by Rosalyn Eves
I am not the marrying type. Each word was a dart, pricking my skin. Taken separately, the pain was slight. Taken collectively, I caught my breath at the sting. I gripped my hands together, my nails cutting into my palms.
“I do not see what that has to do with anything,” Mama said, her voice rising. “You have compromised them both. If you do not marry one of them, what man will want them? Particularly Anna, who does not have her sister’s beauty or her magic.”
“I am sure you overstate the matter,” Freddy said. “Miss Anna is a lovely girl. And it was only a kiss. Two kisses. Not a promise.”
Sourness bit at the back of my throat. His face was like a Greek sculpture, all perfect lines and curves and achingly remote.
“You may have given your kiss lightly,” Papa said, “but I doubt my daughters did. Anna, did you believe yourself plighted to this man?”
Yes, I thought. Maybe. “No.”
“Catherine, did you?”
“Of course. Do you think I would let him kiss me otherwise?”
Catherine was a terrible liar. But I underestimated my mother’s will to have one of her daughters wed.
“Then you see you must marry her,” Mama said. “Or we will sue you for breach of contract.”
Freddy sprang up, snatching his hat from his lap and shoving it on his head. “This is ridiculous. I can’t do this. I won’t.”
Anger flickered in me. Maybe I had been premature to think he might marry me on the weight of a kiss. But I had believed he cared for me. “Can’t do what? Court me? Kiss me—and my sister? Or is it only doing the honorable thing that you struggle with?” I shook off Mama’s restraining hand and stood and faced him, pausing to give my words emphasis. “I had believed you were so much more than this.”
“Anna.” The anger slid from Freddy’s face, and he looked only tired and a little sad. “I’m sorry. I was foolish, but not malicious. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”
“Did you mean any of it?” I asked.
“I meant it when I kissed you,” he said, very low. “It didn’t mean anything when I kissed Catherine.”
I heard my sister’s gasp, but I kept my eyes fixed on Freddy.
“But it was a mistake. I realized that at Catherine’s debut. I—I heard people talking about you, after. I can’t marry you.”
A strange high buzzing filled my ears. “Why?”
Catherine’s voice sliced at me. “Surely you must know, Anna. Freddy needs to marry power. And you haven’t any.”
The flush in Freddy’s cheeks confirmed her words.
“So this is to be all?” Mama asked. “You refuse us?”
“I must go,” Freddy said, turning toward the door. “You’re welcome to bring a suit against me, but I doubt it will prosper. It will only serve to embarrass your daughters.” In the doorway he stopped and whirled, his eyes meeting mine. “I am sorry, Anna. If there had been any other way—if you had any magic at all…I shall always remember you.”
Mama began whispering furiously to Papa as soon as the door fell shut behind Freddy, but I did not hear her. Freddy’s words rattled around in my skull.
I did not want to be remembered.
I had only wanted to be loved.
Barton’s heavy knock on the door interrupted Mama and Papa’s argument. Catherine had already fled the room, tears starting from her eyes. Grandmama had taken Mama’s place beside me on the chaise longue, her arm warm around me.
The door flung open, and Barton announced Lady Berri and Lord Orwell. Lady Berri was resplendent in a particularly bright shade of yellow.
I dropped my head in my hands. My day had wanted only this.
“We met Lord Markson Worthing on the street. Such a charming young man,” Lady Berri said. “Is there to be an announcement?”
“No announcement,” Papa said.
“A pity—” Lady Berri began.
Lord Orwell spoke over her: “We did not come here to share gossip, but to examine the girl.”
“Oh, do hush a moment,” Lady Berri said. “It won’t help our task if the young lady is upset.” She turned to Mama. “You can rely on our discretion. It is not our intent to create a scandal for your family.”
The tightness around Mama’s eyes lightened. “That is very kind.”
“To business, then,” Lord Orwell said. “We’ve come to examine the girl.”
Alarm shot through me. I cast a look at Papa. Hadn’t he said no studies?
Lord Orwell held up a sheet of paper, covered with elaborately curving calligraphy and marked by an impressive seal with Queen Victoria’s rearing lion and unicorn. “I’m afraid you can’t refuse. Circle business.”
Grandmama’s arm tightened around me.
“On what grounds?” Papa asked. “She’s still a child.”
“She broke a spell with no apparent effort,” Lord Orwell said.
“An accident,” Papa said.
“You must see how serious this is. A child who can casually break a small spell might break a much larger spell, with deadlier consequences. And the Binding is not so secure as it once was.” Lord Orwell arched his eyebrows at Papa. “But perhaps this has been your plan all along. There are rumors, you know.”
Mama moaned. “Oh, Charles.”
Papa said, “I’ll not deny I think society would be better without the Binding, but I’m not so foolish as to attempt to break it myself—or to urge my untrained daughter to do so! I know our laws as well as you.”
Gooseflesh prickled along my forearms. The radical, William Skala, opposed the Binding. That made sense, for one coveting Luminate magic and position. But why should Papa? He had nothing to gain from such a stand, and everything to lose.
“You heretics are mad,” Lord Orwell said. “You believe the Binding restricts the use of magic, but that is folly. In fact, the Binding spell strengthens our power by giving us access to magic we might not possess individually. It protects us from injudicious spell-casting and from…other threats. Breaking the Binding would only weaken our magic.”
“The Binding preserve us,” Grandmama whispered, echoing a prayer I’d learned in childhood.
Papa did not look convinced.
The radical’s words in the park floated back to me. I asked, “Is it true that magical ability has nothing to do with bloodlines? I heard someone say the Circle only grants magic to families who can afford Confirmation.”
“Nonsense,” Lord Orwell said. “Magic has everything to do with bloodlines—without Luminate blood, we would have no magic.”
Papa opened his mouth to speak, but Mama closed her hand around his forearm and he fell silent.
Lady Berri said, “We believe your daughter may be a danger—both to herself and to others.” She swung toward me with the majestic mass of a ship at sea. “Come here, child.”
“Anna,” Grandmama whispered, “you do not have to do this.”
“I’m afraid she does, Lady Zrínyi,” Lady Berri said.
I crossed the room to her, though I wanted to face the Circle even less than I had wanted to sit through my parents’ proposal to Freddy.
My father wore his scholar face: narrowed eyes, intent focus. Mama looked pale. At some unspoken signal, Lady Berri took my right hand and Lord Orwell my left. They began reciting long, sonorous phrases in Latin. Lady Berri’s hand was warm in mine, Lord Orwell’s callused and dry.
They stopped speaking, and I concentrated on the silence, trying to hear or feel something of the spell they cast. Nothing.
My eyes followed an insect (a bee, perhaps?) tapping gently against a window. Then warmth flooded me, like the first flush of embarrassment. The warmth intensified, tracing lines of heat through my body.
No. I knew this feeling. I knew what happened next.
The heat exploded into flame, as if my entire body had caught fire from the inside out. Heat flared behind my eyes, across my chest, down my limbs, and into my fingers and toes.
I tried to scream, but the sound was swallowed
by the blaze in my throat.
Lady Berri must have sensed my distress, because she released my hand. The flames flickered once, then died. I took a long, shuddering breath and shook my other hand free of Lord Orwell’s grip.
“Odd.” Lord Orwell’s bushy eyebrows pulled together over his nose.
“What happened?” Grandmama’s voice was tight.
My body, which had been overhot, was now cold.
Lady Berri frowned. “I…am not sure. Usually a soul-scry reveals the shape of one’s soul and one’s natural affinity for a magical order. In rare cases, a scry may uncover any hidden spells or geas that impede spell-casting. But Anna’s results are…indeterminate. At any rate, I have never seen anyone react so strongly to this ritual, which suggests that something else is at the root of your daughter’s condition.”
“We’ll need to study the girl further, at our offices on Downing Street.” Lord Orwell nodded at my father. “Perhaps with a blood sample we could—”
Papa cut him off. “I’ve said before, my daughter is not some specimen for examination and dissection.”
“I’m afraid you may not have a choice,” Lady Berri said. A look passed between her and Papa that I could not read. “But I promise you, I will see to it she is safe.”
And with that we had to be content.
After Barton ushered the Circle members from the room, Papa sank into his chair. “I suppose that settles it.”
“Settles what?” I asked. “You can’t mean to let them experiment upon me.”
“We’ll have to send you away,” Papa said.
A great weariness slipped over me. “I suppose you will send me back to Dorset.”
“No,” Mama said. “You will accompany your grandmother to Hungary. You will be gone some months, time enough for the scandal to die down. It is to be hoped when you return you will behave as a proper lady ought.”
“It is to be hoped,” Papa said, “that the Circle will lose interest in you during your absence. I care less for the scandal than for your safety.”
“You will love Hungary, Anna,” Grandmama said. “Such a beautiful country. And generous people. We can stay with my cousin János for the summer. Eszterháza is a remarkable estate—the Hungarian Versailles, people call it, where Haydn used to compose symphonies for the empress Maria Theresa. I spent the happiest summers of my childhood there. I believe János has a great-niece and great-nephew staying with him. They lost their parents, szegények, but I am sure they will be good company for you. And in the fall we can go to Buda-Pest, when the Luminate gather in the cities.”
I tried to smile at the joy in her voice, at the already thickening accent. But my heartbeat thundered in my ears. So this was my fate. Instead of marriage to Freddy, I was to be packed off to a country on the fringes of civilized Europe. Why not Paris, if I must leave England? Or even Vienna? Hungary might be Mama’s and Grandmama’s birthplace, but it was so far.
Leaving England would mean abandoning any hope of a debut, a legitimate place in Luminate society, for a society that spoke a language I did not understand and lived by rules I did not know. There were Grandmama’s stories, of course, of a paradoxical people who could “weep from one eye and laugh with the other,” a people who laughed when they mourned and wept when they were joyful. Stories of a fiercely independent folk who had swept into the Carpathian basin and terrorized Europe before being subjugated themselves, first by the Turks and then by the Austrians. Grandmama’s stories of Hungarian history were littered with tragic heroes: I grew up believing that to be a hero in Hungary meant you had to die.
I loved Grandmama’s stories.
But I did not know how to live in them.
Catherine barged into my room that evening while Ginny was brushing my hair.
“I’m not sorry you’re going,” she said, crossing to my dressing table and examining a tiny vase.
“I had not imagined you would be.” I swallowed. “I am sorry for what I did at your ball. You were rightly angry.”
“Papa says you’re not to be blamed for your…defect.” She whirled, and the uneven candlelight picked out the shadow in her cheek where her jaw was clenched tight. “Perhaps not. But I do blame you for choosing to come there with Freddy. I’m glad he won’t marry you.”
“I’m glad he won’t marry you either.” Let Catherine take that how she would. The Freddy I had seen that morning would not have made either of us happy.
That surprised a bitter laugh from her. “I never wanted Freddy. But it stung to think he preferred you. I knew he did, for all I let him kiss me.”
She swooped toward me, a cloud of lacy nightdress and vanilla scent. Into my ear, she whispered, “I’ve not forgiven you yet…but do try not to drown on the crossing.”
Papa came later, as I was shredding the handful of notes I’d received from Freddy and stuffing them into my wastebasket. He did not seem to notice what I was doing, instead crossing my room to stand at the window. A low light burnished the edge of the sky. Above, inky blackness scrolled behind the stars.
“They were not wrong,” he said. “The Circle, when they called me a heretic. I have studied Luminate history for a long time. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that the Circle is using the Binding, which they once sought to preserve and protect, to increase their own power. Once, Luminate had access to all manner of spells. Now they have only the charms of the order the Circle decrees for them. This control worries me, as does the widening gap between Luminate and the rest of society. I stand by my beliefs, but I am sorry they have brought trouble on you.”
I went to his side, tucking my hand into his as I used to when I was small. “It was not your fault. I am the one who broke the spell.”
He sighed. “Debutante spells have gone awry before. I am afraid my reputation made them look more closely at you than they might have done otherwise.”
I tightened my grip on his hand. “I would not have you change your beliefs just to make things convenient for me.”
My father lost some of his tense look and kissed my brow. “You’re a good girl, Anna.”
I wasn’t, but I was glad my father believed it. “I’m sorry I disappointed you.”
He was silent for a long moment, his throat working without words. Then: “You could never disappoint me, Anna. I just want you to be safe. And happy.”
I understood what he could not say: I forgive you. I love you.
I raised myself on my toes to kiss his cheek. “I love you too, Papa. I will miss you. Write to me?”
“Of course.”
James came last of all, tapping on my door so late I was already in bed, reading by the guttering candle. His eyes were bright with anger. “You said nothing would happen. But you’re leaving!”
He evaded the hand I stretched toward him. “I don’t want to leave.”
“Then don’t.”
“It’s not my choice.” I heard the pain in my voice and hastened to add, “In any case, you will be leaving in the fall for Eton. You won’t miss me for long.”
For answer, James turned scorching eyes on me. His eyes were dark—like mine, like Mama’s, like Grandmama’s. Hungarian eyes. I realized his anger was not at me, not precisely. He was just coming to realize what I already knew: we were both of us trapped in a course we had not chosen.
His would take him to Eton, to suffer through Luminate contempt.
Mine would take me to Hungary.
The Continent, late April 1847
I stood on the deck of the ship, my fingers tight against the railing, and watched the white cliffs of Dover disappear above the grey water. The wind whipped my hair into my eyes, and the sea salt stung my cheeks. Above me, the air was full of black-and-white guillemots. Their raucous, trilling cry filled my ears.
Ginny stood beside me, offering the support of her presence without comment, for which I was grateful.
I would not see Freddy in Europe. He was bound to England, to his plans for Parliament, and his Luminate life. I would no
longer have to confront his loud absence, or wonder, walking in Hyde Park, if I would see him. This is a good thing, I told myself.
I almost believed it.
Behind me remained everything I knew, nearly everyone I cared for. Ahead of me—I could not seem to see past the crashing waves. Grandmama assured me there would be society in Hungary, that the Hungarian Luminate would not place as much value on magic as the English. I hoped she might be right, but that hope seemed a tenuous thing.
My fingers were numb when we reached the shore.
A thin, exceedingly elegant Austrian gentleman met us at the docks in Calais, holding up a hand-lettered sign with Grandmama’s name: LADY ZRÍNYI.
Grandmama frowned at him. “Where is the majordomo I hired?”
“Alas, circumstances conspired against him. He could not come. I have been sent in his place. My name is Herr Steinberg, and I assure you I will take the best possible care of you.” Herr Steinberg adjusted his spectacles and bowed us into a waiting carriage.
I sat by the window in our shared stateroom aboard a luxury steamboat and counted German castles as Herr Steinberg named them for me: Koblenz, Stolzenfels, Kamp-Bornhofen, Rheinfels, Katz. After spending our first night in Calais, we had traveled northeast to the Netherlands, where we took a steamboat down the Rhine. Byron’s Childe Harold had come this way too, I remembered, exiled and alone. An impoverished German Luminate entertained the passengers with illusions. A ring of fire and a crouching dragon around the largest of the castles, a knight in armor in the air above the yellow crenellation of another. Ginny watched with us and clapped her hands in delight.
Near the village of St. Goarshausen, the river skirted around a jutting rock cliff. At its base, our magician cast another illusion: a lovely maiden sat in sunlight, drawing a comb through her golden tresses. Herr Steinberg explained this was one of the Lorelei, a siren maiden who sang sailors to their deaths. The illusion, naturally, had no sound, but as we passed, a low humming lifted above the noise of the steam engine.