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“Noon,” nodded Agnes. “Mrs. Pegg took the twins to market in the village, and Elfreda is in the blue room, and I’ve been waiting here for you, but I’m feeling—I’m feeling awfully faint.” She wavered, fingertips to her temple.
“Stay right where you are.” Georgie clattered around the kitchen, managing, after several more ambitious efforts, to transform half a loaf of bread into toast.
“Do you know what happened to my gown?” they asked, when the toast had done its work and Agnes was crunching with restored animation. “Was it laundered?”
“Cut up for rags.” Agnes studied them, looking big-eyed and winsome with her shorn hair. “Is Elfreda your friend now?”
“She is.” Georgie nodded matter-of-factly, as though it were merely that, a matter of fact, and not also a matter of dreams and fancies, of yearnings that enchanted reality itself.
Agnes’s genuine smile showed charmingly crooked teeth. “Will you write to her from London?”
“I will.” Georgie considered the crumbs on their plate, suddenly bereft. They took another piece of toast.
“Will you invite her to go with you?”
“No.” Georgie stuffed too much toast into their mouth. Invite Elf? To share a shabby room in a boardinghouse inhabited by singers and dancers, artists and radicals? Perhaps if there was a desk, a place to put her books…
“Beatrice hasn’t invited me.” Agnes drooped. “My clothing isn’t right for London.”
Georgie washed down the toast with a swig of lukewarm tea. “Your gown is lovely. You look like an orchid.”
“Do I?” Agnes held up her arms, showing off the pale purple sleeves, which boasted three tiers of flounces. “It is lovely. But I wore it to dinner once at Beatrice’s and overhead her mother telling Mrs. Alderwalsey that I looked like I’d escaped from a lesser Gainsborough.”
Thomas Gainsborough had painted ladies in similar attire, in the mid-1700s. All those lace fichus peeping over the low necklines. All those embellished stomachers.
Georgie coughed. “No one who wasn’t trying too hard to be witty could ever compare you to a lesser Gainsborough.”
“Thank you.” Agnes lowered her arms. “I don’t believe the Parkers want any Gainsborough with them in London. I hope Aunt Susan sends me some pretty muslin soon, so I can have a gown made. She promised she would, once I turned fourteen, and I am fourteen, but perhaps she’s confused, because I was born on leap day.”
Aunt Susan’s well-meant meddling had been rebuffed. No muslin was forthcoming. Knowing the truth, and looking into Agnes’s big, guileless eyes, made Georgie squirm in their seat and mentally review the items in their own wardrobe for something that might suit. They hadn’t a Season’s worth of gowns to donate, and even if they had, the girl would need a modiste. They could help her, much more substantially, in a year’s time. If they stayed in Twynham themself, learned the ins and outs of the estate, read some agricultural journals, they might come to understand how to manage the land in nonbeastly fashion, to increase profit and prosperity for everyone. They’d turn five and twenty in the best possible circumstances. They could let something less shabby in London for the Season and invite Elfreda and Agnes, and Rosalie and Anne, and ask along, too, as chaperone, an older woman who’d shop and gamble and drive about and largely ignore the goings-on. Mrs. Alderwalsey?
Clearly, they’d gone staring mad.
They were staring, they realized, at Agnes, who didn’t seem disconcerted in the least.
“I do have something for you to wear,” she said, and hopped up. “Follow me.”
She flew before them, along corridors and passageways, and up a spiral stair to the room at the top of the tower.
“This is my music room,” she said. “And my dressing room.”
The room was cluttered with trunks and musical instruments, most of which Georgie couldn’t identify, except as oddly shaped guitars and trumpets. They blew into a trumpet until it produced a passably trumpetlike noise, akin to that of a sonorous goose. Meanwhile, Agnes tore through a trunk, heaping the floor with garments.
The garments did not, at first glance, bode well. Rigid, tightly structured gowns sized to a smaller frame. At least nothing crawled visibly with mites.
“This one will fit,” said Agnes, holding it up. “Grandpapa’s druidic vestment. There are antlers to wear with it.”
“The robe will do nicely.” Georgie took it. “I’ll pass on the antlers.”
As they changed, awkwardly, behind a unicorn wall hanging, Agnes strummed upon her lute.
“I don’t know any songs,” she said. “So I compose my own. This one is called ‘Beatrice.’ ”
Georgie emerged, druidically clad.
The song was melancholy, beautiful, and very, very long. Endless even.
“Bravo.” They began clapping.
