Princess at Heart (The Rosewood Chronicles)

Looking at the pictures of William Tufty, Lottie could hardly make sense of it. His features were constantly morphing until she couldn’t find any trace of her own genetics in the image; instead, all she could see was Jamie’s mother.

Why is Jamie your Partizan?

It didn’t help that ever since she’d got the photograph she couldn’t get rid of Ingrid’s voice in her head, constantly whispering the same question.

Christmas holidays were only a week away, and out of the bay window in the Ivy common room Lottie saw students wrapped up in winter coats, giddy with the possibility of snow, while she stayed inside, preoccupied with Claude’s puzzles.

‘Lottie?’

‘Cla–’ Lottie nearly jumped out of her skin, imagining that Claude had called her name, but it was only Jamie, sitting opposite, patiently helping her find inspiration for her PoP piece. ‘Sorry – I was just thinking, maybe I should try a different book?’ she said quickly, hoping he hadn’t notice her slip.

Lottie’s fingers brushed Liliana’s diary within the pile of William Tufty’s books of poems and nursery rhymes, the feel of it sending her hand back like an electric shock.

‘You seem very distracted,’ Jamie said, his eyebrows furrowing in a familiar way. ‘You’re supposed to be submitting your Tufty tribute soon,’ he reminded her; the fact that she’d made virtually no progress lingered unspoken in the air.

‘Sorry, I know this won’t look good for the Wolfsons if I don’t get a move on and submit something impressive.’ She sighed, annoyed with herself. She couldn’t exactly tell Jamie that he and his mother were the very reason she was distracted.

‘That’s not what –’

‘Honestly …’ Lottie began, her eyes wandering to the window, where a flurry of browned leaves danced in a chaotic circle above them, casting strange shadows over the common room. ‘I’m worried about Ellie, among other things. The PoP feels like a pointless distraction.’

Jamie’s jaw twitched. Turning to her, his eyes narrowed and she forced herself to look down at her hands. ‘What’s wrong with Ellie?’

‘Haven’t you noticed?’ Lottie needed to talk about something, anything else – anything to get her mind off Jamie and his mother. ‘She can barely look at me recently. Not since I made the choice to cut off my family. I know she’s been blaming herself for everything, and I’ve tried to tell her it’s fine. I don’t understand why she’s locking me out like this –’

‘Your father,’ Jamie interrupted, giving her a pointed look.

‘What?’

‘You said you cut off your family, but I thought you said your father wasn’t your family.’

Confused, Lottie felt her brows crease, sure that Jamie must have misheard her.

‘I’m sure I said –’

‘I wish you’d give yourself a break,’ Jamie said, interrupting again. ‘This should be a big deal for you, researching your mother’s ancestor. Liliana, Tufty, Rosewood, this is who you are. It could be your whole future.’

Flinching, Lottie struggled not to look away, but knew that would only make Jamie press her more. ‘Since when are you so encouraging about discussions about family?’

It was a low blow, and Lottie instantly regretted it.

To her surprise, Jamie’s face twisted painfully. ‘I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.’ Shaking his head, he picked up another book.

Something about his expression reminded her of when Binah had looked at her in the library the other day, sympathetic in a way that made her embarrassed, only Jamie’s was harsher, a little of himself leaking into it.

‘I know what I’m doing,’ she said without thinking.

‘If you know what you’re doing, then why can’t you even look at one of these books? Why can’t you concentrate on anything that doesn’t involve Ellie and her family?’

The words made her head hurt. Nothing fit right any more.

Above them an old clock ticked away, the sound of its hands turning an incessant reminder of how time was running out, and with great frustration she did the only thing she could think of.

‘Jamie, can I ask you something personal?’

‘Absolutely not,’ he scoffed. ‘You aren’t getting out of this work so easily.’

‘Please. If you answer, I’ll focus on the assignment. I promise.’

Jamie watched her fidgeting, and she tried her best to put on an innocent smile.

Sighing, he leaned back into the wall. ‘What?’

Lottie slammed her book shut, pulling herself up to sit with her hands clasped firmly in her lap until she was leaning forward towards Jamie, excited by the rare invitation to probe the Partizan and relieved to not be talking about her own family any more.

‘It’s just, I realized,’ she started, pushing her hair back to hide how awkward she felt, ‘you know every little thing about my family, and I don’t even know your parents’ names.’

Jamie blinked at her, eyebrow lifting. ‘That’s not a question.’

Rolling her eyes, Lottie puffed out her cheeks. ‘Fine, OK.’ She felt herself getting hot under his blank stare, and she wasn’t sure if it was the discomfort of having to ask Jamie something she knew he’d hate or from the way he was looking at her, like he might burn a hole right through her head with the intensity. ‘What’s your mother’s name?’ She said it as fast as she could before she chickened out.

Jamie stared at her for a weighted moment, until the intensity in his face melted away, replaced with an inward contemplation, like he’d gone away somewhere she couldn’t reach.

‘You’re the second person to ask me about her,’ he said at last, and Lottie felt her skin prickle because she knew it could only be Haru that Jamie was talking about.

‘It’s OK if you don’t want to answer. I was just curious, and –’

‘Hirana.’ Jamie didn’t look at her when he spoke, but instead turned to the curved window, his face so close to the glass that his breath made angel wings of condensation. ‘Hirana Rajput.’

He spoke as if he was reciting a prayer, soft and personal, more for himself than Lottie, and she didn’t want to interrupt his thoughts but a question popped out of her lips before she could stop it.

‘Why did they change your last name?’

Jamie turned to her with the panicked look of a trapped animal. ‘I …’ It was odd to see Jamie of all people scrabbling for words. ‘I’ve never thought about it,’ he confessed, only this wasn’t his usual blasé attitude – instead his eyes turned fiery again and stared off somewhere far away. ‘That book you gave me for my birthday last year. It said that hirana means “deer” in Punjabi.’ Jamie’s voice was low but his next words hit her ears like a screaming banshee. ‘Maybe they didn’t want any deer among the wolves.’

Jamie’s mother was the deer. Lottie didn’t know what that meant, only that she had to get to her dorm right now and figure it out. ‘Jamie, I –’

Before she could finish, a ruckus outside the window pulled their attention away. Vampy was yowling from the other side of the glass with a dead rabbit firmly caught between his teeth. To Lottie’s horror, the cat began tearing the poor creature to shreds in front of squealing students, all the while looking up at Jamie as if he expected praise.

Percy came up behind the cat, waving at them in apology, entirely oblivious to the enormity of their conversation. He scooped up Vampy, who yowled in protest when Percy, in a panic, kicked the still-twitching creature under a bush.

Jamie tutted, the flames in his eyes turning to embers as he watched the cat wriggle about in Percy’s arms, who had a world-weary look at having to babysit the little monster. ‘This damn cat.’

‘Give me a second,’ Jamie signed through the window, giving Vampy a sharp look. The cat sank like a lump of putty, his large head receding into his neck until he was more slug than cat. ‘Sorry, Lottie.’

The moment Jamie was outside, Lottie packed up her books and headed to her dorm.

Ellie had left the balcony door ajar when she’d gone to fencing practice, making the room cold and causing goosebumps to come to life on Lottie’s arms when she entered. Placing Liliana’s diary back on her bedside table, Lottie leaned down, ignoring the way the floorboards groaned in protest when she shoved the rest of the books under her bed before turning to her bedside drawer.

Nestled inconspicuously inside the antique nightstand was Lottie’s sketchbook. It looked quite ordinary, a plain, if slightly beaten-up, purple moleskin, but when she pulled it open the pages were filled with her private thoughts and sketches. Ink and watercolour brought to life everyone, and everything that resided in her mind. Ellie, Jamie and all her friends flickered past her fingertips as she flipped through, mixed up in the slideshow with the more monstrous faces of Ingrid, Haru and Claude. And right at the centre, held in the creases of her sketchbook, were the letters and clues Claude had sent her.

Moving on autopilot, she plucked out the puzzle pieces, laying them on the bed until she found the photo of Hirana, and with shaky hands she wrote down her new information in pencil on an empty page. But writing Hirana’s name still didn’t help Lottie to make any sense of the clues, and so she did the only thing she could think of: she drew what she was feeling.

The graphite pencil became an extension of her thoughts, and slowly the pages began to fill with likenesses of Jamie and Ellie. Ellie she drew as a wolf, snarling teeth, biting and snapping in fear. Jamie she drew above his mother’s name, in flames, trying to capture the burning in his eyes, with thick stag antlers protruding from his skull. These doodles looked more demonic than human, ferociously at odds with the regal and princely ways she usually drew them.

It wasn’t until her left hand brushed one of Claude’s letters that she was pulled out of her trance, the rustling of the paper underneath her skin like a menacing whisper in her ear.

Right there, at the bottom of this letter, were words she’d shoved into a locked box in her head, and now they glared back. She uttered them in horrified rapture. ‘Wolves are hunters too.’

It ignited inside her like a bomb, with no way of stopping it from going off.

Hirana, Bambi, wolves and hunters, and the question that kept her up at night: Why is Jamie your Partizan?

She still didn’t have the answer, she still didn’t understand why, but she knew one thing now with crystalline certainty.

Turning back to her sketches, Lottie stared down at her depictions of Jamie, the stag, and Ellie, the wolf, a story so simple and all it had needed was Hirana’s name to solve it.

What Claude was trying to tell her was that Jamie’s mother had been murdered.

Lottie stood up so fast the world started spinning. She dropped her sketchbook as her legs buckled with the effort of holding her up, sending her crashing to the ground. Fumbling for something to grab hold of, her hands met her bag, its contents spilling around her.

‘What does this mean, Claude?’ she said out loud, fists balled on either side of the sketchbook where the photograph of Jamie’s mother stared back at her. ‘What happened to Hirana? Why are you telling me this?’

With no further clues she felt hopelessly lost, her mind grinding to a halt. She needed something, anything else, to explain Claude’s message.

Pulling herself up, Lottie searched for her tiara. She stared at it, watching the rainbow orbs in the opal swirling in the light like a hypnotic spiral. It felt strange to hold, not giving her any of the soothing properties it usually did; instead it reminded her of another problem.

In the back of her mind, pulling at her for attention, she knew she’d promised Jamie she’d focus on her PoP tribute if he shared something personal with her, but how could she after this discovery?

The very thought of opening up those books and thinking of Liliana made her recoil, as if even touching the pages would pull her further away from Ellie and the Wolfsons – further away from the only real family she had left, at the very moment they needed her the most.

‘I’m a Portman,’ Lottie announced to no one at all, willing the bad feeling away.

The opal moon of the tiara winked rainbow light at her again and the beam landed on the wolf pendant that hung heavily round her neck.

‘I don’t need this. I’ve found a new family, and I need to help them.’ Lottie tried to believe herself but the words felt like excuses.

Shoving the tiara into its box, she clenched her fists again. She was going to find the meaning behind Claude’s messages, and that meant doing something completely irresponsible. It was time to find out what was in Haru’s secret box.

Lottie shut her sketchbook and slotted it, along with Liliana’s diary, into her bag, patting the fabric to check everything was safe and sound.

This was for her princess and Partizan; they were all that mattered. As long as she could solve this and do her Portman duties, everyone would be OK, and she would be part of the Wolfson family forever. Then she set off to a place she’d hoped not to go back to.

Outside was freezing cold, with Lottie’s purple blazer and scarf barely keeping the frost from nipping at her neck. She welcomed the cold – it distracted her from thinking about whatever terrible fate had befallen Jamie’s mother.

Making her way through the school, Lottie kept her head down because there was little doubt that Haru was keeping a close watch on her, but it wasn’t until she was at the door to the so-called Parlour that the cold finally hit her. Her hands were sore when she knocked and Lottie had to remind herself to be brave, that this was for the people she loved.

‘Oh, it’s you again.’ Paris stared at her through the peephole, white-out contact lenses making his eyes look like two moons through the gap. ‘What do you want now?’

Lottie squeezed the bag she was carrying, in which was concealed her greatest secret, Liliana and her royal ancestry, which she’d had to hide away for the sake of her Portman duties, and now she was going to make it useful.

‘I need to speak to Stephanie,’ Lottie demanded. ‘I have a secret to trade for your services.’