Chapter Eighteen #3
Ashbridge looked surprised. “Yes. I don’t think I’d thought of it in quite those terms, but—yes.
Fortunately, Jamie has never had the slightest interest in going to university.
And my mum’s school… well, she made it rather a point, when my father refused to marry her, not to take a single penny from him.
She’d let him take me out to lunch occasionally—it was rare that the fancy struck him; he still envisioned, back then, having his own, proper children to pass the club down to—but she’d never let him pay her for anything else.
So I can only imagine her reaction if I let him anywhere near anything to do with her business. ”
“So you told him to go to hell?”
“In precisely as many words. It got a bit uglier from there.”
“Did you start brawling over the dessert course?” Vesper asked hopefully.
“You’re alarmingly bloodthirsty, aren’t you?
No, it was more civilized. He was oh-so-kind as to inform me that the scholarship I thought I’d earned to go to Cambridge had been funded by him.
He’d been pulling the strings all along—everything I thought I’d earned with my own hard work had his fingerprints all over it. ”
Vesper decided, quite suddenly, that she hated Augustus Grimme-Nox, despite the fact that she’d barely exchanged more than a few polite words with him in her entire life.
“After that little revelation, I was—well, I was half out of my mind with fury by that point. I informed him how much of a favor he’d done my mother by abandoning her because it led her to my dad, who was ten times the father he would ever have been. This landed about as well as you’d imagine.”
Vesper was actually rather impressed. “Max Ashbridge. I truly didn’t think you had it in you.”
He looked her straight in the eye. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Vesper.”
And… was it meant to be flirtatious? Had her brain grown addled over the years? Had her many romantic entanglements led her to start hallucinating flirtation where none existed?
“But,” he added, before she could grow too muddled as she attempted to contemplate this, “by that point, all that was left was to tell him that I looked forward to watching his club cease to exist the second he died, and that I would not lift a finger to save it. I stormed out of the restaurant and handed in my notice the next day. I knew the F.L.E.A. was looking for new recruits. Everyone at the Passport Office thought I was mad, naturally, as did my entire family, but I didn’t give a damn—I was so furious that the wave of anger saw me through the next month or so, as I served out my notice and started the new job.
It was only once I’d cooled off a bit that I realized that I… might have miscalculated.”
“For Merlin’s sake,” Vesper said, torn between being exasperated and reluctantly impressed.
She reached for her forgotten mug of cocoa, which had cooled a bit but was still delicious, of course, because it was cocoa.
“And so then the people in the Flea see the Cambridge education and the well-heeled friends and think, Ah, a toff, we can use him to our own ends?”
Ashbridge winced. “I wouldn’t phrase it quite like that.”
Vesper shook her head. “This is really a bit of a mess you’ve got yourself into.”
To her surprise, he didn’t argue. “Getting sent to Holloway’s wasn’t the first assignment I’ve taken issue with.
The pubs that cater to lower-class clientele are the ones we tend to go after first—collecting sizable fines that they can ill afford, just to allow them to stay in business.
The ones that can’t pay are shut down by the police.
” He shook his head. “So at least, I thought, going after one of the powerful clubs would even the score, and make me feel as if we weren’t solely targeting the working-class element of the magical world.
I tried to convince myself of the fact until I walked through the doors of the club, but as soon as I was there—as soon as I saw you… ”
Vesper held her breath, not even slightly able to predict what the next words out of his mouth might be.
“I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.”
Vesper frowned.
“So,” he concluded, “when you floated in with your offer of working together, in exchange for saving the club… it was a relief. And here we are.”
“And, to be clear,” Vesper said, her mind quite full with the revelations of the past quarter hour, “ ‘here’ is ‘considering breaking and entering at the Grimoire.’ ”
“Correct.” Sheep chirped at him, probably in protest at him having ceased his behind-the-ear scratches, and he obediently commenced scratching the animal once again.
“Ashbridge, this is ridiculous—if we’re caught, the police will be summoned, and we’ll have an awful lot of explaining to do. It will expose our entire investigation.”
“I can’t be seen there, though,” he said. “If my father spotted me, he’d know at once that I was up to something.”
“Well,” Vesper said, realizing at once what the solution was. “I don’t wish to state the obvious, but…”
“What?” he asked, wary now.
“They run an entire club, and pharmacy, specializing in changing one’s appearance. If we wish to pay the club a visit without being recognized, there’s an easy solution.”
She met his eyes, and saw, from the resigned look in them, that he knew where she was going with this.
“Vesper…”
“You, dear Ashbridge,” she said, leaning forward and poking him in the chest, “are going to have to use some magic.”