Page 39 of A Rare Find

“Because of the twins.” Agnes sank lower. “There’s a spoon shortage. I can hear them whinnying now. They’re about to interrupt us too.”

Indeed, faint whinnies had become audible.

“I’ll never learn the proper etiquette,” wailed Agnes. “I will disgrace Beatrice in front of her new friends and lose her forever!”

“Oh please, enough.” Elfreda’s patience snapped. “If Beatrice is so inconstant, you haven’t lost much.”

“How would you know?” Agnes banged the table. “You don’t have any friends!”

The silence that settled was profound. Even the whinnies had faded away.

Elfreda’s nose burned, and pressure built behind her eyes. She didn’t have friends, but she did have sisters, sisters she loved, whose happiness and comfort she put before her own. She played with them, protected and provided for them as best she could. The only reason Agnes could correspond with Beatrice at all was because Elfreda paid for the postage, out of the money she skimmed from the household budget through such laborious means as refilling Papa’s opodeldoc bottle with a liniment she made herself, and repairing certain books he tasked her with sending to the conservator.

The sting of injustice mixed with the deeper pain of rejection. She turned away so Georgina couldn’t see her expression.

“Forgive me.” Agnes was suddenly beside her, tears trembling on her lashes. “But sometimes it seems that you want to keep me from everything wonderful.”

Elfreda sucked in a breath. If that’s how it seemed, what use denying it? Besides, her chest was hurting in a way that made speech difficult.

“Do you hear that?” Agnes’s face lit up. “It must be the post boy!”

She lifted her skirt and ran, hair streaming behind her.

Elfreda watched her cross the Great Hall, the largest room in the house, and the most austere. Benches against the gray walls. Blackened hearth holding dead fire. Fathoms of dim air between floor and timbered ceiling.

The whinnies resumed, became louder, then faded again as the twins galloped on.

She swallowed, and her throat made a tiny, hurting click.

“They’re spoonicorns today,” she said, without turning to look at Georgina, so it was almost like speaking to herself. “Hilda and Matilda. They made themselves manes out of Grandpapa’s mangy old wigs, and I suspect their heads are crawling with mites. I’m going to have to force them to bathe, and they’ll be angrier with me even than Agnes. Usually, they get cake as a reward for a washup, but there’s not any cake. I could bake a cake. We’re low on butter, though. I could go out for butter. But Papa will want me in the library, to get down more books from the shelves. When his leg is stiff, he can’t climb the ladder.” She closed her eyes. Last night, she’d dreamed that Marsden Hall was filling with soot-blackened, ice-cold water. It rose from below, and poured down from above, and she’d plugged the holes in a frenzy, but there were too many. The dream came back to her now, that clawing panic, and the desire—just as terrifying—to stop. To let the waters rise, and slip under.

She turned. Georgina was watching her, and she couldn’t read the slant of their brows, the set of their mouth. Often, her tongue locked in place. Now, her tongue felt loose, and words poured from her like the dream waters, as though if she kept talking, she could finally breathe. “Aunt Susan, Papa’s sister, who stayed with us after Mother died—she recently remarried. In March, her husband wrote to Papa with an offer to bring out Agnes alongside his own daughter the year after next, and to take in the twins as well. He promised to give them every advantage. Aunt Susan’s doing, obviously. While she was here, I resented her for her officiousness—all the sermons, all the ringlets—but she has a warm and generous heart, and real regard for the girls. The offer was meant as a kindness, not an affront. But it certainly affronted Papa. He tore up the letter, which is the only reason I know of its existence. I found the pieces in the waste bin. He must have written something dreadfully disrespectful in response. No letters have arrived from Aunt Susan or her husband since. I haven’t told Agnes. I haven’t told anyone.”

At this she paused, a bitter half smile on her lips. Of course she hadn’t told anyone. She had no friends, no one to whom she could unburden herself. And that was why she was unburdening herself now to Georgina Redmayne.

It was madness.

A crease had formed between their brows.

“Please don’t repeat a word of this to Agnes.” She met their eyes. “She won’t be able to change Papa’s mind, and it will only make her miserable. She expects that Aunt Susan will invite her at some point to London. I don’t want to mislead her, but I don’t want to crush her hope. She makes hope into…everything wonderful.”

She gestured at the table, at the dinner guests. King Alfred, a German knight, an English knight, Merlin. The pain she’d felt when Agnes lashed out had abated, and in its place, she felt the usual mix of affectionate exasperation and admiring trepidation. She could appreciate Agnes’s resourcefulness, even when she had to tidy up afterward, even when tidying up involved dragging full suits of Greenwich and Gothic armor up the great stair. But what would become of her tempestuous, whimsical sister? How would the world see her?

Her gaze had fixed on the painting of Merlin. He was standing with his staff in the mouth of a cave.

She heard the loud scrape of oaken chair legs on stone. And then another.

“Elf.” Georgina was standing behind a chair they’d pulled back from the table. “Will you sit?”

She shook her head. “I have things to do.” Hadn’t they been listening? No, of course not. If they ever listened to her, they wouldn’t have come here at all. She’d called them a curse. She’d vowed to destroy them.

“You look as though you need to sit down first.”

She flushed. They had been listening—listening, and studying her too, making determinations about her needs. She wanted to look away from them, but she could read the expression on their face now, and it transfixed her. Sympathy, but not the amused, condescending kind she anticipated, as though she were a pitiably ridiculous curiosity. No, their face held something far simpler, much more frank. Concern. Kindness.

If resistance was beyond her, destruction was too. She felt too defeated to sweep proudly from the room, and so she most definitely wasn’t about to charge them like a ram, in a display of vengeful fury. There was no point. In truth, she didn’t feel vengeful or furious. That was all gone. She felt tired.

She went to the chair and sat.