Chapter Five
Vesper had many virtues—presumably; most people did, after all—but being an early riser was not one of them.
“Ugh,” she said later that morning as she opened her eyes to autumn sunlight streaming in through a crack in the curtains.
She squinted at the clock on her bedside table—half eight, an hour that she would happily never greet consciously again in her life—and turned back to scowl at the reason she was awake right now:
Her cat, Sheep.
“Meow?” Sheep asked from her favorite perch: directly atop Vesper’s chest, her fluffy white face approximately three inches from Vesper’s.
“Urgh,” Vesper said.
“Meow,” Sheep replied, sounding offended. She leaned close enough to lick Vesper’s nose, twice.
“Sheep, for Merlin’s sake,” Vesper said, reaching up to bodily toss the cat—all eight pounds of her—off the bed. Sheep landed on her feet, naturally, and leveled a wounded gaze at Vesper, allowing approximately one second of silence to elapse before commencing a rousing chorus of indignant meows.
“I’m up, I’m up,” Vesper said, flinging back the eiderdown and shivering in the cool air of her bedroom.
She’d worn her coziest flannel pajamas to bed the night before, not having any company that she cared to impress, and was glad of it this morning.
She pulled back the curtains enough to glimpse a sliver of perfect, autumnal blue sky, and then—no longer able to ignore Sheep’s mournful laments—padded to the kitchen, where she opened a tin of tuna for her ladyship.
Vesper set the kettle to boil on the hob and spooned tea leaves into her favorite yellow teapot that Cecily had brought home as a gift from her honeymoon in Italy.
She considered the shelves above the hob, and reached for a tea tin that was labeled ASSAM but which, upon being opened, was revealed to contain a shimmering, faintly green powder.
Vesper carefully spooned half a teaspoon into her pot, where it would dissolve into her tea, and replaced the tin on the shelf.
Mackleworth’s Headache Powder; there were any number of mundane headache remedies, of course, but none of them worked so well as Mackleworth’s, which had been made with the Mackleworth family’s carefully guarded Word for over two hundred years, and Vesper certainly wasn’t going to stop using it just because it was technically illegal.
Once the water had boiled, Vesper took herself and her tea tray into the sitting room, eyeing the fireplace.
Four hundred years ago, she—or someone in her family, at least—would have been able to light that fire with a single Word.
Vesper thought, sometimes, about what it would have been like to have so much more power readily available—but, on the other hand, she was rather fond of automobiles, gramophones, and indoor plumbing, and so wasn’t certain she’d wish to trade the many technological comforts of her life solely for the sake of a bit more magic in return.
So, instead, she contented herself with crossing the room to toss a handful of Speedy Sparks Powder onto the logs in the grate, which obligingly burst into cheerful flames.
It was still considerably more efficient than trying to coax a fire to life without magical assistance, even if it lacked the flair of spoken-word spells.
Stirring a healthy amount of both milk and sugar into her tea—Vesper was not one to skimp on little luxuries—she stared down at the morning papers, flicking through them hastily to see if there was any word of the previous night’s events at Holloway’s.
After several minutes, she sagged back onto the settee, breathing a sigh of relief—the dailies did not seem to have picked up the story.
But still—if this was twice now, in a week, that someone had suffered a bad reaction to a potion or spell powder at a magical club, surely it was only a matter of time before the papers took notice.
Which meant that, for the time being, helping Max bloody Ashbridge with his little investigation was a matter of self-preservation in multiple ways.
Vesper sighed, shaking her head as she sipped her tea. Sheep, having finished her breakfast, trotted into the room as if she owned the place and fixed Vesper with an inquisitive look.
“Meow?” she asked, tilting her head to the side.
“I don’t know, old pal,” Vesper said, reaching down to scoop the cat into her arms; she was fairly light, as most of her bulk was fluff, rather than body mass. “But I’m going to find out.”
Vesper might have known her reprieve from interrogation would only last so long—and the fact that she made it until eleven fifteen that morning was, in truth, nothing short of a minor miracle.
“Hello, darling,” her mother said, causing Vesper to jump about a foot in the air as she poked a cautious head out her front door and prepared to set off, vague thoughts about a walk in Regent’s Park and then popping round to see if Hazel was available for lunch swirling in her head.
Her mother, however, had clearly anticipated that some such evasive maneuver was likely, because she was waiting, fully dressed, complete with a stylish pink cloche and a matching cape, directly outside Vesper’s door.
“How long have you been standing there?” Vesper demanded, clutching her chest and waiting for her heart rate to return to normal.
“Only five minutes or so,” her mother said brightly.
“Then how—oh,” Vesper said, realizing at once what her mother had done. “Not that bloody prediction potion again.”
“Yes, darling, that bloody prediction potion,” Amelia agreed. The potion in question was made with a specific Word that Amelia had inherited from her own magical family, and allowed her to know whenever her children were about to leave or return to the house.
“I was just about to go for a walk in the park,” Vesper said, in a desperate attempt at escape.
“I’m sure you were,” her mother said, unfazed. “Why don’t I join you, and while we walk, you can explain to me what exactly happened at the club last night.”
Vesper sighed; she’d been hoping to stop by her parents’ for cocktails that evening and present the tale of the previous night’s events in a calm, rational manner, one that would reassure them that there was no cause for concern.
The moment her mother had trapped her outside her front door, however, she’d known that this plan was no longer going to be possible.
She wondered gloomily who had betrayed her: Amir?
Any of the other half dozen staff members who had been present? Or did gossip simply travel that fast?
Vesper and her mother set off in the direction of the park.
It was the sort of day that October was meant for, crisp and sunny and smelling faintly of woodsmoke.
Vesper found herself possessed by the wild desire to gather conkers or pick apples, as if she were some sort of wholesome countryside lass and not someone who only owned one pair of shoes suitable for walking great distances.
“There was an incident last night,” Vesper said, having delayed as long as was plausible by making a great show of cooing over every dog they passed on the street. “A gentleman had an unusual reaction to a Flotation Fizz.”
“I see,” Amelia said, her tone giving away nothing of her thoughts. They had reached the edge of the park, and began to meander down the Broad Walk. “And is he all right?”
“He is,” Vesper said quickly. “The effects wore off quite rapidly.”
She glanced sideways at her mother in time to see Amelia’s brow furrow slightly in thought; it was a gesture she tended to avoid if she could help it, out of vanity.
The line-eliminating elixir she drank with her breakfast each morning—procured at considerable cost from the Grimme-Noxes, whose skills had always lain in the line of small, appearance-modifying spells and who in addition to their club ran a lucrative pharmacy as well—only lasted for a few hours, after all.
“If it was another one of these idiots with an allergy—”
“He said he’d never reacted badly to potions before,” Vesper said, considering her words carefully.
She didn’t want to outright lie to her mother—that had a history of ending badly for her—but nor did she want to encourage even more meddling at Holloway’s, not when she had a plan in place to get to the bottom of the matter.
“But as it happens, there was someone present last night who wants to… look into it. So I’m going to help him. ”
An arched brow. “Oh? And who was that?”
“Maxwell Ashbridge.”
“Ashbridge,” her mother repeated, as if trying to place the name. A moment later, she cottoned. “Not Freddie’s friend from Cambridge?”
“Yes,” Vesper admitted.
“Is he not the one that your brother noted on his little list at dinner last night?”
“Mummy—”
“Oh, Vesper, for heaven’s sake!” Amelia flung her hands into the air, startling a nearby pigeon, which hopped away in alarm. “When we were just discussing the fact that we need to be particularly careful.”
“I wasn’t the one who invited him to the club,” Vesper said, nettled. “You might tell Freddie to speak to Dashiell St. Clair about the company he keeps.”
Amelia sighed, shaking her head. “Wasn’t he always horribly prudish about magic, too? That’ll make him more difficult to bribe.”
“Yes,” Vesper said, the word clipped.
There were any number of reasons that the magical families had run into trouble and disapproval from the mundane world over the years—there were the aristocrats who had always found the magical families threatening; the royal family, too, had never been thrilled by the existence of a subset of society with powers the crown could not harness for themselves; there were the superstitious and the religious who believed that all so-called witchcraft was the work of the devil.
Vesper didn’t much care which camp Ashbridge himself fell into.
“It doesn’t matter,” Vesper said. “He’s agreed not to shut down the club if I help him investigate the source of the bad potion, though.”
“Help him how?”
Vesper shrugged. “Take him to a few of the other magical clubs—ones he’d have difficulty getting into on his own.”
Amelia stopped in her tracks. “Vesper Holloway, you do not mean to tell me that you’re helping him conduct raids.”
“No!” Vesper protested. “He’s not going to raid any of them—we’re just trying to see if we can work out who’s responsible for tampering with the magic.
It’s not as if the government’s going to continue turning a blind eye if people are repeatedly falling ill when they visit one of the clubs.
And we certainly don’t want word to spread—it would be very bad for business. ”
“It will also be very bad for business if all the clubs in Marylebone are shut down by the Fleas. And if we find ourselves blacklisted among our colleagues because you became a government informant.”
This, while a touch melodramatic, did give Vesper pause.
An unpleasant chill crept through her, because she realized that her mother was right—her idea, which had seemed so brilliant at half past midnight, when she was shaken up from the evening’s events and scrambling desperately to work out how to keep Ashbridge off her back, did have a rather obvious flaw to it.
A moment later, however, she brightened.
“Ashbridge is coming to dinner tonight,” she assured her mother.
“I’ll speak to him about all of this—see if I can’t work some sort of promise out of him.
” While Ashbridge seemed to be alarmingly immune to her charms, that must simply indicate that she’d not been trying hard enough.
She would force him to see things from her perspective, somehow.
She was Vesper Holloway—she always got what she wanted.
Well, almost always.
Amelia still looked skeptical. “Darling, I’m not certain this is wise—”
“Well, I’ve no other choice. He saw someone quite plainly under the influence of a magical substance within the walls of Holloway’s last night, and if we don’t want him to shut us down, I’d better keep myself in his good graces.
Unless you’d rather I rang him up and said that oh, never mind, I won’t be helping him after all, and would he please consider not informing his superiors about the illegal trade we conduct on a nightly basis? ”
Amelia sighed, but she was a practical enough creature to realize when a battle was lost—at least for the moment.
“Perhaps you ought to consider going to bed with him,” she said, very casually, as if she were suggesting that Vesper invite Ashbridge over for tea.
“Mother!”
“What?” Amelia raised her hands. “If you seem lovestruck, then no one will think it odd to see you waltzing about with him. And he might prove very convincible afterward, you know—men so often do.”
“I think that option will be my last resort,” Vesper said diplomatically, not wanting to admit the fact that, unfortunately, Ashbridge had made it quite clear in the past that he had no interest at all in going to bed with her.
“And I expect merely being seen with him will be enough to allow people to draw their own conclusions about what we’re doing together. ”
“I suppose so,” her mother agreed, sounding somewhat glum at being deprived of the entertainment of her youngest child whoring herself out for the sake of a clandestine investigation. “Your romantic history is a bit checkered, after all. I never thought that would be a good thing!”
And then, with a tinkling sort of laugh, she led Vesper on a brisk circuit of the park, during which Vesper wondered if her mother had just, in a backhanded sort of way, called her a loose woman, and whether she ought to be offended if she had.