TWO
A SOUL AT ODDS
Hours later, Luce leaned her elbows on the sill of the small stone casement window.
The village looked different from this second-story perch—a maze of interconnected stone buildings, thatched roofs angled here and there in something like a medieval apartment complex.
By late that afternoon, many of the windows, including the one Luce leaned out of, were draped with deep-green vines of ivy or dense boughs of holly that had been woven into wreaths. They were signs of the Faire taking place outside the city that evening.
Valentine’s Day, Luce thought. She could feel Lucinda dreading it.
After Bill had disappeared outside the castle, for his mysterious “night off,” things had happened very quickly: She’d wandered alone through the city until a girl a few years older than her appeared from nowhere to whisk Luce up a flight of dank stairs into this small two-roomed house.
“Draw away from the window, sister,” a high voice called across the room. “You’re letting in Saint Valentine’s draft!”
The girl was Helen, Lucinda’s older sister, and the smoky, confining two-roomed house was where she and her family lived. The chamber’s gray walls were bare, and the only furniture consisted of a wooden bench, a trestle table, and the stack of family sleeping pallets. The floor was strewn with rough straw and sprinkled with lavender—a meager attempt to clear the air of the foul smell from the tallow candles they had to use for light.
“In a moment,” Luce called back. The tiny window was the only place she didn’t feel claustrophobic.
Down the alley to the right was the marketplace she’d glimpsed before, and if she leaned out far enough, she could see a sliver of the white stone castle.
It haunted Lucinda, that tiniest tease of a view—Luce sensed this through the soul they shared—because on the evening of the day Lucinda first met Daniel in the rose garden, she’d come home and coincidentally seen him peering pensively out of the tallest tower casement. Since then, she watched for him every chance she got, but he never appeared again.
Another voice whispered: “What does she stare at for so long? What could possibly be so interesting?”
“The good Lord only knows,” Helen replied, sighing. “My sister is laden with dreams.”
Luce turned around slowly. Her body had never felt so strange. The part that belonged to medieval Lucinda was wilted and lethargic, flattened by the love she was certain she had lost. The part that belonged to Lucinda Price was holding fast to the idea that there might still be a chance.
It was a struggle to perform the simplest of tasks—like conversing with the three girls standing before her, alarmed expressions twisting their pretty faces.
The tallest one, in the middle, was Helen, Lucinda’s only sister and the oldest of five children in their family. She was newly a wife, and as if to prove it, her thick blond hair was divided into two braids and pinned in a matronly chignon.
At Helen’s side was Laura, their young neighbor, who Luce realized was the girl she’d overheard the two women gossiping about over the clothesline. Though Laura was only twelve, she was alluringly beautiful—blond with large blue eyes and a loud, saucy laugh that could be heard across the city.
Luce bit back a laugh, trying to reconcile Laura’s mother’s protectiveness with what Lucinda knew of the girl’s own experience—pressing palms with the page boys in the cool recesses of the lord’s wood. What Luce gleaned from Lucinda’s memories of Laura reminded her of Arriane. Laura, like the angel, was easy to love.
Then there was Eleanor, Lucinda’s oldest, closest friend. They’d grown up wearing one another’s clothes, like sisters. They bickered like sisters, too. Eleanor had a blunt edge, often slicing dreamy Lucinda’s reveries in two with a cutting remark. But she had a skill for bringing Lucinda back to reality, and she loved Lucinda deeply. It wasn’t, Luce realized, so different from her present-day relationship with Shelby.
“Well?” Eleanor asked.
“Well, what?” Lucinda said, startled. “Don’t all stare at me at once!”
“We’ve only asked you three times which mask you’re going to wear tonight.” Eleanor waved three brightly colored masks in Lucinda’s face. “Pray, end the suspense!”
They were simple leather domino masks, made to cover just the eyes and nose and tie around the back of the head with thin silk ribbon. All three were covered in the same coarse fabric, but each had been painted with a different design: one red with small black pansies, one green with delicate white blossoms, and one ivory with pale pink roses near the eyes.
“She stares as if she has not seen these same masks every one of her past five years of masquerading!” Eleanor murmured to Helen.
“She has the gift of seeing old things anew,” Helen said.
Luce shivered, though the room was warmer than it had been for most of the winter months. In exchange for the eggs the citizens had offered as gifts to the lord, he’d repaid each household with a small bundle of cedar firewood. So the hearth was bright and cheery, giving a healthy flush to the girls’ cheeks.
Daniel had been the knight tasked with collecting the eggs and distributing the firewood. He’d stridden through the door with purpose, then staggered back when he saw Lucinda inside. It was the last time medieval Lucinda had seen him, and after months of stolen moments together in the forest, Luce’s past self was certain she would never see Daniel again.
But why? Luce wondered now.
Luce felt Lucinda’s shame at her family’s meager accommodations—but that didn’t seem right. Daniel wouldn’t care that Lucinda was a peasant’s daughter. He knew that she was always and ever much more than that. There had to be something else. Something Lucinda was too sad to see clearly. But Luce could help her—find Daniel, win him back, at least for as long as she still had to live.
“I like the ivory one for you, Lucinda,” Laura prompted, trying to be helpful.
But Luce could not make herself care about the masks. “Oh, any of them will be fine. Perhaps the ivory to match my gown.” She tugged dully at the draped fabric of her worn wool dress.
The girls erupted into laughter.
“You’re not going to wear that common market gown?” Laura gasped. “But we’re all getting done up in our finest!” She collapsed dramatically across the wooden bench near the hearth. “Oh, I would never want to fall in love wearing my dreary Tuesday kirtle!”
A memory pushed to the front of Luce’s mind: Lucinda had disguised herself as a lady in her one fine gown and sneaked into the castle rose garden. That was where she first met Daniel in this life. That was why their romance felt like a betrayal from the beginning. Daniel had thought Lucinda something other than a peasant’s daughter.
That was why the thought of donning that fine red gown again and pretending to make merry at a festival was a staggering prospect to Lucinda.
But Luce knew Daniel better than Lucinda did. If he had an opportunity to spend Valentine’s Day with her, he would seize it.
Of course, she could explain none of this inner turmoil to the girls. All she could do was turn away and subtly wipe her tears with the back of her wrist.
“She looks as if love has already found and dealt roughly with her,” Helen murmured under her breath.
“I say, if love is rough with you, be rough with love!” Eleanor said in her bossy way. “Stamp out sadness with dancing slippers!”
“Oh, Eleanor,” Luce heard herself say. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“And you do understand?” Eleanor laughed. “You, the girl who wouldn’t even put her name in Cupid’s Urn?”
“Oh, Lucinda!” Laura cupped her hands over her mouth. “Why not? I’d give anything if Mother would let me put my name in Cupid’s Urn!”
“Which is why I had to toss her name into the urn for her!” Eleanor cried, seizing the train of Luce’s gown and pulling her around the room in a circle.
After a chase that toppled the bench and the tallow candle on the casement ledge, Luce grabbed Eleanor’s hand. “You didn’t!”
“Oh, a little fun will do you good! I want you dancing tonight, high and lively with the rest of the maskers. Come now, help me choose a visor. Which color makes my nose look smaller, rose or green? Perhaps I shall trick a man into loving me yet!”
Luce’s cheeks were burning. Cupid’s Urn! How did that have anything to do with a Valentine’s Day with Daniel?
Before she could speak, out came Lucinda’s party dress—a floor-length gown of red wool adorned with a narrow collar made of otter fur. It was cut lower across the chest than anything Luce would wear back home in Georgia; if Bill were here to see her, he would probably grunt a “Hubba hubba” in her ear.
Luce sat still while Helen’s fingers wove a stem of holly berries into her loose black hair. She was thinking of Daniel, the way his eyes had lit up in the rose garden when he first approached Lucinda.…
A rapping startled them all; in the doorway, a woman’s face appeared. Luce recognized her instantly as Lucinda’s mother.
Without thinking, she ran into the safe warmth of her mother’s arms.
They closed around her shoulders, tight and affectionate. It was the first of the lives Luce had visited where she felt a strong connection with her mother. It made her feel blissful and homesick all at once.
Back home in Thunderbolt, Georgia, Luce tried to act mature and self-sufficient as often as she could. Lucinda was just the same, Luce realized. But at times like this—when heartbreak made the whole world cheerless—nothing would do but the comfort of a mother’s embrace.
“My daughters, so fine and grown up, you make me feel older than I am!” Their mother laughed as she ran her fingers through Luce’s hair. She had kind hazel eyes and a soft, expressive brow.
“Oh, Mother,” Luce said with her cheek against her mother’s shoulder. She was thinking of Doreen Price and trying not to cry.
“Mother, tell us again how you met Father at the Valentine’s Faire,” Helen said.
“Not that old tale again!” Their mother groaned, but the girls could see the story forming in her eyes already.
“Yes! Yes!” the girls all chanted.
“Why, I was younger than Lucinda when I was a mother made,” her willowy voice began. “My own mother bade me wear the mask she’d worn years before. She gave me this advice on my way out the door: ‘Smile, child, men like a happy maid. Seek happy nights to happy days …’ ”
As her mother dove into her tale of love, Luce found her eyes creeping back toward the casement, imagining the turrets of the castle, the vision of Daniel looking out. Looking for her?
After her story was done, her mother drew something from the pocket strung around her waist and handed it to Luce with a mischievous wink.
“For you,” she whispered.
It was a small cloth package tied with twine. Luce went to the window and carefully unwrapped it. Her fingers trembled as she loosened the twine.
Inside was a lacy heart-shaped doily about the size of her fist. Someone had inscribed these words with what looked to Luce like a blue Bic pen: