Late Summer 1817 — The Cotswolds

The farmer's cart smelled of turnips and old hay and something that might have been goat, though Alyce could not see a goat anywhere among the vegetables. She sat on a sack of something lumpy—potatoes, probably, given the season—and watched the road unwind behind her.

She had paid the farmer threepence for the ride. Her mother would have been horrified. A young lady does not travel in carts. A young lady does not sit amongst vegetables. A young lady does not speak to farmers unless absolutely necessary and certainly does not pay them money for services that might imply she was the sort of young lady who required cart rides.

Alyce was not certain what sort of young lady she was. She was increasingly certain she was not the sort her mother wanted.

The hedgerows along the road were heavy with late summer growth. Wild rose hips ripening to red—good for preserves, better for tisanes, useful against winter coughs. Elderberries darkening on their stems—blood-purifying, fever-reducing, the basis of half a dozen remedies her grandmother had taught her. Meadowsweet in the ditch, past its flowering but still fragrant—headache relief, stomach settling, sacred to peoples who had lived in these hills long before anyone built hedgerows.

Her grandmother's voice, present in her thoughts as it had been for as long as she could remember: Always know what grows beside you. You never know when you will need it.

Alyce knew what grew beside her. She also knew that this knowledge marked her as something her mother pretended not to see and her father chose not to discuss. The baker's boy would not have understood it at all.

The baker's boy.

Thomas Welling. Twenty-two years old. Pleasant face, prosperous prospects, predictable future. He had smiled at Alyce in church for six months before working up the courage to speak to her father. He had Plans: the bakery would expand, the ovens would be rebuilt, there would be journeymen and apprentices and eventually a shop in the larger village three miles distant. He had explained these plans at Sunday dinner, in her parents' home, while Alyce sat silent and her mother beamed and her father nodded with satisfaction.

A suitable match. A sensible match. A match Alyce should be grateful for.

Thomas Welling was not unkind. This was the worst of it. If he had been cruel, if he had been stupid, if he had been obviously unsuitable in some way that even her parents could not ignore—but he was none of these things. He was perfectly acceptable. He would make some woman a perfectly acceptable husband.

Alyce did not want acceptable. She did not want predictable. She did not want to spend the rest of her life in a bakery, smelling of yeast and flour, watching Thomas Welling's pleasant face grow old while she grew old beside him, generation after generation of Wellings stretching into an endless acceptable future.

She wanted—

The cart hit a rut. Alyce caught herself on the sacks, felt the potatoes shift beneath her.

The farmer glanced over his shoulder. "Beg pardon, miss. Road's rough through here."

"No matter."

What did she want? Her mother's voice this time, sharper than her grandmother's: You cannot simply want something else. You must want something specific. What do you propose to do with yourself if not marry?

She did not have an answer. She had never been permitted to consider the question long enough to find one.

The cart crested a hill and the valley opened before her—green fields, scattered cottages, the slant of afternoon light that meant she was nearly there. Another mile of turnip-scented uncertainty, and then—

And then her grandmother would ask the questions her parents never asked. And Alyce would have to find answers.

***

The cottage announced itself by smell before it appeared around the bend: woodsmoke and herbs and the particular green scent of things growing deliberately. The garden sprawled along the path, productive rather than ornamental—rows of vegetables, beds of medicinal plants, a tangle of roses that Alyce suspected were more useful than beautiful. Margerye did not keep anything that was not useful.

A cat observed Alyce's arrival from the garden wall. Grey, ancient, unimpressed. It blinked slowly—contempt or inscrutability, impossible to say—and returned to watching something in the undergrowth.

The door was open. It was always open in good weather—Margerye believed in air circulation with the fervour of a zealot.

"Grandmother?"

No response from inside, but Alyce had not expected one. Margerye would be in the stillroom, or the garden, or somewhere dealing with whatever required dealing with. She did not sit idle. She did not wait for visitors. If Alyce wanted her attention, she would need to go find it.

Alyce left her bag by the door—the single bag she had packed in the hour before dawn, cramming in what she could carry and leaving behind everything that would not fit—and walked around the cottage toward the stillroom.

Margerye was there, grinding something in a mortar with the steady rhythm of long practice. She did not look up when Alyce appeared in the doorway, but her hands paused for a moment before resuming their work.

"Sooner than I expected."

"The cart driver was making good time."

"I meant sooner than I expected you to finally run." Margerye set down the pestle and turned. Her face was lined, weathered, entirely unsurprised. "I thought you might last until Michaelmas."

"The Wellings are hosting a dinner party next week. Mother wanted me to attend. She wanted me to—" Alyce stopped. The words tangled in her throat.

"To accept him formally."

"Yes."

Margerye made a sound that was not quite a laugh. She wiped her hands on her apron—herb-stained, spotted with things Alyce could identify by colour and smell—and gestured toward the cottage. "Tea, then. This is not a conversation for the stillroom."

The kitchen was unchanged from every visit Alyce could remember: cluttered and practical, bundles of herbs hanging from the ceiling beams, jars of preserves lining the shelves, a kettle already warming over the fire. Margerye knew many things she should not have been able to know.

They sat. They drank. The tea was chamomile and something else—lemon balm, Alyce thought, with a hint of something bitter underneath. Calming, focusing, the sort of blend her grandmother gave to patients who needed to think clearly about difficult things.

Margerye set down her cup. "Tell me."

Alyce told her. The words came out tangled at first—the dinner, the dress her mother had commissioned, the way Thomas Welling had looked at her with such earnest expectation—and then faster, tumbling over each other. The weeks of pressure. The months of hints. The year of her parents' careful maneuvering, positioning her like a piece on a board, moving her toward a conclusion they had already decided upon.

"They do not ask what I want. They tell me what I should want. They tell me I am being unreasonable, impractical, that I cannot simply refuse without an alternative to offer, that I should be grateful—" She stopped, breathing hard. "I do not want to be grateful. I do not want to be reasonable. I do not want Thomas Welling."

Margerye listened without interrupting. When Alyce finally ran out of words, she refilled both their cups and sat back in her chair.

"What do you actually want?"

The question landed like a stone.

"I—" Alyce started, and stopped. "Not him."

"That is what you do not want." Margerye's voice was patient. "I asked what you do want."

"I do not know."

"Think harder."

The silence stretched. Outside, a bird sang something complicated. The cat appeared in the doorway, considered entering, and departed again with an air of having decided against it.

What did she want?

She thought about the stillroom. The mortar and pestle, the herbs, the careful work of preparing remedies. She thought about the satisfaction of grinding dried comfrey root, of straining infusions through cloth, of bottling things that would help someone who needed help.

She thought about old Mrs. Bulkeley in the village, who had come to Margerye last winter with a cough that would not shift. Alyce had prepared the syrup herself—horehound and honey and thyme—and Mrs. Bulkeley had drunk it and recovered and told no one where the syrup had come from, because respectable people did not admit to visiting hedgewitches.

She thought about the Dalton baby, born blue and silent, until Margerye had done something Alyce did not fully understand and the baby had gasped and cried and lived.

She thought about the widow Harper, whose husband's ghost had lingered by the hearth for three months after his death, until Margerye had spoken to it quietly and sent it wherever ghosts were meant to go.

Small magics. Practical magics. Help given quietly, without thanks or recognition, to people who needed it.

Was that what she wanted? To spend her life doing what her grandmother did—useful work, invisible work, dismissed as folk practice by anyone with pretensions to respectability?

It was good work. It was necessary work. But it was not—

The word emerged before she had finished thinking it. "Larger."

Margerye raised an eyebrow.

"I want something larger. Not just remedies. Not just the problems that come to the stillroom door. I want—" She struggled for words. "The stories. The ones about fairy godmothers. They do not just make tisanes and poultices. They transform things. They appear when everything seems impossible, and they change what is possible."

Margerye's expression was unreadable. "Cinderella."

"Yes. And the others. The ones who help people become what they were meant to be. Not just healing what is broken—transforming what could be better."

The words sounded ridiculous spoken aloud. Childish. Alyce felt her face warm, expecting her grandmother's practical dismissal, expecting to be reminded that fairy tales were not real life—

Margerye was silent for a long moment. "Fairy godmother."

It was not a dismissal. It was not even a question. It was something closer to recognition.

"You want to be a fairy godmother."

Alyce opened her mouth to take it back, to say she had been speaking foolishly, to retreat to something sensible.

"Yes." The word came out before she could take it back.

The word hung in the kitchen air, definite and terrifying.

Margerye rose, moved to the shelf where she kept her reference books. "There is an Academy. Dame Perenelle's. They train fairy godmothers. Properly. With certification and licensing and all the rest of that institutional nonsense."

"You know about it?"

"I know a great deal about it." Something old moved behind her grandmother's eyes. "Tell me what you know."

Alyce told her—the stories, mostly, fragments and legends. The Bureau of Fairy Godmothers, which she had heard of vaguely. The idea that there was a profession, with standards and requirements, seemed both absurd and inevitable.

Margerye filled in the rest. The Academy's founding in 1422. Two years of rigorous training, culminating in an oath and certification. The Bureau's oversight. The professional mantle, which changed how practitioners were perceived—trustworthy, forgettable, safe.

"The requirements for admission are fae heritage—you have enough through my line—and disposition toward benevolent action. The second is more important than the first."

"I could apply." Alyce heard the wonder in her own voice. "I could actually apply."

"You could." Margerye paused. "There is a complication."

"What complication?"

"The application requires disclosure of any training in alternative magical traditions." Margerye met her eyes steadily. "Hedgewitchery. Cunning craft. Folk practice of any kind."

"Why?"

"Because the institution considers us inferior. Unprofessional." The word came out sharp. "They believe formal magical training is the only legitimate training. That what we do in stillrooms and gardens is superstition. If you disclose my training, you will spend your time at the Academy fighting their assumptions. If they admit you at all."

Alyce understood what her grandmother was not quite saying. "If I do not disclose..."

"You will be lying on your application."

The statement sat between them, plain and unadorned.

"The application is specific," Margerye continued. "It asks whether you have received training in hedgewitchery, cunning craft, unlicensed potion-making, any folk tradition not sanctioned by the Bureau. It asks whether your family has practiced these things. It warns that failure to disclose is grounds for immediate expulsion."

"Then I cannot apply."

"You can apply. You can disclose nothing. You can hide what you know and pretend to be what they expect." Margerye's voice was calm, practical, as if she were discussing the best method for drying herbs. "You can lie."

"You want me to lie?"

"I want you to consider your options." Margerye crossed to a shelf, retrieving a bundle of dried lavender that she began to strip into a small wooden bowl. "The Academy considers hedgewitch training a disadvantage. A contamination, even."

"That is absurd."

"It is institutional prejudice. Common among institutions." Her hands never paused in their work. "The question is: do you believe their prejudice should close this door to you?"

Alyce thought about everything she knew. The plants and their uses. The remedies for a hundred ailments. The practical wisdom her grandmother had passed down through years of patient teaching. Mrs. Bulkeley's cough, cured. The Dalton baby, breathing. The Harper ghost, at peace.

Alyce straightened in her chair. "No."

"Then you know what to do."

It was that simple. And that complicated.

"I would be lying to enter an institution that values honesty."

"You would be refusing to let their dishonesty about your skills determine your future." Margerye's hands stilled on the lavender. "There is nothing inferior about what I have taught you. If they cannot see that—if they have decided before meeting you that your knowledge is worthless—why should you let their blindness close a door?"

"Because honesty—"

"Is valuable. Yes. So is getting what you deserve." Margerye set down the lavender and turned to face her fully. "I am not telling you what to do, Alyce. I am telling you what is possible. The choice is yours."

The choice.

Alyce thought about Thomas Welling's pleasant face. About her mother's expectations. About the endless predictable future stretching before her if she returned home and accepted what was offered.

She thought about fairy godmothers. About transformation. About being more than what others expected.

She thought about lying.

Alyce met her grandmother's eyes. "Teach me. Teach me what to hide."