The Cerulean (The Cerulean Duology #1) - Amy Ewing Page 0,46

safely away in her lab. And the letter from Ithilia, tucked inside a book. She had thought she would feel prouder of herself, but mostly she felt like she hadn’t done anything at all. She should have let Sera escape right away. She should have found some way to get to Pelago already, her father’s money be damned—she had some jewelry of value she could pawn. Surely there was a Pelagan ship that would take her. They wouldn’t care about Kaolin rules, or needing a man’s permission. University or not, at least she could be herself there. Leo’s words rang in her ears.

Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll just marry you off to some low-class Old Port boy and wash his hands of you.

And she knew he would. If Agnes was honest with herself, it was a miracle he hadn’t already. Her stomach clenched at the thought of being married to a man, sharing a bed with a man. If her mother had still been alive, Agnes wondered, would she have been able to confide in her about the type of person she truly wished to marry? Pelago wasn’t as strict as Kaolin when it came to matters of sexuality. There were two southern islands, Lisbe and Crake, that were almost exclusively homosexual. Agnes used to dream of living on one of them when she was younger and beginning to understand that she was not like the other girls she knew. But even as a child, she recognized the danger in expressing that dream aloud.

“My mother wouldn’t have minded,” she muttered.

“Oh yes, she would have,” Mrs. Phelps said. “I know you like to romanticize her, but I’m sure she would have wanted a clean daughter as much as your father does.”

For a heart-stopping second, Agnes thought the woman had read her mind; then she realized Mrs. Phelps was just talking about the dirt again.

“But you didn’t even know her,” she said. Mrs. Phelps had been hired after her mother died.

“No, I didn’t, and I can’t say I’m sorry for it. I worked for the Hornes back then. But everyone knew about Xavier McLellan’s Pelagan wife. All those parties she used to throw, the way she dressed . . . I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but she was a dangerous woman, your mother. Wild. Unconventional. There were stories flying about that she had used her Talman magic and invoked some goddess or other to trick him into the marriage.”

Agnes snorted. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Well, he started acting strangely after a while, that’s for certain. But then she died and he came back to his old self and that was that. Best to keep the past in the past.”

“Acting strangely?” Agnes asked, surprised. She’d always been so obsessed with learning about her mother, she’d never given much thought to how her father might have been back then. She’d assumed he was simply the same as he was now. “How?”

“They weren’t rightly home much,” Mrs. Phelps said as she worked some gardenia shampoo through Agnes’s hair. “Traveling all the time. And the parties, with foreign foods and all sorts of people—not proper company, if you catch my drift. She was wild, like I said, and it rubbed off on him for a bit. Wouldn’t even deign to have you and your brother born at the hospital in Old Port. No, it was some private facility outside the city, that was the only place that would do for her.”

“How do you know that?”

“Servants talk, my dear. I may not have worked in this house then, but gossip like that travels fast, especially in this city. The McLellans left Old Port together, and only you children and your father returned.” She tilted Agnes’s head so she could look into her eyes and smiled. “But that woman gave us you and Leo, and that’s all that matters. Ah, Hattie.”

The young maid came hurrying in with a bucket of water, steam rising gently from its surface. She dumped it over Agnes’s head, rinsing away the shampoo.

“All right, that should do it,” Mrs. Phelps said. “Up you get.”

She covered Agnes in a big fluffy towel as she stepped out of the tub. Hattie wrapped another towel around her hair and led her off down the hall to Agnes’s room. Leo was lounging in the doorway of his own room, looking as smug as a cat with a fresh kill.

“Father wants to see you,” he said.

“Where did they take her?” Agnes demanded.

“Please don’t fight,” Hattie begged, glancing over