Faith walked over and touched the papery petal of one of the fire-red poinsettia. ‘My grandmother loves these,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘Just right for the festive season, they are,’ Janet replied. ‘Bringing wishes for mirth and celebration.’
Faith smiled. ‘I’ll tell Gram. She’ll like that.’
‘Oliver is around somewhere if you need assistance,’ Marcus said, then cupped Faith’s elbow in his hand and steered her from the room. ‘Quick!’ he whispered in her ear. ‘She does all the flowers for the castle, and she’ll tell you about every petal in great detail if you stand still long enough.’
Faith chuckled softly and began to jog towards the exit. Marcus kept pace, grinning.
When they reached the oval lawn in front of the castle they slowed to a walk. The day was crisp and sunny and he breathed in the country air. It smelled like December. Like Christmas. And there was the perfect amount of snow for the ball that night—enough to cover the grassy areas and make the castle look magical, but the paths were clear and the roads gritted.
Quite suddenly he stopped and turned to Faith. ‘Come tonight,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a wonderful evening. You’ll be sorry if you miss it.’
I’ll be sorry if you miss it.
Her nose wrinkled and she grimaced. ‘I don’t have anything to wear.’
He had an answer for that. One she’d supplied. ‘We relaxed the dress code for those that want to, remember? On very good advice.’
She made a soft scoffing noise. ‘There’s relaxing and then there’s relaxing. I’m not sure you lowered it enough for jeans and a T-shirt with a few sequins, and that’s the best I can do.’
He started walking again. ‘Well, if that’s the only problem I’m sure we can sort something out.’ There were wardrobes full of ballgowns in the castle. Surely one would fit Faith? He glanced her way. ‘That is the only problem, isn’t it?’
Faith said nothing, just kept walking towards the studio, eyes straight ahead. She was glad Marcus couldn’t see her face, if only for a few moments. She needed time to let the emotion show, let those stupid feelings free, before clamping everything down again.
She’d been so elated when she’d run into the castle to tell him of her discovery, but now all that was squelched beneath the slow and persistent ache in her chest. She couldn’t go to a ball. Who did she think she was? Cinderella? Real life didn’t work out that way. That was why they called them fairy stories. And she was doing her best to remember that, she really was.
You don’t belong here, she told herself. You will never belong here. Don’t set yourself up for more pain by buying into the dream.
She opened the studio door when she reached it and walked inside, back to her work table. Something solid here, at least. This wasn’t clinging on to fantasies and false hope. She had proof.
She picked up the piece of glass that made up the kneeling woman’s lower leg and bare foot, walked over to the large picture window and held it up. She knew the moment Marcus joined her because the air beside her warmed up.
Holding the fragment carefully between thumb and finger at the edges, she pointed to the edge with a finger from the other hand. ‘I found this while I was cleaning the glass—getting rid of the dirt and grime and removing the old grout.’
Marcus leaned closer, inspecting the glass, and Faith braced her free hand on the window, hoping it would stop her quivering. So much for everything staying platonic. Somehow the look but don’t touch agreement she’d manoeuvred him into had intensified everything, done the opposite of what she’d hoped.
‘There’s writing,’ he said, ‘scratched into the glass.’
She nodded. ‘It’s not unusual to find names and dates on fragments of window—little messages from the craftsmen who made or repaired it. Sometimes they are high up in cathedral windows, where nobody would ever see them, just the maker’s secret message that no one knows to look for.’
He looked at her. ‘So you did find a message in the window?’
‘Yes, I did. Just not the one we were looking for.’
We? Not we. You. It wasn’t her quest. She needed to remember that.
She recited what she knew was engraved on the piece of pale glass showing half a foot and some elegant toes. ‘“S.C. These three will abide. 1919.”’
‘“These three will abide”?’
She smiled softly to herself. ‘It’s about One Corinthians, Thirteen, I think. A favourite at weddings.’ She looked around the room. ‘I wish I had a Bible to check it out, though. Don’t happen to have one to hand, do you?’
He shook his head. ‘But I know a place nearby where we can lay hands on one.’
Faith stopped to look at the window in the chapel while Marcus rummaged in the tiny cluttered vestry for a Bible. Even with her knees and lower legs missing, and the bottom section of the window boarded up, the woman captured in stained glass was exquisite.
The expression on her upturned face was pure rapture. All around her flowers bloomed—daisies in the grass, roses beside her in the bushes, climbing ivy above her head, reaching for the stars in the night sky. Faith could see why Crowbridge hadn’t been able to give up on the idea of making his vision come to life, no matter what the medium.
Marcus returned from the vestry with a worn black leather Bible and began to hunt through it. While he was occupied leafing through the tissue-thin pages, Faith allowed herself to do what she normally resisted—let her eyes rove over him. How was it fair for a man to be so beautiful?
Finally he placed a long finger in the centre of a page and smiled before looking up at her.
This time when their eyes met she didn’t get that earth-shifting-on-its-axis sensation. No, this was much more subtle, and probably much more dangerous. She felt a slow slipping, like the motion of a sled at the top of a snow-covered hill as gravity got hold and it started to move. Once it gathered momentum there’d be no stopping it.
He read out a verse, and the old-fashioned language of the King James Version sat well on his tongue. ‘“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”’
Faith’s heart skipped a beat in the pause before he moved on to the next verse.
Know even as also I am known…
She felt as if those words had been waiting all those centuries for here and now—for her and the man reading them to her. Because that was how she felt with him: she knew him, even though they’d only met just over a fortnight ago. How was that possible?
Everyone else, even her family—especially her family—looked at her through tinted glass, only getting glimpses, never seeing or understanding the whole. Somehow this man managed to do what no one else could. But she liked her tinted glass, liked her separateness. At least she had up until now.
‘It’s the next one,’ she said. ‘Read the next one.’
He looked down again. ‘“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”’
She blew out a breath. These three will abide. ‘That reference makes it even more sure. He was finishing his trio of pictures. The other two weren’t complete without this one.’
A sharp pang deep inside her chest cavity caused her to fall silent. That was how she and Hope and Grace had been once upon a time—the terrible trio, Gram had used to call them, with