“We…don’t know it was him, not for certain,” said Clover, wrapping ribbons around the worn slippers.
“Oh, it was him all right!” The familiar boiling-blood sensation began to heat her fingers. She recalled the cold deadness of his eyes when he pressed the brooch into her hand. Azalea snatched the silver handkerchief from her apron pocket.
“Tell Tutor I won’t be to lessons,” she said. “Invent some sort of disease. I’m going to get it back.”
Azalea hardly paid attention to the glimmering silver-white forest as she hurried through, hot temper speeding her steps. The stale, stagnant smell of the pavilion suffocated her, so different from the gardens. It felt dead. She shoved the silver willow leaves aside, click click clicked over the bridge to the pavilion.
Keeper lay balanced across the railing, between the arched sides of the lattice. His cloak dripped to the floor, a strand of midnight hair over his eyes. He looked like a black, serpentine cobweb clinging to the lattice. Only his long, gloved fingers moved.
They crawled and wound about a scarlet-colored web with uncanny dexterity, a needle dangling as he did so. He was playing spider’s crib with Flora’s embroidery thread. And while he played, he murmured a nursery rhyme:
“How daintily the butterfly
Flits to the spider’s lace
Entranced by glimm’ring silver strings
Entwined with glist’ning grace.
“How craftily the spider speaks
And whispers, ‘All is well,’
Caresses it with poison’d feet
And sucks it to a shell.”
“Where is it?” Azalea stood in the middle of the dance floor, arms crossed, so tense she could hear the blood rushing in her ears.
Keeper twisted his hands, the string wrapping even more weblike about his fingers.
“Ah, my lady,” he said.
“Where is it?”
Keeper gracefully leaped from the railing to the floor.
“Do you know why I am called Keeper?” he said. “Because I keep. You have known me thus long.”
“Give it back.”
“No. It is the first thing I have that is your mother’s. I will keep it.”
The tight parts of Azalea’s dress—her corset, the cuffs of her sleeves, her collar—pulsed.
“Oh, no hard feelings, my lady,” said Keeper. “I simply think you are not trying hard enough. Your mother’s brooch should give you all…encouragement.”
The hard, burning heat inside Azalea went snap.
“It won’t,” she spat. “Keep the stupid brooch. Keep the stupid pocket watch. Keep the gloves and sampler and whatever else you’ve stolen. You can enjoy them on your own. We’re not coming down here again. We never should have trusted you in the first place.”
She swept around, skirts twisting hard against her, eyes searing, and strode to the entrance. Keeper laughed.
“One last dance, my lady, before I am never to see you again?”
Azalea turned at the entrance, eyes narrowed at Keeper. They burned his image into her mind, his hard, black form cutting against the soft silver, his sleek, rakish ponytail pulled back from his pale face. His dead eyes.
“I hate dancing with you,” she said.
She stepped on the threshold.
A grating, cracking-ice explosion seized the air. The silver rose bushes that flanked the sides of the pavilion shot up, black-thorned monstrosities, curling themselves around the lattice. They twisted over the entrance, and Azalea stumbled back before the thorns snagged at her skirts.
Light strangled out of the pavilion as the vines encased it. A new, weird yellow light sputtered to life on the ceiling, and Azalea gasped as hundreds of candles flickered above her, pressed against the casement of the dome, all melted shapeless and creating eerie shadows.
Azalea whipped about sharply.
“Open it up, Keeper,” she snarled. “Enough of your stupid games.”
“What a shame,” said Keeper, still at the side of the ballroom, smiling lazily, “that you don’t care to dance. I’ve planned such a magnificent ball!”
Dancers burst through the pavilion’s thorn-shrouded lattice, sweeping tight circles with their partners. A gust of air whirled over Azalea, and the dancers swirled past her in a twist of colors, chiffons and satins brushing her own black, shabby skirts. She bit back a scream.
The dancers were masked with ornate, gilded animal heads. A golden-furred jackal, and his lady, with feathers and a gold beak. Masks with eyeholes rimmed in gems and embroidery clung to the dancers’ faces. This was a masked ball, something Azalea had only heard of. In her imagination they had been more innocent; gentlemen dressed as hussars and ladies with white, glittery masks attached to a stick. Not this chaotic meshing of gilded beasts and opulent monsters.
In a garish whorl of colors and ribbons, the dancers settled into two long rows, packed so tightly their skirts bunched at odd angles. At the end of their aisle stood Keeper, straight and at ease. The candlelight seemed to make him darker, no highlights or shading over his black form. A twist of a smile graced his lips.