A Restless Truth (The Last Binding #2)

Chapter 18

18

Violet was a professional. She had once done an entire run of a show that featured an oversized velvet chaise as one of the few pieces of set dressing, and upon which chaise she had spectacularly fucked the playwright’s father—who’d paid to have the theatre’s seats reupholstered, and several windows fixed—on the night of the dress rehearsal. A refreshingly blunt exchange of material favours. Violet wasn’t overly surprised when it turned out the man had seen one of her trouser roles and wanted her to boss him around while he frotted urgently against her tall leather riding boots. At least he’d let her ride his face afterwards, like a gentleman.

The props mistress had wearily told Violet that she liked to reserve her magic for emergency mid-show repairs and remaking the mirror that was smashed onstage every night, not removing spunk stains from velvet.

The point being: Violet could behave entirely normally in a room containing furniture where she had, not so many hours earlier, been both the deliverer and the recipient of satisfying orgasms.

Even so. Every time Maud glanced at the four-poster bed, Violet’s cursedly vivid imagination provided a front-row seat to a memory of how Maud had looked with her dimpled thighs splayed on either side of Violet’s head.

“None in this one,” said Maud now, closing another hatbox with a snap. She was industriously locating every strand of Mrs. Navenby’s hair that remained in the old woman’s belongings, in case Ross was unsuccessful in stealing a whole lock.

Hawthorn was taking Violet over the spells needed for what Maud had dubbed the Grand Plan. His cradles had a beautiful fluidity to them despite his being fifteen years out of practice. Violet had to keep making him stop and slow down.

Violet practiced until the anchoring suffix for the Pied Piper flowed smoothly on from the rest of the charm. Then they moved on to the runes needed for an opening-spell performed in parallel on linked items—not difficult at all, thankfully. She took a break and stretched her hands, then glanced over to see how Maud was getting on.

Maud was staring at Violet’s fingers. She jerked away when Violet’s eyes met hers, and that irresistible blush climbed above the lace of her collar.

Violet looked back at Hawthorn. One of his eyebrows rose to a disapproving height. Too much to hope that he hadn’t noticed—nor that he’d hesitate to leap to the correct conclusion.

Well. Neither Violet nor Maud was his responsibility; he’d gone to some pains to point that out. It was none of his business what they did.

Violet performed a short sentence in the cradlespeak of the Debenham household. A framing-spell for the banishing of pests, with a pointed glance at Hawthorn in place of the motion that would normally define the spell’s target of mice or wasps or ants. Stay out of it .

Cradling without power behind it was useful for more than just practice. Cradlespeak was a common pastime of magical children, though not a standardised tongue. It depended on both a shared knowledge of the spells in question and an agreed-upon translation of their meaning.

Hawthorn obviously caught the gist. He glanced again at Maud, deep in hatboxes with the flush lingering at the visible nape of her neck. To Violet he formed the silent cradle for a spell that untangled string or rope, with a reversal prefix, and then paused on a prolonged flick-flick-flick of his index finger, which would increase the spell’s potency. You’re going to make a mess of things.

Violet, maturely, stuck her tongue out at him.

Any further reply was forestalled by the arrival of Ross. Once inside the cabin he made a show of blowing on his hands to warm them.

“Never liked damp, cold places. They always remind me of a cellar I lived in once.”

“But did you get— Wait, really? A cellar?”

Ross grinned at Maud and dug in the pocket of his trousers. “Fearful place, it was,” he intoned. “Full of rats. Not the ice room, Miss B—that was full of eggs and cheeses. And one very dead woman, politely covered in a sheet.”

Maud leapt for the lock of hair that Ross held out. “Violet, are you ready? Can we do it now?”

Violet and Hawthorn had practiced this spell nigh to death the previous evening. It was layered and finicky, and Hawthorn had taken nearly an hour to cobble it together from both memory and Violet’s experimentation.

The first sympathy clause coaxed Maud’s annotated map to represent, truly, the ship itself. Violet formed it painstakingly with her hands held above the map. A new dance. A new harmony. Her magic crept outwards and outwards again, and Violet felt the size of it, the amount it was demanding from her as it built.

“Keep the radius,” Hawthorn said sharply. “Remember.”

Violet remembered. She’d defined the radius of the sympathy to the bounds of the ship, but that was still a long way in every direction. She lifted her hands, the spell balanced between them like a basket full of glass eggs.

She turned to the nearest wall and flung them apart.

“ Oh, ” said Maud.

“Fucking hell,” said Ross.

The map of the Lyric glowed in pale green lines on the wall. All its decks, all its cabins, in blueprints hanging side by side. It could have been sketched there with phosphorescent paint.

“Don’t drop it!” Hawthorn barked, and Violet brought her hands together just in time, forcing herself to focus on the other parts of the spell.

Dangling from her fingers now was a strange cradle that reflected the lights of the room, snatching up small pieces of colour for itself, as if she’d formed it with wires made of invisible stuff. She breathed slowly, holding it. She sketched out a clause for seeking; the invisible wires shone green for a heartbeat and then faded again. Ready.

“Maud,” she said. “Put the hair right in the centre.”

Maud did so. It hovered in Violet’s hands, a fly in a cobweb. Ross gave another bitten-back epithet as most of the map on the wall vanished, leaving only two enlarged sections, as though someone had taken a magnifying glass to them. One of the two was much brighter; the other was a thin, wispy sketch.

“That’s not part of the cabin areas. That must be the ice room,” said Maud, looking at the brightest map.

“Where the rest of her is,” said Ross. “And the other?”

The atmosphere in the room was high and taut with excitement; finally they were close to the beginnings of an answer. Even Hawthorn’s habitual boredom had been replaced with a bright-eyed keenness that made Violet think of foxes.

Maud touched the second map. “It’s showing only a short stretch—B Deck, but I don’t know which room—”

“It’ll be dead centre,” said Hawthorn.

Another short eternity of held breath. Maud’s finger moved.

“Forty-four,” she said.

Ross had his notebook out, flipping. He’d copied the room directory. “B Deck, 44—got it.” His voice sharpened with triumph. “Mr. A. Chapman.”

“Mr. Chapman? But he’s a cotton-mill owner! And he was so friendly… oh.” Maud let out a bitter huff of a laugh. “Perhaps that’s why.”

“He did seem awfully keen to ask you questions about Mrs. Navenby,” said Violet.

“ And, ” said Hawthorn, “someone who’d doctor a decanter of whisky might well do the same to a glass of wine, to make you talkative.”

Violet thought of Maud, swaying and giggling before she emptied her stomach over the railing; and Chapman’s expression when Violet insisted on taking Maud out of the dining saloon, which she’d put down to plain disappointment at losing Maud’s company.

“That’s enough for me. Be careful,” said Hawthorn to Maud. “We’ll proceed as planned today, and if you see Chapman, for God’s sake don’t go running at him like you did with the masked man. Leave minding him to Ross.”

Maud made a face at him, but promised. They coordinated pocket watches and then the conspiracy broke up for lunch. Violet tried to concentrate on the ham and cold jellies and asparagus salad with boiled eggs, but her stomach kept giving little quivers of excitement. She ate anyway. She had a lot of magic to do.

After lunch she made her way up to the sun deck and sat on a deck chair under a parasol, watching the expanse of the sea. She also continued her perusal of the Alexander the Great biography. The more time she spent with Maud Blyth, the more she felt a bemused kinship with Alexander’s friends and generals.

At half past two, Hawthorn joined her, walking with a silver-topped cane as if playing at being a normal sort of gentleman. Violet stood, gave him her most flirtatious smile as he kissed her hand, then handed him both book and parasol before bending to refasten the lacing of her boot. Hawthorn held the parasol at a low angle that would hide what she was doing.

Violet cradled the charm called the Pied Piper and used the anchoring suffix to attach it to an unremarkable patch of deck, where it would lie quiescent until triggered by touch. She then tugged the deck chair sideways by a foot, to cover the charmed spot.

Hawthorn replaced her on the chair. He’d brought a newspaper, which he spread across his face, pretending to nap in what meagre sunshine managed to struggle through the clouded sky.

That was one part down. Violet made her way to the Grand Reception to meet Maud, who led the way down to the cargo hold. Somewhere else, if all was going to plan, Ross would be tracking down Mr. Chapman. His job was simply to shadow the man, to distract him if necessary, and to come and warn them if Chapman looked like heading back to his own cabin.

Now that Maud had entered the cargo hold in Hewitt’s company, the bath attendant ignored them as they entered the stairwell. Maud had ascertained that the Bernard menagerie was fed at the same time every day, after which the keeper took himself off to one of the third-class saloons and played cards for beer money until it was time to clean out the cages and bed the animals down for the night.

Not that one could easily tell day from night in the cargo hold, Violet thought, as they picked their way across to the menagerie. Those dim electric lights probably shone the same at every hour.

“Not the bear, I think,” said Maud. The creature in the largest cage was hunched over, paws on its stomach like a portly gentleman at the end of a good meal. “It’s large enough that it could do someone damage by accident. And not the birds. If they fly off, they’ll be lost entirely.”

On every lock of the other cages and crates, Violet traced the linking rune and held it in her mind. She completed half the opening-spell and held it steady in her hands, awaiting the final clause.

Most of the animals, recently fed, looked sleepy. The spindly cats— cheetahs, Maud said—had the half-feral, half-condescending look that Violet recognised from street cats. One of them was licking the other’s face.

“Time?” Violet asked. Holding the cradle for too long would cramp her fingers.

“Just on three.” Maud slipped her watch away. She was bouncing on her toes, her face anxious.

Three o’clock. Anytime now the Pipes and Drums, performing by special request of the captain, would be blasting into their finest and loudest melodic form.

Here in the bowels of the ship, crouched by the menagerie, Violet couldn’t hear anything but the hums and bangs and grumbling guts of the Lyric . And the closer noises of nearly thirty animals who were probably less than impressed at being in their fourth day at sea.

“Give it here!”

Both of them jumped at once. Violet nearly dropped the cradle as her heart shot into her throat.

“Dorian!” said Maud, recovering first. She went to the aviary. “What are you doing down here?”

“Making friends?” Violet peered into the cage.

“I suppose it is a larger space than his own cage. That was kind of Helen. Sorry, Dorian. We don’t need any birds for this plan.”

“There might be some wild seabirds within the charm’s radius,” said Violet. “Don’t you love the idea of Lord Hawthorn being wooed and bombarded by gulls?”

Maud laughed. “I really thought Robin might have been mistaken about that particular vision being relevant to me. Animals loose on board a ship? But it’s exactly what we need.” She’d shown Violet the brief description in her brother’s notebook.

“He saw this happening and wrote it down, and him writing it down is how you had the idea to do it. It’s one of those snakes eating its own tail.”

Both of them looked at the nearest snake. The python was a gleaming coil the colour of Violet’s hair. Maud had faithfully passed on from Helen the fact that the snake was unlikely to be hungry for days. The Pied Piper charm didn’t turn mild-mannered beasts into rabid ones, it simply made them extremely curious about a particular point in space.

Violet opened her mouth to comment on the irony of the antisocial Lord Hawthorn having agreed to trigger such a charm, and in that moment every animal in the menagerie picked up its head. The kangaroo’s ears lifted. The cheetahs unfolded to their feet. The birds chirped and yelled, wings flapping, all of them competing for the highest perch within the aviary like a seat on a crowded tram car. If Dorian was yelling any words, they were lost in the general chatter.

The performance must have started up on deck. And Lord Hawthorn must have set his foot on the anchored charm beneath the chair, casting the Pied Piper over the ship.

“I hope there are rats, ” Violet whispered. She completed the opening-spell and cast it onto the nearest lock.

In her nerves she’d put more magic into the spell than it needed. The locks didn’t click open; they broke . The door to every crate and cage sprang open at once.

“Violet! Up here.” Maud was standing atop a pile of canvas-covered crates nearby. She helped Violet up to join her.

They needn’t have bothered. The animals had no interest at all in two young women; not when magic was telling them that there was something irresistibly fascinating taking place elsewhere. An untidy exodus of spines, fur, paws, and scales erupted into the cargo hold and made its way, with varying eager gaits and exotic noises, towards the exit. Violet and Maud had left the hatch open. How the animals chose to make their way to the deck was up to them.

Violet pictured the porcupine patiently waiting for the first-class elevators. Laughter bubbled between her lips. She couldn’t hear it over the frustrated aviary’s impression of the Dies Irae.

“Come on!” said Maud, once the python’s tail—the last sign of the last creature—had vanished from view. “We don’t want to be caught down here.”

They nearly were. They had barely made it out of the cargo hold and to the staircase on D Deck when a wild-eyed man in the cap and shirtsleeves of the Lyric ’s sailors, moving at a run, nearly collided with them.

“ Oh! ” Violet screamed, and collapsed half of her weight onto Maud’s shoulder. “I thought you were another of those ghastly creatures! Where are they all coming from? I demand that they are rounded up and—and shot! I’m sure they must be rabid!”

The man touched his cap hastily and mumbled something, then dashed past them.

“We don’t want them to be shot, ” Maud said, indignant. “Don’t give them ideas!”

Chaos was rising on the Lyric . Everywhere Maud and Violet went, people who hadn’t encountered the animals heard the shouts of those who had, and paused to crane their necks and change direction and ask someone else who asked someone else— what’s happening?

Violet cast a longing glance at the way to the sun deck, from whence bagpipes were still audible. Hawthorn was going to keep his foot firmly in place until the chaos reached him, then remove himself from the area to negate the charm. She would have paid a large amount of her new fortune to see what would happen when the Bernards’ menagerie collided with the Pipes and Drums, with Lord Hawthorn in the vicinity.

But they had other things to do.

What they needed, Maud had pointed out the previous night, was something that would thoroughly occupy every security officer on board the ship, so that they were no longer watching out for jewel thieves breaking into—or emerging from—first-class cabins.

Hawthorn had said that allowing a menagerie the run of the ship was the equivalent of trying to kill an ant by dropping a grand piano upon it, but he was unable to deny the fact that it would work.

“And there you are,” said Maud triumphantly, once they reached the right corridor of B-Deck staterooms. “No uniforms anywhere!”

Violet had already begun to cradle the opening-spell that worked on the cabin locks. She let them into Number 44: a single stateroom like her own, with just the bedchamber and small bathroom. The few personal items on the dresser were arranged in rigidly neat lines. It was no reason to dislike someone—and should have counted for nothing when set against possible murder —but Violet still prickled with instinctive annoyance. Very neat people rubbed her the wrong way.

“Keep an eye open,” Maud said as they began to search. “Not just for the silver. Anything that could tell us something about the Last Contract and how they might use it. Even notes, or books.”

Hawthorn’s magical education had finally turned up a blank spot at the idea of a silver-fossicking-spell—“Courcey’s always known more than the rest of us,” he said. Violet didn’t mind. One less thing to learn. There wasn’t much cabin to search, in any case.

“Not in there,” said Maud, emerging from the bathroom. The sound of pounding feet in the corridor outside made them both freeze, but it must have been people running either to or from some animal-related incident.

Violet had finished with the dresser and was cracking the lid of a trunk when Maud—at the writing desk in the corner—gave a stifled noise like someone hiccupping into a flute.

“Here. Here!”

Violet hurried over. “You’ve found them?”

“It must be—surely.” Maud was crouched by the lowest drawer. She drew out a loose and irregular bundle of folded black velvet and stood to set it on the desk. Her hand hesitated in an un-Maudlike way, clutching one edge. “What if it’s not?”

“ Maud, ” said Violet, and Maud unwrapped the fabric.

Silver. It wasn’t much, for all the fuss that had been made over it. The bracelet was tarnished in its crevices as if the elephants had rolled in black mud. The brush and mirror were brighter—especially the handles, polished by regular gripping. The flask had a flat front engraved with the looping initials R.C.N. Maud’s fingers skipped gently across each piece as if to make sure they weren’t as illusory as the flowers on Violet’s hat.

The mirror lay at an angle atop the final item, shielding it from view. Maud tugged at the loop of delicate silver chain, which turned out to be broken: it slithered clear and came away in her hand.

“She always wore this,” Maud said. Hushed. “He must have broken it, pulling it off her—afterwards.”

Maud moved the mirror and picked up the locket beneath, which was the size of a small hen’s egg.

The moment her hand closed on it, Maud’s body jerked. She caught herself on the desk edge with her free hand; the other was desperately tight around the silver locket. She turned her face to Violet, and Violet choked, because Maud was—not Maud.

It was Maud’s heart-shaped face and small mouth and upturned nose. It was Maud’s green eyes.

But the features were folded into an expression of fierce, exhausted surprise, and her entire stance had changed. Maud held herself like a person who’d tripped on a cobblestone and righted themselves again, but for a few more seconds would be inhabiting the startled vision of themselves sprawled in the gutter. Both at home in her body and not.

The voice that emerged was sharp as fabric shears.

“That’s better. By God, that’s better. What on earth…”

Maud looked back to the mirror. Her eyes widened. Then came a short laugh as sharp as the voice had been.

Beneath her tensely hammering heart, Violet felt ill. Forget part of her inheritance—she’d lay down all of it, every penny, that Maud didn’t have this sort of acting ability. This was something else.

“Well, well. Little Miss Blyth, the oh-so-determined girl. You didn’t think it was worth mentioning that you were a medium?”

The rosebud mouth gasped and it was Maud again, trembling. Her fingers clawed around the locket, pressing it to her chest as if to hide it between her ribs.

Violet’s mind and fingers were blank of all the spells she’d ever known. She was too stuffed full of questions. She could have been eight years old, sitting cold-shouldered in the bed she shared with Ellen, filling herself up with ghost stories from her father’s lips.

Maud said, “I’m a what ?”