She is speaking to keep herself steady as much as to guide Louisa. Brave little storm-bird.
Isn’t that what I have heard my mother call her?
A twig cracked under his heel. The sound ricocheted. Louisa’s head tilted. She paused.
“Good,” Adeline whispered at once. “We pause because the wood has greeted us. Did you hear it, poppet? It said, ‘Hush.’ We’ll be polite and hush in return.”
Louisa’s lashes did not lift. Her lips parted a little, breath clouded in the cold. She began to move again. They had left the main drive entirely. The ground fell away gently and then less so. The path, if it could be called that, curved as if by ancient habit toward the lower land where the mere lay cupped like a dark hand. He felt the pull as a fisherman feels his line tug, steady, inexorable. The mere pulled at him.
As it pulled at Sarah.
“Not the mere,” he said before he could stop himself. “Anywhere but there!”
Adeline cut him a look that sliced his breath. Not anger. A command. A maternal command.
She warns me to be silent. To keep my composure. And she would be as direct to the Regent himself if Louisa’s safety were at stake.
He lifted his hands and pressed them against the rough skin of a birch. Louisa descended a little slope scattered with exposed roots. Winston moved to catch her if she stumbled, but she did not. Her little feet found the places children find by instinct. The soft patch, the safe hollow. He remembered her at three, solemnly stepping along the rim of rug borders as if they were sea cliffs. He remembered her at five, balancing on a fallen branch and declaring it a bridge to fairy kingdoms. He wanted to laugh and weep and howl. Adeline hummed.
That melody again. The one that my mother played. The one that I ordered Adeline not to play. Now it might be a lifeline for Louisa.
It wound and unwound, a simple thread of sound. Louisa’s head tipped, the way a flower follows the light.
“Good girl,” Adeline murmured, “we’ll change roads now. We prefer the one that goes up. There’s warm bread at the end of that road. There’s Mrs. Hardcastle, who scolds because she loves. You can’t let me face her alone. It wouldn’t kind.”
A breath that might have been a laugh slipped from Winston in spite of himself. Adeline’s shoulder brushed the branch of a young beech and shook a wash of droplets onto her hair. They glittered and were gone.
The trees thinned. The ground grew slick with mud. Winston could hear the mere now without seeing it. It was a stillness that was almost sound. The years fell away. The wood opened onto the small clearing that dipped toward the shore. Mist lay low, a shawl thrown across the grass. The mere itself was a circle of night darker than the sky around it. Even the heaven’s few stars did not dare look at their reflections there. Reeds murmured. Louisa’s pace quickened.
“No,” Winston breathed.
His hands curled without his permission into boxer’s fists. The birch bark’s sting had not been enough. He wanted to tear the world in two. Adeline stepped half a pace closer to Louisa, still not touching, and shifted herself so that if Louisa took three more steps, she would meet Adeline’s body and not the slope.
“Listen,” Adeline said very quietly. “The ducks are sleeping. They will be very vexed if we wake them, and you do not wish to vex ducks. They are great gossip. They will tell your grandmama you came out without a shawl.”
If there had been any other witness to that utterance, Winston would have expected mockery. There was none. The wood held its breath to hear what the small white figure would do. Louisa paused. She raised her hand as if to lift a veil and then let it fall.
“Turn, sweetheart,” Adeline coaxed. “We can still hear them sleeping when we turn. We will not lose anything by turning, only gain something. A piece of cake, perhaps. A new ribbon. The knowledge that we have been clever and kind.”
Clever and kind. As if technique could be a virtue. Louisa’s right foot turned. Not much. But a pivot, as when a dancer remembers the proper direction after starting wrong. Adeline breathed out, barely a sound. Winston did not dare breathe at all.
Adeline used that inch, then another, then another, so gradually that Winston could not have said when they began to climb. Mist thinned around their knees. The reeds’ whisper died. The dark behind them stayed where it was. He moved with them like a moon shadow, always there, never leading. He felt hopeless and understood that his usefulness tonight consisted in agreeing to be useless.
It’s the first suitable thing I have done.
A cold thought, and true. When at last the trees rose thicker and the ground leveled, Adeline altered her voice, just a hair warmer, a hint more cheerful, as if the house’s walls had already clasped them.
“Almost home,” she said. “Almost done with adventures for the evening. We’re being very good, the three of us. A secret league. I hope you like being in a league. It has rules. Rule the first: do not get your feet wet when there is cake waiting.”
“Rule the second,” Winston said before he had decided to speak, his voice soft as the moss underfoot, “do not terrify your father into an apoplexy.”
Adeline’s head turned. In the dimness, he saw her mouth, quick and small, flicker toward a smile and away again.
“That rule,” she murmured, “applies to more people in this house than one.”
“Name them,” he said, with a voice that did not sound like his, because it held a thread of laughter.
“Later,” she returned, “when I am emboldened by cake.”
