A Restless Truth (The Last Binding #2)

Chapter 28

28

“Maud,” said Violet. “This is possibly the ugliest garment I’ve ever seen, and I worked in a theatre .”

Maud lifted the jacket by one sleeve. It was a garish shade of burnt orange trimmed with blue piping and fussy rosettes of crimson ribbon, and had been the height of fashion for approximately five minutes last season.

“I know,” she said. “But I’ve never worn it on the Lyric, so it’ll help the illusion that I’m someone other than myself.”

The new illusion that Violet had created—the head of a red-haired woman with a boil beside the nose, as instructed—wavered in the air. Violet had based it on her eldest sister, Ellen, she’d said, and Maud had bitten her tongue on anything more than an encouraging nod. Violet was pulling back the curtains of her performance bit by bit. Maud was so heavy with gratitude, at the courage Violet had shown last night, and was showing still, that she didn’t know how to express it. She didn’t want to scare the true, laughing girl into stepping back behind the sophisticated facade.

“Thread, if you please,” said Violet.

Maud stretched out the red cotton thread and Violet cradled the imbuement clause. The red-haired woman dissolved into smudges of kelp-shadow, smothered the thread, and vanished. Violet cradled a thimble of glowing silver with a spell that her fingers flowed through with unthinking grace, took the needle and thread, and began stitching. Again she’d written the embroidery runes down, for reference.

“Whatever possessed you to buy it in the first place?” Violet asked after a while, shaking the offensive jacket into a new position.

“My mother would have hated it,” said Maud. “I do a lot of things because my mother would have hated them.”

Violet didn’t look up, but her mouth quirked as if she could feel Maud’s gaze and knew that she was thinking about the previous night.

One of Maud’s quiet, buried-deep fears was this: What if she had no personality, no taste, no true core of her own? She’d formed herself, from the age she knew how to choose things, by setting herself opposite what her parents wanted in the hope of making them disapprove. Making them notice . When she’d bought that jacket, her mother had been three months dead already, and Maud hadn’t questioned her impulsive satisfaction until her maid Teresa had unwrapped the parcel and conveyed her scepticism with a raise of her brows.

There was no point in irritating Lady Blyth now. Maud had won all the arguments, all the provocations, forever. And also lost them, because she could become the most depraved and disreputable woman in all of England—could waltz down High Holborn in the nude, playing the bagpipes as she went—and her mother would never again stir a single hair in reply.

Maud squeezed her hands tight enough to hurt. Won. Lost. Against a dead woman. What kind of daughter had thoughts like that?

When the illusion was sewn into the jacket, Maud tried it on. The unfamiliar features wrinkled and widened delightfully in the mirror as she moved her face through a series of expressions.

“I could try an accent. Perhaps Imogen is from Cardiff, or the daughter of a Scottish laird. Och, aye, I’m longing to be home with my family—”

“ Please do not try an accent.”

Imogen’s lips pouted. It was true that Violet would be the better choice for skulking around pretending to be someone else. But Violet had other things to do this morning and wanted to preserve as much of her magic as possible, in case she needed it for what they had planned for the afternoon.

Violet signalled when the corridor was empty. Maud—illusion intact—slipped out. Ross had given her the name of the under-cook who’d acquired Dorian’s cage from Hewitt. Maud presented herself at the galley entrance; a kitchen maid bobbed a curtsy but also gave the orange jacket a look that said she suspected its wearer of having come to complain about breakfast.

Maud parried with a convenient piece of half-truth: she’d heard this man Andrews might have won something at cards that her elderly aunt had given away to one of the servants in a temper, and had now changed her mind about.

“And it’ll be hell to pay, forgive my language, if I don’t get it back.”

The girl looked over her shoulder. “Lunch prep’s waiting on the bell and Cook’s gone for a smoke. Give us a moment, then.”

Andrews proved to be a fat man with the sheen of kitchen grease holding his black hair in place, eyes a similar bright green to Maud’s, and a spattered apron lovingly cradling the sag of his stomach. He nodded along when Maud explained the situation and tentatively asked why he’d wanted the parrot cage.

“My sweetheart’s one of the ship musicians. Plays piano for the singers. The musical director’s got a real bee in his bonnet about this ball tonight, so everyone’s scrambling around for ways to make it fancier. That Miss Broadley’s singing some soppy thing about a nightingale in a cage and wanting out of its cage, and my Betty was hoping to beg a stuffed bird off of someone’s hat. I thought the empty cage might be nicer. A metaphor, like. They could hang it from the piano with the door open.”

Having delivered this piece of dramaturgy, Andrews shifted his weight to his other foot.

Maud cast around for an excuse, then remembered that she was Imogen and didn’t need one.

“If you wanted it as a prop, did you empty the cage? Take out anything from inside?”

“You mean the swing? The little bowls for food and drink? Nah, left ’em. Makes it more poignant, if it looks like the bird was there and now it’s gone.”

“I quite see your point,” said Maud faintly. “Thank you, Mr. Andrews. I’ll try to find Betty a stuffed bird in exchange, even if it won’t be as—poignant. Do you know where she’d be at this hour?”

An attempt to venture into the Lyric ’s rehearsal spaces, however, was less successful. Maud was turned back by a young man with the red eyes of the sleepless and sheet music falling out of his arms, who was quite adamant that rehearsal was not to be interrupted by anyone for anything, and Mr. Kingsmill would have Betty Cohen’s head if she left her seat at the piano to chat to a passenger. Sorry, miss. Good day, miss.

Perhaps Maud should have made Imogen a laird’s daughter after all. She was sure that Lord Hawthorn would not have been turned away, though perhaps Betty Cohen would have paid the price for it afterwards.

Maud moved from this to imagining Imogen an entire family, and from there to a surprisingly vehement mental version of herself, as Imogen, refuting a sinister viscount who had come to demand her hand and had designs on her father’s estate. This took up enough of Maud’s thoughts that she turned into the corridor containing her cabin and was a good two yards along before she realised that Morris was kneeling in front of her cabin door.

She faltered. For a moment.

Then she recommenced walking, at a slower pace. There was a leather pouch of tools by Morris’s knee and a hint of red light adorning his fingertips, and he jerked one hand back from the door lock as if stung.

Maud forced herself not to smile. Mrs. Navenby’s warding charm was working.

She’d been waiting for Morris to appear. Chapman had been keeping an intermittent eye on them—and an overt one at meals, forcing them to engage in light conversation until they appeared to be on friendly terms with the horrid, murdering rat. It had been making all of them uneasy that Chapman hadn’t made any obvious attempts to find the silver items and steal them back. And Morris had been nowhere to be seen. Until now.

Morris glanced up sharply at Maud’s approach. Their eyes met.

Should she smile at him? No—he was dressed as a workman, and disguised as one, with those tools. Imogen might have no taste in fashion, but she was still a first-class passenger, and Ross had been right: most toffs didn’t notice the staff. Morris might have been counting on that fact.

So Maud pretended to be a mixture of her mother and Mrs. Navenby. She flicked her eyes down to Morris’s scuffed boots, then up to his cap, and allowed herself to arch her brows and barely sniff: dubious that such a specimen was in the right place. With a hint of I-heard-there-was-a-jewel-thief-aboard. But not caring enough to pry into someone else’s business.

It was a complicated look. Imagining all its nuances kept Maud calm as she drew level with her own door—Morris touched his cap to her as she passed—and her tread remained steady, even as the point between her shoulder blades stung with awareness and tension as she walked to the other end of the corridor and around the corner. Thank God it wasn’t a blind end.

She scurried to the café and ordered a cup of coffee, which she drank without tasting it, and to her relief Morris was gone on her return. The faint mark of the warding on the doorframe was untouched. It had held.

“ Of course it held, ” said Mrs. Navenby when they were inside. She gave exactly the kind of dismissive sniff that Maud had been aiming for with Morris. “ That was one of Flora’s spells. She was very keen on secrets and security. ”

Yes—Flora Sutton, who’d managed to ward her entire property against any magician not granted explicit permission to cross its borders, and hidden the coin of the contract in a murderous maze.

“You kept your piece of the contract right out in the open, as if it were nothing of consequence.” Maud unbuttoned the orange jacket and shrugged it off. “I think that’s brilliant.”

“I had not foreseen that someone might make a gift of my parrot and his cage.”

“You didn’t foresee that you’d die either, ma’am. Or that I’d be a medium.” And neither had Robin. He would have mentioned either of those.

The old woman’s hard laughter filled her mouth. “ True enough. Life makes fools of all our plans, Miss Blyth. ”

Violet returned to the cabin soon after, humming a bright tune and agleam with satisfaction.

“Hawthorn’s money well spent,” she said. “Mrs. Moretti was determined to bluff it out at first—she’s a tough old boot—but I appealed to her, one fraud to another, and she swung around nicely once she heard I’d make it worth her while. I told her I’d done some fake mediumship of my own, and I’d be employing some tricks that she mightn’t have seen before.”

Maud laughed. “Will she ask to be shown your secret contraptions?”

“Very likely,” said Violet cheerfully. “She’s busy studying the script for now.”

Maud explained her own morning’s mingled success and failure.

“Leave that to me,” said Violet, on hearing of the obstacle of Mr. Kingsmill. “I’m sure Lord Albert will be able to speak to his wife in between rehearsals. I’ll see you at lunch.”

Maud was left to twiddle her thumbs until the lunch service. She embroidered her mental fantasy of Imogen some more, then busied herself refolding and repacking clothes, and then wandered down a side road of that task by asking Mrs. Navenby to point out and explain all the charmed pieces of clothing. Maud made a careful list in Robin’s notebook, for Edwin.

“Is there a charm for good luck?” she wondered aloud, folding shirtwaists back into a trunk between layers of tissue paper. “One could sew it into a pair of gloves and be unbeatable at the card tables.”

“ Luck’s in the same basket as time and death, girl, ” said Mrs. Navenby. “ Many magicians have tried, but none have ever mastered it. ”

Lunch was in the main dining saloon. Violet appeared by Maud’s side and caught her arm before they could take their seats, speaking in a low voice.

“I’m beginning to feel as though we’re in a fairy tale and we’ve been set tasks by an evil imp. Miss Broadley says that Betty did show her the cage, and suggested it for her nightingale song, but this morning Mr. Bernard’s keeper came and took it back again. The bloody parrot’s to be a prize in the lottery tonight.”

They took their seats at what had become their usual table: Hawthorn, Chapman, the Bernards, and a handful of rotating others. Today, Mrs. Moretti was among them. She had a distracted air and sighed heavily as she shook her head in response to an offer of wine.

So the cage had moved hands again. Maud stared down into her plate of salad and curling slices of pink roast beef, wondering if their enemies could, somehow, be ahead of them.

Well—Chapman was sitting right there. Either he knew about the bowl and had it already, or he didn’t, and Maud was just talking to her new friend about her ex-employer’s parrot.

“I heard Dorian’s to be a lottery prize tonight?” she asked Helen.

“Oh, yes!” Helen made an apologetic face. “It was kind of you to think of me, Maud, but I think he’s too used to being a human bird. He didn’t get along with the other birds in the aviary. He was teaching them horrible words and pecking at them. Papa says we can have an African Grey when we’re in England, but Mama’s put her foot down and says it won’t be this one. Of course you may have him back if you wish, but Papa assumed you didn’t want him. And the head steward was so pleased to have such a novel prize for the lottery.”

“Oh, no, of course he should be a prize,” said Maud’s mouth before her brain could catch up. She was acutely aware of Chapman watching her. Don’t act as if you care . This is just luncheon chatter about nothing important . “My brother would scold me terribly if I brought home a parrot prone to yelling rude words.”

“Are you looking forward to the ball, Miss Cutler?” asked Chapman. No doubt wanting to know if she’d be out of her cabin, so they could have another try at breaking into it.

“ Very much,” said Maud, arming herself with dimples.

They’d have to find some way to win Dorian back, cage and all. And there was no such thing as magical luck.

Mrs. Moretti cleared her throat. “I’m sure the ball will be enjoyable, as these things go,” she said. “But we mustn’t forget that this ship has already borne witness to matters of life and death. Indeed, I have been given to understand that the dearly departed woman—Mrs. Elizabeth Navenby—has some messages she urgently wishes passed on to the living souls aboard.”

A fascinated silence fell over the table.

Mrs. Moretti preened. “I plan to hold a gathering at three o’clock this afternoon, in one of the private card rooms, in order to contact her spirit and question it more closely.”

“How thrilling,” said Violet. “May anyone attend?”

“I’m afraid the presence of certain persons would make it impossible. Sceptical hearts—negative auras. But the poor dead woman has already reached out to me, in my dreams, and her spirit messengers indicate that there are some whose auras are ideal for our purpose. You in particular, Mr. Chapman. I must insist on your presence.”

Head turned. You could have heard a raspberry drop onto the carpet.

“Er,” said Chapman.

Professional that she was, Mrs. Moretti barrelled on before he could refuse. “Yes, yes, and you must bring with you some of those whose fortunes are tied to yours.” She screwed up her face. Her eyes rolled. “Morris?” the woman ventured. “Do you know a Morris? Or Horace, perhaps? Forgive me, the spirit voices are so faint…”

Chapman’s face had gone wooden. He shot a look at Maud, who deepened her dimples.

“Goodness,” she said. “How exciting, Mr. Chapman, to be so personally requested. Would the spirit of the dear departed object to my presence, ma’am? Do I have the correct sort of aura?”

“It is imperative that you be present, Miss Cutler,” said Mrs. Moretti. “You were closest to her before she passed. Your own spirit will act as a flame to a moth. You must be present as well, Miss Debenham. And you, Lord Hawthorn.”

Helen Bernard looked nakedly envious. But even she joined the rest of the table in turning an inquiring look onto Hawthorn. He’d barely spoken at meals except to be sardonic and off-putting, and altogether the kind of man who would squelch an invitation to a séance beneath the heel of his shoe.

Hawthorn blinked like a cat.

“Why not?” he drawled. “You’re quite right, ma’am. The lack of entertainment on this ship is enough to make one welcome even the prospect of ghosts.”