The Music Box: Chapter Sixty-Eight

“Can I take Papa up a cup of tea?”

Isabelle turned at the sound of Emily’s voice. She would have preferred to keep an eye on her, but this seemed a perfectly reasonable request and she would have aroused suspicion by refusing.

“Sure darling, let me put one on.”

Isabelle placed the kettle over the fire to boil and pulled down the teapot from the shelf. Lifting two small spoons of tea from the tin in which it was kept, she watched the dried leaves tumble into the pot, hooked together until the water would tear them apart and swirl them around.

Once the tea was made she poured a cup for herself and one for Percy. Emily, who had been hovering close to her mother all this time, took one of the cups and placed it on a tray. Isabelle watched as she walked carefully across the kitchen and through the doorway, listening for her footfall on the stairs.

Letting out a deep sigh, Isabelle realised how tense she had been with Emily watching over her. Rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hands, she realised she could no longer face this alone – the time had come to talk to Percy about what was going on.

“I really should have taken that tea up myself,” she thought, kicking herself for letting Emily – she could not think what else to call her – go. Her mind was spinning too fast to make sense of anything, a barrage of thoughts and images passing by. Then, out of this spinning, blurring mess, a sound emerged. The high pitched laughter of the wolf, emerging from the fire, rang in her ears again, but this time his image aligned with a face long consigned to the faded memories of a former life. It was Aloysius.

Aloysius, who had helped her and Percy escape after the wolves had turned against them. Aloysius, who she now knew had been acting not out of a compassion he would have extended to anybody, but a specific desire to see her safe. Aloysius, who she had long since even ceased thinking about, as she moved on with her new life here by the sea, a life with no place for the fraught power struggles and endless dangers of the forest she had long left behind.

Aloysius, Isabelle realised, had returned to claim what he believed his rightful entitlement.