Page 20 of A Rare Find

6

“Another reason I hate the country.” Georgie stood at the parlor window, watching the rain bucket down.

“It rains in London,” said Rosalie, with detestable reasonableness. She was stretched out on the pink brocade sofa, a teacup and saucer balanced on her breastbone.

“Let’s play whist.” Anne dealt at the card table, but none of them were used to the three-player variant, and the game disintegrated.

It was the third day of rain. It felt like the three hundredth.

Anne’s chaperone had revived, and after luncheon, she sat with them in the parlor, which spoiled Georgie’s plan to smuggle champagne up from the wine cellar. Anne was forced to filigree a basket. Rosalie situated herself beneath a lap desk and made unnervingly anatomical sketches of her own hand. Georgie wrote letters. Desperate, wheedling letters. To Harry. To everyone.

When a yellow sunbeam shot into the room, a collective cry of relief rang out. Mrs. Herridge couldn’t have stopped the stampede to the door if she’d tried. Mercifully, she didn’t.

“Another reason I hate the country.” Georgie stood in the garden by a marble column of the wisteria-cloaked pergola, watching the clouds scud through the washed blue of the sky. “There’s nothing happening out here either.”

Anne and Rosalie stepped into the pergola’s shade and squeezed together on the bench. There was no need to squeeze. The bench was long. They looked at each other and then at Georgie. Clearly, the bench wasn’t so long it could accommodate a third wheel.

“Right,” said Georgie. “I’m off.”

Off to where, though?

Georgie headed nowhere, walking out of the garden into the park, kicking at the clinging wet grasses.

Harry had picked his punishment well.

In London, Georgie could have paid a call to one of a hundred acquaintances, fritterers by Elf’s standards, but only because they had pulses. Because they looked at the horizon instead of down at the dirt.

Here, Georgie could pay a call on a childhood friend. But they were all married, if not confined, too busy with domestic life for more than perfunctory engagements. Certainly nothing fun. Who did that leave?

Not Elf. Or as Anne had called her, the elfin queen. She’d always seemed otherworldly. Utterly removed from the here and now. Once, Georgie had sat beside her in a carriage, when Mrs. Alderwalsey had offered them both a ride home from the village during a sudden downpour. She’d never looked up from her book. She hadn’t acknowledged Georgie with a word.

The other day she’d spoken words enough.

Do not come near me ever again.

Georgie was approaching the woodland. Another few minutes and the fishing pond shimmered through the trees.

It made sense as a destination. It made sense to look again for the amulet. As though it were some kind of key.

To what was a question better unanswered.

—

Elfreda stopped on the sweeping carriage drive up to Redmayne Manor. This was her last chance to reconsider. When she turned around, she could see Marsden Hall in the distance, stark and gray on the hill. Papa was huddled in his greatcoat in the frigid library, laboring over descriptions of various disinterred objects for Ancient Derbyshire, perhaps at this very moment recalling her disgrace with strong nouns, giving a disgusted shake of his head. He would rail like King Lear on the heath if he knew what she was doing.

And perhaps it was foolery, a mistake that would expose her to Papa’s wrath and Georgina’s mockery, yielding nothing.

She turned back around. The Redmaynes’ park was landscaped with small stands of trees. Yellow flowers—wild irises—brightened the shade cast by the nearest. This wasn’t the wild iris patch from the abbey’s boundary clause. Silly even to think of it. Charters named features of the landscape familiar at the time, and few endured across the centuries. Even rivers shifted in their beds.

Nonetheless. The irises decided her.

She was closing in on the manor when she heard the giggling.

Instead of knocking on the front door, she followed the sound through the garden.

It was coming from the pergola.

She walked up, stepped between the columns, and…