Lady of Dreams Page 14

  Jessamy’s eyes were unusually solemn. “All right, Hyung. What are you going to do, though?”

  “I don’t know,” said Yong-hwa. “I have to think about it for a little. Ae-jung-ssi!”

  Ae-jung looked up, blinking in surprise. “Ye?”

  “Jessamy is going to take you for a walk. You look pale.”

  “Ye,” agreed Ae-jung, a little listlessly. She smiled wanly at Jessamy, who, having walked far enough into the library to catch sight of me, did a startled double take in my direction and had to look away quickly before Yong-hwa caught him at it. When Yong-hwa helped Ae-jung to her feet he looked back, mouthing, “Nuna?” at me.

  I put my finger to my lips as I had already done once that day and made a shooing motion at him. This earned me a gladsome smile that made me sigh a little; I doubted I would see him again that day. It’s the natural way of things, but I’ve always been a selfish sort of person, and I resented Ae-jung for taking the sunshine away from me when she already had so much of it. I smiled into the curve of my fan at my own irrationality and decided that in this at least, Se-ri and I were very similar. She, too, resented it when those things she considered hers were taken from her. I was distant enough from myself to know the danger of such a way of thinking, but was Se-ri? We would see.

  When Jessamy had herded the unresisting Ae-jung from the library, Yong-hwa remained. At first I thought, in a startled jab of unusual panic, that he had remembered me and would speak to me. Instead, he sat in the chair diagonally across from mine, crossing his legs with a languid air, and sank into the most elegant attitude of scheming that I’d ever had the privilege of seeing. His face was as closed off as I had yet seen, but the boredom was utterly gone from it. From this state he roused some one or two hours later with a quiet, “Ah. Dae,” and uncrossed his legs with something of a flick.

  My eyebrows went up a little, and I said beneath my breath, “Very pleased with yourself, aren’t you?”

  Yong-hwa gave a low laugh and agreed, “Dae,” then looked at the chair opposite him in sharp surprise.

  My lips formed a silent Oooh that—this time at least—I was too sensible to utter aloud. Ma Yong-hwa really was too observant for comfort.

  I didn’t properly relax until Yong-hwa had been absent from the library for some minutes. Then I blew out a breath in an unladylike way that ruffled my hair, and I heard the rattling of the windows to my right. Carlin, uttering a few choice words that he shouldn’t have spoken in front of me, was struggling through the window, rumpling his uniform in the process.

  “What are you doing, Carlin?”

  “Two hours!” panted Carlin, wriggling vigorously to escape the clinging embrace of the foliage through which he’d forged to reach the window. “Two hours, miss! What was he doing in here with you for two hours? And now he’s waiting outside the door, just looking at the floor. Where’s the young master?”

  “Ma Yong-hwa sent him off with Ae-jung-ssi,” I said, watching his struggles with a detached kind of interest. There was a massive buildup of Dream growing at the edges of my mind like a black cloud front, distracting me with the question of when it would fall on me. “You could have left me here a little longer if Yong-hwa-ssi was lingering. You didn’t have to climb through the window.”

  Carlin stopped struggling, exasperation in the line of his shoulders. “What? I thought he was courting her!”

  “He is,” I said.

  “Then why did he send her off with someone else?” complained Carlin. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Ah, that,” I said. “He’s being very kind and perhaps a little bit stupid. He’s not thinking about himself; he’s thinking about her. She needs cheering up, and Jessamy is the best at that. Besides, I think Yong-hwa-ssi has plans that involve helping her in another way.”

  “He needs to be a bit more selfish,” opined Carlin, making it through the window at last and dusting the loose foliage from his uniform. “How does he expect to win her when he’s sending her off with another man to be cheered up? I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Ma Yong-hwa thinks of Jessamy more as a puppy than a man,” I told him. “Ae-jung does, too, I think.”

  “Do you know what I think?” said Carlin, forgetting himself so far as to sit down on the chaise longue at my feet. “I think if a man doesn’t know his own mind enough to—” But I wasn’t destined to know what Carlin thought, because the great storm front of Dream that I had seen growing at the edges of my mind broke just then, sweeping me away and past the garden walk, where Jessamy was prancing with Ae-jung, to follow Yong-hwa, who was no longer outside the library door. Now he was striding down one of Eun-hee’s halls with a decidedly stern look on his face. He went first to Se-ri’s rooms and knocked at the door, and when that produced no answer other than the polite insistence of Se-ri’s maid that her mistress wasn’t within, and that she had no idea where her mistress might be, he made a methodical search of the parlours and tearooms on the floor. It was equally fruitless, and by the time the afternoon was lengthening into evening, Yong-hwa had retreated to his apartment again.

  Was Se-ri hiding, then? She hadn’t been in the garden with Jessamy and Ae-jung, who, when I momentarily wandered away from Yong-hwa to find them, had been sitting companionably on the edge of the tiny stream that ran through Eun-hee’s estate, skipping stones across the diamond waters. Jessamy was finding it highly agreeable, teaching Ae-jung which of the stones were the best for skipping and showing her how to hold them by wrapping her fingers around them. And Ae-jung, who had been silent in her misery earlier in the library, was smiling and open again, with the barest shadow to the backs of her eyes. Shadows always did baulk at the sunshine that was Jessamy, and the two of them bumped shoulders and laughed and splashed the afternoon away together while Yong-hwa stalked through the house after Se-ri like a particularly fashionable hunter.

  When I visited them one last time before trying to pull out of the Dreams long enough to eat dinner, Jessamy was knee-deep in the water, folding Ae-jung’s fingers around another stone.

  “Save this one for later, Nuna,” he said. “It’s my lucky stone. Now it’s yours. You have to skip it when you find the perfect spot and the perfect day.”

  “Oh, but don’t you want to keep it?” protested Ae-Jung. “What if you find the perfect spot and the perfect day?”

  “I already did,” said Jessamy, climbing out of the water with a sparkling of water drops in the sunlight. “Come on, Nuna. We’ll miss dinner.”

  I was still following along when Yong-hwa appeared at the dinner table, his face hard and tense. There was no chance of dinner for me yet, I had discovered; I could hear Carlin muttering somewhere in the back of my mind, but I was pulled along by Yong-hwa as irresistibly as ever I’d been pulled along by Jessamy. Se-ri wasn’t at the dinner table, either, which amused me slightly. She really was hiding. Clever girl. She was quite well aware that she would be approached by Yong-hwa—and quite possibly Jessamy, as well—and she preferred to marshal her resources first. Was that all, though? I hadn’t really thought of Se-ri as the sort to hide from confrontation. I pushed myself away from the dinner table, fighting hard to distance myself from the place where not one but three of my current foci were making an almost irresistible pull in the Dream, and at last managed to take myself away down the halls. Where was Se-ri? And what was she doing?

  I swept through several of Eun-hee’s rooms before I found her. She was back in the library, walking past my own recumbent body—always so interesting to see from within a Dream—to rearrange the cushions on one of the soft-padded couches. I wandered closer, frowning, and as I passed my somnolent body on the couch, I saw it frown, too. Ah. No. She wasn’t rearranging the cushions, she was making sure her evidence was well hidden. The book with which she had threatened Ae-jung was thin enough to slide down between the cushions but thick enough to stay where she put it, safe and hidden. When she was done, she swept back past my body as unseeingly as she had the first time, and I woke from th
e Dream easily, sighing.

  “Where are you hiding, Carlin?” I said to the silence of the library.

  “Here, miss,” said Carlin, emerging from the voluminous drapes with a sneeze. “What was she up to?”

  “Trouble,” I said absently, thinking about the book.

  “I could tell that,” Carlin scoffed. “What a sickly smile that girl has! Heir to the biggest paper company in Eppa, and she goes around simpering at people. Do you want dinner, miss?”

  I could have told Carlin about the book. I could have told Jessamy, too, if it came to that. Either of them would have fetched it for me. But I was feeling stubborn and a little bit invested, which was unusual, so I said to Carlin, “You can go back to my room and prepare dinner, Carlin. I’ll walk back by myself.”

  When he left, I fetched the book myself, tucking it out of sight in my wrap, and made my slow, careful way back to my suite. The question was, I thought, feeling my footsteps heavy and laborious against the carpet, who was the safest person to keep the book? Certainly not Hyun-jun. Jessamy would be safe, but I didn’t want to burden him. It was completely out of the question for me to keep the thing; I didn’t like interacting directly with the people from my Dreams, and I’d already gone further than was comfortable by fetching the book myself. I wasn’t about to try to give it directly to Ae-jung.

  I was no closer to deciding what to do with the book when I woke the next day. I had been troubled with Dreams all through the late night: of Ae-jung, running from Hyun-jun in the moonlit night; of Se-ri, performing on the piano in front of everyone, at last in sight, but as far out of Yong-hwa’s reach as before; of Yong-hwa, both watching Se-ri’s performance, and in Se-ri’s apartments at the same time to search through her things.

  “Magic,” I muttered, and went back to sleep amid the Dream.

  Having gone to sleep in a Dream, I was not surprised to wake in one. I opened my eyes to a ceiling that wasn’t my own and sat up in a strange bed that I sank into though there was no weight to me.

  “What’s this?” I said. “Where am I?”

  “Mwohya?” said a voice from the next room. The door was slightly ajar, and by the time I’d realised it was someone’s bathing chamber, and that it was Yong-hwa’s voice I’d heard, it was too late to retreat. Yong-hwa emerged from the bathing chamber wearing only his trousers, shirtless and with his hair still wet and tousled from washing.

  My eyes very wide, I said, “Oh dear!” in a thoughtful voice.

  Carlin’s voice said very faintly, amid the clinking of the breakfast tea tray as he set it on the table by my chaise longue, “Miss? Is everything all right?”

  “Ah. Yes,” I said. I felt a vague tug as, in my own Reality, Carlin lifted me from bed and over to my chaise longue. I try very hard not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the Dreams often have no concept of privacy. I turned my back on Yong-hwa, who was looking around his own room in frowning puzzlement, and slipped through the wall and into the guest wing. I was immediately walked through by Ae-jung, who was creeping down the hall as if she feared to meet someone else. Ah. She must be off to see Se-ri, then.

  I followed, feeling more like myself, and was interested enough to glide on ahead of Ae-jung and duck through Se-ri’s wall to see if she was already up. She was, which surprised me. I hadn’t expected someone so obviously spoiled to be up hours before such society girls are usually awake. Her makeup was as flawless as if she’d been up for an hour or two already, and her smile was just as carefully applied. When Ae-jung knocked, she waited a minute or two before she answered—just, in fact, as Ae-jung was hesitating between knocking again and waiting for a little longer.

  “Ah,” I said, feeling blindly for a biscuit on the tea tray. Carlin’s fingers stopped mine, turned my hand over, and pushed a delicate shortbread into it. “She was expecting her. Thank you, Carlin.”

  “I’ve decided,” said Ae-jung, as soon as the door opened on Se-ri’s elegant figure. “I’ll come and work for you.”

  “Very good,” Se-ri said, with her perfectly painted smile. “There’s no need to tell Sohn Sajangnim about this just yet. I’ll tell him when we get back. I’ll take good care of you, Ae-jung-ssi.”

  “Ye,” said Ae-jung, her usual smile entirely absent from her eyes.

  “Report to me tomorrow at this time,” said Se-ri. “Don’t be deceived, Ae-jung-ssi; I may be at Eun-hee’s manor but I never take holidays. There is always work to be done.”

  “Ye,” said Ae-jung again, bowing.

  “Oh, and Ae-jung-ssi?”

  “Ye?”

  “Stay away from Hyun-jun from now on.”

  “Oh, but I have to tell him I won’t be working with him any longer!” cried Ae-jung. “I can’t just leave!”

  “I’ll tell him,” said Se-ri. “Don’t worry, Ae-jung-ssi. I’ll make sure he knows exactly how useful you are to me.”

  “Ye,” said Ae-jung, one last time. “I’ll be going, then, Se-ri-ssi.”

  “What a tangle,” I said to Carlin, wondering what Yong-hwa was planning for when he finally did manage to catch Se-ri. There was another Dream pushing at me from within the house: Hyun-jun muttering to himself in the empty breakfast room. “Goodness me, everyone is up early this morning!”

  Hyun-jun, pacing back and forth in a particularly disturbing manner that had him walking through my bathing chamber door, said, “She said she had to go in. What did she mean by that? Did she not want to hear what I was saying? Impossible! I can’t be wrong. Was she nervous, then?”

  And in another Dream, Ae-jung stumbled down the hall toward her room, passing close by my own door, the tears streaming down her face.

  “So emotional!” I sighed. “Carlin, I think this is going to be one of our more hard-won successes.”

  “Yes, miss,” said Carlin. “Miss, you do know that the young master seems to be in love with that girl as well, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “But we’re going to make sure that Yong-hwa-ssi wins out,” said Carlin, nodding.

  “You’re more enthusiastic about this than usual,” I said, shaking my head to clear the contrasting Dream-sights of Hyun-jun and Ae-jung, each alone in their misery.

  “But we are making sure he wins out, aren’t we, miss?”

  “I don’t fix the results,” I said. “I just give a helping hand every now and then.”

  “Yeeeees,” said Carlin dubiously. “I’m sure you’re right, miss—”

  “Thank you so much, Carlin.”

  “Only I do think we should help Yong-hwa-ssi.”

  “Well, perhaps I will,” I said. “But not before breakfast. Tea, Carlin.”

  7

  I’m going to tell you a story. It’s about a little girl who couldn’t walk and Dreamed her days away by the Scandian seaside.

  Shush. I know you know who it is.

  She didn’t remember her mother, and her father was always in Eppa, caring for his business and his young heir. Life was beige and grey, and she had the feeling that it would always have been just a little bit too cold if only she could actually feel the cold.

  Still, if she was determined—and she was very determined, in those days—she could make sure she was taken out for a walk in the Contraption chair every afternoon to feed the seagulls. The footman would prop a small, fat bag of bread on her lap and steer the Contraption chair by the little dial at the back while it puffed and clicked at a good pace.

  She wasn’t an enthusiastic child, but she did enjoy feeding the seagulls. She enjoyed it more than anything else in her Dreamy, shut-in world. It wasn’t until she was older that she began to see the smile on the footman’s face whenever he stood waiting for her, and to wonder what it meant. She didn’t ask him why; it wouldn’t have done any good, and she had other ways of satisfying her interest. But one day, after he brought her back to the house, she let her Dreams follow him as she was carried back upstairs and settled on her couch. She saw him walking down the servants’ hall to th
e kitchen, still smiling, and saw the way the cook shook her stirring stick at him.

  “Take that smirk off your face, you little caution! It’s no business of a footman to be mooning over his employer’s daughter.”

  The footman grinned at her. “You’re not with the times, Mrs. Cottle. We’re all equals in this world, didn’t you know?”

  “At it again, was she?”

  He nodded. “A handful of crumbs for the mob of gulls at her feet, and then all the rest for the injured one. It knows now, the clever little blighter. It sails close by to catch everything she throws. I think it would take the pieces right out of her fingers if it could land. Who ever heard of a legless gull surviving?”

  “That thing will be around for years yet, waving its little leg stumps,” said Mrs. Cottle.

  The footman grinned again, his eyes dancing. “Aye, if she’s got anything to do with it.”

  Ya. You’re interrupting again. What about the footman? Of course he’s the same one she has now; Carlin goes with her everywhere. Let me finish my story.

  The girl let go of her Dream and thought about it for a little while. When had she started feeding that bird? She’d been feeding it for so long that she couldn’t remember. She’d started tossing it pieces of bread because it had only the stump of one leg and couldn’t land with the other to squabble for pieces. It had been clever and had caught everything she threw, even the bad throws. And she had kept feeding it.

  Mwoh? No. She didn’t feed the injured one from a sense of fellow feeling. She fed it because she felt sorry for it. She fed it because it was cleverer, and more determined; because all the others that didn’t have to be so clever and determined didn’t need anyone to feed them. This one needed her, at least for a little while.

  ***

  The Dreams didn’t stay away for long, despite all the struggling I could do without exhausting myself. I gave up trying to push them away at last and was mired about with three Dreams at once.