“Sorry—I’m sorry.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “It’s not about the League. It’s not something I can really explain.” The hysterical giggles tried to push their way out again, but she swallowed them down. “Please don’t worry. It was a thoroughly rotten day, but it’s over.”
Ella stared at her, as if to puzzle her out, then grasped both her hands tightly. “All right. But if at any point you do need my help, you need only say the word.”
Beatrix tried to force her expression into something appropriately appreciative despite the crushing certainty that saying the word would be impossible. “Thank you.”
“Come on—let’s go home.”
They picked their way through the undergrowth, Ella stealing glances at her. Beatrix wished her friend hadn’t discovered her in her moment of weakness. It meant anxiety to no purpose. She tried to think of a distracting subject to talk about, but Ella got there first.
“Any progress on finding a new caterer?”
Beatrix sighed. This too would require less than full honesty, but for a different reason. “Not as such, no,” she hedged.
In truth, she’d put together a list of tiny operations—ones that normally catered garden parties—and Rosemarie was lining up half a dozen to share the load. They had told no one. Even the caterers knew only that the food was for a “ladies’ event.”
She hated that loyalty to her sister meant treating her best friend as if she were a spy and imposter. She hated even more the knowledge that it could be true.
“Makes me want to kick something,” Ella said, responding to the catering problem but capturing Beatrix’s feelings about the entire situation.
Then Ella hoisted her skirt and carried through on a half-decomposed log.
Beatrix backed up a step. “Um ... Not speaking metaphorically, then.”
“Literally is so much more”—thwap!—“satisfying. You give it a try.”
Beatrix lifted her own skirt an inch to more clearly show her bare feet. As much as she disliked the heels stuffed inher bag, she didn’t want to ruin them and waste money on another set.
“Oh—right.” Ella got in a particularly vicious kick. “You can borrow my boots, then.”
She pulled them off and sat in the moss while Beatrix squeezed them onto her two-sizes-larger feet.
Boots finally on, more or less, she gave the remainder of the log a half-hearted whap.
“You can do better than that,” Ella said, wiggling her toes. “Think of all the trouble wizards have been causing you. Think ofBlackwell.”
A minute later, there was nothing left to kick. Beatrix stood amid the mulch and splinters, panting.
Ella gave her an appraising look. “Feels a bit better, doesn’t it?”
It did. But the effect was fleeting. The moment Beatrix stepped into the house and caught sight of Lydia, hunched over a textbook, she realized that being forced to do exactly what Blackwell wanted was not the only outcome of the contract she’d signed.
Half her life was now hidden from everyone she cared about. Bad enough that this pushed Ella to arm’s length—Ella, the one she’d never had any difficulty talking to. How could she keep her awkward, tenuous connection with her sister from collapsing under the weight of things unsaid?
“Hello,” Lydia murmured, flashing a weary half-smile that quickly faded. “Bee—everything all right?”
“Yes,” Beatrix said. “Fine.”
She let the flow of dinner talk wash over her. The rest of the evening she spent on every chore she could find to keep her hands busy, and if they weren’t sufficient distractions, they were at least exhausting. Just after midnight, she crept into her room without waking Lydia and felt her way blindly to bed.
She would get through this.
It wasn’t, after all, the very worst day of her life.
Peter sat down nextto a hospital bed that contained Mrs. Harper. Nothing about this struck him as odd.
Naturally she was alive. That was the way the world was supposed to be. And of course he was by her side. Where else would he be, if she wasn’t well?
He took her hand. Weak pressure, there and then gone, might have been an answering squeeze, but it could just as easily have been his imagination. Her eyes remained closed. Her skin, he realized with the first fluttering of panic, had gone practically gray. Yesterday it had simply been too pale. Yesterday he had thought she would recover.
