He finishes the song and lowers his bow and instrument.
“That was beautiful,” Beatrix says from the doorway, even though the wistful tune has made her inexplicably sad—more than sad, struck with yearning, a sudden realization that something is missing without knowing what she has lost.
“Bloody awful song,” he mutters as he packs the gleaming violin carefully into its velvet-lined case. He takes the glass of champagne Beatrix brought him hours ago from his desk and downs it in one go. “Happy New Year,” he declares, and collapses into a leather armchair next to the fire.
“Happy New Year, sir,” Beatrix replies.
He plucks a small amber bottle from the table at his side and tilts it, examining the liquid in the firelight. It seems they will both be spending the first night of the new century in the same oblivion.
Beatrix turns away. The question Lord Sutton slings at her back stops her in her tracks.
“Do you think I’m mad, Beatrix?”
She turns back to him. “No, sir, I don’t think you’re mad.” He is eccentric. Desperate. Lonely. If that makes him mad, then she is mad, too.
“You think I’m cursed, then, do you?”
“No, sir.” She has been in Lord Sutton’s employ long enough to know there is nothing magical about his misfortune, only tragic luck and the destructive guilt of a man who doesn’t believe he deserved to survive.
He closes his eyes and massages his temples. “Tell me, then, what ails me?”
Beatrix hesitates. He is still her employer. But if he doesn’t like the truth she speaks, he can forget it soon enough. “I think you’re tormented, sir.”
He opens his eyes and gives her a grim smile. “Quite right.” He stares into the dancing flames, but he doesn’t dismiss her. He never dismisses her.
Something keeps Beatrix rooted to the spot. Maybe because it is a new year and a new century. Maybe because she wants to get to the bottom of Lord Sutton’s curse, and she won’t find any answers in the bottle tucked away beneath her bed. Maybe because she wants to know why he hates “Auld Lang Syne,” too. “Why?”
Lord Sutton doesn’t ask her to sit by the fire and listen, but he doesn’t banish her from his study, either. She stands on the threshold, waiting for him to speak.
“Where to start?” He sounds distant, halfway between his chair next to the dying fire and the deck of a ship lost in the Indian Ocean.
Beatrix takes the amber bottle from his trembling hand. She sets it on top of the mantel, next to the clock he refuses to wind. He doesn’t resist, doesn’t say a word, as she lowers herself into the empty chair across from him. “At the beginning.”
February 2, 1814London, England
The evening air stabs through Beatrix’s lungs as she hurries past the blackening piles of snow encroaching on the narrow street, her shoulders hunched against the biting cold. Too cold to snow again. She turns the corner, and the glittering Thames comes into view. Her heart soars and she smiles, even though her face is numb. The river has frozen solid for the first time in twenty-five years, and that can mean only one thing.
The Frost Fair is back.
Beatrix checks the carved wooden sign hanging over the door of the pub. Not that she needs to. She has known this place ever since Oliver told her about it, almost ninety-seven years ago. She pushes the heavy door open with her shoulder and steps gratefully into the warmth.
Oliver slouches over a dark wooden table in an even darker corner. He rests his forehead on the heel of his hand, scanning the pages of the notebook lying open in front of him.
Beatrix’s heart flutters inside her chest. He is still the same man she left in the carriage all those years ago. She knows, eventually, he will not be the same man. He will return older, grayer, maybe imperceptibly so to anyone but her. But not tonight.
She takes a breath, forces herself to slow her steps, to keep her composure. He hasn’t spent nearly a hundred years waiting and hoping, longing for this moment.
She slides onto the bench across from him. “Hello.”
Oliver straightens. He looks like he’s seen a ghost. “You came?”
Beatrix unties the ribbon under her chin and removes her bonnet, the same burgundy shade as her long wool coat. She brushes a curl of her hair back into place. “You sound surprised.”
“I thought you might have changed your mind.” He takes in every inch of her.
Beatrix rests her folded arms on the thick wooden table. “Why would I change my mind?”
His gaze turns dark, horror touched by sadness. “It’s been a hundred years, Bea.”
