The Duke of Snow and Apples (4 page)

Chapter Four

“So, is she anything like her ladyship?” Tall John asked.

Frederick flapped the serviette in his hands, and with a smooth, practiced motion folded it into a peacock fan and lowered it onto the plate, before picking up the next square of linen. Tall John, friend, confidante, and second footman, stared at him from across the dining-room table, his serviette still limp in his hands. The air rang with the quiet peals of china and silverware taking their rightful places as Ben and Eric, the lower footmen, set the table around them.

“Who?” Frederick said.

“What do you mean, who? Miss Charlotte.” Tall John started folding his serviette, then stopped. “I thought serviettes were water-lilies today.”

“No, peacocks.”

“I’m sure I heard ‘lilies.’”

“It’s peacocks,” said Mr. Thompson the under-butler, examining the silverware for scratches or flaws before handing them over to the footmen.

Tall John shrugged, and changed his flower into a bird with a twist of his hands. “What’s Miss Charlotte like?”

“She’s well enough.” Those were the only two words Frederick could use for her that wouldn’t earn him suspicious glances from his peers. The only two words Frederick could allow himself. She was
well enough
.
Loud, strange
, and
lovely
were completely inappropriate words. Entirely unsuited to the context of Tall John’s question. He went back to his folding as if creating peacocks from linen could drive those thoughts from his head.

Mr. Thompson paused, an immaculate salad fork in hand. “I heard Miss Charlotte’s a bloody terror.”

Frederick stiffened, the peacock in his hand reverting to wrinkled linen. “Where did you hear that?”

“Lady Enshaw’s maid let it slip.”

“Worse than Lady Noxley’s son?” asked Tall John.

Frederick’s cheeks heated as blood rushed to his face, to beat an angry tattoo at his temples. “And how could Lady Enshaw’s maid know?”

Mr. Thompson shrugged. “Says she heard Miss Lamonte screeching and carrying on about the girl, spitting Selencian curses bad enough to stain the wallpaper.”

Frederick drew himself up to his full, considerable height. “You leave off. She’s…well enough,” he finished lamely.

Ben settled the forks into their proper ranks, and essayed in a cheery tone, “Let’s remember who this is coming from. Miss Lamonte’s a she-dragon. She hates everyone.”

“The Blight swallowed the Selencian islands twenty years ago,” said Eric. “How come it missed her?”

“Because she’s a Blight unto herself,” Mr. Thompson said. The footmen snickered.

“I don’t know.” Eric cocked his head to one side. “Perhaps it takes a terror to recognize a terror. Freddy hasn’t really answered anything about Miss Charlotte.” The servants’ gazes turned toward Frederick as one.

“She’s…”
What is she?
He clenched his jaw against the instinctive defense that weighted his tongue. He knew nothing about her, nothing except that she had a temper and threw fruit at recalcitrant servants. That would make her a terror in any other footman’s book, but all Frederick could think of was the open, helpless way she’d laughed at herself afterward. Realizing the danger of replying, he held his tongue. Let the other footmen come up with their own answers.

“What slothfulness is this?” Everyone snapped to attention as Mr. Gelvers, the butler, entered the room. He took in the sparkling, immaculately set table with a deep sniff of disapproval. “It’s only an hour and a half to dinner! Why aren’t you finished?”

Guiltily, Ben darted forward and clinked the last salad fork into place. “Now it is.”

“Slow-minded talk makes for slow-handed work,” said Gelvers. “Into the kitchen, now, all of you. There are trays to prepare. Not you two.” He stopped Frederick and Tall John. “You’ve another duty.”

…

Tall John and Frederick stood to attention on either side of the public drawing room’s double doors, providing a purely ornamental function. Expressionless, impeccably dressed, and matching in height, their job as beautiful matching footmen was to demonstrate her ladyship could afford beautiful matching footmen.

Within a quarter of an hour, most of the guests had arrived. Lady Enshaw, sporting a headdress of phoenix feathers that gave off tendrils of fragrant smoke, sat at the pianoforte, playing and singing in harmony with her son and grandsons. Her granddaughter-in-law, the visibly pregnant Mrs. Colton, relaxed in a padded chair close to the fire next to a shy, young redhead Frederick supposed must be Lady Tamsin, Lady Alderley’s granddaughter.

Lady Leighwood glided in, a surprisingly short, unassuming young man on her arm. Her son Mr. Oswald, most likely. She surveyed the room with a glance of stifled boredom, a woman roped into fulfilling an unwanted duty. Likely she was already itching to return to the still-room and see if a few minor alterations to her formula would give her the potion she needed.

Lady Alderley entered a few minutes later, and the hum of chatter in the room quieted as Lady Enshaw ceased playing the pianoforte and hissed her offspring into silence. Lady Alderley’s arm curled protectively around the limb of an elderly woman dressed in unrelenting, shapeless black, who stood with a slightly curved posture, as if used to making herself appear smaller than she really was.

“And how are we tonight, Dorothea?” asked Lady Enshaw, her voice barely above a whisper.

Dorothea’s head bobbed, nearly disappearing beneath her overly large, black mob-cap. A tame crow with a chipped beak groomed itself on her shoulder, almost perfectly blending into her dark attire. “I’m very well, thank you,” she replied, as quiet as breath.

“Caw! Caw!
” Evidently her crow disagreed.

“
Shush
, Beatrice,” said Dorothea, a thread of steel in her small voice. “If you misbehave, you shall go the way of your sisters. Nest and no supper.” She turned around, looking both footmen in the eye. “Good evening, John. Good evening, Frederick.”

“Evening, milady.” Frederick felt the familiar twist, stretch, and pull of emotion whenever he saw Dorothea—a woman who rarely left her chambers yet somehow knew every member of the staff by name. Normally, he suppressed his emotions, wrestling them back into the cold place inside of him where they couldn’t get out and hurt anyone.

However, Dorothea, the seventh Dowager of Charmant Park, looked like she’d lived too long in a cold place not of her own making. Surely there couldn’t be anything wrong in warming a little around her, if it thawed out her own fear and grief. He smiled at her for a brief moment. It was worth it to see her lips flutter upward in tentative response, before Lady Alderley led her to a chair by the crackling fire.

Two moments later, Lady Balrumple swooped in, dripping with jewels and charms. She’d chosen a nautical motif for the evening: a dark blue gown stitched with magicked waves of white thread that rippled and crashed about her hem and sleeves, sending up tiny gouts of embroidered foam. Tiny, glamoured oysters opened and closed in her elaborate hairstyle, revealing glimpses of pearl.

A stiff, strange girl in yellow print muslin followed two steps behind, her head tilted at an angle that made her look as if she was trying to appear arch when really she just looked odd. Frederick didn’t pay her too close attention. As the chatter in the room resumed, he overheard the girl attempt a conversation with one of Lady Enshaw’s grandsons—the elder, Viscount Elban. Her tone of voice, intentionally sugared, was more memorable than anything she actually said.

“I don’t believe you’ve been introduced.” Lady Balrumple’s voice could be heard over the noise. “Charlotte, this is Viscount Elban, heir to the Earl of Enshaw. Lord Elban, may I introduce Miss Charlotte Erlwood?”

Only a decade’s worth of professionalism kept Frederick’s jaw from sagging open in shock. The girl turned her head to catch someone’s eye, confirming her identity.

That. Was. Not. Charlotte.

She wore her hair in tight, bouncy curls that fairly reeked of the burnt-sugar scent of spent magic. They bounced and bobbed with a wholly artificial gaiety that didn’t match her eyes, or any other part of her for that matter.

Her face looked pinched and false as she moved about the room. Her features were built for larger, freer expressions—delighted grins that flashed wide expanses of gleaming teeth, thunderous scowls with her predatory eyebrows crouched low over her eyes. Not the tiny, girlish gestures she made now. She squeezed those lively lips into pursed rosebuds of coyness, knowing smirks, tiny smiles of arch delight, while her eyes remained emotionally shuttered.

All the rough edges of her conversation had been sanded off, each sentence reduced to a carefully polished, smooth stone. Frederick had never before witnessed a girl try so hard to have nothing interesting to say.

She moved about the room, offering her hand and making curtseys with precise, clockwork movements. Everything about her appearance, actions, movements, words seemed so terribly, tediously
rehearsed
. She dispensed compliments and observations like exact coinage needed in payment for a particular reaction.

Lord Enshaw’s younger son, Mr. Colton, finished a joke, and Charlotte tittered.

The damn girl
tittered
. Frederick’s gloved hands clenched into fists. Tittered—not
laughed
, not
chuckled
. No genuine amusement, but an automatic indication of amusement, as meaningless a sound as the chime of a clock. It was the most appalling sound Frederick had ever heard.

Who was this creature, and what had she done with Charlotte Erlwood?

He watched this clockwork belle work the room, something tender inside of him coiling tighter and tighter, stretching all of his nerves painfully taut. The sour taste of anxiety rose in the back of this throat. Was she ill? Was something wrong? Was Charlotte bound and gagged in a dark closet while someone wore this ingenious, if imperfect glamour of her?

The distress he began to feel was in no way assuaged by the fact that he couldn’t understand it himself. She was a guest, one of the dozens of people,
hundreds
, who regularly scuffed her ladyship’s floors and dirtied her ladyship’s linens and consumed her ladyship’s food every year before returning to their own homes and entertainments. She shouldn’t concern him beyond the services he was required to render. She shouldn’t be able to distract and torment him like an unreachable itch.

A familiar warmth prickled behind his eyes.
I could peek. Just once. No harm done
. Frederick closed his eyes, but that heat remained, spread, until it felt like a caress against the back of his head.
One little look, just to see. You’d be doing your job. A servant is meant to anticipate their mistress’s needs. Just once, to stop the itch. Not long enough to cause the Gray.

He shouldn’t be caring this much. He took a deep breath, tried to will the gnawing, angry curiosity back into the cold place. Back under the snow.

“I
do
think something should be done about Trinidon’s poor,” he heard Charlotte coo. “Poverty is such a
dreadful
state.”

Scales-curse it
, Frederick swore inwardly. His eyes snapped open, and heat flared behind his eyes. Not all at once, just a trickle of warmth, a slight application of power, as shifting tones of color materialized in his vision as he stared at Charlotte. Outwardly, she displayed an image of confident coyness, but now Frederick saw flickering shadows swirling about her, mist-gray, bruise-blue, sickly yellow. And, for a brief moment, shimmering rust.

The colored spectrum of emotions that now danced across his vision was something Frederick had never been taught, a language he’d always known and would always remember, even after a decade of suppressing it. And what Frederick saw beneath the shaky mask Charlotte displayed in public was a girl supporting herself on unsteady columns of stress, sadness, and deep uncertainty. But with a glimmer of courage. A far cry from the girl who danced across carpets and cast apples at footmen.

She turned her head, and an accident of angles and timing sent her gaze careening into his, shocking them both with sudden eye contact. Her eyes widened, the air around her blooming turquoise in surprise, and a shamed Frederick pulled his power back, returned it to the cold place with such mental force it shot an unpleasant jolt up his spine, threatening a headache later. That was no matter, just as long as he could pull it back. Lock it up behind snow and stone and steel before it could damage Charlotte’s shifting tones, before the dark side of his magic emerged.

Charlotte, unaware, kept her eyes on him for a moment longer, blinking slowly. One eyebrow inched upward. Then Lady Tamsin tapped her arm with her fan and Charlotte turned away, breaking the spell. Freed, Frederick let his gaze drop to his polished pumps, breathing slowly to calm the sudden excited beat of his pulse. He shouldn’t have used his power. It hadn’t told him a damn thing—or at least anything that was any of his business.

…

Those eyes. Charlotte had never expected to see those eyes again. Not in
that way
, anyhow. Seeing them in the carriage on the way to Charmant Park had seemed to her like an intimately rare occurrence, like spotting a unicorn foal in the wild, or a hermit crab after abandoning its shell. Seeing something naked and new, before it learned to protect itself.

She never thought she’d get another chance, even when Freddy had been assigned as her personal footman. When one looked at a footman one tended to notice the gleam of the bright brass buttons, the hands clothed in crisp white gloves, the top of the pale powdered wig as the servant bowed. And, on occasion, the sturdiness of his calves.

There was absolutely no reason in the world to notice a footman’s eyes. And yet, when Charlotte turned around, they were the first things she saw. Those eyes, shimmering, multifaceted. Even as he stared at her, they darkened in tone. No longer the peaceful lake in summer, but the roiling, deep blue of the ocean’s heart.

They were staring at her.