Chapter 2 #3
“Ha!” Vincent clapped him on the shoulder. “Your wit hasn’t dulled one bit! Oh, I must go tend to something, but I’ll meet you at the tailor’s in a few hours… Nine o’clock sharp. Just tell Biz where to send the car!”
He ambled off into the crowd, who’d started dancing to some new knee-swinging tune.
Ezra and Biz were alone again. Now was his chance to warn her, to make sure she didn’t make an irrevocable mistake, but when he stared at the young woman, with her lush green gown and her holly-berry lips, looking so hauntingly similar to George, he couldn’t speak.
There was a thorniness in the air between them—rather different from those previous pins and needles.
Her stabbing smile, at least, had faded. “What’s wrong, Ezra?”
Nothing. Nothing was wrong. Not in a way he could say, but there was that sixth sense he’d always had—the one that warned Ezra when a storm was brewing. He’d had to invent a war wound to explain it to people like Vincent, while really the stiffness wasn’t in his flesh but in his soul.
“Ezra…” Biz’s voice dropped low, so low that he almost couldn’t hear it for the band’s growling double bass. “Ezra, are you seeing things again?”
He thought of the gallery sculptures’ whispers.
The fourth woman with the black wings.
There was no again. Ezra had lived most of his life with a prickle at the back of his neck—an awareness other people didn’t have.
It had been both worse in the war, and better, because at least in the heat of battle he’d had an excuse for seeing things that weren’t there.
But shell shock didn’t explain the scuttling amethyst scarabs he’d seen as a child.
It didn’t account for the strange locked door on the ocean liner back to England that he’d peeked through to see forest on the other side.
It didn’t justify why Ezra had always seemed to see certain people’s auras…
a color and glow that crowned their brow.
His mother’s—he remembered—had been turquoise.
The winged woman he’d seen at Amiens was unrepentantly silver.
What if… what if angels were real?
This was the true question at the heart of his dissertation.
The one he’d been unable to voice in Professor Blythe’s office.
Or anywhere else, for that matter. What if he wasn’t teetering on the edge of madness, but something far greater?
The possibility was gripping enough to squeeze his breath away.
But Biz wasn’t glowing. Not even the way a newly engaged woman should be.
Ezra shook his head. “I’m just tired, Biz. Don’t waste your time worrying about me.”
“Waste?” Her eyebrows seized as she repeated this.
“You think I’m wasting my time—I—Ezra… Ezra, it’s been eight years.
Eight years since you went off to war and never came back.
You even stopped writing, after we got the news about George…
” Again, the name changed the air between them, twisting the space even tighter.
“I started to fear the worst for you too. In my mind’s eye I saw you dying in some muddy field, all alone.
I must have pictured a thousand deaths, each worse than the last. Caught in barbed wire.
Gutted by a bayonet. Burned from the inside out by mustard gas.
I—” Biz took a shuddering breath. “I even made you a little memorial next to George’s, on the stump of our old wishing tree. I set fresh flowers there every week.”
“Biz—”
“I’m not sure what was worse,” she went on, “believing you were dead or reading in the papers that you’d received the Victoria Cross at Buckingham Palace. In person. That you were back in England, but you never came home.”
Thornhill wasn’t home. Lord Blackwood had made that quite clear.
I cannot lose another child… It’s best for everyone if you leave now. Disappear.
Ezra swallowed. Should he tell her about meeting her father in London, just before he’d been weighted down with that damned cross, where he was told in no uncertain terms to stay away from the Ellington estate?
He couldn’t let Biz in on that conversation.
Should he tell her about all the letters he’d sent from the front?
No doubt censored. Blackened even before Lord Blackwood burned them in his office fireplace.
He’d been silent for so long.
Even longer now.
Biz dabbed the raw edges of her eyes with the already-stained handkerchief.
“I never meant to hurt you, Biz,” he said softly.
“But the thing is, a part of me did die, in France. I didn’t want you to see the broken man who was left…
” Ezra pulled his satchel close, as if books were still a place he could bury himself.
But if the angels in those pages were real, then what did that make him?
A hunter?
Or something far, far worse?
“All of us are broken, Ezra. One way or another. Some of us are just better at painting gold over the cracks.” She wrestled a cigarette from her clutch.
“Love can be many things,” Ezra began. “You said so yourself. I loved you by staying away from Thornhill—”
She broke him off with a bark that could have been a laugh or a sob.
“Leaving someone behind isn’t love. That damned house is a hell of a lot bigger than Rose’s place—that’s for sure.
It’s awful, with just me and Father there.
He doesn’t host scavenger hunts anymore, in case you were wondering.
” The flame of Biz’s lighter shuddered along with her as she lit her cigarette.
Her new jewel reflected the fire with vicious clarity.
“This is the first treasure I’ve found in a very long time. ”
“I’m sorry,” Ezra said through her first plume of smoke. “I wish things didn’t have to be this way.”
He could see glimmers of the girl he’d grown up with, breaking through all the powder and paint on her face.
It brought back memories of running barefoot across immaculate lawns, of tossing Mrs. Smith’s scones to the swans that reigned over the reflection pond, of standing hand in hand with George in front of that ancient oak, all three of them wearing crowns of clover flowers, whispering their hearts’ desires.
Of playing hide-and-seek together, games that turned to war, when they were old enough.
Biz refused to be the damsel in distress.
George refused to be the enemy. We fight together, he’d always said.
We protect each other. After all, that’s what true British soldiers do.
They spent a lot of time throwing pinecones at invisible foes.
If only things had stayed that way.
“Your wishes always did come true,” she reminded him, with an almost-smile. “Moreso than mine. Or George’s. The tree seemed to listen when you spoke… So, tell me, where should I send the car tomorrow?”
“I don’t need any new suits.”
“You do, though.” Biz touched his tattered sleeve. “Please, Ezra. Don’t disappear on me again.”
He sighed, knowing full well he’d regret this in the morning. “I’m staying at a boardinghouse on Cartwright Gardens. Mrs. Davidson is the proprietress. She makes a truly grueling porridge.”
The haggard hostess was probably making it even now.
There was only an hour or so before dawn, though you’d be hard-pressed to tell on this dance floor.
Tables and chairs gave way to glitzy couples who were dancing around a fountain.
Water bubbled to the beat of the drums. Brightness pulsed throughout the room—it turned out that Matisse had added gargoyles to the club’s design.
These served as wooden lantern holders, their light’s reach amplified by hundreds of mirrors and the flash of sequined gowns twisting around and around.
Biz was soon swallowed into this crowd, besieged by women who gathered to admire her ring.
And Vincent? He couldn’t see where Vincent had slipped off to.
Not that there was any chance of a dance here anyway.
Ezra was—once again—the odd one out. The tired man in the tired suit, standing at the edge of everyone else’s happiness.
He gripped his stained satchel, determined to head back toward the stairs.
A group of young men caught his eye before he could turn.
They were dapper lads. Monied. Wearing the sort of suits you could only get on Savile Row.
But it wasn’t their outfits that made Ezra stare.
No, he was far more entranced by the fact that their leader—a brown-haired youth with a square jaw and an eternal smirk—had an open flame dancing across his fingertips.
He was using it to light his friends’ cigarettes, laughing as if the fire on his bare skin simply tickled.
“Not here, Hugo!” One of the other young men scowled. “What if the wrong person sees?”
“Then I’ll wipe their memory along with everyone else’s. Loosen up, Everett. No one’s been Enlightened yet.”
His friend’s shoulders only went tighter. “I’m not talking about gullible gold diggers. What if a senior magician is here?”
“Dancing until dawn in Soho? I hardly think that likely.”
Though Hugo did take a moment to stare out over the crowd, closing his fist and extinguishing the flame there.
Ezra’s cheeks burned. He tried to look busy with his satchel, mind whirring as he picked through books about Valkyries and genies.
Magician… He’d heard the word. Solid and sure.
It didn’t sound as if the group was chatting about men who pulled chains of silk kerchiefs from their sleeves…