Chapter Eighteen #2
She let out a sharp laugh. “It hasn’t grown complicated—it’s been that way from the start, from the moment you showed up at my club.
How else would you describe your history with my family, after all?
I’m not sure what the appropriate adjective is to describe a relationship whose history involves friendship, a row, a brief moment of champagne-fueled insanity, and me with my top off. ”
And there it was, at last: their prior meeting, acknowledged. She felt as though they’d been tiptoeing around it, both wary of giving voice to their past. It was almost a relief to lay it bare.
Ashbridge, meanwhile, was looking angry—properly angry, not merely stern. A deep line formed between his eyebrows, and his gray eyes flashed with an electric spark of fury that Vesper had not previously seen.
“How would I describe it?” he repeated, his voice quiet but something in his tone enough to set Vesper on edge. Sheep evidently sensed it, too, as she looked up at him with a somewhat disquieted expression and offered an inquisitive “Meow?”
Ashbridge rested his hand almost absently on the cat’s head; this was evidently sufficient to smooth Sheep’s ruffled feathers, but Vesper was still feeling quite ruffled, and didn’t fancy a head scratch to soothe her.
“I would describe it as: I had a career that I was perfectly satisfied with until six months ago, when my father sought me out for the first time in years, we had a blazing row, and I quit my job and joined the Licensing Agency out of some Shakespearean quest for revenge, and instead I find myself assigned to some sort of—of fact-finding mission, based on the fact that my superior knows I’m well-connected, and so I walked into Holloway’s dreading seeing anything that would give me cause to report the club and arrange a raid, because one of the best friends I ever had was a member of the family that owned it—and so, too, was his sister, who had lingered in my mind for the better part of seven years, because she was maddening and beautiful and spoiled and overprivileged and everything that I’m meant to despise, but somehow can’t work up to it properly where she’s involved because you Holloways are just…
just… Holloways! And it drives me bloody mad. ”
He came to the end of this quite astonishing speech without any enormous displays of emotion—he had not raised his voice, or gesticulated wildly.
He had not moved from his seat, remaining still enough to allow Sheep to commence her lengthy personal grooming routine (currently involving licking her stomach in an undignified fashion) without being disturbed.
The only hint at any emotion on his part came from the color rising in his cheeks—and, too, in the look in those usually inscrutable gray eyes as they remained locked on hers, unrelenting.
Vesper found her voice; the search took a second longer than it usually did. She was used to men calling her beautiful; she wasn’t at all used to them sounding quite so anguished about it.
And she wasn’t used to it mattering to her quite so much.
But she needed to focus on what was important—which wasn’t the history between her and Ashbridge, or even that between Ashbridge and Freddie.
It was this: the club. The anxious air that had descended upon Marylebone, everyone sensing the ease with which what seemed like a few harmless accidents could slip into something more severe—something that threatened the magic and traditions that they had worked so hard to protect.
So, instead of addressing several of the most interesting points he had just made—ones which she would have greatly enjoyed a prolonged discussion of, in fact—she merely said, “What did your father say to you, to make you become a Flea?”
“F.L.E.—oh, for fuck’s sake, why do I bother?
” He scrubbed his hands over his face, sighing heavily, as Vesper gaped at him for the second time in the past few minutes.
This was becoming a distressing habit. She couldn’t imagine what her face looked like while she was doing it, but it didn’t bear contemplation.
“I ran into him at the National Gallery, of all places,” he said.
“Or, rather—I expect he planned it all, but made it look as though it were a coincidence.” There was a note of such sharp-edged bitterness to his voice as he spoke that it made something in Vesper’s chest ache a bit.
“It was the end of the day, and the room was nearly empty, so once he’d acknowledged me, it would’ve felt rude to turn my back.
” He rubbed his neck. “In retrospect, I’d have been better off doing so. ”
“What happened?”
“He told me he had something he very particularly wished to speak to me about and invited me to dinner. I wanted to refuse, naturally—I don’t think I’d spoken to him since I was at Cambridge and was happy enough to keep it that way—but he must’ve known, because before I could say anything, he offered to drop by my parents’ house one evening.
” A pause. “Needless to say, I don’t want him anywhere near my mum—or my dad and my siblings. ”
Vesper was revising her feelings about Augustus Grimme-Nox.
“Anyway, he took me to some hole-in-the-wall on Dean Street and started asking all sorts of questions about my work at the Passport Office and whether I’d ever considered doing anything else, et cetera.
I tolerated this until we’d finished the starters, and then I told him to get to the point, which he did.
His wife was leaving him—number three, I believe. ”
“Was she the one who had an affair with a shepherd and ran off to live in one of the magical Welsh villages with him?” Vesper asked, recalling having heard the gossip at a party a few months earlier.
“Indeed.”
“Wherever did she meet a shepherd in Marylebone?” Vesper asked, intrigued despite herself.
“I believe she went on some sort of restorative walking holiday.”
“Rather too restorative.”
“Vesper.”
“Sorry, sorry,” she said, holding her hands up in apology, pleased to see the slightest twitch of his mouth. “You were saying?”
“Well, as this was the third of his marriages to end without offspring—his first wife died of complications from pregnancy after a series of miscarriages when I was a boy; the second realized she preferred women and divorced him—he seems to have come face-to-face with his own mortality and decided that I’ll have to do. ”
“You’ll have to do… what?” Vesper asked slowly. Ashbridge looked grimly back at her, waiting. “Not—not run the Grimoire?” She was genuinely incredulous.
“He seems to be of the mind that beggars can’t be choosers; after his slip-up with my mum, he was evidently a bit more careful in the bedroom. So I’m apparently his only option.”
“He can’t seriously think you’d do it,” Vesper said, still reeling.
The passing down of a family’s Word to an out-of-wedlock child was hardly unheard of; magical ability was transferred in bloodlines, which was why repeated intermarrying with mundanes tended to weaken a magical line over time.
It was also why a spouse could not use the Word of the family they’d married into; Vesper’s mother, for example, could still use her own family’s Word, but not that of the Holloways.
Children could only receive a single Word—once they’d used one Word, no other Word would work for them, even if it were from their other parent’s family—so parents had to think quite carefully before deciding which one to pass down to their offspring.
(This usually ended up being a fairly calculated decision based on which parent’s family business the children might one day be expected to run.)
The fact that the magic prized blood over marriage, however, meant that Grimme-Nox would not be the first man to resort to passing on his magic to an illegitimate child—but only if he chose to do so.
A child born of a magical family (in or out of wedlock) possessed the latent ability to perform their family’s magic, but it could only be activated by their parents teaching them the proper Word.
And yet, Vesper could hardly think of someone less likely to be interested in any of this than Max Ashbridge.
“I don’t know what he thought,” Ashbridge said, still looking exceedingly grim.
“But he dangled what he evidently believed was an irresistible carrot before me—an enormous salary. Told me he’d pay for Jamie—my brother—to go to university, if he wanted.
Even offered to buy the building my mum uses for her ballet school, so she’d no longer have to pay rent. ”
“He tried to weaponize your family,” Vesper said, quietly indignant.