Just then, the kitchen door swung open again, making both girls jump, drop their fruit, and pretend to scrub the nearest dish.
Luce was expecting Miss McGovern, but she froze when she saw two girls in beautiful matching white silk dressing gowns, squealing with laughter as they tore through the filthy kitchen.
One of them was Arriane.
The other—it took Luce a moment to place her—was Annabelle. The hot-pink-headed girl Luce had met for just a moment at Parents’ Day, all the way back at Sword & Cross. She’d introduced herself as Arriane’s sister.
Some sister.
Henrietta kept her eyes down, as if this game of tag through the kitchen were a normal occurrence, as if she might get in trouble if she even pretended to see the two girls—who certainly didn’t see either Luce or Henrietta. It was like the servants blended in with the filthy pots and pans.
Or else Arriane and Annabelle were just laughing too hard. As they squeezed past the pastry-making table, Arriane grabbed a fistful of flour from the marble slab and tossed it in Annabelle’s face.
For half a second, Annabelle looked furious; then she started laughing even harder, grabbing a fistful herself and casting it at Arriane.
They were gasping for air by the time they barreled through the back door, out to the small garden, which led to the big garden, where the sun actually shone and where Daniel might be and where Luce was dying to follow.
Luce couldn’t have pinned down what she was feeling if she’d tried—shock or embarrassment, wonder or frustration?
All of it must have shown on her face, because Henrietta eyed her knowingly and leaned in to whisper, “That lot arrived last night. Someone’s cousins from London, in town for the party.” She walked over to the pastry table. “They nearly wrecked the strawberry pie with their antics. Oh, it must be lovely, being rich. Maybe in our next lives, hey, Myrtle?”
“Ha.” It was all Luce could manage.
“I’m off to set the table, sadly,” Henrietta said, cradling a stack of china under her fleshy pink arm. “Why not have a handful of flour ready to toss, just in case those girls come back this way?” She winked at Luce and pushed the door open with her broad behind, then disappeared into the hallway.
Someone else appeared in her place: a boy, also in a servant’s outfit, his face hidden behind a giant box of groceries. He set them down on the table across the kitchen from Luce.
She started at the sight of his face. At least, having just seen Arriane, she was a little more prepared.
“Roland!”
He twitched when he looked up, then collected himself. As he walked toward her, it was her clothes Roland couldn’t stop staring at. He pointed at her apron. “Why are you dressed like that?”
Luce tugged at the tie on her apron, pulling it off. “I’m not who you think I am.”
He stopped in front of her and stared, turning his head first slightly to the left, then to the right. “Well, you’re the spitting image of another girl I know. Since when do the Biscoes go slumming in the scullery?”
“The Biscoes?”
Roland raised an eyebrow at her, amused. “Oh, I get it. You’re playing at being someone else. What are you calling yourself?”
“Myrtle,” Luce said miserably.
“And you are not the Lucinda Biscoe to whom I served that quince tart on the terrace two days ago?”
“No.” Luce didn’t know what to say, how to convince him. She turned to Bill for help, but he had disappeared even from her view. Of course. Roland, fallen angel that he was, would have been able to see Bill.
“What would Miss Biscoe’s father say if he saw his daughter down here, up to her elbows in grease?” Roland smiled. “It’s a fine prank to pull on him.”
“Roland, it is not a—”
“What are you hiding from up there, anyhow?” Roland jerked his head toward the garden.
A tinny rumbling in the pantry at Luce’s feet revealed where Bill had gone. He seemed to be sending her some kind of signal, only she had no idea what it was. Bill probably wanted her to keep her mouth shut, but what was he going to do, come out and stop her?
A sheen of sweat was visible on Roland’s brow. “Are we alone, Lucinda?”
“Absolutely.”
He cocked his head at her and waited. “I don’t feel that we are.”
The only other presence in the room was Bill. How could Roland sense him when Arriane had not?
“Look, I’m really not the girl you think I am,” Luce said again. “I am a Lucinda, but I—I’m here from the future—it’s hard to explain, actually.” She took a deep breath. “I was born in Thunderbolt, Georgia … in 1992.”
“Oh.” Roland swallowed. “Well, well.” He closed his eyes and started speaking very slowly: “And the stars in the sky fell to the earth, like figs blown off a tree in a gale …”
The words were cryptic, but Roland recited them soulfully, almost like he was quoting a favorite line from an old blues song. The kind of song she’d heard him sing at a karaoke party back at Sword & Cross. In that moment, he seemed like the Roland she knew back home, as if he’d slipped out of this Victorian character for a little while.
Only, there was something else about his words. Luce recognized them from somewhere. “What is that? What does that mean?” she asked.
The cupboard rattled again. More loudly this time.
“Nothing.” Roland’s eyes opened and he was back to his Victorian self. His hands were tough and callused and his biceps were larger than she was used to seeing them. His clothes were soaked with sweat against his dark skin. He looked tired. A heavy sadness fell over Luce.
“You’re a servant here?” she asked. “The others—Arriane—they get to run around and … But you have to work, don’t you? Just because you’re—”
“Black?” Roland said, holding her gaze until she looked away, uncomfortable. “Don’t worry about me, Lucinda. I’ve suffered worse than mortal folly. Besides, I’ll have my day.”
“It gets better,” she said, feeling that any reassurance she gave him would be trite and insubstantial, wondering if what she said was really true. “People can be awful.”
“Well. We can’t worry about them too much, can we?” Roland smiled. “What brought you back here, anyway, Lucinda? Does Daniel know? Does Cam?”
“Cam’s here, too?” Luce shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was.
“If my timing’s right, he’s probably just rolled into town.”
Luce couldn’t worry about that now. “Daniel doesn’t know, not yet,” she admitted. “But I need to find him, and Lucinda, too. I have to know—”
“Look,” Roland said, backing away from Luce, his hands raised, almost as if she were radioactive. “You didn’t see me here today. We didn’t have this talk. But you can’t just go up to Daniel—”
“I know,” she said. “He’ll freak out.”
“ ‘Freak out?’ ” Roland tried out the strange-sounding phrase, almost making Luce laugh. “If you mean he might fall in love with this you”—he pointed at her—“then yes. It’s really quite dangerous. You’re a tourist here.”
“Fine, then I’m a tourist. But I can at least talk to them.”
“No, you can’t. You don’t inhabit this life.”
“I don’t want to inhabit anything. I just want to know why—”
“Your being here is dangerous—to you, to them, to everything. Do you understand?”
Luce didn’t understand. How could she be dangerous? “I don’t want to stay here, I just want to know why this keeps happening between me and Daniel—I mean, between this Lucinda and Daniel.”
“That’s precisely what I mean.” Roland dragged his hand down his face, gave her a hard look. “Hear me: You can observe them from a distance. You can—I don’t know—look through the windows. So long as you know nothing here is yours to take.”
“But why can’t I just talk to them?”
He went to the door and closed and bolted it. When he turned back, his face was serious. “Listen, it is possible that you might do something that changes your past, something that ripples down through time and rewrites it so that you—future Lucinda—will be changed.”