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if she exists
“But how,” asks Peaceable Sherwood, and the light from the fire catches on the heavy silver candlesticks and equally in his neatly-tied blond hair, “did you manage to escape with the horse?”
“Easily,” Barbara says. “Eleanor Shipley swore I’d been with her all day, and no one else who knew about the dare thought I could make it over the fence.”
“Even Richard?”
“He doesn’t count. He dared me to do it because he knew I could.” Richard sits below them, imprisoned, and the keys rest in Peaceable’s pocket. “I’m an excellent rider. Dick just wanted to see if I could get away with it.”
“He knew you’d try?”
“A proper young lady would not.”
Laconically, sardonically, eyeing her from under copper lashes: “La, sir.” The room is overwarm and his gaze heavy. The table is small between them.
Barbara lets herself jump when a log falls in the fire. She lets him see her unsettled.
“Do you take every dare, then?” He’s noticed her noticing the keys.
“The worthy ones, I try. Dick always has faith in me; I think he’d have been more surprised if I hadn’t managed.”
“I imagine you often get away with things.” The quirk of his lips, too familiar already.
She smiles, brief. “I do.”
no intention of shrieking
It’s not enough to walk up to an arms dealer with a suitcase of money. Spy craft is rarely so straightforward, Barbara’s learned, as she’d imagined when she was young.
Peaceable’s hand tightens on hers, and she ages eons when he tucks her against his side, implacable. His suit is crisp to the touch.
“Mr. Green,” she says.
The target is almost as tall as Peaceable, and almost as unmoved. His face is charming like a shark’s, lips turned up in what could be a grin or could be a way to accommodate his sharp teeth.
“Was the bodyguard necessary?” His voice is ocean-deep.
“No bodyguard.” She laughs. “My husband.”
Peaceable reaches out to shake hands, elegant and unruffled. “Is the flattery necessary? I’m rather less good with a gun than she is.”
“Talking business already? Before pleasure?” Mr. Green’s hired muscle lurks indiscreetly in the background, a well-appointed lobby a poor place to hide.
“Before which pleasure, you might ask,” Peaceable murmurs. He means the warrant that waits upstairs solid as a sword, Barbara knows, but she smiles, slow and catlike. Let Mr. Green think about their white hotel sheets, askew. Let him be distracted by the way Peaceable shadows her steps overtly. Let him be distracted by the way Peaceable follows her with his eyes.
Let her not be. Please, let her not be.
The sheets aren’t askew, because she’d been so careful last night not to reach toward him, breathing softly on the other side of the bed.
This is only make-believe, Barbara tells herself. Peaceable is distant and professional and endlessly quietly amused, and anything else is part of the act.
“It’s all a pleasure,” he says.
the candle in a lantern
The view from the bed is not the same as it was yesterday. Barbara blinks sleepily, and the angle of light is unfamiliar through the parted curtains, the drapes illumined to a richer red. She yawns, tired mind working, and the hand into which she yawns is not her own.
She sits up fast, all sleep fled, and looks down at her body. Long pale limbs, flat chest, golden hair curling, a – she leaps from the bed to face the tall mirror across the room, and Peaceable Sherwood stares back at her.
Her hands – his hands – cover her mouth, try to keep back an unladylike scream. An unmanly one? She tastes her heart in her throat. Country house parties are too often dull now, conversation veering between the Armistice and more frivolous topics, anything to avoid a mention of the lost; last night one of the men so recently home, so rightly indulged, suggested adding a magical competition to the parlor games. Her fingers minutely tremble, and she watches them as she tries not to look at the rest of the body in the mirror.
A knock at the door.
A dressing gown is hung neatly on the desk chair, and Barbara reaches for it like an automaton, the slow unfurling of Peaceable’s arm something she observes but cannot countenance. There is a jagged scar near his elbow.
She is too fragmented not to catch on the unexpected luxury of midnight blue silk, the orderliness of a captain so late from the front leaving his sash waiting untied. She dresses automatically, glad not to fumble. This body knows how to move with grace, even if she does not how to be graceful in it.
“Yes?” The voice is rougher than expected in her mouth, but not unknown. It is more familiar, more pleasant to hear, than she should admit.
She breathes deeply, and again. Calm, Barbara. Magic can be reversed.
“Miss Grahame? Is it you?” Her own voice is mundane and enquiring on the other side of the door.
Barbara smoothes the dressing gown over her thighs and opens the door to find herself, clad in a carmine morning dress, cheeks pinked with laughter.
“A bit of a predicament,” says Peaceable Sherwood, and smiles with Barbara’s mouth.
prepared for anything
“I would be gratified if you would make her fashionable.”
“Were we ever so young?” Peaceable asks Barbara, and it’s typical of him, teasing Sir Percy when he is stiff and worried before them.
“Perhaps,” Barbara says to Peaceable, grinning; and “It will be a pleasure,” to Sir Percy; and later, waiting to be announced to a glittering English crowd at yet another ball, “Remember, your people were allies to mine in the war; you may call on me to be your second if any of these aristocrats look at you in a way you dislike” in an undertone to the newly married Marguerite Blakeney. Sir Percy takes Marguerite’s hand.
It will be only a few months before Peaceable and Barbara watch over them separately, a distance less acute than softly aching. Peaceable sits as planned in the library, offering Sir Percy his knowledge of disguise. The Committee for Public Safety is nearer to unmasking the Pimpernel every day, and Barbara, casually assessing the echoes in the old house and the number of rooms needed to separate cautious husband from unknowing wife, distracts Marguerite with a walk through the garden.
“Were we ever so hidden?” she asks Peaceable that night, the embers of the fire in the grate a dull orange. She strokes the base of the heavy silver candlestick on the end table, the ghost of a more distant evening between them.
“Not from each other, I think,” he says.
“Have you lost your way?”
The woods are unending, dark tree after dark tree in the fading light. The scent of pine is muted beneath the scent of snow, the clean blankness of it, and it is easy for Barbara to imagine halting her horse and climbing down to rest awhile. There is little in the world besides the storm: the stiffness in her hands, holding the reins; the crimson of her cloak, sodden; her horse’s dark ears, blurred by exhaustion and dusk.
There should be an abandoned woodcutter’s cottage somewhere near the forking turn for town, set away from the road and closer than the full way toward home; if she can stay awake until she finds it, Aunt Susanna can wait until morning for the pleasure of her company. Barbara yawns.
There are more dangerous things in the forest tonight than wolves, and first among them is how soft and gentle the snow looks beneath the trees, the perfect bed.
Through the gloaming looms what looks at first like another broken branch – a signpost. Barbara tugs at the reins, and her horse snorts and resentfully starts away from the road, away from town, but towards a closer shelter. Trees close around them like guards.
Sluggish, she begins to worry about the cottage. It may have collapsed completely. It may be hidden behind a snowdrift. The horse staggers.
“May I assist?” A voice like an apparition, elocution clear and tone wry.
Barbara shakes her head to clear it. Visions are proof that the snow is more dangerous than the rumored wolves; she needs to find somewhere to wait out the storm now.
“There’s a place just ahead,” the voice says, and a man appears beside her, out of the swirling white. The eddies around him weave patterns like feathers.
Barbara closes her eyes against the image, sleepy, and when she opens them, she’s in the woodcutter’s cottage, lying on a bed of bracken and under a cheerful quilt. A fire burns merrily in the grate, and her horse is calmly chewing something in the corner.
“It seemed uncharitable to leave you on the road or the horse outside,” the voice says, and when she looks, it belongs to a handsome man cutting bread at a carved wooden table. Arcing behind him are two shimmering iridescent wings.
“Which crown do you serve?” she manages to ask. The Fair Folk are hardly kind to no purpose, though the Seelie Court might extend itself for lost travelers known to be of well-off family.
“Not yours,” he says, and his wings ripple like laughter. “But that hardly matters in the circumstances.”
“I suppose not,” Barbara says.
The bed is comfortable and his face amused, and the wind outside howls.
She smiles.
a matter of waiting a long time for it
There is no post today, no messages carefully carried by friendly hands. There is no foreign stamp to explain, no one to thank.
There is only independence to work for, only a war to be won.
Barbara breathes in and out, rereads her small cache of letters, and knows another will come soon.