Chapter Eight #2
“Falls out of favor?” he repeated. “But even if they fell out of favor, wouldn’t they still remember the address? How do the staff ensure they don’t come back?”
“The door won’t appear for them. The magic of the door and the ledger are linked—some spellwork the family did when the club was founded in the days of the Georgians, when our magic was more powerful.”
Max wasn’t certain whether to be impressed or horrified that magic this ancient could still exist in the heart of London, in the present day.
He contemplated this as they made their way around the tables and armchairs and settees that littered the space.
At one table they passed, he saw a man tap the contents of a paper packet into the drink before him, using his finger to give the mixture a quick stir.
They’d moved on before he could see what the effects of the spell powder would be.
“This will do,” Vesper said at last.
She’d led him to a table set into a darkened corner so that two sides were parallel to the walls. She and Max took these seats, and as Max leaned back slightly, feeling the comforting protection of the wall just inches behind him, he felt a tiny bit of the tension in his shoulders release.
Vesper was more observant than he’d expected, because she cast him a long sideways glance and said, “Now, will you relax a bit?”
“I’m not—not relaxed.”
“Your shoulders are practically at your ears.”
“That’s just how I sit.”
“No one sits like that. Shall I go fetch you a drink? I can’t remember the last time I saw someone in such desperate need of one.”
“What about the bits of magical frippery you’re so fond of? Not going to encourage me to take a relaxing potion instead?”
“Knowing you, you’d spend so much time feeling guilty about it that you wouldn’t even enjoy it,” she said, which he was very much afraid was actually the truth.
Willing his shoulders to loosen just a bit, he decided that a change in subject was necessary. “Do you come here often?” he asked. He imagined that her responsibilities at Holloway’s kept her evenings occupied.
“Sometimes,” she said, with a lazy, one-shouldered shrug that had the effect of drawing his attention to the shoulder in question, to the smooth skin on display.
Her hair was so short that it did nothing to hide the small birthmark in the shape of a crescent moon sitting just above her clavicle, and he found his gaze fixed on the spot.
“Is there something on my dress?” she asked, the sound of her voice sufficient to draw his eyes back to her face. She was glancing down at the bodice of her dress, a faint frown on her forehead, her short golden curls falling into her face as she searched futilely for a stain.
“I was woolgathering. You were saying?”
“I—oh, yes. I do come here sometimes, when I have a night off from the club. I like that the staff here don’t suffer fools gladly.”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning,” she said, “that if a man gets overly friendly with a lady—or another man, I suppose—who doesn’t welcome his attentions, they waste no time in booting him out and ensuring the doors to the club are barred to him for the rest of his life.
We do the same at Holloway’s,” she added.
“After a while, you learn which places take things like this seriously and which ones don’t.
Grenoble’s for example—I’d avoid it. The younger son frequents the place, and he’s a cad. ”
Max offered a regretful sigh. “If only I hadn’t promised not to shut any clubs down while conducting this investigation…”
Vesper grinned. “Don’t tempt me.” Next to them, there was a sudden clatter of breaking glass, and Max startled slightly.
A quick glance confirmed that someone had merely dropped a champagne coupe, but it was too late: Vesper was giving him an exasperated look.
“Ashbridge, you’re downright twitchy. Illegal activity doesn’t agree with you. ”
“I think it is very telling that you consider that to be an insult,” he informed her, and she laughed.
“Go and fetch us some drinks,” she said.
“A gin fizz for me, please. You might want to consider something stronger for yourself, if you’re going to survive the evening with your nerves intact.
” She looked at him expectantly, as if she thought he would immediately trot to do her bidding.
He sat, very pointedly not moving, and she threw up her hands in exasperation.
“We’re telling a story, Ashbridge.” Registering whatever expression had now taken up residence on his face—utter mystification, if he had to hazard a guess—she sighed, then elaborated.
“Tonight, we need people to see us together, so it won’t seem so strange when we start appearing all over town in each other’s company. ”
“If the point is to see and be seen, then why are we sitting in a corner?”
“Because,” Vesper said through gritted teeth, “we don’t want it to seem like we’re trying to be seen.”
“Is this how your brain works all the time?” It sounded exhausting.
“More or less.”
“It’s impressive.”
“Thank you,” she said, smiling in a satisfied sort of way.
“No one else seems to notice that. So, you will go to the bar, order a round of drinks, and people will notice you—not having seen you here before—and wonder who you are, and who you’re with.
When they realize that you’re delivering that gin fizz to me, they’ll take notice. ”
“They’ll take notice… simply because it’s you?”
“Yes,” Vesper said, not a hint of modesty in her voice.
She brushed an invisible fleck of dust off her shoulder.
“If anyone does recognize you, we’ll look like old family friends, perhaps rekindling a romance, and people won’t think anything else about it, meaning we can poke around to our hearts’ content. ”
“And you just expect that people will be too stupid to notice that we’re making our way to every club in the neighborhood, and trying to discreetly interview the staff?” he asked a bit skeptically.
“Ashbridge, you twit. I’d have thought in your line of work, you’d have learned something very important already.”
“And what’s that?”
She leaned closer, a mischievous grin flitting across her face. In that moment, he didn’t wonder in the slightest at the fact that apparently half the men in London were in thrall to her. He’d follow that grin anywhere.
“People are frightfully stupid.”
And Max—in spite of his better judgment, and the fact that he knew perfectly well that there was nothing about this woman that he should trust…
He laughed.
All in all, Vesper thought, the evening was off to a promising start.
She and Ashbridge were rubbing along together well enough, and he was proving quite amenable to sitting still and listening to her sensibly, which was really all that she required of him.
“Thank you,” she said, accepting the gin fizz he handed her several minutes later when he returned to the table.
He had a tumbler of some sort of amber liquid in his other hand—and wasn’t that just the most predictable?
Of course he was the sort of man who drank stodgy amber spirits. “What took you so long? You were ages.”
“Just… conversation,” Ashbridge said, his cheeks going slightly pink.
Absolutely fascinating. She peered round his shoulder toward the bar, and she spotted Genevieve Colton herself mixing a drink.
She must’ve been in her seventies by now, but she was smiling flirtatiously at a man at the bar who couldn’t have been older than Vesper; the man was gazing at her, rapt.
“Ah,” Vesper said wisely, turning back to Ashbridge. “You received the full Genevieve Colton experience, then.”
“She asked if I had a penchant for older women.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That I’d never had the pleasure, but that I wasn’t opposed to the idea.”
“Ashbridge,” Vesper said, torn between being impressed and alarmed, “be careful. She’ll have you in a bedroom, flat on your back, putting your mouth to work in about three seconds if you don’t watch yourself.”
“Well, she asked who the gin fizz was for, and I nodded in your direction, and she seemed to think I already had my work cut out for me.”
Vesper was unsure whether to be offended or flattered, so instead she merely took a fortifying sip; Ashbridge was still looking somewhat flustered by the experience, though Vesper supposed she couldn’t blame him.
“Have a drink, and try to look as though you’re enamored with me,” she instructed, “and not as though you were recently propositioned by a septuagenarian.” For once, he proved obedient, though his version of “enamored” was, predictably, rather less effusive than Vesper might have hoped.
“Can’t you try to look a bit more like you find me nearly impossible to resist? ”
“I’m trying,” he said through clenched teeth. “I am not naturally very…”
“Lustful?” Vesper suggested, merely for the entertainment of watching him look as though he were about to have apoplexy.
“Demonstrative.”
She sighed. “I suppose that isn’t surprising.” Onstage, the band wound down a rousing number and struck up a softer, slower song. “Why don’t we dance, then?” she said, leaning forward a bit so that she did not have to speak too loudly for Ashbridge to hear her.
He looked back over his shoulder; there were several couples swaying on the open dance floor before the stage, where a girl about Vesper’s age with dark skin sang in a low, throaty voice, accompanied by another woman—short-haired and wearing men’s attire—on the piano.
“All right,” he said, pushing his chair back and coming to his feet without a single word of protest. Vesper was a bit surprised—she wasn’t sure why, but she’d expected him to object.
Instead, he extended a hand toward her, tugged her to her feet, and led her to the dance floor without another word.