“Perhaps we had best try again, with someone better off.”
“We haven’t the time or money to try again,” snarled Sibylla. “The estates at Ylles have good revenues, and though we have not seen them, undoubtedly they will do well enough!”
“Ah,” said Weasel-Rabbit’s mother in a discontented voice. “I suppose it must be done before Phillip finds out your own dowry is as much fakery as the wealth he promised us. He won’t be impressed by hired carriages for long.”
Well, well, I thought as I wandered out into the corridor again. Here was a pretty mess. Papa wanted to marry a fortune. Sibylla wanted to marry a fortune. Both pretended to have one, and both were as poor as lackeys. Who had the fortune? I did. Or rather, Mama did, since she was alive and well, assuming she was alive and well, which I did assume. Though there had been no recent word of her (despite the letter I had misdated), I simply knew that she had suffered no harm. Something inside me declared this to be incontrovertibly so. She was waiting for me, and I had to go to her.
As I was lost in contemplation, Sibylla came out into the hallway and let out a screech to wake the dead. Grumpkin was there, playing with an invisible something, and Sibylla shrieked for someone to come kill the animal at once. I swept him up, hiding him in a fold of the cloak, and went back out to the stables while she had hysterics behind me, screaming about a cat that had disappeared. My only thought was that my life wasn’t worth a fig in that place.
“Where is Ylles?” I asked Martin.
“Eels?” he queried. “In the river, Beauty, some seasons. And in the sea others, so I hear.”
“Not the fish, Martin. The place. A town, maybe?”
Doll came out just then, so I asked her as well. She didn’t know.
“Mama signed her letter ‘Elladine of Ylles,’ ” I told her. “That means it has to be a place, somewhere.”
No one knew. I told Doll to ask Aunt Terror and Aunt Basil, but neither of them had ever heard of Ylles, except as an adjunct to Mama’s name, and they got quite offended at being asked by a servant. So I went to the anteroom where Papa’s steward keeps things. He wasn’t there, or the scribe either, for which I was very grateful. The man always wanted to touch me, just a little. Hand on wrist. Arm against arm. Brushing against me in the hall. You know the kind of thing. Whenever I smiled at him, he melted down into a puddle and just lay there, quivering with inarticulate desire. There is something intensely repugnant about people wanting you in that way. That is, unless you want them back.
I could find nothing that helped. So far as the contracts were concerned, none of them gave direction to Ylles. By the time I had looked through all the dusty scrolls that seemed at all likely to tell me anything, I was starving.
I stopped in the kitchens to sneak some supper. Cold game pie and a lump of cheese out of the firkin in the storeroom. In the stables I chewed and stared at the other hanks of thread, a brown one and a white one. The brown thread was heavy and waxy. It looked familiar to me, and after a time I figured out that it looked like the thread the shoemaker in the village used. Thread to sew leather, which could mean anything at all. I had no way of knowing what. Something kept teasing at me, as though someone might be trying to whisper words in my ear, and I shook my head in annoyance. If I was half fairy, it had to be my bottom half, for my head told me nothing useful. I put the thread down, and found myself picking it up again. Put it down, pick it up. At length I got tired of thinking about it and went to sleep in the hay with Grumpkin curled up beside me.
[I have said elsewhere that Beauty is not particularly intelligent. The sewing kit was the simplest, easiest method Israfel and I could think of to let her seek her mother with the magical powers to which she was born. She has already sewn a cloak; common sense should dictate that the other threads will sew other magical garments! Stories of such garments are current in every hamlet! I cannot recall ever having felt quite so frustrated before. She will need the other garments very soon! I keep whispering, “Use the thread and needles,” but all she does is yawn!]
I was so weary from it all that I didn’t wake up until the middle of the night when I heard people shouting. They were shouting because the dove tower was burning. Of course, I wasn’t in it, though no one but Doll and Martin knew that. Except for my carpet, nothing I treasured was in it, which was a good thing because there was little enough left of the tower when the flames were finally extinguished.
I went to Father Raymond, being very cool and dignified, and told him I’d escaped sure death because I hadn’t been in my room. I said I believed Sibylla had set the fire. I told him why. I said my life wasn’t worth a rotten apple in that place anymore, and I was going away very soon to join my mama. I said that, once I was well away, he could tell everyone I’d gone on a pilgrimage. That would prevent Sibylla laying hands on my dowry lands. He asked me where, and
