11

11

W e left Oxford early for the drive up to Yorkshire, or at least what Alden and Hero called early. It was almost the same route up through the middle of the country as I had taken when I had gone home for Christmas—once or twice I even saw one of the trains I might have been on pass on the horizon. In every way that mattered, though, the journey couldn't have been more different. Eddie and I sat in the back seat of Hero's motorcar, Hero at the wheel with her long hair caught up under a wide-brimmed hat. I wasn't tied to a train, I wasn't tied to anyone except my friends, and the summer holidays stretched before us like a promise. Summer had always meant long, back-breaking days in the hayfield with sweat sticking dust to my skin; it meant setting the rams amidst the ewes, taking advantage of the good weather to mend the barn roof. I'd never been so free before. The sky seemed much higher overhead than usual, as though someone had thrown the roof off the world and at any moment we all might just spin away.

The others had never worked in the hot June sun, but the last few months of study and exams and last-day essays had been gruelling in their own way, and they had caught the mood of freedom and release too. Our conversation became sillier and sillier as we rattled along the road, until we were breathless with laughter without knowing or caring why. At midday we stopped and ate bread and cheese and cold sausages at a roadside inn, served with lemonade and dark ale, and tried to name the birdsong around us. Unsurprisingly, Eddie was better at it than all of us, even though I had grown up on a farm.

"I spent a lot of time outdoors when I was taken out of school," he explained, as if apologising. "And I had a lot of time to sit and listen. I wasn't working like Clover was."

"You didn't have your nose buried in books like Clover, you mean," Hero said, with a quirk of a smile at me. I wrinkled my nose back, grinning.

"Your family won't mind your not being there for the whole summer?" Eddie asked me, as though he'd only just thought of it.

"No, of course not," I said, as airily as I could. I refused to see Alden and Hero exchange glances. "They'll see me for Christmas."

Eddie nodded and gave me a smile. From what he'd let slip, he hadn't heard much from his own family all year. "Well," he said. "We're lucky to have you."

"For your company," Hero added, "if not for your skill at ornithology."

In truth, I didn't know what my family felt about my absence. I hadn't seen them since that horrible December night, nearly six months ago. I had written to them the day after the imp fiasco, not quite apologising, and Matthew had written back reassuring me that everything was fine. But it was the kind of letter we'd had from him in the war—brief, breezy, uninformative—and I'd heard nothing from Mum at all. When the next term holidays had rolled around, I had written and said that I was staying at Camford with my friends to study, and they had voiced no objection; when I had asked after Matthew in the days following each new midnight, he had told me not to worry and nothing more. We were at a fragile truce. I couldn't break it without returning home, and yet I was afraid that if I did, everything would shatter.

Instead, I'd thrown myself into Camford life, and it was more than happy to swallow me whole. Spring term came fresh and bright, with new papers and new lectures and new magic. The trees turned vibrant green, the undergrowth burst into life so thick that finding a way to class was like fighting through a forest, and the roof of Hew Draper Tower finally crumbled under centuries of determined ivy and needed to be closed for repairs. I had exams to study for at the end of term, I had research to do and assignments to write, I had Hero and Alden and Eddie. And, every now and again, Alden and I had our experiments with the imp windows.

Those night-time expeditions were unpredictable—sometimes we would make plans the day before, in hurried whispers before the others caught us up, sometimes I would simply hear a tap at my window while I sat up late at my desk. My chest would always thrill at that tap, in equal parts excitement and guilt. I knew we shouldn't be sneaking off at night to break the law, certainly not without telling Hero and Eddie, and yet I couldn't wait to find out how much further we could refine our law-breaking this time. Alden was at his very best in those stolen hours: brilliant, perceptive, aglow with energy and purpose that spilled over and mingled with my own so that I lost sight of where my ideas ended and his began. Soon we had the timing of the window perfect. When it was my turn to press my fingers to the edges, I could feel the imp's passing even before I registered the silvery lines cooling and glowing.

Last month we'd hit upon a breakthrough. The imp we'd trapped was alarmingly close to pushing through, the opaque sheen of the window bowing and buckling like a plate of glass about to shatter. In blind panic, I'd cast a locking spell; it had settled over the window like oil on water, and the buckling had calmed instantly. The imp still raged, but the surface of the window was still, quiet, frosted as though by thick ice. We had stared at each other, elated. If he hadn't been standing in a faerie circle and I hadn't been holding a faerie door, I think we would have flung our arms around each other. As it was, our smiles met in perfect harmony.

"Oh," he said quietly. " Yes. "

It had been our biggest worry—that only one door might be too fragile, and without the inner faerie door, a trapped faerie could break through. Now we had a solution, and we spent the entire night practicing it until the skies had paled, we were both dizzy and exhausted, and we narrowly missed being caught inside the Bodleian in the morning.

"What are you doing this summer?" Alden had asked that afternoon, out of the blue. We had stepped through the window at the library to sprawl out on the roof, taking advantage of the unusually gentle breeze and the clear, silvery sky. My thoughts, still drowsy from the night before, had wandered from my essay, and I was idly sketching the view of the wall instead.

"Going to visit my family, I suppose." I said it as carelessly as possible, keeping my eyes on the page. "The only summer classes are for third-years and older. Professor Summerdale said I should try to apply next year, though."

"Back to Pendle Hill?" Eddie asked.

I shrugged. "Well, that's where my family are."

They must have noticed I was less than thrilled at the prospect. None of them commented. "Would they object terribly if you came and spent at least part of the summer at my home?" Alden asked.

I was almost as startled as when he'd first proposed opening an imp window in the Bodleian. "At Ashfield?"

"Well, that's where my home is," Alden said, in a credible imitation of my accent. I threw my spare pencil at him, which he ducked easily.

The truth was, Ashfield had become a mythical place to me. I'd heard too many stories of their shared childhoods there, of sealed-off wings and visits to the kitchen and long rambles across the grounds. The thought of seeing it for myself—of being invited to share in it—was both thrilling and unlikely, as though Alden had offered to send me to Neverland.

"Please do come." Hero looked up from her book quickly. "Eddie and I will both be there all summer too. I can't tell you what a relief it would be to have sane company."

"Will your parents mind?" I asked Alden doubtfully.

"Mind? They'd be thrilled. You'd be by far the most civilised guest I've ever brought home. Besides, they'll barely be around. We'll be more or less left to our own devices. Plenty of space for the four of us to try out some of our theories, if we wanted to."

"Is that a euphemism?" Hero asked. "Or did you honestly ask Clover to join us so we could work on our project?"

"Not only for that. I want sane company too." His eyes hadn't left mine, questioning. "Well?"

I understood then what had occasioned the invitation, and with that understanding came a bubbling rush of joy. This was it. Whatever the night-time expeditions had been building toward—and there were times I wasn't certain myself—it was finally going to happen.

"I'd love to," I said, and meant it in every sense.

As the sun grew lower in the sky, we turned off the Great North Road and onto smaller unsealed tracks, backways that bumped and wound through hilly country. Eddie, next to me, went steadily paler and quieter as the roads grew rougher, though he staunchly insisted he was fine; up in front, Hero and Alden started to bicker about whose turn it was to drive and why. Everyone began to feel rather grubby and sick of each other. If I'd taken the train home, I'd have been there by now, I couldn't help thinking. I looked out over the yellow grass and tried not to wonder how the haymaking would get on without me. Matthew had said not to worry. (That was different from saying there was nothing to worry about.)

I almost missed it when the car turned onto a gravel path that I realised belatedly was not another road, but a driveway. I straightened, heart quickening in anticipation, and all thoughts of home fled from my head.

"Is this it?" I asked.

"Just about," Hero said, smothering a yawn. "Thank God. Another few miles and I'd have killed all three of you and then myself."

The car trundled past a building of grey stone, larger than my house ("The stable block," Eddie explained to me quietly) and then came over the crest of the hill. It was early evening, the sunlight beginning to slant and deepen into pale gold, the fields around us gentle green. And then—

The view I glimpse now every time I find myself on a stretch of country road, from the corner of my eye. The great grey stone manor, sprawling and Gothic and ridiculous in the sunlight, the rising turrets against the ocean of yellowing grass, the late-afternoon sky. Ashfield.

"There it is," Alden said carelessly. "It's freezing in the depths of summer, the east wing is falling down, and of course, it's cursed. But it's home."

"It's exactly how I pictured it," I heard myself say, though in fact I had been picturing nothing so clear. I just didn't have the words to explain how familiar it looked when I had never been anywhere like it in my life.

I loved Camford the first time I saw it, but that was a complicated love, its warm glow shot through with ambition and homesickness and determination to belong. It awed and impressed me, and demanded I be worthy of it. My love for Ashfield was unexpected and worn and comfortable from the first, like that for a favourite book. It was, as Alden had once told me, an enormous country estate, with some one hundred and fifty rooms and vast grounds. Yet for all its grandeur, it liked me, and it welcomed me exactly as I was hungry to be welcomed. The butler came out to meet us as the car pulled up: a stocky grey-haired man named Morgan, with a stern face and black eyes that twinkled like unexpected stars. Two younger men moved in to take our bags almost before we were out of the car, all brisk efficiency and neat collars. The doors opened of their own accord—a charm, I assumed—and the enormous entrance hall loomed overhead. Everything in it felt like stepping back in time, into some old, safe world I barely remembered.

Alden's parents were away as he had promised, not due to return for another week, and so the house, in all its sprawling glory, was ours alone. The labyrinth of rooms was bewildering, but Alden and Hero and Eddie moved through them so nonchalantly, with such ease, that I was tugged along in their wake. When I think back to that first day at Ashfield, that's what I see. The wide, sweeping staircase, sunlight catching motes of dust that rose at our approach. The long, dark corridors, lined with oil paintings and brass candle-holders. Rooms of dark wood panelling and gilded furniture, porcelain knick-knacks, a grandfather clock, the smell of dust and sandalwood and something sharper I couldn't identify. Alden and Hero's chatter, bright and meaningless as birdsong.

"I told Morgan to put you up here in the Green Room," Alden said to me, pushing open an oaken door that seemed no different from any of the others. "I hope you don't mind that it's a little small. The views make up for it."

It wasn't small, of course. It was a funny-shaped bedroom on a corner, with floor-sweeping white curtains and wallpaper mottled dark green. There was an enormous four-poster in the centre, an armchair by the window, my shabby travelling chest already at the foot of the bed. Pictures lined the walls—landscapes, mostly, and one or two portraits. Outside, the grass stretched forever under a cloudy sky.

"It's wonderful," I said, and meant it. My heart had jumped in my chest as though I'd seen a lover in a crowd.

His mouth quirked at the corner. "I'm glad. Dinner's going to be downstairs in half an hour. Take your time. It's only us tonight."

"I'm not sure where the dining room is," I remembered to say before they left.

"I'm right next to you, in the Red Room," Hero said, turning back. "Come bang on my door when you're ready—I'm sure I'll take longer than you."

In fact, I was still staring at the mirror in a vague panic when Hero came and knocked on my door instead. She took one look at me, standing in my best clothes helplessly brandishing a hairbrush, and laughed.

"What on earth are you doing?"

"I don't know what to wear to dinner," I confessed. I gestured at my dress, which was one of the many Hero had bought me over the last few months, a smoky-grey fabric the colour of mist. "Is this right?"

"Who cares? You heard Alden—it's just us."

"It isn't, though. There's Morgan. There are footmen and things." I didn't know how to explain, and I knew Hero wouldn't understand, that the various men and women who waited the table and cleaned the fireplaces and turned down the beds were far more my class of people than my friends were. I cared far more about their judgement, truly, than I did about that of the pretentious elite at Camford. I didn't want them to look at me and hate me for being at the table and not behind it. "Help."

She sighed, but indulgently. "Your dress is fine, although that colour would do better in the colder months. Face the mirror and I'll do your hair. Where's that bandeau I saw you wearing last week?"

I found it, a slender band with a rose in silver satin, and Hero brushed out my windblown hair with deft fingers and slipped it on at the elusive angle. She, of course, looked perfect—her dress the cool shimmering green of leaves reflected in a lake, her chestnut hair pinned back with a thin gold band. And yet I had come to know her well enough now to recognise when her confidence was innate and when it was battle armour, and I realised quickly that her hands on my shoulders as she adjusted my position were unusually tense. She was a head taller than me, so I could see her face reflected clearly in the mirror, and there was a brittle quality to her eyes that hadn't been there when we said goodbye twenty minutes ago.

"Is something wrong?" I asked.

Hero laughed again, this time a sharp, humourless bark. "Not really." She didn't bother to deny it as she would have eight months ago. "Just a letter from my father. It was waiting in my room just now. He claims he's changed his mind about letting me go back to Camford in the autumn."

"But… he can't," I said foolishly. Hero had hinted this might be a problem once or twice over the last few months; somehow I had never taken it seriously. I couldn't imagine Camford without Hero. "Your marks are wonderful. You're going to come top in linguistics, at least. Why would he…?"

"For that reason, probably, among others. He has no intention of losing me to academia when he wants me married and settled as soon as possible. Which means no degree, and no possibility of further scholarship."

"There must be other funding," I said, as if I didn't have intimate knowledge of every penny available to our year. "Surely you don't have to leave just because of your father."

"Why do you think the only undergraduate scholarships are for those experiencing hardship, Clover? They don't want anyone to be there against the wishes of a wealthy patron."

"Well… What if you and Alden got engaged, or pretended to?" I suggested tentatively. I suspected it was too close to something in one of the novels my sisters enjoyed to really work. Then again, you never could tell with Families. "Then you'd be free to go back to school. You wouldn't have to go through with it."

"It's a lovely idea, darling." She sounded a little tired. "The bare truth is, we're not rich enough for the Lennox-Fontaines anymore. My father's business dealings are failing. That's the real reason I'm not to be sent back to Camford—it's why Thorngate is shut up this summer, by the way, to save money. Camford fees are expensive—providing for an adult daughter is expensive—and the house needs a new roof or floor or some such thing. We're not destitute or anything like that, but I'm supposed to marry to save the estate and let my father restore the family name. Archaic, isn't it?"

I thought of my sister Mary walking out with Peter Brooks, the accusation I had flung at my mother that she was selling her daughter to pay the farm's debts.

"I'm sorry," I said uselessly.

"I'm one-third through my degree already. If he'd only give me another two years, then—" With a shock I saw the hot, angry glint in her eyes as she turned her head aside. I had never seen Hero come close to tears before. In that moment I'd have killed her father myself.

"We'll find a way." It was all I could think to say. "There's always a way."

Hero laughed, I think sincerely, and certainly fondly. "I'd take that as a useless platitude from most people. You actually mean it." By the time she looked back at the mirror, her head was high again. "Never mind. I won't leave, that's all. I doubt he really will make me. And if he does, I'll raise the money somehow. It's just such nonsense to be at war with my own family over something so simple."

"I argued with my family too," I heard myself say. "At Christmas. I've barely heard from them since."

From her complete lack of surprise, they had all guessed as much. She took my hand and squeezed it tightly.

"We're each other's family now," she said. "The four of us. Now, turn around."

I turned, obligingly, and kept my face as still as I could as she tilted my head up to tweak my eye make-up. At last she nodded, satisfied.

"There." She replaced my glasses, careful of my hair. "Look at that. You're wasted on those idiots downstairs. Eddie might notice the flower, I suppose. Come on, now. I'm starving."

I looked back in the mirror, and for a startled second I didn't see me at all. I saw a modern, confident young woman in a loose dress of evening fog, glossy hair tucked back and shaped in a bob. Her eyes were large and starry, her cheeks slightly flushed; a long silver chain glittered at her throat. Apart from the round wire-rimmed glasses perched on her nose, she looked nothing like Clover Hill. She looked like someone who belonged in the overlarge bedroom reflected behind her in the glass, about to go down to dinner with the tall, elegant woman in pale green beside her.

I removed my glasses again slowly, and the world blurred into soft focus.

"I'm ready," I said.