“Kin I ask ye ’bout sumpthin’ I noticed?”
“Ask away.” Isabel couldn’t help but warm to Tilly. The girl had a welcome honesty to her.
“What’s yer accent? I ain’t ’eard one like it in all me sixteen years.”
Sixteen years? Oh, life wasn’t fair, and that was a fact. With her pleasantly rounded figure and light brown hair streaked with the gold of girlhood not quite gone, Tilly was just the sort of girl places like Number 9 consumed whole on a nightly basis.
“Spanish,” Isabel offered around the lump that had become a permanent fixture in her throat.
“Yer from Spain?” Tilly’s mouth had fallen open.
Isabel nodded.
“Lawks be, yer an exotic one.”
Exotic. Isabel nodded tightly. She didn’t care to be described with that word. She could never be certain it was a compliment.
Isabel’s mind ran through the events of past, present, and future, namely last night, this moment, and her impending introduction to Lord Percival’s family. The part of her that trembled at the strange reality of this situation stilled. There was, in fact, a—slightly—reassuring angle from which to view this calamity. It was presently keeping her, Eva, Ariel, Tilly, and Nell safe. She would go to any lengths to ensure they stayed that way, even if it meant deceiving a family of ’oity-toity aristocrats.
She gave each cheek a pinch, and this time when she met her own gaze in the mirror, she detected steel. “I don’t suppose the informative Jane gave you the direction to the breakfast room?”
~ ~ ~
Isabel cracked the heavy, oaken door wide enough for her to squeak through and found herself slipping into the spell cast by this magical house and garden, just as she had five hours ago when Lord Percival had rushed them through. How was it possible she’d arrived such a short time ago?
Seemed a lifetime.
With its steep-pitched, thatched roof and wattle-and-daub walls, Rosebud Cottage screamed its English charm louder than any house she’d ever encountered. If the manor house was the fairy-tale castle, this was its cottage counterpart.
When a decidedly taciturn Lord Percival had pushed open the front door and she’d crossed its threshold, bleary-eyed and weary to the bone, Isabel had half-expected to happen upon an evil witch waiting to bake them in her oven. Instead, she’d found a cozy fire burning tamely in the fireplace and no witch in sight. All the tension had fallen from her body in that instant. Here was a safe haven.
For the moment.
As she followed Jane’s direction to the manor house, Isabel allowed the feeling of safety to prevail as the trees gently swayed above her head, the birds trilled their songs in happy competition, and verdant leaves soughed in the breeze, a few fluttering to the ground in lazy arabesques.
One didn’t get a moment like this in London.
London was all hustle and bustle with the energy and cacophony of a million lives getting on with their days. A different energy called out to her here, an energy content with itself, yet another reminder of her homeland. Not the verdancy, for summer’s effect on Spain was the opposite. Its interior was a hot, brown terrain and possessed of a different beauty, rugged and rough.
It was this gentle easing into a day that took Isabel to her homeland, a life lived at a slower, gentler pace. Sometimes she missed it so much it was a physical ache in her body. She shook the thought loose. She couldn’t think about Spain and maintain the single-mindedness she needed to survive breakfast with Lord Percival’s family.
She emerged from the magical woods into the wide, open expanse of a formal garden, the hedges and flowers low and orderly. It was lovely and tame and lacked the magic of the wooded copse. She would never understand mankind’s desire to assert its calculated dominance over wild and free nature.
Of a sudden, a yelling, laughing, shouting horde of boys screamed in from her left. She barely had time to scramble out of their way as they barreled past, not giving her a second glance as they disappeared into the woods, jeers and taunts trailing in their wake.
Where on earth had they come from? How many of them had there been? Four? Five? And who was the recipient of their teasing?
That instant, the latter question was answered in the form of a boy with no more than five years on him, red-faced and howling hot tears as he struggled to catch up to the boys. Poor niñito. It was tough being the littlest brother.
Isabel stayed the path. With every step, Gardencourt’s manor house asserted its dominance over the landscape, while her sense of unreality faded and her logical mind had trouble keeping pace with her increasingly jittery stomach. With its towers, turrets, and crenellations that called to mind the pompous castles of Spain, it was the sort of house that wouldn’t be denied respect and obeisance. And this imposing structure was the minor house of a duke, one in a dozen, undoubtedly. That sentence made little sense to Isabel, but it was true.
She ascended wide stone steps set into the side of a short hill rise and found herself standing on a terrace that extended all the way to the house. Detecting a slight crack in the set of French doors, she pointed her feet in that direction. They went heavy with dread, even as her stomach implored her to hurry it up. The scent of breakfast meats and coffee wafted on a light wind gust, and her stomach growled its approval.
Then her ears caught it: the dueling clinks of cutlery against porcelain and the low murmuring of several conversations happening at once. The family were beyond those doors, breaking their fast together.
And she was to join them.
It was all she could do not to turn back, but her stomach refused to consider the possibility.
“And the other hell was called,” came a drift of conversation, “Pizzy’s Pleasure Palace,” the voice finished on a girlish giggle.
“Lucy!”
“Who is this character?”
“They’re calling him the Savior of St. Giles.”
“Some exaggerated fiction, to be sure.”
That last voice, Isabel knew. Lord Percival.
Of course, he would be here. This was his family, after all.
Isabel steeled her nerves and pushed the door open the thinnest sliver possible for her to slip through. She averted her eyes in the desperate hope that she could sneak in unnoticed. All hope was dashed the instant the room went silent.
By painful increments, her gaze lifted. A quick scan yielded eight—eight!—sets of eyes fixed on her with varying degrees of interest, or disinterest as it was in some cases. Her tongue tied into a knot in her mouth, and her stomach filled the otherwise silent void with a long grumble that contained the scope and sweep of a German opera. She could melt into the floor.