A Great and Terrible Beauty (Gemma Doyle #1)(86)

“You could have waited till he asked to have it back!”

“He wouldn’t have, though.”

“Exactly my point!”

We’re laughing when Mrs. Nightwing enters, suspicious and predatory. “Pippa, is all as it was between you and Mr. Bumble?”

Pippa swallows hard. “Yes, Mrs. Nightwing.”

“Then where, pray tell, has your ring gone to?”

We hadn’t gotten this far in our planning—how to explain the loss of the ring to everyone. Now we’re stuck, I fear. But Pippa lifts her chin, the faintest hint of a smile beginning to show.

“Oh, that. He noticed a flaw.”



We sit, sheltered by the colorful scarves of Felicity’s private salon. Pippa and I are giving an account of the morning’s adventure with Mr. Bumble in rapid, sometimes overlapping detail.

“And then Pippa said . . .”

“. . . he found a flaw!”

We laugh till no sound comes out of our mouths, till our sides ache from it.

“Oh, that’s sublime,” Felicity says, wiping a tear from her eye. “Let us hope that is the last we shall see of the unfortunate Mr. Bumble.”

“Mrs. Bartleby Bumble.” Pip spits out the hard Bs. “Can you imagine the horror of that?”

We laugh again and our laughter drifts down into sighs.

“Gemma, I want to go again,” Felicity says when it’s quiet.

Ann nods. “Me too.”

“It might be pressing our luck to do it again so soon,” I say.

“Do be a sport,” Ann pleads.

Felicity nods. “Yes, after all, nothing terrible happened. And think of how marvelous it’s been having all that power at our fingertips. Perhaps your mother was simply doing what mothers do best—worrying needlessly.”

“Perhaps,” I say. I must admit that I’m in love with the feeling the magic of the runes provides. One more visit to them can’t hurt. And then I promise I’ll stop and do as my mother says. “All right, then,” I say. “The caves it is.”

“Oh, honestly, I’m too tired to run off to the woods tonight,” Pippa groans.

“We could do it right now. Right here,” Felicity says.

Pippa’s eyes widen. “Are you mad? With Mrs. Nightwing and all the others around us?”

Felicity lifts a section of scarf with her finger. Crowded around the warm fire in clumps of threes and fours, the others are oblivious to us. “They’ll never know we were gone.”



We take that ride on the mountaintop, falling into ourselves without trying to stop. I have only one rough moment. I’m a mermaid, rising from the sparkling sea, but when I look down, the water is my mother’s face, tight and fearful. I’m suddenly afraid and wish I could stop. But in the next moment we’re swept away to Felicity’s tent. Our eyes are shining, our skin is rosy, our all-knowing smiles are back. Our bodies feel like luxurious sighs as we stand in the great hall, completely invisible.

Oh, God, the great and terrible beauty of it. Around us, the motion of the room has slowed to the lethargic tempo of a music box coming unwound. Their voices are deep and every word seems to take a lifetime to say. Mrs. Nightwing sits in her chair, reading David Copperfield aloud to the younger girls. The temptation is too much for me. I touch her arm, ever so slightly. She doesn’t stop reading, but slowly, slowly, her free hand lifts and comes to rest on the spot I’ve touched. She scratches at the place where my hand has been, an irritation like an insect bite she’s reacted to and forgotten again. It’s extraordinary.

Pippa lets out with a tiny whelp of joy. “They can’t see us! It’s as if we’re not really here! Oh, the things I’d like to do . . .”

“Why not do them?” Felicity says, arching a brow. With that, she reaches over and flips the book in Mrs. Nightwing’s hands so that it is upside down. It takes Mrs. Nightwing a moment to register what has happened, but when she does, she’s completely perplexed. The girls at her feet cover their mouths with their hands to suppress their giggles.

“Why is everything so slow?” I say, leaning my hand against a marble column. It wriggles beneath my hand and I pull it back fast.

The column is alive.

Hundreds of tiny marble fairies and satyrs move on the surface. An odious little gargoyle unfurls his wings, cocks his head to one side. “You see things the way they really are now,” he says. “The others think this is only dreaming. But they live in the dream, not us.” He spits and wipes his nose on his wing.

“Ugh,” Felicity says. “Disgusting. I’m tempted to squash him.”

With a screech, the gargoyle is off, flying higher on the column.

A glimmering fairy boy with yellow eyes smiles up at me. “Why don’t you free us, then?” His voice is a soft murmur.

“Free you?”

“We’re trapped here. Free us—just for a moment, long enough to stretch our wings.”

“All right,” I say. It seems a reasonable request, after all. “You are free.”

With screeches and yelps, the fairies and nymphs run down the column like water till they’re scurrying about the floor, scavenging bits of cheese, hunks of bread, the odd checker piece. It’s madness with all these creatures running and flying about.