Page 51 of A Rare Find

“But Mrs. Marsden died during the lying-in,” protested Sir Graham. “Do you mean to say since the moment they were born?”

Mr. Marsden gave him a caustic look.

“May I?” The Barrow Prince reached into his coat and produced a lozenge. “Licorice.”

He put it in Hilda’s hand. Or Matilda’s.

“Elfreda,” said Mr. Marsden. “Come here, please.”

After a plethora of caresses and whispers, Elfreda disentangled herself and rose.

“You will take the twins back tomorrow, by the very first coach.”

Elfreda went pale.

“I’ll take them,” offered Georgie, before they could think it through.

Mr. Marsden nodded. “You will go as well.” He turned away. “Where were we? Aubin-Aubrey.”

The man who inclined his head was short and broad-shouldered, with a bright white scar splitting one black brow, and a face like a rock. He was leaning on a shovel.

Ah. The Barrow Prince.

“You were describing the barrow by Nine Stones Close,” said Mr. Marsden. “Mortimer and I opened that barrow in 1806. Upward of thirty yards diameter, if I recall.”

“Not twenty.” The Barrow Prince’s voice was also like rock, like rock grating on rock.

“Excuse me,” said the princely-looking man. “But those sweet little unicorns, or wolves, rather, Hilda and Melinda—”

“Matilda,” interrupted Mr. Marsden.

“Yes,” said the man. “Hilda and Matilda. They’re gone.”

15

The twins were indeed gone. Vanished. Elfreda surveyed the street, panic gripping the back of her skull.

“They can’t have gone far,” said Sir Graham, wrongly. He didn’t understand anything about the twins. Hilda and Matilda had uncanny abilities. They’d reach the North Pole by midnight.

“Best check the cottages.” William Aubin-Aubrey turned to do just that. The group fanned out, calling to the girls by name, circling into back gardens.

But wolves didn’t answer to girls’ names, and they didn’t play in back gardens like cosseted family spaniels. In recent memory, Elfreda had been a wolf herself, with a wolf’s wildness.

A shadowed alleyway caught her eye, angling between cottages. She took it. Beyond the cottages, the alleyway turned into an uneven path, sloping up onto the moor through stone outcroppings.

She began to run, clumsily.

“Careful.” It was Georgie, catching her elbow as she slid on the loose rocks.

She jerked away, ankle twisting, and tripped. This time, they caught her hand. She let them. They’d let her, in the carriage, after Sir Graham spoke about their mother, every word draining more color from their face.

“I’m sure they went this way,” she said. “It’s the wildest, most rugged, dangerous, desolate direction. They are unruly. Mrs. Pegg can’t keep up with them, and Agnes won’t be bothered. But this—this is my fault.” She gasped for air. “I put the idea in their heads, making up stories about wolves in the Dark Peak. This is why Papa discourages make-believe, and plays, and novels, and poetry. He says it all leads to heightened feelings, and women are too emotional in the first place. I’m supposed to rise above the limitations of my sex, and use my intellectual faculties properly. But I’m not rational, or objective. I lapse constantly into folly. I embarrassed him, and I embarrassed myself, and spoiled the excursion, and my chance with William Aubin-Aubrey, and my sisters are going to fall off a cliff. And now, my God, now—now I might cry.” She broke off in horror, eyes stinging, throat clogged. She hardly ever cried.

“Cry on my shoulder,” offered Georgie, stopping, tugging her toward them. “I know you don’t want to lose too much time, but storms of violent weeping are usually brief, and you’ll feel much better. I always do.”

She shook her head and ran, but slower than before, because the ground sloped more steeply, and the pressure in her chest made it difficult to breathe. Georgie seemed to jog with no exertion at all, speaking easily as they bounded through the heather.

“I don’t see how feeling is a limitation,” they mused. “Heightened feelings prompt people to transcend limitations. That’s not always a good thing, of course. We shouldn’t just succumb to impulse. We should think. But thinking isn’t something abstract that happens in the ether. It’s a physical process that happens in the body. Doesn’t that mean that objectivity is always subjective? And that no one can really separate thinking and feeling? You’re not a glass brain, and if you were, someone like Sir Graham would stick you in a cabinet.”