So Enchanting

by Connie Brockway

“Ha! Like a prison could ’old a witch of my stature,” she scoffed. “No, because ’twould send the local lads into a right lather if I was t’kill the goose that laid the golden egg afore she’s actually gotten on with the job of layin’ it, if ya sees what I mean. Most folks ’round here lives right comfortable on the money they’re expectin’ to come into from that fortune what the colonel left.

  “Course, I could spell the whole town into doin’ me biddin’ if I wanted to,” she confided. “But Little Firkin ain’t the only town I gots to oversee, and the sort of attention ye need to keep up a spell that big takes effort. Not to mention all them albino fox whiskers.” She looked at him to see if he appreciated the degree of difficulty entailed.

  “I can imagine.” He nodded owlishly. That damn elixir had actually worked. He could hardly feel his head at all. In fact, his lips had gone a little numb.

  She sighed tiredly. “Witchly empiring is a tricksy business.”

  He nodded sympathetically. He had no idea all of the considerations that went into cabal management. Who would have thought being a witch and a politician were such similar occupations?

  “Do you know anyone who would want to harm Miss Chase?”

  “Haven’t you been listenin’? No one would harm a precious hair on her head, includin’ me. What use is havin’ a kingdom if all yer subjects is clearing out ahead of the dunners?”

  Such logic couldn’t fail to persuade. From a purely practical standpoint, no one in Little Firkin would want Amelie dead. But he’d known that. Which meant the urn must have fallen without the aid of a human agent…or the motive for the attempt was personal.

  He hadn’t realized he’d spoken his thoughts aloud until Grammy answered.

  “Probably just a cat prowlin’ about,” she said. “We grow grand-size tabbies here. Besides, as well as her dad’s fortune keeping her safe, no one here has gots much to say agin’ Miss Chase. She ’n’ Mrs. Walcott keeps to themselves, ’cept for Bernard McGowan and the vicar. And the vicar only comes ’cause the archbishop wrote ’im and told ’im he ’ad to.”

  Now, that was interesting.

  “The vicar’s sister works here, doesn’t she?”

  “She cooks,” Grammy said, and leaned over to hand him the teacup. He accepted it.

  “Does the vicar disapprove of her being here?”

  “Vicar disapproves of everything aboot Quod Lamia, and Miss Chase scares ’im shitless, and like most folks that’s scared shitless o’ somethin’, he hates it fierce,” she said simply. “And, twixt us, I think ’is sister’s probably a witch, too. Ever taste her puddin’?” she asked slyly.

  “Yes. It was delicious.”

  Grammy nodded in dark concurrence. “Unnaturally delicious.”

  “You seem to have a surplus of witches around here. Any others?” He took a sip of Grammy’s potion.

  Grammy gave the matter a moment’s thought.

  “Naw. That’s just aboot all of ’em. I thought fer a while maybe Mrs. Walcott was one, but Vi don’t see no evidence of it, and neither do I.”

  Grey almost choked on his tea.

  Grammy leaped up, clapping him on the back, sending rockets of pain ricocheting through his skull. “Hold up a bit there, lad.”

  “Mrs. Walcott?” he sputtered.

  Grammy sank back in her chair. “Now, that’s one as ought to have gone into the witch trade, if you ask me. Never seen a more natural-born witch than Fanny Walcott.”

  If only she knew.

  “What makes ye think someone wants to kill Miss Chase, anyways?” she asked, abruptly returning to the topic at hand.

  “Someone wrote Lord Collier a letter to that effect.”

  She slapped her palms together, visually cleaning her hands of the subject. “Well, there you go, then. Ain’t a half dozen folks in Little Firkin would even know where Lord Collier could be found to send a letter to.” Her tiny eyes narrowed. “What about McGowan? He’d know where to send a letter. Yup, I fancy McGowan did it.”

  Grey shook his head. “McGowan was in Edinburgh speaking to a roomful of stamp collectors at the time of the initial attempt, and in the middle of the ocean on the second.”

  “Ach. That’s too bad.”

  “You don’t like the banker?”

  “I don’t like ’ow he treats them beasts of ’is,” she said shortly. “Well, that’s it, then, less you believe old Colonel Chase ’ad cause to worrit about them threats made agin’ Miss Chase when she was but a lass. And six years is a powerful long time between threat and deed.”

  He stared at her. He was certain what she said was important, but he couldn’t reason out exactly why. The tea had clouded his thinking. Something flitted out there on the edges of conscious thought almost within grasp…and then it was gone.

  Grammy leaned forward, shoving the saucer with the rest of its contents under his nose. “Drink up,” she said companionably.

  He took no further prompting.

  It really was a remarkable potion. It had mellowed his mood and relieved his pain, though he admitted to feeling some floatiness. Nothing wrong with floatiness. Unhappily, something niggled at him, spoiling the experience. What was it…? Oh, yes.

  Where the devil was Fanny?

  “Treating you well, are they?” Grammy asked.

  “Yes, tolerably,” he answered absently.

  “Not you.” Grammy jerked her chin toward Violet. “I’m talking to Vi. Folks like you always gets treated proper. It’s folks like us ’as to always watch out so’s we gets our due.”

  Not only was the old dame a doctor and a politician, but she was a philosopher, too.

  “Well, Vi?” Grammy prodded.

  The girl shrugged. “Fair enough, except they’re always on to me aboot cleanin’ up something or other. Use more soap on these floors inside a week than all Beadletown does on laundry in a year.”

  Grammy and Violet exchanged long-suffering looks of mutual mystification. “Well, you stick with it, lass. No reward worth ’aving is come by easy.”

  With a dap of her palm against the chair’s arm, she tottered upright. Violet bolted to her side, as solicitous with her as any courtier might have been with the old queen. Arm in arm, they tottered toward the doorway.

  “You’re going?” Grey asked. He’d been enjoying their talk.

  “Me and you both, lad,” Grammy said with a wink. She turned to Violet. “Stay here and see as he don’t try to get up, lest he goes head over arse like a pine pole at a caber toss. Dose him a few more times wit’ the tea. That’ll keep ’im off ’is feet. Should be fine by morning. But he ain’t goin’ nowhere afore then. Ta.”

  Violet shut the door behind her.

  Grey tried to sit up but failed, collapsing back. Oh, well. Violet regarded him cautiously. “Yer head is bleedin’ again, so don’t you try nuthin’ stupid. I already hauled yer carcass once today, and that was enough.”

  “Violet,” Grey said with careful dignity, “I could no more rise from this bed than talk Fanny Walcott into it.” Where the hell had that come from? Wherever it had, Violet seemed to accept his pronouncement as the last word in impossibilities, which did little to improve his mood.

  “Good,” she said, settling down in Grammy’s vacated chair and crossing her arms over her skinny chest.

  “If you don’t like the work here, why don’t you quit?” he asked.

  “I will. Soon as I unlocks their secrets.”

  “Secrets? What secrets?” He was feeling blurrier and blurrier. Fanny had secrets? Ah, yes. Of course. And he was her confidant. No, no. That was wrong. She’d manipulated him so Amelie could… What was the word? Inveigle. So Amelie could inveigle Hayden.

  “The secrets of Miss Chase’s magic,” Violet said, drawing his wandering attention back.

  Poor child. Poor, deluded child. The pity of it was, she seemed a rather bright girl, really. Not clean, certainly. But with a native shrewdness that a little cultivation might eventually polish into intelligence. He felt an odd impulse to
ward charity.

  “What magic?”

  Violet rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Her magic.”

  “Yes, yes, lass. But what specific magic do you wish to be privy to?”

  “All of it,” Violet replied.

  “So you wish to know how she flies about on her broomstick?”

  “She can fly on a broomstick?” Violet whispered, wide-eyed.

  “You’d know that better than I. I only just met the girl. You’ve lived with her—”

  “Two years come June.”

  “Precisely. So, does she fly on a broomstick?”

  “No,” Violet admitted.

  “Then she must summon whirlwinds and waterspouts?”

  “No.”

  “No? Well, does she predict the future?”

  Violet’s face scrunched up. She shook her head. “Not to my recollection.”

  “At least she must cause the neighborhood cows’ milk to curdle,” he said in disgust.

  “No,” Violet protested loudly. “Miss Chase wouldn’t—”

  “Couldn’t, Violet,” Grey broke in kindly. “Miss Chase couldn’t. Because there is no such thing as magic. There is nothing beyond the natural world, nothing beyond what we perceive with our five senses.”

  For the first time in his adult life he felt a tincture of sadness as he spoke the familiar litany. What had gotten into him? Ah, yes. Grammy Beadle’s tea.

  “It is all tricks and obfuscations designed to distract and disconcert while the magician makes fools of his audience.”

  “I don’t ’alf know what yer talkin’ aboot, Mr. Sheffield, but I ken what I ken, and I ken there’s magic. Strong magic. And if’n I were you, I wouldn’t go challengin’ it with talk like that. Even you can’t stand against certain rough magics.”

  Well, he’d tried. He closed his eyes.

  “It looks to me like he can’t stand at all,” he heard Fanny say.

  Chapter 26

  At the sound of Fanny’s words, his eyes opened. “You’re not allowed to make quips,” Grey said. “You snuck into the room while I wasn’t paying attention and have an unfair advantage.”

  “Native intelligence and wit hardly qualify as an ‘unfair advantage,’ Lord Sheffield,” Fanny said, masking her concern as she surveyed him. His pupils were enormous, the blue-green irises merely sparking rims around black pools. Good heavens, Fanny thought, alarmed, what had Grammy given him?

  From the way he’d been denouncing magic and all its practitioners as she’d entered the room, she’d expected to find him on his feet at a lectern, not flat on his back, head lolling on a pillow, regarding her with a lazy, somehow sensual gaze that made her lips tingle with remembered sensitivity.

  She was getting odd. She shouldn’t be fantasizing about Greyson Sheffield. As she’d listened to him instructing Violet, she’d been overwhelmed by a sense of disappointment and worse, distress. She’d felt as though she were standing on one side of a widening chasm, while on the other something irreplaceable grew farther away, and the ravine below filled with molten lava.

  She blinked the disturbing image away. This was what came of living in the middle of nowhere with no contact with the outside world save printed material and Bernard McGowan. One lost one’s reason.

  She should be figuring out some way to hasten Grey’s recovery, not be building daydreams around him. And yet, she could not stop thinking about how she’d felt in his arms or how devastatingly, ridiculously attractive she found him. He’d become the object of daydreams far more evocative and titillating than those involving chasms and rivers. Well, it was her imagination, and therefore private, and he needn’t ever know how much she longed to feel him settling his body over hers again and—

  “Damn, are all the birds in Scotland so bloody noisy?” Grey said. “Or is a cat raiding a nest out there somewhere?”

  With a start, she came to her senses. Oh, no. What was she doing? She jumped up and went to the window. That was what she was doing. Reels of chimney swifts filled the sky outside in a flashing, chattering cloud.

  “Not that I see,” she said. She repositioned the basket she carried on her arm and pulled the window shutters half-closed. She turned around, smiling. “How do you feel?”

  “Peculiar. Not unpleasantly so, however,” he said. “Most unlike myself. I feel quite…nice. Must be the tea.”

  His liquid turquoise gaze traveled over her like warm syrup, lingering on her mouth, her chest, her hips, and her feet. Even for Grey, his perusal was bold, but there was something missing in his languid gaze: the urgency, the raw vitality she’d come to associate with him. She missed it. Missed his fire and spirit and bluntness and brusqueness and—

  Oh, Bedlam was too good for her!

  “Perhaps you ought to dose yourself with it more often,” she suggested.

  “No. It’s pleasant, but pleasant like warm milk. You’d be bored with niceness all the time, wouldn’t you?” he asked seriously.

  “I doubt it,” she lied, and before he could question her further, she raced on. “How do you feel physically?”

  “My head hurts, but it’s pain at a remove. Like reports of a war on someone else’s shore. And I think you’re very nice but not in the least boring. I shall have to reassess my definition of ‘nice.’”

  She was pathetic as well as strange. Her pulse had begun fluttering at his faint praise.

  “You called me Grey earlier,” he murmured. “Out on the terrace.”

  “Did I?” She laid her basket on his bed.

  “How do you think I look?” he asked.

  She cocked her head, examining him. He looked wonderfully masculine, indolent, like the big tom outside. Self-satisfied, a little lethal, disreputable, and fully aware of the appeal of disreputableness to female cats. Especially the stupid ones.

  “Aside from your enlarged pupils and a disconcerting tendency for your eyes to wander independently of each other, you look fine. Your color is good.” She picked up his wrist. “Your pulse is strong and slow, and you’ve almost stopped bleeding. That will not last, of course, as you’re bound to start again as soon as I begin stitching you up.”

  “There are lizards in the Americas that do that, you know,” he said.

  “Stitch people up?” she asked, flipping back the lid of her basket.

  He grinned. “No. Their eyes focus independently.”

  “I don’t recall saying anything about focusing.” She picked out as fine a needle as she thought would pierce flesh and rummaged for a match. She struck it against the matchbox lid.

  “I’m focusing,” he said, affronted. “I see you quite clearly. You’ve rid yourself of the flower garden hat and changed out of that fetching white lacy dress into something severe and custodial.”

  “It’s called a skirt,” she retorted, squinting at the needle as she slowly swept it above the flame.

  “Whatever, it isn’t nearly as winning as the lace thing.”

  She dropped the hot needle onto a white kerchief, not bothering to hide her smile as she selected a skein of undyed silk thread. Whatever Grammy had dosed Grey with had rendered him less guarded in his comments. If one were not highly principled, one might take advantage of such a circumstance.

  “So. You think I’m pretty?” she asked casually.

  “I think the dress is pretty.”

  Her spirits unaccountably flagged.

  “You’re far too dramatic to be called pretty. I’m fairly sure Hayden would call you a stunner.”

  She missed the eye of the needle.

  “Oh, come now, Fanny. You know how handsome you are.”

  “Well, yes,” she said. “But I didn’t know that you knew.”

  Once more, he grinned. “Good God, I could like you. Too well,” he murmured.

  “Except…?” she prompted in spite of herself, and in spite of herself held her breath waiting for the answer.

  He sobered. “Except you were a professional fraud. How can I forget that? I have spent my career seeing the
results on unsuspecting fools of wiles such as yours, and now I find myself on the receiving end of those wiles, and I applaud you. They are damn near irresistible.” His smile was sad.

  “But I am not an unsuspecting fool. And you are keeping something from me. Hiding a secret. I would stake my life on it. But not my hea—” Abruptly, he bit off the last word and cleared his throat. “But nothing else.

  “I cannot forget who you are, who you were, any more than I can forget that you had a part in making me the man I am. How can I trust what I feel for you when I don’t trust you?” He sounded apologetic.

  Ah, yes. That. Her secret. The thing that stood like a mountain or a bottomless chasm between them, separating them, just as it had separated her from everyone, always. Until here. Until Little Firkin. He suspected it. He sensed it. Yet he wouldn’t have believed it even if she told him.

  Nothing in the world would persuade Grey Sheffield that mysteries existed that no one would ever solve. She had no desire to do so. She’d had enough of people staring at her when she was a child. She understood too well the apprehension with which the world viewed mysteries, the isolation that the status of the unique bestowed.

  Better a fraud than a freak.

  “I know you’re hiding something, Fanny. I just cannot figure out what it is,” he continued.

  Why must he see so clearly what she’d managed to hide even from Amelie?

  “Grammy told me there aren’t six people in Little Firkin who would know where to post a letter to Lord Collier,” he said.

  “Really?” she said.

  “Really. And I imagine you are one of them.” For a second, the fogginess clouding his gorgeous blue-green eyes lifted, allowing a glimpse of the shrewd intelligence beneath. “I will ask you straight-out for the truth, Fanny. Did you send the letter saying someone was trying to kill Amelie?”

  She met his gaze, her heart racing. His brows dipped toward each other, but not in anger.

  “Fanny?” he whispered.

  “No. No, I did not.” She turned to Violet. “Fetch Ploddy. I’ll need him to help hold Lord Sheffield down while I sew up his wound.”

  The diversion worked as well as she’d hoped.