A Restless Truth (The Last Binding #2)

Chapter 20

20

Maud looked better but still needed Hawthorn’s hand under her arm as they moved. Violet couldn’t stop glancing over her shoulder at where the stone-faced man addressed as Morris followed with implacable, irritated strides behind them.

“My cabin,” Maud said. “Slower—please—”

Hawthorn gave a growl of frustration but slowed himself to match Maud’s speed.

The corridors were emptier than Violet expected. Clearly the menagerie chaos had reached the point of passengers shutting themselves in their cabins and waiting for security to take care of it. Nobody commented on their party’s speed, only eyed the space behind them as if waiting to see what creature was on their tail.

And then Maud said, “Helen! Mr. Hewitt!” and they pulled to a sharp halt.

Helen Bernard and a red-faced man knelt face-to-face with one of the cheetahs. The cat sat very upright on its haunches, ears back, staring at the new arrivals. Helen was murmuring a soothing stream of inaudible words.

“Stay where you are, sir, miss,” said Hewitt. “I’ve a man coming with a sack so we can take her back to the hold, but Miss Helen’s only just calmed her down.”

“We do need to get past,” said Violet. Her back burned with awareness of their pursuer.

The cheetah got to its feet and stalked with slow steps towards Maud. Its amber eyes were fixed on the velvet bundle in Maud’s hands.

Fuck. The last thing they needed was for some oversized cat to also show interest in what they were—

Cat, Violet’s brain yelled. It’s a cat.

“Er,” said Maud nervously.

Violet stepped between Maud and the cheetah. Or rather: between the haunted locket and the only sort of animal, other than human mediums, known to respond to the presence of ghosts.

“You two go ahead.”

Maud and Hawthorn moved past. Robbed of its object of curiosity, the cheetah flicked out a paw and swiped —Violet leapt back, a little too slow. Fabric tore. There was no sting of pain, but the cheetah’s claw was now caught in Violet’s skirt, and it yowled with complaint as it tried to pull itself free.

“Oh, darn,” said Helen. “You silly thing! Stop it!” She lunged forward and took the cheetah by the scruff of the neck. It yowled again, and twisted, but to Violet’s surprise it then subsided as Helen recommenced her murmured monologue of nonsense.

Violet, dry-mouthed, yanked her skirt away. More ripping. At least they were on the other side of the animal, now, and Morris was…

Morris was standing within an arm’s length of them, breathing hard. He looked from Hawthorn to Hewitt and back again.

“You will excuse us for now, sir,” said Hawthorn, syllables dripping aristocracy like oil. “Miss Cutler is indisposed, as you can see, and we are hampering Miss Bernard in her task. You will be so good as to postpone our business until tomorrow.”

It was bald-faced and risky, even for someone like Hawthorn who was never gainsaid. Morris had them all outclassed when it came to magic. Violet thought of Hawthorn’s fingers pulling a card from a fanned pack.

Calculation must have been happening behind the broad forehead. Finally Morris took a step back, gave an ungracious nod, and then turned on his heel.

Violet exhaled.

They made their way without further incident to Maud’s stateroom. Maud locked the door behind them, and Violet grimly cast the strongest locking charm Hawthorn knew, to reinforce it. God knew if it would help. But it was all she was good for. In Chapman’s room she’d just stood there like a damned lump, unable to think of a single useful spell past the enormity of not wanting to die. She’d never had anyone direct magic at her with intent to harm. Maud, unmagical and sheltered Maud, had been the one to shove her aside.

Stepping in front of the cheetah had been an instinctive response from some ornery corner of Violet’s soul determined to address the balance of favours. She’d never been prepared to risk her life in this endeavour. She wasn’t supposed to risk anything .

Hawthorn helped Maud into a chair. Her expression was set, her colour improved. She laid the black velvet down and unwrapped the parcel.

A knock on the door made them all flinch, but the voice came at once. “It’s Ross. Don’t fret, that thug’s retreated. All clear.”

Violet recast the locking charm once they’d let Ross inside. He was full of nervous energy; he pulled off his cap, scrubbed a hand in his hair, redonned the cap, then crossed to Maud, who still had a protective arm laid across the jumbled silver objects.

“Got them in the end? Good. Sorry I couldn’t give you more warning, Miss B. I was shadowing Chapman, and out of nowhere he went stiff and looked like he’d sat on a wasp. Hurried back to his room at once. I got in his way and tripped him over, but it barely slowed him, so I fetched his lordship from the deck instead.”

“ Clearly this man Chapman had set a rune-signal for intruders,” said Maud, “which tipped off the both of them as soon as anyone set foot in his room.”

“No need to get hoity-toity with me, you know I don’t speak magic.” Ross crossed his arms. “A thank-you wouldn’t go amiss either.”

Violet opened her mouth with a new question, but Hawthorn’s sharpest tones got there first.

“How the hell do you know they had a rune-signal?”

Maud sat back in her chair. The locket was in her hand. “ And who, ” she said, “ are these extremely rude men? ”

It was the way she said men that slotted the realisation into place for Violet. Like she’d lifted her shoe after stepping in something sticky on the street.

Violet laughed. The look on Hawthorn’s face was so angrily baffled—she wanted to frame it and keep it forever. “Do you want to do the introductions this time, Maud, or shall I?”

Maud waved a hand. So Violet explained: the items hidden in Chapman’s room, Maud the medium, Maud being benignly possessed. She also filled in what had passed between the two of them and Chapman before Hawthorn’s arrival.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Ross, once the idea of ghosts had sunk in. He stopped himself halfway through the sign of the cross with the irritation of a man falling back into a childish habit.

“ You look familiar, ” Mrs. Navenby said to Hawthorn. “Who are your parents, young man? ”

His lordship’s bafflement had given way successively to raised eyebrows, a grim frown, and now a combination of amused blue eyes and composed, cruel mouth.

“My father is Cheetham,” he said. “Frederick Alston. My mother Mary was a Bastoke.”

“ Ah .” Satisfied. “ I knew Mary Bastoke when she was first out in society. Nice girl. Tall, and all legs. Put one in mind of a colt jumping at squirrels. ”

Ross burst out laughing. Unrestrained, his laugh was rich and bright as coffee poured fresh from the pot.

“Oh, this is a treat,” he said. “Keep at it, ma’am. Compare his lordship’s relatives to some more farmyard animals.”

“No.” It was definitely Maud now. “We’ve too many other things to discuss. Mrs. Navenby—” Her gaze skipped around the room, then landed on the locket in her hand. “ Now I feel like a detective in a story. Only we can ask the victim directly instead of running around after clues. Did one of those two kill you?”

The transition was becoming smoother, and Violet’s ear more attuned to the cadence of each voice. Mrs. Navenby said: “ Yes, it is rather satisfying to be able to solve one’s own murder. It was the dark one. Chapman. He snuck into this very room not long after the voyage started. He was digging through my belongings. Of course I suspected at once he was there for my piece of the contract, after everything Miss Blyth had told me about what happened to Flora .” She looked at Maud’s hands, rubbing wistful fingertips over the smooth skin of the knuckles. “ I’m not as fast with my cradles as I was. I got off a spell to knock him out, and he dodged it. He looked rather panicked, I remember that. Before I could do anything else…” Her mouth firmed. “ Young people are so wasteful. He had no need to kill me. A brisk priez-vous to bind my hands and a memory charm would have sufficed .”

And he could have questioned her properly about the Last Contract instead of just taking every likely-looking silver thing in the place. But Violet knew acutely how quiet the voice of sense could be when panic was yelling inside the skull.

Mrs. Navenby hadn’t been fully aware of herself as a ghost until Maud’s contact with the necklace. Existing as a haunting had felt like the space between sleep and waking.

“Liminal,” said Violet. Her smile was for Maud and her talk of boats, but Mrs. Navenby gave Violet a strange look: halfway between hunger and suspicion.

“Yes. Liminal.”

“Maud had all but solved your murder anyway,” Violet pointed out. “We wouldn’t have been in Chapman’s cabin if we hadn’t discovered he had the silver.”

And that led to a game of five-way verbal tag, in which Mrs. Navenby demanded to be filled in on everything that had happened since what she described as her undignified demise.

“ Well, ” said Mrs. Navenby at the end of it. “ Bother. ”

“Quite,” said Hawthorn.

But Maud’s head was tilted to the side as if listening for something. That pinched frown marred her brow. She looked around the stateroom and the frown deepened.

“ Miss Blyth, ” she said. “ Where is Dorian? ”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Maud. “I didn’t know what I would do with a parrot, myself, and I wanted to make sure he was cared for. I gave him to the Bernards, for their menagerie, so he’s down in the aviary with the other birds. Helen Bernard loves animals. She’ll teach him plenty of new—”

“ The cage, girl. ” Watching the ghost interrupt the medium was a jolting experience. “ Don’t babble. Where’s his cage? ”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Arrive at your point, ma’am, if you have one,” said Hawthorn. “Stop harassing her.”

A dull bubble of fatalistic certainty had begun to form in Violet. It burst entirely as Mrs. Navenby lifted Maud’s fierce green eyes to Hawthorn and said, “ The point, Lord Hawthorn, is that the cup of the Last Contract is none of those pieces of silver that yourselves and my murderers have been squabbling over. It is, in fact, my parrot Dorian’s water bowl. ”

Violet put a hand over her mouth. Ross hissed between his teeth.

Maud’s face transformed—slowly, this time, like a curtain being drawn back—into one of guilty horror.

“Fuck,” squeaked Maud.

It seemed that nobody, not even magicians, knew much about ghosts.

None of them had ever met a true medium, and none of them could tell Maud anything about how her ability was supposed to work. A ghost haunting a portable item, rather than a location, was also unheard-of. Violet’s stories were all of cats and theatres.

Edwin would be overcome with academic bliss. Maud wondered if she could somehow contrive to present him with this as a birthday gift. Herself, a medium, to match her brother the foreseer. A ghost in a necklace. And not just any ghost: one of the members of the Forsythia Club, whose experiments in magic Edwin had been painstakingly untangling for the past several months.

The afternoon’s chaotic conference had been interrupted by the necessity of dressing for dinner. Ghost-experimentation had therefore run, hastily, to working out that Mrs. Navenby could possess Maud to the extent of using her senses—seeing and hearing what Maud saw and heard—so long as the locket was in close proximity to Maud’s skin. The phantom scents and awareness of the ghost’s pushy presence, which had overwhelmed Maud at first, were becoming easier to manage. It was like humming music while reading: one part of her mind kept occupied, freeing up the rest to concentrate on the task at hand.

Maud strung the locket on a chain of her own and wore it beneath a high-necked evening gown. The chain was long enough that the locket sat tucked between her breasts. She tried not to think about that.

“Please,” Maud said to her dead passenger, “don’t take over without asking me. Not in public. We can talk as much as you want after dinner.”

Mrs. Navenby agreed. And to dinner they went.

Maud was in a whirlpool of miserable annoyance with herself. The piece of the Last Contract had been sitting safe in her room, despite Chapman’s best efforts, and Maud had managed to lose it anyway . It didn’t help that Mrs. Vaughn, the old woman whose cabin Maud had disastrously broken into, was dining on her own nearby, and kept sliding suspicious looks at Maud as if trying to catch her making off with the teaspoons.

Maud tried to sweep that aside along with everything else—ghosts, dizzying charms, Violet’s distracting fingers—and focus on what mattered: extracting the present location of Dorian’s cage from the Bernards.

There was a new face at their table that evening. Rose Bernard had befriended Miss Diana Yu, a serious-faced young woman whose family had founded a thriving New York fashion house. Maud was halfway through listening to the woman’s plans to dazzle the new London department stores into carrying her own designs when Chapman appeared.

“I’m late,” he said, “ do forgive me,” and took a decided seat next to Violet.

Cold dug its fingers into the skin over Maud’s breastbone. Mrs. Navenby had clear opinions about the presence of her murderer at the dinner table.

Maud bit her tongue. Chapman was an acquaintance. There was no good excuse to cut him in public, and he knew it. She determined to keep a close eye on Violet’s drinks and her own.

Helen looked more cheerful than Maud had expected, discussing the menagerie’s mysterious escape. One of the main risks of the plan had been the sheer inexplicable nature of it. Cages springing open at once. A general stampede towards the upper decks. But, as Violet had pointed out, unmagical society was not looking to explain things with magic. It was more than capable of filling such gaps with guesswork and gossip.

Consensus aboard the Lyric had crystallised around the idea of mischievous boys sneaking down to the cargo hold and breaking all the locks as a prank, then encouraging the creatures out into the ship, where they’d been attracted by the sounds of the bagpipes.

“Which I hadn’t thought would be enticing to so many different sorts of animals,” said Helen, “but then, I can’t imagine any of them had ever heard a pipe band before, so how would one know? And the poor men in the Pipes and Drums—there was one fellow who lost his drumsticks to our chimpanzee, and by the time Mr. Hewitt and myself hurried up there, the chimp had discovered someone else’s abandoned drum and was banging away having a grand old time, and—oh, I shouldn’t laugh, but it was very funny. You were there, Lord Hawthorn,” she appealed to him. “Wasn’t it funny?”

A pause, in which the table warily weighed the question of whether Lord Hawthorn was familiar with the concept of humour. Not many people here had seen the way his mouth deepened when arguing with Alan Ross, or heard the insouciant bark of a laugh when he was surprised by something.

Maud smiled into her water glass.

“I was not expecting to see a reproduction of the Roman arena, man against beast, on board the White Star Line’s pride and joy,” said his lordship. “I shall suggest they add it to the advertising copy.”

“I hope none of the animals were hurt,” Maud said.

“Not at all, thankfully,” said Helen. “They had a wonderful time of it. I think they were glad to stretch their legs. It is hard on them to be cooped up in that horrid place for days. But poor Mr. Hewitt! Papa’s promised him a week’s holiday once everything is set up in England, for all his work getting them rounded up and back down into the hold.”

Maud seized the opportunity to ask after Dorian. She couldn’t ask outright about the cage— damn Chapman, anyway—but Helen readily admitted that Dorian had been excessively talkative at all hours, in their parlour suite, and she’d ended up giving him to Hewitt to be put with the other birds in the aviary.

Violet’s eyes met Maud’s. Mr. Hewitt. That was somewhere for them to begin tomorrow.

“You’ll bore everyone, Helen,” said Rose, as Helen’s talk veered further into a list of interesting facts about parrots.

“I’m not bored,” said Miss Yu.

“Nor am I,” said Violet.

Helen beamed around the table. “You know, this is what I imagine university would be like. Don’t you, Maud? A lot of people who find a lot of things interesting and don’t mind talking about them. Miss Cutler is going to study at Cambridge,” she told Rose.

“How industrious of you,” said Rose. “I suppose your parents encouraged you to attend a good school?”

“We were at the Emma Willard School,” put in Helen. “The teachers there were ever so strict, but lovely . My science mistress let me dissect as many frogs as I wished.”

Miss Yu, cutlery pausing, directed an ambiguous expression down at her pork cutlet.

Maud smiled at Helen and told her about Miss Lyons, who’d been the last of her governesses, and the first not to care that Maud was dreadful at keeping her mind on things.

“She was the one who suggested I learn to play chess. I told her she’d be fighting a losing battle, but she insisted that an agile mind could see all the possibilities of a game.”

Nobody had ever called Maud agile before that. The other governesses had preferred words like flighty or wilful .

“My brother enjoys chess.” The serious Miss Yu smiled at Maud. Her hair was like black silk, setting off the glow of opals at her ears. “Have you ever played mahjong, Miss Cutler? He says it requires a similar sort of mind.”

Maud had not. Over the rest of the meat course and well into the sweet, Miss Yu explained the basics of the game. Rose Bernard sighed and swirled her spoon in the cream atop her ginger syllabub. Helen ate her own dessert and then absently ate half her sister’s, and looked transported with delight to be conversing on serious topics with other girls.

It was an enjoyable meal. Maud almost managed to forget, for whole minutes at a time, that they were sitting at a table with the magician who had killed Mrs. Navenby—and who would no doubt spend what little time remained of the voyage doing his very best to get his hands back on the necklace that lay, prickling her from time to time with the chill of a ghost’s disapproval, over Maud’s heart.