Werewolf fairytales

Sending him letters

2 years later

*Grace*

The year I turn fourteen, Colin walks through the door in his uniform, and my heart gives one big thump and never beats exactly the same way again. He has grown even taller. His shoulders are very wide, and his cheekbones much more pronounced.

My family flies from their chairs, and everyone clusters around, exclaiming at the fact he’s been made a lieutenant. I don’t quite dare join them, but all day I secretly watch him whenever we’re in a room together. When my mother declares that I am old enough to join the adults at supper, I walk down the stairs white with excitement.

Beta Fenrir happens to be in the entry, and he looks up at me and then smiles. He is a justice of the peace, and Papa has been trying all morning to talk him into running for Wolf Parliament, before his father dies and Beta Fenrir has to take up his seat in the House of Alphas.

But I don’t think he will run for Wolf Parliament; he likes going to court half the day and then playing with his children or sweeping his wife off for a private talk. I love my own mama and papa dearly, but they are busy all day long.

Now Beta Fenrir waits until I reach the bottom step and says, “Miss Grace, you are exquisite. How did you manage to grow up while my back was turned?”

I drop into a deep curtsy and smile at him. “I am not quite grown up yet.”

He offers his arm. “Your mother showed me the painting of Fred in which you caught his snub nose perfectly. I think you show a positive genius with a brush.”

Beta Fenrir sits me beside Colin, stopping to ruffle his oldest son’s hair, just as if he were eleven instead of twenty. “Why don’t you do a portrait of this ruffian, Grace? It would give us something to swear at when he decides to visit the fleshpots of Europe rather than return home where he belongs.”

I have no idea what ‘fleshpots’ are, but they don’t sound very nice.

“I’d love to have you paint my picture,” Colin says cheerfully as I sit down beside him. “As long as you don’t bring along that naughty little sister of yours.”

“I tried to paint her portrait last week, but she wouldn’t sit still long enough.”

Colin laughs. “Lily is like a sprite, isn’t she? Flying on to whatever mischief she can make next.”

I could have sorted him out regarding Lily. She isn’t nearly as interested in mischief as his own brother Fred is, for example. She is just high-spirited. Papa says he is planning to move to Scotland when she comes of age. Mama says that Lily is just like her father.

Deep in my soul, I resent the fact that everyone talks about Lily all the time. “I rode my first steeplechase,” I tell Colin, ignoring his foolish comment about sprites: Lily can’t fly. And she is even worse at riding than I am.

“That’s brilliant! Any luck?”

I shake my head. I had fallen off after about ten minutes, and a groom took me home. “So is it fun being at sea?”

“Fun?”

“Yes, fun,” I prompt. “You always said that the best thing in the world would be to go to sea and never step foot on the shore again. So I was wondering whether it is as much fun as you thought it would be.”

“There are moments that are great fun,” Colin says slowly, then stops because his mother asks him something from his left.

“Which moments?” I ask when that conversation is over, and I have his attention once more.

“There’s nothing better than being chased by a storm. It howls up behind you, and it takes everything you’ve got to outwit it.”

I can almost imagine it because of the paintings I’ve seen in the National Gallery. “Isn’t it wet and cold? Aren’t you afraid?”

“Storms are not always cold. If you’re in the Tropics, the water can be warm as your bath, but even so a storm can whip it up so that it froths like cream.”

“I shouldn’t like that.”

“You might surprise yourself. There’s a wonderful burst of excitement that comes from skimming before a wind that’s going faster than even the swiftest bird can fly.”

I shake my head. “I don’t care for excitement.”

“You don’t, do you? It’s Lily who inherited the pirate sensibility.”

Lily again. I am tired of hearing about Lily.

“What parts are not as much fun?” I ask.

His eyes darken a little, the periwinkle blue going navy. Like seawater in a storm, I think, or my father’s favorite waistcoat. My father likes somber colors, though my mother always tries to put him in magnificent purples.

“Oh, you don’t want to hear about that.”

I sit up a little straighter and give him a polite smile. I am my mother’s daughter and have excellent manners. I know that one never argues at the table. “I do wish to hear about that,” I point out. “Otherwise I would not have asked.”

Colin grins at me. “Do you always mean precisely what you say?”

“Yes.” I don’t have a gift for fibbing. I’m fascinated by the way people try to hide their thoughts. More than anything, I like watching the secrets people have in their faces. But I know perfectly well that I don’t have any secrets myself, and no ability to hide them if I did. “Do tell me what you don’t like about being at sea.”

“Sometimes it feels as if the ship has fallen out from under your feet, and you suddenly realize the water beneath you is fathoms deep: I don’t like those moments.”

I shiver. “I wouldn’t, either. Especially because that water is full of fish who would like to eat you.”

“Not all of them,” Colin says. Then he tells me about fish that have lights on their noses, and eels whose tails whip the water so it looks as if a current goes through it.

But I am nothing if not tenacious. “What else don’t you like about being at sea?” I ask, some time later.

Colin’s smile goes crooked. “You never give up, do you?”

“Why should I?” I ask. “If I want to know something, I mean?”

“Right you are,” he mutters. “Well, I have to say that I don’t like fighting. And that’s a problem because I’m in the navy, and the navy is all about fighting.”

“Do you fight with swords?”

“Mostly with guns.” His face closes shut, and his eyes go the color of the ocean at night, not blue but black.

“When you are fighting, do you wish that you were home instead?”

“There’s no time for it, not in the middle of a sea battle.” He stops but then adds, “After, when we’re cleaning up from the fight, I want nothing more than to watch Fred and Lily misbehaving, or see my father and yours behaving like idiots at the dinner table.”

“Idiots?” I frown at him. “Papa is never an i***t. Don’t you have maids to clean up for you on board ship?”

“No,” Colin says. “There are no maids in the navy, Grace.”

“I could write you a letter now and then,” I offer. “If I knew where to send it, that is. I can describe to you what’s happening at home so that you can picture it, even if you are washing the deck.”

A faint smile touches his lips. “I would love any letter that you would write me. If your father forwarded it to the Admiralty, they would send it on to me in a dispatch.”

And that is how I, Miss Grace Islay, begin writing to Colin Garou, Lieutenant. My first letter is quite short and includes a frank truth: “I hate Lily. Last night she cut off the fingers of my favorite pair of gloves because she thought it was funny.”

Colin writes a note back, saying that he’s had a rotten week, and my letter about the gloves made him laugh.

So I start trying to find stories that might make him laugh in the midst of the worst days. I describe my brother taking all of our father’s neck clothes and turning them into sails for toy boats. I write when the chickens escape and perch on the housekeeper’s clean linens. I even put in a little watercolor of a hen roosting on a sheet.

I tell him the plots of plays we see in London, and what our governess says about them. Once, I even write down an entire song that Lily learned in German, sending it along with an ink drawing of Lily singing with an agonized expression.

In fact, I find myself writing about Lily quite a lot. Lily is funny. Besides, no matter how much I resent my sister, I love her even more. I try to make my own life sound as interesting, but it isn’t.

At some point, I begin painting very, very small portraits… because I have to make them fit between the folds of a sheet of pressed paper… and many of them are of Lily, too.

Mostly, Colin doesn’t write back, but when he does, he always thanks me, and he always asks what Lily has gotten up to lately.

By two years later, Colin hasn’t managed to return to England, but I am still writing to him twice a month. Both families get used to asking me how Colin is doing, and after a while, I begin forwarding his letters to his parents. Colin is not communicative, it seems. The occasional letters he sends to me are the only ones he writes at all.

“He has a best friend,” I tell them all one December. “His name is Philip Drummond, and he’s a lieutenant as well. Colin says that Philip is a better sailor than he is.”

And the following August: “He and Philip are assigned to the West Africa Squadron. Their ship is trying to protect people from being stolen from Africa. He says slavers fight like demons when they’re caught.”

“He’s a chip off the old block,” my father says, smiling at Beta Fenrir and raising his glass. “You raised a good man, Coz.”

But I remember how much Colin hates fighting, and I don’t care whether Colin is good or not; I just wish he could come home.