Chapter Forty-One Lady Liar
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Lady Liar
Inside the ghostly hour, Morrigan found a room bathed in the full fiery glow of sunset, a jasmine-scented summer breeze that gently ruffled the curtains, and the bellowing voice of an utterly incensed teenage girl.
‘I am NOT coming downstairs, and I am NOT wearing that hideous dress!’
Meredith Darling was sitting on the bed. The same bed Morrigan had slept in all winter long.
Morrigan pressed a fist to her mouth, trying to keep in the hysterical laugh or scream or sob that suddenly wanted to escape. She rushed to close the distance between them, standing as close as she dared, scrutinising the furious face of young Meredith Darling as she shouted words Morrigan could barely take in.
‘I don’t CARE who’s coming to the stupid party, and I don’t CARE what they think of me. Tell them I’m sick. Tell them I died !’
Years of gazing at her mother’s portrait, of memorising every hair and freckle and line on her face, still hadn’t prepared her for the real thing. Morrigan wasn’t sure what it was exactly – maybe the stubborn angle of the chin, or the way the dark eyebrows drew together, or something around the mouth – but for the first time ever, she thought she could see herself in that face. Just a little.
Meredith looked perhaps two or three years older than Morrigan. She was taller than expected, and the blonde hair that had fallen past her shoulders in the portrait was short and blunt, cut just below her ears.
‘What a dreadful thing to say. Stop being so horrid.’ Morrigan’s head snapped to the sound of a voice she knew. An older girl with pale thin limbs and unmistakable poise stood by the wardrobe holding a peach-coloured dress in her arms – the same ruffled monstrosity Morrigan had ruined at the wedding. ‘Abigail Blumenthal will be delighted to see a Darling girl wearing her latest design, and Mother says the Blumenthals have fourteen names on their door, so we ought to keep them on side.’ Margot regarded her younger sister with a look of superior calm that Morrigan was now familiar with.
‘I don’t care if Abigail Blumenthal has a thousand names on her door. I’m not wearing her ugly dress and I’m not coming . You can’t force me!’
‘Of course I can, dear.’ Margot’s tone had barely changed at all, but Morrigan felt a dangerous shift in the air. ‘Give me one good reason why you don’t want to go.’
‘I can give you dozens, and they’re all downstairs stuffing their faces with crab cakes in our parlour.’ Meredith slid off the bed and began to pace, counting on her fingers. ‘One, Gerald York kicks his hunting dogs AND talks with his mouth full. Two, if I have to listen to Marjorie Fairchild find new and creative ways to call her daughters fat, I’m going to hold her head under the waterfall gate. Three, I cannot spend another night pretending to care about the twelve-step haircare routine of Conrad Carrington – the most conceited person in the realm – while he stares over my shoulder at his own reflection. Four—’
‘Meredith, Lord York is your godfather,’ said Margot, with the strained patience of a nursery teacher asking a toddler to put their shoes on. ‘ Lady Fairchild is the biggest gossip in the district and could permanently tarnish your reputation during a single loose-lipped afternoon tea, should she wish to. And Lord Conrad will one day be the head of a very large, influential house with a great deal of voting power in the Silver Assembly, making him a valuable ally.’ She heaved a long-suffering sigh. ‘Couldn’t you pretend to be polite to our neighbours for one night?’
Meredith collapsed onto the bed, groaning. ‘It’s not one night, it’s never one night . It’s EVERY NIGHT for the REST OF OUR LIVES. How can you bear it, Margot? You don’t like any of these people either, I know you don’t!’
‘Of course not, they’re positively heinous. But I’ve been planning this party for weeks and I won’t let you ruin it.’ Margot took a deep breath and forced a smile.
‘What happened to you?’ Meredith sat up suddenly, throwing her elder sister a look of pure contempt. ‘We used to sneak out of these stupid parties together, and now you’re hosting them. We used to make fun of all the boring debutantes turning into their parents the second they come of age. Now you’re one of them! The future Lady Darling , smarming up to all the people she secretly hates. It’s pathetic, Margot.’
‘How lucky you are to be so superior to the rest of us.’ Margot marched over to the bed and threw the dress down beside her sister. ‘You are a spoiled, selfish girl with no idea of how precarious our family’s position is, nor the work it takes to protect it. Get up this instant, Meredith, and stop behaving like a child.’
‘At least I’m not behaving like a snake! I can’t pretend to like people I despise, Margot. I’m not a liar like you.’
‘You have five seconds—’
‘Lady Liar, that’s what we should call you.’
‘I mean it, Meredith.’
‘Lady Fake. Lady SNAKE!’
Margot lashed out, her hand connecting with Meredith’s cheek in a sharp, resounding slap. Morrigan and her mother both gasped in unison, but Meredith recovered from the shock much faster. In a heartbeat, her hand shot out to return the blow with a fierce crack across Margot’s cold face.
The terrible moment lingered, the two sisters glaring at each other in thunderstruck silence. But when Margot spoke again, her voice was calm and measured.
‘I have guests to take care of. Tidy yourself up, put on that dress and be downstairs with a smile on your face in no more than ten minutes.’
‘I’ll cut it up into a million pieces and scatter it in the canal!’ Meredith promised darkly, blinking back furious tears.
‘You may do whatever you wish with it, after tonight. I’ll even hand you the scissors. But first you’ll wear it, and behave yourself, and be thankful for the privilege of being a pretty girl from a noble family wearing an expensive dress to a fancy party. Because if you don’t,’ Margot paused before delivering her trump card, ‘I’ll tell Mother and Father about those awful boys you’ve been sneaking around with.’
Meredith paled slightly. ‘What boys?’
‘That pompous law scholar and his ghoulish friend. Do you think I’m stupid?’ asked Margot, rolling her eyes. ‘Even if I hadn’t seen you and Kitty Beauregard slinking off with them to the Talon & Horn, I can read you like a book, Meredith.’
Her sister blinked but said nothing.
‘Stealing my makeup? This new monstrosity of a haircut? Do at least try to neaten it up, it looks disgusting.’
Meredith smoothed the jagged bob. ‘I don’t care what you think of my hair.’
‘And I don’t care what you think of this dress,’ continued Margot icily. ‘You will wear it, and you will charm our guests into believing that you are a lovely girl with lovely manners, not a wretched little ingrate who ought to have been abandoned to a puppy shelter on the day she was born.’ Margot flounced away with her nose in the air, turning back as she reached the door. ‘And that, dear sister, is that.’
‘LADY HORRIBLE!’ Meredith shouted at her, trying to throw the dress across the room and succeeding only in getting herself tangled.
Margot snorted. ‘Lady Horrible. I rather like that one.’
The second the door closed, Meredith leapt up and ran to the dresser, rummaging in the drawers until she found what she was looking for. She marched back to snatch up the loathed dress, holding a pair of scissors in one trembling hand and the ruffled hem of the skirt in the other for at least fifteen furious seconds, before her nerve failed her. She threw the scissors on the floor, shoved her face in the fabric and let out a long, muffled scream.
Morrigan knew what was coming next before it even happened. This was why this moment had called out to her through time, she realised now. Her flare in the dark . She’d thought the dress was the signal … and perhaps it was, but it was also the words her mother now sat on the floor carving feverishly into the bedpost with the scissors, suffusing the scars in the wood with all her childish frustration and fury.
I HATE LADY HORRIBLE
Squall had looped the ghostly hour, so the moment it ended it started again. Morrigan lost count of how many times she let it play, watching the scene unfold from every possible angle. She watched it so many times over the coming days that soon she’d memorised all the lines. She watched it in every spare moment, slipping eagerly through the sliver of light and into the past, hungry for one more minute with Meredith Darling. Angry, spoiled, frustrated, shouty, wonderful, real Meredith Darling.
She’d even snuck Cadence and Hawthorne through her station door to watch it with her one day after school. When the two sisters slapped each other, Cadence’s horror-struck reaction mirrored Morrigan’s own. But Hawthorne was unbothered.
‘That’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Homer and Helena and I have had some absolute corkers . And Baby Dave once bit me so hard I had to have a tetanus shot.’
Morrigan found it harder to shrug off. Though the life-changing magic of being in the same room as her mother never seemed to grow old, it sat uncomfortably alongside a growing unease about Aunt Margot. If the veil around her aunt had begun to slip at the Feast of the Manyhands, it had been yanked off altogether by what she’d seen in the ghostly hour.
The teenage Margot might have had a point about her sister acting like a child (neither girl had acquitted herself particularly well in that argument, Morrigan thought). But Meredith was right when she’d called Margot Lady Liar .
It had taken Morrigan much too long to see it, she knew that now. Aunt Margot had lied to her about her mother. Twice. First, she’d said at the wedding that Meredith had loved the hideous peach dress. Second, she’d said that when Meredith had chopped off all her hair, Margot had thought it ‘rather chic’ – which was quite different to a ‘monstrosity’ that looked ‘disgusting’.
To anyone else these might have seemed like harmless fibs. But to Morrigan, for whom every scrap of information about her mother was rare and precious, this felt like an outrageous betrayal. When she tried to explain it to her best friends, she almost wanted them to say she was overreacting, that it wasn’t that big a deal. Unfortunately, they agreed with her completely.
‘Puts her higher up the suspect list too, doesn’t it?’ said Hawthorne. ‘If she can lie so easily about your mum, what else is she lying about?’
Morrigan had been creeping towards the same conclusion. It didn’t help that her aunt’s alibi was still a question mark. When she’d tried to ask Aunt Margot where she’d been during the cake-cutting, the conversation was swiftly shut down, supposedly because Modestine’s wedding was ‘much too upsetting to talk about’.
‘I thought our motive for her was weak,’ Cadence said thoughtfully, ‘but now we know what a vicious temper she has, I’m not so sure. If she found out Dario was betraying her sister, she might have snapped.’
‘It’s the Vulture’s motive that’s weak,’ said Hawthorne. ‘Showing up at parties and acting like a weirdo doesn’t make him a murderer. It just makes him a weirdo who likes parties.’
‘He also has a connection to Dario,’ Morrigan pointed out. ‘He helped him design Vesta’s chair, remember?’
‘Yeah … pretty nice of him ,’ Hawthorne said pointedly.
‘We’ve got to knuckle down and focus,’ said Cadence. ‘Especially now we’re down to four suspects, since Lady Darling’s crossed off the list.’
Morrigan was quite proud of herself for that bit of investigative prowess. She’d managed to obtain an alibi for her grandmother and corroborate Uncle Tobias’s alibi by pretending she’d been sent to the kitchen to fetch tea for her grandmother. With a bit of subtle prompting, a chatty kitchen maid confirmed she’d seen Tobias on the night of the wedding, leaving Lady Darling’s room sometime near midnight.
It was proving much harder to nail down the whereabouts of their other suspects. Largely because Noelle and her parents – or the ‘Phantoms of the Greater Circle’, as Morrigan heard Lady Prisha slyly refer to them over tea at Mahapatra House – still hadn’t been seen at any social events since the Feast of the Manyhands. Not that Cadence was accepting that as an excuse.
‘What about the break-and-enter twins?’ she asked. ‘Couldn’t they take you lintel-jumping into Noelle’s bedroom or something?’
‘It’s lintel-hopping, and I don’t … um.’ Morrigan racked her brain for a reason why that would be a bad idea, apart from the obvious ‘Noelle would probably murder me on sight’. Annoyingly, though, it was a rather good idea. ‘Yeah. I guess it’s worth a try.’
At least if Louis and Lottie were there, Noelle might resist the urge to attack her with a blunt instrument. Maybe.