Page 43

And then they did less.

It was over.

Their mouth was gone, and hers felt scalded, damp and hot.

“Well?” Georgina was draped over the arm of their chair, chin in hand. “Am I right?”

Elfreda exhaled. “You are…” She couldn’t finish the thought.

“Kiss.” Georgina looked pleased. “Like rubbed against like. Those are lips.”

Kiss? Lips?

“Flints!” Elfreda bestirred herself at last, all the blood that was holding still in her veins coursing now with double the speed. “Rub flints together and they produce sparks. The answer is flints. Or sticks, maybe. Flints or sticks. It’s a riddle about making fire.”

“Oh.” Georgina straightened, skimming a fingertip back and forth over their lower lip. “I thought it was about kissing. And that you wanted me to kiss you.”

Mortification made her stomach drop. She barely understood her own desire, but it seemed Georgina had arrived at an interpretation of that as well.

“It wasn’t just the like rubbed against like that suggested kiss,” they continued, their tone defensive. “It was the hungry sparks. Kissing does that—sometimes at least. Not literally. The answers to this type of riddle are more literal than metaphorical? Is that the lesson?”

“The lesson is that I was right. About you.” She wished her voice wasn’t trembling. “You should leave.”

They collected their bonnet and reticule and stood. She could feel them looking down at her.

“So, just to be clear, you didn’t want me to kiss you?” The disbelief in the question set her teeth on edge.

The silence stretched until she was on the verge of breaking, blurting Yes, I didn’t, or No, I did, some mixed-up affirmative-negative, negative-affirmative retort that contributed to the unclarity of everything.

“Apologies,” they said.

She let a shred of long-held breath escape her.

“Should I talk to your father now about the Peak? Or come back tomorrow?”

“Neither.” She kept staring straight ahead at the engraved breastplate of the suit of armor Papa called the Dudley. The breastplate had a mortal-looking dent. “You can see yourself out.”

After a long moment, she heard Georgina’s receding footsteps. When they dwindled to nothing, she slumped and touched her lips, extinguishing any remaining sparks.

13

She couldn’t sleep that night. She usually curled herself into a ball in bed, tucked her cold fingers between her legs, and huddled motionless, waiting for her body to warm the sheets, drifting off in the process. Instead, she moved restlessly, sweaty with agitation, kicking her legs as she turned over and over.

“Damn you, Georgina.” She muttered it aloud to the dark room. She shivered a feverish shiver, because Miss Poskitt had claimed that fairy tales possessed a kernel of truth, and Miss Mahomed had claimed that repeating someone’s name made them appear, and ideas dismissably silly by day gathered weight in the night, and she could almost believe if she said Georgina again and again, it would summon them into the room. Into her bedchamber.

And then?

She kicked her legs and heaved herself from her right side to her left. Georgina wasn’t going to appear in her bedchamber. Georgina was fast asleep in Redmayne Manor, on a feather bed, smug and smiling. Had they felt their lips spark?

Sometimes kissing does that, they’d said.

Sometimes.

She kicked her legs and heaved herself from her left side to her right. What had come over her in the Great Hall? She’d revealed things about herself, about her family, that she shouldn’t have. She’d sat beside Georgina voluntarily, let them beguile her, as she had at the wolf pit, and instead of a ram, a kiss had brought it all crashing down. In the past five years, they’d gotten worse by getting better, new facets of their personality dazzling her so that she temporarily lost sight of the deeper, ineradicable flaws. This more sensitive, more likeable Georgina, this Georgie, made her lose her head. She became the sort of girl who drank too much champagne in the sun, who howled, who forgot her goals, who aired unpleasant family business, who received kisses that kept her up at night, sighing and fantasizing about sparks. What Fellow of the Albion Society was that sort of girl? No Fellow! None! None of them were girls at all, of course, but that only meant she had to try even harder, to show Papa and William Aubin-Aubrey and Sir Graham and whoever else that hers was a scientific mind. She couldn’t impress anyone as a learned, well-reasoned individual with Georgina goading her into flights of fancy and fits of temper. Refusing Georgina’s offer to accompany her to the Peak was the sensible decision, the correct decision. Or was it?

She kicked her legs and heaved herself from her right side to her left. Was it sensible? Or was it cowardly? She feared Georgina’s proximity would prompt her to do something foolish. Didn’t that ascribe to them too much power? Wasn’t it up to her to exert some self-control? If she allowed the Barrow Prince to slip away because Georgina Redmayne had ruffled her feathers, she’d never forgive Georgina, but more crucially, she’d never forgive herself. She wasn’t a coward! And she was more than Georgina’s match. Suddenly, she knew what to do, and it was so simple, she almost laughed. Take Georgina to the Peak. Accept their help with Aubin-Aubrey. Ignore their provocations. Simple. She’d work with such singular focus, she’d hardly notice they were there. She’d fill her thoughts with urns and calcined bones. She’d keep them at arm’s length.

Except each night when they shared the same bed at the coaching inn.