She read an old volume about ogres and looked up the subject in several bestiaries. She also searched for mentions of the Heart of Dreams but found none. Eventually, she curled up in one of the huge leather chairs with a new novel and divided her time between reading and daydreaming—mainly about the dream she had dreamt in September in which she leapt from some high place to save her friends and called the Raven, who dived down and possessed her, so that instead of falling to her doom, black wings sprouted from her shoulders and she flew—and wondering what the Comfort Lion had meant by: A time will come in the end when you shall know all.
Her one real disappointment was that her father was too busy to sit down with her for any length of time. Several times, she asked him if he could please make time to speak with her. Each time, he assured her that he would try but explained that certain matters at work were taking all his concentration. He begged her to be patient with him.
She longed to tell him what had actually happened at Beaumont, the time she had saved the world—and him—from the demon Azrael. On the holy days, however, Saturnalia, Yule Eve, Yule, etc., his time was occupied with duties required of his rank and there was no time to speak privately. The rest of her stay, he was so busy she hardly saw him. He and Sandra left for Scotland Yard, where their offices were, before she rose in the morning and came back only after she had retired for the night.
Yule Eve brought their yearly journey into the forest behind Gryphon Park Manor to find next year’s Yule Log. This was followed by smearing butter on the outer lintels for the returning sun to melt—so the sun would have the sustenance it needed to burn more brightly again—and the moonlit Yule Buck procession, as Rachel and the other children from Gryphon-on-Dart paraded from house to house carrying the last wheat stalk of the harvest. They sang songs that honored the returning sun and the god Thor; while the houses they visited rewarded them with candied fruit and mulled cider.
Upon coming home, the duke and duchess threw three burning coals into a barrel of water, and nobles and servants alike washed hands and feet there. Then, they all donned new garments, never before worn—ensuring that neither troll or trow would trouble them during the year to follow. And, of course, they played snapdragon and, as always, Rachel singed her fingers trying to steal raisins from the blue flames of the burning brandy. She recalled Gaius scoffing that no one ever burnt their fingers at snapdragon and smiled sadly.
Then deep into the night came Candle Dark, when every light in the mansion must be extinguished. This period of darkness was one of Rachel’s favorite times all year. After the hour of Candle Dark, the winter lamps were lit and placed in windows, where they would keep burning until the spring equinox. Candle Dark was the one hour all year when the Vestal Virgins extinguished their fires.
Rachel and her siblings woke up early on Yule Day amidst mistletoe and piles of presents. Nibbling her slice of Yule cake—all spongy and creamy—she watched with happiness as her family and their servants opened the gifts she had chosen for them and exclaimed with delight over gifts they had picked for her. Her favorite came from Peter, a pretty aquamarine on a silver chain, an amulet of protection against the paralysis hex! Laurel received a beautiful red parka with white trim. She gleefully deposited her old navy one in the arms of their butler, Tennyson, instructing him to give it to the needy.
As the butler left the green drawing room, where the family exchanged their gifts, Rachel ran after him.
“Tennyson, that coat. Might I have it?”
“It is far too big for you, Lady Rachel.”
“Oh, not for me. It’s just…I know someone who has need of a coat.”
“Ah. In that case.” Tennyson bestowed the navy parka upon Rachel, who ran upstairs and put it with her things to go back to school.
After the gifts came the boar sacrifice to Lord Freyr. Rachel held her ears during the actual sacrifice; she hated to hear the beast squealing. The sacrifice was followed by feasting and the burning of this year’s Yule Log.
During the afternoon, the Duke of Devon and his family set out on their yearly pilgrimage to the tenant farms and the village, giving out gifts and coins to all. Rachel loved this procession, throwing Yule feed to the pigs and ducks of her family’s tenants and eating the freshly-baked cookies and pies that the farmwives had prepared just for them. That night, the duke lit the great Yule bonfire upon Gryphon Tor, illuminating the entire sky above the town. Down in the village square, dancing and singing and free-pouring spirits were provided for one and all, by the grace of the duke and his family.
Yule was followed in quick succession by the Twelve Days of Yuletide, including Boxing Day, Winter Cleaning Day, Dartmoor Fey Day, New Year’s Day, and Twelfth Night, where girls dressed as boys, masters waited on servants, and everything was topsy-turvy. For New Year’s this year, the Griffins visited Rachel’s mother’s family: her Aunt Melissa, Uncle Frederick, and her two younger cousins, Ferdinand and Orlando. Grandpa Kim was there as well. During a break in the festivities, Rachel knelt beside the taciturn old Korean gentleman, as he rocked in his rocking chair, and asked him about his mother.
Grandpa Kim had a wrinkled face and a salt and pepper goatee. He was advanced in years and seldom spoke. This time, however, he chose to answer her question.
Gruffly, he replied, “I was six when she died. We had just moved here from the old homeland. My step-mother, she did not like my father remembering his first wife. But I kept mother’s portrait under my bed. You want to come and see?”
Rising and moving slowly, with the help of a black and gold crane-headed cane, Grandpa Kim led her into another room. He took from a closed cabinet a framed portrait of a lovely young Korean woman dressed in a traditional white and lavender hanbok, a high-waisted, A-shaped garment. Rachel stared at the portrait. Her great- grandmother had an ethereal beauty so haunting that it caused an odd lump to form in her chest.
“What was her name?” Rachel asked softly.
“Sun Li,” said her son.
Sun Li. It was a beautiful name.
“How did she die?” Rachel dragged herself away from the painting and turned to her grandfather. “Was there an accident?”
He shook his head and grunted. “One day. She went to sleep. Never woke up.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Grandpa Kim squinted down at Rachel. Then he extended his arm, holding the portrait. “Here, Granddaughter, I give you Mother’s painting. You care for it.”
Awed and honored, Rachel hugged the picture to her chest. “Thank you. I will keep it under my bed, too.”
That earned her a gap-toothed smile from the normally-taciturn Grandpa Kim.
• • •
This year, the famous Griffin Family Yule Party was on Twelfth Night. As with Saturnalia, Rachel feigned illness and begged off, partially because she had no desire to come face to face with John Darling, but mainly because it was her only opportunity to slip into her parents’ room without fear of discovery. She would miss spending time with her friend Benjamin Bridges, but maybe she could make it up to him over the summer.
In the week leading up to the party, Rachel had sought out some of the silver pieces that her Great-Aunt Nimue had given the family. In one room, she found an antique candle snuffer that looked like a griffin, a Vesta case to hold friction matches—it had been Grandmother’s, but the imperious late duchess had once mentioned to Rachel that it had been given to her by her sister-in-law, Nimue—and a small silver muffineer for sprinkling sugar or cinnamon. She also snuck a good look at the griffin-headed chatelaine her mother often wore at her hip, upon which hung some of her mother’s favorite alchemical charms: a thimble imbued with protection cantrips; a whistle that summoned the household fey; a tiny key that opened any unwarded locks; an acorn-shaped vinaigrette containing a healing elixir for cuts and scrapes; a watch set with jasper; and a pincushion holding a needle that sewed on its own.
The silver pieces all bore the same series of hallmarks, except that next to last mark in
each series differed. None of the encyclopedias Rachel had memorized explained these marks, so she had to search in the house’s main library until she found a book specifically on British hallmarks. Apparently, the lion passant indicated the piece was sterling silver. The three towers meant it had been made in the nearby town of Exeter.
The next stamp was a date stamp, but date stamps were issued in a strange way. A new letter was assigned each May, but every twenty years the font changed to distinguish one set of letters from another. There was no way to figure out which font corresponded to which dates without a legend, which Rachel did not have. It was this stamp that differed from piece to piece.
The final stamp, the maker’s mark, was two letters, JA. According to the book, this would be the initials of the silversmith. Rachel checked two or three dozen other pieces of the household silver, pieces that did not come from Great-Aunt Nimue. A few were from Exeter, but not a single one bore the initials JA.
The next day her friend Taddy, the cook’s grandson, came to visit. Rachel was excused from preparing for the party to spend the day in the kitchens with him. The two had a wonderful time together, reminiscing, swapping tales, and sampling Cook’s pies. When Cook headed out on a shopping trip, Rachel convinced her to take the two of them to Exeter, where they visited the boutiques, went skating, and saw a pantomime. While there, Rachel stopped at Johannes Ashley’s Silversmith Shoppe and asked the clerk about the stamps on their wares. Sure enough, he confirmed that silverwork from this shop was marked with the initials JA. The clerk also showed her a chart on the wall that displayed the date stamps for the last four hundred years.
The night of the Yule Party, she slipped out of bed, where she was pretending to be sick with an all-too-real stomachache, brought on most likely by nerves. She tiptoed down to the floor below, to her parents’ bedroom. Her mother’s jewelry case sat upon the vanity. It was a black-lacquered Oriental antique inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the shape of roses and butterflies.
Rachel crept over and opened the jewelry box. The top of the case lifted, revealing three little drawers. The first two drawers contained fine pieces of jewelry. Odds and ends filled the bottom drawer: charm bracelets, long dangly earrings, old medals, and commemorative coins. Gently, disturbing as little as possible, she felt her way to the back of the bottom drawer and found what she had been seeking, a silver baby’s rattle engraved with an A. Turning it over, she checked the hallmark. Sure enough, three of the four marks were familiar: the sterling mark, the Exeter mark, and the JA.
Rachel stared at the rattle. The JA confirmed that the piece was most likely a gift from her great-aunt, whom the clerk at Johannes Ashley’s claimed as a long time client. However, this alone did not tell Rachel when the piece had been commissioned. Perhaps her great-aunt had bought it over a hundred years ago, for the birth of one of Myrddin’s siblings—her father’s dead brothers and sisters—three of whose names Rachel did not even know, and it had only been given to Rachel’s mother more recently.
Rachel listened, but she could hear no noise in this wing of the house. Closing her eyes, she recalled in perfect photographic detail the chart on the silversmith’s wall. She compared the third mark on the silver rattle with the date stamp letters and fonts on the chart. A cold shiver ran up her spine. According to the silversmith’s chart, the hallmark on the delicate silver rattle had been stamped two years before Sandra’s birth.
Shutting the jewelry box with a snap, Rachel ran upstairs and crawled back into bed; however, even the warmth of her blankets could not stop her shivering. Safe under her pink and white quilt, inside the curtains of her pale rose canopy bed, she called Gaius on the bracelet and told him all that she had found.
• • •
Like all wonderful things, the three weeks of Yule Break came to an end all too quickly. Arriving back at school on Monday, January 8th, Rachel discovered that Sigfried had spent the break at Roanoke, even though the school was closed. For the first week, he had managed to stay in his room, eating his stored food and what Lucky could catch in the forest. Sometime during the second week, however, a proctor had caught sight of him, when Siggy had accidentally crossed a ward near De Vere Hall, and his chameleon elixir failed. Sigfried and Lucky had spent the rest of the holiday as the guests of Maverick Badger and his wife Maggie at their cottage in the Staff Village along Roanoke Creek.
Recalling the vastness of her family’s mansion, with its hundreds of empty rooms, Rachel resolved to write to her parents about inviting Sigfried to Gryphon Park for Spring Break.
As Monday continued, Rachel kept her eye out for the upperclassman from Marlowe with the threadbare coat. Catching sight of her long curling locks as the older girl was rushing across the commons on her way to lunch, Rachel ran up to her and presented her with Laurel’s old navy blue parka.
“Hallo. Um…I thought you might want this.”
It was snowing again. When she saw the coat, the shivering young woman’s eyes grew wide with longing. But then she took a step back.
“Did my family send you?”
“Your family? No. I…don’t know who they are.”
Her expression was wary. “I’m Chalandra Druess of Druess Confectionaries and Druess Cosmetics?” Her voice rose at the end, as if posing the question, “Do you recognize me?”
Rachel had heard of the Druess family holdings. Laurel had received a gift of expensive Druess perfume just this Yule.
Chalandra cupped her chipmunk protectively in one hand. “If my family has put you up to this, I cannot accept. If you don’t get paid unless you trick me into taking the coat…I’m sorry.”
Very properly, Rachel replied, “I am The Lady Rachel Griffin, daughter of the Duke of Devon. I have never met your family and am certainly not in their pay. My sister outgrew her coat this year. I couldn’t help noticing, the time my friend nearly hit you with her war club, that you looked cold. So, I kept it for you.” She thrust the navy parka at the shivering girl.
Chalandra looked from the coat to Rachel and back. “You mean, you’re giving this to me of your own free will. Out of kindness?”
Rachel nodded.
The young woman’s eyes filled with tears. “Th-thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Rachel smiled back. She held out the coat again.
Chalandra grabbed the warm garment and, shrugging off her old dinner jacket, snuggled into the navy parka. She was shorter and slenderer than Laurel. It fit her well.
With a smile and a wave, Rachel said goodbye and sped back to her dorm.
Chapter Twenty-One:
Unhealed Scars
“Listen,” Joy whispered, as she steadied the ladder upon which Rachel stood. “Did you know that Zoë has scars all over her body?”
“What?” Rachel paused on the ladder, tape in hand, trying to fasten a giant poster of Sigfried’s head to the wall.
It was Saturday, the 13th of January, a week after they returned from Yule break. The Die Horribly Debate Club had spent the afternoon decorating their clubhouse, Room 321, which currently consisted of a large rectangular table surrounded by chairs. It was on the third floor of the back leg of Roanoke Hall, where many of the school clubs met.
Some of the bigger clubs met elsewhere. The school paper—the Roanoke Glass, the Photography Club, and the yearbook had offices on the floor below. Music groups like the Ginger Snaps, the Madrigal Singers, and the Geometric Quartet, met in the basement of Dare Hall. The botany club met in the greenhouse, which was between the Staff Village and the Oriental gardens. The Fencing Club met in the gym, along with the Knights of Walpurgis and the Young Sorcerers’ League.
The majority of the rest of the clubs, however, met on this floor. Until this year, Room 321 had been the home of the Saturday Night Probabilities Study Group, which was a fancy name for a poker club that had been started by Blackie’s younger brother, Granite Moth. That club had become so big that it had moved to a larger meeting area, vacating 321.
The Roanoke Seers met in
Room 319 and the Bird Watching Club met in 323. Across the hall in 324 was the Treasure Hunters’ Club, a gathering of alchemy enthusiasts who searched for new and interesting items for use in elixir recipes. They were right next door to 326, which housed the Hudson Highland War Gamers, a club that studied the military uses of sorcery. Farther down the hall was a chess club and the haunts of the Vampire Hunters’ Club led by Abraham Van Helsing. In the other direction, Room 318 belonged to the Sacred Days Club, devoted to celebrating the many holidays and sacred festivals throughout the year.
A wonderful aroma wafted down from Room 311, the home of Cooks’ Broth. Upon hearing that today was their official move-in day, the president of this cooking club, Joy’s eldest sister Temperance, had brought the Die Horribly Debate Club a plate of maple-glazed apple crisp cookies as a housewarming gift.
Only two remained on the plate.
Rachel and her friends had been granted the room a couple of months earlier, but they had not been able to agree on décor. Zoë had recommended plastering the walls with posters of punk bands. The princess had voted for Magical Australia’s stunning natural vistas. Valerie, the rock hound, had wanted photographs of smoky quartz and red chalcedony. Sigfried suggested decorating the walls with the heads of their enemies. When the others pointed out that they had no heads to post, Valerie offered to make some from paper mache.
It did not help that matters between Sigfried and the princess were growing worse. Ever since Nastasia had failed to take him along on her trip to bring the Elf home, Sigfried had declared a private vendetta against her. Since she was a girl, he could not solve the problem in his preferred fashion, punching her in the face. So he was forced to express his outrage more subtly. What he did instead was both utterly effective and infinitely worse for Rachel.
Had he acted like Zoë, who needled her target with sarcastic comments, or like the Drake Hall girls, who specialized in petty, mocking snipes, he would have failed to achieve his purpose. The princess graciously ignored all attempts to provoke her, declaring such behavior to be beneath her notice. But such was not Sigfried’s style.
The Awful Truth About Forgetting (Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 4) Page 24