Her smile was rather tight. She held up the clinking glass, as Hensley fell asleep on her shoulder. “I drown them in gin, but I’d be no kind of guardian if I recommended that.”
EIGHT
DAYS PASSED, AND EDWARD’S fever still didn’t break.
We moved about the manor like unquiet ghosts. McKenna tried to brighten our gloom with talk of the wedding. She sent the girls out to prune the flowering trees in the garden so the spring would be full of new growth, and prepared entrees for us to sample for the wedding feast, but it was increasingly impossible to ignore the feverish moans coming from Edward’s room. Lucy attended to his bedside day and night.
“You’re going to make yourself sick,” I told her. “Take a break. Let me watch him.”
“Your bedside manor is deplorable.” She tried unsuccessfully to feed him broth. “You’d poke and prod him so much, he’d never want to get better.”
She tried to feed him more broth, but he turned his head, eyes glassy and unfocused, and mumbled something incomprehensible. Sometimes he seemed to be aware of who we were, and in the next moment he’d push the bowl away and shudder.
“It’s getting worse,” she muttered, mopping up the spilled broth. “No matter what Elizabeth said, I can’t help but think . . .” Her voice trailed off as she caught sight of something over my shoulder. “Goodness, do you see that? It looks like the moors are on fire!”
I whirled toward the windows, where the blackness was broken by huge flames in the lower fields. I pressed my face against the glass.
“Montgomery!” I called. “Balthazar, hurry!”
They soon appeared, and I pointed beyond the window. “The fields are on fire,” I gasped. “Stay with Edward. I’ll find Elizabeth and warn her.” I turned to go.
“Juliet, wait.” Montgomery’s voice was steady and calm, almost light. “It’s just a bonfire. Look.”
I squinted into the darkness. He was right—it was a controlled blaze in the lower field. I let out all the tension in one long breath.
“It’s the festival of Twelfth Night,” Montgomery explained. “It’s a pagan holiday in this area. Carlyle told me about it while I was helping him chop firewood yesterday. The highlanders celebrate it out here, where no preachers are around to tell them not to.”
The flames rose higher, crackling with sparks. Now I could make out clusters of people around the bonfire, some of them dancing. My heart lurched. With Edward so ill, it had been a long time since we’d all laughed and danced that carefree.
“The whole household must be down there,” I said. “No wonder it’s quiet as a church around here.”
Lucy tsked as she squinted toward the fire, exhaustion written in her features. “To think, they didn’t invite us.”
“They probably thought we wouldn’t approve of a pagan festival,” I said. “We being such civilized city folk and all.”
Lucy rolled her eyes.
Balthazar turned to Montgomery, fingers knit together. “I’ve never seen a festival before.” He paused and sniffed the air. “Roast pig with honey. Oh, Sharkey loves roast pig. Might we go?”
Montgomery seemed amused. “Certainly you may go, Balthazar, and I’ve no doubt Sharkey would be welcome, too.”
Balthazar grinned and started to straighten his shirt, but his fingers were too clumsy. Lucy adjusted his collar and refastened his top button, dusting off his shoulders. “There now. All the ladies shall want to dance with you.”
His face fell. “I don’t know how to dance.”
“Can’t dance!” she said. “Well, Montgomery, you’d best go and teach him. And you should go, too, Juliet, or else one of those girls is going to try to steal him from you.”
“Only if you come as well,” I said to her.
She jerked her head toward the bed. “I can’t leave Edward.”
“McKenna can watch Edward—it’s only for a few hours. Come on, we all need a bit of fun.”
She bit her lip in indecision, but then her stomach grumbled. “Roast pig, did you say?”
I grinned and grabbed her hand, pulling her downstairs and into the night. A gust of cold bit at our legs and I shrieked and pulled her across the fields toward the warmth of the fire. For a few hundred feet we were caught between the house and the bonfire with the stars overhead, and a sudden bolt of joy seized me. After days closed up in such a stuffy manor, my soul yearned for a moment of life. For an instant I loved it here, far from the rest of the world, in a place so wild and free.
The field was full of people, most of them strangers and performers traveling the winter fair circuit, but I recognized the servant girls and a few familiar faces from Quick. The fiddler was the tavern owner. He tipped his hat to us as one of the girls, Lily, passed us a tankard of warm cider. A belch came from the direction of the performers. With a start, I realized it came from the same old woman from the inn on the road to Inverness. I looked more closely at her companions and recognized the thin leader of the carnival troupe, acting out a play that seemed to involve a donkey. There was no sign of the fortune-teller.
I shivered at the memory. A child can never escape her father.
Was it chance that brought them to this particular festival, out of all the Twelfth Night celebrations happening in the north? The coincidence left me uneasy, but then Montgomery and Balthazar caught up to us, legs damp from the dew, and Sharkey trotted up to the fire trying to catch flames in his teeth. I relaxed. They were festival performers, after all, and this was a festival. Why should I be surprised to find them here?
I spotted Elizabeth through the flames. She wore a heavy fur stole out of the pages of a Viking history book, and with her hair down she looked like one of the fairy folk, strong and beautiful. No wonder she had left the city, when here she was queen.
“I didn’t think you’d join us,” she said, as she walked around the fire, “or else I’d have invited you myself.”
“Well, don’t tell the vicar we’re here,” I said. “He’d never agree to preside over the wedding of two heathens.”
She smiled. “He’s over there.” She pointed her chin to a group of old men on the far side of the bonfire who were drinking in a very ungodly way. “He brought the ale.”
The night passed amid music and laughter, and I was able to let go of my worry over Edward, if only for a few stolen moments. Lucy disappeared for a while, playing games with the younger girls beneath the stars, and after some time I went looking for her. One of the servants pointed me in the direction of the carnival troupe’s temporary camp at the edge of the field. I walked through the high grass, hugging my coat tight, and eventually found her by a wood-and-silk tent. A dark-skinned man was reading her palm, muttering words that made her eyes go wide.