“I’m not?—”
“And what about your sister? What do you thinkshe’llsay?”
Ella seemed to have finally come to a halt. Beatrix clasped her shaking hands together. “I expect she’d say pretty much what you’re saying. Rosemarie, too. But I’d thought you would understand.”
Ella made a disgusted noise. “What, because he’s tall and good-looking?”
“No,” Beatrix said, now angry herself. “Because I trusted you would give me a chance to explain that he’s good-natured and funny and I’ve never heard him say a negative word about women’s rights. He’s the exact opposite of our omnimancer, and he’s investigating him to boot.”
“Those areslightlybetter reasons, I’ll admit, but?—”
“Every time I see him, I feel happier!”
That came out louder than she’d intended. She lowered her voice and leaned toward Ella.
“You’re telling me to stick it to society because society’s sticking it to me, but if I really love him, how is suppressing that feeling any different than having to stifle my desire to be a medical researcher? Am I to have nothing I want out of life?”
“You have us. You have the League.” Ella sighed. “I know—it’s not enough.”
A minute or perhaps two ticked away as they sat in silence.
“I wanted to build things,” Ella said abruptly. “Skyscrapers. I wanted to leave reminders all over the country that I was there, that I made something lasting and important andpowerful.”
Ella had said that once before, though in her usual humorous way—since I can’t be an architect, I figured the next best thing is correcting spelling.This, now, was altogether different.
“Some days I feel I might explode,” Ella muttered at the table.
Beatrix took her hand, wondering how she could ever have suspected her friend of spying. “I know exactly what you mean.”
Ella looked up at her, seeming to consider her words. “Please don’t marry him. He’s a wizard, Beatrix. He may smile and joke, but I don’t think you understand how bad wizards are. There’s—there’s just something about being part of the magiocracy that warps these men.”
“What do you?—”
Beatrix paused. Footsteps—someone on the front porch.
“Listen,” she said quietly, “he certainly hasn’t asked me to marry him, and I don’t know that I would accept if he later does. I just don’t know him well enough yet. I’d have to beverysure before I give my rights away like that.”
The front door creaked open. “Hello,” Lydia called out.
“And I’d like to keep this under wraps while I’m figuring it out,” Beatrix added in a whisper. “Please.”
Ella quirked her lips and an eyebrow. “Just don’t kiss certain parties at the edge of the forest where anyone can see you.”
After that, it was as if she had three disconnected lives. Theo’s Beatrix existed in the woods for about forty-five minutes each morning and afternoon, caught up in his cocoon of good cheer. Blackwell’s Beatrix slogged through the greater part of the day, angry, fearful, absorbed. And Lydia’s Beatrix spent evenings and weekends preparing poster-board signs, negotiating to borrow one of Hazelhurst’s public-address systems, checking in on the caterers and wondering when she might ever again have time to herself.
She felt most like Beatrix’s Beatrix with Theo. But as she couldn’t tell him what Blackwell was doing to her and was leery of talking about the League, their conversations reinforced her sense of split personality.
He had the same problem she did, if for a different reason. “I can’t tell you,” he’d said when she asked how he spent his days. “It’s—say it with me?—”
“—classified. Of course.”
So they talked instead about his peripatetic childhood, never in the same home for more than four years. And how she had refashioned herself from a pupil to a de facto mother. And why they both thought Schubert’s piano trio in E flat utterly transporting. And which words they loved to say.
“Ineffable,” she said, the flaming red and dazzling yellow of the leaves around them putting a fairy-tale sheen on the moment.
“Oh, that’s a good one.” He tapped his chin. “Mellifluous.”
“Evocative.”
