A Restless Truth (The Last Binding #2)

Chapter 26

26

“Good Lord,” said Hawthorn. “Your stitches must be coming loose, Violet. He looks like he’s been left in the rain until his colours ran.”

The door to Hawthorn’s cabin was firmly closed and warded, now that they’d all gathered here for the nightly war council. In the centre of the parlour, the uneven illusion atop Alan Ross’s body scowled. That made things even worse.

What on Maud had been a convincing illusion of a young man’s head was on Ross an unfortunately lopsided collection of features, which slid when one stared at them hard. Maud was put in mind of a Victoria sandwich cake of which the upper half was slowly attempting to divorce itself from the lower.

She was relieved when Ross removed the jacket, solidifying into himself.

“It was perfectly fine on Maud.” Violet sounded annoyed.

Ross wordlessly passed the jacket to Maud. It did still work on her. It worked on Violet. It even worked on Hawthorn, who could barely fasten a single button as the garment strained over his shoulders.

“Is it that I’m not magical?” Ross asked.

“I am not a magician, and neither is Miss Blyth, medium or no.” Hawthorn looked hard at Ross. “You don’t appear in foresight, and you wreak havoc with an illusion. What are you, Master Cesare, beyond a damned inconvenience?”

Ross’s expression shouted Try me and find out . Maud didn’t want to waste good strategy time watching men snipe at each other.

“It got you up here, at least,” she said hastily.

“Most toffs don’t bother to look closely at the staff.”

“I doubt it’d have held up if anyone stopped you,” said Hawthorn. “This may not be the solution you’re looking for if you want him bowl-hunting tomorrow, Maud.”

“I could wear it!” Maud’s spirits rose at the prospect.

“Maud, darling,” said Violet. “Not even the most shortsighted of toffs would miss that you’re the wrong shape entirely for that uniform. I doubt we’d get the trousers on at all.”

Maud inspected her hips and chest and had to admit Violet was right. Violet might have fared better, except that she was far too long-limbed for it. Her wrists had stuck out of the jacket cuffs like a child wearing something outgrown two seasons ago.

“I’ll make you one of your own,” added Violet. “First thing tomorrow.”

“I’m here now, at least.” Ross made himself at home on one end of the sofa. “Make the most of me. And tell me everything you couldn’t at lunch.”

Violet told him about Clarence, Walter Courcey, and Lady Enid. Hawthorn poured drinks for Violet and for himself, and—after a pause of deliberate and needling rudeness—for Ross. He’d disposed of the tainted whisky and acquired a new decanter from the private store of luxuries that seemed to make itself instantly available in any space frequented by nobility. There was probably a cellar on this ship full of wine and brandy and port that would have made Maud’s father, Sir Robert, gasp with envy. She almost wanted to go looking for it, just for how smug she’d feel standing there. Look at me now. Look what I’m doing.

“Did he threaten your cousin, this Courcey, do you think?”

Maud dragged her attention back to the conversation. The question had come from Ross.

Violet frowned. “Perhaps? Clarence did seem nervous at the prospect of crossing him. But then, Clarence likes society to be orderly. To have lines drawn that tell him where to stand and who to talk to, and who he should respect and who he shouldn’t. I rather scuffed those lines, by daring to inherit his family’s fortune when I’d tossed all my respectability out the window.” She grinned. “If Courcey’s a senior advisor to the Assembly, then Clarence wouldn’t blink at obeying. He really swallowed that line about the Good of the Empire, and didn’t ask questions about why this mysterious object was so important.”

“Nice to know you magicians don’t content yourself with the normal sort of toffs and gutter classes and everything in between,” said Ross, with a resigned sort of sarcasm. “You have to throw in a handful more hierarchies on top. More magic sits you at the top, does it?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” said Hawthorn.

Maud thought of Chapman sneering at him. I’ve heard of you. More magic might not be everything, but losing magic had clearly sunk Lord Hawthorn, future earl, into contempt.

“The search for the Last Contract is all about greed for power,” said Maud. “We’ve always known that.”

“ And not just more power, ” said Mrs. Navenby. “ Power you’re not entitled to. That you haven’t earned .”

“Most power’s unearned.” Ross was sitting forward, tense. “What did Lord Arsehole over there ever do but be born to the right parents? What did he do to earn all those stewards tugging at their forelocks, or being a lordship instead of a simple sir, or any of this luxury we’re parking our arses on and pouring down our throats?”

“ Quite the radical you’ve recruited here, ” said Mrs. Navenby, amused.

Ross saluted Maud with his glass, black-eyed and keen. “Up yours, ma’am.”

Mrs. Navenby’s crack of a laugh felt abrasive on the way out. “ Well, Hawthorn? Are you going to give the little Robespierre an answer? ”

Hawthorn didn’t look angry. His posture was relaxed. Maud wondered what it took to grow that shell, that impermeability to the emotions of others, and how much of it was true.

“He’s quite right,” he said calmly. “I did nothing at all. And we could sit here drafting seditious pamphlets all evening, but it’s beside the point, because we’re not speaking of titles and wealth at present. Nobody has to earn magic. Magicians are born. Magic exists in its own right and cannot be given or taken away—”

Nobody spoke into the abruptness of his pause.

Hawthorn drained his glass.

“Edwin’s tried to explain it,” said Maud. “The Last Contract was a contract, a—a witnessed inheritance, when it began. The magicians of Britain were given the magic of the fae, in return for accepting responsibility for the land. He thinks that the tendency of houses and estates to become entwined with the magic of their owners is something similar, but working by different rules. Because inheritance doesn’t have to be about bloodline. He inherited Sutton, after all.”

“It can’t work that way everywhere, can it?” asked Ross. “Handshakes with elves? Or are you telling me there isn’t a single magician in Italy or China?”

“Of course there is.” Violet sat up. “It can’t be all about where you live. English magicians come to America and still have magic—and their children still have magic. And use it by cradling. It’d never occurred to me that it might be done differently elsewhere, but…” She lifted her ringed thumbs and wiggled them. “A friend of mine once told me that New York City is an argument of magicians. She said that her ancestors did magic entirely by song, but her family’s lost most of the secrets of it.”

“ Careless, ” said Mrs. Navenby.

“I suspect the abduction into the slave trade was somewhat to blame there,” said Violet. “The point is, nobody knows what the damned rules are, really. If you’d told me three days ago that you could anchor an illusion with single-handed cradling…”

“Mrs. Sutton did that too,” said Maud. “Edwin’s been learning it from her notes.”

“ Flora always was one for keeping notes, ” said Mrs. Navenby. “ And laughing at the idea of rules .”

Unlike Edwin, for whom any inconsistency against assumed rules was both a puzzle to be worried at, like a dog with a bone, and a matter of deep personal affront.

“It sounds as though you and your friends did great things, ma’am,” said Violet. There was a wistfulness to her that made sense now that Maud knew more about her past, and the fears that had driven her across the Atlantic in the first place. “Producing new magic on your own—discovering the Last Contract and then keeping it hidden—didn’t you want to share any of your accomplishments with the world?”

“ Perhaps we would have, ” said Mrs. Navenby, dry, “ if they’d cared at all to listen to a group of silly women .”

“We’re listening now.”

It was Hawthorn. Maud stared at him. His lordship had settled back into his chair. He made a startlingly elegant gesture of invitation. “The other side knows exactly who you and your friends are—or were —so my point about keeping things from George and Morris no longer applies. And we’re all deep enough in this business now that I’d rather like to hear where it started.”

Maud felt the wavering flow of Mrs. Navenby’s indecision. The locket sat warm against her skin.

“So would I,” said Violet. “You’ve been alone with these secrets for a long time, ma’am. I imagine part of you has been bursting to have a safe place to air them.”

Maud’s heart thudded. If she was to learn anything more about the Last Contract to share with Edwin and Robin, Mrs. Navenby’s ghost was the best source she would ever find.

“Please,” she said softly.

Even Ross nodded encouragement, curling his feet up onto his seat as if settling in for a long evening in front of a fire.

“ Hmm, ” said Mrs. Navenby. “ Let’s wet this throat I’m using, shall we? Lord Hawthorn, I’ll have a glass of that, if you please. ”

“Can you taste what I’m eating and drinking?” Maud asked, startled.

“Not exactly. But there’s a— I hate to make the obvious comparison, but a ghost of a sensation. Perhaps it’s just memory. I’ll take it, either way.”

Maud had never tried whisky. She took a cautious sniff from the glass, hesitated, and decided to plunge in. The amber liquid was like opening one’s lips to the kiss of a dragon: eye-watering fumes, smoke, and heat.

“ Thank you, ” said Mrs. Navenby when Maud was done coughing. Then another long pause. Maud did her best to settle herself out of the way in her own mind; it was an odd sensation. She felt her face move through a moue of embarrassment. “ You were right, Miss Debenham. It’s been such a secret, for so long, that I don’t know how to begin .”

“Tell it like a story in a book,” said Violet. “Tell it like a monologue. Ignore us. We’re on the other side of the footlights. We won’t interrupt.”

All very well for her to say. Although it would be harder for Maud to thoughtlessly interrupt when it was her mouth that was telling the story in the first place.

“ A story, ” said Mrs. Navenby. She took another sip of the whisky. This time it went down more smoothly, even as it burned. “ Very well .”

THE STORY OF THE FORSYTHIA CLUB

If you asked Flora, she’d tell you that it started many years before. But as far as I’m concerned everything started on a summer evening in 1850, at a dinner party being held in a good house in a good corner of London.

A scare had gone around the magicians of London the previous year, due to a number of things—most notably a book purporting to expose a secret underworld of witches and Satanists, and an unfortunate mass unbusheling in Brighton af ter a deadly public disagreement between two members of the Assembly.

The remainder of the Assembly had decreed a dampening. Magicians were to conduct themselves with more circumspection, blending their edges more smoothly with the unmagical society of Britain in which we all had to exist, until the rumblings had died down and the Coopers had quietly discovered all the smouldering embers of true suspicion. And, where necessary, stifled them.

One unexpected side effect of this affair was that my anxious parents had kept my brothers home from school for several terms, wanting them to learn better control, and had them tutored in the English tradition of magic at home. Little mastery was expected of me. Magic in the female was to be turned towards the betterment of the home. But I was bored, and my brothers were restless boys, and I was considered a good example for them in the schoolroom.

All of which is to say: on this particular summer night, at this particular party, I was eighteen years old and had spent several months having my mind and my magic pried open like the lid of a box, allowing through a chink of that marvellous light which is the birthright of all magicians. I was hungry, where I had never thought to have appetite. I wanted more.

It was a large and busy gathering. Dinner was not due to be served until dark fell, but that would not be for another hour. I left my parents deep in renewing social ties and slipped away to explore the house, which was one I’d never visited before. It was old and deeply magical—far more so than our own residence. I was careful to pause on thresholds and touch doorframes with respect, trusting that the house would tell me if I was venturing into spaces where I was unwelcome. So far, it had given me nothing but a slow, strange sensation in the pit of my stomach, like the knot of nerves that preceded performing on the piano.

I came out into the courtyard just as the light was changing, pouring a golden syrup of illumination down the rosy stones of the building, turning the neat trees in their pots and the bushes in their beds to clusters of ink. A woman was crouched inspecting a bed of flowers. The folds of her silver gown had gone lavender in that dusk light.

I stopped, and thought about retreating. Before I could move the woman glanced over her shoulder and saw me.

“There’s something wrong with the magic in this place,” she said in lieu of greeting. “Have you noticed?”

“Er,” I said, with great intelligence.

“Look at this.”

I hesitated, thinking of creases and mud on my gown; but she sounded so assured, so certain that I would find this interesting, that I found my body hastening over to join her.

“You’re the Godwin girl,” she said as I knelt.

“Beth,” I affirmed. “Forgive me, have we met, ah—” She was old enough for a madam, could well have been a decade my senior, but there was no ring on the hand gently turning leaves aside.

“Miss,” she said, dry, as if she knew what I was thinking. “Flora Gatling. We have met, but you would have been a child then.”

“Of course.” My parents did know the Gatlings. And their eldest daughter had spent some time living in Scotland, I remembered now, with another branch of the family. “I’m delighted to make your acquaintance. Again.”

Miss Gatling showed me the garden. Or rather, she showed me what was wrong with it, which was a great many things. Nothing that was obvious to a cursory glance, but clear if you took time and had a naturalist’s eye. Ugly mustard-yellow specks covered an otherwise flourishing bed of pansies, and a lemon tree’s trunk was beginning to twist and blacken. A substance like ash coated Miss Gatling’s fingertips when she touched the darkest streak.

“Perhaps they’ve a lazy gardener,” I suggested.

“There’s too much wrongness. Some of these are diseases of overwatering; some of drought. Some aren’t natural conditions of plants at all. And it feels wrong.” She took my hand and pressed it flat at the tree’s base, on the soil above its roots. A taste like sluggish mornings filled my mouth. My own magic tried to shrink back from my skin like a fox kit seeking refuge in its burrow.

I recoiled.

“Yes,” said Miss Gatling. “There’s a rot .”

“It’s in the house too,” said a frank voice from behind us.

We stood. I clumsily executed something between a nod and a curtsy. “Lady Enid.”

The Blackwoods were better society than we usually mixed with. Lady Enid’s father was probably the loftiest gentleman present. Though even in this light I could tell that her gown had been reworked several times, and that her adornments tended more towards flowers than jewels.

“What have you noticed, Flora?” Lady Enid asked. “The mirrors in this place keep shifting their positions on the walls. A box of dried rose petals in the powder room tried to nip at my fingers. And have you noticed that nobody’s sitting down for long? You can’t remain in a single room without feeling that the place would rather you were elsewhere . Everything’s out of kilter. Something’s horridly wrong here.”

“I could have told you that. Without any need to go scrabbling in the dirt or fondling the furnishings.”

We all turned. And now there were four of us; or rather, there had been four all along, but one of our number had been seated on a bench tucked behind a hedge, listening, unmoving and invisible in the fading light. Now she stood and joined us.

I didn’t know Miss Seraphina Hope well. I was not a naturally gregarious or amiable person, not someone who made friends easily, and Miss Hope had a skittish air that didn’t encourage closeness, despite her pretty, open face. She always made me think of blackbirds.

We were in her house. Or her father’s house, at least. The Hopes were magicians stretching back untold generations, like the Gatlings; Mr. Hope was a pillar of the community and ex-Secretary of the Magical Assembly.

Had I come outside, seeking quiet in the garden, of my own volition? Or had the Hope house made me as restless as all the other guests?

I wondered if Lady Enid or Miss Gatling would apologise for the insult to their hosts. Instead Miss Gatling said, “Do you know what it is that’s wrong, Sera?”

Miss Hope looked around the walls of the courtyard as if suspecting spying ears. She gave a low laugh. “Where would you like me to start?”

That was how it began. The four of us, girl magicians with curious minds and the ability to recognise a kindred spirit, standing in the garden of a house where the contract between magicians and residence had been corrupted to the point of disaster by the sheer intensity of unhappiness spun within the walls through the actions of one man. Even when we became close friends, Sera never told us everything. Or even most things, I suspect.

Two months later, Mr. and Mrs. Hope disappeared.

First her, and then him. The Coopers searched for them, but not very hard—not once the servants began to speak out. The Assembly cleared their collective throats and moved on.

There are some things that no blood-pact will forgive was all Sera ever said.

Her eldest brother inherited, of course. None of the Hope sons had any interest in the potion shop of Whistlethropp to her parents’ despair, she had turned them all down. She was well past the verge of spinsterhood when she set her sights firmly on Gerald Sutton. He was her elder by some fifteen years, unremarkable in looks—I used to make fun of his red-brown beard with Sera when I was feeling catty—and not well known to London magical society. He spent much of his time abroad, and when in England he preferred his estate in Cambridgeshire.

But Flora wanted to marry him, and so he married her and agreed to teach her everything he knew. Flora left London and moved to Sutton Cottage.

Somewhere around this time Enid married as well, after falling in love with the young thaumoluthier who delivered her sister’s harpsichord, and so plunged beneath the notice of her appalled family. She was the happiest of all of us, I think. James was as understanding as Gerald, and their marriage was a partnership in the deepest sense of the word.

The four of us travelled often between our houses to visit one another, and slowly we developed individual interests in our pursuit of the magic that nobody thought we should be pursuing.

Flora had a passion for botany. From her love of living things grew tendrils of curiosity about the land itself, and stories fallen out of fashion—including the ley lines of legend, the channels by which magic flowed through the land and renewed itself as it went. Flora was convinced that all truly interesting magic existed in the liminal spaces, where different sorts of power met and mingled, and that living things were the key to it.

Enid had a mind that enjoyed solving and creating puzzles. And she was musical. She became as keen and creative an artisan as her husband, and I’m sure no little portion of his eventual financial success can be laid at her own feet.

Sera had an uneasy relationship with her own passion for imbuement, given the man she’d inherited it from, but it never stopped her from honing her craft. She would give us new creams to soothe sun-scalded skin, and denude Flora’s garden of herbs in search of the ingredients that would best hold a wakefulness charm. She was too proud to approach the shop now only known as Whistlethropp’s to offer them her findings; like the rest of us, she worked only for love of the work itself.

As for me—Miss Beth Godwin, the only unmarried member of the Forsythia Club—I honed my needlework, but I wanted to know everything, and could never narrow it down for fear there was something more exciting lurking around the next corner. Flora would tell me that I was the most invaluable of the Forsythians, because a long conversation with me was worth a week in a library. I knew how to ask the right questions, to make an idea appear from a different perspective. And given my tutoring with my brothers I had the most comprehensive knowledge of what English magic thought it could do.

Which was useful to know as we went about proving it wrong.

Flora was the one who realised that the Last Contract might be real, and who studied the ley lines until we found it. She believed first and believed hardest; I don’t know if the rest of us truly thought we’d find anything when we took that trip to North Yorkshire, until we put our hands into the ancient cubbyhole in that ancient church and touched silver.

It was me who realised that the nature of the Last Contract would allow it to be used to transfer power from one magician to another. That was my real gift, I think. Finding new ways of doing old things; or old, old ways of doing something terribly new.

We disagreed as to whether we should keep working at it. We argued . Though we were friends, united in our desire to pursue knowledge and power, we were still different kinds of women. And we could disagree fundamentally, we discovered, on how much we were willing to risk and where the lines of decency lay.

In the end, caution won. We made the Last Contract more difficult to find, for anyone who might come after us. Three of us took a piece each, to disguise and keep hidden.

After that Flora had a habit of giving us silver objects as gifts. It was a kind of joke. That mirror-and-brush set of mine was from her; she gave one to both Enid and Sera, too, each with a slightly different design.

And this sunflower locket was a secret gift for me, alone, to match the silver rose pendant Flora had worn since she was married. I had to consult a book to remind myself of the symbolic meaning of sunflowers, because Flora never did anything that wasn’t layered in symbols.

Gratitude, and loyalty, and adoration.

Whatever question you’re thinking of asking here, the answer is probably yes .

Flora was the most important person in my life, and I know she felt the same way about me. She and Gerald were an intellectual match, they respected each other deeply, and she’d singled him out as her best chance of learning strong magic from a sympathetic teacher. I assumed he’d fallen for her immediately, because who could help doing so? Who wouldn’t know her and love her helplessly, without surcease?

But Gerald had never married before Flora, and spent months travelling to dusty corners of Europe with one of his lifelong friends: a bachelor who studied fossils and old rocks. And he and Flora never had children. I always wondered… but could never, quite, gather the courage to ask.

Without a household of my own, I visited Sutton Cottage far more often than Enid or Sera. Gerald was often away with his friend. So it was the two of us, Flora and me, in that beautiful house Flora had made so entirely her own, bound so sturdily to her will and her magic. I could pretend that I lived there, too, twined thick along the fences and walls of Flora’s heart like any other bramble rose or holly hedge. I could pretend that Sutton was ours .

Again—did I say it outright? Did I push? Did I ever touch her with anything more than friendly affection? No. Flora was no more religious than the average magician, but whatever unusual shape her marriage took, she respected the vows she’d spoken to create it. She believed in contracts once she’d made them.

And I was as happy as I imagined I could be, because in this area of my life and no other, I put deliberate shackles on my imagination.

After many years, a friend of my brother’s called Ralph Navenby, who’d drifted quietly in and out of my awareness since childhood, asked me to marry him. It was a surprise. I surprised myself further by accepting. Ralph was a widower by then—a kind man who desired companionship but placed few demands on me—and we were past the years where children would be possible. He took me to America, where he had family. Flora and I wrote letters—still fond, but less frequent with every year that passed.

It was easier to let go with an ocean between us. Easier to wear my sunflowers, and to think of her surrounded by her wonderful gardens, and be content that she existed at all.