Nobility surged to offer their obsequies and commoners cheered for Prince Fernand’s unorthodox costume choice. In the distraction, Pip whisked Eugenie from among her crowd of admirers. They stole through to the courtyard, where early diners flocked the buffet of fine foods.
“Are you hungry?” Pip asked.
“Famished,” said Eugenie, though her soaring spirits seemed fare enough to satisfy any appetite.
“What say we grab a plate and sneak away to the balcony for a picnic? Or would you rather take your chances with the crowds?”
Much as she loved the energy of the masquerade, the abundance of would-be partners had overwhelmed her. Seclusion was a far better option. The abandoned balcony would draw no attention while allowing them to people-watch.
They collected their dinners and skulked through the shadows, back into the palace and up the stairs. “Will we get in trouble?” Eugenie whispered when they slipped up onto the balcony.
“No. A domino can go wherever he pleases without anyone looking twice at him.” He punctuated this statement with a wink.
She chuckled.
The dancing continued below. They settled on the floor next to the balustrade, able to peer between the gaps at the spectacle while remaining hidden from notice. Eugenie, nestled amid voluminous skirts, arranged herself into a modest position. Her faceted shoes poked out from the edge of her hem.
They caught Sir Pip’s eye. “Glass slippers again?”
“Quartz tonight,” she said, peering over the folds of her dress to glimpse them.
“The workmanship is exquisite. A gift from your benefactor?”
“Yes.” Her gown was her own dress magicked into a different form, but the slippers were woven from pure fairy dust. Her worn shoes remained at home, awaiting her return in a patch of grass by the stairs to the manor house because the fairy deemed them too shabby to transform.
“And I suppose you have to make an early exit tonight again,” he said with reservation.
She nodded, brimming with unspoken regret.
A sigh of long-suffering escaped him. He reached up and removed the full face mask, revealing the half-mask beneath again. “Then I shall soak up your warmth while I can and hope it sustains me until we meet again. Who is this benefactor who tortures me so?”
Eugenie conveniently popped a bite of her dinner roll into her mouth.
Pip quirked a smile. “That’s all right. I didn’t expect an answer.”
They chattered as they ate—light, nonsensical conversation. After they finished, Pip stacked their dishes next to the wall with a promise to clear them once she had gone. He stood and offered her both hands. She took them, and he pulled her up as though she were weightless.
“Shall we venture down again, or would you rather stay up here a while longer?”
It wasn’t even ten o’clock. Although tempted by the dance, she could hardly justify keeping Pip as her exclusive partner should they return. In the balcony, no one could judge them for remaining in one another’s company.
She wandered to the balustrade, fascinated by the patterns of movement below. “The colors are so much darker tonight,” she said as she leaned over the railing. From above, the trend was more apparent: more women had opted for blacks and blues and indigos in their choice of dress than last week. She tried to discern Marielle among them, but wherever she was, she blended in.
An apprehensive lump rose in her throat. Eugenie swallowed it, wary of having caused her stepmother injury by giving her a costume that fit in with others instead of standing out.
Beside her, Pip let out a grunt of satisfaction. “No doubt that was the influence of last week’s Queen of the Night.” She looked to him sharply. His smile only broadened. “You must know yours was the most beautiful costume of the masquerade. As it is tonight.”
“Surely not.” The words escaped in a faint protest. She returned her attention to the dancing crowd, conscious of a blush that swept up her neck to her face. “As for dark colors, someone else was dressed as a starry sky. You can’t say my influence was more than hers.”
“Baroness Lavande,” he said, peering over the balustrade. Eugenie jerked at the name, her stepmother’s former title from her first marriage. She opened her mouth to correct him—Marielle was the Marchioness of Pluterra, or the Dowager Marchioness now that the Marquis had died—but she checked herself. Would knowledge of the family give her identity away?
Pip continued, oblivious to her internal struggle. “Her last costume was a fine piece, to be sure, and tonight’s is even more so.” He pointed into the crowd. “You see the raven there?”
She followed the line of his finger and picked out Marielle’s feathered headdress atop her silvery-blonde curls. A crowd of admiring nobles clustered around her.
“Even she has gone from spangled midnight blue to black, though,” said Pip. “That’s a follower, not a leader. Your influence was profound.”
Her breath left her on a shuddering exhale. “I don’t believe it.”
“Why not?” he asked, all good humor. “Was your surge of suitors tonight not proof enough?”
She spared him a perturbed glance and returned her attention to the dance. “I’m starting to think I really should have stayed home.”
“I’m very glad you didn’t,” said Pip, lounging against the rail so that his view was entirely upon her instead of the crowd.
Eugenie fought the warmth that blossomed within her. She focused stubbornly on the other masqueraders. “The dark costumes make the colorful ones stand out all the more. That pink one there is lovely. Is it a rose?”
She had, of course, picked out Florelle in the middle of a quadrille. Her costume, at least, could draw no complaint.
Pip straightened. “Ah, yes. That’s one of the baroness’s daughters, though I couldn’t say which. Perhaps she meant for them to shine while she receded into the background tonight. The other is over there, in the vibrant red.” He pointed out Aurielle, oblivious that Eugenie was already well attuned to her location.
“What is she dressed as?” she asked, all innocence.
“The most innovative of designs: a ruby. I’m sure both of their costumes will have influence for next week’s fête, though not as much as the embers that briefly danced among them.”
Determined to ignore the hint, she said firmly, “How did you recognize them?”
“I saw them arrive with the baroness, and she must always be recognized.”
“Well, neither of them lack partners. Nor shall they for the whole night, I’d wager.”
“They wouldn’t.” A cynical pitch entered his voice. “Fortune-hunters abound in this crowd, and one of them is set to inherit a sizable estate.”
Eugenie frowned at this misinformation, at the trouble it might cause Florelle and Aurielle. “I understood the late Baron Lavande’s estate to be quite wasted.”
“Not the Lavande estate,” said Pip. “The Pluterra one, from their mother’s second marriage.”
“Oh, no.” The words left her lips on instinct. “They can’t inherit that one. It belongs to the marquis’s natural daughter.”
He shifted his gaze to her, his lips parted and his eyes narrowed behind his mask.
“I-it belongs to his natural daughter,” Eugenie said again. “She inherits when she comes of age.”
But he only shook his head, his mouth a solemn slant. “The Marquis of Pluterra’s natural daughter died three years ago.”
Shock, cold and jarring, tumbled over her. She forced a smile, clearing her head to keep her wits about her. “You are mistaken.”
His expression remained grave. “I’m not. I attended her funeral.”
The words made no sense. She took a halting backward step, her gaze unfocused. “You can’t have—”
“I did. Everyone did, the whole country over, as a sign of respect for her family. You must have been abroad at the time, not to have known.”
What nonsense was this?
“She was the last of
the Pluterra line,” Pip said, wistfulness in his far-off expression. “The title returned to the crown when she died, and the estate went to the baroness, as the marquis’s surviving spouse.”
An inelegant noise escaped her throat. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t force her lungs to inhale or her mind to work beyond the picture he constructed.
“Cinderella, are you all right?” he asked, reaching for her in concern.
“I have to go,” Eugenie said. She flung away from him, her stomach twisting.
“Wait!” He dogged her footsteps. “Cinderella, wait, please.”
She paid him no heed, desperate to escape the sudden, stifling heat that threatened to suffocate her. Her walk quickened to a run. She passed the entrance to the cool night air, but there was no relief.
“Cinderella,” said Pip, keeping pace beside her. When he reached for her arm, she wrenched away. Anguish played across his face, but she could not remain here even for him.
“I have to go. I’m so sorry. I have to.” She picked up her skirts and ran for the grand staircase. Near the top, she stumbled. One of her slippers skittered away, too far out of her path, and in her frenzy to be gone, she left it.
Her carriage, as though sensing her every thought, waited at the base of the stairs. The fairy-footman opened the door, and she threw herself inside, where she kicked off her other shoe.
Stricken, she cast her gaze back toward the stairs as the carriage lurched.
Pip had followed her only as far as the top step. He stooped and carefully picked up the quartz slipper. A tortured breath caught in her throat, but she forced it out. The delicate shoe would disintegrate into fairy dust at midnight. Thank heavens the finicky fairy had not magicked her real shoes with a glamour.
But shoes were the least of her worries.
The ride home passed in a blur, her mind ablaze. The carriage clattered into the yard of her father’s estate—of Marielle’s estate?—and stopped in the patch of ground between the house and the garden. Her trembling hands slipped from the door latch. She caught it again and shoved it open, almost tumbling from the phantom carriage to the earth. She righted herself, her lovely, voluminous dress rustling around her.
Everything was as she had left it.
And yet, everything had changed.
Numb, sick with disbelief, she started toward the house.
“You’re home early.” The fairy’s voice floated toward her from the garden.
Eugenie halted, ice shooting through her veins. “Yes,” she said, her voice hollow.
“And how was the party?” The creature was drifting closer. Did she know? Was this the mischief she had spoken of on their first encounter?
Eugenie turned to search for her dubious benefactor, as though the sight of her might confirm those suspicions. The firefly heart manifested a split-second before the full humanoid form. The fairy regarded her with a faint smile, her head tilted at a questioning angle.
Giving a fairy too much information was asking for trouble.
“I’m tired,” said Eugenie, careful to keep her voice light. “You can take back your magic. I won’t need it anymore tonight.”
The smile broadened. “Of course.” She flicked one dainty wrist. The gorgeous dress disintegrated from Eugenie’s shoulders, replaced with her own worn clothing. Behind the fairy, the carriage evaporated into dust and swirled away on a whispering breeze.
A muffled thunk sounded in the night. Something glinted in the grass where the carriage had stood.
Eugenie’s breath hitched. Stricken, she darted past the fairy to scoop up the fallen object. Her smoke-colored slipper reflected the moonlight, cold to the touch.
She raised wide, horrified eyes. The fairy watched her with the satisfaction of a well-fed cat. “I… I don’t understand. Why didn’t it disappear?”
The creature drew close, her canny expression alight. She spoke in all innocence, but her speech stabbed like a dagger to the heart. “Temporary magic can only have temporary consequences. If something permanent comes from it, a piece of the magic becomes permanent as well to keep the balance. What permanent consequence came of your attending the masquerade tonight, Eugenie of Pluterra?”
No answer would pass Eugenie’s lips. She clutched the quartz shoe to her breast, her gaze unfocused as the evening’s terrible revelation resurfaced.
It couldn’t be—
“Did you already know?” she asked.
Feather-light fingers glanced off her shoulders as the ethereal creature swished past. “I’m your godmother, child. I know everything about you.”
Godmother. The term had to mean something different to fairy-kind than to humans. But when had this creature ensnared her, and how? Her grip tightened around the slipper, her knuckles white. She redirected her thoughts.
“Only one shoe?” she asked, forcing herself to look up into the pointed face.
The fairy’s smile dripped with indulgent sympathy. “There’s no balance in only one shoe.”
Despair escaped Eugenie’s throat. She launched from the grass and bolted for the stairs. The fairy made no attempt to stop her or to call her back. She passed through the front door and slammed it shut, her back against it as though a horde of monsters chased her.
She couldn’t breathe. The full weight of hopelessness crashed upon her. If everyone believed her dead, if Marielle owned this estate and everything within it, then Eugenie lived on her goodwill. She was a pauper, robbed of title, inheritance, and even her very existence.
But Marielle had always been so kind.
She forced an inhale as she slid to the floor. Eyes unfocused, she searched the shadowed ceiling for some remedy to this miserable ruin. Her whole world had turned upside-down, and the fairy’s magic only deemed such a calamity equal to a pair of glittering shoes.
7
Unmasked
A carriage rattled up the gravel to the front of the manor house. Eugenie, curled beneath a blanket next to the dying fire, listened as three bodies descended. The hackney drove away again as they tripped up the steps.
“I’m so tired!” Florelle declared, flouncing through the door.
“You’re tired?” said Aurielle. “You spent half the night off in the corner flirting with Signore Falco, and it only ended up being our loathsome cousin, Edward Lavande. Your face at the unmasking, Florie! You were almost as horrified as he was!” Her peal of laughter echoed off the high ceilings in the entryway, followed by a cry of rage from her sister.
“Girls, please.” Marielle said over the din. “You’re both exhausted.” Footsteps clacked across the tiled entryway. Eugenie, her back to the door, evened her breathing.
She couldn’t face her stepmother. Not yet.
“Eugenie’s asleep by the fire,” said Marielle in a hush. “Hurry upstairs and get some rest yourselves.”
Grumbling ensued. Florelle and Aurielle shoved one another back and forth as they mounted the staircase to the next floor.
Marielle lingered. “Eugenie,” she said, in a voice too forceful to ignore.
Feigning disorientation, Eugenie lifted her head. Her hair fell across her eyes, obscuring her view as she tilted her neck toward the doorway. “Hmm?”
“You left your shoes outside,” said Marielle. She held aloft the pair of worn slippers. “They’re soaked with dew.”
“Sorry,” Eugenie murmured, and she laid her head back down.
Her stepmother dropped the shoes within the room. She stayed for three breaths longer, as though she wished to ask something more, but then her footsteps retreated in a click-click-click across the entryway and up the stairs.
When three doors in the west wing had shut, Eugenie threw aside her blanket and sat up, miserable and restless. Two minutes passed with no further movement from the second floor. If last week was any indication, the Elles would sleep all morning and into the afternoon.
Like a ghost she drifted to the entryway, pausing only to slip her wet shoes on her feet. She pulled her threadbare cloak fro
m its hook by the door and swung it around her shoulders. As she stepped outside, she tossed the hood up over her head.
Dawn had come, but a sheet of gray clouds blocked any view of the sun on the horizon and mist lumbered across the ground. The melancholy world mirrored her mood. She drew her cloak tight and walked quickly to the lane.
The cold morning seeped into her bones, the road deserted except for her own crunching footsteps. She paused when a farmer’s wagon passed at a fork up ahead, obscured in the haze. It rumbled into the distance, the noise muffled around her. She shivered and continued onward, turning to follow its wake, toward the village of Hazelcross.
The cemetery lay beside the church, with the forest boundaries just beyond. She hadn’t come as often as she should have, but she had never found comfort among stone pillars and memorial inscriptions. Her dying mother had begged her not to mourn. When her father put on a cheerful face to hide his grief, Eugenie could do nothing less.
Her own illness after his death, a rheumatic fever, had plagued her for the better part of a year. Even the short walk to the church was beyond her stamina for several months afterward. Marielle had long since sold the estate horses—an expense they could only keep by dipping into Eugenie’s inheritance, she had claimed at the time. Eugenie had not returned to the cemetery more than once or twice since then.
And yet, according to Pip, the whole world believed she was a permanent resident there.
A misting rain began to fall as she crossed between the posts that marked the graveyard’s boundaries. She passed a black carriage with a pair of equally black horses—some other early mourner—and threaded through gravestones to the stateliest set in the far corner. Her parents’ monument, an edifice of white marble, glistened in the light rain. Ivy twisted up around its base, climbing toward the pair of names inscribed in the stone. It hugged her mother’s death date, obscuring the last number in the year.
Marielle had planted it herself to symbolize the wedded love between her late husband and his first wife. Four years ago, Eugenie had thought it a sweet gesture.
Soot and Slipper Page 5