A Restless Truth (The Last Binding #2)

Chapter 14

14

After breakfast the next morning Violet was stopped in her tracks, on her way across the first-class parlour on B Deck, by the word magic .

“—that for those of us truly gifted with the Sight, the word spiritualism sets us apart from cheap stage tricks and charlatans peddling love potions.”

Mrs. Moretti was holding court nearby. The self-proclaimed medium was somehow wearing more furs every time Violet saw her. Perhaps the things were mating.

“You really have seen ghosts, then?” asked an eager woman.

“The Sight does not refer to what we perceive with the eyes. Spirits are ephemeral. They are a presence, a will. What use have they for an earthly form, having been separated from their coarse flesh?”

This was accurate enough that Violet drifted closer. She had a morning of sneaking and room-searching ahead of her. Ross would do the same in between continuing his interviews. Maud would deliver Dorian to Helen Bernard, who’d delightedly accepted the offer of a talkative African Grey, and then intended to visit the Turkish baths during ladies’ hour to try charming a sample of sandalwood oil out of the attendants.

Hawthorn had not volunteered his plans for the day.

“In that case, how does one know of their presence?” asked another of Mrs. Moretti’s audience. This woman was dressed in mourning.

“There are various signs, to those of us with sensitivity,” said Mrs. Moretti impressively.

Cats, Violet was tempted to say, but she kept her mouth shut.

It was commonly agreed that there was at least one ghost in the Penumbra, given how the theatre’s cats behaved, and that its preferred haunts were the prompt side wings and the storage space beneath the stage. In the absence of true mediums, who were rare, there was no way of communicating with ghosts, so the company had bandied about competing stories as to who the unfortunate person had been and how they’d died.

Henri had worked at the Paris Opéra, before being dismissed for stealing, and claimed that theatres were often riddled with ghosts. He had a whole theory, which he’d deliver with increasing volume and decreasing coherence over half a bottle of bourbon, that it had something to do with music and vibrations in the air. He’d even known an unmagical journalist who became interested enough in the Paris Opéra’s ghosts that he planned to write a novel about it.

Mrs. Moretti was now explaining to her enraptured circle that she had been aware of her gifts since girlhood: sometimes a cold sensation on the skin or a stirring of her hair, sometimes a whisper in her ear, asking her to give voice to the voiceless departed. Why, her own dear husband, who passed five years ago…

It all sounded like absolute bollocks. But then, the Penumbra had functioned by presenting real magic in the guise of handmade spectacle. Magicians made all sorts of choices as to how they wanted to exist in a world ignorant of their true nature. And New York’s magicians were self-policing; no official body existed like the Coopers did in England, to chase down and suppress—and punish, if necessary—anyone endangering the secrecy of magical society.

Perhaps Mrs. Moretti was a magician, and a cunning one. Or even a true medium, camouflaging herself with the trappings of nonsense.

Either way. Violet went and consulted the directory, and then broke into the woman’s cabin on general principles. The opening-spell came more fluidly to her fingers today.

She searched quickly for any of the silver items that had been taken from Mrs. Navenby’s belongings. There was plenty of jewellery; most of it, Violet judged after careful inspection, was paste.

More furs, though none new, and none with a maker’s label still present, only holes where they’d been unpicked and removed. Theft? Careful shopping in secondhand stores?

The most useful discovery was a nondescript black case, which Violet pulled from the back corner of the wardrobe. It contained— ah . Fishing line, wound on a wheel. Metal wires and bent hooks. Folded gauze. A small bottle of fluorescent paint with a spattered label. Notebooks.

Only a professional fraud would need these props. Perhaps the woman had fleeced one of her oh-so-rich and influential clients of a little too much money, and was making the hasty move to London to impose herself on a new set of suckers.

Violet had the sudden urge to throw the black case at the mirror and watch it smash.

Instead she put it back in place, let herself out into the corridor, and stood there, breathing the anger down. She was not going to think of Jerry, the deceitful smiling prick, except to be savagely glad for the lesson he’d taught her.

The maple and the pine were smooth as satin against her skin. Wood, for illusion.

Learn the lesson, Violet. Trust is a luxury.

Before she’d completed the thought, Violet was walking, with her confident Cleopatra stalk. People stepped out of her way; men touched their hats. The disapproving looks and gleeful whispers were still there, but Violet had every right to be aboard the Lyric and to walk wherever she wanted.

She used the opening-spell on Maud’s cabin and let herself in.

Violet refused to feel guilty. It was past time she did some digging. So far, there had been little of storybook fae-wonder in this—what had Hawthorn called it? A wild goose chase with a side order of possibly being apprehended for theft. It had been entertaining, and promised to continue to be so, but Violet wasn’t sticking her neck out further without all the facts.

Truth-candles were one thing. Maud Blyth was able to talk perfect wide-eyed truth, lace-making around the gaps in the information, to get what she wanted. A morning watching her at work had been very instructive. Violet had begun, yesterday, to listen for the gaps.

It’s Robin’s wasn’t an answer to the question What is that? even if it was true.

Black cases, black notebooks. Everyone was hiding something.

Violet went into the adjoining room, where Maud’s own belongings were. The bed was neatly made but there was still a faint impression on the feather pillow, a dimpling of fabric that sent heat throbbing through Violet’s body as she remembered how Maud’s hands had felt on her waist the previous night.

She didn’t honestly think that Maud had propositioned her out of anything more than an impulse of the moment, born out of newly recognising that women could do that sort of thing with other women, and having compounded the problem by reading pornography all evening.

The problem was how much Violet wanted to be seduced. How easily she could have taken Maud up on her offer. She could have pressed the girl back against the wall and kissed her, filled her hands with Maud’s body and then opened Maud’s rosebud mouth with her own, taught her to bring all that blazing awakened hunger into a kiss, taught her what other purposes mouths could be turned to, taught her to crave it—

Violet bit down hard on the inside of her cheek. She knew better. She was too canny to let herself fall into temptation without thinking.

She knelt by the largest trunk and felt between layers of clothes and paper-wrapped packages, taking care to leave things more or less in position.

The notebook was in a bottom corner. Violet drew it out and sat on the edge of the bed.

Not every page was written on, and most pages weren’t full. Each held a few paragraphs, sometimes less. There were oc casional sketches in black ink or soft grey pencil. There were no dates such as one would expect with a diary. The hand was strong and loose. Violet read an entry at random.

An interior view down a long corridor, carpeted in dark green, lit with electric. Two young men (unfamiliar) dressed in sporting jackets flung themselves back against the wall, as if to make themselves small. They were staring to their right and one was speaking.

A group of animals dashed past them. Most of the animals moved too fast for me to make them out, but they were of various sizes, and all moved in different ways. Not just dogs or cats. One was definitely a monkey—it came last, more slowly, but didn’t stop as it passed the young men. I could not shift the vision to see where the animals came from or where they were going.

(Note: I cannot be sure of this one being aboard a ship, but the corridor matches another of those featuring Hawthorn.)

Violet turned to a different page.

Harriet was seated in an armchair. Her palms were pressed together in front of her, and she gestured with them as she spoke. Something about the way she moved made me think she couldn’t move her hands apart. * She looked like she was arguing heatedly. A man stepped in front of the chair—I could only see the back of him, fair hair and dark braces over white shirt—and swung his arm, very hard. I think he hit her across the face.

(Note: I was pushing hard to return to this one, and you know Edwin has theories about that. Possibility and probability. For God’s sake BE CAREFUL, Maudie.)

Violet turned a few more pages. The notebook fell open naturally, as if at a page that had been returned to over and over. It was a pencil sketch of a woman’s face nearly in profile, spread across both pages. Violet turned it sideways to right the image.

Cold water pooled in the gaps between Violet’s bones. It stayed there, freezing her, for a few heartbeats. Then it began to warm itself at the brazier of her mounting anger.

She traced with one fingertip down the severe straight line of the nose. The artist was not an expert. The forehead was lopsided and the hair sketched in hurriedly. In contrast, some of the pencil lines showing the shape of the chin and lips had been many times erased and redone, as if the artist were painstakingly trying to get them correct.

It was still, recognisably, a sketch of Violet herself, drawn by someone who had studied her face well enough to reproduce it.

Beneath the drawing was the name Harriet, in the same handwriting as the other entries.

Violet kept flicking. Now she knew what she was looking for, her eyes were pulled to it on page after page.

Harriet, on a poorly lit night, opening the door of a motorcar and climbing in. No other details. Glimpsed only briefly in between two others when I lost control momentarily.

Harriet at an evening party, crowded. Definitely aboard the ship this time—I could see the portholes along one wall. She wore a dark blue gown and was shaking the hand of a blond man in a red coat.

Violet closed the notebook and looked around. For the first time, it occurred to her to be afraid.

Or not to be afraid—there was little room for that, what with the size of the anger and a grand swooping sense of vindication: she’d been right to go snooping, right not to trust anything as sweetly offered as Maud Blyth and her adventure—but to wonder if she should be afraid.

The anger was what carried her to where she knew Maud would be.

Violet paid the two-shilling entry fee and took the robe and towels she was handed by the bath attendant. She had tight hold of herself now. She did not charge into the fray fully dressed and heedless. She changed as directed and entered the perfumed mist of the Turkish baths with only the rough, pale robe and the wooden rings on her fingers. And the notebook in her hands.

A small handful of women, most of them elderly, were taking advantage of the ladies’ hour. One sat alone in the dry-heat room, another lay under the newfangled electric heat lamps, and a group of three chatted quietly in the temperate room.

Maud was the sole occupant of the steam room.

In here the mosaic pattern on the pillars and walls was picked out in purples and blues, the light scattered into a grid of shadows by the Moorish wooden screens placed across each of the portholes. Wooden benches of a similar design dotted the room. The tiles were smooth as pearls underfoot, alternating white feathery flourishes and black. The Lyric ’s baths were like nowhere Violet had ever been before.

She was not in any sort of mood to enjoy them.

Maud was making a circuit of a pillar in one corner, her fingers curiously tracing the mosaic. She looked over at Violet’s entry, and a smile lit her expression.

Violet should have worn nacre. Nacre was for blunt strength.

“Good news! I have some of that oil for you, though I did have to pay for…” Maud faltered. Her eyes searched Violet’s face. “Violet? What is it?”

Violet didn’t speak. Maud’s gaze dropped to the notebook. The cynical part of Violet had time to snidely marvel at another, smaller part, which even then whispered: It’s all a silly misunderstanding. She’ll laugh, and explain.

Maud didn’t laugh. Guilt flooded her extraordinary windowpane of a face and made a vulnerable confection out of her mouth.

Violet did not want to kiss it. Oh, she did. She wanted to bite .

She thought suddenly and with a wrench of awful nausea of the single time she had used the knife-spell, and the way blood had soaked her gloves as if she’d dipped them in a warm basin—she thought of the morning after Jerry left, when she’d imagined chasing him down and using that same spell on him. She’d imagined it until she could almost taste the hot red copper of fresh blood, and had ended up on her knees retching over a pot, emptying her stomach as if her body were trying to turn itself inside out to be beaten like a carpetbag.

“Violet—” Maud began.

Violet flung the notebook onto a bench and a smile onto her face. She didn’t stop to work out which smile from her repertoire it was. The curtain-spell pulsed like a heartbeat in her hands and she threw it wide—Maud flinched—muffling this corner of the room to both sight and sound. Nobody would disturb them. Violet could shout, if she wanted.

Instead she used her height to crowd Maud back against the beautiful pillar, until Maud couldn’t step back any farther and couldn’t move forward unless she wanted to shove Violet aside. Violet dearly wished she’d try.

But no—nacre rings would have added nothing. Maud sagged easily, bonelessly, with unshed tears glimmering in her eyes. Real? Manipulation? Violet didn’t care.

“Maud. Maud, my dear girl.”

Maud flinched again. Violet kept smiling.

“Who’s Harriet?”

“You. You are,” said Maud.

Despite the heat, despite the steam rising with faint floral hisses from the grates set along the side of the room, a chill chased over Maud’s skin. For a single moment, before the performance flicked on, Violet’s face had been entirely hard; en tirely angry. Even now, no light sparkled in those grey eyes at all. Maud’s heart gave a great rabbity whimper of fear in her chest, followed by a completely unreasonable clench of desire. Her nerves were so confused.

“Am I,” said Violet.

She was so close that she must be able to hear the race of Maud’s heart. Maud had messed this up so very, very badly. Of course she had. How had she ever fooled herself she knew what she was doing?

“Please. Please let me—Violet—I’ll explain everything, it’s not—it doesn’t change anything.”

Wrong thing to say. Again. Stupid .

Violet gave her a look of stifled violence. Then she stepped back, sat on the bench, and arranged the robe around herself, a queen settling on a throne. Her eyes were still hard as marble.

“All right,” she said. “Explain.”

Maud eased away from the pillar and glanced at the notebook. Violet pulled it into her lap. The pages would curl with damp if they stayed here long.

Truth, then. All of it.

“I told you Robin has foresight,” Maud said, sitting next to Violet. “He’s been writing his visions down since they started. All he gets is tiny glimpses, but he knew something would happen to me on board a ship. He kept seeing Lord Hawthorn too.”

This queenly version of Violet had a dignity that defied even the strands of yellow hair unpeeling themselves from her hairline and sticking to the side of her neck. “So I imagine you weren’t too worried about picking the right card from the pack.”

“Yes. No,” Maud said. “I knew he’d be involved, one way or another. But I didn’t think he’d react well to being told he was destined to help. Given, er, his personality.”

“And you thought I’d react well to being lied to?”

“I didn’t—”

“No, you just withheld .”

Maud looked down at her own pale ankles and flushed toes where they emerged from the robe. Set against the cool tiles, the soles of her feet might have existed in a different world to the rest of her, which glowed with warmth.

“I was going to tell you soon. I’m sorry. I honestly am. I wasn’t sure what to do, ” she said desperately. “Should I have told you at once, as a near-perfect stranger, that my brother had seen enough visions of you to draw you from memory? I never liked being told that I had no choice what to do with my life. I was afraid if I told you or Hawthorn about Robin’s visions, you wouldn’t listen to anything else. You might have refused to help me out of sheer contrariness.” She swallowed. “It’s what I’d have done.”

Violet was silent. Water sloshed on the edge of hearing: the baritone beat of the sea against the side of the ship, with a louder treble of water being poured into itself somewhere else in the baths.

After a while Violet said, “I’m a fool. You trusted me on no acquaintance at all, and I barely questioned it.” Her eyes narrowed. “You sat next to me at dinner. You even asked if I’d done magic. You knew me.”

“I knew what you looked like, and that you were probably a magician. Nothing else. Robin called you Harriet as a joke, because he couldn’t keep calling you the blond woman . And I didn’t trust you until I used the truth-candle.”

“For a few specific questions!” said Violet. “I could have been any sort of person!”

Real exasperation escaped past her anger, and a tiny fleck of hope rose in Maud. Sometimes truth was the most devastating when you delivered it unadorned.

“I like the sort of person you are. I liked you from the moment I heard you laugh. And I trust my first impressions.”

That wiped some more of the performance away. Violet’s fingers clenched and unclenched around Robin’s notebook. She took half an age to answer.

“I hadn’t ever thought about it as something personal. Foresight. It’s almost as much of a story as the Three Families and the Last Contract, and—yes, I do hate the idea of my life being inevitable, and someone else being able to see it. Like flicking ahead to the end of a novel when I have to live it one page at a time. That’s not fair.”

“If it helps, Robin is the best person in the world to have this sort of ability. He’d never do anything awful with it, or anything to take advantage. He’s— good .” It felt, for the first time, like an inadequate word. It held within it the huge, warm symphony that was everything Maud saw in her brother and loved beyond her own untutored ability to describe.

Violet had collected her face again. She did not comment on Robin’s goodness or otherwise. “He’s flicked to the end of the book for you and told you all about it. Written it down, in fact.”

“Only bits and pieces. He can’t control what he sees,” Maud said. “The most certain visions are those that arrive on their own, when he doesn’t try to force their direction at all, and often they’re useless.”

Another long pause. “Would you ask him to tell you? If he could see how your entire life falls out?”

Maud had asked herself this question. Who wouldn’t? She’d asked herself a few others too. If Robin saw disaster—if he saw his own death, or Maud’s—would he tell her? She didn’t think so. He would withhold, which was a different beast of a verb to lie, and he’d do it out of love.

And out of love, she hadn’t asked him. If she did, he would tell her the truth.

The cold was climbing Maud’s legs. She rolled her feet forward so that the only part in contact with the tiles was her toenails. Now that she’d calmed a little, she recognised the occasional shimmer of air that surrounded them as a curtain-spell. She hadn’t realised how much she’d wanted to talk about this. Even before Liza’s marriage, Maud had been sworn to secrecy about magic, and had hated having that secret between them along with everything else.

“I don’t know,” Maud said. “It would be a relief to know that there is one thing out there that I’m supposed to do with my life, so I can finally stop worrying about choosing the wrong one. But then I think, what if I want to keep doing a lot of things? And then I think, well, that’s selfish, what if my interest keeps leaping on to the next thing, just as it always has, because I’m scared of missing out on something, and I end up doing that forever? And then turn around one day and discover I’ve never done anything truly worthwhile? What if I die in a motor accident like Mother and Father, and I’ve not even managed to do as much with my life as they did?”

She wasn’t explaining this well. It was as much of a muddle on her tongue as it was when it throbbed behind her eyes at night and kept her from sleeping.

She pushed down on her largest toe until it ached.

Violet said, “And what did they do?”

It was becoming clear what this was. Violet was demanding recompense in the form of disclosure before she would let them move on.

So Maud told Violet about the charity work: the donations, the auctions, the dinner parties. The endless hunger that her parents had for praise and attention. Her father’s careless disregard for how the conditions for tenant farmers at Thornley Hill worsened and worsened with every year, as all the money from the estate went to London and bought another flattering magazine article or another expensive piece of art to be hung on the wall and forgotten.

Lady Blyth’s gift for sparkling and laughing and charming what she wanted out of people, keeping up a perfect performance in front of those whose weaknesses she exploited and whose human foibles she laughed over in private.

“Personalities and principles in harmony,” said Violet dryly.

It took Maud a moment to remember what she’d said about her parents at dinner, when the wine was starting to work on her.

“They were… very happy. They probably died happy. They didn’t deserve to.” She winced at her own words, then looked hesitantly at Violet. “What about your parents? Is their marriage—harmonious?”

“At least you can be sure your parents would be very unhappy if they knew that you were spending your money on a comprehensive collection of erotic literature. I bet you anything there’s at least one scene in a Turkish bath somewhere in those pamphlets. All bare skin and slipping towels and perfumed massage oils.”

Maud opened her mouth to repeat her question, but the image that Violet had conjured sprang into her mind and overtook her previous thoughts.

She was being distracted.

If that was how Violet wanted to move her pieces, Maud would meet her play.

“I have no doubt that men are allowed to wander these baths wearing only towels. And are allowed the use of the shampooing stalls and massage tables, perfumed oils and all.” Maud loosened the tie at her waist. “As usual, we women are expected to content ourselves with a lesser experience. Mrs. Sinclair would say that someone should stage an act of protest.”

“Maud, when it comes to the Suffragette agenda, I’m sure…”

Violet’s voice stuttered. Maud tilted her head to one side, enjoying the caress of air on bare skin. She’d only let her robe fall to an inch below the angle of her shoulders. Her collarbones were exposed, and the very tops of her breasts.

Women in modern evening gowns exposed more skin than this in public. Even so: the scandalous and experienced Violet Debenham had stopped talking at the sight of her. A thrill of triumph washed over Maud, and it turned to an outright rush of dizziness as she looked Violet in the face. Violet’s brow had a small furrow, and her lips were parted. There was a flutter in the hollow of her throat where drops of sweat had collected.

For a few seconds Maud, too, forgot how one formed entire English words.

Then she blurted, “So it’s not that you don’t think I’m—I mean, that you find me—”

Not much better.

Violet lifted a restless hand and rubbed at the back of her own neck, as if something there had bothered her. The weight of her gaze on Maud’s skin was like stepping into sunlight from shadow.

“You’re completely lovely and someone should have taught you it’s rude to fish for compliments,” said Violet, flat.

“They did,” said Maud. “I ignored them. Do you…” She fumbled her own tongue, again. So much for her promising first attempt at flirtation; how did half the ship believe her to be a loose woman, honestly? Her brain kept mechanically repeating words like oil and skin, or else trying to throw up more images from those erotic pamphlets. “Do you…”

It was just a word. Violet could say it. A parrot could say it. Maud could too.

“Do you want to fuck me?”

She wondered if Violet would lie about this, when those grey eyes were so hot and revealing. She wondered if she would ever forgive Violet if she did.

But Violet said, in that voice of smoke: “Yes. I do.”

“Then why did you turn me down?”

“It’s a bad idea. I told you.”

“ You, ” said Maud fiercely, “Miss Debauchery and Scandal— you are the last person to tell me I shouldn’t pursue what I want. Bad idea or otherwise.”

Violet tugged Maud’s robe back up atop her shoulders. Her thumbs brushed against Maud’s skin as she did so. The drag of fabric felt like the kindling of fire. The roof of Maud’s mouth ached; she felt knocked stupid by the way her joints went buttery and lax. Oh, God, everything made this worse.

“And you’re the last person to be telling me how much of myself I should trust you with, right now,” said Violet, remorseless. “Besides—so far, Maud Cutler is being gossiped about, but it’s all just hearsay. And Maud Blyth is still a respectable girl. I know you want to have fun, but you shouldn’t rush into something you can’t take back.”

“ You did.”

“My situation was different.”

“Oh?” Maud raised her eyebrows, inviting. But Violet didn’t volunteer anything more, and Maud found herself swinging straight from breathless with want to buzzing with anger. She’d opened herself up at Violet’s request. She’d exposed parts of her grubby personal tapestry that only Robin had ever seen. And here Violet was, brushing off the smallest of return questions.

There was a high, firm wall beneath the constant performance that was Violet Debenham. She was the opposite to Edwin; his walls were all up front, the warmth there beneath them if you had the patience to wait to be granted entry.

Violet’s warmth was on the outside. Sweets spread temptingly out on a blanket. Pause and let yourself accept the entertainment, the offering, and you might not notice the wall at all.

Maud’s mother had been like that. But Lady Blyth had had a mocking emptiness at her centre; Violet, behind the barrier of her pretence, had more than that. Maud was sure of it.

“Very well,” Maud said. “You told Lord Hawthorn that there are other people on board who would oblige you. I’m sure the same holds true for me.”

“Plenty of women ?”

“Or men,” said Maud, needling.

“Don’t be a fool out of bad temper,” Violet snapped. “There’s no guarantee any man will care a whit for your pleasure, or stop before you get in trouble.”

“Thank you for the advice. But as you’ve declined to participate, Miss Debenham, I can’t see that it’s any of your business.”

“You—” Violet looked away. She rubbed again at the back of her neck. A hint of red showed beneath her fingertips.

“Have you hurt yourself?”

“It’s nothing. An itch.”

“I can see blood there, Violet.” Maud stood and brushed Violet’s fingers away. The red mark was just below the hairline, where it would be covered by a collar. It wasn’t a bloody scratch, or a welt. It looked as if someone had taken a red-inked pen to Violet’s skin and made a strange shape there.

“Have I nicked myself with my own nails?”

“It looks…” Maud swallowed. “It looks like a rune.”

The muscles of Violet’s neck stiffened. As Maud watched, the red mark deepened to crimson and then, swiftly, faded to nothing.

“Tell me exactly what it is.”

“I don’t know if I could draw it,” Maud said. “It’s gone now. It was only there a moment.” Violet looked pale as her robe. Maud, thinking of the curse on Robin’s arm, didn’t blame her. “Runes. We should ask Lord Hawthorn.”

Violet’s expression darkened. Her fingertips lingered at the nape of her neck.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I would very much like to ask Hawthorn about this.”