A Restless Truth (The Last Binding #2)

Chapter 34

34

Applause from the dining saloon spattered into the opening notes played by the orchestra. The piece was familiar, but the breeze snatched the quivering melody of the strings away before Maud’s ears could catch proper hold.

A curtain-spell, thought Maud fuzzily, can be used solely for concealment of what lies inside its radius, or can have its clauses adjusted so that those within cannot see or hear what takes place without . One day she would find herself sitting exams at Cambridge, trying to dredge up facts about history or philosophy or art, and instead would be able to recall nothing but Edwin Courcey’s voice as he explained magic to her entirely unmagical self.

With effort, she hauled her thoughts back to the present moment.

The effect of the imbued champagne was already lessening. Maud clung to that, along with the fact that she had not been tied to any more chairs. She had simply been led, gently but firmly, to sit in the corner of the deck farthest from the hatches leading back into the saloon.

The illusion of Violet had vanished when Mrs. Vaughn cast the curtain-spell around them. It had served its purpose.

How had Maud been so stupid? She would never, ever drink champagne again. She’d fallen twice for the same trick. She’d dropped her guard, too wrapped up in self-congratulation at having finally put her hands on the bowl.

The bowl.

Maud’s throat closed. She laced her hands together instantly and squeezed tight enough to hurt. She would not touch it. She would not think of it. It wasn’t there.

The items of the Last Contract are undetectable by seeking spells, said the dry, comforting voice of her inner Edwin.

Seraphina Vaughn cradled a spell that solidified into a folding-stool. She seated herself with the slowness of the elderly, rescuing the fringed ends of her shawl from where they were slipping down her elbows. Maud couldn’t make out the colour of the embroidery at the shawl’s edges, though Mrs. Vaughn sat with her back to the railing, and golden light spilled out of the closest porthole, illuminating her face well enough.

Some more of the sick giddiness receded. Maud felt well enough to tuck her legs to one side, take a deep breath of the bracing air, and look Mrs. Vaughn in the face.

“You weren’t there when I told Chapman and Morris who I am, and why you don’t want to do me any harm.”

Though Mrs. Vaughn had called Maud by her real name, Maud remembered with a lurch.

“No. Joe Morris filled me in on the details. A foreseer —fancy that.” Mrs. Vaughn looked tired. A frown pinched the wrinkles of her face like a finger pushed down in the skin atop heated milk. “I don’t know if that whimpering wide-eyed look is for show, girl, but you can set it aside, if so. I won’t hurt you. I only want to have a conversation.”

“And if—if I get up and walk away, right this moment?” Maud had no idea if her legs would hold her.

Another fretful petting of the shawl. “I suppose I would try to stop you. I am a magician, Miss Blyth, and you are not.” It was spoken with such calm resignation that it almost didn’t register as a threat. “Though you are something interesting.”

Yes. This woman had to believe, as Morris believed, that Mrs. Navenby was still haunting Maud; that the locket had nothing to do with it at all. And this woman was one of Mrs. Navenby’s oldest friends, even if they hadn’t spoken for de cades. Maud couldn’t hope to fool her for long with a simple impression.

“Mrs. Navenby won’t tell you anything,” said Maud. “She—she has nothing to say to you.”

“I know.”

Maud blinked. “You know?”

A twinkling, Christmas-card sort of smile, with malice dusted faintly at the edges. “Beth would fling you overboard herself before she’d betray any more secrets that Flora wanted her to keep. Has she already given that actress a scalding earful for giving up the cup?”

“No,” said Maud. “She’s… been quiet.” Truth. It tasted dangerous on her tongue.

“Sulking.” Mrs Vaughn snorted. “She was never a graceful loser.”

Maud’s head was entirely clear now. She thought again about the contents of her skirt pocket. She was almost certain she’d be able to run. But Mrs. Vaughn, for all her showy infirmity and twinkling roundness, had cradled with the nimble speed that Maud had seen in old women knitting quilt-squares for charity.

And… a conversation meant information flowing in both directions. Chapman was dead and Morris in hiding. This might be the best chance Maud had.

She looped her clasped hands around her knees, stretching out her back.

“If you know Mrs. Navenby won’t talk to you,” she said frankly, “then why do you want to talk to me ?”

“Why you, instead of Enid’s heir?”

That was a revealing assumption. Maud nodded. Mrs. Vaughn’s silver brows rose.

“The one who surrendered the cup when she realised this was a more deadly game than she’d bargained for? No, no—she sounds like a practical, self-interested girl. I’ve no doubt she has her price, and we’ve plenty of time to discover what it is. But you, Miss Blyth, strike me as less easily bought. And less likely to do anything rash like slitting the throat of an old woman.”

Maud was struck speechless: both by the casual, insidious we, and by the fact that someone could be so sharp and yet so utterly wrong. Then she wondered at her own surprise. After all, Violet had been performing selfishness from the moment she set foot on board, and Maud… Maud was the nice one. Everyone knew that.

“I wondered,” Mrs. Vaughn went on, “if you might listen to reason.”

“Reason? Your friends magicked me to a chair and tried to pummel information out of me!”

“Friends? Indeed. Mr. Chapman was a Cooper.” Mrs. Vaughn shook her head like a disappointed grandmother. “The Coopers are bullies to a man, Miss Blyth. They’re in love with their own power and will eat from anyone’s hand if they think it’ll get them more. Chapman had all the worst of that with no strength of character to offset it.”

Maud, off-balance, barely managed to bite back her wholehearted agreement. Don’t interrupt, she told herself savagely. For once in your life, Maud Blyth, don’t open your mouth.

“Morris is a far better trained dog. He’s a blunt instrument in his master’s hand, and he can’t be turned. And these men tolerate me because I know things they need to know, but they still think there’s something grubby about their reliance on a woman. An old woman, at that. You call them my friends ?”

Mrs. Vaughn laughed. It was a comfortable chuckle, so warm and soft that you wanted to cut off a slice and spread it with butter. “You have no idea how angry these men are that they’ve been forced to look at old women and take them seriously. That idiot Chapman probably killed Beth out of sheer affront that she’d lifted her hands to do magic against him.”

“Then why work with them at all?” asked Maud. Should she be trying to reason with Mrs. Vaughn in return? Talk her out of it? All of Maud’s instincts still told her she was in danger, but Mrs. Vaughn was talking with the steady, slightly defensive fluency of someone who’d not been listened to and now had an audience. And Maud was so curious . She wanted to hear what kind of person Seraphina Hope was, outside of the story that Mrs. Navenby had told.

“Because their larger goals are laudable,” said Mrs. Vaughn simply.

“Stealing power?”

“Pooling power.” She frowned. “The fundamental limitation of magic is that it’s individual. We magicians only keep ourselves hidden because we’re vastly outnumbered, and working large spells needs difficult coordination.”

“You think magicians shouldn’t be secret?” said Maud. That was a new piece in this puzzle. “You think everyone should be—unbusheled.”

“I think the Forsythia Club didn’t go far enough,” said Mrs. Vaughn. “The world would have tried to stop us because we were women, and instead of laughing in their faces and proving them wrong, Flora made us stop ourselves .” A bitter, salt-soaked lash of a word. “We could have done things that no man ever could. We could have pushed magic further. We almost had more power than anyone, and we gave it up .”

“It sounds like you did do more than most men,” said Maud. “Incredible things. Wasn’t that enough?” But she thought of Violet, running across an ocean in order to live a life more magical than the one she’d been allotted.

“It’s a weak kind of ambition that recognises enough . I thought I’d found my true friends. I thought we were in agreement that we would change the world. Flora and her ley lines—she could have rerouted rivers, she could have uprooted every forest in England, and instead she scrabbled around in the dirt and grew roses. Beth was always flitting from one thing to the next, content to be a dabbler. And Lady Enid, who began on a higher footing than any of us, was happy to work with her husband for no more than music .”

There was so much disgust there that Maud pushed down her instinctive response. She thought of roses climbing the walls, and lights exploding in the sky, and glittering scarlet fish. She thought of Miss Broadley’s voice. She thought: Nothing is wasted that’s beautiful.

She chewed her lip as if in doubt. She took some truth and twisted it.

“I… I’ve always hated how little is expected of women. My brother didn’t take me seriously when I told him I wanted to study at university.”

“There, you see?” Mrs. Vaughn snorted.

“And you, ma’am?” Maud asked respectfully. “What was your speciality of magic?”

“Ah, well. There are still some ways for a small amount of magic to have a large effect,” said Mrs. Vaughn with a smile. “I could have poured one of my imbuements into the soup served at dinner, or into the freshwater tanks, and made this entire ship sleep for a hundred years. As though you, Miss Blyth, or some other princess, had pricked your finger on a spindle and cursed them.”

A chill passed through Maud at the thought of the ship floating forever, silent, too far from land to even overgrow with ivy and thorns.

“You imbued Lord Hawthorn’s whisky,” she blurted as the thought slotted home.

“He picked up on that, did he? I thought he must have, given he’s still walking around. Even a sip would have put an elephant into the depths of unconsciousness for a week. In a man, it’d have appeared almost like death.”

She sounded wistful that she hadn’t had the chance to see the success of her creation. Maud thought of Alan Ross, on whom magic never quite worked as it should, slumped on Hawthorn’s rug in a shallow and easily negated sleep.

“Regardless,” said Mrs. Vaughn. It took Maud a moment to remember what they’d been speaking of. The Forsythia Club and its goals—yes. “The others said that they wished to push at the boundaries of magic, to rewrite what men had assumed, but they all turned squeamish at the cost. And I was outvoted.”

And not trusted with a piece of the Last Contract. And had carried her bitterness beneath her tongue like an unswallowed pill all the years that followed.

They were close, so close, to the answers that Robin and Edwin had been seeking. Was the fragile kinship Maud had woven between them enough for her to dig further?

“What was the cost?”

Mrs. Vaughn’s gaze was distant, as if fixed far beyond the Lyric and all the souls aboard. “Oh, blood,” she said. “It always is, for real power.”

Maud drew breath to prod further, but the woman’s attention sharpened. Her eyes returned to Maud and a curtain drew over her expression.

“So yes, Miss Blyth. I considered it worth the tedium of dealing with men. Necessity makes strange bedfellows. If the contract can be put to its obvious purpose, every magician will benefit. Men and women alike.”

“And you honestly think these men will share their power with you when they have it?” It flared out of Maud before she could snatch it back.

Mrs. Vaughn’s face hardened. “I think I will live long enough to fix my mistakes. I have no intention of dying with regrets.”

“No—just making sure that your friends are murdered with theirs.”

“They made their choices,” Mrs. Vaughn snapped. “Flora was dead before I ever knew what was afoot.”

Maud bit her tongue on any further accusations. So—Mrs. Vaughn had told Bastoke’s conspirators where to find Lady Enid, who’d died just as Flora Sutton had, rather than betray the contract to them. And then—

“Did you come to America to try and talk Mrs. Navenby around to your side?” Maud asked.

A small, half-amused nod. The last knot of guilt in Maud, at the prospect that she might have led them to Mrs. Navenby and so caused her death, slipped gratefully free.

“They didn’t want a repeat of what happened with Enid. If nothing else, I knew Beth well enough that I might be able to discover what she’d done with the cup. But Morris had barely time to—what was that dreadful term?— scope out the joint, when you arrived, and Beth was suddenly making plans to move back to England.” A genteel shrug. “It’s all turned out for the best. We have the cup now. And we’ll have the knife, too, though that will go easier if someone sympathetic has Miss Debenham’s trust.”

It was an obvious prompt, seeking an obvious answer. Maud looked over at the well-lit portholes where the party carried on without her. Had Violet missed her yet? Had she come to the hatch and seen nothing but sky and the empty deck?

“You can’t let the dead rule your life, girl,” said Mrs. Vaughn. “Take my advice on that. You can only reach out and take what’s best for you .”

It echoed unpleasantly what Violet had said when Maud was tied to the chair; and Violet had been acting, but not quite acting.

And Maud was in the same fix, and it was going to have the same outcome. It was all so stupid. She was starting to tremble with cold.

“I’m sorry,” she said; the only lie she could muster. “I can’t help you. I won’t. Mrs. Navenby and I are in agreement on this point.”

“Why?” It sounded like a genuine question. “You don’t owe anything to the magicians of Britain.”

Hawthorn had said that. Violet had said that. All the usual answers—Robin, revenge for Mrs. Navenby, the inherent wrongness of taking from another without asking—brimmed on Maud’s tongue.

But she touched her mouth with the side of her thumb. And told the truth.

“No, I don’t. But if I have to create myself every day, with every choice I make, then I want to make the choices I won’t regret when I look back on my life at its end.”

There was a sigh from Mrs. Vaughn. “A pity. Life’s not kind to idealists, girl, when you haven’t the power to go with the ideas.”

She cradled. Maud barely had time to tense before the spell was done, a dense white light that Mrs. Vaughn turned on herself and rubbed into both of her forearms like cold cream. Then the old woman stood, creakingly, and offered Maud a hand up from the deck.

Maud, drilled in society manners and entirely unsure what was happening, took her hand.

The yank that brought her upright made Maud yelp with pain. She’d been braced for a gentle tug, not a pull like she’d been roped to a motorcar. Now Mrs. Vaughn held both of Maud’s arms snug against her sides, just above the elbows. Maud might have been wedged in a crevice of stone.

“Unlike the men with whom I find myself working,” said Mrs. Vaughn calmly, “I have no qualms about disappointing George Bastoke. It doesn’t matter who or what your brother is. If Elizabeth Navenby wants to stand between me and the power I’ve worked for, again, and if you will do nothing to prevent it, then I must act for myself.”

“What—”

Mrs. Vaughn’s spell-strengthened arms lifted Maud clear off her feet and then higher, as if she were no more than a hollow toy sewn from leaves and feathers. Maud let out a shriek, and then a louder one, and tried to kick for all she was worth, but her aim was wild with panic and her toes kept glancing off the vast softness and slipperiness of Mrs. Vaughn’s skirts.

She was two feet off the ground. The breeze off the sea, swift and sly and suddenly hungry, dragged cold fingers over the bare skin of Maud’s neck and arms. And Maud realised what was about to happen.

As Mrs. Vaughn lifted her clear over the railing at the edge of the deck, Maud found an icy point right in the centre of her fear. It said: This, or nothing .

Survive, or nothing.

She lashed out one last time with her foot and connected with a crunch.

Mrs. Vaughn made a grunt of pain and fumbled her grip. Maud scrabbled in midair. Her stomach formed a stone as she realised it was too late—she was too far out over the edge. Nothing but magic could save her from falling now.

For a single, awful moment she was facing straight down, into the distant black expanse of the sea: a foam-tipped mouth waiting to swallow her cold.

But she had the use of her arms back.

Mrs. Vaughn was still cursing behind her, and the skirts of Maud’s lovely dress slithered against the damp metal of the rail as she tipped over, and she twisted her body in a movement that felt like it came from that smouldering wordless place of anger deep inside her chest. Her hands moved frantically. They wanted to grab . The railing was just there, and her only option.

She missed the top rail. One finger erupted in new pain from jarring at an angle, and she slid down—grabbed for the lower rail, hearing a sound like a snarling fox come from her mouth—and she had it with one hand, which began at once to slide free—and then the other.

Another yank. Her shoulder throbbed. Something tore in the bodice of her dress.

But it was the yank of a body’s weight coming to a stop.

It had taken—how many heartbeats? Time had turned slow and cold, and fire-hot and fast, both at once. And now Maud and her layers and layers of clothes, Maud who’d never learned to swim, dangled high above the night-darkened ocean, from ten gloved fingers holding cold damp metal with no magic to strengthen their grip.

Mrs. Vaughn appeared at the railing. Her nose bled an inky streak down the blur of her face. She glanced down at Maud, made a tutting sound, and fished something from a sleeve to dab at her nose. They were farther from the light. Maud couldn’t see the woman’s expression, just the white flag of her handkerchief.

Any moment now, Mrs. Vaughn would take hold of Maud’s hands and pry them loose.

Lifting one of her own hands from the rail was the hardest thing Maud had done in her life. She slid her freed hand into her pocket.

First she touched the bowl. The cause of all of this. For a wild tantrum of a moment she pictured herself tossing the bloody thing into the sea. But no: Maud could fight for Britain’s magicians, but it wasn’t up to her to make choices of that size on their behalf. She was done trampling on people’s lives and powers without thought.

The other object in Maud’s pocket was something she’d found in Chapman’s room.

Maud had searched Chapman’s luggage, looking for clues about the contract, while Violet took the desk and dresser. The hinged wooden box had been tucked into a travelling bag. Inside it were nestled a cluster of glass baubles the size of a nutmeg, each one filled with smoke of a different hue.

Chapman had flung one into the motorcar to make Maud and Violet climb out. And before that, when they first found the stolen silver, Maud remembered Chapman beginning to toss one at Hawthorn before his lordship got him in the knees with a stick. A neat little box of nasty tricks. Perhaps, like the priez-vous, all the Coopers used them.

Maud had quietly transferred the baubles into her own possession. She hadn’t told Hawthorn; he’d likely try to take them off her, for her own good. She hadn’t even told Violet. After the Goblin’s Bridle, after being hit and kicked and threatened with worse, Maud had gratefully seized the prospect of having some secret magic defences of her own. She’d brought a jade-green bauble in her pocket tonight, much as Violet had brought her collection of rings.

Now she closed her fingers carefully around it and pulled her hand free.

A curtain-spell, like an illusion, requires sustained focus .

“Now then,” said Mrs. Vaughn, rather nasally. “Let’s—”

Maud lifted the bauble with her aching arm and tossed it right into the woman’s face.

Only the edge of the smell caught Maud, but it was still enough for her to retch: a solid, horrific stench of rot. She turned her face away, shoved her free hand over her mouth and nose, and took a huge breath through the damp dirty palm of her glove.

Then she opened her mouth and screamed—a shrill, high sound as loud as she could make it. With the next breath she yelled, “ Help! Someone help! ” for good measure, before screaming again.

Mrs. Vaughn was coughing into her hands. She stumbled away. Now all Maud could see was the white rail and her own gloves, gripping it with shaking fingers—she latched on her second hand, feeling the muscles of her forearms stretch painfully—and the side of the ship above the deck, stretching up and up to where plumes of smoke from the vast chimneys cast a blurred shadow on the night sky.

Maud sucked in another breath for the next scream. The jade-green stench was thinning with the wind. Her arms burned and she felt frantically for toeholds. Her shoes scrabbled against metal panels dotted with cruelly small bolts and irregularities. The top railing would take so much strength to reach, it might as well have been yards above her head.

Could she hear voices? She couldn’t hear music any longer, but the wind and her own pulse were exchanging breathless cries in her ears.

Her left hand spasmed and slipped free, and the next scream was entirely involuntary, short and sharp. Robin, Robin, I’m so sorry. She gritted her jaw so hard with anger that her face ached.

“Maud!”

It was Violet, her voice harsh and thin with fear as she leaned over the rail. Maud almost sobbed. “Careful!” she gasped, as Violet’s clumsy grab nearly dislodged her fingers.

“Vi, get out of the way” came another voice, just as harsh.

A second pair of hands—these ones ungloved, thin fingers brimming with a murky-gold spell—descended in her direction. She strained, flailing up with her free left hand—missed once, missed again—and was caught fast.

Clarence Blackwood’s grip lacked the iron strength that Mrs. Vaughn had used, but something about it felt utterly unshakable, as if he’d welded his palms to her wrist. Maud’s right hand slipped from the rail. She barely budged an inch, dangling from the single arm in Clarence’s grasp.

“Can—grab Vi with the other,” Clarence panted. “Might take both of us.”

Violet took fresh hold of Maud’s hand and leaned perilously far down to grab Maud’s dress at the shoulder. Fabric strained and tore as she and Clarence heaved, but Maud was held steady, and she let out her breath in a wheezy sob as her waist passed over the railing and she half slid, half fell in an awkward heap on the deck.

“I’m fine,” she found herself saying, over and over. “I’m fine, I’m fine. Really. I’m fine.”

She was mostly trying to convince herself. She would sort out the truth of it later.

She struggled to her feet with Violet’s help and looked around. People were trickling out onto the deck and pressing their noses to the portholes, trying to see what the commotion was about. She saw the top of Lord Hawthorn’s head where he was using his cane and his sharpest manner to part the thicket of people in the hatchway.

And there. Off to the side and half-shadowed was Mrs. Vaughn, her face now clear of blood, her hands folded in front of her—a harmless, currant-bun woman with a will as large as the moon.

She smiled as she met Maud’s eyes and cradled something, then disappeared entirely.