Page 81 of The Trick of It

“The only other woman I’ve ever met like that one you have here with you,” Merlin was saying as he was shuffled over to sit on the corner of his bed, watching Rhys place the lanterns on the wooden table at its side, “was your mother, the Baroness Selwyn.”

Rhys hesitated, his throat squeezing in surprise. “What?”

“She wouldn’t have had me,” Merlin said fondly, giving a little sigh as he kicked his shoes off and climbed backward on the pillows, still fully clothed. “Even if I’d been brave enough to ask. But oh, how I admired her. She was the best part of visiting Brighton in the summers. The absolute pinnacle.”

“Willa?” Rhys repeated stupidly, turning to squint at Merlin. “I didn’t know you were friends.”

“Oh, yes, yes,” the old man said, nodding. “She was a vibrant and untamable creature, your mother.”

“She wasn’t my mother,” he replied. “I had a mother, but she died. She was my … patron?”

“I know she didn’t birth you, boy,” said Merlin, his pale irises wide and shiny as he stared past the room and into something else, a time that came before. “But she always called you her son. She wouldn’t say it of some of the others. The ones who already had parents or who wouldn’t like it. She called two of the girls daughter, and only one boy son. Only you. And oh, she spoke of you often. She was so proud of you. My son, Rhys, whose cleverness burns so bright, it will not let him sleep.”

Rhys was frozen in place, his hands still hovering over the stupid turnips as his heart had fallen sideways and was thumping in protest.

She had said that?

About him?

“I have been dying for about a year,” Merlin continued, blinking away the reverie and turning his focus onto Rhys. Onto the present. He gestured at the foot of the bed, inviting him to sit, and did not speak again until Rhys had complied. “I found out in Brussels, last October. It might have been All Hallows’ Eve, come to think of it. Obviously, the festival was not my focus at the time.”

“Cancer,” Rhys said softly. “That is what Father Wheeler called it.”

“Yes, how did he know?” Merlin mused, shaking his head.

“In your stomach?” Rhys guessed. “Is that why you eat the ice?”

“In my whole body by now, I’d wager,” Merlin said with a sigh. “Down to the blood and bones. But yes, it started in my stomach. I thought I’d caught a bug. But I knew in short order it was worse. They put me in a ward and filled me with laudanum and cut me and argued and fussed. And while I was in that state, I started to get visitors.”

“‘Visitors,’” Rhys repeated, unable to articulate anything else.

“It was odd,” said Merlin, frowning. “I know for a fact some of them were real. Nini came to see me because her circus was also in Brussels at the time. She was there. She was real. She remembers it too. But then people who died under a guillotine twenty years ago were there too, sitting at my bedside, telling me tales, chuckling over old follies. I couldn’t tell which was which. And that was when I saw your mother.”

Rhys could only stare. He could not speak because if he’d opened his mouth, his heart would surely leap out of it.

“She sat by my bed and sketched pictures on her keepsake cards. Cards she’d sent and received between us for many years, and she told me about you. About how I reminded her of you and you reminded her of me,” he said dreamily. “She drew that timepiece I sent you. She showed it to me and let me hold it and then put it next to my bedside and sketched its impression on a little card of vellum. I’m sure of it. Carpe noctem. But the surgeons told me no lady had come by. No lady could have drawn it and I must have done it myself in my fugue. They showed me the charcoal on my own fingers. They pointed out that I had other cards, just like that one, still blank in a pile.”

Merlin shifted, frowning and shaking his head. He looked at Rhys and asked, “So was she real? Was that the living Willa Selwyn? Or was she a spirit? Do you know, Rhys Caradoc? Can you tell me that?”

He shook his head, his throat flexing over a difficult swallow. “Did you ask Madame Ivanova? How to tell the difference?”

“Of course I did, boy,” Merlin said wearily. “She said she doesn’t see them. She only hears them. But that you have seen one before. A spirit. And you told her so.”

“Hughes,” Rhys murmured. He tried again to swallow, as he had failed the last time. “I did. When I was small. She said it wasn’t him.”

“She said that what you saw wasn’t your uncle,” Merlin corrected. “She said the same thing to me. If you really are a changeling, lad, then that man wouldn’t have been your real relative. Would he have? Because you are an imposter in the human world.”

Rhys startled, a surprised little chirp of laughter escaping his throat, which he reached up to touch as the moisture found its way back through the pipes inside again. “Hughes always said he was a changeling. That all people like us are,” he told Merlin. “Look for the vagabonds and vagrants, the odd ones and the unusual. Those are the changelings. If he were here tonight, he’d claim everyone in this house is one, except maybe that prig footman of yours with the golden hair. Or perhaps him too. Fae are sometimes a bit too precious and proper to hide their true nature.”

“Well, then, there you have it,” Merlin said with a nod. “You saw Hughes. But you did not see your uncle.”

“Ivanova …” Rhys began, wincing. “I thought she was a complete fraud. I’ve seen her act. Twice. It was cold reading and letter guessing and nonsense with knocking and lodestones. But when she said that to me … she … I don’t know.” He shook his head, running his hands over his hair. “She knew things she shouldn’t have known.”

“Perhaps her gift is sporadic,” Merlin suggested, “but her expenses are not.”

Rhys chuckled and gave an acknowledging quirk of his head. “Point well made.”

He could almost hear Hughes in the room with them just now, gloating over being agreed with by someone as regal and respected as Merlin.