Chapter Eight
Before the ball, he’d had the notion that the carriage was a tumbrel and he was Robespierre headed for the guillotine; upon leaving the ball, Barnaby felt that he was the main character in Perrault’s Cendrillon. When the clock struck midnight, the enchantment would be broken. The carriage would turn back into a pumpkin, the horses into mice, and he would revert to who he’d been before his godmother had cast her spell: a ragged cinder maid. Except that he didn’t have a Faerie godmother, he wasn’t female, and the rags and the cinders were of his own making.
Barnaby snorted under his breath. i***t.
But the feeling of enchantment persisted in the warm, swaying darkness of the carriage. It felt as if the clock had turned back, as if that afternoon with Lavinia had never happene
