Well! It seems I have struck a chord! She held it to her nose and inhaled, smiling. “Thank you,” she repeated. “This is lovely! And one of my favorite flowers!”
Where on earth are they getting fresh lavender at this season? she wondered as she made her way back to her rooms. Ah, well. The same place the rose and the other flowers came from, I suppose. If this was Sebastian’s doing, he was a much more powerful magician than he claimed to be. And if it was the Godmother’s doing — it argued a level of interest in Sebastian and his welfare that was unusual, to say the least.
The bath was heavenly; her dinner was waiting, perfectly hot and ready, when she came out, clothed in a flannel nightdress and a warm dressing gown. Verte bandaged her foot again when she had finished eating, and she made a random selection of the books to take with her to bed.
That was when it all hit her, as she settled into the comfortable, soft bed with books she had selected — why had she proceeded to take over the ordering of the household as if she was in charge of it? As something more to distract her from a situation that was as horrible as a velvet-lined prison in which she was to await her sentence?
Because that was, long and short of it, what this was.
The bed might have been warmed, but there was a hard, cold lump inside her, a frozen ball of fear that nothing was going to thaw.
And she could try to distract herself all she liked with taking over and ordering this household as she did her own, with trying to make sense and allies out of the strange creatures that passed for servants, but that did not change the fact that in a month’s time, she might well find herself locked in a cell beside Duke Sebastian —
As if to drive that thought home, a long, heartbroken howl throbbed through the corridors of Redbuck Manor.
Isabella Beauchamps burst into uncontrollable tears.
In the end, she stopped crying, not because she had run out of fear and grief, not because she was too tired and wept-out to continue, but because there was an insistent tugging at the coverlet she huddled beneath.
She turned over, and started to dry her eyes on her sleeve, when a lavender-scented handkerchief was thrust into her hand.
She took it, too tired to be angry that one of the invisibles had violated her privacy and seen her crying. “Verte?” she croaked.
The floating fabric was a ribbon, not a scarf, and blue, not green. “Oh. You will be Sapphire, then,” she said, and blinked her sore eyes in surprise when a child’s slate and a bit of chalk floated into view.
“We R Veri sori,” the chalk scratched onto the slate.
“It’s not your fault,” she sniffed, dabbing at her eyes and blowing her nose. “If anything, it’s my own stupid fault. I was the one who tried to go home through the woods after dark.”
The previous words were erased. “Erk shud have warned U.”
“Well, yes, he should, instead of trying to bully me into indecencies,” she said, a rekindling of her anger burning away a little of the grief. “Especially since it was the full moon!”
“Erk sposed to guard wuds at ful moon.”
“As you can see, he didn’t do a very good job of it.” She sighed, and her throat closed again. “I don’t belong here. I don’t want to be here. I want to go home!” The last came out in a little wail.
An invisible hand patted her knee through the coverlet. “We like U. Not B sad, Godmuther fix.”
Privately she could not imagine how. If the Godmother had not been able to fix Sebastian’s werewolfery after all these years, how could she expect the Godmother to help her? But instead of saying so, and descending into inconsolable crying again, she made an effort to put a good face on things. No amount of crying was going to change what had already happened. All she could do was fight to fix it, or find ways to cope if the worst came. “I hope so,” she replied.
“Godmuther fix evrthing.”
If only that were true. She felt her eyes starting to burn again. No matter how hard she tried to make herself brave and practical — it didn’t stop the fear.