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I asked Mrs. Kelly what duties I was supposed to do, and she started reeling off a whole massive list of things, and I wrote them all down in my notebook because there were too many to remember. And she was impressed because I was able to write, and she asked me where I was from and who my family were, even though she'd promised she wasn't going to ask me stuff like that. I told her I wasn't able to talk about my past, it was too painful, which is a great way to stop people from asking nosy questions that you're not too interested in answering.

The first thing on the list of duties was to make Cordelia's breakfast and take it up to her. I could feel my plan firming up. After that I was to clear out the grates of three fires, sweep the kitchen floor, peel a massive bucket of potatoes, polish the furniture in the hall, and feed the horses. I told Mrs. Kelly she could count on me, no problem, and she
said, “Lord above, Cosmo, but you really are a great fellow altogether,” and I said, “Thanks.” Being called a great fellow was a few notches up from being called madder than a brush. It felt like I was making progress.

She looked at me a bit dreamily as I started getting Cordelia's breakfast ready. She said my name a few times, and then she asked how on earth I'd come to be called something so unusual. I told her that I wished I knew.

I'd figured out exactly what I was going to do by then, and it was lousy, but at the time I didn't think I had much of an option.

When I knocked on Cordelia's door, she was just as rude to me as she'd been to Kevin.

“Oh, come IN,” she said. And when I did go in, her face was hard and sharp, her words bitter and cross. She asked me who the devil I was, and I told her I was a new person come to help for a few days.

“I didn't give anyone permission to send a strange new boy to me. Where's Kevin?”

I told her that Kevin was busy. I told her that I was a family friend of Mrs. Kelly's and that I was above board in every way. But I said there was something else going on that was completely below board and she might want to know about it. Cordelia started nibbling on the corner of one of the pieces of crustless toast, and she looked into my eyes and said, “Very well, then. What is it?”

“There's this girl who's been smuggled in here, and now
she's sleeping over and she's planning to stay. I don't think your dad would be that thrilled if he found out about it.”

“A girl?” Cordelia said, pensively pouring herself some tea, steam rising in front of her face.

“Yes, a girl.”

“Who smuggled her in?” she said,
plink
ing two sugar cubes into her cup and making a little tea whirlpool with the skinny silver spoon.

“Look, all I'm going to say is that at the moment she's asleep in the old wing where your brother used to live.”

She stopped stirring, put the spoon back down on the tray, and blinked a few times.

“Did you know my brother?” she said, and her arrogant little voice changed for a moment.

“No. I didn't. But anyway, that's where she is.”

“Father doesn't allow anyone to go in there, not even me. If he finds out there's a strange girl staying there without anyone's consent, he is going to lose his sense of reason.”

Excellent
, I thought.

“Don't you think you'd better tell him, then?”

“Yes,” she said, staring out the window, munching away. “Yes, I very much think I ought to. Father and I shall be dining together this evening, and I shall use that as an opportunity to inform him of the situation.”

“Great,” I said.

“By the way, how is it that
you
know about this girl?”

I told her that I'd prefer not to get into the details, just
that I knew a lot of stuff that other people didn't know, and that was all I was prepared to say. I also told her not to tell her father who she had gotten the information from. I sold the idea to her by saying that if she didn't reveal her sources, she'd get all the credit herself.

Her eyes went kind of flickery and gray for a second like she was suspicious, and as if she thought I was some kind of snake or weasel. And I suppose if you want to be precise about it, that's what I was, but I was acting for a good cause, even though it might have seemed mean at the time.

After filling Cordelia in on Maggie, I had to go and do all of Kevin's other jobs. And I kept on thinking how much I hoped my plan to get Maggie kicked out was going to work.

I thought I had the whole thing in order: Corporamore was going to find out about Maggie and go mad and send her away, and she would go back to where she'd come from, where she had all those brothers and sisters who loved her so much, and Kevin would be able to get on with the life that he was meant to have, not the one he thought he wanted, and I'd go back home to the present, and that would basically be that.

“The best way to make the gods laugh is to tell them your plans,” is what my granddad used to say. I'm sure if I'd listened that day for a second, I would have heard a thousand gods laughing their heads off.

By the middle of the morning, I was already a hundred percent wrecked, partly because of the stress but mainly because of all the heavy lifting and slave labor. I legged it down to the kitchen, where I bumped straight into Kevin, who apparently was “nipping up” to get himself and Maggie a cup of tea. Very
Romeo and Juliet
. I had a disturbing image of the two of them sitting at the end of Crispin's bed, sipping from the polite little china cups, both of them saying, “Ah, fantastic” together.

He asked me how I was getting on with the work, and I said fine but that to be perfectly honest, I didn't have much time to hang out and chat because I still had a ton more of it to do.

And he said, “You've no idea how wonderful it has been to spend time with her,” and I said, “No, I'm sure I haven't a clue.”

In my head I was thinking that pretty soon Cordelia would have briefed her father and Kevin and Maggie would be ratted out and everything would be okay.

Mrs. Kelly made dinner for the Corporamores and hobbled up with it to the dining room herself. She reported that by the time she was serving pudding, Lord George Corporamore had drunk a whole bottle of brandy. You can't always predict when people are going to do things like that. And you definitely can't predict the way they're going to behave after they've done it.

I sprinted off to Crispin's wing. Maggie was asleep, like an angel in a white nightshirt with her messy black hair all spread out over the pillow and the pale skin of her cheek looking kind of like it was glowing.

I made it in just ahead of him and hid under the bed. And then almost instantly I heard the
thud
s and
bang
s of George Corporamore's feet getting closer and closer, and I could hear him bursting in through the doorway and I was realizing that this whole thing was my responsibility now, and if something bad happened to her, it would be because of me.

From where I was hiding, I could see his boots in the doorway, and they were very pointy. And I could feel the bed creaking, which must have been Maggie waking up.

“Who the blazes are you? What are you doing in this bed? NO ONE is ALLOWED in here. Do you hear me? This is a place where people are FORBIDDEN. Explain yourself immediately,” he demanded, and I was thinking this was all going to go horribly wrong now.

More rustling, and I imagined her eyes opening, and I was thinking about her face.

“Hello, sir. My name is Maggie. Maggie McGuire.”

She always cast a spell on people—at least that's what I think always used to happen. Soon I could hear his voice softening and sounding a hundred percent gentler. He went on then about how there once was a person who used to sleep in this bed and who had curly hair too. And at first I
wasn't sure what the sound was, but I realized that what I was hearing was George Corporamore starting to cry.

“Forgive me,” I could hear him say. “He was my son. I once had a son. His name was Crispin.”

And then, right in front of my face, Corporamore's knees hit the ground, which looked as if it could have been quite painful, and there were all these sniffling, sobby kinds of noises, and a few minutes went by, and Maggie said, “I'm so sorry, sir.” He sobbed away at the end of the bed. And she said, “Hush, hush. There, there,” the way you might talk to a baby.

Maggie had obviously had a load of practice comforting people when they were crying. She was very good at it. Corporamore stopped sobbing and quietened down altogether. He said to her how wrong it had felt for this room to have become so empty and cold, and how now that it was warm again and had some life in it, it reminded him of the way things used to be. He went on about how warmth brings memories alive and how coldness keeps them dead.

I got kind of paralyzed for a bit, but eventually I slid out from under the bed, which was risky. And before I managed to sneak away, I stood there for a second, feeling like a big idiot. They didn't see me, but still for some reason I was mortified.

Chapter 13

KEVIN WAS still very happy for me to be on Cordelia Corporamore's breakfast duty for the few days I was going to be here. And I was happy about it too—I didn't want him talking to her and finding out that I was a miserable informer and that I had spilled the beans about Maggie and that because of me, Cordelia had gone and told her father.