Chapter Nine #2
“That had a mishap with a potion just like ours,” Vesper finished for him.
“I didn’t drink anything magical while I was there—the whole thing is making me a bit nervous,” Miss Thomas continued.
“But Horatia Montgomery was there, and her uncle and aunt are the owners. When she saw I wasn’t drinking, she told me I needn’t worry—that they’d got rid of the staff member responsible for what went wrong, so it wouldn’t happen again. ”
Vesper glanced at Max, a frown wrinkling her usually smooth brow. “How did they work out who it was?”
Miss Thomas shook her head. “I don’t know—she didn’t seem to have heard about what happened here on Friday, and I didn’t want to spread gossip.”
“I expect we ought to pay them a visit,” Max said.
“Indeed.” Vesper’s brow was still furrowed, and she was clearly deep in thought. She looked entirely different to the smiling, flirtatious Vesper Holloway who had greeted him when he’d first walked into this club three nights earlier.
Miss Thomas rose. “I’d better go.” She smiled at Max. “Nice to see you, Ashbridge.” She divided a curious sort of glance between Max and Vesper, one that made Max feel seen in a way that he didn’t think he liked.
Not that there was anything to see, of course.
“I’ll pop round to collect you for lunch tomorrow at one,” Vesper said, and watched her friend walk away with a slightly worried look on her face.
“What’s wrong?” Max asked, taking the seat that Miss Thomas had vacated.
He had not considered, when sitting, that he was both taller and broader than Miss Thomas by a fair margin, and the space felt decidedly cozy as a result.
Vesper was wearing an evening dress of golden satin, a gold bumblebee clip in her hair, and as he turned to look at her as he settled into the seat next to her, something in his throat ached.
She was beautiful even when looking a bit sad.
“Nothing,” she said, in response to his question, and he let it lie; they weren’t close enough for him to prod her about whatever troubles plagued her. They were none of his concern.
“Did you want a drink?” she asked, more briskly now, draining her own glass, and he shook his head.
“Overdid it last night.”
An eyebrow lifted. “You had one drink.”
“I indulged a bit more when I got home. Couldn’t sleep.”
The eyebrow inched higher. “I see.”
“Too annoyed,” he added, just to needle her, and he was rewarded with the sight of an eye roll, which gave him the strangest urge to smile.
He resisted the urge.
He was good at resisting urges.
“I spoke to Raffles,” he said, prompting a deepening of the pucker in her brow, and clarified, “Effie Raffles—head of the F.L.E.A.”
“Right. I believe she’s married to… someone my brother-in-law dislikes.”
“Who is your brother-in-law?” he asked; he knew that Freddie and Vesper’s elder sister had married years earlier, but he couldn’t recall the details of the match.
“Simon Covington. He’s an MP.”
Max stilled. “Simon Covington is your brother-in-law,” he repeated, his mind on his conversation with Raffles earlier that day.
Surely Raffles must have been aware of this; he wondered uneasily if her initial order that he target Holloway’s in particular had anything to do with the family’s connection to Covington. The thought did not sit well with him.
“Yes. What’s wrong?” Vesper was giving him a strange look.
“I just hadn’t made the connection. Then yes, your brother-in-law would dislike Raffles’s husband. He’s a Tory MP—one of the leading advocates of Forbiddance. Allied closely with Jacob Finlay.”
Vesper’s nose wrinkled at the name. “Nice company you keep, Ashbridge.”
“I’ve nothing to do with Raffles’s husband—or Finlay. I’ve never met either.”
“You merely enforce the ridiculous law they forced through Parliament.”
“I don’t think any forcing was required—they had the votes.”
“By a very narrow margin,” Vesper said. “It only passed because of that Daily Mail article about a virtuous young woman being led into a life of vice and sin by her addiction to spell powder. Don’t you recall?”
Max frowned, casting his mind back. He’d been at Cambridge at the time of the bill’s passage—he’d delayed university until after he’d returned home from the war—and hadn’t followed the politics of it all very closely.
“Vaguely,” he said. The story rang a bell, but Max, frankly, had been more focused on how bloody infuriated his father would be by Forbiddance than anything else.
“It wasn’t true,” Vesper said. “To start with, you can’t get addicted to spell powder—it’s not like strong drink.
The Spark—Cecily’s paper, you know—tracked the woman down a couple of months later.
She’d been paid by someone to go to the Mail with the story.
But by then, it was too late—and she wouldn’t go on the record for the exposé, anyway. ”
Max frowned at her. “I’ve never heard anything about this.”
“Well, Ashbridge, it’s almost as if there are people in this country with very deep pockets who want to ensure that you wouldn’t.
” Sarcasm positively dripped from her voice, but oddly, Max didn’t find it off-putting.
He liked Vesper like this—annoyed, curt, sharp—more than he liked the smiling and flirting version of her that she presented most of the time.
“Just as there are people in this country with very deep pockets hell-bent on flouting the law and ensuring that they don’t have to sacrifice a single bit of the privilege their ability to perform a bit of hocus-pocus gives them.”
“Hocus-pocus,” Vesper muttered, shaking her head, but there was a smile creeping across her face; a dimple appeared in one cheek. He did not think someone with a face like hers should be allowed dimples; it was unsporting.
Rather than focus on her dimples or be dragged further into an intractable debate on magic, privilege, and the British class system, Max attempted to return to business.
“The point of all this is, I spoke to Raffles and explained our plan. She wasn’t thrilled—seems to think I went a bit off-script with this—but she’s letting us proceed, so long as I keep quiet about it.
I expect she thinks we might make a hash of things and doesn’t want it to reflect poorly on her. ”
“Well, then, we shall simply have to crack on with it and prove her wrong.” Vesper sounded very matter-of-fact.
Max had not known that he was attracted to matter-of-fact women until this precise moment.
She lapsed into a thoughtful silence, her gaze fixed idly on a table across the room, where a trio of couples were clinking glasses.
Max’s eyes narrowed as he spotted a faint sheen along the hairline of one of the men in the group.
“Which potion did they drink?” he asked, and Vesper glanced at him, startled. He jerked his chin in the direction of the table. “I can see the spell residue on one of them—you aren’t terribly careful about keeping them in your hidden bar, are you?”
“Plausible deniability.” She gave him an angelic smile. “It’s none of our concern if someone comes to Holloway’s having partaken of something illegal prior to arriving here, so long as we are not the ones providing any illegal substances.”
He gave her a speaking look. Her smile widened, before her gaze flicked back to the party in question. She tapped her chin. “Not having served them myself, I can’t be certain, but if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say they’ve had a Gin and Giggles.”
“Ah. I expect it does what it says on the tin?”
“More or less. Our magic tends to be a bit… frivolous. Our potions are meant to be fun, and not much else.”
“Isn’t that the point of all magic these days?”