My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

THE LADY AND THE FOX BY KELLY LINK

Someone is in the garden.

“Daniel,” Miranda says. “It’s Santa Claus. He’s looking in the window.”

“No, it’s not,” Daniel says. He doesn’t look. “We’ve already had the presents. Besides. No such thing as Santa.”

They are together under the tree, the celebrated Honeywell Christmas tree. They are both eleven years old. There’s just enough space up against the trunk to sit cross-legged. Daniel is running the train set around the tree forwards, then backwards, then forwards again. Miranda is admiring her best present, a pair of gold-handled scissors shaped like a crane. The beak is the blade. Snip, snip, she slices brittle needles one by one off the branch above her. A smell of pine. A small green needle rain.

It must be very cold outside in the garden. The window shines with frost. It’s long past bedtime. If it isn’t Santa Claus, it could be a burglar come to steal someone’s jewels. Or an axe murderer.

Or else, of course, it’s one of Daniel’s hundreds of uncles or cousins. Because there isn’t a beard, and the face in the window isn’t a jolly face. Even partially obscured by darkness and frost, it has that Honeywell look to it. The room is full of adult Honeywells talking about the things that Honeywells always talk about, which is to say everything, horses and houses and God and grouting, tanning salons and—of course—theater. Always theater. Honeywells like to talk. When Honeywells have no lines to speak, they improvise. All the world’s a stage.

Rare to see a Honeywell in isolation. They come bunched like bananas. Not single spies, but in battalions. And as much as Miranda admires the red-gold Honeywell hair, the exaggerated, expressive Honeywell good looks, the Honeywell repertoire of jokes and confidences, poetry and nonsense, sometimes she needs an escape. Honeywells want you to talk, too. They ask questions until your mouth gets dry from answering.

Daniel is exceptionally restful for a Honeywell. He doesn’t care if you are there or not.

Miranda wriggles out from under the tree, through the press of leggy Honeywells in black tie and party dresses: apocalyptically orange taffeta, slithering, clingy satins in canary and violet, foamy white silk already spotted with wine.

She is patted on the head, winked at. Someone in cloth of gold says, “Poor little lamb.”

“Baaaah humbug,” Miranda blurts, beats on. Her own dress is green, fine-wale corduroy. Empire waist. Pinching at the armpits. Miranda’s interest in these things is half professional. Her mother, Joannie (resident the last six months in a Phuket jail, will be there for many years to come), was Elspeth Honeywell’s dresser and confidante.

Daniel is Elspeth’s son. Miranda is Elspeth’s goddaughter.

There are two men languorously kissing in the kitchen. Leaning against the sink, where one of the new Honeywell kittens licks sauce out of a gravy boat. A girl—only a few years older than Miranda—lays soiled and tattered Tarot cards out on the farmhouse table. Empty wine bottles tilt like cannons; a butcher knife sheathed in a demolished Christmas cake. Warmth seeps from the stove: just inside the Aga’s warming drawer, Miranda can see the other kittens, asleep in a crusted pan.

Miranda picks up a bag of party trash, lipstick-blotted napkins, throwaway champagne glasses, greasy fragments of pastry, hauls it out through the kitchen door. Mama cat slips inside as Miranda goes out.

Snow is falling. Big, sticky clumps that melt on her hair, her cheeks. Snow on Christmas. None in Phuket, of course. She wonders what they give you to eat on Christmas Day in a Thai prison. Her mother always makes the Christmas cake. Miranda helps roll out the marzipan in sheets. Her ballet flats skid on the grass.

She ties the bag, leaves it against the steps. And here is the man in the garden, still standing before the window, looking in.

He must hear Miranda. Surely he hears her. Her feet upon the frozen grass. But he doesn’t turn around.

Even seen from the back, he is recognizably a Honeywell. Lanky, yellow-haired; perfectly still, he is somehow perfectly still, perfectly posed to catch the eye. Unnaturally natural. The snow that is making Miranda’s nose run, her cheeks blotchy with cold, rests unmelted upon the bright Honeywell hair, the shoulders of the surprising coat.

Typical Honeywell behavior, Miranda thinks. A lovers’ quarrel, or else he’s taken offense at something someone said, and is now going to sulk himself handsomely to death in the cold. Her mother has been quite clear about how to behave when a Honeywell is being dramatic when drama isn’t required. Firmness is the key.

At this last thought of her mother, Miranda has some dramatic feelings of her own. She focuses on the coat, sends the feelings away. It is quite a coat. A costume? Pilfered from some production. Eighteenth century. Beautifully cut. Not a frock coat. A justacorps. Rose damask. Embroidered all over with white silk thread, poppies and roses, and there, where it flares out over the hips, a staghorn beetle on a green leaf. She has come nearer and nearer, cannot stop herself from reaching out to touch the beetle.

She almost expects her hand to pass right through. (Surely there are ghosts at Honeywell Hall.) But it doesn’t. The coat is real. Miranda pinches the damask between her fingers. Says, “Whatever it is that happened, it isn’t worth freezing to death over. You shouldn’t be out here. You should come inside.”

The Honeywell in the justacorps turns around then. “I am exactly where I am supposed to be,” he says. “Which is here. Doing precisely what I am supposed to be doing. Which does not include having conversations with little girls. Go away, little girl.”

Little girl she may be, but Miranda is well armored already against the Honeywell arsenal of tantrums, tempests, ups, downs, charm, strange.

Above the wide right pocket of the justacorps is a fox stitched in red and gold, its foreleg caught in a trap.

“I’m Miranda,” she says. And then, because she’s picked up a Honeywell trick or two herself, she says, “My mother’s in jail.”

The Honeywell looks almost sympathetic for the briefest of moments, then shrugs. Theatrically, of course. Sticks his hands in his pockets. “What’s that got to do with me?”

“Everyone’s got problems, that’s all,” Miranda says. “I’m here because Elspeth feels sorry for me. I hate when people feel sorry for me. And I don’t feel sorry for you. I don’t know you. I just don’t think it’s very smart, standing out here because you’re in a mood. But maybe you aren’t very smart. My mother says good-looking people often don’t bother. What’s your name?”

“If I tell you, will you go away?” the Honeywell says.

“Yes,” Miranda says. She can go in the kitchen and play with the kittens. Do the dishes and be useful. Have her fortune told. Sit under the tree again with Daniel until it’s well past time to go to sleep. Tomorrow she’ll be sent away home on a bus. By next year Elspeth will have most likely forgotten she has a goddaughter.

“I’m Fenny,” the Honeywell says. “Now go away. I have things to not do, and not a lot of time to not do them in.”

“Well,” Miranda says. She pats Fenny on the broad cuff of the sleeve of his lovely coat. She wonders what the lining is. How cold he must be. How stupid he is, standing out here when he is welcome inside. “Merry Christmas. Good night.”

She reaches out one last time, touches the embroidered fox, its leg caught in the trap. Stem stitch and seed stitch and herringbone. “It’s very fine work, truly,” she says. “But I hope he gets free.”

“He was stupid to get caught,” Fenny says, “you peculiar and annoying child.” He is already turning back to the window. What does he see through it? When Miranda is finally back inside the drawing room where tipsy Honeywells are all roaring out inappropriate lyrics to carols, pulling Christmas crackers, putting on paper crowns, she looks through the window. The snow has stopped. No one is there.

But Elspeth Honeywell, as it happens, remembers Miranda the next year and the year and the year after that. There are presents for Miranda under the magnificent tree. A ticket to a London musical that she never sees. A makeup kit when she is thirteen.

The year she is fourteen, Daniel gives her a chess set and a box of assorted skeins of silk thread. Under her black tights, Miranda wears a red braided leather anklet that came in an envelope, no letter, from Phuket. The kittens are all grown up and pretend not to know her.

The year she is twelve, she looks for the mysterious Fenny. He isn’t there. When she asks, no one knows who she means.

The year she is thirteen, she has champagne for the first time.

The Christmas she is fourteen, she feels quite grown up. The man in the justacorps was a dream, or some story she made up for herself in order to feel interesting. At fourteen she’s outgrown fairytales, Santa Claus, ghost stories. When Daniel points out that they are standing under the mistletoe, she kisses him once on each cheek. And then sticks her tongue in his ear.

It snows again the Christmas she is fifteen. Snow is predicted, snow falls. Something about the chance of snow makes her think of him again. The man in the snowy garden. There is no man in the garden, of course; there never was. But there is Honeywell Hall, which is enough—and seemingly endless heaps of Honeywell adults behaving as if they were children again.

It’s exhausting, almost Olympic, the amount of fun Honeywells seem to require. She can’t decide if it’s awful or if it’s wonderful.

Late in the afternoon the Honeywells are playing charades. No fun, playing with people who do this professionally. Miranda stands at the window, watching the snow fall, looking for something. Birds. A fox. A man in the garden.

A Honeywell shouts, “Good god, no! Cleopatra came rolled up in a carpet, not in the Sunday supplement!”

Daniel is up in his room, talking to his father on Skype.

Miranda moves from window to window, pretending she is not looking for anything in particular. Far down the grounds, she sees something out of place. Someone. She’s out the door in a flash.

“Going for a walk!” she yells while the door is swinging closed. In case anyone cares.

She finds the man navigating along the top of the old perimeter wall, stepping stone to stone. Fenny. He knocks a stick against each stone as he goes.

“You,” he says. “I wondered if I’d see you again.”

“Miranda,” she says. “I bet you forgot.”

“No,” he says. “I didn’t. Want to come up?”

He holds out his hand. She hesitates, and he says, “Suit yourself.”

“I can get up by myself,” she says, and does. She’s in front of him now. Walks backwards so that she can keep an eye on him.

“You’re not a Honeywell,” he says.

“No,” she says. “You are.”

“Yes,” he says. “Sort of.”

She stops then, so that he has to stop, too. It isn’t like they could keep on going anyway. There’s a gap in the wall just behind her.

“I remember when they built this wall,” he says.

She’s probably misheard him. Or else he’s teasing her. She says, “You must be very old.”

“Older than you anyway,” he says. He sits down on the wall, so she sits down, too. Honeywell Hall is in front of them. There’s a copse of woods behind. Snow falls lazily, a bit of wind swirling it, tossing it up again.

“Why do you always wear that coat?” Miranda says. She fidgets a little. Her bum is getting cold. “You shouldn’t sit on a dirty wall. It’s too nice.” She touches the embroidered beetle, the fox.

“Someone very … special gave it to me,” he says. “I wear it always because it is her wish that I do so.” The way he says it makes Miranda shiver just a little.

“Right,” she says. “Like my anklet. My mother sent it to me. She’s in prison. She’ll never get out. She’ll be there until she dies.”

“Like the fox,” he says.

“Like your fox,” Miranda says. She’s horrified to find that her eyes are watering. Is she crying? It isn’t even a real fox. She doesn’t want to look at the man in the coat, Fenny, to see if he’s noticed, so she jumps down off the wall and begins to walk back toward the house.

When she’s halfway to the Hall, the drifting snow stops. She looks back; no one sits on the wall.

The snow stops and starts, on and off all day long. When dinner is finished, Honeywells groaning, clutching their bellies, Elspeth has something for Miranda.

Elspeth says, wagging the present between two fingers like it’s a special treat, Miranda some stray puppy, “Someone left it on the doorstep for you, Miranda. I wonder who.”

The wrapping is a sheet of plain white stationery, tied with a bit of green thread. Her name in a scratchy hand. Miranda. Inside is a scrap of rose damask, the embroidered fox, snarling; the mangled leg, the bloodied trap.

“Let me see, sweet,” Elspeth says, and takes the rose damask from her. “What a strange present! A joke?”

“I don’t know,” Miranda says. “Maybe.”

It’s eight o’clock. Honeywell Hall, up on its hill, must shine like a torch. Miranda puts on her coat and walks around the house three times. The snow has all melted. Daniel intercepts her on the final circuit. He’s pimply, knobbly at present, and his nose is too big for his face. She loves him dearly, just like she loves Elspeth. They are always kind to her. “Here,” he says, handing her the bit of damask. “Secret Santa? Secret admirer? Secret code?”

“Oh, you know,” Miranda says. “Long story. Saving it for my memoirs.”

“Meanwhile back in there everyone’s pretending it’s 1970 and they’re all sweet sixteen again. Playing Sardines and drinking. It’ll be orgies in all the cupboards, dramatic confessions and attempted murders in the pantry, under the stairs, in the beds and under them all night long. So I took this and snuck out.” Daniel shows her the bottle of Strongbow in his coat pocket. “Let’s go and sit in the Tiger. You can tell me all about school and the agony aunt, I’ll tell you which Tory MP Elspeth’s been seeing on the sly. Then you can sell the story to The Sun.”

“And use the proceeds to buy us a cold-water flat in Wolverhampton. We’ll live the life,” Miranda says.

They drink the cider and eat a half-melted Mars bar. They talk and Miranda wonders if Daniel will try to kiss her. If she should try to kiss Daniel. But he doesn’t, she doesn’t—they don’t—and she falls asleep on the mouse-eaten upholstery of the preposterous carcass of the Sunbeam Tiger, her head on Daniel’s shoulder, the trapped fox crumpled in her fist.

Christmas after, Elspeth is in all the papers. The Tory MP’s husband is divorcing her. Elspeth is a correspondent in the divorce. Meanwhile she has a new thing with a footballer twenty years her junior. It’s the best kind of Christmas story. Journalists everywhere. Elspeth, in the Sunbeam Tiger, picks up Miranda at the station in a wide-brimmed black hat, black jumpsuit, black sunglasses, triumphantly disgraced. In her element.

Miranda’s aunt almost didn’t let her come this year. But then, if Miranda had stayed, they would have both been miserable. Her aunt has a new boyfriend. Almost as awful as she is. Someone should tell the tabloids.

“Lovely dress,” Elspeth says, kissing her on the cheek. “You make it?”

Miranda is particularly pleased with the hem. “It’s all right.”

“I want one just like it,” Elspeth says. “In red. Lower the neckline, raise the hem a bit. You could go into business. Ever think of it?”

“I’m only sixteen,” Miranda says. “There’s plenty of room for improvement.”

“Alexander McQueen! Left school when he was sixteen,” Elspeth says. “Went off to apprentice on Savile Row. Used to sew human hair into his linings. A kind of spell, I suppose. I have one of his manta dresses somewhere in the Hall. And your mother, she was barely older than you are now. Hanging around backstage, stitching sequins and crystals on tulle.”

“Where’s Daniel?” Miranda says. She and her mother have been corresponding. Miranda is saving up money. She hasn’t told her aunt yet, but next summer Miranda’s going to Thailand.

“Back at the house. In a mood. Listening to my old records. The Smiths.”

Miranda looks over, studies Elspeth’s face. “That girl broke up with him, didn’t she?”

“If you mean the one with the ferrets and the unfortunate ankles,” Elspeth says, “yes. What’s her name. It’s a mystery. Not her name, the breakup. He grows three inches in two months, his skin clears up, honestly, Miranda, he’s even better looking than I expected he’d turn out. Heart of gold, that boy, a good brain, too. I can’t think what she was thinking.”

“Preemptive strike, perhaps,” Miranda says.

“I wouldn’t know about the breakup except for accidentally overhearing a conversation. Somewhat accidentally,” Elspeth says. “Well, that and the Smiths. He doesn’t talk to me about his love life.”

“Do you want him to talk to you about his love life?”

“No,” Elspeth says. “Yes. Maybe? Probably not. Anyway, how about you, Miranda? Do you have one of those, yet? A love life?”

“I don’t even have ferrets,” Miranda says.

On Christmas Eve, while all the visiting Honeywells and cousins and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends and their accountants are out caroling in the village, Elspeth takes Miranda and Daniel aside. She gives them each a joint.

“It’s not as if I don’t know you’ve been raiding my supply, Daniel,” Elspeth says. “At least this way, I know what you’re up to. If you’re going to break the law, you might as well learn to break it responsibly. Under adult supervision.”

Daniel rolls his eyes, looks at Miranda. Whatever he sees in her face makes him snort. It’s annoying but true: he really has become quite spectacular looking. Well, it was inevitable. Apparently they drown all the ugly Honeywells at birth.

“It’s okay, Mirandy,” he says. “I’ll have yours if you don’t want it.”

Miranda sticks the joint in her bra. “Thanks, but I’ll hang on to it.”

“Anyway I’m sure the two of you have lots of catching up to do,” Elspeth says. “I’m off to the pub to kiss the barmaids and make the journos cry.”

When she’s out the door, Daniel says, “She’s matchmaking, isn’t she?”

Miranda says, “Or else it’s reverse psychology?”

Their eyes meet. Courage, Miranda. Daniel tilts his head, looks gleeful.

“In which case, I should do this,” he says. He leans forward, puts his hand on Miranda’s chin, tilts it up. “We should do this.”

He kisses her. His lips are soft and dry. Miranda sucks on the bottom one experimentally. She arranges her arms around his neck, and his hands go down, cup her bum. He opens his mouth and does things with his tongue until she opens her mouth, too. He seems to know how this goes; he and the girl with the ferrets probably did this a lot.

Miranda wonders if the ferrets were in the cage at the time, or out. How unsettling is it, she wonders, to fool around with ferrets watching you? Their beady button eyes.

She can feel Daniel’s erection. Oh, God. How embarrassing. She pushes him away. “Sorry,” she groans. “Sorry! Yeah, no, I don’t think we should be doing this. Any of this!”

“Probably not,” Daniel says. “Probably definitely not. It’s weird, right?”

“It’s weird,” Miranda says.

“But perhaps it wouldn’t be so weird if we smoked a joint first,” Daniel says. His hair is messy. Apparently she did that.

“Or,” Miranda says, “maybe we could just smoke a joint. And, you know, not complicate things.”

Halfway through the joint, Daniel says, “It wouldn’t have to complicate everything.” His head is in her lap. She’s curling pieces of his hair around her finger.

“Yes, it would,” Miranda says. “It really, really would.”

Later on she says, “I wish it would snow. That would be nice. If it snowed. I thought that’s why you lot came here at Christmas. The whole white Christmas thing.”

“Awful stuff,” Daniel says. “Cold. Slippy. Makes you feel like you’re supposed to be singing or something. In a movie.”

“Or in a snow globe.”

“Stuck,” Miranda says. “Trapped.”

“Stuck,” Daniel says.

They’re lying, tangled together, on a sofa across from the Christmas tree. Occasionally Miranda has to remove Daniel’s hand from somewhere it shouldn’t be. She doesn’t think he’s doing it intentionally. She kisses him behind the ear now and then. “That’s nice,” he says. Pats her bum. She wriggles out from under his hand. Kisses him again. There’s a movie on television, lots of explosions. Zombies. Cameron Diaz unloading groceries in a cottage, all by herself.

No, that’s another movie entirely, Miranda thinks. Apparently she’s been asleep. Daniel is still sleeping. Why does he have to be so irritatingly good-looking, even in his sleep? Miranda hates to think what she looks like asleep. No wonder the ferret girl dumped him.

Elspeth must have come back from the pub, because there’s a heap of blankets over the both of them.

Outside, it’s snowing.

Miranda puts her hand in the pocket of her dress, feels the piece of damask she has had there all day long. It’s a big pocket. Plenty of room for all kinds of things. Miranda doesn’t want to be one of those designers who only makes pretty things. She wants them to be useful, too. And provoking. She takes the prettiest blanket from the sofa for herself, distributes the other blankets over Daniel so that all of him is covered.

She goes by a mirror, stops to smooth her hair down, collect it into a ponytail. Wraps the blanket around herself like a shawl, goes out into the snow.

He’s there, under the hawthorn tree. She shivers, tells herself it’s because of the cold. There isn’t much snow on the ground yet. She tells herself she hasn’t been asleep too long. He hasn’t been waiting long.

He wears the same coat. His face is the same. He isn’t as old as she thought he was, that first time. Only a few years older than she. Than Daniel. He hasn’t aged. She has. Where is he, when he isn’t here?

“Are you a ghost?” she says.

“No,” he says. “I’m not a ghost.”

“Then you’re a real person? A Honeywell?”

“Fenwick Septimus Honeywell.” He bows. It looks better than it should, probably because of the coat. People don’t really do that sort of thing anymore. No one has names like that. How old is he?

“You only come when it snows,” she says.

“I am only allowed to come when it’s snowing,” he says. “And only on Christmas Day.”

“Right,” she says. “Okay, no. No, I don’t understand. Allowed by whom?”

He shrugs. Doesn’t answer. Maybe it isn’t allowed.

“You gave me something,” Miranda says.

He nods again. She puts out her hand, touches the place on the justacorps where he tore away the fox. So he could give it to her.

“Oh,” Miranda said. “The poor old thing. You didn’t even use scissors, did you? Let me fix it.”

She takes the piece of damask out of her pocket, along with her sewing kit, the one she always keeps with her. She’s had exactly the right thread in there for over a year. Just in case.

She shows him the damask. A few months ago she unpicked all of the fox’s leg, all of the trap. The drops of blood. The tail and snarling head. Then she reworked the embroidery to her own design, mimicking as closely as possible the feel of the original. Now the fox is free, tongue lolling, tail aloft, running along the pink plane of the damask. Pink cotton backing, a piece she cut from an old nightgown.

He takes it from her, turns it over in his hand. “You did this?”

“You gave me a present last year. This is my present for you,” she says. “I’ll sew it back in. It will be a little untidy, but at least you won’t have a hole in your lovely coat.”

He says, “I told her I tore it on a branch. It’s fine just as it is.”

“It isn’t fine,” she says. “Let me fix it, please.”

He smiles. It’s a real smile, maybe even a flirtatious smile. He and Daniel could be brothers. They’re that much alike. So why did she stop Daniel from kissing her? Why does she have to bite her tongue, sometimes, when Daniel is being kind to her? At Honeywell Hall, she is only as real as Elspeth and Daniel allow her to be. This isn’t her real life.

It’s ridiculous, of course. Real is real. Daniel is real. Miranda is real when she isn’t here. Whatever Fenwick Septimus Honeywell is, Miranda’s fairly sure it’s complicated.

“Please,” she says.

“As you wish it, Miranda,” Fenny says. She helps him out of the coat. Her hand touches his, and she pushes down the inexplicable desire to clutch at it. As if one of them were falling.

“Come inside the Hall,” she says. “Just while I’m working on this. I should do it inside. Better light. You could meet Daniel. Or Elspeth. I could wake her up. I bet Elspeth knows how to deal with this sort of thing.” Whatever this sort of thing is. “Theater people seem like they know how to deal with things like this. Come inside with me.”

“I can’t,” he says regretfully.

Of course. It’s against the rules.

“Okay,” Miranda says, adjusting. “Then we’ll both stay out here. I’ll stay with you. You can tell me all about yourself. Unless that’s against the rules too.” She busies herself with pins. He lifts her hand away, holds it.

“Inside out, if you please,” he says. “The fox on the inside.”

He has lovely hands. No calluses on his fingertips. Manicured nails. Definitely not real. His thumb smooths over her knuckles. Miranda says, a little breathless, “Inside out. So she won’t notice someone’s repaired it?” Whoever she is.

“She’ll notice,” he says. “But this way she won’t see that the fox is free.”

“Okay. That’s sensible. I guess.” Miranda lets go of his hand. “Here. We can sit on this.”

She spreads out the blanket. Sits down. Remembers she has a Mars bar in her pocket. She passes that to him. “Sit.”

He examines the Mars bar. Unwraps it.

“Oh, no,” she says. “More rules? You’re not allowed to eat?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve never been given anything before. When I came. No one has ever talked to me.”

“So you show up when it snows, creep around for a while, looking in at the windows. Then you go back wherever when the snow stops.”

Fenny nods. He looks almost abashed.

“What fun!” Miranda says. “Wait, no, I mean how creepy!” She has the piece of embroidery how she wants it, is tacking it into place with running stitches, so the fox is hidden.

If it stops snowing, will he just disappear? Will the coat stay? Something tells her that all of this is very against the rules. Does he want to come back? And what does she mean by back, anyway? Back here, to Honeywell Hall? Or back to wherever it is that he is when he isn’t here? Why doesn’t he get older?

Elspeth says it’s a laugh, getting older. But oh, Miranda knows, Elspeth doesn’t mean it.

“It’s good,” Fenny says, sounding surprised. The Mars bar is gone. He’s licking his fingers.

“I could go back in the house,” Miranda says. “I could make you a cheese sandwich. There’s Christmas cake for tomorrow.”

“No,” he says. “Stay.”

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll stay. Here. That’s the best I can do in this light. My hands are getting too cold.”

He takes the coat from her. Nods. Then puts it around her shoulders. Pulls her back against his chest. All of that damask: it’s heavy. There’s snow inside and out.

Fenny is surprisingly solid for someone who mostly isn’t here. She wonders if she is surprising to him, too.

His mouth is just above the top of her head, blowing little hot circles against her hair. She’s very, very cold. Ridiculous to be out here in the snow with this ridiculous person with his list of ridiculous rules.

She’ll catch her death of cold.

Cautiously, as if he’s waiting for her to stop him, he puts his arms around her waist. He sighs. Warm breath in her hair. Miranda is suddenly so very afraid that it will stop snowing. They haven’t talked about anything. They haven’t even kissed. She knows, every part of her knows, that she wants to kiss him. That he wants to kiss her. All of her skin prickles with longing. Her insides fizz.

She puts her sewing kit back into her pocket, discovers the joint Elspeth gave her, Daniel’s lighter. “I bet you haven’t ever tried this, either,” she says. She twists in his arms. “You smoke it. Here.” She taps at his lips with the joint, sticks it between his lips when they part. Flicks the lighter until it catches, and then she’s lunging at him, kissing him, and he’s kissing her back. The second time tonight that she’s kissed a boy, the first two boys she’s ever kissed, and both of them Honeywells.

And oh, it was lovely kissing Daniel, but this is something better than lovely. All they do is kiss, she doesn’t know how long they kiss, at first Fenny tastes of chocolate, and she doesn’t know what happens to the joint. Or to the lighter. They kiss until Miranda’s lips are numb and the justacorps has come entirely off of her, and she’s in Fenny’s lap and she has one hand in Fenny’s hair and one hand digging into Fenny’s waist, and all she wants to do is keep on kissing Fenny forever and ever. Until he pulls away.

They’re both breathing hard. His cheeks are red. His mouth is redder. Miranda wonders if she looks as crazed as he looks.

“You’re shivering,” he says.

“Of course I’m shivering! It’s freezing out here! And you won’t come inside. Because,” Miranda says, panting, shivering, all of her vibrating with cold and with want, want, want, “it’s against the rules!”

Fenny nods. Looks at her lips, licks his own. Jerks back, though, when Miranda tries to kiss him again. She’s tempted to pick up a handful of wet snow and smush it into his Honeywell face.

“Fine, fine! You stay right here. Don’t move. Not even a inch, understand? I’ll get the keys to the Tiger,” she says. “Unless it’s against the rules to sit in old cars.”

“All of this is against the rules,” Fenny says. But he nods. Maybe, she thinks, she can get him in the car and just drive away with him. Maybe that would work.

“I mean it,” Miranda says. “Don’t you dare go anywhere.”

He nods. She kisses him, punishingly, lingeringly, desperately, then takes off in a run for the kitchen. Her fingers are so cold she can’t get the door open at first. She grabs her coat, the keys to the Tiger, and then, on impulse, cuts off a hunk of the inviolate Christmas cake. Well, if Elspeth says anything, she’ll tell her the whole story.

Then she’s out the door again. Says the worst words she knows when she sees that the snow has stopped. There is the snow-blotted blanket, the joint, and the Mars-bar wrapper.

She leaves the Christmas cake on the window ledge. Maybe the birds will eat it.

Daniel is still asleep on the couch. She wakes him up. “Merry Christmas,” she says. “Good morning.” She gives him his present. She’s made him a shirt. Egyptian cotton, gray-blue to match his eyes. But of course it won’t fit. He’s already outgrown it.

Daniel catches her under the mistletoe when it’s past time for bed, Christmas night and no one wants to go to sleep yet, everyone tipsy and loose and picking fights about things they don’t care about. For the sheer pleasure of picking fights. He kisses Miranda. She lets him.

It’s sort of a present for Elspeth, Miranda rationalizes. It’s sort of because she knows it’s ridiculous, not kissing Daniel, just because she wants to be kissing someone else instead. Especially when the person she wants to be kissing isn’t really a real person at all. At least not most of the time.

Besides, he’s wearing the shirt Miranda made for him, even though it doesn’t fit.

In the morning, Daniel is too hungover to drive her down to the village to catch the bus. Elspeth takes her instead. Elspeth is wearing a vintage suit, puce gabardine, trimmed with sable, something Miranda itches to take apart, just to see how it’s made. What a tiny waist she has.

Elspeth says, “You know he’s in love with you.”

“He’s not,” Miranda says. “He loves me, but he’s not in love with me. I love him, but I’m not in love with him.”

“If you say so,” Elspeth says. Her tone is cool. “Although I can’t help being curious how you’ve come to know so much about love, Miranda, at your tender age.”

Miranda flushes.

“You know you can talk to me,” Elspeth says. “You can talk to me whenever you want to. Whenever you need to. Darling Miranda. There’s a boy, isn’t there? Not Daniel. Poor Daniel.”

“There’s nobody,” Miranda says. “Really. There’s nobody. It’s nothing. I’m just a bit sad because I have to go home again. It was such a lovely Christmas.”

“Such lovely snow!” Elspeth says. “Too bad it never lasts.”

Daniel comes to visit in the spring. Two months after Christmas. Miranda isn’t expecting him. He shows up at the door with a bouquet of roses. Miranda’s aunt’s eyebrows go almost up to her hairline. “I’ll make tea,” she says, and scurries off. “And we’ll need a vase for those.”

Miranda takes the roses from Daniel. Says, “Daniel! What are you doing here?”

“You’ve been avoiding me,” Daniel says.

“Avoiding you? We don’t live in the same place,” Miranda says. “I wasn’t even sure you knew where I lived.” She can hardly stand to have him here, standing in the spotless foyer of her aunt’s semidetached bungalow.

“You know what I mean, Miranda. You’re never online,” he says. “And when you are, you never want to chat. You never text me back. Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

“No,” she says. Grabs her bag.

“Don’t bother with the tea, Aunt Dora,” she says loudly, “We’re going out.”

She yanks at Daniel’s hand, extracts him violently from her life, her real life. If only.

She speed walks him past the tract houses with their small, white-stone frontages, all the way to the dreary, dingy, Midlands-typical High Street. Daniel trailing behind her. It’s a long walk, and she has no idea what to say to him. He doesn’t seem to know what to say, either.

Her dress is experimental, nothing she’s ever intended to wear out. She hasn’t yet brushed her hair today. It’s the weekend. She was planning to stay in and study. How dare he show up.

There’s a teashop where the scones and the sandwiches are particularly foul. She takes him there, and they sit down. Order.

“I should have let you know I was coming,” Daniel says.

“Yes,” Miranda says. “Then I could have told you not to.”

He tries to take her hand. “Mirandy,” he says. “I think about you all the time. About us. I think about us.”

“Don’t,” she says. “Stop!”

“I can’t,” he says. “I like you. Very much. Don’t you like me?”

It’s a horrible conversation. Like stepping on a baby mouse. A baby mouse who happens to be your friend. It doesn’t help that Miranda knows how unfair she’s being. She shouldn’t be angry that he’s come here. He doesn’t know how she feels about this place. Just a few more months and she’ll be gone from here forever. It will never have existed.

They are both practically on the verge of tears by the time the scones come. Daniel takes one bite and then spits it out onto the plate.

“It’s not that bad,” she snaps. Dares him to complain.

“Yes it is,” he says. “It really truly is that bad.” He takes a sip of his tea. “And the milk has gone off, too.”

He seems so astonished at this that she can’t help it. She bursts out laughing. This astonishes him, too. And just like that, they aren’t fighting anymore. They spend the rest of the day feeding ducks at the frozen pond, going in and out of horror movies, action movies, cartoons—all the movies except the romantic comedies, because why rub salt in the wound?—at the cinema. He doesn’t try to hold her hand. She tries not to imagine that it is snowing outside, that it is Fenny sitting in the flickering darkness here beside her. Imagining this is against the rules.

Miranda finishes out the term. Packs up what she wants to take with her, boxes up the rest. Sells her sewing machine. Leaves a note for her aunt. Never mind what’s in it.

She knows she should be more grateful. Her aunt has kept her fed, kept her clothed, given her bed and board. Never hit her. Never, really, been unkind. But Miranda is so very, very tired of being grateful to people.

She is sticky, smelly, and punch-drunk with jetlag when her flight arrives in Phuket. Stays the night in a hostel and then sets off. She’s read about how this is supposed to go. What you can bring, how long you can stay, how you should behave. All the rules.

But, in the end, she doesn’t see Joannie. It isn’t allowed. It isn’t clear why. Is her mother there? They tell her yes. Is she still alive? Yes. Can Miranda see her? No. Not possible today. Come back.

Miranda comes back three times. Each time she is sent away. The consul can’t help. On her second visit, she speaks to a young woman named Dinda, who comes and spends time with the prisoners when they are in the infirmary. Dinda says that she’s sat with Joannie two or three times. That Miranda’s mother never says much. It’s been over six months since her mother wrote to either Elspeth or to Miranda.

The third time she is sent away, Miranda buys a plane ticket to Japan. She spends the next four months there, teaching English in Kyoto. Going to museums. Looking at kimonos at the flea markets at the temples.

She sends postcards to Elspeth, to Daniel. To her mother. She even sends one to her aunt. And two days before Christmas, Miranda flies home.

On the plane, she falls asleep and dreams that it’s snowing. She’s with Joannie in a cell in the prison in Phuket. Her mother tells Miranda that she loves her. She tells her that her sentence has been commuted. She tells her that if Miranda’s good and follows the rules very carefully, she’ll be home by Christmas.

She has a plan this year. The plan is that it will snow on Christmas. Never mind what the forecast says. It will snow. She will find Fenny. And she won’t leave his side. Never mind what the rules say.

Daniel is going to St. Andrews next year. His girlfriend’s name is Lillian. Elspeth is on her best behavior. Miranda is, too. She tells various Honeywells amusing stories about her students, the deer at the temples, and the girl who played the flute for them.

Elspeth is getting old. She’s still the most beautiful woman Miranda has ever seen, but she’s in her sixties now. Any day she’ll be given a knighthood and never be scandalous again.

Lillian is a nice person. She tells Miranda that she likes Miranda’s dress. She flirts with the most decrepit of the Honeywells, helps set the table. Daniel watches everything that she does as if all of it is brand new, as if Lillian has invented compliments, flirting, as if there were no such thing as water glasses and table linens before Lillian discovered them. Oh newfound land.

Despite all this, Miranda thinks she could be fond of Lillian. She’s smart. Likes maths. Actually, truly, really seems to like Miranda’s dress, which, let’s admit it, is meant as an act of war. Miranda is not into pretty at the moment. She’s into armor, weaponry, abrasiveness, discomfort—hers and other peoples’. The dress is leather, punk, studded with spikes, buckles, metal cuffs, chain looped round and around. Whenever she sits down, she has to be careful not to gash, impale, or skewer the furniture. Hugging is completely out of the question.

Lillian wants a tour, so after dinner and the first round of cocktails, Miranda and Daniel take her all through Honeywell Hall, the parts that are kept up and the parts that are falling into shadow. They end up in one of the attics, digging through Elspeth’s trunks of costumes. They make Lillian try on cheesecloth dresses, hand-beaded fairy wings, ancient, cakey stage makeup. Take selfies. Daniel reads old mail from fans, pulls out old photos of Elspeth and Joannie, backstage. Here’s Joannie perched on a giant urn. Joannie, her mouth full of pins. Joannie, at a first-night party, drunk and laughing and young. It should hurt to look at these pictures. Shouldn’t it?

“Do you think it will snow?” Lillian says. “I want snow for Christmas.”

Daniel says, “Snowed last Christmas. Shouldn’t expect that it will, this year. Too warm.”

Not even trying to sound casual about it, Miranda says, “It’s going to snow. It has to snow. And if it doesn’t snow, then we’re going to do something about it. We’ll make it snow.”

She feels quite gratified when Lillian looks at her as if Miranda is insane, possibly dangerous. Well, the dress should have told her that.

“My present this year,” Miranda says, “is going to be snow. Call me the Snow Queen. Come and see.”

Her suitcases—her special equipment—barely fit into the Tiger. Elspeth didn’t say a word, just raised an eyebrow. Most of it is still in the carriage house.

Daniel is game when she explains. Lillian is either game, or pretending to be. There are long, gauzy swathes of white cloth to weave through tree branches, to tack down to the ground. There are long strings of glass and crystal and silver ornaments. Handcut lace snowflakes caught in netting. The pièce de résistance is the Snowboy Stage Whisper Fake Snow Machine with its fifty-foot extending hose reel. Miranda’s got bags and bags of fake snow. Over an hour’s worth of the best quality fake snow money can buy, according to the guy who rented her the Snowboy.

It’s nearly midnight by the time they have everything arranged to Miranda’s satisfaction. She goes inside and turns on the Hall’s floodlights, then turns on the snow machine. A fine, glittering snow begins. Lillian kisses Daniel lingeringly. A fine romance.

Elspeth has been observing the whole time from the kitchen stair. She puts a hand over her cocktail. Fake snow dusts her fair hair, streaks it white.

All of the Honeywells who haven’t gone to bed yet, which is most of them, ooh and ah. The youngest Honeywells, the ones who weren’t even born when Miranda first came to Honeywell Hall, break into a spontaneous round of applause. Miranda feels quite powerful. Santa Claus exists after all.

All of the Honeywells eventually retreat back into the house to drink and gossip and admire Miranda’s special effects from within. It may not be properly cold tonight, but it’s cold enough. Time for hot chocolate, hot toddies, hot baths, hot water bottles and bed.

She’s not sure, of course, that this will work. If this is playing by the rules. But isn’t she owed something by now? A bit of luck?

And she is. At first, not daring to hope, she thinks that Daniel has come from the Hall to fetch her in. But it isn’t Daniel.

Fenny, in that old justacorps, Miranda’s stitching around the piece above his pocket, walks out from under the hawthorn tree.

“It worked,” Miranda says. She hugs herself, which is a mistake. All those spikes. “Ow. Oh.”

“I shouldn’t be here, should I?” Fenny says. “You’ve done something.” Miranda looks closely at his face. How young he looks. Barely older than she. How long has he been this young?

Fake snow is falling on their heads. “We have about an hour,” Miranda says. “Not much time.”

He comes to her then, takes her in his arms. “Be careful,” she says. “I’m all spikes.”

“A ridiculous dress,” he says into her hair. “Though comely. Is this what people wear in this age?”

“Says the man wearing a justacorps,” she says. They’re almost the same height this year. He’s shorter than Daniel now, she realizes. Then they’re kissing, she and Fenny are kissing, and she isn’t thinking about Daniel at all.

They kiss, and Fenny presses himself against her, armored with spikes though Miranda is. He holds her, hands just above her waist, tight enough that she thinks she will have bruises in the shape of his fingers.

“Come in the Hall with me,” Miranda says, in between kisses. “Come with me.”

Fenny bites her lower lip. Then licks it. “Can’t,” he says.

“Because of the rules.” Now he’s nibbling her ear. She whimpers. Tugs him away by the hair. “Hateful rules.”

“Could I stay with you, I vow I would. I would stay and grow old with you, Miranda. Or as long as you wanted me to stay.”

“Stay with me,” she says. Her dress must be goring into him. His stomach, his thighs. They’ll both be black and blue tomorrow.

He doesn’t say anything. Kisses her over and over. Distracting her, she knows. The front of her dress fastens with a simple clasp. Underneath she’s wearing an old T-shirt. Leggings. She guides his hands.

“If you can’t stay with me,” she says, as Fenny opens the clasp, “then I’ll stay with you.”

His hands are on her rib cage as she speaks. Simple enough to draw him inside the armature of the dress, to reach behind his back, pull the belt of heavy chain around them both. Fasten it. The key is in the Hall. In the attic, where she left it.

“Miranda,” Fenny says, when he realizes. “What have you done?”

“A crucial component of any relationship is the capacity to surprise the one you love. I read that somewhere. A magazine. You’re going to love women’s magazines. Oh, and the Internet. Well, parts of it anyway. I won’t let you go,” Miranda says. The dress is a snug fit for two people. She can feel every breath he takes. “If you go, then I’ll go, too. Wherever it is that you go.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” he says. “There are rules.”

“There are always ways to get around the rules,” Miranda says. “That was in another magazine.” She knows that she’s babbling. A coping mechanism. There are articles about that, too. Why can’t she stop thinking about women’s magazines? Some byproduct of realizing that you’re in love? “Fifteen Ways to Know He Loves You Back.” Number eight. He doesn’t object when you chain yourself to him after using fake snow in a magic spell to lure him into your arms.

The fake snow is colder and wetter and heavier than she’d thought it would be. Much more like real snow. Fenny has been muttering something against her neck. Either I love you or else What the hell were you thinking, Miranda?

It’s both. He’s saying both. It’s fake snow and real. Real snow mingling with the fake. Her fake magic and real magic. Coming down heavier and heavier until all the world is white. The air, colder and colder and colder still.

“Something’s happening, Fenny,” she says. “It’s snowing. Really snowing.”

It’s as if he’s turned to stone in her arms. She can feel him stop breathing. But his heart is racing. “Let me go,” he says. “Please let me go.”

“I can’t,” Miranda says. “I don’t have the key.”

“You can.” A voice like a bell, clear and sweet.

And here is the one Miranda has been waiting for. Fenny’s she. The one who catches foxes in traps. Never lets them go. The one who makes the rules.

It’s silly, perhaps, to be reminded in this moment of Elspeth, but that’s who Miranda thinks of when she looks up and sees the Lady who approaches, more Honeywell than any Honeywell Miranda has ever met. The presence, the puissance that Elspeth commands, just for a little while when Elspeth takes the stage, is a game. Elspeth plays at the thing. Here is the substance. Power is something granted willingly to Elspeth by her audience. Fenny’s Lady has it always. What a burden. Never to be able to put it down.

Can the Lady see what Miranda is thinking? Her gaze takes in all. Fenny keeps his head bowed. But his hands are in Miranda’s hands. He is in her keeping, and she will not let him go.

“I have no key,” Miranda says. “And he does not want to go with you.”

“He did once,” the Lady says. She wears armor, too, all made of ice. What a thing it would be, to dress this Lady. To serve her. She could go with Fenny, if the Lady let her.

Down inside the dress where the Lady cannot see, Fenny pinches the soft web between Miranda’s thumb and first finger. The pain brings her back to herself. She sees that he is watching her. He says nothing, only looks until Miranda finds herself again in his eyes.

“I went with you willingly,” Fenny agrees. But he doesn’t look at the Lady. He only looks at Miranda.

“But you would leave me now? Only speak it and I will let you go at once.”

Fenny says nothing. A rule, Miranda thinks. There is a rule here.

“He can’t say it,” she says. “Because you won’t let him. So let me say it for him. He will stay here. Haven’t you kept him from his home for long enough?”

“His home is with me. Let him go,” the Lady says. “Or you will be sorry.” She reaches out a long hand and touches the chain around Miranda’s dress. It splinters beneath her featherlight touch. Miranda feels it give.

“Let him go and I will give you your heart’s desire,” the Lady says. She is so close that Miranda can feel the Lady’s breath frosting her cheek. And then Miranda isn’t holding Fenny. She’s holding Daniel. Miranda and Daniel are married. They love each other so much. Honeywell Hall is her home. It always has been. Their children under the tree, Elspeth white-haired and lovely at the head of the table, wearing a dress from Miranda’s couture label.

Only it isn’t Elspeth at all, is it? It’s the Lady. Miranda almost lets go of Daniel. Fenny! But he holds her hands and she wraps her hands around his waist, tighter than before.

“Be careful, girl,” the Lady says. “He bites.”

Miranda is holding a fox. Scrabbling, snapping, carrion breath at her face. Miranda holds fast.

Then: Fenny again. Trembling against her.

“It’s okay,” Miranda says. “I’ve got you.”

But it isn’t Fenny after all. It’s her mother. They’re together in a small, dirty cell. Joannie says, “It’s okay, Miranda. I’m here. It’s okay. You can let go. I’m here. Let go and we can go home.”

“No,” Miranda says, suddenly boiling with rage. “No, you’re not here. And I can’t do anything about that. But I can do something about this.” And she holds on to her mother until her mother is Fenny again, and the Lady is looking at Miranda and Fenny as if they are a speck of filth beneath her slippered foot.

“Very well then,” the Lady says. She smiles, the way you would smile at a speck of filth. “Keep him then. For a while. But know that he will never again know the joy that I taught him. With me he could not be but happy. I made him so. You will bring him grief and death. You have dragged him into a world where he knows nothing. Has nothing. He will look at you and think of what he lost.”

“We all lose,” says an acerbic voice. “We all love and we all lose and we go on loving just the same.”

“Elspeth?” Miranda says. But she thinks, it’s a trap. Just another trap. She squeezes Fenny so hard around his middle that he gasps.

Elspeth looks at Fenny. She says, “I saw you once, I think. Outside the window. I thought you were a shadow or a ghost.”

Fenny says, “I remember. Though you had hardly come into your beauty then.”

“Such talk! You are going to be wasted on my Miranda, I’m afraid,” Elspeth says. “As for you, my lady, I think you’ll find you’ve been bested. Go and find another toy. We here are not your meat.”

The Lady curtseys. Looks one last time at Elspeth, Miranda. Fenny. This time he looks back. What does he see? Does any part of him move to follow her? His hand finds Miranda’s hand again.

Then the Lady is gone and the snow thins and blows away to nothing at all.

Elspeth blows out a breath. “Well,” she says. “You’re a stubborn girl, a good-hearted girl, Miranda, and brighter than your poor mother. But if I’d known what you were about, we would have had a word or two. Stage magic is well and good, but better to steer clear of the real kind.”

“Better for Miranda,” Fenny says. “But she has won me free with her brave trick.”

“And now I suppose we’ll have to figure out what to do with you,” Elspeth says. “You’ll be needing something more practical than that coat.”

“Come on,” Miranda says. She is still holding on to Fenny’s hand. Perhaps she’s holding on too tightly, but he doesn’t seem to care. He’s holding on just as tightly.

So she says, “Let’s go in.”