“And you think we’re going to leave you here?” I stared at her. “Of all the cork-brained notions!”
“What else do you expect me to do?” Angeline said. “You know what happened earlier. Even if Stepmama would agree to take me back—”
“She will,” I said. “If you’ll just listen—”
She waved one hand dismissively as another heavy crash hit the door. “It doesn’t matter. There’s no point in going back to Yorkshire only to be lectured and treated as an object of charity.” She looked down, her lips twisting. “Being an old maid forever, under Stepmama’s roof—”
“You won’t be,” I said. “Frederick Carlyle still wants to marry you.”
Her head jerked up. “He does not,” she said. But I saw the sudden vulnerability in her dark eyes.
“He certainly does,” I said. “When I saw him last, he was racing off in his carriage, desperate to catch up with you and Viscount Scarwood. He didn’t know which direction to take, though, so if you want to be kind to him, we should leave quickly and put him out of his misery.”
“His—?” She cut herself off, breathing hard. “Don’t you dare try any of your schemes or wild stories on me, Kat. If you’re making this up just to bring me home—”
“I’m not,” I said. “I swear it. I stood in the parlor of our inn not three hours ago and heard him say how much he regretted walking away from you this morning.”
I decided not to add the part where he’d said that her mad elopement was all his fault. After all, Angeline could use a little humility now and again … and anyway, he was sure to tell her all that gushing nonsense himself, later on.
Angeline gave me a long, measuring look. Viscount Scarwood began to curse venomously at the door. I’d never even heard most of those words before.
Mr. Gregson coughed. “Perhaps, for ease of thought …” A ripple of Guardian power shot through the room. The sound of Viscount Scarwood’s curses disappeared. A moment later I saw the door shudder with another blow, but I couldn’t hear the crash.
“Much better,” I said. “Thank you.”
He sighed. “Well, if you will continue to drag me into situations like this …”
Angeline stood up and walked rapidly to the far wall, only six steps away. When she swung around, her eyes looked wild. “Even if Frederick has forgiven me, that still won’t change his mother’s attitude. Without her permission—”
“You have it,” I said, and grinned at the shock on her face. “Or you will have it, anyway,” I amended, for the sake of honesty, “as of nine o’clock tomorrow morning, when Lady Fotherington finds her and Mrs. Wingate in the Pump Room and tells them both how terribly wrong she was about you and about our entire family.”
Mr. Gregson let out a strangled sound behind me. I ignored him. Angeline tried to speak but nothing came out. She stopped, swallowing visibly. Then she said, enunciating each word clearly, “Why on earth would Lady Fotherington do that?”
My smile widened until it hurt my cheeks. I didn’t care. “Because I helped her to realize how very wrong she had been,” I said. “That is why she is going to apologize to Mrs. Carlyle and Mrs. Wingate for passing on such horrible false rumors about us both. Then she is going to personally recommend to Mrs. Carlyle that she open her heart and home to you as her future daughter-in-law.” I said that last line with particular satisfaction. I’d made Lady Fotherington repeat it after me twice, to make sure she would say it exactly. Each time she’d said the words, I’d enjoyed them even more.
Mr. Gregson let out a heavy sigh behind me. “More wild schemes,” he mumbled. “Heaven help us. …”
I chose not to hear him.
Angeline was looking only at me, her expression a blur of emotions I couldn’t interpret. Finally, her lips curved into a smile.
“Oh, Kat,” she said. “I give in. Come here.”
I ran straight into her arms. They were warm and strong around me, and every bit of her scent was familiar.
My maddening, aggravating, beloved older sister would be coming home after all.
“Thank you,” she whispered, too softly for anyone but me to hear. “Thank you so much.”
Out loud, as we moved apart, she said briskly, “So how shall we find Frederick? I liked the way you both landed here. Can we use the same technique again now? Somehow, I don’t think my escort deserves a proper good-bye before we leave.”
“He certainly does not,” Mr. Gregson said. “Now, all that the three of us need do is join hands, and then …”
“Just a moment,” I said. I looked at the door, which was shuddering under the onslaught of a new crash. I said to Angeline, “I do think Viscount Scarwood deserves some kind of farewell, though, don’t you? After all the trouble he took to bring you here?”
“Ah … Kat?” Mr. Gregson said. “I’m not certain—”
But Angeline’s face was already mirroring the mischief in my mind. “A proper send-off, you mean? So that he really feels my gratitude for his kind care?”
“I really don’t think—” Mr. Gregson began.
But it was too late. With a single thought, I’d already broken Angeline’s spell on the door.
It crashed open, sending Viscount Scarwood staggering in, off balance. He caught himself with one large strong hand on the door frame and looked straight at Angeline, his handsome face twisted in rage. “You think you can play games with me?” He slammed the door behind him. “You think—”
I didn’t even need to tell Angeline my plan. She was already whispering under her breath, while the scent of flowers rose to fill the air.
For the first time, Scarwood noticed me and Mr. Gregson standing near her. “I don’t care if you’ve smuggled in your brat of a sister to help you,” he snarled, “or some old man who can’t protect you. You are not getting away from me this easily!”
“No?” Angeline smiled at him sweetly. “Perhaps you ought to try the door handle yourself, just in case.”
“What?”
“Just try it,” I said, as I took Angeline’s hand in one hand and Mr. Gregson’s hand in the other. Even the pain of my scalded right palm was nothing compared to my satisfaction. “Please,” I added, and I gave him my most innocent smile.
Mr. Gregson shook his head beside me, but he didn’t say a word. He knew better.
“What … ?” Viscount Scarwood put one hand on the door handle behind him. It didn’t move. He turned. He started to shake it. It wouldn’t budge. “What—? Damnation, what—?”
“Now we’re ready,” I said to my tutor.
Guardian magic swept up around us.
Holding hands, my sister and I disappeared from the dingy inn bedroom, leaving only the sound of our laughter behind us.
Author’s Note
Everything that Kat learns about the history of the Roman baths (except for the bits about the wild magic) is true. The springs on which they were built really was considered a sacred spot, not only by the Romans (who left offerings along with requests for favors or curses, just like Charles and his friends) but by the Celts who lived there beforehand.
If you visit the baths now, you’ll see them laid out as the Romans enjoyed them, and you can find out more about the temple to Minerva that once was there. However, you won’t see them laid out as described in this novel, because the layout of the baths and the buildings around them was quite different in 1803 than it is now.
There was an enormous amount of building done in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and then again in the later nineteenth century. I have used eighteenth-century maps along with early nineteenth-century records and descriptions to try to establish as authentic a setting as possible for Kat’s adventures. However, I also used my imagination to fill in the blanks, and I felt free to make small changes to accommodate my magical history.
If you’re curious about the baths and can’t visit them yourself, you can visit their website, romanbaths.co.uk. I especially recommend checking out their photograph of the gorgeous b
ronze head of Sulis Minerva that was unearthed in 1727, almost eighty years before Kat would have arrived. It’s eerie, beautiful … and very magical.
Acknowledgments
I owe huge thanks to all my friends who read and critiqued this novel: Tiffany Trent, Jenn Reese, Karen Healey, Ysabeau Wilce, Lisa Mantchev, and Patrick Samphire. Thank you guys so much!
Special thanks to Jenn and Karen for providing lightning-fast responses to brand-new chapters when I flung them at you in my last-minute rewriting madness. You guys kept me sane!
Thanks so much to my parents, brothers, and grandmother for being so supportive of my books and of me. It means the world.
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my parents and my mother-in-law for babysitting so that I could get the second draft of this book written. I truly couldn’t have finished it on time without your help.
I am so lucky to have Barry Goldblatt as an agent and Namrata Tripathi as an editor. Thank you guys so much! And I owe big thanks to Emma Ledbetter, Lindsay Schlegel, Ariel Colletti, and Anna McKean for all their generosity and hard work on my (and especially Kat’s!) behalf.
Thank you to Gail Hammond for actually making me laugh and enjoy having my author photos taken (something I never would have imagined possible!), and to David Burgis for making brilliant book trailers and button designs and for helping out in a zillion other ways. This trilogy is all about family, and my family has rallied around me amazingly to help with it.
Thank you to Annette Marnat for my gorgeous book covers, and to Jeannie Ng and Jenica Nasworthy for their sharp-eyed copyediting, which has saved me from so many embarrassing mistakes.
Thank you to the wonderfully supportive community of commenters on LiveJournal, and thank you so much to everybody who’s written to tell me they love Kat. I cherish every e-mail and reread them whenever I need motivation to write on a bad day.
Last but definitely not least, I owe an infinite number of thanks to Patrick Samphire, my husband and best friend. So here’s a condensed version:
Thank you for hundreds of brainstorming sessions and insane amounts of child care and housework, on top of designing and maintaining my website. Thank you for taking endless videos of the Baths as we walked through them—and then helping me with even more endless research after we realized, halfway through the building, that the Regency layout had actually been completely different from the layout we could see now. Aack! Thank you for drawing me countless maps and being patient with all my contradictory directions about them. (Thank goodness at least one of us is capable of spatial visualization … but that one sure isn’t me!)
Most of all, thank you so much for being mine.
Renegade Magic Page 24