When You Wish

by Jane Feather

  Oblivious to Charlotte, George was continuing, “Who knows where the sturgeon came from. He could have swallowed the bottle anywhere on the high seas. I once read a book about a shipwrecked sailor who used a charred stick to scratch the word help on a scrap of lamp shade, and set it adrift in a bottle—”

  Lucy could see poor George was setting himself up for one of his grand disappointments. She tried to let him down gently. “What’s the good in scratching help on a paper and setting it adrift? If anyone found it, how would they know where to help?”

  “It doesn’t say help.” Elf had succeeded in prying loose the note. “It says … Charlotte, can I borrow some of your candle—thank you. It says … I think it says, ‘To thine own wish be true. Do not follow the moth to the star.’”

  In the moment of bewildered silence, Lucy saw her mother hiding a smirk behind her dishcloth.

  Rupa appeared as entranced as George. She made a hand-sign to ward off witchery. “It’s a spell cast. A real spell cast. This is something very ancient. Very powerful. Dangerous.”

  “No, no,” George said. “This is a code of some kind. Obviously, it’s a code. You’re right, Lucy. No one who was shipwrecked would write help on a paper and send it out in a bottle. What would be the sense in that? What’s happened is,” he went on with rapidly increasing excitement, “he’s put his cry for help in a code!”

  Charlotte had abandoned the minutes. “Why on earth would he do that?”

  “Pirates.”

  Lucy saw more of her mother disappear behind the dishcloth.

  “Just think about it,” George said. “You’re lost on a desert isle. You put a note in a bottle and throw it out to sea. What then? Pirates might come on it and find you out and you’d be worse off than before. So you do the thing in code.”

  “George, how can you be such a stupid?” Rupa said. “This is a spell. This is spell language. What kind of message says, ‘Do not follow the moth to the star’? Moths don’t go to stars.”

  The ensuing argument about the habits of moths lasted until Lucy’s mother put them firmly from the house.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CRIMPED STURGEON WITH lobster sauce. Sturgeon à la St. Marcel. Sturgeon pudding. Sturgeon stewed in cream. Sturgeon with caper sauce. It was a week to remember. Every night there were friends to dine and there was still some to give away.

  Lucy wished for nothing.

  It wasn’t until the last delicious morsel had been eaten and Roger tomcat had stolen off with the spine that Lucy recalled her mother’s condemnation of wishing. Because she found herself almost wishing she could catch a sturgeon every week. She stopped herself just in time.

  It wasn’t as though she placed any faith in Rupa’s belief that she’d fished up a spell bottle. Rupa frequently tried magic of one sort or another, and Charlotte had once designed a formula comparing the success outcome of Rupa’s spell casting to the success outcome of pure mathematical chance. It had turned out Rupa’s rate of failure was higher than pure chance would have predicted. In other words, you were more likely to come out on top from ignoring a problem than you were by going to Rupa to have it fixed.

  So, did she have herself a wishing bottle?.

  No.

  But Safe is a happier fellow than Sorry. As she had so many times in her life, Lucy found herself grateful for her mother’s profound good sense. Lucy regarded her mother as a woman of courage, resolve, and wisdom. In short, she idolized her.

  Lucy’s mother, born the Honorable Miss Laura Hibbert, had suffered a Disappointment in her youth. Which meant, without benefit of metaphor, that at age twenty, she had been delivered of a child out of wedlock shortly after the death of her lover, which had occurred in the most scandalous and humiliating manner imaginable.

  When anyone inquired about Laura’s family, it was her habit to say they had cast her off. This was not strictly true. What had actually happened was that after announcing to her horrified parents and siblings that she was in the family way, Laura had sold off a Botticelli given to her by her grandpapa on the occasion of her confirmation, and had used the proceeds to move to London and buy the cottage in which she had raised Lucy. Because her family continued to try to ensure her well-being by offering her a wealth of unwelcome sermonettes, it was Laura herself who decided to dispense with the obligations of having to please a family with whom she had never seen eye to eye.

  This had begun, for Laura, a golden age of freedom. She had introduced herself to her new neighbors by saying, “I am Miss Laura Hibbert, and I am an unwed mother. This is my blameless daughter, Lucinda. You may shun us if you choose, but it would be an Unchristian act.”

  She then devoted herself to her daughter, to her garden, and to the foundation of an institute to help other women in need. And, in the evenings, to small classes of students who paid her a two-penny piece a week for the privilege of attending. Hundreds of impoverished London children had learned to read, write, and do sums at her knee. Some had stayed with her for years, Elf, Charlotte, and Rupa among them.

  Lucy couldn’t imagine anyone having a better upbringing then hers, filled with playfellows, sensible encouragement, a sense of mission, and fishing. And now there was the kidnapping to look forward to.

  She had no sense that she was being stalked by disaster.

  She was pleased to note, as she stepped out on a cool Thursday dawn to walk with her mother, that there was not a thing in the world to wish for.

  She strove for a state of blissful contentment. Why wish for relief from the thick morning fog? Fog shrank the city. Made pearls of the lamp globes. Shined the paving stones.

  The moist clatter of unseen market wagons and the thud of trotting horses were softer and more secret.

  “I’ll bet we have Hyde Park to ourselves,” her mother said cheerfully.

  Lucy thought, It would be nice if we bad the park to ourselves, but I don’t wish for it. She was pleased she was able to make so fine a moral distinction. In fact, she realized she was so pleased with herself in general that she began to feel a little uneasy. She was just beginning to worry she might be growing smug as they turned the gates into the park.

  The park was deserted.

  She heard only the hushed tap of dripping leaves and the sigh of the wet grass surrendering to their passing footsteps.

  When they climbed the south knoll, the fog was so thick she could barely see the newly planted geranium pots that lined the walkway. The poplars ahead were pale, stately, giant.

  The world seemed to have tiptoed away and left her floating with her mother in a dense and muffled silver sea. She made a point not to think there was something magical in the vast dancing curtains of opalescent mist. She made a point not to wish they didn’t have the park quite so much to themselves.

  Then, amidst the haunting quiet, she heard a woman’s rich, throaty laughter. Surprisingly close by.

  She stopped, twisting quickly around.

  Saw nothing but shivering tendrils of fog.

  Her mother had stopped too, and stood still as a doe, gazing west. She whispered, “Don’t look, Lucinda. What you see will disgust you.”

  But as though the fog had curled its soft fronds and held her, Lucy could not look away.

  The mist opened like a web before a glistening coppice of holly trees dotted with small white blossoms. Beneath the branches, a young man held a woman in his arms.

  The woman was half-dressed in a wet evening gown of gold silk tulle. Sprinkled with grass thatch, fog-drenched, the gown might have tumbled from her bare shoulders if it had not been held aloft by the lady’s creamy upraised arms, which clung so tightly to the young man. The lady’s hair was loose, damp, dark, lovely.

  Lucy did not travel in fashionable circles. She did not know the woman.

  Oh, but the man.

  Henry Lamb.

  No one could miss that face. It was widely regarded as the most captivating in England. Henry Lamb. Enthralling, disgraced, disgraceful Henry Lamb.

  Luc
y had seen him only once in her life, and afterward it had taken months of serious effort to cleanse him from her thoughts. For once, two Christmases earlier, she had witnessed him engage in one of the most naïve, sweet-spirited, and careless acts of kindness she had ever seen.

  It had occurred on Boxing Day, on what was surely the bleakest morn of winter, when she had gone with her mother to the St. Giles slum to help nurse a child with putrid fever. The child’s fever had broken about midnight and at daybreak, he slept peacefully. Lucy’s mother had fallen asleep too, sitting upright in a parlor chair.

  So alone with Mrs. McGrew, the ill child’s mother, gazing out through the window frost into the chilly gray of morning, Lucy had seen two begging children approach a young man. Elegant, disheveled, stop-and-stare handsome, Henry Lamb was unknown to Lucy, but not to Mrs. McGrew, who had seen him pass this way once or twice before with a group of young rakehells who came to bet at the fighting-cock dens.

  Lucy had stood up from her chair, ready to grab her shawl and run outside to intervene. Young bloods slumming made it a practice to cane the begging children who were so often accomplished pickpockets.

  Mrs. McGrew had called her back.

  “Here, now, stay. Will you look at that? Will you just look at that?”

  Henry Lamb had knelt by the children and was talking to them, emptying out his pockets to them, crumpled banknotes, gold coins, silver ones, bronze ones. Everything. His night’s winnings, it seemed. And when he had emptied every pocket, he gave them his watch, the gold ring from his finger, and then popped the gilt buttons off his waistcoat to give them to the children, too. Finally, he blew their noses on his silk cravat and, laughing, tucked it into the little boy’s frieze coat. And then he had walked off, his finely etched mouth carrying the slight whimsical smile she would have to work so hard to erase from her dreams.

  Henry Lamb.

  As famous for his amazing good looks as he was for the shame he had inflicted on his family.

  And somehow, in this odd, shocked moment of coming upon him so suddenly, again at dawn, in a mist-hung park, in the obvious act of having compromised a lady, a terrible thing happened.

  Lucy felt it happen. A little wish slipped out. A horrid, irrepressible, wicked little wish. Somehow—she couldn’t understand how—but somehow she felt herself wish she might be the barely dressed lady in his arms.

  She immediately imagined the wish in her mind as a fire she was trying to stomp out. Stomp that wish. Stomp it. Crush the life out of it.

  But a strange tingling sensation was beginning to spread through her body. Hot prickles. Cold prickles. She felt light-headed and rather sick.

  She practically ran from the park.

  Her mother caught up with her near the park gates.

  “Oh, poor Lucy. I’m so sorry. What a thing to have to see. And before breakfast, too. If it’s any consolation, I saw they were so engaged with each other they didn’t even know we were there.”

  Lucy found that was no consolation. None whatsoever.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LUCY SPENT THE balance of the morning violently weeding her bean garden. Chickweed and docks lay around her in ragged piles of slaughter.

  Could you unwish a wish?.

  She alternated between unwishing and the certainty that the unwishing was as frivolous and ignorant as wishing. Superstition was a bane to humanity.

  She tried to enforce the idea in her mind that there was nothing real about magical spells. For heaven’s sake, stick to science. Ban the uncomfortable memory of the day Rupa had miraculously cured the Misses Hoskinses’ lame pig.

  Lucy had struggled to understand how Henry Lamb could have taken such hold of her thoughts on her first view of him. What had captured her? The uninhibited act of generosity or the astounding sweetness of his smile? Or merely the novelty of his undeniable good looks and blackened reputation?.

  There could be nothing so absurd on her part, nothing so utterly ludicrous, as to feel even a small shred of distress because she had seen him kiss a lady, Henry Lamb had no part in her life. And furthermore, if there was truth in common gossip, kissing women was the thing Mr. Lamb spent the better part of his time doing. That women paid him to do this.

  Could anything be worse?.

  Sometimes she worried she had inherited her father’s unsteadiness of character.

  She wished the sun would come out so she could go back to Human Bone Creek and fish. And then she thought, Have mercy, Lord, I’ve wished again. What was the matter with her? What was she becoming? An addle-brained wish wisher?.

  She was losing her serenity. Or even her sanity.

  As she shifted between the weed piles, her glance fell on her gray stone cottage, nestled in honeysuckle and jessamine and clematis that climbed to the eaves. Above the bluebells in the window box, the sash held the vexing glass bottle, now filled with a nodding runner of ivy.

  “I know you’re only an old bottle,” she said. “You have no power whatsoever. But if it were to happen that by an undiscovered quirk of nature or science you have a sort of power, I want you to understand what happened this morning was not a wish. I am not interested in being in the company of any ramshackle gentlemen for—for any purpose. I know about those sorts of men from my poor mother’s Disappointment. I am a contented person. I wish for nothing. My life is exactly the way I want it to remain. As is.”

  She felt utterly stupid. She was talking to a bottle.

  A lone shaft of light sliced the heavy cloud cover and fell like a spent arrow upon her cottage window, striking the bottle with a bright glint. It was so lucent, so merry. It looked like a wink.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LUCY WAS RELIEVED that afternoon when the weather turned to rain. No fishing today. The bottle had shown itself unable to command the elements.

  At two, the Justice Society (Or Club) was meeting for the last time before the kidnapping, which was now called “the provision of an opportunity for Lord Kendal to initiate an act of compensation for his lechery.”

  Forced indoors by the rain, the assembly convened at George’s, a rare treat. George’s parents were not fond of the lot of them. George’s parents had, in fact, said if they caught any members of the Justice Society near their home, they would have them arrested and whipped.

  But, fortunately, George’s parents were spending the week with George’s married sister in Kent, and had left George with his grandfather and a skeleton crew of staff. Since George had sent most of the remaining servants on holiday, keeping around only those he could bribe, and since George’s grandfather spent the afternoons napping, the mansion became a perfectly safe meeting place.

  They gathered in a snug drawing room, with walls hung in blue textured silk, and rosewood furnishings detailed in gold. Rain rattled against the windowpanes but a large fire crackled in the grate, a luxury this time of year that only George was used to.

  George had raided the larder of a pair of roasted woodcocks with lobster sauce, some sausages cooked with Spanish chestnuts, a substantial pigeon pie, asparagus points dressed in the French fashion, brandied cherries, apple tarts, a compote of peaches, and a bottle of burgundy. It was splendid. They could have stayed there until midnight, debating resolutions.

  In the friendly hubbub before the meeting was called to order, Lucy felt a light pressure on her wrist, and turned to see Elf had taken her arm. He drew her aside to join him on a silk-upholstered settee.

  “Lucy, my dear girl, what’s the matter?”

  Shocked that her painful unease might be visible, she blurted, “Why do you think there’s something the matter?”

  “Your cheeks are flushed. Your eyes look unhappy and I hardly ever see you look unhappy. And you’ve been tying nymph-fly lures. You always do that when you’re upset.”

  Astonished, she said, “How did you know I was tying nymph flies?”

  “Because you’ve left one strung to your hair ribbons. Don’t close me out, Luce. What’s happened?”

  “Nothing.
Really nothing. It’s just …” She looked toward the fire, where Elf’s ancient terrier, Mr. Frog, lay rolled over, basking with his feet in the air. “This is so ridiculous …. Elf, you don’t think there’s any chance Rupa could be right about that silly bottle, do you?”

  “What bottle? The one in the sturgeon, do you mean?”

  When she didn’t answer, he began to laugh. “Lucy, Lucy … what did you do, wish for an eye in the back of your head? I’d better have a look.”

  When she had finished smacking his hands out of her curls, he pinched her chin affectionately and began to untangle the nymph fly from her hair.

  He said, “I know what you wished, I’ll bet. You wished your hair ribbons would turn to fishing lures.”

  By the time the meeting began, Elf had teased her out of her feeling of unease. She felt so much more cheerful she was able to enjoy the meeting and vigorously add her opinion to such questions as whether Lord Kendal was to be rendered insensible by a blow to the skull or by a sleeping powder (furtively administered).

  They had begun to tackle the list of demands to be made of Lord Kendal when George’s grandfather ambled into the drawing room in embroidered mules and a plum-colored banyan, his hair whisped like floss under a tipsy nightcap. It was clear where George had got his hairy legs and hawk nose.

  The old duke gazed crossly around, glared at George, and demanded, “Who on earth are these persons?”

  It was abundantly clear they were not going to be able to pass themselves off as young men and women of fashion. George stood petrified like a waxwork, fumbling for inspiration. His grandfather was the one person capable of unnerving George.

  Charlotte leaped to her feet, curtsied clumsily, and said, “If it pleases Your Grace, we have come to inquire about the position.”

  The duke looked bewildered. “Have we a position open?”

  “Yes, sir,” George said, finding his tongue. “I’ve been conducting … interviews.”