Page 50 of A Rare Find

“I blame myself.” Sir Graham sounded maudlin. “I knew it wasn’t wise to walk to the village by the sands. I’d no notion that they would make the attempt, but still, I have often wished I’d thought to warn them about the dangers of a spring tide. The fisherwoman who saw them turn off the high road and failed to call them back—she is a murderess in my eyes.” Sir Graham blotted his forehead with a handkerchief, pausing to catch his breath. “I apologize,” he said, with genuine feeling. “I should not have spoken so freely. Elfreda, sit by your friend and offer the comfort of your feminine delicacy.”

The ensuing rearrangement entailed indelicate bumping and jostling, but Sir Graham managed to cram himself between Mr. Marsden’s bulk and the door, and Elf, after tripping and nearly falling into Georgie’s lap, perched awkwardly beside them.

Sir Graham pointed with his chin and waggled his brows, until Elf took Georgie’s hand in hers.

Georgie looked down at their linked fingers. She hadn’t made this contact of her own volition. And Sir Graham’s sympathy was misplaced. Only they knew how misplaced. But the touch sent a lick of warmth up their arm, and their blood began to flow again. They tightened their grip. Elf gripped back.

Outside the window, the scenery was sublime enough to force all thoughts from their mind. The road followed the sparkling river through the valley, then crested an eminence, so that the green dales dropped far below, dotted with woodlands and bounded by overhanging rocks, the gray hills marching across the horizon.

Those gray, gritstone hills, shadowed by distance—they might have been the dark swells of an angry ocean. The ocean rushed forward, and Georgie’s mother was there, galloping a white mare, the white foam of the breaking waves catching up to her until it seemed the horse itself was foam, part of the ocean, and she went as fast as the water would take her, away from Georgie, Lady Beverly clinging to her waist, long pale hair streaming like a comet’s tail.

Georgie woke with a start in an empty carriage. They had a crick in their neck and a foul taste in their mouth.

“Are we there?” They half fell from the carriage. It had stopped in a village of slate-roofed stone cottages, hills rising starkly behind. They tottered as they turned a circle, and there, there was Elf, hovering on the edge of a group of men, Sir Graham and her father, but also three more, strangers.

One of them was young, tall, golden-haired, and obscenely handsome.

The Barrow Prince.

Georgie took a step toward the little crowd and heard a thump. It was coming from the trunk in the boot of the carriage. Georgie’s items had been stowed with Elf’s, in one of the imperials on the roof. The trunk had to be Sir Graham’s. Did it contain an ash-covered corpse from Pompeii? Had the ash-covered corpse awakened on the journey, eager to wreak vengeance on the man who’d thieved its brain?

Thump. Thump.

Georgie approached, alarm stiffening the fine hairs on the nape of their neck.

Thump.

They jerked their hands back. Nothing. They drew a breath, and reached, and…thump! The lid of the trunk flew open. Their shout was seconded by a shrill scream. A head popped up, not an ashy, de-brained skull, but a proper head, with mussed hair and flushed cheeks and round eyes and a button nose. A second head appeared, much like the first. Two little girls. Two little giggling girls. One clambered from the trunk with remarkable speed and agility, while the other struggled and flopped.

“Here.” Georgie grabbed her, and she clung to them so powerfully it felt like suction.

“Is this the Dark Peak?” she asked. Her hands were sticky, and she smelled like raisins.

“It is,” they said, and wondered if they should mention, in their capacity as an adult, that her being in the Dark Peak was the height of naughtiness.

Two little girls hiding in a trunk for a fifty-mile carriage ride was such spectacular naughtiness, it filled them with a sense of awe.

“Hilda!” cried Elf. “Matilda!”

The little girl began to wiggle frantically in Georgie’s arms. They couldn’t wrestle a child—what if they damaged her?—so they let go. She dropped, bounced, and was off like a shot.

“Hullo.” The Barrow Prince knelt and addressed the other little girl, who’d raced up to the group of men, then frozen in apparent confusion. “What’s your name?”

She looked up at him with glowing eyes. “Dorcas the unicorn.”

“No! We’re wolves now.” Her sister ran to her, grabbed her wrist, and pulled. “We’ve come all this way because we’re wolves.” She turned and banged smack into Mr. Marsden’s legs. There followed the unfortunate, inevitable ricochet. An instant later, both girls lay sobbing on the ground.

Mr. Marsden stared down at them.

“How?” he asked.

“The trunk in the boot,” said Georgie, hurrying up as Elf sat and gathered her sisters into her arms.

“I will lock you in a trunk until you are five and thirty.” Mr. Marsden addressed his sobbing progeny. “Do you know how many years that is?”

The sobs continued. Hilda and Matilda kept their faces pressed into Elf’s bodice, but one of them lifted her hand and spread her fingers.

“Five, five, five, five, five, four,” said Mr. Marsden, in time with her movements. “That is correct.” He glanced around the circle of men. “They have been this way since their mother died. Willful. Unruly.”