And there was the princess, framed by stones as always at that time of the morning, standing in an arched walkway near the top of the house, with the restless sough of sounds splashing up from the great chasm of the hall behind her. She smiled instantly at Emma. But her speckled eyes seemed wary, oddly secretive.
“I’m exploring,” she told Emma very softly. “I’m trying to understand things.”
“Oh, be careful,” Emma begged.
“I am, I am.” Her wild, curly red hair hung loosely down her back; on her pale, plain face the mark of the knight’s fingers had faded to a startling shade of greengage plum. “I can’t talk now; I must be very quiet.”
“I know; I can’t, either. The house will be full of guests by evening. The heir is coming.”
“Ah—did your lady die?”
“Not yet. But she’s no better.”
Ysabo nodded gravely. Then her eyes shifted. She stared in utter astonishment at what was going on at Emma’s elbow, which was Ridley Dow, touching Emma’s arm gently, and saying, as he eased past her to step across the threshold, “Princess Ysabo, I am Ridley Dow. I believe you might have crossed paths with an ancestor of mine, Nemos Moore.”
“Emma!” Mrs. Blakeley called just outside the stillroom door, and Emma’s bones leaped in her skin like a deer at a pistol shot. Her fingers slid off the door. Mr. Dow reached out, closed it deftly behind him as the housekeeper entered the stillroom.
“Oh, there you are, Emma. And Hesper, too! I do hope you’ve come to give us a hand; I’m sure Emma’s told you what’s happening.”
“Yes,” Hesper said, blinking rapidly at the afterimage of the vanished Mr. Dow. “Yes, I’d be happy to, Mrs. Blakeley. I could give this room a good tidying, for instance.”
“That would be extremely helpful. Emma, the servants’ stairway needs sweeping badly, if we’re to have strangers running up and down them.”
“Yes, Mrs.—”
“And the windows in the breakfast room are appalling, Mr. Fitch discovered when he went to gather up the silver pieces to polish. You’ll need to examine the linen in the drawers for moths.”
“Stairway,” Emma repeated mindlessly. “Windows, linens—”
“And—oh, I know there is so much we depend upon you for, but please remember Lady Eglantyne’s lunch tray. Though why we bother when she won’t eat—” Mrs. Blakeley finished worriedly.
“I can take that up,” Hesper offered quickly. “I’d like a look at her, to see if anything comes to mind to help her.”
“Yes, Hesper, please do. I just don’t know, all this turmoil, and the poor woman trying to die peacefully.”
“I’m sure you’re doing your best, Mrs. Blakeley.”
“Well, we are, and I’m glad to see you back, Hesper.”
Emma waited until the housekeeper turned finally, and the last of her black hem fluttered through the door. Then she flung herself at the pantry door, her mother close behind her. She wrenched it open.
Nothing but shelf after shelf of dusty bottles and jars, dried herbs and cobwebs hanging overhead, a couple of bluebottles banging away at the small, high, grimy windows.
She and Hesper stared at one another wordlessly. Then Hesper said sharply, “I’ll finish the game room and clean the stillroom. You go and open every door you see.”
She did, all through the house, pitting herself as desperately and randomly as any bluebottle searching for its freedom, at all the doors in the house.
Not one opened to Ysabo’s world.
She pulled her apron straight, hitched up a stocking, and ran to the open front door to join the rest of the staff of Aislinn House on the steps to welcome the heir. Mr. Fitch, in his black and looking stately, had a cloth stained with silver polish hanging out of his back pocket. Mrs. Blakeley gestured sharply to Emma, who hurried into the gap between the housekeeper and Mrs. Haw, whose annoyance at being pulled out of the kitchen was rapidly melting into terror.
Even Hesper had been given an apron and pulled into the receiving line. The ruffled apron hem dangled oddly between her torn skirt and her bare feet in their clogs.
Seven carriages, a dozen men on horseback, filed down the drive, came to a halt at the front steps. Emma watched numbly as steps were placed, carriage doors opened, ladies placed a satin slipper, a gilded shoe upon the first step and came out in streams and clouds of color, their hats completely veiled in swaths of flowing net and lace. They stood on the drive, faces hidden within their private clouds, turning this way and that to examine the ancient, tired house, the overgrown lawns and tangled gardens, the stables no one had remembered to open, the dry fountain and the fish pool so murky that even the frogs had abandoned it.
Mrs. Haw gave a weary sigh, flung up her hands, and lowered her bulk heavily onto the steps. “Might as well just walk straight into the wood,” she muttered. Mr. Fitch hissed at her; Mrs. Blakeley gave a small, despairing moan. Even Hesper shifted, backed up a step, as though she wanted to yield the house to its fate and go take off the ridiculous apron.
Then the head carriage trembled on its axle; a streak of cobalt blue filled the doorway. A white kid boot with a heel like a spindle positioned itself upon the wooden steps amid the flurry of white lace underskirt and dark blue. A head, startlingly bare in that company, ducked under the lintel, tilted upward to survey the motley assembled on the porch. They stared at her; she gazed back at them. She had ivory hair with shades of gold in it, done up in a bouquet of curls on top of her head with a violet tucked into each curl. She looked like something out of a fairy tale, Emma thought: skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood. Great eyes the color of her name, green as sea on a turbulent day, but no expression in them at all; no telling what she was thinking.
She unfolded a tall, slender body and descended gracefully to the ground. Nobody around her moved. They simply watched her silently, as though waiting for a sign that they would stay or go.
She walked up the steps, stopped in front of Mr. Fitch.
“I’m Miranda Beryl,” she said, as though he hadn’t guessed. Her voice was deep, cool, and crisp. “I wish to see my great-aunt.”
“Yes, miss,” he said quickly, and turned his head. “Emma. Take Miss Beryl upstairs.”
“Yes, Mr. Fitch,” Emma said, her own voice so high and tight in her head she sounded like the hinges on the boot room door.
Miranda Beryl said nothing more, gave no instructions to the world suspended outside Aislinn House. She followed Emma inside, barely glancing at the house, the broad rooms opened for the first time in years, and respectably tidy, except, Emma noted, for the dust cloth dangling over the marble head of somebody in the drawing room. But no time left to deal with it now. They went up the grand staircase, polished and dusted until the old rosewood gleamed; the painted faces of Miranda Beryl’s family along the walls seemed to watch her with interest as she passed.
Emma opened Lady Eglantyne’s door. Sophie, startled out of a nap in her chair beside the bed, rose, blinking with wonder at the astonishing woman in blue. She curtsied suddenly in confusion, as though to the fairy queen. Miss Beryl flicked a glance at her, then ignored her. She went to the bedside, stood looking down at her great-aunt a moment. She laid her long fingers on the bird-bone wrist, and Lady Eglantyne’s eyes fluttered open.
Her sunken, cloudy eyes gazed back at her grandniece. Did she see her? Emma wondered. Or only a dream?
She breathed something, a half word, the beginning of a comment, the beginning of a name. Her eyelids fell again, closed.
“H’m,” was all Miranda Beryl said before she turned and walked out of the room. She went downstairs again, the amazed Emma following, and out the front door. To all the silent figures turning to her, including Mrs. Haw still sitting on the steps, she announced,