Soot and Slipper Page 7

  “Noon. We’re having lunch brought in shortly. Can you eat something?”

  She shook her head, her appetite nonexistent. Instead she peered to his friend, who lingered by the door with misgivings plain upon him. “What did the villagers say?”

  “It’s not important,” said Pip.

  A rebellious spark lit her countenance. “Of course it is.”

  He sat back on his heels. With resignation, he beckoned his friend to join them. “Go on. Tell her.”

  The friend perched on the edge of the nearest chair. His conviction of only moments before had fled. With utmost politeness, he asked, “Who is Nanette, my lady?”

  A leaden weight settled in her chest. “She was our maid. She left us three years ago, about a month after my illness set in. Marielle said she went home to her family, that they needed her help more than we did.”

  “You see?” Pip said, but his friend only shook his head.

  It wasn’t difficult to guess the source of their disagreement. Eugenie spoke her conclusion aloud, her voice dull. “Everyone in the village thinks I’m Nanette.”

  “We’ll sort it out,” said Pip.

  The friend jostled him with a foot to the back, but his contrition returned as he addressed Eugenie. “Everyone I spoke with said that Baroness Lavande and her two daughters live with only a maid to tend them—Nanette, who comes from a village somewhere east of here.”

  “A village that Theo’s about to set off in search of,” said Pip.

  His friend scowled.

  Eugenie, more hopeless than ever despite her rest, settled back in her chair. “Is that your name? Theo?” The friend, flustered, ducked his head in acknowledgement. Eugenie toyed with her fingertips. “And you think I’m Nanette too.”

  “I don’t—”

  “He doesn’t know what he thinks,” Pip interjected.

  “Nic, be serious,” said Theo.

  “Nic?” Eugenie asked before they could erupt into another argument. “Short for Nicolas?”

  “Dominic,” Pip said. He favored her with a rueful smile. “And now you know the extent of my imagination: Dominic the Domino.”

  Behind him, Theo snorted and muttered under his breath, “If only.”

  Pip swatted his legs. “If it’s all the same, Milady, I’m happy for you to continue calling me Sir Pip.”

  “I think we’re past the point of masquerading,” she said.

  Theo snorted again and received another swat for his troubles.

  “You,” said Pip in rebuke. “If you’re so convinced she’s not who she says she is, get a horse from the hostler and track down this village to the east.”

  “Leaving you to drive the carriage, I suppose,” said Theo with a bite of sarcasm.

  “We both know I’m perfectly capable.”

  Eugenie watched the interchange, unable to determine their relationship. Were they master and servant? But Theo didn’t look like any servant she had ever seen, and Pip treated him more like a brother or a close friend, even if he did order him around.

  And yet, Theo seemed the elder of the pair, so he should have ordered Pip around if they had equal standing.

  “You’re crazy,” said Theo, confirmation that he was no servant. “You’d send me off in this kind of weather, with hardly a lead to follow? It’s a wild goose chase.”

  “If you won’t believe Eugenie or me, then you deserve it,” said Pip, leaning back on his elbows as though he had not a concern in the world. “Go find your proof that she’s Nanette.”

  Theo glanced self-consciously toward Eugenie. “It’s not that I don’t believe you,” he said apologetically. “It’s just… I was at her funeral. We all were. Practically the whole country saw her body lowered into the earth. By the time we’d all cast in our handful of dirt, the gravediggers had hardly any work left to do. The whole of Jacondria believes that Eugenie of Pluterra is dead and buried.”

  Her eyes slid shut, his words a knell upon her soul.

  “Get your horse and go,” said Pip, more irritated than angry.

  Theo kept his chair. “Think what this means, Nic. You’re saying that Baroness Lavande faked her stepdaughter’s death and stole her inheritance.”

  “Yes,” Pip said on a hiss.

  “You’ve never liked her, not since—”

  “Never mind that.”

  “But it makes no sense. Why would she then allow the same stepdaughter to come to the royal masquerades and move among the nobles who believe her dead?”

  “She made her leave again before the unmasking,” said Pip.

  “She didn’t let me go at all,” said Eugenie. She opened her eyes to the pair’s confused gazes upon her. The leaden weight on her heart intensified. She gathered the fur coverlet almost to her chin, huddling in its softness.

  “What—” Pip began.

  “She asked me not to go. She wants Florelle and Aurielle to find husbands and said I might be a distraction for any of their prospective suitors.”

  “I’ll say,” Theo muttered, eyeing her from top to bottom. Whatever else he disapproved, it wasn’t her looks—at least not in comparison with her stepsisters.

  Eugenie flushed crimson and continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “I agreed to stay home. But then I didn’t.”

  “So who was your benefactor?” asked Pip. “Was it the same seamstress who made their costumes? The one they refuse to disclose to anyone?”

  She slouched a fraction deeper into her chair. “I made their costumes.”

  “You?” said Theo. His expression twisted. “If you’re a nobleman’s daughter, how could you possibly know how to sew like a tradeswoman?”

  Her eyes flashed. “Spend weeks in a sickbed and you’ll learn just about anything to relieve the boredom. I started taking dresses apart at the seams and piecing them back together again. It’s not hard once you know how everything fits.”

  “So you made your own costumes,” Pip said, though bewilderment still hovered around him.

  “No.” Eugenie averted her attention to the window, where a thread of cold air seeped in from the gray daylight beyond.

  “Then who—?”

  “What happened to my slipper?” she asked, fiddling with her blanket. “Do you have it with you? I’m going to need it back.”

  “I don’t have it,” he said.

  Her gaze snapped to his face, her breath tight in her lungs. “Where is it?”

  He opened his mouth as though to make excuses, but his expression turned apologetic. “With the queen. She saw it in my hands when I returned to the masquerade, and she asked me for it.”

  Dread plunged through Eugenie like a vat of ice water. Blood drained from her cheeks and an odd light-headedness warned her against any sudden movement.

  Fairy mischief, indeed.

  “Who is your benefactor?” Pip asked.

  “My godmother,” she said in a listless voice.

  He sat up straight. “You have a godmother? Then she can vouch for who you are.”

  A cynical noise escaped her throat. “But no one would believe her. Even I wouldn’t.” Confusion descended on Pip and Theo both. Eugenie, determined to have everything out in the open at last, leaned forward, interlacing her fingers and wringing them. “I don’t have a godmother, not really. It was a fairy. She showed up in the garden after the Elles left for the masquerade last week, and she said if I returned before midnight that none of the magic would cause any permanent consequences.”

  Pip’s grave expression mirrored on Theo’s face. Perhaps they were brothers, or cousins. A fluttering, half-desperate laugh tumbled from Eugenie’s lips. She tossed her hands up in defeat. “I just wanted to go to a party. We were living in poverty and it was my fault, because Marielle refused to touch my inheritance for her own comforts—or so she always said.” Her words choked on a sob. She looked to the wall, willing the emotion away.

  “You bargained with a fairy?” Theo asked. “So you’re fairy-cursed now on top of everything else?”

&
nbsp; Eugenie shook her head. “The fairy said she couldn’t curse me. She already knew my name, and she swore the magic was only temporary. And it was, the first time. The shoes remained behind last night because I learned that everyone thinks I’m dead—a permanent consequence instead of a temporary one. And I think… I think that’s the whole reason the fairy wanted me to go.” She locked gazes with Pip, who wore an unreadable expression. Her voice turned piteous. “You do believe me, don’t you?”

  A tense moment passed. Would he deny her? Declaim anything to do with her, all because of a fairy’s mischievous intervention?

  But when he finally spoke, he said nothing of the fairy at all. “You have the other shoe?” he asked.

  She nodded, bemused.

  “Good.” He pushed from the floor, his manner brusque. “Theo, get a horse from the hostler.”

  “But—”

  “Now.”

  Any fight vanished on that iron command. Theo hefted from his chair and ushered out the door without another word. Pip, in his absence, paced to the writing desk and back, his movement swift.

  The fairy’s involvement changed everything. It undermined her whole story: fairies could alter a person’s looks, or their memories. Anyone who dealt with fairies became unreliable and untrustworthy in the aftermath. Eugenie, conscious of her mistake, pushed the coverlet aside and slowly stood.

  Pip paused halfway across the room, an inquiry in his eyes.

  She plucked up her cloak, mostly dry now, from where it hung near the fire. “I think it’s time for me to go home,” she said in little better than a whisper. “They’ll wake up soon if they haven’t already.” But when she stepped toward the door, he blocked her path.

  “You can’t go back there.”

  A harrowed little laugh escaped her throat. “Then where am I to go? The only place I have in this world is as a servant in my own house.”

  He grasped her arms below the shoulders and looked her square in the eyes. “Eugenie, there’s a body in your grave. We don’t know how that person died, whether it was natural causes or whether—” His voice cut out before he could pronounce the fatal accusation.

  Anxiety laced her ribcage tighter than a corset. “Marielle wouldn’t kill someone.” Even as the words left her mouth, she second-guessed them. Her stepmother had always acted cordially to her, but there was an underlying ruthlessness about her that unsettled Eugenie.

  Pip’s somber demeanor in no way allayed her fears. “How do you know that? She convinced the whole country that you’re dead. Do you think she expects to keep you hidden on that estate forever?”

  What did Marielle mean to do with her? How would she keep up the charade when Eugenie became old enough to claim her inheritance? How would she react if Eugenie insisted on going to the next masquerade, or if she asked to be presented at court? Nothing made sense anymore.

  She shook the troubling questions away, but her panic escalated nonetheless. “If she intended to kill me, she might have done it any time these past three years. Why would she let me live if she were such a villain?”

  His grip upon her arms tensed. “I don’t know. But I can’t let you go back there.”

  “I have nowhere else to go, Pip. She doesn’t know that I know. If I get home before she wakes up, she won’t even suspect. And maybe the best thing to do would be to ask her outright—”

  “You can’t confront her. You don’t know what she’s capable of.”

  Eugenie favored him with a skeptical frown. “She’s barely a dab of a thing. And if she has such terrible plans for me, what do you think she’ll do if I suddenly disappear?”

  He blinked, his gaze unfocused as he digested this question. Eugenie stooped to catch his attention again. Her voice dropped to a near-whisper.

  “Theo said you never liked her. Why?”

  Pip’s mouth pulled to one side. He averted his gaze. “It’s nothing. I don’t care what she does if she finds you gone. If you go back to that house, I—”

  But he didn’t complete the sentence. His hands trembled on her shoulders and he looked so torn that Eugenie didn’t know what to think.

  “Why have you never liked Marielle?” she quietly asked.

  “She’s a gold-digger,” he said, flint in his words and his gaze fixed upon the wall. “She married for a title and fortune, wasted her first husband’s estate, and then married your father for another fortune—and she staged your death when your father left her nothing more than a pittance. Why should I like her? Eugenie, as your friend, as someone who cares deeply that you remain safe in this world, I beg you not to return to that house.”

  “And where do you propose I go instead?” She peered up at him, wondering how he might respond. Was he willing to offer his protection, and could she even accept such a thing if he did?

  But the offer didn’t come.

  “Go to the queen,” he said. “Plead your case. She can reinstate your family title and give you protection.”

  “And how do I prove to her who I am?” Even as he opened his mouth to respond, she added, “And don’t tell me to rely on the prince. He might believe, as Theo does, that I’m an impostor.”

  “He’ll vouch for you,” said Pip, a stubborn set to his mouth. “I swear to you he will.”

  He couldn’t swear any such thing with assurance, but Eugenie recognized when someone was past reasoning. “Any proof of who I am lies in that manor house, Pip,” she said, and she gently skirted from his grasp. “The family portrait from when I was a child, my sketchbooks and my diary…” Even her letters from the prince, if those could serve as evidence, she had squirreled away in a packet beneath her bed so the Elles would never find them.

  “And the fairy shoe?” he asked, his gaze distant again.

  She nodded. She’d hidden it last night after bolting into the house.

  Indecision warred upon his face. At long last he gripped her hands and locked eyes with her. His intensity pierced her to her core. “Swear to me that you won’t confront her.”

  Eugenie hesitated. “I—”

  “Please, I beg of you. I won’t have a moment’s peace until you’re free of that house, of that woman. Swear you won’t confront her.”

  “All right. I swear.” It was more for his sake than hers. She couldn’t imagine her stepmother physically lashing out against anyone. Marielle’s words could be sharp, cutting, but she had never resorted to physical violence.

  Except, perhaps, against the unknown body in Eugenie’s grave…

  The vow elicited a breath of relief from Pip. He swallowed and regrouped himself. “Go through the rest of your day as though it were any other. Don’t act suspicious, don’t gather your things. I have an idea, but it might take time to orchestrate. Will you meet me tonight so I know nothing has happened to you?”

  Her brows arched. “Meet you where?”

  “Isn’t there a garden or something on the estate?”

  “It’s right next to the house. The Elles would be able to see you out the windows.”

  “I’ll keep to the bushes. Make an excuse to take a walk at dusk. I’ll tell you my plans then.”

  It seemed a simple enough request. When she agreed, he pressed her hands, his eyes bright.

  He drove her home, too, almost to the manor house. The carriage stopped in a bend just out of sight from the estate, and Pip hopped from the driver’s box to open her door. The swath of gray overhead still spit an occasional raindrop, but it was nothing to the morning’s downpour.

  “Remember: act natural,” Pip said as he handed her to the ground, though he looked like he would sooner bundle her back into the carriage than let her go.

  On impulse, she pressed her palm to his cheek. “It’s all right.” She sounded more confident than she felt. Everything since last night’s masquerade played upon her thoughts like a nightmare. Perhaps she would wake up in her own bed soon. Or perhaps she could divine the truth of Marielle’s treachery. She would certainly learn nothing by running away.

&nbs
p; He kissed her fingers and withdrew, his hands in fists at his side and his eyes fixed upon her. Eugenie felt his gaze every step of her retreat. When she reached the curve that would take her beyond his sight, she paused to raise her hand in one last farewell.

  He returned the gesture, somber though his expression was. And yet, the mere fact that he waited at all warmed her soul. After a deep breath to boost her confidence, she continued up the road and past the fence posts that marked the estate boundaries. She listened for sounds of a retreating carriage, but they did not come until she was almost to the house, the clatter hardly more than a whisper carried along the road.

  9

  Suspicion Ignited

  The manor house was quiet. Eugenie slipped inside and set her shoes and her cloak by the door. Her pulse thundered in her throat. Every inch past the fence posts had increased her paranoia, but surely she was in no danger here.

  “Out for a walk?”

  She started, barely stifling a shriek, and spun to find her stepmother at the top of the stairs. Marielle looked down at her with a question on her pretty face.

  Act natural.

  “Yes,” Eugenie said, her hand at her heart.

  The woman descended like a queen, one hand upon the balustrade. The poise that Eugenie had always admired twisted from refinement into a sign of dominance. The fingers upon the wooden railing claimed ownership. Every step was the step of a master in her own house.

  “You didn’t walk far, I hope,” Marielle said, a note of concern in her voice, “especially on a gray day like this. You know how delicate your health is.”

  “Yes. I mean—I didn’t walk far.” Realizing that her stepmother may have seen her coming from the lane, she added, “I only went a little up the road.”

  “And did you get rained on?”

  Eugenie shrank from the woman’s piercing scrutiny and lied again. “Not very much.”

  Marielle made an exasperated noise. “You know how dangerous it is for you to overexert yourself, and getting caught in a rainstorm is only going to make the stress on your body that much worse.”

  This was a pattern Eugenie could easily navigate. Marielle fussed about her health on almost a daily basis. She’d always assumed it was her stepmother’s way of showing concern.