Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet,
And so are you.
I will look for you tonight—
Love, Daniel
Luce almost sputtered with laughter. This was something the Daniel she knew would never write. Clearly, someone else had been behind it. Bill?
But to the part of Luce that was Lucinda, the words were a chaos of scribbles. She couldn’t read, Luce realized. And yet, once the meaning of the poem was processed by Luce, she could feel an understanding break open in Lucinda. Her past self found this the freshest, most captivating poetry ever known.
She would go to the festival and she would find Daniel. She would show Lucinda how powerful their love could be.
Tonight there would be dancing. Tonight there would be magic in the air. And—even if it was the only time it ever happened in the long history of Daniel and Lucinda—tonight there would be the particular joy of spending Valentine’s Day with the one she loved.
THREE
DELIGHT IN DISORDER
“Eleanor!” Luce shouted over a dense crowd of dancers as her friend bounced past in the spirited line of a jig. But Eleanor didn’t hear her.
It was hard to say whether Luce’s voice was drowned out by the delighted hoots of a crowd at a puppet show in one of the movable stages set up on the western edge of the dancing area for the raucous, hungry crowd lining up at the long food tables on the eastern side of the green. Or maybe it was just the sea of dancers in the middle, who bounded, twirled, and spun with reckless, romantic abandon.
It seemed as though the dancers at the Valentine’s Faire were not just dancing—but also hollering, laughing, belting out verses to the troubadour’s music, and hollering to friends across the muddy dance area. They were doing it all at once. And all at the top of their lungs.
Eleanor was out of earshot, spinning as she stamped out dance steps all the way across the oak-ringed green. Luce had no choice but to turn back to her clumsy partner and curtsy.
He was a spindly older man with sallow cheeks and ill-fitting lips whose slouched shoulders made him look like he wanted to hide behind his too-small lynx-face mask.
And yet Lucinda didn’t care. She couldn’t remember ever having had this much fun dancing. They’d been dancing since the sun kissed the horizon; now the stars shone like armor in the sky. There were always so many stars in past skies. The night was chilly, but Luce’s face was flushed and her forehead was damp with perspiration. As the song neared its end, she thanked her partner and sidled between a line of dancers, eager to get away.
Because despite the joys of dancing under the stars, Luce hadn’t forgotten about the real reason she was here.
She looked out across the green and worried that even if Daniel was somewhere out there, she might never find him. Four troubadours dressed in motley gathered on a wobbly dais at the northern edge of the green, plucking on lutes and lyres to play a song as sweet as a Beatles ballad. At a high school dance, these slow songs were the ones that made the single girls, including Luce, a little anxious—but here, the moves were built into the songs and no one was ever at a loss for a partner. You just grabbed the nearest warm body, for better or for worse, and you danced. A skipping jig for this one, a circling dance in groups of eight for another. Luce felt Lucinda knowing some of the moves innately; the rest of them were easy to pick up.
If only Daniel were here …
Luce withdrew to the edge of the green, taking a break. She studied the women’s dresses. By modern standards, they weren’t fancy, but the women wore them with such pride that the dresses seemed as elegant as any of the fine gowns she’d seen at Versailles. Many were made of wool; a few had linen or cotton accents sewn into a collar or a hem. Most people in the city only owned one pair of shoes, so worn leather boots abounded, but Luce quickly realized how much easier it was to dance in them than in high-heeled shoes that pinched her feet.
The men managed to look dapper in their best breeches. Most wore a long wool tunic on top for warmth. Hoods were tossed back over their shoulders—the weather that night was above freezing, almost mild. Most of their leather masks were painted to mimic the faces of forest animals, complementing the floral designs of the ladies’ masks. A few men wore gloves, which looked expensive. But most of the hands Luce touched that night were cold and chapped and red.
Cats stared from dirt roads around the green. Dogs searched for their owners among the mess of bodies. The air smelled like pine and sweat and beeswax candles and the sweet musk of fresh-baked gingerbread.
As the next song wound down, Luce spotted Eleanor, who seemed happy to be plucked from the arm of a boy whose red mask was painted like a fox’s face.
“Where’s Laura?”
Eleanor pointed toward a stand of trees, where their young friend leaned close to a boy they didn’t recognize, whispering something. He was showing her a book, gesturing in the air. It looked like he took a great deal of care with his hair. He wore a mask made to resemble a rabbit’s face.
The girls shared a giggle as they made their way through the crowd. There was Helen, sitting with her husband on a wool blanket spread out on the grass. They were sharing a wooden cup of steaming cider and laughing easily about something, which made Luce miss Daniel all over again.
There were lovers everywhere. Even Lucinda’s parents had turned out for the Faire. Her father’s wiry white beard scraped her mother’s cheek as they sashayed around the green.
Luce sighed, then fingered the lace doily in her pocket.