When one makes a faerie bargain, one must be prepared to pay the price. There is one silver lining. I have nothing to lose.
Chapter Three
Mama and Mrs. Tuttle dress me in my sister’s Pact Parade gown, a confection of Swiss-dot chiffon and a bodice embroidered with English wildflowers, white thread on white fabric. It’s been altered to fit me, but I still feel like I’m wearing a Lydia Benton costume.
I sit on the small stool in front of my vanity, and Mama’s cool fingers wind my hair into a nest of braids at the back of my skull. Mrs. Tuttle helps her pin white roses, fresh from the garden, in my hair. The effect is beautiful, but no match for the diamond-encrusted tiaras and bandeaux the other girls will be wearing. Papa tells me not to concern myself with matters of finances, but how can I not when I overhear him and his business advisers arguing in the study all day long.
How could he have known that the land he bargained for the spring he turned eighteen had been so overfarmed it was barren? He was sure it grew plentiful produce when his father’s tenants farmed the field right next door, but he gave up his childhood memories in exchange for the plot, so he can’t be entirely sure. The tenant farmers have all packed up and left in search of literal greener pastures.
Others would have leaned on friends for advice, but Papa’s lackof childhood memories made it difficult to bond with the other men of the peerage. He doesn’t remember their boarding school stories or the tales of rugby victories in their youth. There’s a hollowness to him that others seem to be able to sense.
He’s tried to fill it in the years since with books and philosophy. We’ve spent our family dinners debating matters of politics and Plato, but it only helped serve to make us all a little odd.
“What will you ask for?” my mother asks one final time as she fastens her own mother’s pearls around my neck.
I hate lying to her. “I’ll ask for what you asked for, Mama, to have a better memory. I’ll get to know someone so well he’ll have no choice but to see I’d be the best wife for him.”
My mother’s hands go still, and she runs her thumb over the nub of her pinkie. She’s no longer looking at me in the mirror; her eyes are far off, somewhere else. “That’s a lovely thought, sweetheart.”
“Then why do you still look so sad?” I smile as I say it, but my heart is aching too.
“Just be careful.” She shakes her head and returns to fixing the flowers pinned to my head. “Remembering is heavy. It lasts so long.”
My dress has a wide V-neck decorated with a ruffle that continues down sleeves that stop at my elbows. The bodice ends in a point at my waist, and the skirt is wide.
“You look perfect,” Mama whispers.
I look like Lydia. Our curly honey-blond hair and brown eyes are the same, only Lydia has a face that’s sharper somehow, as if my features are more settled on her face. My cheeks are rounder, my eyes a little softer around the edges.
She’s been in her room all morning. I knocked on her door to askher once more to dress my hair, and I had to pretend that I didn’t care when she said no.
I poke my bare feet out from under the hem of the dress. “The matching slippers, Mama? I didn’t see them in the atelier’s box.”
My mother looks down at the carpet awkwardly, her face turning the same splotchy, tomato shade of red I so often see on myself. “She must have forgotten them. You can borrow your sister’s.”
I can read between the lines well enough. We couldn’t afford a new dress, and we couldn’t afford new shoes either.
I’ve felt so much embarrassment over the past few months, the sting is taken out of this particular blow. I’m just annoyed.
Mrs. Tuttle walks through the door moments later, Lydia’s white silk slippers dangling from her fingers. “Here you go, darling,” she says pityingly. “Do you need my help putting them on?”
“No, thank you.” I smile.
She closes the door behind her, and I grimace. Lydia’s feet have been smaller than mine since we were children. On one particularly humiliating occasion when I was eleven, a cobbler told me I was shaped like the letterL.
I attempt to cram my toes into the delicate silk shoes, but they’re pinching all over. I take two steps, and my left heel pops right out.
This day is going to be difficult enough without hobbling all over the palace.
I hide Lydia’s slippers under a bonnet in my wardrobe and slip on my stockings and trusty, well-worn boots instead. Under the layers of my dress, they’re hardly visible, and no one will be looking at me enough today to notice.
I’m tightening the final laces when my mother’s voice calls from downstairs. “Ivy, we can’t be late!”
“Coming!”
Praying she doesn’t see my traitorous choice in shoes, I race down the stairs to join her.
The carriage pulls up at exactly eleven, and Mama and I make our way across town to Kensington Palace.
