Ash & Bramble Page 8

  “Come along to breakfast, Penelope,” my stepmother orders. “Hurry now; the clock has already struck eight. And then you must go up to your room and change.” She sweeps out of the library.

  I close my eyes for a moment. Taking a deep breath, I try to remember my father’s face, but I can’t. The sadness is there, though, aching and deep and surprisingly immediate.

  “Come to breakfast now,” Stepmama shrills from the hallway.

  I clench my teeth and will myself not to cry. I am alone, and no amount of grieving is going to change that. I straighten my spine and head for the library door.

  The fashion is for blue, and so stepping into the breakfast room is like being closed into a blue box. The ceiling and walls are painted the color of robins’ eggs; the carpet is sky blue and matches the velvet curtains at the tall windows. Even the pictures on the walls feature blue scenes—seascapes and sweeping skies and landscapes brimming with bluebells. I blink. This room is like the library—like everything here. Only half familiar, as if it’s been described to me, but I’ve never actually seen it for myself. It makes me feel shaky, as if the floor isn’t quite solid under my feet.

  My stepsisters—also oddly sharp around the edges, as if I’m seeing them for the first time too—are already at the table. They are both excruciatingly elegant and polite, and somehow I know that even though they never show it, they despise me.

  That’s all right. Apparently I don’t like them very much either.

  The sisters are dressed in blue—of course—chestnut-haired Precious in royal-blue silk with an embroidered slate-colored overskirt, blonde Dulcet in a woolen riding dress in palest cerulean to match her eyes. Though they are both naturally slender, they are corseted within an inch of their lives.

  Precious butters a morsel of toast. “Good morning, sister,” she says, and takes a dainty bite. “You’re covered in cinders.”

  Dulcet holds an eggshell-thin teacup to her lips. “She looks a bit watery, too, don’t you think, Precious?”

  Precious raises a perfect eyebrow. “I believe she does, Dulcie.”

  Stepmama has taken toast at the sideboard and seated herself at the table, where she rings the silver bell at her place. “More tea,” she tells the maid who appears. Then she turns her gimlet gaze onto me. “Really, Penelope. It’s been almost a year. You don’t see me weeping into my teacup, do you? Six months is the allotted time for mourning. It is time to stop all this silly crying.”

  I grit my teeth. I am not actually crying. Instead of pointing this out, I give my stepmama and stepsisters a stiff smile and go to the sideboard, where the food is laid out in chafing dishes warmed by paraffin candles. The smell of breakfast wafts from them, and suddenly, despite everything, I am still ravenous—as if I haven’t eaten for days—and I fill my plate with eggs and grilled mushrooms and five pieces of crisp bacon, adding two pieces of toast. I am barely seated when I begin eating. “Pass the jam, would you, Dulcie?” I ask through a mouthful of toast.

  My stepsister raises an eyebrow and passes a jar with an ornate label on it.

  Raspberry. “Ta,” I say, and add a spoonful of jam to my next bite of toast. Mm, and the bacon is delightfully crisp.

  At the head of the table, my stepmama stares. “Penelope, you’re eating like a dock worker. It’s hardly attractive.”

  Thanks to the food, I am feeling more like myself. “I have absolutely no interest in being attractive,” I say, and pour out a cup of tea.

  “Yes you do,” Stepmama insists. “You’re seventeen years old, and that means old enough to marry. You need to be thinking about attracting a husband, and believe you me, no man wants to see his wife eating like a pig at the trough when he comes down to the breakfast table.”

  I take a gulp of tea and ignore my stepmother, who gives an exasperated sigh. “Hopeless!” she says.

  “Mama is right,” Dulcet says primly, forking up a tiny bite of egg, inspecting it, and then setting it down.

  “She also needs to put off her mourning clothes,” Precious adds.

  “Oh yes, very much so,” Stepmama agrees. “Penelope, we were all dreadfully sorry when our dear duke died, but you look like—”

  “Like a crow with shabby feathers,” Precious finishes for her.

  “Yes, exactly so,” Stepmama says. “Well put, my dear. And so, Penelope, after breakfast you will find that all of your mourning clothes have been taken from your room and put properly away in the attic.”

  I freeze, and the bite of bacon and egg I am about to eat suddenly doesn’t smell quite so delicious. The grief and loss that I feel are too immediate; I’m not ready to put off my mourning clothes.

  “She’s getting watery again,” Dulcet notes.

  I am not going to cry. “You had no right to do that,” I protest.

  Stepmama places a hand on her wide bosom. “I have every right!” Her voice grows shriller. “This is my house, after all, and you are living in it on my sufferance!” She goes on, listing the ways in which I am an ungrateful, unnatural child, so difficult compared to her own daughters, such an expense, a burden, a trial, and so on.

  I close my ears and grimly eat more toast.

  It isn’t actually Stepmama’s house. It is mine, or it should be, except that I am only seventeen and my father died unexpectedly and without leaving a will, and Stepmama is very rich—and so my place in the world is a little uncertain, except that I am Lady Penelope because I am the daughter of a duke.

  It must be one of the reasons my stepsisters hate me. They have more money than they know what to do with, and I have no money at all, but they’re not Lady Precious and Lady Dulcet; they’re just ordinary Misses.

  “It’s settled then,” Stepmama says with a self-satisfied nod.

  I look up, my toast forgotten. What is settled?

  “I shall write to Lady Faye at once,” Stepmama goes on. She sees my blank look. “About setting you up with a husband, of course,” she adds.

  “The last thing I want is a husband,” I say. And I don’t need this Lady Faye friend of my stepmother’s telling me I need one, either.

  “Don’t be silly,” Stepmama corrects. “Every girl wants a husband. Just leave it to me, and to Lady Faye. She is an expert matchmaker. We’ll have you out of this house and settled with a fine man in a trice.”

  “I’m perfectly settled as I am,” I say. I don’t feel too much alarm. Stepmama can’t actually force me to marry somebody I don’t want to.

  “Oh!” Stepmama makes shooing motions with her hands. “You’re impossibly contradictory. Leave the table at once, Penelope. Go to your room until you can behave properly.”

  I get up and, snatching two muffins from a plate on the sideboard, leave my stepmama and stepsisters to tell one another all about what a horrible girl I am.

  IN MY ROOM, the maid is standing before the wardrobe folding a pair of black stockings and setting them in a trunk. After a blank moment her name slots into place: Anna. I shake my head. My memory is behaving so strangely; it’s like a worn cloth, full of holes and unraveling threads. Seeing me, Anna bobs a curtsy. “I’m sorry, Lady Penelope, indeed I am, for I knew you wouldn’t like it none, but your stepmother ordered it, and—”

  “It’s all right,” I say, and Anna heaves a sigh of relief and keeps packing.

  I lean against the wall and nibble at a muffin and feel twitchy, as if there’s something else I’m supposed to be doing, but I can’t remember what it is. It’s like an itch in the middle of your back, that feeling. An itch you can’t scratch.

  My room is large and full of light, but shabby, too. Even though he was a duke, my father didn’t have much money, but when he married wealthy Stepmama I refused to let her redecorate my room—I don’t like blue—though she offered more than once to pay for it. I still don’t regret saying no, because Stepmama would only add it to her list of the many things that her ungrateful stepdaughter owes her.

  A bed takes up some of the space, with a chipped wardrobe beside it and,
under the window, a small writing desk covered with books and papers and a pot of ink. I must be a scholar, though I don’t recognize the handwriting on the pages. Opening the top drawer of the desk, I find an embroidery hoop and an impossible knot of silk threads. Only one edge of the cloth is filled with an awkward jumble of stitches. I have calluses on each of my fingertips, but clearly I am no seamstress. I wonder how I got them.

  I try to think back to what happened yesterday. A kind of blank nothingness waits for me there, and I flinch from it. For a moment I feel as if I am falling. A sudden pain lances into my forehead, and I lean against my bedroom wall and close my eyes. The wall is solid behind me. With my fingers I can feel the nubbled silk of my dress. My too-small shoes pinch my toes. An ordinary day, I tell myself. Yesterday was ordinary. I don’t need to think about it.

  At a scraping sound, I open my eyes. The maid Anna is dragging the packed trunk out of the room.

  I take a deep, steadying breath. “Anna.”

  She straightens. “Yes, Lady Penelope?”

  “Do you remember my father?” I ask. “The duke?”

  She frowns, and for a moment she looks flustered. “I—” Then she looks primly down. “I remember just what I ought to,” she says, her voice wooden.

  A strange answer.

  “Will that be all?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say, and I can’t help adding a sharp retort. “If you’re done taking all my dresses away, that is.”

  With a flush, she bobs a hasty curtsy and leaves the room.

  Sighing, I rub my forehead. The ache lingers, as if someone is pushing against it with freezing-cold fingers. I catch sight of the ash-smudged bandage on my wrist. I don’t remember hurting myself. I turn my hand over and unwrap the bandage. It reveals a mostly healed gash on the inside of my wrist. It doesn’t hurt, so I find an old stocking in my wardrobe and wrap it up again. As I try to remember how I got the gash, my head aches even more. I know what will comfort me, and I reach into the pocket of my dress for my thimble.

  But the pocket is empty. Frowning, I check my other pocket, and then the purse in the wardrobe where I keep a few coins. The thimble isn’t there, either. I know it isn’t in my desk with the disastrous jumble of embroidery, but I check it just in case.

  I couldn’t have lost it, could I?

  Now I really am getting watery. The thimble is real, solid—I know it. It’s the only thing that I am really certain of. Everything else is slipping away from me. I can’t remember anything about my father, not even what he looked like, and the only thing I remember about my mother is that the thimble was a special present from her. It is silver, engraved along the bottom with the roses among thorns that are the symbol of my mother’s family, and it has been passed down, mother to daughter, for many generations. Just having it in my pocket gives me strength. And now to lose it!

  If I can find the thimble, I will have something to hold on to. Something that will make this strange place feel solid and real to me; something that will make me feel real to myself.

  The thimble is surely somewhere in the house. It must be. Where else could it be?

  CHAPTER

  8

  HIS LIPS ARE STILL BURNING FROM THEIR KISS, AND YET Shoe is furiously angry with Pin.

  “You have a chance to get away, you stubborn idiot,” she shouts, and points up the stream toward the mountain. “Go, curse you!”

  Glaring at her, he scrambles to his feet. She is the one being the stubborn, stupid idiot. Neither one of them is going to escape—hasn’t she realized that yet?—and they might as well be together when it comes. “Not without you, Pin.”

  She holds up her hand. The bandage on her wrist is soaked with blood; drops spatter on the ground and are absorbed by the ash. Her face is thin and determined, and seeing it, maybe for the last time, makes Shoe’s heart, which he’d thought was a frozen, shriveled thing about the size of a burned crust, pound in his chest. “Shoe,” she says. “If you care about me at all, you won’t follow me.” Then she turns her back and heads down the ash-covered stream bank.

  Shoe stares after her. If you care about me at all . . .

  His legs quiver with weariness, and the rest of him is shivering because he knows what the Godmother will do to them—she will break them to her will, each of them in different, slow, special ways, and she’ll take pleasure in doing it, too.

  Pin starts to run, leaping over rocks, stepping lightly over the ash, and she’s running right into the arms of capture. Her boots, Shoe notices, are making her steps surer than they would be without them. There might be irony in that. Pin would know if there was or not.

  She disappears from view, and the shock of it is enough to get him moving, scrambling like a scared rabbit up the bank past the waterfall, then around another bend, his feet leaving easy-to-follow prints in the ash. Pin, he thinks with every step, but he can’t help but fear for his own skin, too.

  The backpack is heavy, and it rubs against his old friends, the still-healing welts from his time at the post, but that just reminds him to go faster. As he told Pin, there’s worse things than the post. When he sees a sort of notch in the side of the ravine, he runs for it, knowing that the Godmother will follow his trail easily, but knowing, too, that to stay in the ravine is an even surer way to be captured. He climbs the slope, ash as fine and soft as sable sliding down around him and filling his boots, until he makes it to the notch that takes him up and out of the ravine, scrambling along a rocky shoulder of the mountain. What he really needs is to get down into the trees again; out here he’s too exposed.

  The first jolt of energy has worn off, and he can feel how tired his body is; it’s a candle burned almost down to the socket, a flickering flame about to go out. The backpack weighs more with every step. The ash-covered slopes have turned to wiry brown grass, and below him he can see the tree line, which is dark and welcoming, as if he’ll be safe there, which he knows he won’t.

  Carrying the backpack is stupid. He pauses and slips it off, dumping it behind a rock, but taking out the cheese and gingerbread first, just in case he lives long enough to want to eat again. The relief from the pain of carrying it takes him the rest of the way down the slope to the edge of the forest, but then the weariness catches up to him again. About to plunge into the trees, he pauses to catch his breath and looks back over his shoulder.

  A jolt of fright flashes through him. A man on a big brown horse is at the top of the spur of the mountain where Shoe left the backpack. Two creatures that look something like dogs and something like men crouch at the horse’s knees; they have their heads to the ground as if they’re sniffing. As Shoe stares at them, the man sweeps a look over the tree line; his gaze stops, fastens on Shoe. Slowly, deliberately, he nudges the horse into a walk, and they start down the slope.

  The Godmother’s Huntsman and two trackers.

  Shoe stumbles into the forest and jerks himself into a run. The Huntsman has his trail. “I’m not getting out of this, am I?” he mutters to himself. But he isn’t going to hand himself over to them, either.

  The trees are spaced widely here, this high up the flank of the mountain, so he has room to run, ferns brushing his knees, slipping and sliding now and then down a steeper, pine-needle-covered slope, always finding a path, as if the forest is clearing a way for him. Clouds have moved in to cover the sun; it must be after midday, he guesses. The Huntsman can’t be very far behind. His stomach growls, and he puts his hand into his coat pocket to find the packet of cheese. Something else is in there; he pulls it out.

  Staggering to a stop, he stares down at Pin’s thimble. She must have slipped it into his pocket. Why? It’s magic—he’s figured that much out at least, he’s not completely an idiot—and maybe Pin thought it would help him. “That was stupid,” he mutters. Because the thimble would have helped her more.

  The Huntsman and his trackers are coming, he reminds himself. Taking a quick bite of cheese and then wrapping it back up again, Shoe stumbles on, holding Pin’s th
imble tightly in his fist.

  The sky overhead has turned darker gray, the sun going down behind the clouds. Shadows gather among the trees. Shoe’s run isn’t a run anymore, it’s just a dull shuffle, his muscles one big weary ache. Now and then he trips over a gnarled root and has to find the will to pick himself off the ground so he can shuffle on. In his fist, the thimble feels warm, and it seems to pull in one direction. Maybe Pin created some kind of magic with the thimble so it will lead him to safety.

  He hears the shuff-shuff of hooves on soft ground. He’s got his head down, watching for tree roots to trip over. At the corner of his vision, he sees the Huntsman pull even with him, the horse at a plodding walk. The horse’s head is hanging, Shoe notices, as if it’s just as exhausted as he is. The trackers that hover at the horse’s heels are tired too, their tongues lolling.

  Clutching the thimble, Shoe stumbles on. He’s good and caught, he realizes through the haze of weariness, but he’s too tired to be afraid. The twilight advances. He bumps into a tree, then stops, staring at it for a moment.

  Tree.

  Tree?

  What to do with a tree? Oh. Yes. Go around it. Slowly he shuffles around the tree and keeps going. Another root trips him and he goes down hard, but keeps his hold on the thimble, then slowly peels himself off the soft, welcoming ground.

  He hears the Huntsman beside him, the snorts of his tired horse, the creaking of his saddle, the occasional low whine from one of the trackers.

  “Aren’t you—” Shoe starts, and stops, alarmed at how rough and weary his voice sounds. He catches his breath. “Aren’t you going to capture me?” he asks the Huntsman.

  The man clears his throat. “Aye, we’re getting to it,” he answers, his voice deep and gravelly.

  Oh. Shoe trudges on. His feet aren’t sore, he realizes. Well, of course. He’s wearing boots he made himself.

  “Just waiting for you to run yourself out,” the Huntsman adds.

  “This isn’t exactly running,” Shoe mutters.