Page 37
“I caught a few more pages,” they told her. “I brought them for you.”
“The novel?” Mr. Marsden frowned. “Enough about the novel.”
Georgie tipped their head, confused. “Novel?”
“I found the wolf pit.” Elf glanced at Georgie, as though for confirmation, and for whatever it was worth, they nodded.
Mr. Marsden snorted. “Yes, the wolf pit. My mother should have titled her romance The Wolves of Twynham Abbey.”
All at once, Georgie comprehended. The novel was the translated chronicle. Mr. Marsden insisted that his mother scribbled fantasy, perhaps because he disbelieved women capable of anything else. Or because other people’s accomplishments took attention away from his own. Probably both.
Elf was fighting an uphill battle.
And Georgie had knocked her down, literally and figuratively, at every turn. They hadn’t meant to do so, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was putting it to rights.
“Is the Barrow Prince still coming?” they asked.
“The Barrow Prince?” Mr. Marsden sounded personally insulted. “Did Elfreda call Aubin-Aubrey the Barrow Prince?”
It was almost sweet, his transparent need for preeminence. He reminded Georgie of a stock character from the commedia, one of the old men who played his miserliness and self-importance for laughs. Except he wasn’t acting.
“She said that some do call him that.” Georgie brightened their smile. “And she said that you are called the Barrow King.”
“Am I?” Mr. Marsden stroked his beard. “Well, I’ve opened barrows from Kent to Orkney, and not the piddling grave mounds that satisfy some. The ones mutilated by the plow in a farmer’s cabbage patch, and all you get is a handful of flint. No, I am selective about my burial chambers. As you can see, my collections are remarkable.” He waved his hand.
“Remarkable,” Georgie murmured, smiling around at the clutter, which brought on the urge to sneeze.
“I suppose Barrow Prince isn’t far from the mark, for Aubin-Aubrey,” conceded Mr. Marsden, with an air of largesse. “He is a bright boy and eager to follow in my footsteps. I shall doubtless pick him, one day, as my successor. Just as Mortimer picked me. He is that talented.”
Georgie rounded their eyes. “As talented as you?”
“I would say so, yes. Or thereabouts.” Mr. Marsden was growing ever more expansive, and he glanced at Elf with kinder eyes. “He was delayed in Norfolk and decided to travel to the Peak directly. We meet him there on Saturday. Elfreda will assist us. She is not without talent herself. When she isn’t behaving like the silliest girl in Derbyshire, taking fairy tales as gospel and knocking over priceless urns.” He chuckled. “Well, Miss Redmayne, you are not as deficient in good sense as you might be, and that is to your credit. You are welcome to call again, when next you are in Twynham. Agnes will see you out.” He walked back to his chair and pulled it up to a table covered with maps, open notebooks, and assorted fragments, some of which seemed to be bone.
“Elfreda,” he said. “Where is the book I asked for?”
Elfreda carefully retrieved the book she’d dropped. She had to pass close to Georgie as she walked to her father, close enough for them to catch the rosemary fragrance of her hair, but she didn’t look up.
She set the book before him and pulled her own chair up to the table.
Georgie stared at a point right between her shoulder blades, willing her to turn around.
Five folded pages were burning a hole in their reticule. They had five folded pages, and a plan. But they needed Elf to turn. To rise and follow them from the library. Not forgive them, but at least talk to them, hear them out.
They felt a tug. Agnes had looped her arm through theirs and was looking up at them with those big, voracious eyes. “Instead of a concert, we could go to a banquet. Which do you prefer?”
“One moment.” They stared at Elf’s back so hard their eyes ached.
“Come with me.” Agnes pulled with surprising strength. “We’ll go to the banquet. There’s a wizard you truly have to meet!”
11
Peace restored to the library, Elfreda dipped her pen and began to write—about the leathern cup that stood six and three-quarter inches high in front of her writing pad. It was Saxon, taken from the second of three barrows she’d opened with Papa the previous summer on a rocky hill near Thornton. The leather was decorated with…
Elfreda’s pen made a distressed noise and released a large blotch of ink.
She had to will her fingers to loosen, to set it down.
There was no peace with Georgina in the house. And Georgina was most definitely still in the house.
