“Did I say it was the Binding?” Her eyes glinted with amusement. “Do this thing for me, and I can give you the thing you wanted most, the thing you believed you’d lost forever.”
My eyebrows drew together. What was she talking about?
Lady Berri waved her hand and I heard the distant, far-off chime of a bell. Then footsteps in a neighboring room and the sound of a doorway opening onto the hall. More footsteps, and then a gentle tap at the door.
“Lady Berri?” The voice was masculine and somehow familiar, though muffled though the wood.
My hammering pulse accelerated. Gábor?
The door opened. A gentleman’s booted foot stepped into the room. My eyes traveled upward, over the pressed trousers, the exquisitely cut coat, the striped Ascot he wore around his neck. At last I nerved myself to look at the gentleman’s face. Really, Anna, what are you afraid of?
The honey hair and grey eyes were familiar to me from old dreams, though I’d not seen his image in recent months, dreaming or waking.
“Freddy?” I sprang to my feet.
Freddy smiled his old familiar smile and spread his arms wide.
I rushed toward him. His familiar smell, of tobacco and cinnamon, made my stomach swim with both longing and revulsion.
I lifted my hand—and slapped him. “That is for lying to me.” I hit his other cheek while he gaped at me. “And that is for abandoning me.”
“Ow!” Freddy rubbed his cheek and scowled at me. “I never lied to you.”
He did not deny my other charge.
I swung back to Lady Berri. “I will help you. But not for him. For myself. And for my brother, James.”
Her eyebrows lifted.
“If I help you break this spell, I want you to gift him some magic also.”
“Very well.”
Some of the tightness in my body eased. “When must we do this?” My magical education had been limited, but I knew timing was critical to many spell-bindings.
“All Hallows Eve,” Lady Berri said. “The season for Unmaking is best. Winter would perhaps be better, but I hope to be home to England by then.”
Less than a week away. But . . . “I thought All Saints Day was stronger.”
Lady Berri nodded. “True. But All Saints Day is a high holy day, and dissolution magic might be unpredictable.” She stood, signaling the end of our interview. “Thank you for your help, my dear. Lady Pázmandy is hosting a ball that night. You will leave the ball with me. Please let your Grandmama know. I will have you back by morning.”
I shivered a little, thinking of a long, cold, nighttime ritual. At least I had not long to dread it. One week more, and the entire shape of my life might change.
I turned to leave, but Freddy caught my hand.
“Might I escort you home, Anna?”
I flinched away from the grating intimacy of my given name. “I suppose you may.”
I did not take the arm he proffered me. I preceded him down the stairs, and in the lobby, I took my gloves from Jenny and pulled them on, refusing Freddy’s aid with my cloak. “Jenny can do that.”
Jenny cast Freddy an evil eye that might have amused me had I not been so vexed with him myself.
Outside, a cool wind had picked up, sending leaves scuttling down the street and raining newly liberated leaves onto our heads and shoulders. I hunched into my cloak.
Freddy took my hand and threaded it through his arm. He tried to press my gloved fingers against his side, but I tugged my hand away.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
Freddy looked nonplussed, as if such a forthright question had robbed him of the chance to make his case more gracefully. Good.
“Lady Berri sent me a letter some weeks ago suggesting I might like to revisit our acquaintance.”
Something shriveled inside me. “You mean she ordered you to come.”
Again that disconcerted look on his face. Doubtless he remembered me all amiableness and acquiescence. Well, I was not that girl any longer.
“She . . . I . . . that is. Da–dash it, Miss Anna, what’s happened to you?”
I fluttered my lashes at him and answered, in the sweetest tones I could muster, “I was jilted, sir, and discovered I enjoy my independence. In short, I grew up.”
Freddy recovered quickly enough, letting his eyes sweep me up and down. “So I see. I admired the girl, but the woman before me is increasingly intriguing.”
I laughed. “Is that the best you can do?”
“Anna, I’m trying. You’re making this terribly difficult.”
I faced him. “And why should I make this easy for you?”
Jenny inched forward, her head cocked to one side as she tried to hear our conversation over the wind. At my words, she smiled.
A rueful grimace crossed Freddy’s face. I liked him better in that moment than I had since his reappearance. “Look, what if we admit I was an ass and begin afresh?”
I could enjoy this new dynamic, where Freddy was the supplicant and I the disperser of favors. We started walking again. “Isn’t that still making things easy for you?”
“Yes, but,” here Freddy summoned the boyish grin that always made my insides liquefy, “I am the pampered, useless, scion of a very wealthy house, and I’m afraid I’m rather weak. Please be merciful, lady.”
It was impossible to remain stern in the face of such an appeal. I sighed. “I won’t promise anything, but I will hear you out.”
We’d reached the Korzó. A flower-seller stood near the promenade railing with a basket of late blooms. Freddy dropped a couple of krajcár coins into the old woman’s palm and returned with a single red rose.
The scent of roses, a thin note above the fall smell of wood fire and river water, called back memories of Elizabeth’s debut.
Freddy must have been reminiscing along similar lines, because he frowned at the rose as he handed it to me. “I think of you every time I see these. You, in a garden, looking impossibly pretty and impossibly young at the same time. Do you know why I ran away?”
I’d asked myself this a thousand times, flagellating myself with endless variations on the theme. “Because you discovered I had no magic?”
Freddy dropped his eyes. “That is part of it, I admit, though I’m not proud of myself. I really had no idea until that night, until Elizabeth . . . I don’t say I was right, only that there are a lot of expectations for a fellow like me. One is that I marry well.”
Coldness that had nothing to do with the wind prickled me. “Is that why you’re here? Lady Berri told you she had a way to fix my defect and suddenly I was bride material?”
Freddy took a deep breath. “No—no. I haven’t been able to forget you, not all these months later. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know where to find you. I hoped you’d be back in London for the season next year.”
And if it was too late then? If I’d fallen for a dashing Hungarian baron? “A letter given to my father would have found me easily enough.”
“And what would I say to your father? ‘I’m sorry I behaved so unforgivably, but I’d like a second chance?’”
“Something like that.”
Freddy pulled off his top hat and ran one hand through his curls in frustration. “Anna, I think I’m in love with you. I thought so before, but then I got scared. You were so young, and then I discovered you had no magic and your father wanted me to marry Elizabeth of all people. I didn’t know what to do. I panicked, and then you were gone to Hungary, and no one could say when you’d be back.”
“Elizabeth said you kissed her,” I said, picking up a random thread from his speech. My body was betraying me again. Some part of me wanted to believe Freddy. This was familiar. This was easy. This was nothing like what I’d felt for Gábor: the prickly uncertainty of a dark-eyed man with angled cheeks and a sense of honor so bright I paled in comparison.
“What?” Freddy jerked back in surprise. “I never did.”
I fingered the petals of the rose in my hand and looked down the Duna to Széchenyi’s chain bridge, still under construction, the first permanent structure to link Buda and Pest. “Lord Markson Worthing. You let me believe you loved me; you let me think that promises existed between us when, in fact, there was nothing but air-dreams on my part. Perhaps you do find me attractive—more now that Lady Berri has made her offer—but I am not sure I can trust your promises.”
Freddy closed his eyes briefly. “That is . . . exceedingly frank. Will you at least think on it? Will you allow me to call?”
I had a sudden vision of Freddy coming with Mátyás and me to one of the crowded, smoky coffeehouses and imbibing the brew of revolutionary talk. I blinked. Of course Freddy wouldn’t follow me there. No doubt he envisioned sedate strolls along the Korzó, or leisurely rides in a carriage drawn by a pair of perfectly matched horses.
I hesitated. Freddy might claim he had changed, but I had, too.
“I like you, Freddy, I do. Once I believed I could build a life with you. But I don’t think you and I want the same things anymore.”
“I don’t understand. You want to be part of high society, you want a life where you are accepted, feted, adored. I can give you all those things.”
He was right. I had wanted all those things—I wanted them still, for all that my weeks of listening to revolutionary talk made me want other things, too: independence, greater equality. But I knew Freddy, whatever he had told me in those first infatuated weeks, did not really want to see a society of equals. And there was the little matter of my magic.
“You can give me those things,” I agreed. “But only if Lady Berri can cure me of my Barrenness. And I think, on the whole, I would rather be courted by a man whose love does not hinge on such conditions.”
Such a bewildered expression of hurt filled Freddy’s face that my heart clenched. I put one hand on his arm, and when I spoke next, my words were as gentle as I could make them. “I think it’s for the best, Freddy. You and I were never going to suit.”
“But I love you, Anna.”
A piece of my heart broke, that Freddy should tell me this now, when the words no longer carried their weight. I wished I could package those words and send them to the girl I used to be, the one who longed so desperately to hear them. I could not regret I was no longer the girl who was madly, uncomplicatedly in love with Freddy, but I was sorry to relinquish entirely the dreams I’d once had of him.
“Loving someone isn’t the same thing as suiting them. You need a wife with power; I may never be that wife. And I—I need someone who can love me as I am, not as I could be.”
“Do you love me?” Freddy asked.
I hesitated, sorting through possible answers. I did love you once. You broke my heart. “My loving you won’t change our situation.”
“Is there someone else?”
I fingered the rose stem, remembering the flowers he’d brought for Elizabeth. Freddy did not deserve the truth. “No.”
Freddy snorted, as if he did not believe me. “You’ve persuaded some minor Hungarian lordling to take you, have you? Well, I hope you think of me frequently, and the wealth and position you might have had.”
My temper flared. Any regret I’d felt at my refusal was assuaged by Freddy’s idiocy. “I’ve no plans to marry anyone. In any case, it’s quite ridiculous to throw your wealth and position in my face when you’ve never actually offered it to me. Do, please, go away—before I lose my temper entirely.”
Freddy bared his teeth in a gesture more snarl than smile and stomped away.
I let the rose fall into the river below.