I told him plainly, when I was finally able to speak again.
He looked at me a moment, then nodded, as if some question had been answered. “I was instructed not to allow you to leave the house,” he said. “But would you care to explore it?”
It was an odd tour that we took through my father’s house that night, in the stale darkness. There were two different grand receiving rooms on the ground floor, along with a dining room, but none of them looked as if they had been used in years. Higher up in the house, on the first storey, we walked through a library crammed full of leather-bound books on folklore, mythology, and science, all jumbled together. It was the first room I’d stepped inside that showed any signs of recent use. We also passed one room whose door Achilles did not open. Hushed male voices sounded inside, too low for me to decipher any words, but with a tone of urgency and anticipation that made the skin at the base of my neck itch with an odd discomfort.
“Your father has guests,” Achilles said quietly, and ushered me onward.
He would have deposited me at last in one of the receiving rooms, to sit alone like a fine lady, but I would not let him. We ended in the kitchen instead, in the very basement of the house. The air, at least, was fresher here, closer to the earth. And there was some semblance of familiarity, if not coziness, to the great hearth in the corner, though there were no friendly, sweet-smelling herbs hanging from the ceiling here.
There was far less food than I would have expected, actually. I’d never been invited through the front door of the local squire’s house, back home, but I’d been inside his kitchens once with Bessie, so I knew what a gentleman’s pantry ought to look like, and just how crowded it ought to be. Achilles had lit a second candle when we’d stepped inside this kitchen, chasing away some of the shadows that might have hidden the scarcity all around me as I sat down at the sturdy wooden table in the center of the room.
“Is my father’s cook away?” I frowned at the bare counters.
Achilles was leaning into a cupboard, his voice muffled as he answered, “Your father has no cook, Miss Norton, and no servants apart from myself and Horsham. We generally take turns with the cooking as needed, or have meals delivered from a local pub.” He straightened, holding the remains of what looked like a savory meat pie. “I have found us something to eat, though, if you’re hungry.”
“I am,” I admitted, and dug in heartily, though the welt on my hand ached with every movement, and the food itself tasted bland and chewy. Still, I remembered what he’d told me, and I said politely, “It is very fine.”
“Thank you,” said Achilles, “but I’m afraid I couldn’t claim credit, even if that were true.” Humor gleamed in his eyes as his full lips curved into a half-smile. “This pie came from the pub’s landlady, not my own hands. Mine would have been even worse, I promise you.”
My shoulders relaxed for the first time in hours as I laughed, caught in his warm gaze. “I can cook a little,” I told him, “but they wouldn’t be elegant recipes.”
His eyes flared wide, as if I’d insulted him. “I think not,” he said, with finality. “You are a gentleman’s daughter.”
“Am I?” I hadn’t realized, until now, just how much fury had been simmering inside me all those hours as I sat in my darkened bedroom, alone. “My father was very urgent in his summons, but he seems not to care to have me here now.”
Achilles’s expression turned blank, as if he were drawing another set of curtains against me. “Your father…is most preoccupied.”
“With what?” I pointed at the empty kitchen counters. “What exactly does he care for? He keeps a fine house in town, but he doesn’t bother to employ a cook, or even a maid to fight the dust. Why not? It can’t be for lack of money, surely.”
Achilles winced. “Miss Norton…”
“Does he not care for the state of his own home?” I demanded. “Or is he hiding something else besides me, and can’t afford any witnesses?”
At that, Achilles stood, leaving his plate half-full. “I beg your pardon.” He bowed with stiff formality. “I have work to do, Miss Norton, and I cannot leave it undone any longer. Shall I show you back up to your room?”
The pie in my stomach seemed to curdle at the sudden chill in his voice, but I kept my chin lifted as high as if I really were the lady he had called me. “That won’t be necessary,” I told him. “I can find my own way back.”
And I did, picking my way through the still house by the light of the candle he had left me.
There were no voices sounding through the door of my father’s study this time. But as I stood with my ears pressed to the door, I heard a soft swishing sound, again and again, as of pages turning in fierce study…study far too intense, apparently, to allow for the distraction of a mere daughter’s arrival.
My own words from the kitchen, so full of splendid confidence and outrage, echoed in my ears, spurring me on to some brave confrontation, a demand for answers. And yet…and yet…
I stood alone in the darkness of the hallway, shut out of my father’s study and my father’s notice, as I had been all my life. It felt all too sinkingly familiar. And as I stood there, I couldn’t help remembering every disdainful look I had ever been given when I’d ventured out with Bessie from the safety of our house and woods; every parent who’d warned their daughters not to play with me when we were small; and every mother who’d stood protectively before her son, glaring at me as I’d walked past them in church, ever since I’d grown into a woman’s shape.
I could not face any looks like that again. Not now. Not after this long, strange day…and especially not from my father, after all those years of waiting for his notice.
My hand fell away from the door handle. As I turned and left for bed, exhaustion weighed down my bones until I nearly staggered.
Tomorrow, I would be stronger. Tomorrow I would confront him. I promised it to myself as I lay down in the big canopied bed. It sagged underneath me, soft and smothering, and it made me miss my narrow cot in Bessie’s cottage with a physical ache of longing.
The last thing I thought, before I drifted into unhappy sleep, was: If he doesn’t want me here, not really…perhaps he’ll change his mind and let me go home?
It was home that I dreamed of, that night. But I wasn’t in Bessie’s safe, cozy cottage, after all. Instead, I found myself standing in the night-dark forest nearby, one hand set on the familiar bark of an oak tree, while sweet, high-pitched bells rang around me in jubilation. Voices laughed and called to me from the shadows of the trees beyond, in a language that I very nearly knew. Every rolling syllable tingled against my skin like a promise. Music played in the distance, beckoning me to dance among others, for the first time in my life.
I was more than invited. I was welcome.
I picked up my skirts and started forward into the free, green darkness…
…And woke, coughing, with dust filling my throat and choking me in my too-soft bed.
There was a large china pitcher of water on a stand in the far corner of the room, clearly meant for my ablutions. I had to down nearly a quarter of it before I could finally stop coughing. Even after I had finished, my eyes still leaked, stubbornly, in their corners.
That fresh night air had felt so real.
I would have ripped apart the stifling curtains that hid the window if it hadn’t been for the cursed iron nails that held them…and the unfamiliar sensation of sinking lassitude that ran like melting lead throughout my veins, once I had finally finished coughing.
Even plants could grow without sunlight, Bessie had told me, but they grew white and limp when they were so deprived.
My head pounded as I dragged myself toward the door, but I fought the urge to collapse back into bed. I was no plant, despite my name; I was a human being, and I deserved answers from the man who’d ordered me here.
I found him standing just outside, his hand upraised, preparing to knock on my door as I opened it.
“There you are,” my father said briskly, dropping his hand. He looked me up and down, eyes narrowed, while I gaped at him in the shadows of the unlit hallway.
His hair, unlike mine, was black; his lips were thin, and they compressed even tighter as he studied me; but his eyes and nose were nearly identical to those I’d glimpsed in reflections all my life. It was odd to see those familiar brown eyes narrowed in calculation. There were specks of red in the whites of them, as if he’d stayed up late too many nights and woken up too early…or perhaps not yet been to bed since I’d heard him in the middle of the night. But rather than displaying any of the exhaustion that I felt, he seemed gripped by nervous energy, tapping one foot against the carpet and one impatient finger against the pile of books that he carried under one arm as he nodded twice, firmly.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “Achilles was quite right. I should have foreseen it.”
“Father?” I put one hand to the doorway, but it wasn’t only my physical balance I had lost.
“Never mind,” he said, “you’ll feel better soon, I’m sure. I’ll have Achilles bring you something.” He took the top book from his pile and flipped it open as he turned away, his voice growing abstracted. “Unless you’d rather sit downstairs, of course. He said you didn’t care for your room. Not very girlish, I suppose. No feminine frills and fripperies…well…”
“I want – I need to go outside!” With a surge of effort, I broke through the leaden fog that had settled around me and started forward, my head pounding harder than ever. “Please!”
“Yes, yes, I understand.” He flapped one hand impatiently. “I should have thought of it. Achilles will see to everything.”
“So I can go out to the garden?” I sagged against the faded paper on the closest wall, limp with relief.
He looked up from his book, something cold and grim skimming across his expression. “That would not do at all,” he said. “No, you’ll need to stay inside, my dear, for your own safety. But Achilles will take care of things.”
“My safety?” I stared at him. “But – !”
But he was already striding away, and when I tried to follow after him, my legs slid out below me like dead stalks, leaving me collapsed and alone on the carpet.
I had run through woods and meadows all my life, and climbed trees for the sheer joy of movement. But as I lay slumped on the floor of my father’s house, I couldn’t find the energy within me to move at all.
Achilles found me there some time later, long after the fog had overwhelmed me entirely.
I heard his voice before I saw him. “Miss Norton!”
It took me a moment to open my eyes, and another moment to focus through the dizzying swirl of colors as everything blurred before me. Finally, though, Achilles’s features swam into place, strong and clear. He knelt before me, his forehead creased with worry.
“How long have you been lying here?” he asked.
I tried to shrug, but I could only manage a tiny shift in my shoulders. “Since…” I drifted off, my voice fading.
“I should have come earlier,” he muttered. “Forgive me. I was in the garden. Your father desired me to gather these for you.” He nodded over one broad shoulder; then, when he realized that I couldn’t see past him, he shifted aside to clear the way.
A massive green bundle of long grass lay on the carpet beyond him. He must have tossed it down when he’d seen me. It was like a vivid piece of the outdoors itself, with dandelions and other wildflowers scattered among the long green stalks.
At the sight of so much abundance, my tight chest finally loosened. For the first time in hours, I took a deep, invigorating breath.
Watching me carefully, Achilles scooped up a handful of the piled greenery and passed it to me. “I’m afraid it’s hardly an elegant bouquet. There is no gardener in residence to grow roses for you.”
“Oh, no, these are far better than roses!” I pressed the mass of slim green stems against my nose and mouth as tightly as I could, breathing in their vibrancy. Tingles of pleasure shot into my lungs and out through all my limbs, like bright stars of captured sunlight. As sudden energy flowed through me, I pulled myself up into a sitting position, bracing myself against the floor with one hand.
It was surprisingly easy to move, after all; I let out a startled laugh. “May I have the rest, please?”
Achilles was frowning even more deeply now, but he silently passed me more and more stalks of grass and leaves and wildflowers, until they filled both of my arms and I could taste their fresh air and bright green life in every delicious breath I took.
I jumped to my feet, kicking my long skirts out of the way when they sought to tangle me. Nothing could stop me from moving now. I gave a twirl from sheer giddy delight, clasping my treasure to my chest….and then realization hit.
“Oh!” I came to a standstill, cradling the greenery more gently in my arms. “But we’ll need water for these, or they won’t survive the day!”
Achilles rose slowly from the floor, his dark eyes wary. “Shall I bring you a vase for them? You needn’t stir yourself – ”
“Don’t be absurd!” I started down the stairs, my thrice-mended petticoats rustling around me. I couldn’t help it; a full-blown laugh burst out of me as I looked back, a moment later, to find him staring after me, stock-still at the top of the third-storey landing. “Well?” I demanded, exhilaration flooding through my lungs. “Can’t you keep up?”
“I don’t believe I can,” Achilles said quietly.
But he couldn’t have meant it literally, for he was at my side only a few quick strides later, his eyes hooded and his expression startlingly grim, as if he were contemplating issues far too unpalatable for such an unexpectedly delightful morning.
I gave him a mischievous grin, hugging my greenery to me, as we reached the next landing. “I’ll race you to the kitchen!”
He started to utter some protest, but I ignored it. I hadn’t stretched my legs in a run for nearly twenty-four hours. I couldn’t wait a moment longer. I tore down the staircase, whirled around the bannister on the first storey landing, raced down the final flight of steps toward the darkened hallway below…
And as I leapt onto the ground floor, triumphant, I nearly ran into Horsham, who stood before the closed front door with two men I’d never seen before.
Their eyebrows rose as their gazes fixed on me. The exhilaration in my chest turned cold.
My father had worked so hard not to let anyone know of my existence.
“Oh!” I grabbed the bannister, forcing myself to a stop. “I beg your pardon. Gentlemen.” I ducked an awkward curtsy, still clinging to my mass of greenery. “I only…” But my powers of invention dried away under Horsham’s cold, disapproving glare.
Proper young ladies did not run down staircases, giggling, and throw themselves down the last few steps. And my father’s daughter was meant never to be seen.
But the two men behind Horsham had no disapproval in their expressions.
“Well, I say!” The man on the left was in his middle age, I thought; at least as old as my father, if not a few years older, with a finely embroidered waistcoat and the comfortable mass and weight of a man who’d known expensive dining all his life. He gave me a leering smile that made my hand clench on the bannister, as I fought the ignoble urge to back away. “Is she the one, then?”
“The…?” I gave Horsham a panicked glance, but his lip only curled, faintly, in response.
The other man was younger, with a lean build and spectacles on his bony face. But his eyes were intent behind his spectacles, and his face was alive with calculation. “Oh, yes,” he murmured. “Oh, I can see it. Ye-e-es…”
I’d been so transfixed by their attention, like a mouse cornered in the open by a pair of snakes, that I hadn’t even heard any footsteps behind me. So it came as a shuddering relief when I heard Achilles’s voice suddenly speak behind my shoulder. Better yet, with his voice came the sudden awareness, like a rush of warmth, of his strong, steady presence just beside me as he joined me at the bottom of the staircase. “Gentlemen.” He nodded with cool politeness. “Mr. Norton is awaiting you in his study.”
“Oh, but we’re enjoying ourselves right here!” The older man let out a sniggering laugh. “We’ve only just met this fine young lady. I’m sure Norton won’t mind waiting a few more minutes, eh, what?”
I tensed, and felt Achilles shift closer. But the two men were moving closer, too, until I was hemmed in on all sides.
“I do have a few observations I would like to make first,” said the younger man. He reached out as if to touch my face with his long fingers. “For example – ”
I jerked back. But Achilles was already moving.
“Forgive me.” He blocked the man’s hand with one solid arm and slipped his other hand beneath my elbow in a silent gesture of support. “Miss Norton has a prior engagement. If you would excuse us, gentlemen…”
The younger man’s eyes flared wide, and again, I thought of snakes. I could only too easily imagine a forked tongue flashing in affront from between those white teeth.
His friend glowered, big shoulders tensing as if for battle.
For a moment, I thought they would refuse to move. But as Achilles drew me gently and inexorably forward, they finally stepped aside, making way for us.
My skirts brushed against the bigger man as we passed, and my skin crawled. But I held my greenery close for comfort as Achilles’s hand dropped away from my arm, and I followed his lead in walking slowly and calmly down the hall, with my head raised high…
…And it was the other man’s coldly intent gaze that left an icy trail along my back.
“Bloody cheek!” growled the bigger man, as they finally started up the staircase. He stomped up the steps in Horsham’s wake, huffing as if his waistcoat were too tight. “Norton ought to have a talk with that man of his about the way he addresses his betters! If you ask me, he’s starting to get notions above his station, and I’ll be happy to tell Norton that myself. Why – !”
His friend’s voice interrupted him, too quietly for me to make out the words as they walked higher up the stairs. But I heard the hissing undertone in his voice, and it made my jaw tighten even more.
I waited until they had moved entirely out of hearing before I finally stopped walking and let out the full-body shudder that had been building inside me all the while.
“Ohhh.” I drew a deep breath and then released it, shaking my head. “What vile creatures. Why on earth did my father invite them here?”
Achilles did not respond, except to look away from me.
I eyed him guiltily in the half-darkness, wishing I could read his expression better. Neither of us carried a candle, and only just enough dim light filtered through the closest thick curtains for me to make his features out. “Will you be in disgrace for rescuing me from them? I never meant – ”
“No,” Achilles said curtly. “Do not concern yourself.” His shoulders looked stiff with tension as he turned back to face me, his dark face tightly set. “You have nothing to apologize for, Miss Norton.”
“But if they complain to my father – ”
Achilles shook his head, cutting me off. “Your father has found me useful for many years. He will not dismiss me for one morning’s irritation to his friends.”
His friends. My face twisted with distaste. “I cannot think highly of my father’s taste in company.”
Achilles sighed, his shoulders slumping. “I believe he finds them useful, too.”
Something in that word made a chill prickle through me, even in the stuffy warmth of the narrow hallway. “Does my father calculate everyone’s worth by their usefulness to him?” I asked.
And silently, I added: Exactly what use does he intend for me?
Achilles gestured forward without answering. “You wished to find a vase, Miss Norton.”
I looked at him a long moment before I finally nodded and gave in. “Very well,” I said. “Will you escort me?”
He went still as I closed my hand around his strong arm. For a moment, he said nothing, only looked down at the point where my fingers curled around the sleeve of his plain black coat, absorbing the warmth that emanated through it. Then he said, his voice sounding strained, “Miss Norton. I am a servant, not a gentleman.”
“And yet,” I said, “you rescued me from the two gentlemen who were visiting my father.” I met his gaze squarely, daring him to disagree. “So, will you escort me to the kitchen?”
He opened his mouth, as if to speak. Then he closed it again, his dark eyes searching my face.
“Very well,” he said quietly. “But only this once.”
Ten minutes later, we were sitting at the long wooden table in the kitchen, where my greenery sat in a tall vase. I was eating bread and cheese for my breakfast when he said, abruptly breaking the comfortable silence: “I met your father when I was nine years old.”
I set down my bread, waiting.
He didn’t even seem to see me, his attention directed inward, at something that drew his brow into a frown. “I was…my mother and I…” He stopped.
I put out my hand until it hovered only an inch from his on the table between us, but he did not take it. Instead, he drew a shuddering breath and straightened, drawing away from me. “I never knew my father,” he said plainly. “He and my mother did not marry.”
“Like my parents, then.” I picked up my bread again. Something in his mood had infected me; instead of lifting the bread to my mouth, I began picking the end into crumbs with nervous fingers. “I never knew my mother, either. My father sent me to live with Bessie when I was born.”
“You were better there,” Achilles said. “He made the choice that was best for you, and gave Bessie what she needed to support you. My father…” His shoulders shifted as if he were trying to release some heavy weight. “He took no such care with us. My mother did…what she had to do for our survival. But in the end, it wasn’t enough. When I was six, we went into the workhouse.” His generous lips tightened until, for a moment, they looked nearly as thin as my father’s. Then he opened his mouth again on a sigh. “I might not have survived it, if not for your father. He came in one day and chose me out of everyone there, all of us desperate for escape. I’ve never been beaten or locked in again. Only because of him, I am free.”
Unlike me, I thought. But I didn’t say it out loud.
Instead, I asked, “What of your mother? Did my father take her in, too?”
Achilles’s features twisted. “My mother was…not well, by then. And Mr. Norton had come looking for only one servant, a young and agile boy to run his errands.” He took a deep breath, his right hand knotting into a fist. “She told me to go, to take the opportunity to escape. I saved all of my earnings. But when I went back…”
“I understand,” I said. And I did. I closed both hands around his fist.
A cough sounded behind me.
Horsham stood watching us from the doorway.
I yanked my hands back, my whole body flooding with scorching heat. Achilles stood up so quickly, his chair clattered against the floor.
Horsham watched it all with cold eyes. “Mr. Norton desires your presence,” he told Achilles.
Two hours later, as I sat alone in my father’s library, I heard footsteps hesitate outside the door. Unease slid along my spine. I held still, unmoving, not even daring to release my breath. If it was one of my father’s friends, come to find me alone…
Finally, the footsteps moved on. I sagged with relief. A moment later, I heard someone run quickly down the staircase. Through the curtained window, I heard the front door open and close, and then a carriage rattled off down the street outside.
With a sigh, I turned back to the book of ancient mythology that I had chosen, trying my best to summon up any dregs of interest in the long, rolling phrases and unfamiliar names, as the sudden burst of panic drained out of me. But it wasn’t until much later that I realized what had actually happened.
Achilles had been sent away by my father…and I did not see him again.
* * *
It was Horsham who brought me my greenery from then on. It might have been carelessness or cool calculation, but always, he seemed to wait until my very last strands were drooping in their vase, and I was lying, nearly as lifeless, in a sluggish, aching torpor on my bed – or, if I had managed to drag myself in search of help before my legs gave out, on the carpet or stairway outside my room. But it was useless to ask for them to be brought any earlier; they came when he chose to bring them, like my meals.
At least the greenery he brought was enough to let me breathe, and move. But there were no more lush armfuls of the long grass from my father’s untended garden, only small, carefully-sliced chunks that barely pierced through the thick, dusty air of the house. I didn’t dare step far from them, but I was equally frightened to clutch them too close, for fear that they would die even more quickly.
And, of course, there were no more friendly moments of warmth or companionship to be found in the kitchen. It was cold and empty the first time I visited it at night after Achilles’s departure, in lingering hope of finding him returned. The second time I visited, I saw a candle flickering through the doorway, and I started forward joyfully.
But the man who stood at the cupboard was leaner than Achilles; and when he turned, I saw my father.
He looked nearly as startled as I felt. Of course, it was only my second meeting with him since my arrival, four days earlier – and this time, with my vase in my hand, I was capable of real movement and speech.
I realized as much even before my shock had faded. Grim determination took its place.
This time, he would not find it so easy to walk away from me.
“Father!” I said.
“Ah…Lily. Yes.” He gave me a quick, perfunctory twist of his lips that might, perhaps, have been intended as a smile. “If you’ll forgive me…” He raised the plate of bread that he’d pulled from the cupboard. “Only collecting fuel for the scholarly endeavors,” he said, starting forward. “So…”
I placed myself, unmistakably, in his path. “Don’t leave,” I said. “Not yet.” Not this time.
He frowned. “Lily…”
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
“Talk?” He blinked, as if the word were foreign to him.
“You summoned me here,” I told him, “but I still don’t know why. What is it that you want of me?”
His nostrils flared. He let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a “harrumph.” “You needn’t bother yourself about that,” he said.
“But I do.” I would have crossed my arms if I could have. With my vase tucked securely in the curve of my left arm, the best that I could manage was to set my free hand on my waist and tip my head back to look him squarely in the eye, as sternly as possible. “I do concern myself, Father. And I have a right to know.”
“Hmmph.” His eyes narrowed, moving from my face to the vase in my arm. “Determined to have all the answers, are you?”
“Yes,” I told him.
“Well, then.” His cheeks creased. It might have been the first real smile I’d seen from him, but somehow, it didn’t make me feel any better. “It’s only four days until your birthday, isn’t it?”
“Um…” My eyes widened. “Yes?”
He nodded, his smile turning secretive. “An important birthday, too, particularly in your mother’s family. Your coming-of-age, they would term it.”
“Would they?” I blinked at him. Was he really going to offer me a début, after all? For one mad moment, there in the darkened kitchen, Bessie’s tales of glamorous balls and dashing suitors floated in my head.
I dismissed them in an instant. But by then, he had taken the opportunity to brush past me while I was distracted.
“You’ll find out everything on your birthday,” he said as he strode for the door. “That, I promise you.”
“Wait!” I hurried after him, reaching out to grab his coat sleeve. “Father, I have to ask you something else.”
His expression was openly impatient this time, as he tried to tug his arm free and I stubbornly clung to him. “Well, girl? Out with it.”
“Achilles…” I swallowed, feeling heat gather at my throat. I couldn’t avoid this, though, not with any justice. “Please, Father. Tell me: Did you send Achilles away because of me?”
His eyebrows rose. The new smile that curled his lips made my face burn, even as he finally stopped trying to pull free. “Concerned about him, are you?”
I plowed doggedly forward, clutching his sleeve. “He did nothing wrong, Father. I don’t know what Horsham told you, but – ”
“I haven’t dismissed him, if that’s what worries you.” Father snorted. “He’s far too useful for that.”
“Oh.” I let out my breath in a sigh of pure relief. “Thank goodness.”
“No, he’s merely taking care of some business for me in Leeds for the next five days. Then he’ll come back to serve me for many years longer.” Father shook his head gently. “I’d hardly blame any man for making that mistake. Why, I made it myself, once. With some creatures, it’s simply unavoidable. But a man with any sense will understand that, in the end, and find a way to turn his error into something useful.”
Useful. The word rang heavily in my ears.
“What use am I to you, Father?” I whispered, holding his sleeve tighter than ever.
“On your birthday,” he said, “I’ll tell you.”
There was only a brief widening of his eyes to alert me. Then, with a sudden lunge, he knocked the vase out from under my arm.
I dived for it, my breath catching in my throat…
And when I looked up again, I was alone.
* * *
I dreamed again, that night. I wasn’t in the forest near Bessie’s cottage this time, but hovering just at the edge of it, while the long grasses of the meadow rustled behind me.
Chiming voices beckoned me deeper into the trees. A clever wind tugged at my skirts, trying to pull me in.
Everything in my body yearned toward that lush green gathering. But when I tried to step forward, my throat clenched…
And the next moment, I woke up, gasping for breath, in my bed.
I couldn’t see anything in that pitch blackness, thick with dust and hopelessness. But I did not need sight, then, to know that the paltry strands of grass had gone limp and drooping in the vase that I had set beside the bed.
I could barely summon the energy to roll over and stare in the direction of the impenetrable curtains that hid the garden from me, and my freedom.
The memory of those enchanted voices was already fading in my head.
Horsham did not bring any more greenery to me for another twelve hours.
That was three days ago. This morning, I found an iron bar set across the inside handle of the front door.
Today is the day before my seventeenth birthday…and apparently, there will be no escape.
* * *
I’d spent almost all the years of my life waiting with hope or with fear for my father to summon me. But when I saw that iron bar this morning, I knew with cold certainty that I could not afford to wait any longer.
Bessie forced me to learn my letters against my will when I was a child, only because my father was a gentleman and he deserved to have a daughter who could read and write like a lady. This afternoon, as I crept into my father’s study, with every escape route from the house barred against me, I silently blessed my old nurse with all of my heart for her foresight. For as I pawed, faster and faster, through the books and papers piled on his desk, from anatomical drawings fit for a surgeon to well-worn books on myth and ritual, reading the notes scrawled in them by William Norton, Esq.’s, familiar hand, I finally understood a great many things about myself...
…And about the man who had fathered me.
“Lily.” His voice sounded in the doorway and startled me into a gasp. Oddly enough, he didn’t look angry to find me poking through all of his careful notes – years’ worth of notes, based on their scribbled dates; notes and books he’d been accumulating for the last seventeen years, at least.
…Ever since he’d found out what a useful seed he had planted.
He looked dryly amused as he walked toward me, shaking his head. “You couldn’t wait until tomorrow to find out, eh? I suppose there must be some of me in you, after all.”
“Half of you,” I rasped, through a dry throat.
But he’d clearly never seen me as a true daughter.
I picked up an ancient-looking pamphlet that started near the bottom of the pile: more folklore, like the books that filled his library. I only hadn’t realized, until today, that he was actually reading about me. “So this is why you never told anyone who my mother was.”
His thin lips twisted into a wry smile. “Would your good country nurse have believed me?” He slid the book from my hands, as if it were a gift I’d been offering him. “You should be grateful that I didn’t choose to tell her the truth. Those superstitious country folk think of your mother’s people as lesser demons, you know. Even Horsham believes in all that rubbish, and he’s been a city man for nearly thirty years now. Why, you’d have been tortured all your life if they’d had any inkling of it. Barred from the church. I spared you all of that.”
“Grateful,” I repeated.
Iron nails studded the window in the small, cramped room. There was nowhere I could turn to breathe, as my chest tightened more and more.
“What happened to my mother?” I whispered. “Why were you the one who raised me?”
He shrugged as he set the book back on his desk. “Childbirth is always a dangerous business,” he said. “Especially for them. Humans are rougher, tougher sorts, you know. That’s why so few creatures like you come safely into the world – and even fewer survive long enough to come of age.” Something like a smirk flitted across his face. “If you think you’re a small, slim sort, you should have seen her. She managed to bring you to me before she gave in for good, though, before she could even tell her own family.” He shook his head in what looked like amused disbelief. “Her kind always did like a good, romantic impulse. Named you, too, with her last breath, as she passed you to me.”
My mother named me. I nestled that thought tightly into my heart, holding it private and safe where he couldn’t see it touch me. I had far more urgent truths to elicit from William Norton, Esq., and I was running out of time.
“Why didn’t you send me back to her family, then?” I asked.
Of course, I’d seen the notes he’d scribbled, by then. I could hardly fail to know the answer.
But apparently, I was still a child at heart, in that moment. Because somehow, I still wanted my father to prove that I was wrong after all.
Instead, he settled down in the great armchair before his desk with a sigh of contentment. “What use would they have had for you? Whereas I – ! Why, there are men who’ve spent their whole lives searching for a creature like you. You have no idea of the power a true scholar can harvest from your mixture, if he knows exactly what to do and when to do it…and the riches a sensible man can earn, too, if he’s willing to share that harvest with his friends!
“But for now, if you don’t mind…” He waved briskly toward the door as he picked up the top sheet of paper. “It isn’t your birthday yet, after all.”
Not until midnight tonight. My coming of age in my mother’s tradition, according to my father’s notes. The moment my blood will come into its power.
That is when the ritual will begin.
Apparently, Horsham knows my habits by now. When I retreated into the library, half-blind with grief and rage, I found a plate of cold pie waiting there, beside my accustomed chair.
I doubled over, clutching the back of the closest chair for balance as I tried desperately to keep my gorge down.
I should have run away the moment I saw my father’s carriage in front of Bessie’s door. But there is no forest to escape into, here in the city. Only in my dreams.
If my father is right about my coming of age, those recent dreams must have been more true than I’d realized. After all, my mother’s people should be more and more able to sense my affinity to them with every moment that the clock ticks down. They’ll finally recognize me as their own.
But the iron that holds me a prisoner here holds them out, too. Whether the other side of my family wants me or not, they cannot save me now. No one else can.
Now, I can hear the tall clock downstairs tolling half past eleven o’clock, as I sit waiting in my room at the last, in the endless dark. My hands are raw and weeping from my first attempts to break past the iron nails on a downstairs window, soon after my meeting with my father. Horsham forcibly escorted me up here half an hour later, after he discovered me battering at the thick curtains with a kitchen knife, my hands wrapped in layers and layers of toweling for protection. Before he locked my bedroom door behind him, he confiscated every last bit of greenery from me but a single handful of grass, leaving me just enough air to breathe.
There was no need to leave a guard at the door, after that. And everyone knows there can be no escape through a third-storey window.
I haven’t enough energy left to try to barricade my door. But even now, huddled on the floor beside my tightly-curtained window, measuring out every breath and harboring the last precious remnants of strength, with my puny bit of greenery resting in my hands, I still haven’t given up…
…For I didn’t walk straight to the window when Horsham locked me in. I picked up the big china water pitcher, first, from the stand by my door, though it felt like a lead weight in my hands.
I’ve spent all my life feeling dutifully grateful for my existence, only waiting for my father to decide exactly what use to make of me. Now it is time to claim the rest of my life for myself. From now on, I will make my own choices, no matter how bitter they may taste.
When I hear the front door of the house open and close, and men’s voices starting up the steps, I don’t feel even a moment of panic. All that I feel now is a ferocious sense of resolution. After all these years, my waiting is finally at an end.
I am ready.
Slowly, I heave myself to my feet. With the last of my strength, I pull my arms back.
Then I fling the pitcher at the center of my curtained window.
Glass shatters. The sound is muffled behind the curtains, but it echoes through my bones. It is the sound of my salvation.
Footsteps sound on the staircase below, men’s voices raised in drunken laughter, but they’re too late.
I take a last, deep breath of my greenery, for strength. And then I let my whole body pitch forward. Even the burning pain of the iron nails is not enough to hold back the force of gravity.
Fire blazes along my skin. Cloth wraps around me. I burn as I fall from my bedroom window, wild and free, no tame plant to be harvested for any man’s use. I am Lily, and if my father was right and my mother’s people have no use for me…well, then at least I can still choose my own ending.
The curtains, with their cruel iron nails, fall away from my face. I take one desperate, elated gulp of the outside air, cherishing my final taste of freedom…
And cool hands grasp me from every side, as steady as a heartbeat, as transparent as clear water.
I’m not falling anymore. I’m flying, carried by a dozen gentle arms, slower and slower until they set me on the ground of the abandoned garden. Wild greenery erupts before me, and long grass pokes up under my skirts, tickling against my mended stockings and welcoming me home.
The sound of ringing bells fills the night air, wild and joyful and finally intelligible to my ears.
Home. Darling. Lost child. Found!
Alight, ecstatic, and alive, I twirl around and around in my father’s darkened garden, my skirts lifting around me in the caressing breeze. Hands stroke my hair, my cheeks, and my arms, and even my rawest burns ease at their touch. I laugh out loud in wonder and disbelief.
No wonder my father never dared let me step outside as the days grew closer to my seventeenth birthday.
Just as I finish my final twirl, a familiar figure comes skidding around the corner of the house, his outlines revealed in the faint glow of light that bleeds outside through the thick curtains and the broken window upstairs.
“Miss Norton!” Achilles looks frantic, nothing like his usual unflappable self, as he drops the ladder he’s been carrying to the ground. “Thank God I found you in time! What I’ve discovered – we must leave… Miss Norton?” His voice grows suddenly uncertain as I walk closer and closer to him, my skirts whispering around me like a promise. “Why are you smiling at a time like this?” he asks faintly. “You’re in terrible danger.”
“Not anymore.” My skin glows as I point into the darkness of the hedges and trees that gather at the back of my father’s untended garden. More and more tiny, sparkling lights appear amidst the branches as we watch. Golden bells ring triumphantly in my ears. “I’m just preparing to finally go home,” I tell him, “for my coming-of-age début.”
His dark eyes widen, and he falls back a step. “You saved yourself,” he says softly.
“But you came to save me, too.” I glance down at the ladder he’s brought, to carry me from my window like a knight in a fairytale, and I shake my head in amazement. “I thought you such a loyal servant, you would never question anything my father did.”
“Well…” He shrugs uncomfortably, then gives half a laugh. “You said my name was remarkable, once.”
I tilt my head, trying to read him in the darkness. “Yes?”
His lips twist in a wry grin. “My mother gave it to me for strength,” he says. “But apparently, every Achilles has his particular weakness, too.”
My whole body hums with delight, in the dark green vibrancy of the garden, as I reach out to take his hand.
Before I can, shouts sound overhead. “There she is!” It’s one of my father’s despicable friends, leaning out of my broken window with a group of men clustered behind him. “She’s with your damned servant, Norton! By God, he deserves a good thrashing for this!”
“There’s no time for idle talk,” my father raps out. “Gentlemen, now!”
Their heads disappear from the window. I don’t need to hear them to know that they’re thundering down the three flights of stairs, heading in our direction.
Achilles steps back before my hand can touch him. “Go.” He points to the gathering lights in the garden. “Quickly. Take your opportunity.” His voice drops to a half-whisper. “You know I did, all those years ago.”
The lights at the end of the garden beckon me home. My family’s voices grow stronger and clearer with every moment. All I have to do is step into the lush darkness to join them.
Instead, I hold out my hand once more. “I’m not leaving you behind,” I tell him.
“Me?” He lets out a bark of laughter, then points at his chest. “And what use would I be in Fairyland?”
I narrow my eyes at him, like Bessie at her very sternest. “You’ve been useful to my father for all these years,” I tell him. “Don’t you want to find out what use you might be to yourself?”
His breath catches. His strong throat works, so close to my lips.
“The first time we met,” he whispers, “I took you away from the world that you knew.”
“Now it’s my turn,” I say, and I close my fingers around his.
The striking of the clock echoes through the iron-bound walls of the house. Angry voices sound through the tightly curtained windows. My father and his friends are pounding toward us on heavy footsteps of retribution, duty, and authority…
But there won’t be anyone left to greet them when they arrive.
Together, laughing with delight, as clumsy and as giddy as children, Achilles and I run hand-in-hand toward the lights in the wild green darkness, as midnight finally strikes and I leave my father’s house forever.
THE END