A Restless Truth (The Last Binding #2)

Chapter 25

25

Violet arrived in the Café Marseille and joined Maud and Hawthorn for lunch. Maud was engrossed in telling Hawthorn what Mrs. Navenby had said about Lady Enid and Seraphina Vaughn.

At one point Hawthorn coughed into his napkin and indicated with his eyes: Ross had entered the café and was doing some lively notepad-wielding at a distant table. Maud had pointed out that meeting him in public, during daylight hours, was likely to attract less suspicion than sneaking off to meet in secret.

In between bites of her own ham and stealing forkfuls from Maud’s eggy, curry-fragrant dish of spinach and minced lamb and almonds, Violet told them about Clarence.

“So, Walter Courcey still has his fingers in this.” Hawthorn drawled the name as if scraping it from his shoe. “Damn. And you think Morris and Chapman know about Lady Enid as well, Violet, and your cousin doesn’t know about them ?”

“I don’t know,” said Violet. “Neither of them seemed much interested in me, during the first days aboard, but I suppose Mrs. Navenby and her contract piece were the more urgent issue. None of us can do anything about the knife until we’re back in London.” Though she remembered the rune again, with the now-familiar prickle of fear that ran all the way down her spine.

“And then I sat next to you at dinner on the first night.” Maud made a rueful face. “It really must have looked as though we were in cahoots.”

“We are in cahoots.”

“Cahoots of circumstance,” said Maud solemnly.

“Either way. It appears that I’m well and truly in this for self-interested reasons now.”

Maud started to say something, then stopped. Not wanting to start up their argument again in front of Hawthorn, no doubt.

They ate and drank in silence for a while. The sweet course was blackberry pudding draped in a delicate milky custard. Tart berry melting on her tongue hurtled Violet back to a childhood summer, a dining table loud with girls talking over one another. She tried instantly to put the memory down and walk away from it.

Then she stopped, and forced herself to sit with it instead. Remembering her old life gave her the same off-balance sensation as Maud’s aggressive openness, Maud’s questing eyes, which reached past the polished versions of Violet and demanded whatever was beneath.

What was beneath? Nobody Violet recognised. A girl with a berry-purple tongue who’d grown too tall for yet another of Meg’s old skirts. A girl full of stories, who didn’t know anything about the world.

Nobody at the Penumbra had ever asked to meet that girl. It was one of the unspoken rules. You were allowed to reinvent yourself as many times as necessary. The Lyric, and Violet’s flight back to England, was supposed to play by the same rules.

She hadn’t anticipated Maud Blyth. She didn’t know how anyone ever could.

Violet turned the maple ring on her thumb, drew her spoon through a streak of custard, and exhaled.

“My sister Alice was wild for blackberries,” she said. “She would come home with an apron full of them as soon as the hedges were full.”

“You don’t talk about your sisters,” Maud said after a cautious pause.

Violet glanced at Hawthorn. He looked back, blue eyes sardonic as ever. Nothing Violet could say would move him. And after the last few days she knew more than he’d ever wanted her to, she was sure, about Lady Elsie and his cousin Bastoke and a secret-bind that Hawthorn had been carrying for years.

This, too, felt like something owed.

“I don’t talk about them because I abandoned them,” she said.

The story sounded small and petty when she told it. She didn’t have a well-crafted set of words with which to convey her father’s ever-growing disappointment with each year that failed to deliver a son; her mother’s fretful nature similarly worsening with time, until she could tighten the strings of Violet’s body just by entering a room.

The expectation that the Debenham girls would all marry, as soon and as advantageously as possible, and live good, small lives and never learn more magic than was proper for a gentleman magician’s daughter—never do anything that could cause society to talk—never seek change, or adventure, or wilder, larger magics.

She told them about Ellen, who never had much magic or care to use it, and didn’t mind hiding it forever when she married an unmagical parson. Meg, who took their mother’s worries to heart and married a rich and unpleasant man. Alice, the truly beautiful one and the family’s hope, who to their mother’s horror fell in passionate love with a poor soldier when she was barely seventeen. Julia, the bookish youngest, who swore steely-eyed she’d never marry.

And Violet, stuck between her sisters like a double set of parentheses. Too tall and too prone to talking back; too prone to putting fairy-tale dreams in her sisters’ heads or doing devastating impressions of their suitors or using unladylike amounts of magic. Violet, the one who ran.

“You didn’t tell me any of this, when you came to me asking to be ruined,” said Hawthorn.

“Would you have cared?”

“No,” he said calmly.

“I told myself I was making the others look like angels in comparison, by running off and turning myself into the most scandalous of all,” said Violet. “But I am selfish. If I’d stayed, I could have been there for them, like your brother was for you.”

“And married when you didn’t want to?” said Maud.

“No, I—wait.” Violet pointed a spoon at her. “Why are you on my side now?”

“It was a hard situation. I can see why you did what you did. And I still think it was awfully brave of you to even think of it.”

“You’re too good a person, Maud Blyth,” said Violet, because she needed to tease. Teasing was easier. “There must be a catch.”

“I’m not naturally good,” said Maud. “I’m selfish too. And I know how to unravel someone with gossip. How to pick at anyone’s faults. But I decided that there were enough people like that in our house already. I wanted to be different.” There was a weariness behind her words. That wax-sensation gentled its fingers in Violet’s chest again. “Perhaps I did shove myself in where it wasn’t my business, wasn’t my fight, because my parents wouldn’t lift a finger for other people. Oh, they were great philanthropists. But they wouldn’t give a beggar on the street a single penny if nobody was around to see them do it.”

“And you would,” said Violet. Of course Maud would. She’d probably start a petition on the spot for more shelter houses too.

“Mrs. Sinclair says you look at the world and decide you can live with it or decide you can’t. And if you can’t, you decide what you’re prepared to do about it.”

“Did you get that down, Mr. Ross,” said Hawthorn, “or would you like her to repeat it?”

Ross stood at Maud’s shoulder. “Moral philosophy doesn’t go down well in the society papers.”

“Whereas advertising is well known for it.”

Ross looked down at Maud. “Reporting in, Miss B. Bad news, I’m afraid.”

Maud’s face fell. “You can’t find it?”

“Your bird’s been put in the larger cage with the others, so they didn’t need the small cage anymore. I talked to that Mr. Hewitt, the keeper—he said he gave it to one of the first-class undercooks. Wasn’t sure why the man wanted it but didn’t mind getting it off his hands in exchange for a drink or two, once he’d checked Miss Helen didn’t want the thing back.”

“That’s your idea of bad news?” said Violet. “You move fast.”

Ross gave an impatient waggle of his notepad. Yes. Tracking down information wasn’t new work to him. “That’s as far as I managed. I’d have headed to the kitchens after that. But one of the thugs from security said the master-at-arms wanted to see me.”

“About…” Maud lowered her voice. “The jewels?”

“I wouldn’t be standing here if that was the case, would I? No, he wanted to point out that I’d been spending a lot of time in first class. And wasn’t I meant to be speaking to all the passengers? And this wasn’t a pleasure cruise for scribblers, young man—and a lot of similar folderol.”

“I don’t understand,” said Maud.

“Means someone’s seen me leaving someone’s cabin late at night and made a complaint about the White Star Line’s moral standards,” said Ross bluntly, looking at Hawthorn. “His lordship’s entertaining floozies. Everyone knows that.”

Maud made a small choking sound.

“They can’t ask you lot to leave the party when we’re in the middle of the ocean. But they can disapprove of me being invited to partake.”

“Perhaps they’re envious,” said Violet.

Ross shot her a startled look, then broke into a grin. She hadn’t really been joking. Alanzo Rossi, with his curls and coffee-dark eyes and insolent tongue, could have walked off the pages of fantasy for plenty of rich women who watched their driver bend over the hood of the motorcar to polish it, and dreamed scalding little dreams in their cold marital beds.

“That’s as may be. Either way. I’m not to have my run of first class after dark any longer.”

“If someone’s noticed enough to complain, then Morris or Chapman might notice you next,” said Hawthorn. “You shouldn’t meet with us again.”

“Well, woe the fucking day.” Ross flipped a showy page in his notebook. “How will I live without the nightly orgies in his lordship’s suite?”

“Violet, that illusion you did, changing your hair, and…” Maud gestured to her face. “Could you do one on someone else?”

“Yes?”

“We’ll make you a disguise,” Maud said to Ross.

His eyebrows went up. “A magical one?”

“Partly. We’ll get it to you before tonight, so you can attend all the orgies you want.” She raised her sunny smile to him. “What’s your cabin number?”

“I’m worried that Chapman seems to have given up on us,” said Violet. “And we haven’t seen Morris since yesterday.”

“Perhaps they’ve decided to wait until we’re off the ship,” said Maud dubiously.

“ You’re right to worry about silence, ” said Mrs. Navenby. “ It’s when you don’t hear a peep out of children for an hour that you discover they’ve dug a moat in your rhododendron patch or decided to render the Bayeux Tapestry in wax crayon on the wall. ”

They’d returned to Violet’s cabin after lunch, packed up some more of her belongings, and taken them to Maud’s, where they faithfully checked the hairlock and Violet applied Mrs. Navenby’s warding. The atmosphere between Maud and Violet had thawed. Violet swung between resentment and relief that all it had taken was the peeling-back of her sleeve to show the vulnerable course of her veins. Figuratively speaking.

“I wouldn’t classify Chapman and Morris as children,” said Violet now. “Clarence, possibly yes.”

“You mentioned Lady Enid had a son,” said Maud. “Do you have children, Mrs. Navenby? Goodness, I should have asked earlier. I shall have to telegraph someone that you’re dead.”

“No children of my own, but Ralph’s sister in Boston had plenty, and we visited enough to witness the carnage. Now, what was your plan to disguise that young man, Miss Blyth? Do you fancy yourself a magician now?”

“No,” said Maud. “But you know how it is when two ideas that have been living on different shelves in your head knock against each other, and suddenly there’s a new idea there.” She was flitting around the cabin again, touching things absently. Maud was thinking and so needed to move.

Violet did not need to move. Violet rather fancied a nap, if she was honest. She contented herself with sitting down.

“I can cast a costume illusion on anyone you like, Maud, but I’ve never done it unless they’re in front of me, and it takes more concentration to sustain on someone else. We used them for quick changes and tricks. Nothing that needed to last onstage. I could probably get Ross up here looking like someone else, but I’d need to be close to him the whole way, and that’d defeat the purpose.”

“Yes,” said Maud. A touch of the curving frame of a mirror; a touch of the bed-post. “You said you could anchor illusion to an object? Like the flowers on your hat?”

“I don’t know if it’d work for something that large,” Violet said. “Something that’d need to shift and move with a person.”

“What if it was just the head?” said Maud. “New hair, new face. Not an entire outfit. And what if I could show you a new way to anchor it, so it’d last? Mrs. Navenby can sew magic into clothes. You can create illusions to turn a person into someone else.” Her fists lifted one after the other, then knocked together. Two ideas on a shelf.

“Your faith is touching,” said Violet. “What do you mean, sew into clothes?”

“ The green coat, girl, ” said Mrs. Navenby. “ That’s the easiest to explain. ”

Maud fetched a coat from one of the trunks. It was an old style, full-skirted and with puffed upper sleeves, made of a green fabric showing rub and wear at the cuffs and elbows. There were only so many times you could patch and repair something, even with magic.

Maud exposed the inside of the coat’s collar. Instead of a tailor’s mark there was a row of yellow embroidery, which looked for all the world like—

“Runes?”

“A similar principle. This one’s an imbuement for warmth. One imbues the thread with the spell, then the pattern anchors it to the garment. It can last for years, if you put enough power into both steps.”

Violet traced the yellow characters. “Where did you learn this technique? It seems so useful, I’d have thought it would be passed down in families.”

“ I invented it, ” said Mrs. Navenby carelessly. “ Now, you’ll need thread. It works with cotton or silk, but the cradles for the imbuement differ for each. ”

It was a one-handed cradle. Something else that Violet had never seen. It made her hand cramp, the first time she tried it, but Mrs. Navenby had none of Hawthorn’s patience with teaching—she just said, “ Practice, ” and then, “ To what, pray tell, were you thinking of attaching this spell? I’m not sure any of my shawls will suit that boy. ”

“I’ve an idea for that as well.” Maud moved to the dresser. “Mrs. Navenby, which of these would you say is your least favourite jewel?”

A minute later Maud left the cabin, leaving Violet to her work. Most two-handed cradles contained the sense of string within their patterns. Violet hadn’t used string since she was twelve. She had enough power that most things fell out well enough, with a little practice.

She built a quick face-illusion of Thom, fast and comfortable as if she were backstage at the Penumbra. They’d done an absurd, risqué, vaguely Shakespearean show centred on identical twins, and one of Violet’s roles had been to stroll across upstage wearing Thom’s face a few moments after he’d dashed through the audience and vanished. It was easier to hold an illusion if it was a face you knew. She made a couple of tweaks—thicker eyebrows, a skin tone closer to Ross’s olive—then let it dissolve into nothing.

She went back to practising the one-handed cradle that was Mrs. Navenby’s imbuement clause, and was singing to her leather rings when Maud returned to the cabin.

“That’s a lively tune,” said Maud. “What is it?”

It was a Newfoundland shanty that Jerry had taught her, and which had a tendency to rise up and tangle in Violet’s mind at inconvenient moments. Rings don’t care what you sing to them, Claudette used to say, just that you make them feel welcome in the magic. Make them your own.

Violet had left a lot of her life behind in New York, sacrificed on the altar of her gullibility, but she refused to abandon music. She’d sing this song as many times as it took to lose the sting; to make it as much a part of herself as her rings.

Violet said none of that. Telling Maud the truth felt like a dangerous habit to have begun. Stories and secrets were surfacing in Violet like an ocean stirred up by a storm. She would let them out as she chose, and no sooner.

She said, “What have you got there?”

Maud proudly unfolded the bundle beneath her arm: a White Star Line steward’s uniform of trousers and trimmed jacket.

“Bribery accomplished, I take it.”

“Yes. I found Jamison—the one who blabbed on me to the master-at-arms after I was caught leaving Mrs. Vaughn’s cabin. No doubt he thinks I am a jewel thief, now, but a thief who’s happy to share her gains to keep him quiet. And I already knew he takes bribes.”

“A productive friendship,” said Violet dryly. “Now, how is this going to work?”

“ How’s your embroidery? ” asked Mrs. Navenby.

“Poor. I’ve always used magic for mending, and not done anything decorative for years.”

“Mine’s not bad,” said Maud. “Miss Lyons and I discovered that it helped me to do something with my hands when she was teaching me history and French.”

“It hardly matters how good yours is, girl—it won’t do us a whit of good, because you’ve no magic.”

“So the act of stitching is like the act of cradling?” asked Violet.

“If it helps to think of it that way.”

Violet decided on her maple ring on her left thumb and leather on the right: this was going to be illusion and imbuement mingled. Maud found the yellow cotton thread in Mrs. Navenby’s sewing kit and cut off a long length of it, threaded through a needle and doubled. She held it taut, and Violet built her illusion of not-quite-Thom, finishing off with the one-handed imbuement clause. The illusion began to spin and then to thin out, until it was no more than a murky, dark length like ink smudged in the air. This flowed down and wrapped itself around the thread, back and forth several times, winding and tangling, tighter and tighter, sinking in.

When there was only yellow visible once more, Violet took the needle and thread from Maud and sat down to do her best to replicate the anchoring runes from the green coat. It didn’t feel like cursing over her embroidery hoop in the parlour while Julia snuck pages of her book between rows of knitting and their mother spun catastrophes out of nothing. It felt like power . The spell steamed from the thread in small wisps of darkness that slipped between Violet’s fingers.

Half of illusion work was holding the desired effect in your mind. Violet imagined that she was attaching a hood to the jacket collar. She could almost feel it taking shape, like velvet made of shadow.

Her rings warmed on her thumbs. She was humming the shanty again. Maud told her to add the words; Violet laughed and taught Maud the chorus. It had a rhythm of larger actions than this, of bending backs and straining arms. A sea pulse. Maud improvised a sweet alto harmony beneath Violet’s melody.

“There,” Violet said when she’d tied off the final knot and cut the ends. “Maud, will you do the honours?”

Maud donned the jacket with aplomb. The illusion swallowed her as soon as the top button was fastened. Thom’s short brown hair, wide-set eyes, and broad, broken nose looked somewhat absurd atop Maud’s skirts, but the illusion was crisp and detailed.

“That’s perfect,” said Maud, inspecting herself in the mirror. “Violet, you’re an artist .” She turned jerkily, as if to catch the illusion out. Hearing her voice emerging from Thom’s mouth was even odder than hearing Mrs. Navenby’s out of hers.

“It should hang even more neatly on Ross, given it’s closer to his appearance,” said Violet. “I’ll sew a different face into a scarf for you, shall I?”

Maud unfastened the jacket and was herself again. She turned, delighted. “Will you?”

“We’ve been looking for a way to move around the ship without attracting suspicious eyes. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a disguise like this in your bag or your pocket, so that you could slip it on in a quiet corner and emerge as someone new?”

“Oh, yes ! And it would be so much more elegant than those horrid fog masks. You should make me a redhead with an enormous boil beside her nose,” said Maud with relish. “A redhead called Imogen. As a girl I always wished my name was Imogen. Could you make it now, so I can take this down to second class for Mr. Ross?”

“I haven’t enough magic now.” Violet felt threadbare and her stomach was growling for food. “But as soon as I can, yes. And don’t worry about the delivery. I’ll take care of that.”

They transferred the pornography from the battered suitcase to a large bandbox, and the steward’s uniform into the suitcase. Then Violet, suitcase in hand, went to knock on Lord Albert’s cabin door. At least his lordship’s valet made no attempt to shoo her away this time.

“Hullo, Miss Debenham,” said Lord Albert. “Have you been up to the carnival? That wind nearly had me overboard, but there’s a frightfully clever chap doing caricatures, look—d’you think it’ll make Elle laugh? It’s all r-right, Carter. Miss Debenham knows what’s what. We can trust her with our deepest, darkest secrets.”

The valet refrained from commenting on that assertion. So did Violet. She murmured politely over the sketch Lord Albert was showing her and asked, “Are you still making trips down to second class to see her?” She nearly wanted to offer him a magical disguise, or at least something better than the hat she’d seen him wearing.

Lord Albert nodded. “Staff don’t ask questions,” he said. “Not if you’re generous with the tips.”

“Good,” said Violet. “Go pay her a visit, and while you’re there, deliver this to the gentleman in this cabin.” She handed over the suitcase and a slip of notepaper with Ross’s cabin number.

Lord Albert took the suitcase without a murmur. He was too well bred to ask her what it contained, though he looked desperately curious.

“It’s a man’s clothes,” said Violet, obliging him with the truth. She sent her most strumpetly look through her eyelashes at Carter, who was pretending to brush down a dinner jacket while listening intently.

Lord Albert blinked at her, then at the suitcase.

“Of course,” he said. “Anything to oblige. Don’t suppose you’d oblige me with your company in the bar before dinner? Sip a few cocktails, hang off my arm, the usual?”

“I’d be delighted,” said Violet, and leaned in to kiss his cheek for the satisfaction of seeing Carter twitch in her periphery.