Snow Read online

  She appreciated the thought and looked forward to the party. She had sat with her kind-seeming, if somewhat overeager, stepmother as they talked with tailors and artisans, shopped for masks, and chose the dress. Jessica wound up choosing not an animal or traditional bauta, but a simple white one, decorated with feathers and tiny silver six-pointed stars, held up by a slender wand and decorated with ribbons that flowed down like a drift of snow.

  It would take more than a party to set her at ease, though. Whenever her stepmother wasn’t looking, Jessica would watch her, looking for some sign of the murderess she might have been. The duke of Edgington and Henry found excuses to stay close by, but she wanted to know the truth for herself.

  She slept on a bed she did not remember, on pillows with the impressions of their owner bleached, washed, and pressed out. When not formally dressed she wore resting gowns, pretty things, airy and with trailing ribbons. She preferred looking at them than wearing them, but somehow sensed that being caught asleep naked would have been frowned upon in this world she didn’t remember well.

  She found an urge to sit next to or under the bed, with crumbs in her hand, as if to feed pigeons or mice, but none came. It’s been years since I was last here; if I trained them they probably all forgot. She found she could, if she desired, move so quickly and stealthily in darkened halls that no one, not even the butler, saw her. Maybe I used to meet an illicit lover. Jessica would ponder her skills while stealing cheese out of the pantry, where she was most comfortable—but not when people were there. She took the little gifts people gave her, jewelry and combs and things, and hid them under her bed for reasons she couldn’t understand or explain.

  “I’m a blank slate,” she told herself cheerfully in the mirror. “I can be anyone I want.”

  But even this wasn’t true.

  It was expected that the duke would propose to her that night, like something right out of a fairy tale. And if that did not happen, well, she was going to be reintroduced to a number of suitable suitors. She was nineteen, for heaven’s sake. She would be married in a year or two.

  As if on cue, her stepmother knocked rapidly and came in. Jessica hated that. There was a lock on her door, but reversed so that she could be locked in. It was the first thing she had noticed about the room.

  “Come dear, why don’t you take off that locket and wear a real necklace tonight,” the duchess suggested. She had an array of trinkety things in her hand, each probably worth a fortune.

  Jessica shook her head and touched the locket she always wore. It was slightly beaten and scratched and held the miniature of a mother she remembered no more than the woman before her. But still she refused to take it off.

  Frustrated, the duchess put on one of her fake smiles. “Well, its up to you, but it just looks a little … common. I’ll leave these here in case you change your mind.”

  She left the baubles on the bureau. Jessica might take one, for later, just in case—in case of what, she didn’t know.

  She descended the staircase in a grand entrance, the way she was expected. Her father took her by the fingertips and led her down to the floor, introducing her as he went. He held a mask but didn’t wear it; his moustache was waxed until it shone.

  Jessica had no idea of what kind of girl she was before her memory failed, but she thought that she might be wiser now. Perhaps her desperation to fill the void in her mind allowed Jessica to pick up quiet words and tense emotions that might otherwise be missed by those around her. A blank slate allowed Jessica to meet people she had known all her life as if for the first time.

  With suspicion.

  This man, for instance. The man who was her father was passably handsome, emotionless, boring, and, well, stiff as a prig. His wife, the duchess, was artificial and obviously scared of Jessica; probably because she was the only heir and was taking away everyone’s attention. The duchess was obviously a very vain person. It might be worth it to get married just to get away from those two, she thought wryly.

  The hall and ballroom were lit with hundreds of candles in little silver candleholders, the mirrors shining with their reflected light. Guests filled every nook and hall of the house. Ladies swished broad, elegant skirts trimmed with layers of silk and lace that cascaded in tiers, trains just skimming the floor. Long gloves covered bare arms; dark silk ribbons encircled bare necks and trailed down their blocks like streams of blood.

  The young men were slim and elegant and serious; the old men were handsome and jolly. All wore similar black suits with white shirts, as if to better show off their peacock women, and all offered to kiss Jessicas hand.

  The servants were beside themselves, also elegantly dressed and passing trays of goodies and drinks. She had overheard that this was the first party since her own fourteenth birthday—another mysterious occasion from her past about which she had yet to learn the whole truth. Waves of perfume hit her, musky and floral, light and overwhelming, and the sounds of laughter and music filled her head. It was all very, very beautiful—and she had the urge to grab a tray of food, a glass of champagne, and hide under the stairwell.

  She had a little card to write down people’s names for different dances; the blond duke had the first one. He bowed elegantly to her and offered her his hand; she took it.

  Everyone watched as he led her slowly across the floor. Somehow her feet knew how to dance, and he covered for her when she didn’t. His hair shone gold in the candlelight, his blue eyes were—Well, all right, he’s handsome. And obviously a decent sort for helping me out and bringing me home. But who is he?

  And, while were at it, who were those other people who he took me from? What happened to them?

  The blond duke leaned in and brushed his lips to her ear. “How has the duchess been treating you?” he whispered.

  “I don t trust her,” she whispered back.

  Everyone admired the apparently flirting couple—or gossiped about Jessica behind their gold and crimson papier-mâché masks, looking away quickly when she glanced in their direction. She found herself scanning the crowd, thinking she might recognize someone. Ridiculous, she knew. One mask caught her eye; a black grotesque in the form of a raven. For some reason it gave her a warm feeling.

  She kept her eye on the person wearing it through three dances, trying to work her way over to him. She thought she lost him at the fourth, a waltz, but he tapped her on the shoulder from behind her.

  “May I have this dance?” he asked, ignoring her dance card.

  “Of course.” She picked up her skirt and took his hand, unable to keep her eyes off his ebon mask.

  “This dance is mine,” another young man interrupted, face flush.

  “Oh, Sir,” a beautiful young woman in a cat mask approached the intruder, tapping him lightly on the shoulder, “My throat is parched. Would you kindly get me another glass?” She lowered her lids and looked up through her lashes at him.

  “Of course,” the man said, instantly smitten. He bowed and excused himself, leaving Jessica and the raven-man alone.

  She dropped her fan and picked up her train as he took her in his arms.

  “I’m sorry—I am sure you have heard about my … accident,” she apologized, for the seventeenth time that evening. “I do not recall you—you were announced—the Earl of Sussex, I believe?”

  “You do not remember me at all?” the man in the raven mask whispered. “Snow?”

  Why does that name sound familiar? She lifted up his mask, and there were the familiar brown eyes and glossy black hair. The man from the group of thieves in London.

  “I returned to the Clockwork Man—I have a cure for your memory,” he whispered.

  He spoke so intently. No one at Kenigh looked at her like that.

  “A spell? What are you talking about? It was a fit, an overheating of the brain….” But something wasn’t right. The room spun. “The other room, the parlor,” she whispered, “Get me out of here. Let us pretend we are trysting,”

  They danced off the floor an
d she laughed, loud and ringingly. He led her into the small study.

  “I have the components here,” Raven reached into his pocket. Jessica studied his face intently less concerned for her memory at the moment. There was something about him that felt more like home than home. “The duchess put a spell on you, we think, so if you ever woke up you wouldn’t remember who she was or what she did to you. The Clockwork Man said it probably wasn’t that strong a charm, like on Alan’s—you don’t remember that, of course. You were aleep.” He pulled out a nail with what looked like sheep’s wool wrapped around the top, and an old black feather. “I’m afraid I have to cut your palm with this….”

  She reached up and kissed him.

  Raven was surprised, but she put her hand around the back of his neck to keep him from pulling away. Her fingers entwined in his hair and feathers, and she remembered the ravens she used to watch from her window….

  Remembered?

  “Raven,” the name came back to her, with all of its original meanings.

  Her memories rushed in, hurting her head.

  “Raven,” she whispered again. Her stomach turned; her head felt crazy. “What … happened? I was with the duchess. In her apartment. She did something to me….”

  “Snow? You remember everything? The duchess put a—” Raven said, a little conftised and very flushed. He touched his lips and looked at the strange iron nail in his hand. “I guess I didn’t need this…. How …?”

  She smiled. “They say true love can always break a spell.”

  Raven opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He closed it again. Finally he changed the subject. “Do you remember visiting the duchess? In her house? She attached things to you…. It was more than two years ago….”

  Jessica—Snow—thought, and it was hard, like digging a hole. If she concentrated the hole widened a little. Layers of memory: her time with the Lonely Ones, two years of dreaming, her life before at Kenigh Hall …

  “I slept for almost three years,” she realized, sinking into a chair. “I lost three years of my life….” She shivered at the memory of sleep: always dreaming, almost waking up, but never quite.

  “You did sleep, but I don’t think you lost three years … you haven’t changed at all.”

  She looked up at him and realized he was right. Raven, once her height, was now several inches taller than she. His chest had broadened and he stood straighten There were little creases around his eyes, not quite wrinkles, and a light in his eye that wasn’t there before. He had a scattering of freckles, and some of his hair were actually feathers.

  He was almost three years older than her now.

  Jessica—Snow—opened her purse and took out a pocket mirror. She looked at herself and realized she did look the same, and that should have been strange. Why had no one on the estate noticed it? “I have changed,” she whispered. “Just not on the outside.”

  She still possessed the wisdom her erased memory had brought her; she still saw everyone at the estate as if for the first time, but now it was overlaid with layers of memory. The duke and duchess as people, not parents. Flawed people.

  And, now that she matched up what she knew about the duchess with her revelation, insane people, she realized.

  Raven knelt so that their faces were level. “You’re all right now, you’re safe with me. And the rest of us are here, too.”

  “Cat. Chauncey. The Mouser. Sparrow” She repeated them like a mantra, afraid of slipping away again. Raven helped her rise and led her to the door of the parlor so she could look out over the dancing crowds. At first, it just looked like a sea of silk, fans and ruffles. Then she looked again, as a Lonely One.

  In one corner a beautiful young woman posed, with black hair high on her head and a wicked, wicked grin, a cat mask held flirtatiously to her side. She was laughing loudly at something someone said…. She saw Snow and grinned at her. Candlelight caught her eyes just enough to show the slits; a flash of white revealed her fangs. The Mouser didn’t bother with a mask; he was talking politics with some men in the corner, but he too smiled at her. Sparrow was strolling casually up and down one of the hors d’oeuvres tables, looking too intently at the treats to see her. Alan actually waved; the harlequin mask he wore didn’t cover his smile, which she remembered like the back of her hand.

  The blond duke was there as well, chattering inanely at someone; Henry looked bored beside him.

  “Those two have been very kind to me,” Snow said. She saw Raven tense out of the corner of her eye. “Oh, settle down. I can see you have a lot to tell me once we get away from all this. What happened to the feathers on your hands?”

  Her fingers entwined in his hair and feathers, and she remembered the ravens she used to watch from her window….

  “Wait a moment,” she said uncertainly. “It cannot be …”

  A connection …

  A movement.

  She and Raven both turned at the same time, both realizing the presence of an intruder. She threw her mirror without thinking, at where she thought the persons head should be. It connected.

  “You didn’t learn that from your tutor,” the duchess said wryly, coming out of the shadows and touching the blood on her forehead. “And who is this? One of your little thieving friends—”

  The duchess stopped short. She and Raven were caught in each other’s stares.

  With exactly the same eyes.

  “You couldn’t have a child,” Snow—Jessica—said slowly, fitting clues from her childhood into place. “You tried all kinds of things. All of Alan’s strange tasks …”

  “You?” Raven cried« “You made us? Abandoned us? You, murderer?”

  “My … son …”

  “No son of yours!”

  Snow was putting it together now. The kitten that disappeared. Cat? But that cat was white … maybe it failed the first time. The mice whose babies went missing. Alan, stealing fledglings from the raven’s nest. The black blood leaking under the duchess’s door. The fact that she and the Lonely Ones came from nearly the same place.

  “Alan …” She knew she should do something about the murderous look in Raven’s eyes, but one remaining thing bothered her. She remembered the day Alan helped her escape, his sweat and fainting. “You had him under a spell….”

  “Not a spell,” the duchess said, never taking her eyes off Raven. “Not exactly. Mesmerism. His golden necklace resonates at the same wavelength as his brain. How many of you survived?” she asked Raven.

  “You have five children, you witch,” Raven spat, “who must hide from the sun and other people—five outcasts.”

  “Why are they so old?” Snow asked, “If you … made them as babies just a few years ago?”

  “They weren’t babies, exactly, when I … operated on them,” the duchess answered slowly. “Animals age much faster than humans. That is also one of the reasons it had such a … high mortality rate.”

  “’High mortality rate? And is that all Snow was, too?”

  “Attempting to use her heart was ill-thought and probably a little mad,” the duchess admitted. “But it might have worked.”

  And that was what made Raven leap for her throat; the simple coldness with which she spoke.

  “Raven, no!” Snow leaped between them, pushing the duchess out of the way. “No good can come of this!” She saw her father sending for the police, imagined her Raven stained with murder. Her hand brushed the duchess’s arm as she pushed the older woman out of the way.

  A bad spell turns back on the caster times three.

  She remembered Alan’s words as sparks blew purple around the two women. The spell on my memory—she cast it before I slept. What will it do to her?

  “What … where am I?” The duchess started to collapse; Snow caught her before she fell and lowered her gently to the couch.

  The duchess put a hand to her head. There was something slack about her features, Snow realized. A dullness to her eyes that wasn’t there before. “Maman …? Where is my maman?”
r />   She sounded … old. Confused. Her hair was still bright, and nothing physical had changed that Snow could see, but there was something missing in her face.

  The duke appeared in the doorway with two men. “What the devil is going on here?”

  Snow clasped the duchess’s hand. “My stepmother started to say something and pitched forward. Her cheeks are burning up! Get the doctor!” Where do such lies come from so easily? She thought about the Lonely Ones, and then remembered her childhood, full of lies.

  Chapter Forty

  ENDINGS

  The doctor was called. The party ended.

  Alan’s grandmother had been right—whatever mind-befuddling spell the duchess had cast on Snow had trebled back on the older woman. She could remember nothing except long stories from when she was a child. She had no short-term memory. The duchess had, in fact, turned into the somewhat lovable, scatterbrained grandmother type Snow had always wanted in her life.

  At first Snow doubted it was anything but an act. To test her theory she threatened to burn one of the duchess’s precious arcane books in front of her. Anne had shrugged helplessly and said she didn’t care, but that it might cause a bit of a mess. Shocked but convinced, Snow was forced to swallow her feelings of rage; the old woman before her had little or no connection to the duchess of a few days ago.

  The old duke had a manly breakdown over all of the recent mishaps in his family. He shed manly tears and was pitied and admired by all. When he emerged from his rooms a few days later he was a sadder but calmer man, who treated his wife carefully, but with a kindness and loving Snow could not remember witnessing before.

  Snow pretended to regain her own memories over the next few weeks even as it was obvious Anne had lost hers. Some cheerfully said that it must be some sort of sickness in the household, and if the girl had recovered her mind so would the old woman. Expensive doctors privately told the family that they did not think this was the case; it was more like the old duchess had had a stroke.