A Restless Truth (The Last Binding #2)

Chapter 17

17

Once the planning session was complete, Violet walked back to Maud’s cabin to check the hairlock charm she’d created earlier that day. Her skill didn’t run to a really strong warding, but a hairlock—two strands of Maud’s hair, coated in the sandalwood oil that Maud had bought and Violet had done her best to imbue—was a poor man’s warning system, tied to Maud’s identity.

It was intact. Even better, it fell promptly from the wall when Violet herself entered the cabin, which meant it was working.

The hour wasn’t late—certainly not by Violet’s standards—but she found herself stifling a yawn on the bare back of her hand. She’d stuffed her gloves into her evening bag.

“How can you be tired?” Maud flitted around the stateroom like a butterfly in a ballet. The embroidered gauze layer of her gown floated and swayed, a bar behind the melody of her body. “I swear I won’t sleep for hours, I’m too nervous for tomorrow. Having a real plan is such a relief .” She butterflied into the adjoining room, out of sight, and Violet could hear rustling fabric as Maud began the process of changing into her nightgown.

“Do you need any help?” Violet called. “Hairpins, buttons, corset strings?”

“Thank you—no, I’m much handier than I was.”

Violet was fingering the back of her neck again. She forced her hand down to her side. Dwelling on it wouldn’t help. The only way to get the bloody rune off was to track down this illusion-masked man.

“I wanted to apologise again for dragging you into this,” said Maud, as if she’d sensed the thread of Violet’s thoughts. Her voice was muffled. “I won’t let you get hurt, Violet. I promise.”

Nobody could make such a promise. But Violet didn’t want to puncture the sweet, fierce confidence in Maud’s tone by pointing that out. Instead she smiled and ran her fingers over the back of the nearest chair, seeking the hints of dust in the crevices of the well-turned wood, thinking about Lady Enid and James Taverner.

“At least I’m not bored. It was going to be a tedious week, brightened only by the prospect of giving Aunt Caroline the vapours at every opportunity.”

“Do you mean you don’t regret it? Good,” said Maud. “Because I’m sorry you might be in danger, but I can’t say I wish it had never happened. I’m not sorry you were the one in Robin’s visions. I’m not sorry I met you.”

Violet’s mouth, open to admit that she wasn’t sorry to have met Maud either, dried up entirely when Maud reappeared in the doorway.

Maud hadn’t been changing into her nightgown. Or rather, she’d begun the process, and paused it halfway. She’d removed gown and petticoat, camisole and corset, and the stockings of her evening outfit. What remained was only a pair of drawers and a short chemise: a single lace-edged layer of ivory silk through which Violet could glimpse the outline of dark pink nipples.

Maud’s hair was pin-free and wild with it, a mass of fluffy waves still unwinding as if it were exhaling all on its own. It drew the eyes down to the expanses of skin. Violet was used to seeing half-dressed women; used to seeing their nipples, even. There wasn’t much mystery or modesty between the members of a theatre company.

She’d thought it was bad when Maud let the robe slip from her shoulders in the baths. Now she could see Maud’s knees, and it felt practically obscene.

“What are you doing?” She heard the echo, her own words in her own dry mouth, from last night out under the stars. As then, it wasn’t a real question. It was a line thrown in to buy time.

As then, Maud was working off a different script.

Maud said, “Asking again.”

“Maud.”

“I’m very persistent,” said Maud. “It’s one of my worst qualities. And your argument about Miss Cutler’s rumoured depravity being hypothetical was rather ruined by what I did today in order to not be arrested as a thief, and I still haven’t had a chance to do anything that I’m supposed to have done.” Some strain escaped into her voice. She was within touching distance now. The green of her eyes was dark as wet leaves. “And I might as well be hanged for a penny. So. I’m giving you another chance to say no.”

The sheer courage that took, to ask again after being twice turned aside; to put oneself out there to be thrice denied. There was something ritualistic about it. It called to the storyteller in Violet: three princes setting out to make their fortune, three families entrusted with fae magic, three days to guess someone’s name.

Here they were on the third night of the voyage, and Maud was asking again, standing there flushed amongst those airy waves of brown hair like a stubborn bird in a ravaged nest. Her hands rubbed fretfully at her own bare arms.

Violet did remember how it felt, in those first days and weeks after you finally woke up to what the bloody fuss was about—how this was a hunger that could distract you during the day and keep you awake at night, your whole body a cymbal set ringing, a quilt of needy inhalations, a hollow throb right in the core.

Now Violet’s own body gave the same throb. How could it not? How could anyone with eyes avoid feeling like this, looking at Maud with her bitten lip and soft curves? Her toes, bare on the floor. The pink-and-white of her skin straining against the creamy silk and lace.

“Violet?” Maud said, uncertain.

“I’m not… saying no.”

“But you haven’t,” said Maud, “said—”

And stopped, because Violet’s fingers were on her lips.

If Violet had taught herself anything, clung to any principle when it came to partners and pleasure, it was that no single act was an agreement to any others. A kiss was a kiss alone, until the next kiss was bestowed. Asking a man for his mouth on you didn’t mean you’d agreed to have his cock inside you next, no matter what some might think.

Touching Maud’s mouth was not a statement that anything else would happen. It could just be this: the pink, perfect bow slightly parted, and parting further with the press of Violet’s thumb in its centre.

At any point, Violet could stop. At any point, she could resurrect the bones of her reservations from where they were crumbling to dust.

Maud took a very small step forward. Violet’s thumb slipped into her mouth.

Violet’s heart beat once, hung thrilled and heavy in her ribs for a soft forever—then beat again, the pulse in her thumb enormous where it sat against the inside of Maud’s lip. Maud’s chest rose and fell. She smelled like sugar.

Violet took her hand back. Maud’s mouth stayed open, as if in complaint. As if Violet could plunge her fingers in again, or her tongue, and ruin it like a windfall plum lying bruised in sunshine heat. God, Violet could taste it. She swallowed, hard, and reminded herself that she’d done this before. This was what she did. Violet knew how to be exactly what a person wanted her to be, between the sheets.

And these were classic, well-worn roles. The blushing ingénue and the rake willing to debauch her. Pleasure was pleasure. Violet didn’t have to trust Maud entirely to do this. In fact she should keep the dregs of her anger, coat herself in it, like licking one’s fingers before extinguishing a candle flame.

She drew a smile onto her face and made sure it was exactly the one she intended it to be.

“What do you want?”

“Anything you’ll show me,” said Maud at once.

“Anything anyone would show you, it seems.” She put her fingers at Maud’s jaw and tilted the girl’s face up, then let those fingers drag down the side of Maud’s neck, to the lace-edged silk of her chemise. Goose pimples sprang up beneath her touch. The pink of Maud’s cheeks deepened further.

“No,” Maud said. “You. Violet.”

“Why me?” Violet, appalled that she’d let that question escape, immediately pulled on a further defence: the arch laughter of a woman sure of the answer. “Because I’m beautiful?”

“No.”

Maud, who didn’t lie, punctured the archness with a word. But she was thoughtful rather than insulting. She looked at Violet as if trying to recognise her. It was clear she was disagreeing with the specific word only because she wanted to find a better.

“No,” Maud said again. She lifted a hand and flattened Violet’s where it lay, over silk—over skin—over the uppermost part of Maud’s beating heart. Now Violet couldn’t tell whose pulse was whose. “Because when you’re in a room I don’t want to look anywhere else.”

Violet’s free hand moved before she could tell it to. It scooped up the back of Maud’s neck, all that heavy brown hair, and dragged Maud close, her hot body flush against Violet’s, so that Violet could kiss that open mouth.

Maud’s gasp sounded like triumph soaked in need like sponge cake in syrup; and tasted sweeter even than that.

Maud had witnessed exactly four kisses over the course of her life.

The first had been between her grandparents during a visit to Thornley Hill when Maud was very young. She remembered the drizzle of rain on the windows, and the servants running around with dishes to catch the drips. She remembered thick layers of petticoats about her own legs and the smell of humbugs on her grandmother’s breath.

The kiss in question had been a brief, absent press of lips as the old baronet bid his wife farewell, departing for a visit to London. Maud’s mother had made a face as if someone had dropped a teacup.

The second had been on the stage. Mrs. Sinclair had taken Liza and Maud to see Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in The Merchant of Venice at the Lyceum. Maud remembered the elusive music of the spoken word, the magnetic energy of Terry as both the frustrated Portia and the eloquent Balthazar, and the passionate embrace between Portia and her new husband once she had thrown off her disguise. A stage kiss. Its emotion both false and compellingly real.

The third, Maud’s parents. In company, Sir Robert and Lady Blyth were physically affectionate only in proper ways: the slide of a hand beneath an arm, or the press of a shoulder. They cared about the look of things.

It was sheer luck that Maud had been sneaking back from a late-night trip to the kitchens—using the servants’ stairs, where she wouldn’t be seen—and caught a glimpse of them through the door of Lady Blyth’s bedchamber. They were standing close together, fully dressed. They looked caught up in each other, as if nobody else in the world existed; and even if they did, such people could never be as fascinating and beautiful and real as the two of them, and therefore were not worth looking at in the first place.

The final kiss was one that Maud had been deliberately allowed to see. Robin, laughing at something Edwin said, then crossing the room to bend down and lower the top edge of Edwin’s book—and to kiss him while smiling, with the ease that said he’d done it a hundred times before, and the confidence that said he wasn’t ashamed.

There had been more emotion in the brief press of Edwin’s fingertips to Robin’s jaw, his sharp blue eyes falling closed, than in an operatic aria.

Based on these four examples and the extensive descriptions in Ross’s suitcase, Maud had attempted to formulate a guess as to how it would feel to kiss Violet Debenham.

She’d been halfway right, and halfway wrong.

Wrong because she’d thought it would be natural, effortless. For her body to want something so much, it should know what to do once it had it, like shaping one’s voice to the pitch of a note. But she was not sure if her mouth was doing what it should; the same for her free hand, which clutched inelegantly at Violet’s shoulder. Or if she was breathing in the right places. Or at all.

She’d been right because even with this evidence of her inexperience, it still sent Maud’s blood singing. She’d be happy to stand here for another hour—two hours—kissing until her lips turned numb, learning every taste of Violet’s mouth.

Violet’s hand was crushed against Maud’s chest between them, a lid for the noisy pipes and drums of Maud’s heart. The ring on Violet’s other thumb caught in Maud’s hair as she tugged, using the grip to break the kiss and create some distance between them.

Maud licked her lips. Caught her breath.

“Three times really is the charm, it seems,” Violet said.

Before Maud could ask what she’d meant, Violet leaned in. She kissed one corner of Maud’s mouth, then the other. Each kiss dragged Maud’s breath with it when she pulled away, like a ribbon reel unspooling. Maud barely realised that Violet had taken her hands back until those hands untucked Maud’s chemise and landed on the naked skin of her waist.

“Oh,” Maud said, “ yes, ” and got herself closer.

Violet was still entirely dressed. Maud had a picture of them, clear as one of Robin’s visions: Violet in her ink-blue gown, and Maud pressed up against her in nothing but her rapidly crumpling underthings. The image seared her mind and shook her legs.

One of Violet’s hands was in the centre of her back now, and the other slid up to cup one of Maud’s breasts. Her thumb moved over a nipple. Maud tipped her face forward into the crook of Violet’s neck and made a small noise.

“All right?” Violet said.

“Very all right. Exceedingly all right. That feels— ah, ” as Violet bent and took the nipple, silk and all, into her mouth.

Several of the women in the erotic stories had screamed when their nipples were thus treated. Maud didn’t particularly want to scream, even though pleasant shivers were skating down her arms and burrowing into her flesh. She did want to know what expression Violet would make when someone did the same to her, and what it felt like to have the softness of a nipple turn stiff and wanting between your lips, and what it would take to make Violet scream.

Maud had a moment of hysterical kinship with Edwin Courcey, who would approve of her experimental approach, and then banished him entirely from her mind.

“ Please can we take your clothes off now?” she said.

They did. Undressing another girl when you knew that what was beneath was for you was probably the best thing in the world, Maud thought. Like unwrapping a present. She’d been right: Violet wore a soft corset, nothing rigidly boned. Her evening underthings were cotton instead of silk. She had narrow legs, and a reddish birthmark in the small of her back, and a long, thin scar along the inside of her left upper arm, which Maud hadn’t noticed before now.

“Have you ever frigged yourself?” Violet asked.

The blunt word was like the flick of a finger between Maud’s thighs, a place that already felt heavy and hot.

Maud nodded. “But I couldn’t quite—get it to work.”

“You didn’t like it?”

“It felt… like I was walking around something but couldn’t find the path through it.”

Violet stepped back. Instead of removing pins from her hair, she cradled a brief spell and swept her palms up over her forehead and back. Her hair fell from its arrangement at once, in long blond hanks with only the hint of wave at the ends. She looked younger with her hair down.

“I thought,” said Violet, “I could show you what I like, and you could try it on yourself and see whether you like it too.”

That sounded like taking things slowly, sensibly, and Maud felt rather like a steam train devouring an open stretch of rail. She didn’t want to slow down. But she also didn’t want to reject anything that Violet was prepared to offer.

Violet moved with a swagger to her hips and the sparkle back in her eyes. She removed her drawers and sat back against pillows at the top of the grand bed in the main room, one knee straight and the other crooked to the side; and Maud sat across from her, and copied.

Violet, frank and fearless as ever, told Maud to suck her own fingers to wet them, and that there was nothing wrong with using oil to ease the way if one’s body was sluggish. She indicated that the red hawthorn berry —“No, for God’s sake, let’s just call it a clit ”—was the seat of pleasure in most women, though not all. That Violet herself had found it uncomfortable to pay that spot too much attention when she was first being introduced to bedroom activities, and Maud might want to come back to it when everything else was—warmed up, as it were.

She’d slipped into the smoky registers of her voice. Maud would have been happy to sit with her eyes closed and her hand in her drawers while Violet recited—oh, anything, Shakespeare or filthy poetry or French verbs or the railway schedule.

But with her eyes closed, she’d have missed the sight of Violet: her skin gaining its own peachy flush, her knuckles glistening in the light of the electrics as she pressed two fingers into herself, then pulled them out, then pressed in again. The motion was assured in a way that Maud would give anything to mimic, and that compelling performer’s face was upturned to her audience as if already hearing the applause.

Maud’s fingers slid between her own folds. She didn’t know how it was supposed to feel. But she felt good : grown-up and free, and enjoyably wicked.

She appreciated Violet’s lesson. The attention to her own pleasure, just as Mrs. Sinclair had recommended. But what Maud had wanted all along was Violet .

Maud undid the small top button of her chemise, then the second. Her fingers were sticky. That, of all things, made heat fill her cheeks again.

“Maud?”

“Oh, carry on,” said Maud, as innocently as she could manage. “Don’t mind me.”

Violet did so. Her grey gaze was tangible like the tip of a feather as Maud removed the rest of her clothes. It slid across Maud’s breasts when they were bared, and down to Maud’s hips and the place between Maud’s legs.

Maud, kneeling on the bed, squeezed her thighs together to quell the quiver of sensation. Then she settled herself right next to Violet, propped up on one elbow. A new scent filled the air: not quite vinegar, not quite salt. It mingled with the scent of lavender from the pillows.

Maud’s courage had taken her this far, but it gave out when her right hand touched Violet’s. Now Maud was almost touching Violet’s— cunt . The word curled in the mind with a satisfying crudity. Her fingers lay over Violet’s own as if resting on the keys of a piano, not yet daring to press down and hear the chord.

“Can I—?” she whispered.

In answer Violet moved her own hand quick as a cradling, swapping their positions. Now Maud’s fingers were held between Violet’s own and the hot, so-slick flesh, and now the lesson began in earnest. Violet abandoned performance: she chased her pleasure with short sharp motions, demanding, and she used Maud’s hand to do it, and Maud boiled with desire and delight until she thought she might burst. Her mouth was open against the tip of Violet’s shoulder. She could feel it when Violet’s body arched, Violet’s rib cage heaved, and the breath shuddered out of Violet as if being hauled over rocks.

Violet released Maud’s hand. Maud kept her fingers where they were, marvelling. Violet’s now-soaking cunt gave tiny shivers beneath her fingertips.

“R… Right.” Violet sounded a little slurred. “Fuck, I needed that. Now .”

And with a burst of movement that Maud had not been expecting—some of the pamphlets had made it seem as if achieving release melted one’s muscles entirely—Violet turned, and rolled, and all of a sudden Maud was flat on her back with Violet sitting astride her hips, Violet’s hands on her shoulders, Violet’s chemise gaping as she leaned down.

Every sensation in Maud’s body went from pleasant moderato to urgent allegro. It felt—close to fear, but nothing like fear. She was aware of things that she hadn’t noticed until now. The puckered stitching of the bedcover beneath her palms, and the prickle of her own hair against her back. The distant voice of the ship’s engines, heard in Maud’s bones.

This time when Violet kissed her it was looser, dreamier. It seemed only natural for Maud to open her mouth to the press of Violet’s tongue, and to explore with her own for the brief glorious minutes that the kiss lasted.

“Now then, Miss Blyth,” said Violet, sparkling grandly. “Full marks for participation, so far. But for the next lesson, I only require you to lie still.”

“What was it you said? Lie back, think of England, and don’t whimper too much?”

Violet grinned. “Whimpering is encouraged .”

Maud bit back a gulp of mingled anxiety and anticipation. She could see the tip of Violet’s tongue.

And then she could feel it go to work. Violet mouthed all the way down Maud’s body. She scraped her nails through the curls between Maud’s legs, then shifted lower, and touched—so gently that Maud wanted to yell at her to get on —where Maud was wet and hot and wanting.

Violet looked up to meet Maud’s gaze. She swept her own hair elegantly to one side of her neck, and then ruined the effect with one of the most wicked smiles Maud had ever seen. In that moment she was the Dark Duke, and the grinning satyr, and the bold courtesan, and every figure of fantasy ever invented.

Maud knew what Violet intended to do. Some of the pamphlets had been extremely fixated on it. None of them, however, prepared her for how it actually felt to have Violet’s fingers and tongue working in harmony upon her.

It made all the difference not to know what would happen next, not to be the one directing the action. Maud had nothing to do but… lie there. To focus helplessly on the drip of pleasure down her legs and the hectic crawl of it beneath her skin, and the tightening of some low, unseen muscle, like a mousetrap pulled back and held.

Violet sucked hard on the sensitive nub of her clit. Maud thought deliriously, hawthorn berry. One of her legs jerked, hard. Violet lifted her face only enough to laugh; Maud felt the puff of breath on unbearably sensitive folds.

“Sorry,” Maud panted.

“Give me a black eye and I’ll take it as a compliment,” said Violet, sounding very New York for a moment.

“Oh—please, can you— please —”

Maud didn’t know what she was begging for, only that she wanted to greedily gather all that her body could take. She wanted the steam train.

“I’ve got you, darling,” Violet murmured, still with the city clinging to her consonants. And bent back to her task.

After a few more timeless ebbs and flows of pleasure, Maud became aware of a slow, new pressure. She tried to push her hips into it, encouraging. Only then did her lust-fogged mind realise that Violet had put a finger there, all the way to the base.

Violet is inside me, Maud thought, her whole body making a bewildered fist of itself around the sentence. And then—as if the words had called it into being—all the tension spilled over at once.

An inelegant sound flew out between her lips. She stared at a spot on the underside of the bed’s canopy as hot waves of sensation grabbed and released everything beneath her navel, rhythmic as kneading dough.

“Fuck,” she whispered, when she’d recovered.

The word was getting easier. And nothing else seemed strong enough for the occasion.

“That’s the spirit,” said Violet, sounding very satisfied indeed, and wiped her mouth on her hand.

It took some industrious wriggling and tugging to get them both beneath the covers. Maud couldn’t stop looking at Violet’s mouth, parted with her slowing breath. She wondered what Violet’s first time had been like. Or her last time, before Maud.

Well. The last time had been Hawthorn, in a way.

“What’s it like, to do it with a man?” Maud asked.

A curious blankness spread over Violet’s face. It was replaced almost at once when she let out a howl of laughter and buried her face in a pillow.

Blood flew to Maud’s cheeks. She wondered it had the energy.

“ Maud, ” said Violet, muffled. “Having completed an enjoyable sexual encounter with someone, it’s not the thing to immediately start wondering aloud about someone else.”

“I wasn’t—I only meant—oh, bother, that was awfully rude, wasn’t it?”

Violet removed her face from the pillow. “Everything I just did to you would be the same if it were a man doing it.” She paused. “Perhaps scratchier, if he’d a moustache.”

That was not what Maud had meant. She didn’t want to do this with any man; at least, if she was scrupulous about it, not with any man that she’d met so far in her life.

But she had no intention of digging herself any deeper by trying to explain.

“It was wonderful.” She smiled, and then smiled harder when Violet poked a finger teasingly into one of her dimples. “Thank you. I should have looked into this debauchery business years ago.”

“I’m glad you waited,” said Violet, still laughing.

“I’m glad I waited for you.”

The laughter’s edges changed to something Maud couldn’t interpret. Violet kissed her once more on the lips, friendly and soft. Then Violet slid out of bed and went into the bathroom, where Maud heard the sound of water in the basin as Violet washed up. Violet re-dressed with hands and magic both, transforming herself back into the shocking Miss Debenham. Gown on. Hair up.

“We should both get some sleep,” she told Maud. “You’ve organised a busy day for us tomorrow.”

When Violet left, Maud washed as well, then changed into her nightgown. She brushed and plaited her hair. She remade the four-poster bed, then looked at the dog’s breakfast she’d made of it, sighed, and turned off the room light and climbed beneath the covers. There was nobody else in the stateroom to use it, after all. Nothing wrong with the poor cousin Miss Cutler taking the opportunity to sleep in the larger, grander bed.

The bed still smelled of bodies. Of Violet. Maud felt her mouth form a new smile.

Tomorrow, she thought, in the darkness. It was going to be busy.