She tried to imagine what he must be feeling right now. Everything he’d grown up believing was suddenly not true. The foundations of his life had crumbled into nothing. His past had been wiped out. Did he feel lost? Alone? Did he feel that he stood in a void, with emptiness all around him, that he had nothing firm to hold onto anymore?
“Vic?” Georgie rose to her feet, but didn’t quite dare to approach him. “Vic, if you’d like to go to Cornwall and see where you were born, I’ll take you there.” She made the offer tentatively. “You don’t have to. Only . . . if you want to?” If it would give him solid ground to stand on again, a chance to start filling his life with truths.
There was a long moment of silence, and then Vickery’s head turned. She tried to read his expression, and failed.
“Yes,” he said. “I would like to go to Cornwall.”
“We can go as soon as you like. Tomorrow, if you wish.” And then she remembered that even though she was an adult, she couldn’t travel alone with a man. “Mother will come with us, won’t you, Mama?” She turned to her mother and beseeched her silently, urgently.
Lady Dalrymple hesitated, and exchanged a glance with her husband, and Georgie suddenly remembered that her mother was due to go to Derbyshire tomorrow.
“I’ll come with you,” Lord Dalrymple said.
Chapter Five
September 13th, 1814
Devonshire
Alexander had barely slept the night he’d found his father’s diaries. He hadn’t slept at all the following night. If his father’s doubts had been bad enough, Georgiana’s certainties were a hundred times worse. He’d lain awake, exhausted, wrestling with the truth—I am not Alexander St. Clare—while his heart beat steadily and calmly, as if his whole life hadn’t been ripped to shreds.
He fell asleep the next morning, though, within ten minutes of the carriage departing Eype, and woke not knowing where he was. He jolted to consciousness, alarmed, wondering where in the devil he was—and realized that he was in his traveling chaise, slumped into a corner like a drunk man, the vibration of the wheels juddering along his bones and rattling inside his skull.
For a moment he had absolutely no idea why he was in the carriage or where he was going—and then memory came flooding back. I’m not Alexander St. Clare. His brain ran through its gamut of emotions again: the instinctive denial, the shock, the dismay, the disbelief. Grief was buried in there, too, and a strange unsteady feeling, as if he’d been shoved sideways and lost his balance and was falling but had yet to hit the ground.
He turned his head. Georgiana and her father were seated opposite. Georgiana was looking out the window, her expression pensive, but the viscount was watching him.
Alexander slowly levered himself to sit upright. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
Georgiana turned her head and smiled at him. It was one of her small, faintly sad smiles. The sort of smile she’d worn often in the years following Hubert’s disappearance but that he’d not seen at all these past eight months.
He should have worried about that smile, should have been embarrassed that he’d fallen asleep in front of her, but there was no space in his head for either of those things. I’m not Alexander St. Clare. The words were so big that they squeezed out everything else.
Alexander rubbed his eyes, wishing he could erase the last two days, and then touched his cheek where Lady Dalrymple had kissed him goodbye that morning. Kissed him and hugged him, folding him in her arms as if he were family. And then she’d told him, quite sternly, “Look after my daughter and husband, young man, or I’ll turn you into a caterpillar.”
A tiny sliver of curiosity nudged its way into his brain. Alexander fastened on it with relief. Curiosity was a thousand times better than the awful helplessness of knowing that his life was collapsing around him and being unable to do anything about it. He fingered the spot on his cheek where the viscountess had kissed him, and asked, “Can Lady Dalrymple really turn people into caterpillars?”
“No,” Georgiana said. “It’s her way of a joke. She can only walk on air.”
Only. Only walk on air.
His curiosity became stronger. Questions piled on his tongue. Alexander kneaded the back of his neck, trying to decide which question to ask first. He glanced out the window briefly, and then a second time in astonishment. “Where are we?”
“We’ve just crossed over the Exe.”
Crossed over the River Exe? He’d slept for forty miles? No wonder his neck was so stiff.
Abruptly he was ravenously hungry. And thirsty. And in urgent need of a piss. “How far to the next stage?”
They halted briefly at Topsham and then pushed on, heading south and west, towards Cornwall. Alexander wished he could fall asleep again and shut out the world, silence the voice in his head that told him he wasn’t Alexander St. Clare, but he was wide awake now. He let his curiosity worm its way forward again. “Can you explain to me about the walking on air, please? I mean, how is it possible? How can anyone have a Faerie godmother?”
Georgiana explained, and it sounded wholly unbelievable—an act of courage performed centuries ago, a Faerie wish granted in return, a bloodline of women receiving magical gifts. Alexander listened, instinctively rejecting everything she said as impossible. When Georgiana had finished, he looked mutely at Lord Dalrymple. Tell me it’s a joke, sir? But Lord Dalrymple, who was without doubt the most intelligent person Alexander knew, gave one of his gentle smiles and said, “It’s the truth.”
Alexander wrestled with this for several minutes, while the carriage rattled its way towards Cornwall. Questions swarmed in his brain. He selected one. “Daughters only?”
“Yes,” Georgiana said.
“And only one wish?”
She nodded. “On our twenty-third birthdays.”
“And a Faerie actually visited you to grant you this wish?” He heard the disbelief in his voice.
Georgiana nodded again.
“And you chose to be able to find things?”
She nodded a third time.
Alexander stared at her. Georgiana Dalrymple, whom he’d known most of his life, with her soft brown hair and wise brown eyes and sweet, sad smile. Georgiana Dalrymple, who had a Faerie godmother and a mother who could walk on air. Georgiana, who could find things.
It was a very odd gift to have chosen, but he understood why she had. If she’d wanted to move forward with her life it was the only gift she could have chosen.
Alexander looked out the window for a moment, watching the fields flash past, and thought about Hubert. Curly-headed, laughing Hubert. Hubert, who should have married Georgiana years ago.
He looked back at Georgiana. She and her father were watching him silently.
Alexander groped for another of his questions. “What’s it like?” he asked. “I mean, how does it work? Your ability.”
“I ask myself where something is, and the answer is suddenly inside my head. I can see where it is as clearly as if I’ve been there, and I can find it exactly on a map. It’s . . . it’s as if someone asked you where your celestial globe is.”