He named their daughter after her.
Tears spring to Beatrix’s eyes. Her heart swells and shatters, like it did the first—the only—time she heard her daughter’s cry. She lived a long life. Beatrix hopes, with every fiber of her being, that it was a happy one. The happiest one.
She brushes the moss from the stone. She wishes she had come in summer, that she could gather flowers to leave, some proof she has been here. But the earth is barren, waiting to wake.
The other graves in the row bear the name Beckett, too. Her daughter’s children, maybe, or grandchildren or beyond. She wanders through the stones, wonders who these dead are to her. She reaches the low wall and stops at the place she stood with William on their wedding day. The last light of day dances across the river’s surface far below her.
She had come back to remember. As if she could ever forget.
She is Beatrix Atwood of the village of Lancaut.
She was born in 1481.
Everyone she has ever known is gone. Everyone she has ever loved is dead. But she is still here, still twenty-three, still Beatrix. She will exist forever and always, and not at all.
January 27, 1819London, England
Beatrix has never fitted in anywhere, but she has never been more painfully aware of it than in her work as a governess.
She went to the manor in search of Professor Winfield, England’s preeminent scholar on faerie lore. More specifically, in search of his extensive library, which had just been featured in theLondon Times. Her plans went out the window when she rang the bell and a frazzled maid ushered her inside, chiding her about being late. Beatrix couldn’t get a word in before Mrs. Winfield marched past her in mourning dress, a young boy and girl with pale, tear-streaked faces trailing behind her.
When the door slammed behind them, she was left standing awkwardly in the silent foyer with the maid. Beatrix turned to her and asked, “Professor Winfield?”
The maid crossed herself and replied, “May God rest his soul.”
Beatrix never claimed to be the new governess. She only told the maid her things would arrive shortly when she asked where they were and followed her willingly when she offered to show her to her room. She had hoped to be left alone upstairs long enough to explore the professor’s library, but she only got a glimpse of the crammed shelves before the maid closed the door on it. She’d need more than a few hours in the manor if she was to discover anything useful.
Beatrix has come to think of herself as a liminal person, existing in that space between the past and the present, human and yet not. Now, she is a liminal person in a liminal position. She is expected to look after the children as if they were her own, but she isn’t their mother. She isn’t a servant, either. They won’t even speak to her if they can help it. And she isn’t part of the family, a point Mrs. Winfield makes abundantly clear every chance she gets. She takes most of her meals inthe same room where she teaches, and she spends her evenings alone, reading in her bedroom. It feels like her earliest days in London, when everyone looked through her until she was sure she was invisible.
It’s the books that keep her here. Each night before the kitchen maids rise, she unlocks Professor Winfield’s library with her borrowed key and slips inside.
She reads by the light of a single candle flame. She doesn’t dare illuminate the study, even though the rest of the house is asleep. Doesn’t dare take any of the professor’s papers from the room where his widow locks them away.
It is a strange library. The walls are built of books, the windows hollowed out of them, a reminder that a world outside the room exists. The professor seems to have been the type of person who would forget that. Papers cover his desk. The end tables are stacked with magazines and periodicals and various correspondences, some of which have never been opened. She wonders if their writers are still awaiting a reply, if they even know that the professor died months ago.
Beatrix can tell the library was organized once, before the professor became overwhelmed by documents and illness. It feels frozen in a moment, as if he has stepped out for a cup of tea, as if he might walk through his door at any moment, clap his hands together, and muse about where he left off. At least, that is how Beatrix imagines the man whose letters she pores over every night, before the sun rises.
She reads tales of maidens and princesses, inescapable towers and magical forests, witches and imps and talking animals, evil queens and sorceresses, riddles and curses. Oliver really did give her a gift when he left her in that inn with a pile of books and a letter she couldn’t read. She wonders if she could be considered a scholar. She has learned more about faeries than she ever thought possible. Laughed when she discovered they couldn’t lie, that the faerie’s twisting words were her own sort of curse. Cried at the tales of children left alone to die as changelings. But she has found no stories of a human babe coming back as a faerie. No stories of a woman with mismatched eyes coming back from death. No answers.
Snow floats past the schoolroom window in giant flakes, coating the manicured lawn and circular gravel drive with a dusting of white powder that reminds Beatrix of icing sugar on Venetian pastries. The sound of pens scratching on paper fills the silence. The Winfield children sit at their desks, copying the sentence Beatrix has written on her blackboard, a quote from a copy ofGrimms’ Fairy Talesshe snuck out of their father’s library.
Margaret, the younger at five, writes slowly, taking care with every letter. She pushes a strand of sandy-brown hair out of her face, smudging ink across her forehead. Beatrix can’t help but smile.
Victor scribbles his last words and hands Beatrix his page. He is two years older than his sister, with darker hair but the same wide green eyes, and no time for governesses.
She scans the illegible words. “Is this your best work, Victor?”
“Yes,” he says immediately. He won’t look her in the eye.
“I see.”
Margaret hands in her own paper, a much neater copy. “Now can we have a story?”
Beatrix considers them. Victor straightens in his seat. “All right. One, before it’s time to get ready for your mother’s dinner party.”
She crosses the room to an old armchair in the corner, meant to serve as her private sitting area since she isn’t welcome in Mrs. Winfield’s parlor. It is far more comfortable than the wooden chair and table she is supposed to teach from, and the only one that allows Margaret to crawl into her lap when she reads.
Victor pulls the copy ofGrimms’ Fairy Talesoff the bookshelf and hands it to Beatrix as Margaret settles. “Can we have one of yours instead?” she asks.
