Mrs. Wheatley pushed her way across the crowded room to the sideboard, looked in the silver platter. “You can see,” she reported to James. “You can clearly see.”

“Why did you not change your hiding place?” James asked. “If you thought it had been seen?”

Mrs. Miller hesitated. “I didn’t,” she admitted. “I didn’t.”

Her words fell a little flat and she struggled to restore her credibility. “Because she enchanted me!” she declared. “I forgot all about it until now. I simply forgot until now, and I trusted her again and again, because I had forgotten that she had seen me. What’s that if not spell casting?”

“Do you deny this?” James prompted Alinor, but she was not looking at him. She was looking across the room at Alys’s white face, seeing that Richard Stoney was holding her away. Alinor barely heard James; she was gazing at her daughter, her beloved daughter. She was thinking what she might have to do to keep Alys safe.

“You have to answer me,” James prompted her.

She turned her head and looked at him indifferently. “Yes, I did see her in the reflection,” she confirmed. “But I didn’t do anything about it. I’m not a thief. I don’t care where she keeps her egg money.”

“Egg money! There was more than forty pounds in there!” Mrs. Miller exclaimed.

“My dowry!” Jane reminded everyone.

Alinor shrugged, as contemptuous as a lady of court. “I don’t know. I never saw what was inside the purse. I never held the purse. I don’t know the weight or how much you had saved. I only ever saw it in your hand as you gave me money to buy your lace. I never even touched it, did I?”

Alinor’s disdain was more than Mrs. Miller could bear. “I don’t doubt you changed the money into faerie gold without touching it! Without taking the purse from its hiding place!” she shouted. “I don’t doubt it for a moment! I don’t doubt you never touched it; but did it all at midnight from the mire, where you’re always alone, walking in moonlight, on paths that no one else follows, talking to yourself.”

Alinor swayed back a little from the venom in the woman’s voice.

“She didn’t take it!” Alys suddenly spoke up, cutting through the rising noise, stepping forward, pulling away from her new husband. “I know she did not!”

Alinor raised her head and met her daughter’s eyes. “Alys, you say nothing,” she ordered. She looked past her to Richard’s strained face. “Take her away,” she said quietly. “It’s her wedding day. She shouldn’t be here. Take her home. Take her to her new home.”

He nodded, his young face shocked, and tried to guide Alys to the door, but she resisted him.

“I won’t go,” she told him.

“Then stay silent,” Richard said. “As your mother tells you.”

Alys turned to her mother. “Ma,” she said desperately. “You know. . . .”

“Yes, I know.” Alinor nodded. “I know. Just go, Alys.”