The Fairy Stepmother Inc.

by Maggie Hoyt

  “I have the right to decide what is suitable for my son! How is it that you can decide your daughter’s suitors are fools but I cannot?”

  “Clarrie Babcock is a model young lady—”

  “Oh yes, I’m quite aware! She’s only been parading it in front of my face for weeks. Only someone putting on a show would be so blatant.”

  “What is she supposed to do if you won’t give her the time of day? Have you actually met her? Have you seen her with your son? How is it you can claim our situations are the same? I’ve done my research!”

  “It is still my decision, and you are still undermining my authority! Is that the reason you came to dinner? To manipulate me? When I brought you into my home in good faith?”

  “I came in good faith.”

  He snorted. “Really.” He’d leaned back in his chair so he could look down his thin hooknose at me, and his eyes conveyed an almost sinister level of condescension. I wanted to rip that crocodile grin off his face.

  “You knew who I was,” I said. “You made it clear from the moment I introduced myself that you knew what had happened to me. Did you think I wouldn’t care? Did you think it wouldn’t bother me that you were putting the Babcocks in the same position I was in? Last year, I was Clarrie Babcock! I was this close to living on the streets. I was this close to marrying a museum piece up on Squire Hill just so I could feed my stepdaughter. Did you really think I wouldn’t care that you were being cruel to a girl my daughter’s age? You didn’t invite me here. You invited an idea. You didn’t think once about who I really was.”

  As soon as I said it, I felt like something in me had opened up, like I was free to be as blazingly furious as I wanted, with no more questioning of just how much was my fault. Finally, I’d named what was wrong with Husband #1. He cared only about my function: Did I look charming on his arm? Could I manage a household? Would I make a good impression on his clients? I might as well have been a doll.

  And of course, this was exactly why I’d gotten myself into this mess.

  I could tell that my words had bothered Lord Piminder. Maybe he had an inkling I was right, or perhaps he was offended that I’d suggest such a thing. Either way, he wouldn’t look at me. He stood up and crossed to his desk.

  “So you decided to sabotage me behind my back rather than take the mature option of simply telling me how you felt,” he said.

  “I did tell you!” I said, rising to follow him. “I told you this was cruel! But you fed me a cock and bull story about how if you helped one person, everyone would take advantage of you.”

  “Which is true,” he said, sitting at his desk. “You cannot understand the finer points of—”

  I slammed my hands on his desk and leaned in. “Why can’t I understand? Because I’m a woman? You and I both know that restructuring or even forgiving the Babcocks’ loan would be a loss, sure, but a drop in the bucket for your finances. And if you don’t have anyone on your payroll who can spin the Babcocks’ sob story into a plus for you, well—in fact, I’ll make a deal with you. Hire me to do your PR. Forgive the interest accrued on the loan since your father died and structure a payment plan on the original loan that Patrick Babcock has a hope of paying off. I’ll quit the Babcocks’ employ right now, tell Clarrie to find a different husband, call off the straw-into-gold spinning, and instead I’ll spin this so your reputation doesn’t take a hit. You get to do the right thing, but you don’t lose out in the long run, and I still get paid. What do you say?”

  He’d already leaned back in an effort to get away from me; now, he kept his eyes fixed on some paperwork on his desk. I let him sit for a few seconds in uncomfortable silence, then stood up and crossed my arms.

  “Very well, then. So much for the mature option. You told Clarrie she had five days. Am I correct in assuming you mean the twelfth?”

  He nodded curtly.

  “At what time on the twelfth?” I asked.

  “Let’s say dawn.”

  “Very well. In four days’ time, Clarrie will enter her family’s barn, where she will work all day and night, neither entering, leaving, nor admitting visitors, until dawn the next day, where she will emerge with the gold.”

  “I was rather hoping she’d do this publicly,” he said.

  “No, and I’m not going to let you put her in the stocks, either. I think you’ll find that publicly humiliating Clarrie will go worse for you than her.”

  “But surely you understand that I cannot accept any part of her family’s estate as the staging ground. There are simply too many avenues for cheating. In order to be fair, I will lock her in the southern tower on my estate.”

  Well, I certainly couldn’t agree to that. I’d never be able to get the brass wires in to Clarrie. I had to produce neutral ground, and quickly.

  “Of course not, for the same reasons you just listed. How about the abandoned round tower near the King’s Wood? The city keeps it in good repair. Neutral territory.”

  “And both parties shall have the opportunity to inspect the site before Clarrie enters.”

  I had to grit my teeth and nod. What I most wanted was for the Piminders to stay as far away from the tower as possible so I could hide the brass in it, but I couldn’t very well say that.

  “Are we all agreed?” he asked.

  “I believe we are,” I said, extending my hand. We shook, and I turned to leave before he got it into his head to dismiss me.

  “One more thing,” he said, stopping me in the doorway. “In light of recent events, it seems to me that I must ask for the entire amount of the loan in gold.”

  “After you already lowered it?” Oh no. This was one thing I truly couldn’t work around. I didn’t have that much wire or that much time. “Are you sure? Everyone in Strachey knows you reduced the amount Clarrie had to spin. If you go back on your promise now, you’ll have branded yourself the villain, and I won’t have had to lift a finger. Trust me, you don’t want to.”

  “As it happens, Evelyn, I don’t trust you. So I’m afraid I must insist.”

  I opened my mouth to press argument, but he stopped me.

  “You may go now.”

  I wheeled out of the room and hurried out of the house. I didn’t stop to take a breath until I was back in the street. I was flushed with anger; heat filled my head, burning from ear to ear.

  I’d been so close! I was so close to having a deal I could work with—it was going to be challenging, sure, but at least I’d have had a chance. There was no way I could get tens of thousands of sovereigns’ worth of fake gold wire in time, and without Terence’s cooperation …

  I ran through my half-baked plan in my head. Originally, I had thought that when Clarrie emerged with the brass, the crowd would erupt with excitement. I wasn’t expecting Lord Piminder to believe it was really gold, but if Terence took that moment to propose to Clarrie, the crowd would be so enthused, Piminder would lose every client in Strachey if he backed down. Now, Terence would stay silent, Lord Piminder would say the gold was insufficient, and everyone would be disappointed and a little embarrassed for Clarrie.

  Not to mention, I realized, Piminder would tell the whole town the gold was fake. My plan required that no one look at it too closely, but without a marriage proposal, there’d be nothing else to see. I couldn’t let her walk out with an armful of brass wire—we’d both be ruined. I had to tell Clarrie to shut it down. But how was I going to convince her that her fairy godmother wasn’t coming? Should I just let it go? Let her stumble out of the tower in tears, knowing that no fairies had come to save her?

  I crossed through the center of town fairly oblivious to my surroundings, still seething at Lord Piminder. How had I let him dismiss me? I’d known it was coming, but he caught me having to have the last word—and then there was that rubbish about opening his house to me. He hadn’t listened to me! He’d spent the whole night trying to impress me (and I’d fallen for it, a fact I glossed over as I ranted to myself), and he didn’t listen to me at all. Did he even ask me ab
out my daughters?

  I was in such a mood, in fact, that I very nearly missed someone calling my name.

  “Madam Radcliffe?”

  I spun around, looking for the voice.

  “Mr. Sherman?” I exclaimed as I recognized my solicitor sitting on the patio of a teahouse.

  He looked just as anxious and timid as the last time I saw him. Actually, if it were possible, he looked even more world-weary than usual.

  “It’s good to see you, Madam Radcliffe. I suppose congratulations are in order,” he said. “A royal wedding! That’s something. I’m very, very glad things worked out for you, Madam Radcliffe. Very glad.”

  “Thank you. What brings you to Strachey?”

  His timid smile turned glum. “Lord Dorplin has me on retainer.”

  “To take care of his will?”

  “No, he’s hoping to cement some business arrangements while he’s here, so he brought me to draw up the contracts. Brought my wife too. Insisted that we get to experience all the parties.”

  “Well, the Season can be a bit—”

  “I’ve got nothing to do! Nothing to witness, no contracts to draw up until he makes an agreement. I’m eating limitless lemon ices and watching my wife spend money,” he wailed.

  As I was trying hard not to laugh, an idea struck me. Leverage, Evelyn. You need leverage.

  “Do you do loan contracts, Mr. Sherman?”

  “I can do. Are you looking to borrow money?”

  “No, I’m more curious about defaulting on loans, debt collection, invalid contracts. That sort of thing. I suppose that’s more investigation and court time than you really do.”

  “I look into that occasionally. You need a barrister to bring the lawsuit, of course, but I might gather the evidence. Why?”

  “It’s a bit of a complicated story, but a friend of mine is in some trouble over a loan his father took, which he didn’t know about until recently. The creditor is demanding full payment plus interest, which puts the amount quite out of reach.”

  “Well, for starters, in the case of an inherited debt, the creditor is required to give the debtor a copy of the contract within so many days of the original debtor’s death. If your friend’s creditor didn’t do that, he could easily argue for a suspension of interest until the notification was given. Other than that, I’d have to inspect the contract for any other advantages. There’s always the possibility that the creditor might do something to invalidate the contract, but that’s rare, of course. You said this was for a friend?”

  “Yes. Mr. Sherman, would you like some work to do while you’re waiting around?”

  His eyes lit up, and then he immediately tried to cover that he was excited to do work. “Why, I … well, if you need something …”

  “I’ll send you the details. Care of Lord Dorplin?”

  He nodded.

  “Thank you, Mr. Sherman. I’ll be in touch soon.”

  I couldn’t help walking away with a grin on my face. Don’t count your chickens, Evelyn, I warned myself. You can’t be sure Mr. Sherman will find anything strong enough to persuade Lord Piminder to cooperate.

  But oh, I prayed, I hope he does. Because with enough leverage, I would wipe the floor with Hugo Piminder’s smug grin.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I SPENT THE next two nights making batch after batch of brass wire until I had a heaping wheelbarrow full of what I hoped looked like gleaming straw. I was utterly exhausted.

  On the third day, I went to the tower. Lord Piminder and I had agreed that I could get the tower ready for Clarrie. Then, the next morning, we would inspect it together, bring in the straw, and leave Clarrie to her fate. I had one chance to hide the wire in the tower before Clarrie took occupancy, and it would have to pass Lord Piminder’s inspection.

  So I trudged through the neighborhood that morning, fresh off my alchemical experimentations, pushing a wheelbarrow packed with a sack of wire that I’d carefully topped with blankets, pillows, and a broom. In my satchel, I’d packed hemp twine, a hammer, nails, shears, pliers, glue, parchment, ink, a pen, and at the last second, I’d thrown in chalk, just in case. I did know I’d gone overboard, but I still had no idea how I would pull this off.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to lug everything through the center of town. Our home wasn’t far from the King’s Wood, which was a selling point for Henry when he bought it. It was a quieter neighborhood, a little bit out of the way, and the perfect environment to transport a wheelbarrow of brass wire unnoticed. Unfortunately, the tower was on a small hill. I bent low, put my back into it, and pushed.

  The tower itself was quite simply round and tall and had stood there far longer than any of the nearby homes. Most assumed it had been a watchtower, although I wasn’t sure it was tall enough to spot anything but the leaves on the trees. It belonged, I supposed, to the city, or the nation, or the queen, perhaps. I had no idea who kept it standing.

  I approached the door of the tower—or rather, the door at ground level. Directly opposite and facing the woods was a door about six feet off the ground, the purpose of which historians continued to debate. The city, for its part, had simply built staircases on either side of the door.

  Lord Piminder had asked the mayor for permission to use the tower and had received the key, which he passed on to me. Since it rarely occurred to me to ask for permission, I’d planned on picking the lock and apologizing afterward, but clearly, wealthy men had a different way of doing things.

  As soon as I pushed the door open, I was hit with a cloud of dust. When the sneezing abated, I surveyed the ground floor. Someone had filled the space with crates, piled haphazardly throughout the room. They’d all had a board or two pried up and then bent back into some kind of shape so they could be stacked, although the person doing the stacking had not been meticulous, by any means. I peeked inside a few crates. Empty.

  The crates were an obvious answer to my problem. Simply pack the wire in the crates. However, they were so obvious, Lord Piminder would be immediately suspicious. I could well imagine him ordering someone to open the crates; the question was, would he insist on opening every one? The wire would fit in a few crates, and I could easily hide them among the empty ones. How thorough would he be?

  I could also pack all the crates with a layer of—well, what? Fabric scraps? Shredded newspapers? That would take a lot of newspapers, I thought. Besides, would Lord Piminder simply demand that the crates be unpacked? And how would I get Clarrie to open them? It didn’t really seem like fairy magic to hide your reward in used packing crates.

  What I’d really wanted was to hide the wire under the pile of straw. Then Clarrie would uncover it as she attempted to send straw through her spinning wheel. That’s the sort of thing fairies would do—you find their magic after you’ve tried and tried and it all seems hopeless. You’ve got to suffer a bit before your fairy godmother shows up.

  I sighed and went to work. The crates all had to be stacked along the tower wall to make room for the straw and the spinning wheel. I swept up the dust and dirt that had accumulated, and by that I mean I pushed it out the door. Then I went upstairs and pushed the second-floor dirt into the fireplace. It was a little cramped downstairs with all the crates, and I certainly didn’t want to remove them all. Clarrie could sleep on the second floor and work on the first floor, so I didn’t need to clean the third.

  I did go up and look at it, however. I don’t know what I expected to find—a secret cupboard? A hollow spot in the floor? Unfortunately for me, from top to bottom this tower was quite ordinary. I ran through my options. I couldn’t hide the wire in the straw. The crates were much too big a risk.

  There was also the option of sneaking the wire in during the night. I’d surely have to use the floating door, but Clarrie still might catch me. She might decide to stay awake all night trying to spin, and if I opened the door, she’d spot me immediately. And if Lord Piminder set someone to watch the tower …

  I returned to the ground floor and examined everyt
hing one last time. Was there anything else Clarrie would need? The summer heat wave had just hit, so she wouldn’t be cold. There would be no need to use the fireplace. Wait. The fireplace. Could I hide the wire in the flue?

  I got on my knees, stuck my head into the first-floor fireplace, and twisted around to see the opening. That has to be big enough, I thought. I stuck my hand up the flue—unblocked. I could shove the sack of wire up the chimney. I just needed a way to hold it in place, and a way to make it drop.

  I crawled back out of the fireplace and looked around the room. I had an awful lot of wood available. If I stuck a board in the flue underneath the sack of wire and propped it up with a couple of planks, I’d simply have to remove the props and the gold would fall into the fireplace.

  I pulled one of the crates from the stack. The one thing I hadn’t brought was a saw, sadly, so I focused on the board that had already been pried up, hoping it had been weakened enough that I could break it in half. Blessedly, these crates had been shoddily constructed, so it only took most of my strength to crack the board at its weak spot.

  When it finally snapped, the piece flipped out of my hands, hit me in the knee, and clattered on the floor while I flinched and shut my eyes, trying to avoid flying wood splinters. I picked up the piece and held it up to the flue. A decent fit. Now I needed the props, so I pried off two of the diagonal planks that reinforced the sides of the crate.

  I removed the sack of wire from the wheelbarrow. It was, of course, much, much lighter than actual gold, which would end this whole thing rather quickly if Lord Piminder got his hands on it. But he won’t, I told myself. That’s why you hired Mr. Sherman. You’ll press your legal points on Piminder while the ladies of Strachey ooh and ah over Clarrie. Leverage.

  I shoved the sack up the chimney. Then, holding the small board underneath the sack, I reached for one of the support beams and stood it on its end. It was long enough to keep the board hovering just below the narrow opening. I added the second prop and stepped back.

  It held. I breathed a sigh of relief. I mean, there were two wooden planks standing straight up in the middle of the fireplace, but at least the wires were out of sight.