Chapter Seven #3
“All right.” Miss Llewelyn’s gaze was nakedly curious now.
Vesper led them behind the bar and through a small doorway set among the shelves of spirits and mysterious bottles.
They emerged into a narrow hallway painted a rich blue, the walls lined with framed newspaper articles.
Leaning closer, Max realized that they contained coverage of the club from over the years—largely from The Spark, but some from The Times and The Evening Standard as well.
Vesper brought them to some sort of sitting room, presumably for use by the club’s staff, which was filled with well-loved furniture and an enormous carpet in an intricate blue-and-brown pattern.
There was a fireplace, though the fire within had been allowed to go out; Vesper crossed to the mantel, retrieved a bit of powder from a battered silver pot, and, with a surreptitious glance over her shoulder at Max, tossed it in the grate. Immediately, flames whooshed to life.
Precisely how many small bits of magic, he wondered suddenly, were the Marylebone families still using?
She turned back to them, looking pleased with herself as she tucked an unruly curl behind one ear.
Miss Llewelyn wasted no time in sinking down onto one of the tartan sofas that faced the fireplace.
After a moment’s hesitation, Max joined her.
She eyed him with considerable interest; Max couldn’t work out if she suspected, somehow, that he was an F.L.E.A.
—or at least somehow not sympathetic to the magical cause—or if it was solely his presence here with Vesper that was causing such scrutiny.
Vesper perched on the edge of an armchair; the fire that had roared to life in the grate behind her now gilded the bare skin of her arms, the curve of her cheek.
She met Miss Llewelyn’s gaze. “We’re trying to work out what went wrong last night, so we can ensure it never happens again.
Do you recall anything about the chap who ordered the Fizz? ”
Miss Llewelyn looked back at Vesper, chewing her lower lip thoughtfully.
“There was a group of boys who all wanted Flotation Fizzes—five or six of them, at least. And it’s an easy enough potion to make—just gin, lemon, champagne, and a bit of the lemon-flavored syrup, isn’t it?
I could make it in my sleep. I made them all at once and handed them off to the boys.
I can’t understand how something could have gone wrong with the magic itself, if none of the others were ill. ”
Vesper was frowning now. “You’re certain you made the whole batch at the same time?”
Miss Llewelyn nodded. “They were all standing there—one of them offered to buy me a potion so I could join them. Somehow, I mustered the willpower to decline,” she added with an eloquent eye roll.
Vesper’s frown deepened. “And you handed them all to the boys themselves?”
Miss Llewelyn paused, clearly deep in thought. “A couple of the boys—and one of them I handed to a girl they were with.”
“A girl?” Max asked, straightening in his seat. “What girl?”
Miss Llewelyn shrugged. “Blond. Slender. She had beautiful blue eyes, and the loveliest long eyelashes—she was very pretty, and clearly one of those women who knows it. She’d already had a potion or two—I noticed the shimmer.
” She gestured at her hairline. “Actually, come to think of it, I’m not certain she was with them—the boys, I mean.
She sort of materialized as soon as I began handing out the potions, and the two boys who had come to collect them couldn’t carry them all, so she took one to deliver to someone. ”
“The one whose potion was contaminated?” Vesper asked.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t looking at their faces that carefully. They all sort of blended together—young, posh, English, you know?”
Max, after years at Harrow and then, after the war, Cambridge, did know.
“How long were they in the backdoor bar, after drinking their potions?” Max asked.
“About three-quarters of an hour, I suppose; the Flotation Fizz is pretty fast-acting, only takes about five minutes or so for it to kick in, but then it only lasts for about a half hour—unless,” she added cannily, “you buy another.” She leaned forward confidingly.
“Vesper’s very good at convincing men that they ought to just buy a second potion to have on hand when the first one wears off. ”
“Why does that not surprise me,” Max murmured, and Vesper laughed. It was a loud, delighted sound—entirely different from the coy, tinkling, flirtatious laugh she’d given him the night before at the club, when she’d been trying to work out why he was there.
“I lost sight of them at some point,” Miss Llewelyn continued, “so they must’ve gone out to the main bar once they stopped floating. Or once they thought they had.”
“And what about the woman who was with them?” Vesper asked.
“I didn’t see her again,” Miss Llewelyn said. “I didn’t think about it, given all the chaos.”
Vesper turned her head sharply in Max’s direction, and he met her gaze with a grim twist of the mouth.
If someone had somehow tampered with the potion—slipped something into it, or performed some magic of their own—then this woman sounded like an excellent candidate. The problem now, of course, was that they had no bloody clue who she was, or how to find her.