Barbara Metzger
Authors: An Enchanted Affair
An Enchanted Affair by Barbara Metzger
An Enchanted Affair
By Barbara Metzger
Copyright 2012 by Barbara Metzger
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 1999.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Also by Barbara Metzger and Untreed Reads Publishing
An Angel for the Earl
The Duel
A Suspicious Affair
Ace of Hearts (Book One of The House of Cards Trilogy)
Jack of Clubs (Book Two of The House of Cards Trilogy)
Queen of Diamonds (Book Three of The House of Cards Trilogy)
Father Christmas
Lady Whilton’s Wedding
An Enchanted Affair
By Barbara Metzger
To Stacy Seiden and Mark Siegal in honor of your marriage.
May you be as happy as any fairy-tale lovers, forever after.
Lisanne Neville was six years old before she realized no one else could talk to the fairies. No one else cared, either, so Lisanne was not concerned. She simply felt more special.
Her nanny was an old Cornishwoman, with superstitions bred into her blood since the Celts fled the mainland. Nanny Murtagh blamed the piskis for stealing her thimbles, for making holes in her stockings, and for causing her frequent bilious attacks. The medicinal tot of rum she added to her tea at night couldn’t be contributing to her sore head and her upset stomach, ah, no. Didn’t she leave a saucer of the brew on the windowsill every night to appease the wee folk, and didn’t they drink it up by morning? If, by chance, an inordinate amount of pigeons fell off the roof at night, well, the pixies were a mischievous race indeed.
Nanny saw nothing unusual in her darling girl’s knowing which herbs and meadow flowers made the most soothing tisane for a maudled digestion, or knowing how to bind a pigeon’s broken wing. The Neville estate bordered on Sevrin Woods, didn’t it?
Everyone knew the woods were bewitched. They were not as dangerous as demon-filled Dartmoor, at Devonshire’s other end, but bad enough that the locals wouldn’t set foot under the ancient oaks and wide-spreading hollies. Not even Devon’s intrepid smugglers used the forest’s winding paths, nor did poachers follow its deer tracks. Neither group feared the Duke of St. Sevrin or his minions, for His Grace was away in London dissipating what little remained of the family’s fortune, and St. Sevrin Priory was going to wrack and ruin without benefit of housekeeper, gatekeeper, or gamekeeper. What would-be trespassers feared was magic, witchcraft, sorcery. A bit of venison or a tickled trout wasn’t worth the risk of being turned into a toad or getting elf-led off the paths to wander for enchanted eternity.
The vicar’s harangues against paganism didn’t open a single closed mind, nor did the fact that Lord Neville’s little girl played in the woods all the time without coming to harm. The housemaids and stable boys at Neville Hall simply crossed themselves when Lisanne claimed the forest folk weren’t evil, that they’d never hurt anybody.
As for Lisanne’s parents, Lord Neville had married late in life, and his wife had conceived even later in their marriage. After Lisanne’s difficult birth, the physicians had warned the baron that there would be no more children. Lord Neville was content. His barony was one of those archaic land grants by which title and property could pass through the female line if necessary. The papers were drawn, the succession was secure, and the baron could return to his translations of the early Greeks and Romans.
To say that Lisanne was the apple of her father’s eye would be an understatement. She was the whole orchard, with nary a blight or a blemish to spoil his satisfaction. So when his little golden-haired cherub climbed on her papa’s knee and babbled about her friends in the forest, Tug and Moss, Alon and baby Rimtim, Lord Neville was delighted. What a bright puss she was, his precious poppet, creative and clever. She was already learning the
Greek alphabet along with her ABC’s. Best of all, she was happy to play for hours at the far side of Neville Hall’s sloping lawns, past the formal gardens and the maze. She did not interfere with her papa’s concentration on a difficult passage, but was right there when he looked up and out his library’s windows. The baron could always spot his jewel of a daughter, laughing and dancing and skipping around while Nanny sat with her knitting on a nearby bench, there at the edge of Sevrin Woods. As Nanny Murtagh would have said, the sight warmed the cockles of his heart.
Lady Neville’s cockles were not quite so contented, although she loved her daughter none the less. It was a lonely child who created imaginary playmates, the baroness believed, an only child. Whenever she saw Lisanne frolicking with sunbeams at the edge of the forest, Lady Neville’s heart ached. When she heard Lisanne’s bedtime recital of her day’s adventures with her little friends, the baroness nodded and smiled and agreed that the forest people were the happiest, wisest, most amusing companions a child could have, and wasn’t Lisanne lucky they’d chosen her. Inside, Lady Neville grieved for the sisters and brothers Lisanne would never have.
There were no wellborn children of an age with Lisanne in the neighborhood, and the tenants’ children were too busy with chores, the village youngsters too rough. Neither Lady Neville nor the baron, of course, would ever entertain the notion of sending their treasure away to school with other daughters of the nobility. Perhaps when she got older, they’d tell each other, never intending to part with their dearest joy.
Of frail constitution herself, the baroness never considered joining her daughter for rambles through the woods. She also never considered how such a little girl seemed to know the name of every wildflower, which berries were safe to eat, or when a storm was coming. Perhaps old Nanny Murtagh was teaching her, or the gardeners. The gardeners? Heaven forfend the future Lady Neville be reduced to befriending the servants. Imaginary playmates were better, even if they were fairies.
So Lady Neville took matters into her own frail hands. It wasn’t what she would have wished, but for her daughter’s sake the baroness was willing to make the sacrifice. She invited her brother and his hopeful family to spend the summer at Neville Hall.
Sir Alfred Findley was hopeful of separating his scholarly brother-in-law from a portion of the Neville fortune. Findley was a baronet of very minor gentry as was his father before him, and as his son Nigel would be after him, with a barely adequate competence. Sir Alfred’s baroness sister, however, had risen to the nobility—the wealthy, landed, idle, and inbred nobility. Sir Alfred bitterly resented this fact, which was one reason traffic between the two families was so infrequent. The other was that Lord Neville considered his in-laws nothing but a clump of ignorant mushrooms.
Still, the invitation went out and was accepted. The Findley
familia
arrived and settled in.
“Why don’t you show your cousins around, dearest,” her mother directed Lisanne the next morning. “They might enjoy the maze and the gardens. Nigel can roll his hoop on the lawns, and you and Esmé can have a tea party in the gazebo.”
Nigel was a year older than Lisanne and didn’t want to play with girls. Esméralda, Esmé as she was called, was a year younger than Lisanne and didn’t want to get her slippers wet in the damp grass. They went anyway, following the stern direction of their father and the nervous cautions of their city-bred mother. Lisanne promptly lost them in the woods.
She didn’t mean to, of course. She merely intended to introduce her cousins to her other playmates. The cousins couldn’t see them, of course.
“I don’t understand,” Lisanne complained to her friend Moss, who was reclining beneath a dandelion.
Moss stood and puffed out his cheeks and blew until the dandelion fuzz drifted away. “That’s what they have between their ears, your cousins, nothing but fluff. A toadstool has more imagination. Who wants to talk to lumpish, loutish children like them?”
Lisanne turned back to her guests. Nigel was tossing stones at the crows jabbering above them. “This is boring,” he whined when he didn’t hit any.
Esmé was brushing a smudge off her pinafore and sniveling, “I want to go home.”
“See?” Moss asked. “You’re not like them. You’re special. Now, come, the vixen just had her babies in the meadow.”
Lisanne politely invited her guests along to see the new fox kits.
“Mama said we weren’t to get out of sight of the house,” Esmé dutifully reminded, “and it’s nearly time for tea.”
Nigel sneered at his cousin. “You can’t know there’s any such thing in the meadow. And no fox is going to let you play with her babies. We should go find the head huntsman, anyway, so he can drown the vermin or take the young hounds cubbing.”
Moss just laughed, shaking the tiny bells on his cap. Lisanne looked from her glum-faced cousins to her smiling friend. There was no competition. She waved to Nigel and Esmé and ran laughing after the tinkling chimes. “Wait for me!”
Esmé would have been happy to go back to the house, but Nigel was having none of it. What, get shown up by a mere girl? He grabbed his sister’s hand and pulled her along the faint path Lisanne had taken. Then he dragged her through briars and brambles and a stream. It was the stream that did it. Esmé set up such a howling that Nigel relented. “Very well, you sissy, we’ll go home.” Except that Nigel had no idea of where home was.
Lady Findley lay prostrate on the sofa while her maid burned feathers under her nose. Sir Alfred was all for calling out the stable hands, the tenant farmers, the militia. Even Lisanne’s fond papa was a tad concerned when his poppet ambled out of the woods some hours later, leaves in her braids, mud on her skirts, and berry juice on her chin, sans cousins.
Matters were not helped any when Lisanne was able to lead the searchers through the woods on a direct route to the missing children. Nigel and Esmé were huddled under a juniper bush, damp, cold, and frightened out of what wits they possessed. Sobbing, Nigel shoved his sister aside to be first into his father’s arms. Then he remembered he was a boy.
“She did it,” he screamed, pointing at Lisanne, the cause of his shameful tears. “She led us into the woods saying we’d see wonderful things. Then she left us alone so we couldn’t get back. She pretended to talk to someone who wasn’t there, just to frighten us.”
“No, Papa, I never did. They didn’t want to come with Moss and me, so I left them in the gardens.”
“Moss? Who’s this Moss?” Uncle Alfred demanded. “Nigel said there was no one else around.”
Lord Neville could only shrug, but Nigel hopped up and down. “There wasn’t, Pa, I swear. She was talking to a dandelion. Lisanne’s a loony, Pa. Addled Annie, they should call her.”
And Esmé, now that she was safe in her father’s arms, chanted, “Addled Annie, Addled Annie,” all the way home.
Suddenly, being special wasn’t quite so much fun.
*
Sir Alfred raged at his sister while his wife saw to the packing. “You always were a weakling, Elizabeth. And now you’re raising a mooncalf because you’re too feeble to do anything about it. You are letting some half-mad Cornishwoman raise your daughter, and look what it’s gotten you. Why, the woman didn’t even know the children had wandered off. Drunk, I don’t doubt.”