Wyrde and Wayward Read online

  ‘I was not speaking of the Wyrde. You deserve a high position, and it is shameful that you should never have had the opportunity to win one.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Gussie, laughing. ‘Every woman of moderate beauty, small fortune and little practical use deserves a high position. And how should such a position ever be achieved, except by marriage?’

  ‘Your aunt Werth will support your going, I am sure of it,’ said Miss Frostell, affecting not to hear this. ‘Her being so old a friend of Lady Maundevyle’s.’

  ‘Is she, though?’ said Gussie.

  ‘Why else should the dowager invite you, if she is not?’

  ‘Why would she invite me, if she is? We are perfect strangers to one another. Even supposing her to be seized by a sudden freak, and compelled to fill her house with the unremarkable relations of all her friends, why would she choose me? There are Werths enough to satisfy every possible requirement.’

  ‘True,’ said Miss Frostell. ‘And it does not quite make sense that she should not extend the same invitation to your aunt. But,’ and here she hesitated, ‘perhaps it is your very lack of talents, as you put it, or rather your lack of the Wyrde, that encourages her. Not everybody prizes the effects of it as the Werths do.’

  ‘You may well be right, but still it is not quite explanation enough. The world is full of the unWyrded. There are far more of them, than there are of gorgons and mermaids and nightmarists. Why, then, me? She must be quite spoiled for choice.’

  ‘I cannot explain it, but I still think you should go.’

  ‘Why, Frosty?’

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Frostell, with a shrug of her shoulders. ‘Something wonderful could come of it. Who knows?’

  ‘That is like your optimism,’ said Gussie, folding up the letter. ‘But I am of a suspicious, shrewish disposition, and I say there is more afoot here than is apparent.’

  ‘Do you not, then, wish to find out what it is?’

  Gussie sat tapping the letter against her knee, and did not immediately reply. At length she said: ‘Well, and why not?’ Glancing about at their comfortable, but quiet, parlour, she added: ‘Though it will be difficult to tear myself away from the unending revelries of the Towers, I daresay Starminster will contrive to entertain me.’

  ‘No,’ said Lady Werth, some two hours later, Gussie having walked back up to the great house to attend at dinner.

  ‘No?’ Gussie echoed, too surprised to come up with a more intelligent response.

  Lady Werth thrust the letter back into her niece’s hands, crumpling the delicate paper in the process. ‘Starminster,’ she said, with an air of exasperation. Then, abandoning this line of thought, ‘Lady Maundevyle is not my dearest friend, whatever she may say; we have not spoken in quite twenty years. Why she should suddenly impose upon you, well—’ She stopped, and looked long at Gussie.

  ‘Yes, aunt?’

  Lady Werth swept into the dining-parlour without offering any immediate reply. Only once seated did she say: ‘I do not think it suitable for you to attend upon Lady Maundevyle at Starminster.’

  ‘And if that is the case then certainly I shan’t,’ Gussie said calmly. ‘But it does not appear so objectionable to me, aunt. Why should the idea trouble you?’

  ‘You will not be suitably attended.’

  ‘I will take Miss Frostell with me. Lady Maundevyle could hardly object to so proper a measure.’

  ‘It is quite out of the question.’

  ‘Perhaps she would not object if you were to accompany me,’ Gussie suggested. ‘Seeing as she considers you so special a friend.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  Gussie held her peace, watching her aunt closely. More lay behind her objections than was apparent, that was obvious. She began to feel quite tangled up in secrets, and the feeling did not please her at all.

  She was not strictly obliged to seek her aunt’s or her uncle’s permission, being six-and-twenty years of age, and possessed of her own independence. But living, as she did, in one of her uncle’s cottages, and so often attending upon the family at the Towers, any outright defiance would be both unwise and unbecoming.

  She did not mean, however, to be kept forever at home.

  ‘I should like very much to go,’ said Gussie, after a moment. ‘I have barely stirred beyond the family grounds. If I do not travel when I am granted the opportunity, then I will never see anything of the world.’

  ‘The world,’ said Lady Werth shortly, ‘is vastly overrated.’

  Lord Werth, having made his appearance at table, now interrupted his wife. ‘What’s that, Gussie? Are you asked somewhere?’

  Gussie explained, aware of her aunt silently fuming beside her as she did so.

  Instead of leaping at once to her defence, as Gussie had hoped, and immediately offering her the use of his carriage, Lord Werth looked at his wife. Their eyes met, and something Gussie could not read passed silently between them.

  ‘You think it unwise?’ said Lord Werth.

  ‘You know that it must be,’ came the reply.

  Lord Werth submitted. ‘Perhaps another time, Gussie,’ he said, kindly enough. ‘I am sure there will be better chances to see something of the world, than to be walled up at Starminster.’

  Gussie gazed helplessly at her well-meaning protectors: at her aunt in her lavender silks and her elaborately arranged hair, perfect and composed and utterly unmoved; and her uncle, never unkind, but with a will to match the iron hue of his hair.

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  Her aunt was startled into meeting her gaze. ‘Why… what?’

  ‘Why do you object? What is the real reason?’

  Lady Werth looked away. ‘How fanciful you are, my dear.’

  Gussie gave it up. This conversation had been conducted before an audience of attentive Werths, but one glance at their rapt faces — Cousin Theo at her elbow the only exception, intent upon a wholesale rejection of his food — convinced her that they could not intervene, nor were they inclined to try.

  With a soft sigh, she turned her attention to her own dinner, and tried to console herself with ragout of mutton, and herb pie.

  Chapter Three

  Upon the morrow, after the sad duty of answering Lady Maundevyle’s invitation in the negative, Gussie busied herself with the myriad duties attendant upon so large a gathering of Werths. It was a pleasure to see Nell, whose residence some distance away with her husband and four children kept her too busy for regular visiting.

  Gussie found her in the garden pavilion, enjoying the late morning sun. She was alone; Mr. Thannibour had elected not to attend Lizzie’s Great Event, and her children remained at home with their nanny.

  In Gussie’s private opinion, Nell was hugely enjoying the respite.

  ‘Gus,’ said she upon her sister’s approach, looking up from the book spread open in her lap.

  Gussie sank into the pretty cane chair opposite, her glance falling briefly upon the Wyrding Throne. The servants had not yet removed it, and it loomed still, all the more terrible for its emptiness. Gussie would never admit to having taken a seat there herself, on more than one occasion since her own, failed Wyrding. As a three-year-old, she had proved herself the only Werth in living memory passed over by the Wyrde. At ten, she had proved it again; and at fifteen, and one-and-twenty…

  ‘I came looking for my shawl,’ said Gussie. ‘And also, my sister.’

  ‘The pink? I believe I left it in the cloakroom.’ Her own gaze wandered to the throne. ‘You’re lucky, you know,’ she said. ‘Though I am sure you don’t feel it at the Towers. The Wyrde is… troublesome.’

  Gussie recognised the book she was reading. It was a book of spectres, penned by a long-ago Werth, and added to by later generations — including Nell.

  ‘Perhaps I am better suited to a life outside the Towers,’ Gussie agreed. ‘But that, it seems, I am not to have.’ That piece of fortune had fallen, instead, to her sister. She had found in Mr. Thannibour a man who did not mind what she did
in the night, and who was unruffled by the shades that wandered into Fothingale Manor, bent on having a comfortable cose with his wife. Such men were not often to be met with.

  ‘Your chance will come, Gus,’ said Nell, with a look of sympathy.

  ‘Oh?’ said Gussie. ‘When?’

  Nell shrugged, and closed her book.

  ‘Do you know why my aunt and uncle are so set against my going?’

  ‘They think it unsuitable, did they not say that?’ said Nell, frowning.

  ‘An explanation not much to the purpose.’

  Nell’s frown deepened, and she turned upon her sister a troubled gaze. ‘Gussie. Have you not sometimes wondered…’

  ‘Wondered what?’

  ‘Have you never noticed?’ said Nell.

  ‘Noticed? What am I to have noticed?’

  But Nell would not be drawn. ‘No,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘How could you have? And perhaps they are right, after all.’

  ‘Nell! If you, too, are keeping secrets from me, I swear I shall — why, I’ll tell Great-Aunt Honoria what became of the fur tippet she left to Mother.’

  Nell gasped. ‘You would not!’

  Gussie subsided with a sigh. ‘Probably I would not. I am nowhere near evil enough.’

  ‘She was delighted about Lizzie,’ Nell offered.

  ‘Well she might have been. You should stay here to keep her in line, or she’ll be haunting the poor child quite until she is grown.’

  ‘I cannot,’ said Nell, not without regret. ‘I must leave tomorrow, as planned, or heaven knows in what state I shall find Arthur and the children.’

  ‘They can manage very well without you, I am sure.’

  ‘They may, perhaps. The spectres, I am persuaded, are most unlikely to leave them alone.’

  Perhaps that was what Nell meant, when she called the Wyrde troublesome. And a fair observation at that.

  A flicker of movement caught Gussie’s eye. She looked up, and beheld the distant figure of Cousin Theo, recognisable by the shock of red hair blowing in the wind. He was red elsewhere about himself, too, in places he rather ought not, and Gussie averted her eyes.

  ‘Oh, is that Theo?’ Nell sighed. ‘Someone ought to break him of those habits, or he will never find a wife.’

  ‘Perhaps he doesn’t want one.’

  Nell’s brows rose. ‘That can hardly be permissible.’

  ‘Whyever not?’

  ‘Well — look at him, Gus. Did you ever see a more total figure of helplessness?’

  Theo was, at that moment, engaged in stalking across the distant grass, a book tucked under one arm and something red and glistening clutched in the other hand.

  Gussie began to laugh. ‘I doubt the woman exists who could make Theo respectable.’

  ‘I would settle for tolerable,’ said Nell.

  ‘Well, and from tomorrow,’ said Gussie lightly, rising from her chair, ‘you, at least, will not have to tolerate him at all.’

  Nell waved this away. ‘I love Theo,’ she said. ‘Even with all his… quirks. And I love you, Gus, even if you are boring and ordinary—’ She squeaked as Gussie swatted at her hair, and ran away, laughing. ‘The Towers may be as mad as it gets,’ she called back, ‘but I miss it, all the same.’

  Gussie was left to ponder her own and her sister’s very different fates: in being trapped at the seat of the Werths, Gussie had learned to resent it; and in having left it, Nell took every opportunity to return.

  The scent of an impending storm reached Gussie’s senses, and a chill wind swirled about her feet.

  Thunder growled as Aunt Wheldrake wafted by.

  ‘Oh, Lord,’ said Nell, coming up again. ‘Is she going Theo’s way? I believe she is.’

  ‘Better stop her,’ said Gussie, and away ran Nell again.

  Great-Aunt Honoria’s head appeared. ‘And how is my darling grand-child— oh! Was not Lucretia here? I quite thought she was.’

  The head was uncomfortably solid-looking, complete with a bloom of health across the thin cheeks. Her hair was piled high in the fashion of some decades before, and bristling with ornaments. Honoria might still have been alive, were it not for the fact of having mislaid everything of herself below the neck.

  Gussie merely pointed.

  Great-Aunt Honoria gave a sigh, and disappeared.

  Gussie took the opportunity quietly to withdraw, and return to the tranquillity of her own, spectre-free house.

  A haphazard, rambling place some centuries old, Werth Towers covered a great deal of ground. Many successive generations of Werths had altered it, and added to it, until it sprawled across the parkland as though thrown there by a careless child, gables and chambers and chimneys scattered every which way. The main house had originally been built in Elizabeth’s time; a later Werth had added a set of towers, and accordingly changing the name; another had expanded the stables, and the coach-houses. Yet another had indulged a passion for architectural symmetry by building a new wing in the modern style, a confection of chalky limestone and pilasters far out of step with the rest of the pile.

  Gussie thought its eccentricities charming — from the outside. Inside, the house was a perfect maze of passageways, staircases, towers and garrets, halls and parlours, bedchambers and salons. Many years’ residence there had been insufficient to make her acquainted with all its nooks and crannies; moreover, she suspected the Towers — or its spectral occupants — of occasionally changing things. A door removed; a staircase turned about; a window shifted or a trapdoor barred; such minor alterations might never occasion any remark, but could nonetheless cause considerable inconvenience. Indeed, no one could claim to have seen the south-west tower in several years.

  ‘It will come back,’ was Lady Werth’s comfortable prediction, and Lord Werth seemed hardly to regard the matter at all.

  An unladylike curse or two might escape Gussie, however, as she navigated her way from the rear entrance adjacent to the kitchens, through the utility rooms and the servants’ halls, up past the drawing-rooms and the best bedchambers, up again past the second-best bedchambers, around a winding mess of corridors and at last into the east tower, presently termed Theo’s. The door to his private chambers was, as usual, firmly shut.

  Gussie tapped upon it. ‘Theo?’

  No answer.

  ‘Theo,’ she called, knocking again. ‘It’s Gussie, and I have need of you. Will you let me in?’

  The silence continued, and Gussie wondered if she had calculated wrongly. Theo’s schedule tended to be regular: he had his hours in the library, his prowlings in the gardens, and his (typically reluctant) presence at family meals. The rest of his time was spent closeted in his rooms, where he did not like to be disturbed.

  Gussie had only once ventured to seek him there, and did not lightly do so again. A small part of her felt relieved at her mistiming, for it meant that she need not—

  The door swung open, yanked with some force from the other side.

  There stood Theo, pale and frowning. ‘If this is about the rabbits again—’

  ‘It is not.’ Gussie smiled, and endeavoured to look like a person come on no excessively troublesome errand. ‘May I come in?’

  Theo’s frown relaxed, and he stood back to let Gussie pass. She swept into the airy, well-lit room, took up a station upon a crimson carpet in the centre of it, and mentally prepared her speech.

  Theo did not encourage her by any word or gesture. He merely waited. A tall man a year or two younger than Gussie herself, Theo had inherited none of his mother’s delicate, fair prettiness; he was his father’s son through and through, lean of figure, with that wild rust-coloured hair and remarkably white skin.

  A spray of blood had discoloured his carelessly-tied cravat, a diamond pin making an incongruous ornament in the midst of such a mess.

  Gussie averted her eyes from it.

  ‘You see, cousin, it is like this,’ she began. ‘You have heard, I imagine, about my invitation to Starminster?’

  Theo loo
ked blank.

  ‘Seat of the Viscounts Maundevyle,’ Gussie supplied. ‘In Somerset. The Dowager Viscountess begs the honour of my company.’

  ‘Maundevyle,’ said Theo. ‘Right.’

  ‘And, well, my aunt and uncle will not give me leave to go.’

  Theo said nothing.

  ‘They say it is inappropriate in some fashion, though I do not know why, for I cannot feel that it is. And — and this is where I was hoping you might help me, Theo. For it cannot be inappropriate if I take Miss Frostell with me, and — and you. Now, can it?’

  ‘Me?’ blurted Theo. ‘Somerset?’

  ‘Your being Lord Bedgberry, I mean, and quite able to go wherever you please. Your father and mother would not interfere so in what you chose to do, would they?’

  ‘But I don’t choose,’ said Theo.

  ‘It would only be for a week or two,’ said Gussie. ‘And I am sure there are rabbits aplenty on the Starminster estate.’

  Theo folded his arms. ‘Cousin,’ he said. ‘Being among the least intolerable members of my family, there are numerous ways I would gladly contribute to your comfort. But this is not one of them.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I cannot leave the Towers. Certainly not to spend a week or more as the guest of a perfect stranger, who is not expecting me, and could hardly want me.’ He punctuated this depressing speech with a gesture at the drying blood upon his cravat, which was eloquent enough.

  Gussie, deflated, had nothing to add. She had known it to be a gamble, approaching Theo. And she knew he was right in his objections. An hour ago, pacing about the parlour of her little cottage alone, she had persuaded herself that Theo could contain his odder qualities for a week or two, and pass for a respectable gentleman; that the viscountess who was so eager for her company must be flattered to receive that of the much more important Lord Bedgberry, also; and that a possible future lay before her in which Theo himself might be amenable to it.

  Even as she had toiled up the stairs into the east tower, her certainty on all these points had been declining. Now she saw all the folly of it, and wondered that she had ever thought it likely at all.