“But—” Alanna felt her throat closing again, and Elizabeth held up her hand.
“I have not finished. I further modified this curse; should Arachne manage to awaken it, Marina will not die.” Elizabeth sighed, wearily. “But there, my knowledge fails me. I told you that curses are difficult; this one took the power and twisted it away from me. I can only tell you that the curse will not kill outright. I cannot tell you what it will do…”
Alanna watched a hundred dire thoughts pass behind Elizabeth’s eyes. There were so many things that were worse than death—and many that were only a little better. What if the curse struck Mari blind, or deaf, or mindless? What if it made a cripple of her?
Then Elizabeth gathered herself and nodded briskly. “Never mind. We must see that it does not come to that. Alanna, we must hide her.”
“Hide her?” Hugh said, from behind her. “By my faith, Elizabeth, that is no bad notion! Like—like the infant Arthur, we can send her away where Arachne can’t find her!”
“Take her?” Alanna clutched the infant closer, her voice rising. “You’d take her away from me?”
“Alanna, we can’t hide her if you go with her,” Hugh pointed out, his own arms tightening around her. “But where? That’s the question.”
Hot tears spilled from Alanna’s eyes, as the others discussed her baby’s fate, heedless of her breaking heart. They were taking her away, her Marina, her little Mari—
She heard them in a haze of grief, as if from a great distance, as her friends, her husband, decided among them to send Marina away, away, off with Sebastian and Thomas and Margherita, practically into the wilds of Cornwall. It was Hugh’s allusion to Arthur that had decided them. Arachne knew nothing of them; if she had known of Hugh’s childhood schoolmates, she hadn’t recognized the playfellows that had been in the artists of now.
Elizabeth tried to comfort her. “It’s only until she’s of age, darling,” her friend said, patting her shoulders as the tears flowed and she shook with sobs. “When she’s eighteen, she’ll come back to you!”
Eighteen years. An eternity. An age, in which she would never see Marina’s first step, hear her first word, see her grow…
Alanna wept. Wept as they bundled Marina up in a baby-basket and carried her away, leaving behind the little dresses that Alanna had embroidered during the months of her confinement, the toys, even the cradle. She wept as her friends smuggled the child into their cart, as if she was nothing more than a few apples or a bottle of cider.
She wept as they drove away, her husband’s arms around her, her best friend standing at her side. She wept and would not be consoled; for she had lost her heart, and something told her she would never see her child again.
Chapter One
BIRDS twittered in the rose bushes outside the old-fashioned diamond-paned windows. The windows, swung open on their ancient iron hinges, let in sunshine, a floating dandelion seed and a breath of mown grass, even if Marina wasn’t in position to see the view into the farmyard. The sunshine gilded an oblong on the worn wooden floor. Behind her, somewhere out in the yard, chickens clucked and muttered, and two of Aunt Margherita’s cats had a half-minute spat. Marina’s arm was starting to go numb.
The unenlightened might think that posing as an artist’s model was easy, because “all” one had to do was sit, stand, or recline in one position. The unenlightened ought to try it some time, she thought. It took the same sort of simultaneous concentration and relaxation that magic did—concentration, to make sure that there wasn’t a bit of movement, and relaxation, to ensure that muscles didn’t lock up. If the pose was a standing one, then it wasn’t long before feet and legs were aching; if sitting or reclining, it was a certainty that some part of the body would fall asleep, with the resulting pins—and—needles agony when the model was allowed to move.
Then there was the boredom—well, perhaps boredom wasn’t quite the right word. The model had to have something to occupy her mind while her body was frozen in one position; it was rare that Marina ever got to take a pose that allowed her to either read or nap. She generally used the time to go over the basic exercises of magic that Uncle Thomas taught her, or to go over some more mundane lesson or other.
Oh, modeling was work, all right. She understood that artists who didn’t have complacent relatives paid well for models to pose, and in her opinion, every penny was earned.
She’d been here all morning posing, because Uncle had got a mania about the early light; enough was enough. She was hungry, it was time for luncheon, and it wasn’t fair to make her work from dawn to dark. How could anyone waste such a beautiful autumn day inside the stone walls of this farmhouse? “Uncle Sebastian,” she called. “The model’s arm is falling off.”
A whiff of oil paints came to her as Sebastian looked up from his canvas. “It isn’t, I assure you,” he retorted.
She didn’t pout; it wasn’t in her nature to pout. But she did protest. “Well, feels as though it’s falling off!”
Sebastian heaved a theatrical sigh. “The modern generation has no stamina,” he complained, disordering his graying chestnut locks with the same hand that held his brush, and leaving streaks of gold all through it. “Why, when your aunt was your age, she could hold a pose for six and seven hours at a time, and never a complaint out of her.”
Taking that as permission to break her pose, Marina leaned the oriflamme, the battle banner of medieval France, against the wall, and put her sword down on the floor. “When my aunt was my age, you posed her as a reclining odalisque, or fainting on the couch, or leaning languidly in a window,” she retorted. “You never once posed her as Joan of Arc. Or Britannia, in a heavy helmet and breastplate. Or Morgan Le Fay, with a snake and a dagger.”
“Trivial details,” Sebastian said with a dismissive gesture. “Inconsequential.”
“Not to my arm.” Marina shook both of her arms vigorously, grateful that Sebastian had not inflicted the heavy breastplate and helmet on her. Of course, that would have made the current painting look rather more like that one of Britannia that he had recently finished than Sebastian would have preferred.
And since the Britannia painting was owned by a business rival of the gentleman who had commissioned this one, it wouldn’t do to make one a copy of the other.
This one, which was to be significantly larger than “Britannia Awakes” as well as significantly different, was going to be very profitable for Uncle Sebastian. And since the rival who had commissioned “Saint Jeanne” was a profound Francophobe…
Men, Marina had long since concluded, could be remarkably silly. On the other hand, when the first man caught wind of this there might be another commission for a new painting, perhaps a companion to “Britannia Awakes,” which would be very nice for the household indeed. And then—another commission from the second gentleman? This could be amusing as well as profitable!
The second gentleman, however, had made some interesting assumptions, perhaps based upon the considerable amount of arm and shoulder, ankle and calf that Britannia had displayed. He had made it quite clear to Uncle Sebastian that he wanted the same model for his painting, but he had also thrown out plenty of hints that he wanted the model as well, perhaps presuming that his rival had also included that as part of the commission.
Marina wasn’t supposed to know that. Uncle Sebastian hadn’t known she was anywhere near the house when the client came to call. In fact, she’d been gathering eggs and had heard voices in Uncle Sebastian’s studio, and the Sylphs had told her that one was a stranger. It had been quite funny—she was listening from outside the window—until Uncle Sebastian, with a cold remark that the gentleman couldn’t possibly be referring to his dear niece, had interrupted the train of increasingly less subtle hints about Sebastian’s “lovely model.” Fortunately, Sebastian hadn’t lost his temper. Uncle Sebastian in a temper was apt to damage things.