Roger, thank heavens!” Poppy leaped to her feet, scattering her knitting across the floor, when the butler showed Christian, Roger, and Dickon into the parlor. “I just sent you a message!”
She barely stopped herself in time: she had been close to throwing her arms around the older Thwaite brother in relief. She looked at Christian, almost blushing, but he was glancing around the parlor as though he had never seen it before. Dickon Thwaite, too, looked around with an expression of mild interest, taking no notice of Marianne on the sofa. Poppy raised her eyebrows, and Roger nodded gravely.
“Dickon, Christian,” Poppy said loudly. “Why don’t you chat with Marianne while Roger and I discuss something?” She kept her voice bright yet firm. It was the same type of voice she used when trying to get Pansy and Petunia—her youngest sisters—to do something without any tantrums.
“Are you plotting something, Poppy?” Marianne looked up with a twinkle in her eye, her hands tangled in yarn.
Poppy had been trying to teach her to knit in order to distract Marianne from the two topics that obsessed her: her birthday ball and Lady Ella.
Marianne had awoken that morning with a pounding headache and a memory of the gala that differed from Poppy’s. She remembered Lady Ella being not just pretty, but devas-tatingly beautiful, and both Christian and Dickon dancing only with the mysterious charmer, ignoring Poppy and herself entirely. She was almost violent in her feelings toward Lady Ella, and no amount of correction on Poppy’s part would convince her that her memories were wrong.
Having given up trying to talk to her friend about enchantments and the truth behind Lady Ella’s identity, Poppy had instead gotten her to talk about her own ball. She had hinted about gifts, both from herself and Marianne’s parents, and even agreed to dance at least one dance, just to appease her friend.
Poppy explained all this in a rush to Roger as they took up a position by the window seat, half-hidden in the long purple drapes. Poppy found her eyes searching each passing carriage, as though she expected a familiar face to arrive and provide help. But the depressing truth was that no one was coming.
“But what about Eleanora?” Roger’s voice was low.
“Oh yes! Eleanora!” Poppy was almost as passionate about her as Marianne was. “I insisted on coming home as soon as she left the ballroom, hoping that we could catch her changing her gown or something. But having the carriage brought round took so blasted long that it was nearly one o’clock before we arrived. And there she was, waiting to help Marianne and me undress as though she hadn’t been throwing herself at Christian just an hour before!”
“The gown? The jewels? There was no sign of them?”
“None at all,” Poppy affirmed. “In fact, I stayed up until nearly dawn searching most of the house. And this morning I sneaked upstairs to look in the maids’ rooms.”
“Did you ask her about it directly? What did she say?”
“ ‘I don’t know what you mean, Your Highness,’” Poppy recited. “ ‘I never left the manor, Your Highness. I wouldn’t have a gown fit for a ball!’” Poppy gritted her teeth. “All sweet ignorance, and all of it a lie.”
“Now, Your Highness,” Roger said, flushing.
Poppy remembered belatedly that Ellen, no matter how trying, was Roger’s childhood friend, and checked her temper. Slightly.
“Call me Poppy,” she said. “And I’m afraid it’s true. There was none of the nonsense that my sisters and I went through. She didn’t start babbling incoherently, she didn’t suddenly lose her voice. She looked right at me with big eyes and lied. Just as she lied when I asked her why, then, was her hair so full of pomade? Why did she smell of exotic perfume? And, more tellingly, where were her stockings and why was she limping?”
“Limping?”
Roger looked concerned, and Poppy had to fight down another sigh. It would not do for him to be just as smitten with “Lady Ella” as the other gentlemen, with or without enchantment.
“I would imagine it was from dancing for hours in those impractical shoes,” she said. “I’m sure she’ll be fine. In the meantime, we really must figure out what is happening.”
“What is happening in here?”
Poppy and Roger looked up, startled, as Poppy’s words were echoed from the doorway. Lord Richard had just come into the room, and was surveying the assorted young people with his typical amusement.
“Rehashing last night’s gala? Gossiping about who danced with whom?”
Lord Richard had been in the garden with friends during most of the gala, and had not seen Lady Ella. But his ears had been filled with the story of how Poppy’s gown had been copied by the mysterious upstart, as Marianne labeled her, all the way back to the manor the night before. More speculation had occurred over breakfast, of course, which caused the gentleman to barricade himself behind a newspaper.
“Papa,” Marianne said peevishly. “There’s no use ignoring it: Lady Ella ruined the effect of Poppy’s gown and stole away all the gentlemen!” Marianne gave Dickon an uncharacteristically scornful look.
Clearly startled, Lord Richard studied his normally cheerful daughter and then glanced at Roger and Poppy before turning back to Marianne. “All the gentlemen? My dear, I hardly think it possible for one young girl to commandeer all your dance partners at once.”
Before Marianne could reply, Poppy took Roger by the arm and led him across the room. “Cousin Richard, if we might have a word with you in your study?”
Lord Richard nodded. “As you seem more yourself today than the rest of the household, I am quite agreeable,” he said.
“What’s this all about?” The earl hardly waited until the study door was shut to ask the question.
First Roger, then Poppy poured out everything they knew: how Eleanora the penniless orphan had become Ellen the maid, then gone to the ball in a gown copied from Poppy’s and entranced everyone who saw her there. How no one, not even Lady Margaret, had recognized her, and how this morning Christian and Dickon were both muzzy-headed and obsessed with this Lady Ella, while Marianne and her mother both reviled the mystery woman for being so spectacular and desired.
“I can’t find any sign of the gown, the slippers, none of it,” Poppy said. “I’ve asked her over and over again about last night, but she denies everything.”
Seated behind his grand desk, Lord Richard toyed with a letter opener. “I see.” He pursed his lips. “Poppy, if I may ask a rather sensitive question: does this in any way recall the … unpleasantness you and your sisters suffered from?”
“Not at all,” Poppy said promptly. “Oh, it feels like some kind of spell, but that’s just my intuition. Ellen seems pleased. I believe that she could talk about it if she wanted to. I’ve seen her walking around the manor at all hours of the night, and always covered in soot with an expression like the cat who stole the cream. You didn’t see her last night, but I …”
She trailed off, finally noticing the expression on Lord Richard’s face. He was quite gray, and his eyes were bleak.
“Did you say covered in soot?” His voice was hardly more than a whisper.
Poppy had to clear her throat twice before she answered. “Yes. Why?”
Lord Richard merely stared over their shoulders for a long time, then he looked down at his desk, still pale. “This is something to think about, indeed. How did you avoid falling under the enchantment?”
Poppy opened her mouth to counter his question with one of her own, but thought better and meekly said, “I have garters knit especially to protect me.”
“And Thwaite? What about you?”
“I happened to be wearing a charm given to me by a magician, sir,” Roger said quietly. He, too, had become silent in the face of Lord Richard’s terrible expression.
“Good. Keep them with you at all times. Now if you’ll both excuse me. I would like to speak to Ellen. Alone.” He reached for the bell pull, and Poppy and Roger retreated to the parlor.
Now Poppy didn’t know what to think. Lord Richard knew something, Ellen was quite possibly a willing participant in the spell and didn’t want to talk about it, and Christian was alarmingly obsessed with “Lady Ella.” The comfortable little world she had known here in Breton just days before was all coming down around her ears.
“At least it wasn’t my fault,” she murmured. “Of course, it wasn’t before, either, but that didn’t help.”
She wanted to write another letter to Galen and Rose—she had already sent one that morning—but it was futile. They wouldn’t receive the letter for nearly two weeks, and it would be yet another two weeks before she had a reply.
She was both consoled and a little frightened, too, by Roger’s look of shock. The consolation came from not being the only one thrown by Lord Richard’s reaction. The fright, however, came from discovering that even with Roger’s knowledge of spells and magic, and Lord Richard’s steady intelligence, they hadn’t found a ready answer for what was happening.
Back in the parlor, Christian was playing chess with Marianne while Dickon looked on. The scene was so much the way things had been before the royal gala that Poppy was quite reassured. If they could just avoid talking about Lady Ella until this was sorted out, everything might be all right after all.
Exchanging a relieved look with Roger, Poppy sat on the sofa and took up her knitting.
“I wonder if Lady Ella plays chess?” Dickon mused brightly. Poppy cursed.