“And the family did suffer. There were beheadings and murders, disgraces and scandals. Despite this, somehow, a Dewhurst has always remained at Thistlemarsh Hall.
“Yet, Faerie lives are long and Faerie Kings can wait.”
Mouse opened her eyes, blinking against the brightness of the carriage. James’s breath had steadied, although his fingers still shook. No one spoke.
The train slowed, approaching Tithe station in a flurry of steam.
“Enjoy your trip,” Mouse said as she collected her things. Dorothy plucked the map off the floor and folded it away.
“Thank you,” Charles said, attempting cheer. “That will be a useful addition to James’s story collection, even if it was a bit ominous. How can we repay you?”
Despite his light tone, his words were weighted.
“Consider it a gift, if you are willing to accept such a thing from the scandalous daughter of an Irish gardener,” she said with a smile.
She stepped out into the corridor before Charles’s confusion could fully transform into mortification. The sharp burst of James’s laughter punctuated the snap of the compartment door closing.
The sun came to meet Mouse as she hopped from the train step to the platform. Despite herself, energy sprang up while she was in midair, buzzing in her belly like a hive of bees. It was the first time she had been in the country when Lord Dewhurst was not there.
She waited, but the sky did not shatter overhead, and whistles did not ring out, warning the villagers that she was loose and alone. Of course, her logical mind did not expect any of that, but the childwithin her who still visualized Thistlemarsh Hall as a remote dungeon could not reconcile reality and fantasy. Absently, she rubbed the little silver key that hung around her neck. She collected her trunk from where the porter deposited it at the end of the platform.
In the vaulted station, the overwhelming scent of coffee washed over Mouse. The man in the ticket booth stared at her as she walked by. Did he recognize her?
Mouse could not tell, but she glanced away. She was not ready to know what the villagers might think of her, the unwanted Dewhurst cousin, back from the Front. Would they pity her? Or would they think she was a greedy, ungrateful social climber, benefiting from the devastation of the war?
Mouse shook away her thoughts, commanding herself to focus on the present.
The station walls boasted an intricate mosaic. A string of figures walked across it, some Faerie, some human. Roses wrapped around their feet, the petals caressing them while the thorns bit into their clothes.
The Faeries’ painted forms were elevated, every feature exaggerated into something divine. Mouse doubted that the famed first mortal king of England, Alfred, looked quite so handsome as he did on the station wall. Next to him stood a tall, dark-haired Faerie with a billowing black cloak. He was a figure familiar to every child in England: Oberon, the former king of the Faeries.
Further down the line, Queen Elizabeth Tudor exuded graceful beauty, her face framed by a striking white frill and her clothing contrasting that of the Faerie King at her side, adorned with her crown of gold. Her skin was as pale and flawless as his, a sun to his moon.
Oberon walked beside another two English monarchs before another Faerie took his place: a golden-haired Faerie woman with a gown as white as a dove. This pattern of Faerie and mortal monarchscontinued until it ended in a final tableau of a befuddled George III pushed behind a young George IV, both gazing after the Faerie man striding out in front of them. That was where the mosaic ended, with the final Faerie King’s face cut in half at the arched doorway. On the other side of the doorway, an image of Queen Victoria stood alone, looking back at the parade of mortal rulers and Faerie monarchs behind her.
Nothing had changed in the hundred years since the Faeries disappeared, winking out of their powerful stations in courts throughout Europe. The English blamed the French Revolution and then Napoleon, while the French blamed the English prince regent, a slovenly spendthrift, but no one knew exactly what happened to the Faeries. Or if they would ever come back.
Although Mouse knew that the artwork was highly Victorian in its self-righteousness, it had fascinated her since she first arrived in Tithe as a child. Back then she was fresh from the city smog, and the mosaic framed by the rolling hills beyond the station doors made her feel as if she’d just stepped into a story fromBlakeney’s.
Outside the station, Mouse hiked her trunk up on her hip, frowning at the grim prospect of the long, muddy walk into town laid out before her. Someone dressed in black coming up the path caught her eye. The man waved at her, and his familiar broad shoulders and broader smile sent Mouse stumbling toward him, joy fizzling through her chest into her fingertips.
“John, I wasn’t expecting you to meet me here!” she cried, dropping the trunk and throwing her arms around his neck. He grunted, leaning sideways under her weight.
“God, Mouse. You weigh more than lead.”
“Nonsense,” she said, pulling back and chucking him under the chin. “Besides, you must not take the Lord’s name in vain. Didn’t you pay attention in Sunday school?”
John straightened, nose in the air, and adjusted his white dog collar.
“More than you, I’m sure,” he said, lifting her luggage with an authoritative glare as she tried to wrestle it from him. He won their match, and she looped her arm through his.
John was apple-cheeked, with a strong chin and bright blue eyes that shone whenever he spoke, whether it was about a sermon or an excellent book. Instead of washing him out, the black of his suit made him more robust. Too tall for his own good, he had the endearing habit of ducking in sympathy whenever speaking.
Almost as soon as he arrived in Tithe to take over the vicarage when she was fifteen, Mouse felt a connection with him that defied all her other experiences with the people near Thistlemarsh Hall. Bertie and Roger felt it, too, and soon the four of them made a little band of ramblers, braving the forest between John’s cottage and Thistlemarsh nearly every day of the week.
“I brought my bicycle, of course, but you will have to walk it back to the village since you saddled me with this millstone you call a trunk.”
“You’ll be lucky if I don’t ride off without you if you keep that up,” Mouse teased, snatching the bike from its resting place against a tumbledown wall.