A restless truth, p.22
A Restless Truth, page 22
Violet laughed. “Something magical.”
“Oh!” She couldn’t feel disappointed. There was so much magic in the world, hidden in crevices and kept necessarily secret. Every small piece Maud saw, every new thing she learned, was a wonder. And she wanted all of it. She wanted to open her mouth and drink down the sweet and the fizz and the cream and the bitter; to poke her fingers into all the crevices she was offered.
It was the same feeling she’d had in bed with Violet. And so it was easy to take her hands back, to seat herself on the bed’s edge and look forward to what Violet might offer.
Violet opened a drawstring pouch and shook out a small collection of rings. She kept the wooden ones on her thumbs and added a pair of penny-bright ones to her middle fingers.
“Copper. It helps with replication clauses. Or it doesn’t, if you ask those people who think metal’s too dead for rings. I think they add something.”
“And the wood?”
“Illusion.” Violet’s fingers were moving already. The cradle seemed a complicated one. Small sparks of every colour swam between Violet’s hands. “This will be better without lights.”
Switching off the electric lamp plunged the room into soft darkness. The sparks danced in variegated colours. The front of Violet’s dress was a cathedral dappled by its own rose window.
“Ready?”
Maud grinned in the dark. “Yes!”
Violet gave a decided flick of both hands and the sparks soared to the ceiling, where they exploded.
Maud found herself gripping the bedcovers. A gasp punched out of her throat. Each spark was a blossoming, a dandelion puff grown at zoetrope speed into tendrils of glowing colour that drooped in the air and lingered before they faded.
Faded; and were replaced. More sparks became a shower of silver and gold mingling into molten raindrops. Colour rioted in the corners of the ceiling, and the plain wallpaper of the stateroom shone green and purple and blue and the fierce red of embers as each giddying of light had its turn.
“There were fireworks at the Exhibition, last year,” said Maud. She remembered standing in a crowd with Robin, having to shout to be heard above the bang-bang of the gunpowder. “These are better.”
“The good thing about illusion is there’s no noise and no cloud of smoke dangling in the air at the end. Though we usually added a bit of both, in the Penumbra, to make things a little less magical.”
Maud wanted to turn this enormous ship and sail herself back to New York and visit this theatre where Violet had worked. But this show was intimate. This was for her, alone. Violet stretched out her fingers, when the last fireworks faded and Maud lit the lamp again—all grey-eyed sparkle, all delight at her audience’s praise.
“Want to see more?”
“Yes.”
The next illusion was one that, Violet said, took five magicians working in careful harmony when they built it in a theatre. One couldn’t share power or share a mind’s-eye image with another person, but with exhaustive rehearsal they could create the effect of something enormous growing in many places at once.
And growing it was. Uneven young grass peeked up through the ground, dotted with stray primroses and orange poppies. A hedge of dogroses grew along the wall and in front of the door, its leafy tangle a barrier between them and the outside world. Like the warding charm, it settled a feeling of safety in Maud, even though she knew it was illusion. The eyes clamoured to be believed. The heart clamoured to believe them.
Honeysuckle crawled up the walls as if the ceiling held the sun. Delicate white flowers unfurled their filigree, dense and profuse, until the plant sat heavy with their imaginary weight.
Violet’s lips were parted, her brow fierce with concentration. Illusion complete, she seesawed the cradle. Her fingertips drew close without touching, then drew away again to let the heels of her hands close—a rhythmic motion like the squeeze of a beating heart. No worse than a handful of splinters when you’re spinning an orchard from twigs, Edwin said sometimes. And here it was being spun from nothing.
“I can almost smell the flowers and hear the bees,” Maud said. “Would you have someone doing those, as well, in the theatre?”
Violet nodded.
“How did no one guess it was magic?”
“The rules are different inside a theatre,” said Violet. “Fewer questions. More trust.”
Maud’s fingers passed through the honeysuckle like mist, and Violet laughed. “Ah. I should have known—illusions aren’t your thing. You like to touch.” Violet’s mouth curled up at the side. “It’s how you know the world.”
Maud’s breastbone burned. She pressed a hand over it as if she could push tears down into her chest and keep them from springing to her eyes. Silly, to be overwhelmed by the fact that Violet had seen that about her. She didn’t know what to say.
“I think,” Violet said slowly, “I can hold it—enough—” She paused the rock of her cradle, then dropped it. The garden of illusion around them faded only a little. “Ah, good. Finishing touches, then.”
The finishing touch was on Violet herself. She cradled a new spell, moving more quickly and confidently, before lifting her cupped hands above her head and letting the illusion spill down. Her features were still her own, but transformed with a man’s short haircut and a vanity-thin brown moustache. She wore trousers and a tweed sports jacket over a shirt, and looked for all the world like one of Robin’s school friends attending a garden party.
“Oh, very good,” said Maud.
“This one won’t hold up to touch either,” Violet warned, and held out her hand.
Maud walked through intangible grass and flowers to take Violet’s hand. She grinned and executed a curtsy that they were half a century too modern for. “Mr. Debenham.”
“Miss Blyth.”
Maud didn’t care that there was satin and gauze beneath her palm instead of tweed. She put her other hand in Violet’s and was pulled into a close hold, and they danced with more verve than grace in the meagre space between the bed and the chairs. Violet smelled exactly of herself. In those grey eyes her pupils crept outwards like wine spilled onto a napkin every time Maud pressed tighter.
When Maud released Violet’s hand and shoulder it was only to slide her hands up and around Violet’s neck. The nape was still bare; no necklace tonight, and her hair dressed high, nothing to contradict the evidence of the illusion.
She pulled Violet down, and this time Violet bent all the way. The kiss was dreamy as the honeysuckle over their heads. Maud wanted to melt into the magic that surrounded her, and into Violet’s lips. She wanted to thank Violet for the gift of this beautiful, playful magic, created just for Maud’s pleasure, as if Maud had done anything to deserve it. She swept her tongue into Violet’s mouth and Violet’s hands on her waist tightened convulsively.
“Ah, hell, there it goes,” Violet murmured.
They drew apart. The garden had vanished and Violet’s costume with it.
“You broke my concentration,” said Violet, mock-severely.
“You barely need illusion. You’re still holding yourself like a man,” said Maud. “Exactly like when you were playing the young man who rescued the nymph. It’s extraordinary.”
“It’s part of music-hall.” Violet stepped back and spread her hands. “The audience likes seeing men dressed as women and women dressed as men, so they can laugh over it. Of course, they don’t laugh so merrily when faced with someone who prefers to live in what society thinks of as the wrong clothes all the time.” She was watching Maud as if eager to shock her, but she was a few years too late for that.
“One of Mrs. Sinclair’s friends from the Women’s Society is a—lady, of that nature.”
Miss Hannity had been a sailor, when she was young Mr. Hannity. She told jokes that made you laugh until you creaked.
Was Maud being told something, sidelong?
“Are you…” Maud didn’t know how to shape the question. “Would you prefer…?”
“Goodness, no. I got into that sort of act because I have the build for it. And the eye for mimicry.” Violet tucked her hands into the pockets of invisible trousers and swaggered. “I saw the actress Maude Adams as Peter Pan soon after I arrived in New York. This woman was thirty-four years old and still playing a young boy, and when she was onstage you utterly believed it. No magic at all, just stagecraft.”
“Show me that,” said Maud, daring.
Violet gave a roguish wink, flung one arm up as if brandishing a sword, and attempted to spring into a wide-legged crouch.
Unfortunately, the skirts of her gown were neither wide nor illusory. Violet overbalanced and fell onto the rug with a yelp that quickly turned into her smoky chuckle.
“Well, that’s punctured my performer’s dignity.” She sat up and looked musingly at her evening shoes where they emerged from the frilled gem of her skirts. “I told you the theatre’s a good place for people who are different. Maude Adams is another woman who prefers the company of other women.”
“How do you know?”
Maud expected another wink, but Violet blushed a sudden and complete scarlet. Maud felt a tug of wistful jealousy—but also relief to think that Violet, too, had once been young and inexperienced. And she wouldn’t change anything that made Violet the person she was now.
“Thank you for showing me that. All of it.” She helped Violet to her feet, and Violet kept hold of her hand. The circling of her thumb on the back of Maud’s hand was deliberate. Maud’s body went from relaxed with laughter to pulled taut with desire as if she were hooked up to the electric and fitted with a switch. It must have shown on her face; Violet laughed and kissed the angle of her jaw.
“You undress. I need to find where I threw a few items when I was packing.”
A few minutes later Maud—down to only her chemise—set eyes on the items in question and said, “Oh!” She reached out and picked up a large rod with a flared base. Cool ceramic kissed her fingers.
“Not that one,” said Violet, taking it back and lifting something more modestly slender. “For your first time you don’t want anything bigger than this, and we’ll warm you up first.”
“One of the ladies in the pamphlets fit an empty wine bottle up there,” said Maud. “She did wail a lot during the process, though.”
Violet made a choking sound and, delightfully, flushed again. “Hawthorn was right. We have corrupted you beyond repair. I am confiscating your entire collection. Where is it? In here? I shall—”
Her laugh became a small scream as Maud grabbed her around the waist and hauled her over to the bed. Violet too had undressed, down to chemise and drawers, and had taken down her hair. It spilled out like sweet yellow wine around her head as she flopped onto her back. Maud still had the smaller phallus in her hand, but lost track of it when Violet got her hands beneath Maud’s chemise and moved her fingers in what was unmistakably a tickle.
Maud writhed and grabbed at Violet’s wrists, trying to force them away, while her own laughter became a steady “No no no no—” which leapt up and down the registers of her voice.
Violet pulled away. Maud bit her tongue and studied Violet’s face, anxious, too breathless to explain.
Violet was studying her in return. “No?”
“Please. Don’t do that.”
“No, of course,” said Violet easily, and the next stroke of her hand was firm enough not to tickle in the slightest.
Affection pooled in the cracks around Maud’s heart. She was inexperienced, yes. She still knew the value of feeling safe. She let her legs fall open and reached out to slip some of that yellow-wine hair between her fingers.
Violet seemed to take the reminder of Maud’s academic knowledge as a challenge to prove her greater experience. She proceeded to warm Maud up with lips and hands and tongue. Maud tried to commit the best tricks to memory, but her scattered attention fell even further apart when Violet lifted her head from between Maud’s legs, leaned her elbows on Maud’s hips, and cradled a very quick spell that left her with that illusion of a moustache again.
Maud’s stomach shook with silent giggles. Along with Violet’s long hair, the thin moustache made her look like a painting from the court of the French Sun King. An exceedingly lewd painting.
“It won’t feel like a real one would,” said Violet, “but perhaps you could pretend.”
“Oh, sir. Do be gentle. I am but an innocent maid.”
Violet bit Maud’s inner thigh, hard enough for a delicious sharpness to quiver straight to Maud’s clit, and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like the hell you are. By the time they got around to searching the crumpled sheets for the phallus, Maud was slick and warm and there was a glorious ache like a clenched fist below her navel. Two of Violet’s wet fingers still felt like a stretch, but a good one.
The phallus was a different sensation again.
“Ow,” said Maud. And then, “No, try again! I can do it.”
Violet puffed some hair out of her face, her expression halfway between laughing and exasperated. “I know you’re stubborn, Maud, but this isn’t some sort of heroic trial that you have to overcome. You don’t have to like everything, or even try everything.”
Nothing made Maud more stubborn than being reminded that she could back down from something. She planted her heels farther apart on the sheets. Everything else that Violet had suggested had been enjoyable thus far.
“I can do it,” she said again. “I want to know.”
“You are going to be an absolute terror at university, my girl,” said Violet.
Maud was suffused with fond warmth. Not even Robin had ever spoken of her future with such casual faith.
“All right,” said Violet. “Breathe. That’s it.”
She stroked a hand over Maud’s stomach, soothing and steadying, before lining up the phallus again. She leaned down and traced a slow circle with her tongue over Maud’s collarbone where the chemise had been pulled askew, and with that and the steam-bath warmth of affection, the muscles between Maud’s legs forgot to tense.
The pressure inside her went right past sharp and into something new. That hot ache twisted into acute pleasure. Maud’s next breath caught like wool on brambles.
“There you are,” said Violet.
“Oh, can you—” But Maud didn’t need to do more than shift her hips and leave the sentence unfinished, because Violet knew exactly what she needed. She worked Maud’s clit in between slow movements of the phallus. She was gentle, and then she wasn’t, and Maud bit down on the side of her hand and closed her eyes, the muscles at the backs of her legs cramping as her release came charging out of the dark.
“There,” she panted afterwards, triumphant. She had sleepy midsummer winds beneath her skin. She was an entire weather system in the shape of a girl. “Oh, that was lovely. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” said Violet, setting the phallus aside with a fastidious face.
“I did so want to try that. I can see—some of what the fuss is about.”
A pause. Violet’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve made a list, haven’t you? Off the back of Ross’s pornography. A list of things you want to try.”
“Yes.” She drew Violet down to kiss her again. Violet’s leg slid firm between her own and Violet’s hair smelled like sweat and flowers, and her mouth was soft and clever, and Maud could also see why some ingenious person had come up with a device that would allow for the phallus to be separated from, well. The rest of a man.
“You’ve got that thoughtful look again,” said Violet, drawing back. “Are you about to ask me something alarming?”
“No,” said Maud, which now wasn’t a lie.
Violet bit Maud’s lower lip, a slow drag of teeth. Maud shivered and found a tiny keening sound in her throat.
“You’re gorgeous when you come. Shall we try for another?”
Maud made a face in the negative. Everything down there was sensitive from Violet’s prolonged ministrations; not as bad as her ticklish sides, but certainly at a point where further attempts would be more painful than enjoyable.
Besides: “It’s your turn,” she said, sitting up. “How would you like it?” She sounded like someone proffering tea— Milk, madam? And how many sugars?
Violet fetched the collection of bedroom aides again. “Would you like to choose for me?”
Maud searched Violet’s face for clues as she ran her fingers over the collection, and was pleased with the flicker when she picked up her selection.
“I am going to need slick for that one,” Violet said. “There’s some petroleum jelly in the dresser. We can’t all carry olive oil around in a decadent little bottle like his lordship.”
Maud remembered Violet imbuing the golden-green oil that they’d used to reverse the sleeping charm on Ross. It hadn’t occurred to her at the time to question why Hawthorn had such a thing in his cabin in the first place.
“Perhaps they supply it to the parlour suites, like the decanters,” she said. “All the amenities.”
The petroleum jelly warmed quickly on Maud’s fingers as she leaned back against the head of the bed, with Violet sitting snug between her legs. It took some wriggling to get the angle correct, but Maud quickly found a rhythm of exploration, dragging her fingers through the folds of Violet’s sex. With her other hand across Violet’s middle, Violet’s spine pressed gloriously against Maud’s front, she could feel every tense of muscle and hitch of breath. Violet hissed, encouraging, when Maud bent her fingers and pressed inside. It was so hot.
Violet’s heart beat against her fingertips. Maud paused to wonder at it.
She paused for long enough that Violet began to direct her: one finger at a time, faster than Maud would have thought comfortable, until Maud’s wrist began to ache with the angle.
“Like this?” she ventured, when Violet shifted and pressed the phallus into her hand. “Er—”
Violet used Maud’s splayed legs for support as she struggled upright. “No, you’re right, the angle’s no good. Here.”
