Kissed by Starlight (13 page)

She moved, wincing at the stiffness of her legs and the numbness of her buttocks where they had been pressed against the cold stone floor. Something small fell out of her lap. For a moment, she recoiled at the unexpected movement, unsure whether she’d been used as a bed by some rodent or other. Then, realizing that the thing moved no more, she prodded it with a finger.

This new object made her realize that the worst part of prison was the monotony. She seized upon this small mystery with a hunger greater than the hunger of her body. The moment she took it in her hand, Felicia knew it was of fairy-make. A slight tingle ran up her arm, not unlike the time some friend of her father’s had demonstrated the science of electric fluid to the family.

It was a small white sack, the mouth puckered tight by a golden cord. The stuff of which it was made was both velvety soft and resilient, finer than her very best pair of kidskin gloves. Embroidered on the side in the tiniest of stitches was a magnificently curling capital letter B.

In the top opening of the letter was the face of a man with gaunt cheeks and starved eyes. In the bottom opening stood the same fellow, his cheeks plump, his waistcoat unbuttoned over a bulging belly. The pictures were as tiny and clear as they’d have been if scratched by the pen of a monk working on a medieval manuscript.

“What’s that?” Morris stared greedily at the bag in her hand.

She scarcely glanced at him. “No one has come in here?”

“Nary a man nor mouse,” said the pregnant woman. “An’ every time I been in this plaice afore, it’s been runnin’ over with rats.”

“That’s right,” said her friend. The baby lay sound asleep in the dirty hay, its lips slightly blue from the cold. “Bit me zick and zore from top to toe.”

“Maybe ol’ Richards cleaned ‘em out,” Morris said, and had the satisfaction of listening to the others’ laughter at the preposterous idea. He laughed too, his black and broken teeth an unpleasant sight, though Felicia had seen worse in the mouths of prominent people.

Felicia wished that she’d thought to hide the mysterious bag from prying eyes but, on reflection, realized how utterly impossible secrecy was in the gaol. It was only natural that the others would be interested. Where had it come from? Did the B stand for Blaic?

He had not come out of the starlit pool the way Clarice had. She could only guess that when he dived in, he’d gone back to his own place—that Wilder World of which he had spoken. Clarice and Felicia had also returned to their own world, the younger gasping on the shores of a very real stream. Felicia saw again in imagination the slime-streaked figure being carried to the house while one of the grooms lashed a horse into a gallop, riding first for the doctor and then for the constable. She was certain she would never see Clarice alive again.

“Open it,” the fellow she decided was Dale urged. The others were as eager for something to break the monotony as she herself. Only Choate reclined in his corner and said, “What’s the odds? Only thing as would interest me is a tankard of good ol’ zider. I’d zell me zoul for a tankard o’ zider as me poor ol’ father made at harvest. But I’ll niver taste the like no more.”

He sniffed sentimentally and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

Felicia untied the mouth of the bag and tugged the edges apart. “I think it’s empty,” she said, and felt the others’ disappointment go around the cell like a sigh. “Wait....”

She put in her hand and recoiled at the touch of something wet and cold. Then, slowly, squinting up her eyes in her reluctance, she pushed her hand in again. The smooth, wet sides of a hard rounded shape met her shrinking touch.

She traced the earlike shape at the side and thought, “A handle?”

Spilling a little, she pulled out a tankard of cider. The crisp tantalizing scent cut through the horrible stink of the gaol. Choate didn’t trouble to stand up. He scrambled over to her on his hands and ragged knees with remarkable speed. He made as though to snatch at the tankard, pulling his hand back at the last second. Much more slowly, he traced with a black-rimmed fingertip a bead of liquid condensed on the gleaming pewter.

The droplet went into his mouth. His eyebrows rose. Taking the tankard, he drained it without a second breath. His fellow smuggler watched, his pale tongue flicking over his lips.

“Is it?” Dale demanded long before the tankard came down.

Choate licked the foam off his upper lip with a grin of rare satisfaction. “As true as ever the ol’ man made!”

Dale and the others cowered back. “Devil’s work ...,” someone whispered.

Choate laughed and threw down the mug to clatter on the stone floor. “I promised the Black One my zoul in exchange. Now he can take it and welcome! ‘Tis my thanks I’m offerin’ him!”

“Don’t be a fool,” Felicia said. “It’s not devil’s work at all, and you mustn’t give up your soul.”

Morris, braver or meaner than the rest, said, ‘That there bag ain’t natural! If it ain’t the devil, and it ain’t the loaves and the fishes like what parson tells of, what is it?”

She chose the word they’d understand best, though she knew that if Blaic was listening he’d be enraged. “It’s just the pixies.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Morris nodded. “That’s all right then.”

The others seemed to agree. Her husband asked, “What else is in there?”

After that, the gaol was a merrier place. Anything they could think of in the way of food, the small bag supplied. Being of simple tastes, their flights of culinary fancy         extended no further than cider served beside sausages in sputtering grease—on which Felicia burnt her fingertips as she pulled out the plates. The cider was as heady as champagne; the smooth casing of the sausages squeaked when bit, bursting into succulence. Felicia also took out a bottle of milk for the baby when it woke up in the middle of the noise and cried.

“What about you, miss?” the mother asked, sitting gorged over what must have been her fourth plate of sausages. “You ain’t had a bite, not a bite.”

“I’m not very hungry,” Felicia said.

“Oh, now...you’d best eat lest them what give you that...” she nodded toward the white bag in Felicia’s lap “think you be ungrateful. My ol’ mam used t’zay, ‘Niver madden the fairy-folk if ye kin help it.’ Zeems they take offense that dreadful easy. No more ‘n a word’ll do it zo that they make the cow run dry an’ the hens not to lay. She’m be powerful zmart, my ol’ mam.”

“Where is she now?”

“Be to home more’n laik. T’isn’t her, you zee, t’is my ol’ dad. He what showed me the door.” She picked up her baby and rocked it gently without saying another word. Felicia respected the woman’s memories, though she now suspected that the wench was not very much older than she herself.

The sun had fallen quite low by now and the buzzing snores of the full-bellied prisoners echoed around her. Felicia sat in her spot, her ringers idly tracing the initial on the white kid bag. Slowly a feeling of self-pity stole over her. She tried to keep it at bay, but she had little meat to feed her confidence. The white bag could not help her there.

Why had no one come to see her? Even now, she did not know if Clarice was alive or dead. Surely someone — Doctor Danby or Justice Garfield — should have come by now to at least tell her whether she was charged with murder or only attempted murder. If it had been Blaic who had given her the bag as she slept — and who else could it have been? — why hadn’t he told her what was happening at Hamdry Manor?

He could have enspelled the others long enough to speak to her if he did not care to be seen by them. She could only assume it was because the news was so bad he didn’t dare tell her. Staring down at the gift, her ringer stilling, she wondered if this magic bag was the price for absolving Blaic of his part in her sister’s drowning.

She had to believe he had meant well. Surely he would not have gone to so much trouble just to hurt her, or Clarice. After what she’d seen of the pool, she had no choice but to believe he was exactly what he said, one of the mysteries of life turned to flesh. Remembering the solid muscle of his arm, Felicia blushed to think how attractive she’d found him from the first. If he were but a man ...

The fast-setting sun gilded the cell with red-gold beams. The temperature dropped with the sun. This night would prove colder than the one before. The little bag would not dispense a quilt for her, nor a warm woolen coat. With a resigned glance at the pot in the corner, Felicia said softly, “A glass of sweet milk and a bun with currants. Please.”

She drew out these things and sat nibbling them while the sun dropped ever lower. The bun was a good one, chunky with currants and lemon peel, sprinkled with cinnamon and glazed with honey. She thought idly that the food in the Wilder World must always be exceptional.

She’d no sooner eaten the last bite and sipped the last drop than she heard the clanging of the outer door. This sound, she’d already learned, heralded the approach of Constable Richards and his skinny minion, the one who actually dirtied his hands with the abominable meals. She smiled to herself to think that, tonight at least, the meal would be returned uneaten.

Glancing around with affection at her fellow inmates, Felicia saw that the tankards and greasy plates had all vanished, along with the tumbler she’d drunk from. The People believed in leaving no evidence, it seemed.

A flicker of a lantern shone on the wall. Almost at the same time, she heard Richards’s voice calling her. “Miss Starret?” he said, in as near a coo as he could manage.

“If you’ve come to renew your flattering offer, Constable,” she said, rising, “I have no new answer to make you.”

“Now then, Miss Starret, you’ll allow a fellow a bit of a joke, won’t you? No hard feelin’, eh?”

Carefully picking her way around the sprawled bodies of her cellmates, Felicia came nearer the door. The barred opening in the middle showed her the constable and his servant, both appearing most anxious. She heard the rattle of the keys turning in the big lock, then watched as the door screeched open.

Richards showed her his sweating face, topped by a stained hat with a dirty plume. “I was doin’ no more’n my duty,” he was saying apologetically even as he pulled open the door. “Lady Stavely told me flat-out that you be dangerous and must be locked away, zo I did it. No one can blame me for doin’ my duty and not going against her ladyship.”

He swiped at the sweat trickling down his cheeks. She realized from his puffing that he was out of breath. Who had made Constable Richards run from his comfortable lodging across the street from the gaol?

“You won’t hold no hard feelin’ against me, will you, Miss Starret?’’ he said again, holding the door wide.

Felicia swept out of the gaol. The minion’s hand shook as he held the lantern, making the lights and shadows jump and dance. She glanced over her shoulder at the sleeping forms huddled among the straw.

“What now?” she asked, forcing Richards to meet her eyes. Inwardly she was rejoicing. If Richards was taking this attitude, it could only mean one thing. But she refused to permit him the satisfaction of watching her listen to the news he was so plainly agog to tell. She would ask him no important questions.

“If you come with me, Miss Starret, I’ll be more’n happy to show you to a place where you can get clean. An’ I’d be most obliged, miss, if you could zee your way clear to zaying I run a modern gaol?”

“I shall, of course, be perfectly honest about the conditions I have endured.”

For some reason, this promise did not seem to reassure Constable Richards. He showed her into a small chamber at the side of the gaol, where a basin of water, a slab of coarse soap, and a rough towel tempted her more than even a bath of asses’ milk would have. If her freedom did await her, as seemed possible, the first thing she would do is plunge into a scalding bath.

Constable Richards gave her the cloak and hat that had been taken from her upon her arrest. “And zum hard work I had, too.  That devil Locker made me pay more’n what he paid me! ‘Have to have me profit,’ he zays. ‘These are hard times,’ he zays! Aye, them Northerners are all t’zame. Do a man down as zoon as look at ‘im! We Dartymoor folk b’ain’t like that, I’m glad to zay.”

He kept up in this vein all the way across the street, his acolyte nodding and agreeing with every other word. Felicia found it difficult to sympathize with Constable Richards' plight in regard to the pawnbroker. After all, it was her things he’d been trying to pawn. She prayerfully hoped that Locker had made him pay triple what he’d realized on the first transaction.

Richards’s lodging beside the small provincial courthouse reeked of cooked cabbage and boiled pudding. On the lower level, a small tavern had been set up. The sign overhead showed two jovial attorneys eating and drinking, while a death’s head in the background must have symbolized their clients.

In the low-ceilinged taproom, a well-known bald pate caught her eye. “Doctor Danby!”

At her voice, he spun about and hastened across the room to her, his hands held out. “By thunder!” This was all he could say for several minutes, shaking both her hands in his own and beaming all over his small, monkeyish face. He was so moved that his spectacles danced the entire way down his nose.

Then the plumed eyebrows frowned past her at Richards, shaking like a jelly bag in the dimness of the room. “There’d better be no sign of gaol fever in that pesthole, or I’ll throw you in there myself and let you rot!”

“Yes, sir, Doctor, I mean, no, sir, Doctor! Not a zingle death in, oh, over a month...or more! Much more. Much, much more...” He was backing out of the taproom, his lackey beside him shaking his head as though the very thought of losing a prisoner to a dread disease was completely unheard of.

Felicia hardly waited until they were alone before demanding, “What is happening? Why am I free? What about Clarice?”

“Well, what about her?” The words were not delivered in Doctor Danby’s usual rough and admonishing tones but in a soft, lilting voice that held a young girl’s laughter.

There on the small stairs that led away to the first floor stood Clarice. Her gown was of pale gray silk, low in the bosom and highly flounced around the skirt. There was not a scrap of a pinafore. Her golden hair lay in soft, well-ordered waves, with ringlets on her shoulders and a neat knot on top. All was neatness, all was propriety. She looked nothing like the hoyden child that Felicia had known and protected for the last three years. Only the laughter in her eyes remained the same.