A restless truth, p.26
A Restless Truth, page 26
“And you’re a toad,” snapped Violet. “Do I have to secret-bind you?”
Clarence blanched. Violet struggled with her temper; with that part of her carved out of anger, which always wanted an excuse to lash out. At the same time, it was as if Maud were there in the room with her, laying a hand on her arm. The memory of Hawthorn choking around his own secret-bind flashed across her mind.
Damn it.
Violet’s thoughts cleared. Even if Clarence told Walter Courcey that Violet had been asking questions about the Last Contract, it was no more than Chapman and Morris already knew.
“All right,” Violet said. “Tell him everything. Tell him I’ve no idea what this bloody item is, but he and the Assembly have no right to come rummaging through my property.”
She cradled a negation and the spell fell away. Clarence’s glare returned as he climbed off the bed, rubbing at his wrists. The cleanness of his dislike was refreshing compared to Jerry’s habit of laughing at Violet’s anger and Maud’s stubborn refusal to stop liking her, no matter what. Clarence had never fallen for Violet’s stories. Clearly they were about the wrong things—about her, and not about him. He’d fallen right into the arms of a story painting him as an important agent on a secret mission.
For all that her cousin was an obnoxious parsnip of a man, Violet didn’t want him hurt. Well. Not much.
“Go away now, Clarence.”
“Do you know, Violet, you’re going to end up exactly like Lady Enid,” Clarence shot at her. “Alone with all your money, unable to tell if anyone truly likes you or is just toadying up to you because you’re rich. You probably won’t even do anything with it. Just sit on it like a dragon, feeling smug about the fact that you’ve ruined the family’s reputation.”
It landed hard on the bruise Maud had left. Violet should have fed him mint, should have branded his tongue, should have left him silenced forever. It wasn’t as though anything Clarence said was improving the world; and she very much doubted that giving him money would improve anything either, except to reduce the whining.
“How wrong you are, Clarence,” Violet said brightly. “I’ll spend it all on scandalous parties, where I invite only the most dissolute and radical guests, and we all walk around in the nude. Though perhaps I shall have a pile of gold in the corner for me to lie on. What a helpful suggestion.”
Clarence, purple-faced, had given up around the word nude. He slammed the cabin door as he left.
25
Violet arrived in the Café Marseille and joined Maud and Hawthorn for lunch. Maud was engrossed in telling Hawthorn what Mrs. Navenby had said about Lady Enid and Seraphina Vaughn.
At one point Hawthorn coughed into his napkin and indicated with his eyes: Ross had entered the café and was doing some lively notepad-wielding at a distant table. Maud had pointed out that meeting him in public, during daylight hours, was likely to attract less suspicion than sneaking off to meet in secret.
In between bites of her own ham and stealing forkfuls from Maud’s eggy, curry-fragrant dish of spinach and minced lamb and almonds, Violet told them about Clarence.
“So, Walter Courcey still has his fingers in this.” Hawthorn drawled the name as if scraping it from his shoe. “Damn. And you think Morris and Chapman know about Lady Enid as well, Violet, and your cousin doesn’t know about them?”
“I don’t know,” said Violet. “Neither of them seemed much interested in me, during the first days aboard, but I suppose Mrs. Navenby and her contract piece were the more urgent issue. None of us can do anything about the knife until we’re back in London.” Though she remembered the rune again, with the now-familiar prickle of fear that ran all the way down her spine.
“And then I sat next to you at dinner on the first night.” Maud made a rueful face. “It really must have looked as though we were in cahoots.”
“We are in cahoots.”
“Cahoots of circumstance,” said Maud solemnly.
“Either way. It appears that I’m well and truly in this for self-interested reasons now.”
Maud started to say something, then stopped. Not wanting to start up their argument again in front of Hawthorn, no doubt.
They ate and drank in silence for a while. The sweet course was blackberry pudding draped in a delicate milky custard. Tart berry melting on her tongue hurtled Violet back to a childhood summer, a dining table loud with girls talking over one another. She tried instantly to put the memory down and walk away from it.
Then she stopped, and forced herself to sit with it instead. Remembering her old life gave her the same off-balance sensation as Maud’s aggressive openness, Maud’s questing eyes, which reached past the polished versions of Violet and demanded whatever was beneath.
What was beneath? Nobody Violet recognised. A girl with a berry-purple tongue who’d grown too tall for yet another of Meg’s old skirts. A girl full of stories, who didn’t know anything about the world.
Nobody at the Penumbra had ever asked to meet that girl. It was one of the unspoken rules. You were allowed to reinvent yourself as many times as necessary. The Lyric, and Violet’s flight back to England, was supposed to play by the same rules.
She hadn’t anticipated Maud Blyth. She didn’t know how anyone ever could.
Violet turned the maple ring on her thumb, drew her spoon through a streak of custard, and exhaled.
“My sister Alice was wild for blackberries,” she said. “She would come home with an apron full of them as soon as the hedges were full.”
“You don’t talk about your sisters,” Maud said after a cautious pause.
Violet glanced at Hawthorn. He looked back, blue eyes sardonic as ever. Nothing Violet could say would move him. And after the last few days she knew more than he’d ever wanted her to, she was sure, about Lady Elsie and his cousin Bastoke and a secret-bind that Hawthorn had been carrying for years.
This, too, felt like something owed.
“I don’t talk about them because I abandoned them,” she said.
The story sounded small and petty when she told it. She didn’t have a well-crafted set of words with which to convey her father’s ever-growing disappointment with each year that failed to deliver a son; her mother’s fretful nature similarly worsening with time, until she could tighten the strings of Violet’s body just by entering a room.
The expectation that the Debenham girls would all marry, as soon and as advantageously as possible, and live good, small lives and never learn more magic than was proper for a gentleman magician’s daughter—never do anything that could cause society to talk—never seek change, or adventure, or wilder, larger magics.
She told them about Ellen, who never had much magic or care to use it, and didn’t mind hiding it forever when she married an unmagical parson. Meg, who took their mother’s worries to heart and married a rich and unpleasant man. Alice, the truly beautiful one and the family’s hope, who to their mother’s horror fell in passionate love with a poor soldier when she was barely seventeen. Julia, the bookish youngest, who swore steely-eyed she’d never marry.
And Violet, stuck between her sisters like a double set of parentheses. Too tall and too prone to talking back; too prone to putting fairy-tale dreams in her sisters’ heads or doing devastating impressions of their suitors or using unladylike amounts of magic. Violet, the one who ran.
“You didn’t tell me any of this, when you came to me asking to be ruined,” said Hawthorn.
“Would you have cared?”
“No,” he said calmly.
“I told myself I was making the others look like angels in comparison, by running off and turning myself into the most scandalous of all,” said Violet. “But I am selfish. If I’d stayed, I could have been there for them, like your brother was for you.”
“And married when you didn’t want to?” said Maud.
“No, I—wait.” Violet pointed a spoon at her. “Why are you on my side now?”
“It was a hard situation. I can see why you did what you did. And I still think it was awfully brave of you to even think of it.”
“You’re too good a person, Maud Blyth,” said Violet, because she needed to tease. Teasing was easier. “There must be a catch.”
“I’m not naturally good,” said Maud. “I’m selfish too. And I know how to unravel someone with gossip. How to pick at anyone’s faults. But I decided that there were enough people like that in our house already. I wanted to be different.” There was a weariness behind her words. That wax-sensation gentled its fingers in Violet’s chest again. “Perhaps I did shove myself in where it wasn’t my business, wasn’t my fight, because my parents wouldn’t lift a finger for other people. Oh, they were great philanthropists. But they wouldn’t give a beggar on the street a single penny if nobody was around to see them do it.”
“And you would,” said Violet. Of course Maud would. She’d probably start a petition on the spot for more shelter houses too.
“Mrs. Sinclair says you look at the world and decide you can live with it or decide you can’t. And if you can’t, you decide what you’re prepared to do about it.”
“Did you get that down, Mr. Ross,” said Hawthorn, “or would you like her to repeat it?”
Ross stood at Maud’s shoulder. “Moral philosophy doesn’t go down well in the society papers.”
“Whereas advertising is well known for it.”
Ross looked down at Maud. “Reporting in, Miss B. Bad news, I’m afraid.”
Maud’s face fell. “You can’t find it?”
“Your bird’s been put in the larger cage with the others, so they didn’t need the small cage anymore. I talked to that Mr. Hewitt, the keeper—he said he gave it to one of the first-class undercooks. Wasn’t sure why the man wanted it but didn’t mind getting it off his hands in exchange for a drink or two, once he’d checked Miss Helen didn’t want the thing back.”
“That’s your idea of bad news?” said Violet. “You move fast.”
Ross gave an impatient waggle of his notepad. Yes. Tracking down information wasn’t new work to him. “That’s as far as I managed. I’d have headed to the kitchens after that. But one of the thugs from security said the master-at-arms wanted to see me.”
“About…” Maud lowered her voice. “The jewels?”
“I wouldn’t be standing here if that was the case, would I? No, he wanted to point out that I’d been spending a lot of time in first class. And wasn’t I meant to be speaking to all the passengers? And this wasn’t a pleasure cruise for scribblers, young man—and a lot of similar folderol.”
“I don’t understand,” said Maud.
“Means someone’s seen me leaving someone’s cabin late at night and made a complaint about the White Star Line’s moral standards,” said Ross bluntly, looking at Hawthorn. “His lordship’s entertaining floozies. Everyone knows that.”
Maud made a small choking sound.
“They can’t ask you lot to leave the party when we’re in the middle of the ocean. But they can disapprove of me being invited to partake.”
“Perhaps they’re envious,” said Violet.
Ross shot her a startled look, then broke into a grin. She hadn’t really been joking. Alanzo Rossi, with his curls and coffee-dark eyes and insolent tongue, could have walked off the pages of fantasy for plenty of rich women who watched their driver bend over the hood of the motorcar to polish it, and dreamed scalding little dreams in their cold marital beds.
“That’s as may be. Either way. I’m not to have my run of first class after dark any longer.”
“If someone’s noticed enough to complain, then Morris or Chapman might notice you next,” said Hawthorn. “You shouldn’t meet with us again.”
“Well, woe the fucking day.” Ross flipped a showy page in his notebook. “How will I live without the nightly orgies in his lordship’s suite?”
“Violet, that illusion you did, changing your hair, and…” Maud gestured to her face. “Could you do one on someone else?”
“Yes?”
“We’ll make you a disguise,” Maud said to Ross.
His eyebrows went up. “A magical one?”
“Partly. We’ll get it to you before tonight, so you can attend all the orgies you want.” She raised her sunny smile to him. “What’s your cabin number?”
* * *
“I’m worried that Chapman seems to have given up on us,” said Violet. “And we haven’t seen Morris since yesterday.”
“Perhaps they’ve decided to wait until we’re off the ship,” said Maud dubiously.
“You’re right to worry about silence,” said Mrs. Navenby. “It’s when you don’t hear a peep out of children for an hour that you discover they’ve dug a moat in your rhododendron patch or decided to render the Bayeux Tapestry in wax crayon on the wall.”
They’d returned to Violet’s cabin after lunch, packed up some more of her belongings, and taken them to Maud’s, where they faithfully checked the hairlock and Violet applied Mrs. Navenby’s warding. The atmosphere between Maud and Violet had thawed. Violet swung between resentment and relief that all it had taken was the peeling-back of her sleeve to show the vulnerable course of her veins. Figuratively speaking.
“I wouldn’t classify Chapman and Morris as children,” said Violet now. “Clarence, possibly yes.”
“You mentioned Lady Enid had a son,” said Maud. “Do you have children, Mrs. Navenby? Goodness, I should have asked earlier. I shall have to telegraph someone that you’re dead.”
“No children of my own, but Ralph’s sister in Boston had plenty, and we visited enough to witness the carnage. Now, what was your plan to disguise that young man, Miss Blyth? Do you fancy yourself a magician now?”
“No,” said Maud. “But you know how it is when two ideas that have been living on different shelves in your head knock against each other, and suddenly there’s a new idea there.” She was flitting around the cabin again, touching things absently. Maud was thinking and so needed to move.
Violet did not need to move. Violet rather fancied a nap, if she was honest. She contented herself with sitting down.
“I can cast a costume illusion on anyone you like, Maud, but I’ve never done it unless they’re in front of me, and it takes more concentration to sustain on someone else. We used them for quick changes and tricks. Nothing that needed to last onstage. I could probably get Ross up here looking like someone else, but I’d need to be close to him the whole way, and that’d defeat the purpose.”
“Yes,” said Maud. A touch of the curving frame of a mirror; a touch of the bed-post. “You said you could anchor illusion to an object? Like the flowers on your hat?”
“I don’t know if it’d work for something that large,” Violet said. “Something that’d need to shift and move with a person.”
“What if it was just the head?” said Maud. “New hair, new face. Not an entire outfit. And what if I could show you a new way to anchor it, so it’d last? Mrs. Navenby can sew magic into clothes. You can create illusions to turn a person into someone else.” Her fists lifted one after the other, then knocked together. Two ideas on a shelf.
“Your faith is touching,” said Violet. “What do you mean, sew into clothes?”
“The green coat, girl,” said Mrs. Navenby. “That’s the easiest to explain.”
Maud fetched a coat from one of the trunks. It was an old style, full-skirted and with puffed upper sleeves, made of a green fabric showing rub and wear at the cuffs and elbows. There were only so many times you could patch and repair something, even with magic.
Maud exposed the inside of the coat’s collar. Instead of a tailor’s mark there was a row of yellow embroidery, which looked for all the world like—
“Runes?”
“A similar principle. This one’s an imbuement for warmth. One imbues the thread with the spell, then the pattern anchors it to the garment. It can last for years, if you put enough power into both steps.”
Violet traced the yellow characters. “Where did you learn this technique? It seems so useful, I’d have thought it would be passed down in families.”
“I invented it,” said Mrs. Navenby carelessly. “Now, you’ll need thread. It works with cotton or silk, but the cradles for the imbuement differ for each.”
It was a one-handed cradle. Something else that Violet had never seen. It made her hand cramp, the first time she tried it, but Mrs. Navenby had none of Hawthorn’s patience with teaching—she just said, “Practice,” and then, “To what, pray tell, were you thinking of attaching this spell? I’m not sure any of my shawls will suit that boy.”
“I’ve an idea for that as well.” Maud moved to the dresser. “Mrs. Navenby, which of these would you say is your least favourite jewel?”
A minute later Maud left the cabin, leaving Violet to her work. Most two-handed cradles contained the sense of string within their patterns. Violet hadn’t used string since she was twelve. She had enough power that most things fell out well enough, with a little practice.
She built a quick face-illusion of Thom, fast and comfortable as if she were backstage at the Penumbra. They’d done an absurd, risqué, vaguely Shakespearean show centred on identical twins, and one of Violet’s roles had been to stroll across upstage wearing Thom’s face a few moments after he’d dashed through the audience and vanished. It was easier to hold an illusion if it was a face you knew. She made a couple of tweaks—thicker eyebrows, a skin tone closer to Ross’s olive—then let it dissolve into nothing.
She went back to practising the one-handed cradle that was Mrs. Navenby’s imbuement clause, and was singing to her leather rings when Maud returned to the cabin.
“That’s a lively tune,” said Maud. “What is it?”
It was a Newfoundland shanty that Jerry had taught her, and which had a tendency to rise up and tangle in Violet’s mind at inconvenient moments. Rings don’t care what you sing to them, Claudette used to say, just that you make them feel welcome in the magic. Make them your own.
Violet had left a lot of her life behind in New York, sacrificed on the altar of her gullibility, but she refused to abandon music. She’d sing this song as many times as it took to lose the sting; to make it as much a part of herself as her rings.
Clarence blanched. Violet struggled with her temper; with that part of her carved out of anger, which always wanted an excuse to lash out. At the same time, it was as if Maud were there in the room with her, laying a hand on her arm. The memory of Hawthorn choking around his own secret-bind flashed across her mind.
Damn it.
Violet’s thoughts cleared. Even if Clarence told Walter Courcey that Violet had been asking questions about the Last Contract, it was no more than Chapman and Morris already knew.
“All right,” Violet said. “Tell him everything. Tell him I’ve no idea what this bloody item is, but he and the Assembly have no right to come rummaging through my property.”
She cradled a negation and the spell fell away. Clarence’s glare returned as he climbed off the bed, rubbing at his wrists. The cleanness of his dislike was refreshing compared to Jerry’s habit of laughing at Violet’s anger and Maud’s stubborn refusal to stop liking her, no matter what. Clarence had never fallen for Violet’s stories. Clearly they were about the wrong things—about her, and not about him. He’d fallen right into the arms of a story painting him as an important agent on a secret mission.
For all that her cousin was an obnoxious parsnip of a man, Violet didn’t want him hurt. Well. Not much.
“Go away now, Clarence.”
“Do you know, Violet, you’re going to end up exactly like Lady Enid,” Clarence shot at her. “Alone with all your money, unable to tell if anyone truly likes you or is just toadying up to you because you’re rich. You probably won’t even do anything with it. Just sit on it like a dragon, feeling smug about the fact that you’ve ruined the family’s reputation.”
It landed hard on the bruise Maud had left. Violet should have fed him mint, should have branded his tongue, should have left him silenced forever. It wasn’t as though anything Clarence said was improving the world; and she very much doubted that giving him money would improve anything either, except to reduce the whining.
“How wrong you are, Clarence,” Violet said brightly. “I’ll spend it all on scandalous parties, where I invite only the most dissolute and radical guests, and we all walk around in the nude. Though perhaps I shall have a pile of gold in the corner for me to lie on. What a helpful suggestion.”
Clarence, purple-faced, had given up around the word nude. He slammed the cabin door as he left.
25
Violet arrived in the Café Marseille and joined Maud and Hawthorn for lunch. Maud was engrossed in telling Hawthorn what Mrs. Navenby had said about Lady Enid and Seraphina Vaughn.
At one point Hawthorn coughed into his napkin and indicated with his eyes: Ross had entered the café and was doing some lively notepad-wielding at a distant table. Maud had pointed out that meeting him in public, during daylight hours, was likely to attract less suspicion than sneaking off to meet in secret.
In between bites of her own ham and stealing forkfuls from Maud’s eggy, curry-fragrant dish of spinach and minced lamb and almonds, Violet told them about Clarence.
“So, Walter Courcey still has his fingers in this.” Hawthorn drawled the name as if scraping it from his shoe. “Damn. And you think Morris and Chapman know about Lady Enid as well, Violet, and your cousin doesn’t know about them?”
“I don’t know,” said Violet. “Neither of them seemed much interested in me, during the first days aboard, but I suppose Mrs. Navenby and her contract piece were the more urgent issue. None of us can do anything about the knife until we’re back in London.” Though she remembered the rune again, with the now-familiar prickle of fear that ran all the way down her spine.
“And then I sat next to you at dinner on the first night.” Maud made a rueful face. “It really must have looked as though we were in cahoots.”
“We are in cahoots.”
“Cahoots of circumstance,” said Maud solemnly.
“Either way. It appears that I’m well and truly in this for self-interested reasons now.”
Maud started to say something, then stopped. Not wanting to start up their argument again in front of Hawthorn, no doubt.
They ate and drank in silence for a while. The sweet course was blackberry pudding draped in a delicate milky custard. Tart berry melting on her tongue hurtled Violet back to a childhood summer, a dining table loud with girls talking over one another. She tried instantly to put the memory down and walk away from it.
Then she stopped, and forced herself to sit with it instead. Remembering her old life gave her the same off-balance sensation as Maud’s aggressive openness, Maud’s questing eyes, which reached past the polished versions of Violet and demanded whatever was beneath.
What was beneath? Nobody Violet recognised. A girl with a berry-purple tongue who’d grown too tall for yet another of Meg’s old skirts. A girl full of stories, who didn’t know anything about the world.
Nobody at the Penumbra had ever asked to meet that girl. It was one of the unspoken rules. You were allowed to reinvent yourself as many times as necessary. The Lyric, and Violet’s flight back to England, was supposed to play by the same rules.
She hadn’t anticipated Maud Blyth. She didn’t know how anyone ever could.
Violet turned the maple ring on her thumb, drew her spoon through a streak of custard, and exhaled.
“My sister Alice was wild for blackberries,” she said. “She would come home with an apron full of them as soon as the hedges were full.”
“You don’t talk about your sisters,” Maud said after a cautious pause.
Violet glanced at Hawthorn. He looked back, blue eyes sardonic as ever. Nothing Violet could say would move him. And after the last few days she knew more than he’d ever wanted her to, she was sure, about Lady Elsie and his cousin Bastoke and a secret-bind that Hawthorn had been carrying for years.
This, too, felt like something owed.
“I don’t talk about them because I abandoned them,” she said.
The story sounded small and petty when she told it. She didn’t have a well-crafted set of words with which to convey her father’s ever-growing disappointment with each year that failed to deliver a son; her mother’s fretful nature similarly worsening with time, until she could tighten the strings of Violet’s body just by entering a room.
The expectation that the Debenham girls would all marry, as soon and as advantageously as possible, and live good, small lives and never learn more magic than was proper for a gentleman magician’s daughter—never do anything that could cause society to talk—never seek change, or adventure, or wilder, larger magics.
She told them about Ellen, who never had much magic or care to use it, and didn’t mind hiding it forever when she married an unmagical parson. Meg, who took their mother’s worries to heart and married a rich and unpleasant man. Alice, the truly beautiful one and the family’s hope, who to their mother’s horror fell in passionate love with a poor soldier when she was barely seventeen. Julia, the bookish youngest, who swore steely-eyed she’d never marry.
And Violet, stuck between her sisters like a double set of parentheses. Too tall and too prone to talking back; too prone to putting fairy-tale dreams in her sisters’ heads or doing devastating impressions of their suitors or using unladylike amounts of magic. Violet, the one who ran.
“You didn’t tell me any of this, when you came to me asking to be ruined,” said Hawthorn.
“Would you have cared?”
“No,” he said calmly.
“I told myself I was making the others look like angels in comparison, by running off and turning myself into the most scandalous of all,” said Violet. “But I am selfish. If I’d stayed, I could have been there for them, like your brother was for you.”
“And married when you didn’t want to?” said Maud.
“No, I—wait.” Violet pointed a spoon at her. “Why are you on my side now?”
“It was a hard situation. I can see why you did what you did. And I still think it was awfully brave of you to even think of it.”
“You’re too good a person, Maud Blyth,” said Violet, because she needed to tease. Teasing was easier. “There must be a catch.”
“I’m not naturally good,” said Maud. “I’m selfish too. And I know how to unravel someone with gossip. How to pick at anyone’s faults. But I decided that there were enough people like that in our house already. I wanted to be different.” There was a weariness behind her words. That wax-sensation gentled its fingers in Violet’s chest again. “Perhaps I did shove myself in where it wasn’t my business, wasn’t my fight, because my parents wouldn’t lift a finger for other people. Oh, they were great philanthropists. But they wouldn’t give a beggar on the street a single penny if nobody was around to see them do it.”
“And you would,” said Violet. Of course Maud would. She’d probably start a petition on the spot for more shelter houses too.
“Mrs. Sinclair says you look at the world and decide you can live with it or decide you can’t. And if you can’t, you decide what you’re prepared to do about it.”
“Did you get that down, Mr. Ross,” said Hawthorn, “or would you like her to repeat it?”
Ross stood at Maud’s shoulder. “Moral philosophy doesn’t go down well in the society papers.”
“Whereas advertising is well known for it.”
Ross looked down at Maud. “Reporting in, Miss B. Bad news, I’m afraid.”
Maud’s face fell. “You can’t find it?”
“Your bird’s been put in the larger cage with the others, so they didn’t need the small cage anymore. I talked to that Mr. Hewitt, the keeper—he said he gave it to one of the first-class undercooks. Wasn’t sure why the man wanted it but didn’t mind getting it off his hands in exchange for a drink or two, once he’d checked Miss Helen didn’t want the thing back.”
“That’s your idea of bad news?” said Violet. “You move fast.”
Ross gave an impatient waggle of his notepad. Yes. Tracking down information wasn’t new work to him. “That’s as far as I managed. I’d have headed to the kitchens after that. But one of the thugs from security said the master-at-arms wanted to see me.”
“About…” Maud lowered her voice. “The jewels?”
“I wouldn’t be standing here if that was the case, would I? No, he wanted to point out that I’d been spending a lot of time in first class. And wasn’t I meant to be speaking to all the passengers? And this wasn’t a pleasure cruise for scribblers, young man—and a lot of similar folderol.”
“I don’t understand,” said Maud.
“Means someone’s seen me leaving someone’s cabin late at night and made a complaint about the White Star Line’s moral standards,” said Ross bluntly, looking at Hawthorn. “His lordship’s entertaining floozies. Everyone knows that.”
Maud made a small choking sound.
“They can’t ask you lot to leave the party when we’re in the middle of the ocean. But they can disapprove of me being invited to partake.”
“Perhaps they’re envious,” said Violet.
Ross shot her a startled look, then broke into a grin. She hadn’t really been joking. Alanzo Rossi, with his curls and coffee-dark eyes and insolent tongue, could have walked off the pages of fantasy for plenty of rich women who watched their driver bend over the hood of the motorcar to polish it, and dreamed scalding little dreams in their cold marital beds.
“That’s as may be. Either way. I’m not to have my run of first class after dark any longer.”
“If someone’s noticed enough to complain, then Morris or Chapman might notice you next,” said Hawthorn. “You shouldn’t meet with us again.”
“Well, woe the fucking day.” Ross flipped a showy page in his notebook. “How will I live without the nightly orgies in his lordship’s suite?”
“Violet, that illusion you did, changing your hair, and…” Maud gestured to her face. “Could you do one on someone else?”
“Yes?”
“We’ll make you a disguise,” Maud said to Ross.
His eyebrows went up. “A magical one?”
“Partly. We’ll get it to you before tonight, so you can attend all the orgies you want.” She raised her sunny smile to him. “What’s your cabin number?”
* * *
“I’m worried that Chapman seems to have given up on us,” said Violet. “And we haven’t seen Morris since yesterday.”
“Perhaps they’ve decided to wait until we’re off the ship,” said Maud dubiously.
“You’re right to worry about silence,” said Mrs. Navenby. “It’s when you don’t hear a peep out of children for an hour that you discover they’ve dug a moat in your rhododendron patch or decided to render the Bayeux Tapestry in wax crayon on the wall.”
They’d returned to Violet’s cabin after lunch, packed up some more of her belongings, and taken them to Maud’s, where they faithfully checked the hairlock and Violet applied Mrs. Navenby’s warding. The atmosphere between Maud and Violet had thawed. Violet swung between resentment and relief that all it had taken was the peeling-back of her sleeve to show the vulnerable course of her veins. Figuratively speaking.
“I wouldn’t classify Chapman and Morris as children,” said Violet now. “Clarence, possibly yes.”
“You mentioned Lady Enid had a son,” said Maud. “Do you have children, Mrs. Navenby? Goodness, I should have asked earlier. I shall have to telegraph someone that you’re dead.”
“No children of my own, but Ralph’s sister in Boston had plenty, and we visited enough to witness the carnage. Now, what was your plan to disguise that young man, Miss Blyth? Do you fancy yourself a magician now?”
“No,” said Maud. “But you know how it is when two ideas that have been living on different shelves in your head knock against each other, and suddenly there’s a new idea there.” She was flitting around the cabin again, touching things absently. Maud was thinking and so needed to move.
Violet did not need to move. Violet rather fancied a nap, if she was honest. She contented herself with sitting down.
“I can cast a costume illusion on anyone you like, Maud, but I’ve never done it unless they’re in front of me, and it takes more concentration to sustain on someone else. We used them for quick changes and tricks. Nothing that needed to last onstage. I could probably get Ross up here looking like someone else, but I’d need to be close to him the whole way, and that’d defeat the purpose.”
“Yes,” said Maud. A touch of the curving frame of a mirror; a touch of the bed-post. “You said you could anchor illusion to an object? Like the flowers on your hat?”
“I don’t know if it’d work for something that large,” Violet said. “Something that’d need to shift and move with a person.”
“What if it was just the head?” said Maud. “New hair, new face. Not an entire outfit. And what if I could show you a new way to anchor it, so it’d last? Mrs. Navenby can sew magic into clothes. You can create illusions to turn a person into someone else.” Her fists lifted one after the other, then knocked together. Two ideas on a shelf.
“Your faith is touching,” said Violet. “What do you mean, sew into clothes?”
“The green coat, girl,” said Mrs. Navenby. “That’s the easiest to explain.”
Maud fetched a coat from one of the trunks. It was an old style, full-skirted and with puffed upper sleeves, made of a green fabric showing rub and wear at the cuffs and elbows. There were only so many times you could patch and repair something, even with magic.
Maud exposed the inside of the coat’s collar. Instead of a tailor’s mark there was a row of yellow embroidery, which looked for all the world like—
“Runes?”
“A similar principle. This one’s an imbuement for warmth. One imbues the thread with the spell, then the pattern anchors it to the garment. It can last for years, if you put enough power into both steps.”
Violet traced the yellow characters. “Where did you learn this technique? It seems so useful, I’d have thought it would be passed down in families.”
“I invented it,” said Mrs. Navenby carelessly. “Now, you’ll need thread. It works with cotton or silk, but the cradles for the imbuement differ for each.”
It was a one-handed cradle. Something else that Violet had never seen. It made her hand cramp, the first time she tried it, but Mrs. Navenby had none of Hawthorn’s patience with teaching—she just said, “Practice,” and then, “To what, pray tell, were you thinking of attaching this spell? I’m not sure any of my shawls will suit that boy.”
“I’ve an idea for that as well.” Maud moved to the dresser. “Mrs. Navenby, which of these would you say is your least favourite jewel?”
A minute later Maud left the cabin, leaving Violet to her work. Most two-handed cradles contained the sense of string within their patterns. Violet hadn’t used string since she was twelve. She had enough power that most things fell out well enough, with a little practice.
She built a quick face-illusion of Thom, fast and comfortable as if she were backstage at the Penumbra. They’d done an absurd, risqué, vaguely Shakespearean show centred on identical twins, and one of Violet’s roles had been to stroll across upstage wearing Thom’s face a few moments after he’d dashed through the audience and vanished. It was easier to hold an illusion if it was a face you knew. She made a couple of tweaks—thicker eyebrows, a skin tone closer to Ross’s olive—then let it dissolve into nothing.
She went back to practising the one-handed cradle that was Mrs. Navenby’s imbuement clause, and was singing to her leather rings when Maud returned to the cabin.
“That’s a lively tune,” said Maud. “What is it?”
It was a Newfoundland shanty that Jerry had taught her, and which had a tendency to rise up and tangle in Violet’s mind at inconvenient moments. Rings don’t care what you sing to them, Claudette used to say, just that you make them feel welcome in the magic. Make them your own.
Violet had left a lot of her life behind in New York, sacrificed on the altar of her gullibility, but she refused to abandon music. She’d sing this song as many times as it took to lose the sting; to make it as much a part of herself as her rings.
