Chapter Three
By the time Vesper arrived at Holloway’s, it was nearly ten, and the club was busy.
By night, the place was transformed; gone was the daytime sense of peaceful escape from the world, replaced by an air of revelry.
On the second floor, there was a bar and lounge where cocktails were mixed and champagne flowed freely; a live band entertained the assembled crowds, and space was cleared on the floor for dancing.
The overhead lights had been dimmed, and there were candles in sconces along the walls, along with electric lamps.
The entire atmosphere was one of romance and temptation.
And, if you knew who to speak to, and which password was in use that month, then a particular bookshelf in the club’s library could be moved aside to allow entrance to rooms that, until a few years earlier, no one outside of the Holloway family had even known existed.
The rooms—known as the backdoor bar, by the family and staff—were often the most crowded in the club; Holloway’s capped entry and frequently turned would-be revelers away: Those so disappointed had to content themselves with the consumption of the legal variety of intoxicating substances that particular evening.
Tonight, Vesper made a beeline for the backdoor bar.
She would never have admitted to anyone in her family that she was worried, but the concerns that Freddie and Cecily had raised today felt like heavy weights on her shoulders, and she knew that she would only be able to relax once she’d confirmed that all was running as it should.
“Vee.”
Lost in her thoughts, smiling absently at people in the assembled crowds whom she recognized as she walked, Vesper hadn’t even noticed that she was passing within a foot of her best friend, Hazel.
She whirled around so quickly that she nearly lost her balance; Hazel reached out with a steadying hand at her elbow. The motion mimicked twenty years of friendship in a single, tidy moment.
“Hazel!” Vesper squeezed her friend’s hand. “I didn’t know you were coming tonight.”
Hazel grimaced. “I didn’t want to, but John Delacqua wanted to take me for a drink, and Papa didn’t want me to say no.
” She looked very pretty, in a robe de style made of pink lace; her hair was a couple of shades darker than Vesper’s, and this evening her riotous curls had been tamed somewhat with a headband featuring a golden rose.
Her expression was unhappy, however, and Vesper cast a worried glance at her.
She gave Hazel’s hand another squeeze. “Delacqua’s nice.
” Delacqua came from an old, storied family that was the product of a number of mixed marriages between the magical and mundane worlds; over time, the intermarrying had diluted the family’s magical abilities to virtually nothing, but they still had plenty of money and were well situated in both magical and mundane society.
“I suppose you’re right, but—what’s wrong?” Hazel asked, seeing that Vesper’s gaze had become fixed on a point in the distance. Not a point, in fact, but a figure.
“Vesper?” Hazel asked, craning to look over her shoulder in an attempt to follow her friend’s stare.
“Sorry!” Vesper said. “I just… er… need to speak to someone.”
Hazel looked at her, brow wrinkling. “Who is he?”
Vesper cast a surreptitious glance around, though she knew they were unlikely to be overheard, given the noise inside the club. “Max Ashbridge.”
Hazel’s frown deepened. “Who?”
Vesper sighed, impatient, but she supposed, given her rather lengthy romantic history, it would be unreasonable to expect Hazel to keep track of all of the names.
“Max. Ashbridge,” she repeated in an undertone, enunciating each word very clearly.
“He was at Cambridge with Freddie—he’s the one I met at Freddie’s twenty-third birthday party and… ” She waved her hand illustratively.
Hazel’s eyes widened. “Not the one you propositioned!”
“Hazel, I didn’t proposition him, I simply…
made my interest known.” The memory was mortifying; Vesper had largely succeeded at putting it out of her mind for the past seven years.
She had been eighteen at the time, and nervous around Freddie’s university friends.
She’d found herself in an incriminating situation with one of them—hidden away in a coat closet, gown pushed down to her waist, the man’s hands beneath her skirts—when Ashbridge had walked in, got quite an eyeful of Vesper’s bare breasts, and then icily reminded the man in question of the existence of his fiancée. In the next room.
Ashbridge had been exceptionally decent about the whole thing, averting his eyes while Vesper had put her clothing to rights and then escorting her to a private corner where he had brought her a glass of champagne and pretended not to notice her surreptitiously dabbing at her eyes.
He had been kind, in other words. At the time, she’d been certain that this meant he had some sort of romantic interest in her, and so she’d leaned in to kiss him.
In the years since, Vesper had kissed a great many men, and never had one leapt backward so quickly to escape her as Ashbridge had done that night.
It had been the final humiliation in what had already been an exceptionally humiliating three-quarters of an hour.
Fortunately for her, Freddie and Ashbridge had fallen out soon afterward—some sort of political quarrel, she remembered vaguely—and she could only be grateful for this fact, since it meant that she had never had to look him in the eye again.
Until now.
“Wouldn’t you rather avoid him?” Hazel asked; her philosophy tended to be that discretion—or, at least, avoiding people one didn’t want to speak to—was the better part of valor. Vesper was never sure whether to find this quality admirable or troubling in her friend.
“It’s a bit more complicated than that, unfortunately,” Vesper said, her eyes still fixed on the man across the room even as her mind returned to the list Freddie had shown her just a few hours earlier. She lowered her voice. “Ashbridge is a Flea.”
Hazel’s eyes widened in alarm. “Vesper, I don’t think you would be suited to prison.”
“I don’t either,” Vesper assured her. “I doubt they’d let me bring my silk pajamas.
Or champagne.” She looked past Hazel toward the bar, where she spotted Amir, one of their most experienced bartenders, who’d worked for the Holloway family for nearly twenty years.
With a distracted wave to Hazel, Vesper made a beeline for the gleaming bar, where Amir was adding a cherry garnish to a cocktail.
“Miss Holloway,” he said, nodding at her as he slid the glass across the dark, polished wood of the bar to a waiting couple.
Vesper leaned forward across the bar so that she could say in an undertone, “There’s a Flea.”
Amir stilled for a moment, his dark eyes catching hers; then he reached for a rag to wipe the bar. “One we can bribe?” he replied in a low murmur.
It was a fair question; part of the reason Freddie spent considerable time greasing palms to stay abreast of who was currently employed by the Forbiddance and Licensing Enforcement Agency was to get an idea of which ones were likely to show up at Holloway’s, and which could be bribed with a few packets of spell powder to ignore their duties.
“I don’t think so, unfortunately. Can you send word to the backdoor bar not to let anyone out for a quarter of an hour, until I can get rid of him?”
“There are already a few people from the backdoor bar out here,” Amir said, with a discreet nod of his head; Vesper saw a group of men who looked to be a few years younger than her laughing uproariously.
They were clutching (entirely legal) cocktails, but there was the telltale shimmer around the hairline that indicated that they’d consumed something magical in the past hour or so.
The club was strict about ensuring that no magical substances were taken outside the backdoor bar, but less so about keeping the clubgoers confined to those rooms once they’d had their fill of potions and powders.
Vesper swore under her breath, then said, “Tell Anna not to let anyone else out, at least—I’m going to see if I can distract Ashbridge.
” Anna Llewelyn was the bartender who ran the backdoor bar so competently that if it hadn’t been for the need for a family member to oversee the club and perform the necessary magic every night, Vesper would have felt entirely superfluous.
“Going to flirt with him?” Amir asked wisely.
“I’m going to speak to him,” she corrected; admittedly, these two things tended to look quite similar when coming from her.
Amir regarded her skeptically.
“I’ve met this one before—I’ll do it all under the guise of welcoming an old family friend.”
“Hmm,” said Amir, his skeptical expression not budging.
Vesper turned on her heel and began to make her way toward Ashbridge, who was still standing just through the doorway, surveying the scene around him rather like someone observing an unknown animal species at the zoo.
She didn’t think he’d noticed her; his attention was fixed on some point in the distance, an expression of vague distaste on his face.
“Max Ashbridge,” she said, placing a hand on her hip and allowing herself a languorous perusal of his body, head to toe and back again, as his head jerked toward her.
He looked largely the same as she’d remembered; there were faint lines at the corners of his eyes that she didn’t remember from before, which made him look older than twenty-nine.
Everything about his appearance was as neat and fastidious as she recalled; his jaw was closely shaved, his dark hair combed into ruthless submission and further quelled with pomade, and his tie carefully knotted.
Even the angle at which he held his chin seemed very proper.
“Fancy seeing you here,” she said, meeting his gray eyes again.
“Miss Holloway.” He cleared his throat. “It’s been quite a while.”