“Maybe I’m misunderstanding your mortal customs, but I thought the lady reconsidering was considered a bad thing.”
He shrugged. “Usually. But I want Miss Northwood to be certain she’s happy with her choice. If her mind changes before spring—if, for example, she falls in love elsewhere—she’s welcome to cry off. I have told her so.”
Love. Irrith raised an eyebrow. “What does the Queen say?”
It was a cruel blow, but one he would have taken sooner or later. Galen’s qualified happiness faded visibly. “I haven’t told her yet.”
“You are aware that she keeps spies, yes?” Including, Irrith suspected, Edward Thorne, who was currently in an adjoining room, attempting to remove the dirt Galen had pressed into his stockings when he knelt to propose to Miss Delphia Northwood.
Galen sat forward in his chair and put his head in his hands. After a moment, he pulled off his wig, giving his scalp a good scratch. The sight reminded Irrith of the last time she’d seen his head bare—and Galen soon recalled it, too, for he blushed and hastily pulled the wig back on. “Dame Irrith—”
So they were back to titles. “Yes, Lord Galen?” she inquired, too sweetly.
It was so easy to call anguish up in his expressive face. “We cannot—I am promised to another, now.”
He never ceased to enchant her, the way different parts of him could say different things, all at the same time. His eyes told a much less certain story than his mouth. It wasn’t the manipulative artifice of someone like Valentin Aspell, either; Galen felt all these things, honestly and completely, even when they contradicted each other. However did he manage it?
She would not surrender the game, not so long as his eyes were still playing. “Promised, Galen. Not married.”
“But her Grace—”
“I thought we dealt with that matter already.”
“I cannot give myself to three women at once!”
The adjoining room was far too silent. Irrith hoped Edward Thorne was entertained. “You aren’t giving all of yourself—just pieces. Lune has your love. Miss Northwood has your promise. I don’t ask for either of those things; your body is enough for me.”
He turned very red, and shot up out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box. “You would treat me like some kind of male prostitute?”
Where had this anger come from? Irrith rose to her own feet, letting her own hurt show. “Did I say that? Did I imply it? What have I paid you, that gives you the right to accuse me like that? I’m only acting on what I saw in you. When you look at me, you see something you wish you could be: a person who doesn’t care what’s proper, who does what she likes and smiles at it all, a person without any chains. And it attracts you. But you’re too scared, too worried about what Lune thinks, and your father, and everyone else, to do what you want, and so I did it for you. How is that wrong?”
All the anger had gone out of him while she worked herself up to a shout. He wasn’t really mad, she realised—not at her. At himself, yes, for letting his father sell him in marriage, and for wanting what he thought he shouldn’t. Irrith had listened to farmers in Berkshire complain about the bad behaviour of the so-called polite folk, keeping mistresses under the same roof as their wives, and had thought it common; and maybe it was, but not with Galen.
At least, he didn’t want it to be.
He’d retreated behind his chair; now she followed him, standing so close their buttons touched. “I’ll go away when you marry,” Irrith whispered, realizing only after it came out that for the first time in her timeless life, she was willing to let go of a mortal before she tired of him, for his sake. Because otherwise it would hurt him too much. “Let me enjoy this now, Galen. You love the Queen, and you want to hold faith with Miss Northwood, and you want to honour your father and help your sisters and learn great things and save the Onyx Hall—you want so much, and so intensely, and there’s nothing like that for us, don’t you understand? Nothing except you.”
By the end she wasn’t even sure she was making sense. It didn’t matter, though, because this time Galen was the one to move; his arms lifted her onto her toes so he could more easily reach her mouth, and for a few moments Irrith forgot to think about the listening Edward Thorne at all.
But the servant must have been waiting, for when Irrith lost her balance and staggered, breaking Galen’s embrace, he coughed politely from the doorway. “Lord Galen,” Thorne said, for all the world as if he’d seen nothing at all, “you asked me to remind you of Dr. Andrews.”
He might have been speaking Greek. “Yes, thank you,” Galen said distractedly, then came to himself with a jump. “Oh, yes. Irrith, I’m sorry—I’m to meet with Dr. Andrews, now that we’ve made a place for him in the Onyx Hall, and to introduce him to a few scholars who have volunteered their assistance. We must get him started on his work.”
She could hardly begrudge it. If they didn’t save the palace, there would be no more Galens for her to play with. “May I come?”
“If you wish to—though I fear it will be terribly boring. We cannot expect to solve our problems on the first day.” Galen accepted Thorne’s ministrations, straightening what Irrith had disarranged.
“If I grow bored, I’ll leave.” Andrews was a consumptive, after all. She wasn’t hoping for him to drop dead in front of her—that wouldn’t help Galen at all—but it was interesting to watch a man die by degrees. “Until then, I should like to hear what he has to say.”
Following on his Midsummer thought, Galen had assembled a small group of faerie scholars to work with Dr. Andrews. Lady Feidelm; a lesser courtier named Savennis; Wrain, a sticklike sprite who looked to be half again Irrith’s height but no more than her slight weight. The von das Tickens said they would look in from time to time, or rather Wilhas did; Niklas, being his usual unsociable self, declined. Ktistes would follow their efforts from his garden pavilion.
They met in the chamber Galen had arranged for Dr. Andrews’s use, and settled into chairs near the hearth. “How do you like your laboratory?” he asked, gesturing toward the other end of the room. Servants had brought in suitable furniture, and he’d tried to equip the place with things he thought Dr. Andrews might need: bookshelves, a writing desk, a large table for experimentation. Proper equipment would have to wait until the doctor made more specific requests.
“This place is incredible,” Dr. Andrews admitted. “The palace, that is—though I do appreciate the laboratory. To think that all this lies beneath the feet of unsuspecting Londoners…” He shook his head, lost for anything else to say.
“And they will stay unsuspecting, won’t they?”
Galen glared at Irrith. Andrews might not hear the threat shading that question, but he did. Fortunately, Andrews hastened to reassure her. “Oh, yes, my dear. I’ve been given a miraculous opportunity here; I would not squander it so easily.”
She bristled at the condescending address. Andrews had lost his fear of Irrith on Midsummer’s Eve, but it seemed Galen had not made it sufficiently clear that for all her youthful appearance, Irrith was both a lady knight of the court, and a hundred times older than Andrews could ever hope to be. An old man’s tendency to call every young woman “my dear” would not please her.
Hurrying to smooth over that ripple, Galen said, “I imagine you have a great many questions—indeed, I know you have them, as you’ve already shared several with me.”