13

13

H ad I not seen Alden that night, I probably wouldn't have seen anything out of the ordinary about him the following morning. If he looked paler than he had the day before, if he was quiet at breakfast and came close to biting Hero's head off when she urged us to hurry up, it could easily have been attributed to the fact that Hero's plan had worked and we were all, for once, downstairs and ready to leave the house at a reasonable hour.

But I did see it—and what was more, I understood now what I had been seeing all summer. I was used to watching for signs like it in my brother. I saw how little of the food at the table actually made it to his plate and how hollow his cheeks had become in just over a month. I saw how slow some of his smiles were to come and how brittle they were when they did. I saw that he hadn't slept a wink all night. Little things, things that would soon be worn away by sunlight and conversation, and yet they were there. Something was fraying him at the edges, and he was having to wind himself tighter and tighter to keep from unravelling.

I kept seeing it the rest of that day, which was otherwise perfect. By now we had mastered a spell that would keep a shade cloth rippling above us to protect ourselves from the all-encompassing heat, and we alternated crossing open fields under its cover with casting it off to feel the sun in full force on our faces. We walked a different way across the estate to any we'd covered before, past the old ruins of the twelfth-century monastery that Alden had told me about in his mock real estate mode, and we spent an hour wandering through the skeletal frame, marvelling at the height of it against the blue sky.

"It reminds me of Camford," Eddie said unexpectedly.

"What do you mean?" I asked, startled. "Camford isn't a ruin."

"No, but… the way the plants have taken it over." He pointed out the gorse overgrowing the stone walls, the heather strangling the old doorways. I could see what he meant then. It did resemble the way the strange trees and vines and flowers flourished across the university. "I sometimes think Camford is like a ruin that's still alive."

"I know exactly how it feels," Alden said wryly. He was looking rather grey, and I had seen him rub his temples when he thought nobody was looking. I decided then and there, trying to balance on the ruins of a medieval column, that I wasn't going to leave whatever was bothering him to Hero. I was going to talk to him myself.

My chance came sooner than I expected. The lake was over the crest of a hill. We dragged one another up the slope, laughing, taking it in turns to carry the picnic basket as the shade cloth flapped uselessly above our head. The spell was wearing off, and it was becoming wayward. We ended up pulling it down and collapsing onto it, breathless, to use as a picnic blanket.

"Which is just as well," Hero pointed out, unfazed. "We didn't bring a picnic blanket, and this dress is white lace."

The plan was to eat first and then go boating on the water. The boat was there—a rowboat, larger than I had expected and painted a deep green. Before we had finished, though, it was fairly evident that Alden wasn't going to be rowing us anywhere immediately. He stretched out in the shade of the oak that bordered the lake and closed his eyes.

"Alden?" Hero said conversationally.

"Mm?"

"Are you just going to lie there all afternoon?"

He considered. "Mm."

"Well. That was certainly worth dragging ourselves all the way up here for. I could have made other plans, you know. Augustus Carmichael telephoned the other day and offered to take me for a ride in his new car."

"You hate going for rides with men unless they let you drive."

"He would have had no choice."

"You hate Augustus Carmichael."

"True," she conceded. "But he's marginally more interesting awake than you are with your eyes closed. Marginally."

His eyes flickered open, and he sighed. "Give me half an hour. Then I'll row you wherever you like. I had a terrible night last night."

Eddie frowned. "We didn't do anything last night."

"Exactly. It was terrible."

Hero's gaze met mine for just a second, a mute acknowledgement, and then she rolled her eyes extravagantly. "I suppose you'll only drown us all in this state. Though I don't know what you think the rest of us are supposed to do for that half an hour."

"Go for a walk. Pick flowers. Perfect your headstands. Compose a sonata in honour of the ducks. My God, woman, can you really not amuse yourself without me for thirty minutes and counting?"

"May I draw you?" I asked. I kept my voice casual, probably too casual. I had drawn all three of them often enough, especially this summer. There was no reason for anyone, Alden included, to suspect an ulterior motive. "I need a live model, and it's difficult to find someone who'll keep still."

"He'll keep still all right," Hero said. "It just won't be a very riveting picture with his eyes closed."

"It will be mesmerising," Alden said. "How dare you. Everyone knows the eyes are the boring part."

"I like the eyes," Eddie said. "They're my favourite thing about Clover's drawings."

"Strange," Alden said. "I've never seen a drawing of broccoli with eyes."

Hero swatted him with a napkin.

The eyes were my favourite too—when I drew my brothers and sisters, they were what I always did first. But there was something about Alden's face when his were closed that was indeed mesmerising. The lines of it softened, smoothed, as though a guard was being lowered. Most people's eyes gave away more than they concealed; Alden's never did, even at his most relaxed. It was only when he wasn't looking at anything at all that it was possible to get a glimpse of what he might be like when he wasn't being looked at.

"It's fine by me," Alden added, and it took me a moment to realise he was answering my question. "I'll try to keep still. Feel free to kick me if I start to snore."

"I suppose I'll go and look for fungus down by the lake, then," Eddie said. He said it without a hint of recrimination, or even disappointment, and yet guilt twinged my stomach. I had promised to go with him to sketch the specimens he found. I'd done so last week by the river, and I'd unexpectedly had a wonderful time. It was cool and pleasant down by the water, and the delicate, soft-coloured folds of mushrooms were beautiful against the bark. I'd sketched them quickly, while Eddie measured them and took samples and lit up with enthusiasm at my every question, and made notes on the pinks and yellows and reds to fill in with watercolours later. The mushrooms would still be there another day, though. I would make it up to him.

"I'll come along for a walk," Hero said. She stood, picked up her hat, and dusted off her long white skirt. I wondered if she minded my staying—she'd known Alden her whole life, after all, and she'd as good as said his problems were hers to deal with. The grateful wink she gave me set my mind at rest. "Enjoy your nap, Fontaine, and try not to outshine the Mona Lisa . Clover, don't feel you have to flatter him too much. We both know his ears are too small."

"That's slander," Alden said with a yawn. "My ears are exactly right. The rest of my head is too big."

In fact, I discovered as I started to sketch, his proportions were unfortunately and inevitably perfect. I hadn't often drawn Alden except in brief snatches—partly because he was rarely still; partly, though I hated to admit it, because I still tended to blush if I looked at him for too long. But he truly must have been tired, because his face relaxed into sleep as soon as the others had left, and much as I wanted to talk to him, I couldn't exactly kick him awake to do it. So I shaded in his high cheekbones, his sharp chin, the quirk of his eyebrows. The hollows under his eyes, too deep and dark lately; the fine eyelashes against the curve of his cheek; the gentle tumble of his curls, darker at the roots, lightening to fine gold. It's an oddly hypnotic experience, to sink so deeply into the details of someone else's face. The world slowed down around me as I drew, and my breathing slowed to match his. I tried to tell myself this was no different to drawing anybody else, and almost succeeded.

After a while he twitched, then his eyes blinked open. "Sorry," he said drowsily. "There's a tree root digging in my back." He wriggled against the bank and scratched the back of his neck before settling back down. "That's better. Is this still all right?"

The shadows had shifted on his face. I looked at the paper, then at him. "Tilt your head down a little? And to the left?"

It wasn't perfect, but it was close enough that I nodded. "Thanks. You can get up and stretch first if you need a break."

"I'm comfortable." His eyes had closed again. "How long was I asleep?"

I had to check my watch myself. The time had unspooled slowly and gently as a skein of thread. "About twenty minutes."

His eyebrow quirked. "That long? You're a restful person to be around, Clover Hill."

"You mean dull," I said dryly.

"Not in the least. Dull people make me fidgety. You're restful."

"You're exhausted," I countered. I shook off my reluctance to speak further. I was a scholar, after all, and so was Alden. We believed in answers. "I saw you in the corridor outside my room last night."

He grimaced. "Did you? I didn't see you. I wasn't sleepwalking, was I?"

"You might have been." The thought, foolishly, hadn't occurred to me. "I stayed out of sight."

"You should have come and said hello. I'd have appreciated the company."

"I didn't like to. You seemed—"

"Yes." He sighed, and his eyes opened to meet mine. "I can imagine. I'm sorry if I worried you. I don't sleep very well at home."

"This is why you left at Christmas, isn't it?" I had been wondering that ever since, on and off. It had never seemed right to ask. "Why? What bothers you about this house?"

"Oh, old memories. Old curses. You don't feel them?"

"I love Ashfield." The breeze stirred my hair gently, as if in response. "It might be haunted, but it isn't cursed."

"Well." His voice was getting drowsy again. If I wasn't quick, I was going to either lose him or have to actually kick him after all. "Perhaps the memories and curses are all mine."

"Who was Thomas?" The words came from my mouth before I could bite them back.

Alden didn't so much as blink, and yet something in him woke all the way up. "Are you asking if Thomas was cursed?"

"No." I looked down at my paper, flustered, which wasn't very helpful since Alden was there as well. "No, I just—I heard his name somewhere, I was just wondering—"

"It's all right," he interrupted with a smile. I couldn't tell how forced it was. "It's not a secret. Thomas was my older brother. He disappeared at the end of August 1914—almost a month after the war broke out. He was eighteen."

Of course. The first time on the library roof: Hero had asked how Alden had known about it, and he said that Thomas had told him. No doubt it was Thomas who had taught him to get into the library after hours too; probably the name had passed between them a few other times without my noticing it.

I was such an idiot. Of course Alden didn't like being at Ashfield, for the simplest and most commonplace of reasons, the same reason I hated being on the farm and seeing my father's empty chair. So many of us these days had missing elder brothers or cousins or fathers whose absence haunted our homes. I should have guessed.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"No, why should you be? I'm sorry. I forgot you didn't know."

Alden was clearly waiting for the next question, the obvious question, so I asked it as tactfully as I could. "I—Did he go to fight?"

"I still think he must have done. Nobody really knows for certain." He propped himself up on his elbows with a faint sigh, as though resigning himself to a story he'd prefer not to tell. "He intended to enlist with a few of his friends from Camford. My parents didn't want him to—they thought the war was none of our business and the Families should stay out, from what I could gather. I was twelve years old and hopelessly self-centred, so it all went over my head. But Thomas wanted to go. He and my parents argued; he insisted on his right to fight for what he believed in, and he was determined to enlist. Then, the night before he was due to go, he disappeared. Nobody ever saw him again."

"Could he not have run away to enlist, as he'd said he would?"

"That's what I believe. I think he left after we had all gone to bed, so that our parents couldn't stop him. But he never reached his friends. Perhaps something happened to him on the way. Perhaps he signed up without them and was killed thousands of miles away under a different name. Some of the more malicious Families, especially the ones who had lost sons in the war, started a rumour that he had simply run away. It nearly broke my mother's heart, hearing him branded a coward. Strange, isn't it? When she didn't want him to go in the first place." He fell silent. "Anyway. His friends swore they left without him. One of them died in the trenches, one lost a leg. One came back whole. I suppose we'll never know what happened to Thomas."

"I'm so sorry." I fumbled for something to say. "If he was afraid—if he did run away—then it wouldn't be shameful. Those trenches were terrible."

"I suppose your brother told you about them?"

I shook my head. "Not really. He won't talk about the war. But he lets things slip sometimes, and the rest I can guess. He came back different, and only some of it was the faerie curse." I was saying more than I'd meant to now, and yet Alden didn't seem to mind. He was still listening. "I hate it. I hate watching him try to pretend everything's fine. I hate hearing how he did his duty and we should all be proud of him. I hate remembering that I argued with our parents that he should be allowed to go, and that he thanked me for it. I hate that it's my fault."

"Clover, my love, it was a war." The endearment was meant lightly, but there was real softness in his voice. "It wasn't your fault. You couldn't have stopped him."

"I could have tried. He trusted my judgement. He might have listened to me if I'd really insisted we needed him at home."

"You'd have felt guilty about that too, believe me."

I'd always thought so. Lately, I wasn't so sure. "Would your parents have felt guilty? If they'd made Thomas stay?"

"You know, when it came to it, I don't believe they really would have stopped him. Oh, they argued with him about going, they said all the right things and might have even believed them, but they would have given in. My parents believe in duty, country, glory, and all that."

"And you don't?"

He laughed a little. "I'm a disappointment in that regard. That's considered quite normal for a younger son at this time of his life, though, so they aren't worried. I don't get anything like the rubbish that Eddie gets from his family. There's still hope for me, so long as I do my time at Camford, graduate well but not too well, possibly go into politics. Marry a nice girl."

"Not Hero anymore, though."

I wondered belatedly if I had betrayed a confidence, but Alden only rolled his eyes. "Oh, she told you about that nonsense? Mother's never trusted Hero—she's thrilled that she has a reason to argue for a better match. The irony of course is that Hero never intends to get married, so they have nothing to hope for or to worry about on that score. What about you?"

"Do I intend to marry, do you mean?"

"Well, I could be asking if you'd marry me , but I'm not that brave."

"It's a no on both counts, I'm afraid," I said, as lightly as I could. I refused to question how much I meant it. "I want to be a scholar. That's difficult enough for a single woman. Marriage would rob me of my time and independence."

"Hero would agree with you. The difference is, and forgive me for being blunt, she's at least only trying to break into one world, not two."

I didn't mind the bluntness at all. It was refreshing, after all the sideways snubs of the Families. "I'm already in your world," I reminded him. "Whatever my background, I've made it. All I need to do now is be so good they can't make me leave."

"I have no doubt you'll be that good, but you know things like that are rarely dependent on merit alone in this world."

I shrugged. "I can't do very much about the world. If Camford won't keep me, I'll study independently. They can't stop me."

"No." His lips curved into something that wasn't quite a smile. "No, I don't imagine they could."

Hero's voice came up the slope. "Have you really not moved since we left? God, you're going to grow into the tree at this rate."

"I have moved, I'll have you know," Alden replied, raising his voice to match. He sat up as Hero and Eddie came back, looking far more like his usual self. "Ask Clover. I ruined her picture, didn't I, Clover?"

"It takes more than that to ruin one of my pictures," I informed him haughtily. "It's come out very well."

In fact, when I drew back to look at the picture critically, the results were frustrating. The features were all recognisably there under my pencil. There was something missing nonetheless, some elusive secret that I couldn't put on the page.

"Let's see?" Hero bent to look at the drawing over my shoulder. "Excellent, given the limitations of your subject matter. Fortunately, Eddie found some toadstools for you to draw next. I suppose we can go rowing now?"

"I could have a go, if you don't want to," Eddie suggested. He sounded serious. It was difficult to tell with Eddie. "I've seen it done. Once or twice."

"Don't you dare." Alden got to his feet with alacrity. "You'll see some pond weed or something and send the boat to the bottom for a closer look."

Hero's hand tightened on my shoulder as she straightened, a mute thank-you. I had no doubt she knew far more of what the two of us had been talking about than she had let on, and that she had taken Eddie away especially to let our conversation happen. The trouble was, she vastly overestimated how much good I could do.

What Alden had told me made perfect sense. It explained his distraction, his night-time wanderings, his reluctance to come home to Ashfield, and even his parents' distance when he did.

It didn't explain the moonlight.

That night, I couldn't sleep. We had gone to bed before midnight again this time, worn out after the golden afternoon on the river and the velvet walk home in the evening. I told myself that was why I was lying awake: I wasn't used to two relatively early nights in a row. I twisted to my left side as the sheets warmed beneath me, then my right; I lay back and tried to think of nothing at all.

Then, in the early hours of the morning, a faint glow played across the ceiling, a sliver of silver, moonlight where there was no moon. I heard the light tread of footsteps outside my door, the creak of a loose floorboard. I knew this was what I had been waiting for all along.

Alden was outside the door when I opened it, the features I had drawn that afternoon once again cast into relief by that peculiar shaft of light. This time, he gave no sign of hearing me, even though I made no effort to conceal my presence and the door squeaked again. He was moving in the same direction as before, quicker this time, his footsteps unusually heavy and rapid.

This time, I didn't go back to bed. I followed him.

We walked a long way, farther than I was expecting. Down the corridor, up a short staircase, then a sharp right, headed slowly but certainly toward the east wing. We hadn't been to that part of the house that summer. The rooms were smaller there, less fashionable, the wallpaper showing signs of age. Alden gave no sign of knowing I was there—that, and the occasional uncharacteristic stumble, made me increasingly sure that he wasn't really awake. He'd warned me I might see him sleepwalking; he hadn't told me what to do in the event it happened. I knew common wisdom was not to wake someone in his state, yet surely it wasn't safe for him to walk around the house all night? Hero would probably know. If I went for her, though, I would lose him. It wasn't only that I was afraid of where he might go on his own. I wanted to know where he was going.

When he did stop, I nearly missed it. The door was no different to any of the others we passed; abruptly, out of nowhere, he simply turned the doorknob and went in. I stopped, startled, as it closed in my face.

I hesitated only a moment before opening it again.

I had assumed, without quite realising it, that the room Alden was visiting was Thomas's. Perhaps it had been once, but there was no sign now it had ever been a bedroom. It was a sitting room of some kind: a long low couch in faded green, two armchairs in front of an unlit fireplace, a shelf filled with odd books. An ordinary room by Ashfield standards, somewhat shabby. The only strange thing about it was the glow of moonlight that filled it, and that Alden stood in the centre.

There was no doubt now that he was still asleep. His eyes were open, but they weren't seeing me. They were wide, their blue almost translucent, and they were filled with fear. His body was taut, his chest rising and falling at double speed. Whatever landscape was playing in his head, it was filled with terror.

"Alden." I said his name as calmly as I could.

He didn't hear me. But, as in the corridor the night before, he heard something . His head twisted sharply in the direction of my voice, eyes flickering over me without seeing. His brow furrowed.

"Thomas?" he said.

"No." I swallowed. "No, it's me. Do you know where you are?"

He didn't answer. He was breathing even faster now, his face glistening with perspiration.

I reached out, tentative. "Alden—"

He wrenched away abruptly, shoving me backwards. "Get away from me!"

The cry was startlingly loud in the silence of the house, loud enough that I thought for certain someone would hear and come. At home, when the younger children woke screaming in their various infancies, the whole house had always woken with them. In the early days after the war, when my brother had woken from nightmares crying out for people who were dead, the sound had travelled from the attic and brought us to him. This was Ashfield. We were several floors above the staff, several locked rooms away from Lord and Lady Alconleigh or Hero or Eddie. We might as well have been in another house entirely. For the first time I was aware of the loneliness of this vast estate, suspended alone with nothing but the moors and the sky for miles in either direction.

I don't know whether I was afraid of Alden or for him—perhaps both. Either way, I took a slow step back. My heart thrummed in my ears, a frantic beat of warning.

"Stay there," I said to him, uselessly. He didn't move. "I'll be right back."

I waited until I was safely in the corridor before I started to run.

Fortunately, Hero didn't sleep with her door locked, and she didn't sleep heavily. I needed only to shake her shoulder lightly before she stirred and twisted around.

"Clover," she said hazily. She sat up, frowning, and brushed her hair back from her eyes. "What's wrong?"

"Alden," I said. "He's in the east wing—sleepwalking, I think. I tried to wake him, but—"

Hero swore quietly under her breath and threw back the covers. "Not again. Where did you say he was?"