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Felicity is hard at work. Her brush dips from pot to pot, and when I see the castle emerge, I smile and add the craggy mountains of the Winterlands behind it. Miss McCleethy walks between the tables, her hands behind her back. She makes improvements with her paintbrush, correcting a bush here, a flower there. It is quite annoying and I have the thought of painting a mustache on Miss McCleethy.
“What is this?” Miss McCleethy frowns at our picture of the Borderlands in progress.
“A fairy tale,” Felicity answers. She adds touches of purple berries to a tree.
“Fairy tales are rather treacherous. How does this one end?”
Felicity’s smile is a challenge. “Happily ever after.”
“It’s a bit dreary.” Miss McCleethy grabs a paintbrush and dabs a bright pinkish orange over the churning gray of my distant Winterlands sky. It doesn’t improve it; it only makes it into a muddy mess with a false dash of color.
“That helps,” she says. “Carry on.”
“Monster,” Felicity mutters under her breath. “Promise you won’t give her a drop of magic, Gemma.”
“I shouldn’t share with her if my life depended upon it,” I vow.
In the afternoon, the Gypsy women come bearing baskets of jams and other sweets. We slather jam on bread, not caring about our paint-smeared fingers. Miss McCleethy asks if one of the Gypsies might be hired to chop firewood, and a short while later, Kartik comes, and the heat rises in my face. He removes his coat, rolls his shirtsleeves to his elbows, and takes the ax to a tree.
Miss McCleethy leaves us so that she might inquire after the East Wing’s progress, and I sneak over to where Kartik is working. His shirt is damp and clings to him. I offer him water. He glances toward McCleethy, who pays not a whit of attention to us. Satisfied, he gulps the water and wipes the back of his hand across his forehead.
“Thank you,” he says, smiling in a curious way.
“What is so amusing?” I ask.
“I’m reminded of the oddest dream I had.” He rubs his thumb across his lower lip.
The blush begins at my toenails and whooshes up to my face. “Well,” I say, fumbling with the water bucket. “It was only a dream.”
“If you remember, I believe in dreams,” he says, gazing at me in such a way that I find I must look elsewhere to keep from kissing him again.
“I…I need to speak to you about an urgent matter,” I say. “Mr. Fowlson paid me a visit in London. We’d been invited to dinner at the Hippocrates Society. He was waiting outside.”
Kartik pulls the ax from its resting place in the tree stump. His jaw tightens. “What did he want?”
“The magic. I told him I’d given it to the Order, but he didn’t believe me. He threatened trouble, and when Thomas returned home the next evening, he told me he’d been asked to join an exclusive gentlemen’s club. There on his lapel was the pin of the Rakshana.”
“That would not be given idly. He is being courted,” Kartik says.
“I must meet with the Rakshana,” I say. “Can you arrange it?”
“No.” He brings the ax down with new determination.
“They could hurt my brother!”
“He’s his own man.”
“How can you be so hard? You had a brother.”
“Once.” He swings the ax again, and the log is cleaved in two.
“Please…,” I say.
Kartik glances again at the East Wing, then nods toward the laundry house. “Not here. In there.”
I wait inside the laundry. There are no washerwomen today; the old wood-and-stone room is empty. Impatiently, I pace, past the stove where the flatirons are lined up to be heated. I step around the big copper tubs and bang my knuckles against the ribbed washboards lying inside, flit past the hooks holding the possers—those long sticks with flared ends for pushing the clothes about. I give the mangle’s wheel a churn. I know it works wonders on the wet clothes, squeezing every bit of water from them as they pass through its long rollers. How I wish I could pass my sodden thoughts through the machine, releasing the heaviness weighing me down.
At last Kartik comes. He stands so close I can smell the grass and sweat on him. “You don’t know what the Rakshana can do,” he warns.
