Page 72 of The Mad Baron's Bride
“A mermaid’s purse!” Ellinore peered into her palm. “Oi, that’s a great find. Very lucky, mum, do the mermaid leave her magic in it.”
Leda turned over the small packet with her finger. A slit showed the innards, empty.
“Alas, this one lacks magic, it would seem.” She showed Muriel, who had come to hover, too. “Shall I throw it back?”
“My mother always kept them,” Muriel said. “She put them on her dressing table. Said they were gifts from the sea, and one oughtn’t take gifts lightly.”
Leda couldn’t toss the thing onto the ground after that remark, not even if she thought it a dark omen. A woman who would keep a piece of sea wrack but had spurned the gift of her husband, if she’d never reveled with him in the kind of pleasure Leda had known last night. Even now she felt pleasantly aware of the warm place between her legs, though she went about all the normal activities of her day. Ordinary life suddenly turned on its side to show a wondrous new realm available to her, underneath the rest.
“I’ve heard the mermaids singing,” Leda said instead. “Saw one swimming last night, in fact.”
Muriel met this confidence with narrowed eyes. Ellinore raised her brows. “Singing?”
“They’ve small round heads and pointed noses. Very long eyelashes. And they give that high, keening cry, almost like a gull, but sweeter.”
Ellinore’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “Thas the seals, mum.”
“Seals!”
“There’s a colony of them as lives here. The winter babies will be growing now. Grey seals,” Muriel said with great scorn for Leda’s ignorance. “Do you go around the point that way,” and she pointed north, toward the sea, “there’s a place where they come ashore. Scores at a time, some days.”
Leda curled her hands around the mermaid purse and slipped it into her pocket. There was no enchantment here.No mermaids. Seals, a lovely creature, but flesh and bone and whiskery seal skin all the same.
And there was no ghost either, not of a girl. Only the ghost of Anne-Marie, still looming between her and Jack, to continue looming if Leda stayed. So would linger Muriel’s contempt, and Ellinore’s polite distance.
A figure down the beach caught her eye. A man, standing where the rocky cliffs slowly fell to their knees and sank into a sandy stretch of beach, a place where a tumble would not break a woman’s neck. It was not Jack, nor anyone else she recognized. Yet she knew him.
Every muscle in Leda’s body went rigid with fear. It was Toplady. A ghost in truth. The ghost of the man she’d murdered. He stood there without cuts in his coat, without blood staining his chest, but the arrogant set of that jaw, the smirk of contempt—that she knew, even from this distance.
She was going mad in truth, to see visions of him here.
Her boot kicked up a stone as she started forward—why she would run toward this apparition, she didn’t know—but she looked down and froze, seeing another omen. A smooth gray stone, roughly oval in shape, with a hole straight through it the size of her finger. She plucked it from the sand, a cool weight in her palm, and stared.
“What is it?” Ellinore gaped, too.
“It’s a hag stone.” Muriel’s cry was sharp as a seal’s, fearful, she thought. Cold darted down Leda’s spine. “And why shouldyoufind it? I’ve been looking for one all my life.”
“What does it mean?” Leda asked.
“It can cure poison and keep away witches,” Muriel said. “And if you look through it, you can see a witch, or a fairy.”
Leda held up the stone and looked through the small window at Muriel. “You’re not a fairy.”
Muriel’s knit brow eased, and her lips curled into a smile before she caught herself. “Boo.”
“And you’re not a witch.” Leda swung toward Ellinore.
The girl stepped back, wide-eyed, shaking her head. “What d’you see, then?”
“Nothing. Sand.”
On a mad impulse, Leda looked down the beach to where the ghost from her nightmare had appeared.
No man was there. A sea swallow darted above where he had stood, its cap a streak of black, its serrated wings cutting the sky.
No ghosts, and no magic. No world of enchantment lay through this lens. The wind swooped under her cap, stealing her breath.
Grace met them as they climbed to high land and circled back along the cliffs. “Did you know there are seals here?” Leda asked her.
