Chapter One
Liverpool, England
If the last three months had taught Ava anything, it was that ruin doesn’t always come with thunder. Sometimes it creeps in, silent and slow – building little by little until suddenly you are surrounded by it.
Ava rested her head against the train’s window, watching the raindrops speckle the glass.
A single droplet wasn’t enough to blur the grey-green countryside rushing past outside the window, but once they split and spilled – gathering other droplets in their wake – they became a current, transforming the landscape into a thousand, fractured lines.
That’s how it had felt for her, too. For Jem’s empty seat on show night had been a droplet. Lillian’s insistence that she take on her mother’s act had been a droplet.
And what Jem had said when he’d come to her doorstep that night had been a droplet, too.
Even now, sitting here, she flinched from the memory.
She’d been ready to chide him for missing the performance – for not even sending a note to the theatre – but he’d looked so dishevelled, so utterly defeated, that the words died on her tongue.
His hair – spun with threads of gold from the summer’s heat – had stuck to his face, but it was the smudge on the crooked bridge of his nose that had drawn a small smile from her; for she could imagine him at the apothecary, pinching powdered charcoal into delicate, glass bottles.
Her first instinct had been to reach up and clean it away, but he’d recoiled from her touch, stumbling backwards on the porch steps.
‘Don’t. Please.’
She’d faltered a little at that, but Jem was often like this – warm as the summer’s sun one moment, and clouded the next.
She’d learned as a child to take his sullen moods in her stride, and now that she was a woman grown – and they would spend their lives together – she tried to treat them as one might treat a shower of rain.
Safe in the knowledge that even the heaviest deluge would not last forever.
‘Guess what,’ she’d said, trying to inject as much warmth into her voice as she could. ‘Lillian wants me to take on my mother’s act. To become the Memory Binder. Isn’t that marvellous? She believes I am ready.’
Jem had kept his gaze upon the floor, his brow knotting. ‘Ava. Listen—’ He’d removed his hat, pinching fretfully at the brim. ‘I came to tell you that I … I can’t do this.’
Stupidly, foolishly, she’d assumed he was talking about meeting the rest of the theatre company, announcing their engagement to the world, and she’d laughed.
‘All you need to do is exchange some pleasantries with Miss Lillian. She won’t like you of course, but then she doesn’t like the idea of any of her performers having a life outside the theatre. ’
‘Not that, Ava. This. Us. I can’t …’ His frown deepened, and finally he looked up. His clouded blue eyes meeting her clear, grey ones. ‘I can’t marry you. I’m sorry.’
I’m sorry.
It felt as though she had heard those words often in the months that’d stretched between that moment and this one.
It’s what she’d said when she’d frozen up there – on Lillian’s stage – just a week after Jem had broken their engagement.
It’s what she’d said to Oliver as she’d packed her bags, and left.
And she suspected she would say it again before the day was out.
‘Liverpool, next stop,’ announced the conductor, gripping the backs of the chairs as he walked from one end of the carriage to the other. ‘Next stop, Liverpool.’
And she felt her heart sink to her stomach.
Ava hadn’t realized how much she’d missed Liverpool until she stepped from the train and felt the salt air sting her nostrils, felt the briny taste of it upon her tongue.
It cut through the coal smoke of the station, the scent of over-warm bodies and stuffy compartments, sending strands of blonde hair whipping about her face.
The train wheezed then, and she heard the distant reply of a ship in harbour, the thudding bellow of its horn.
She’d tried to forget what home smelled like, what it felt like, but now it sank beneath her skin, adding to the humming tension that had chased her since Preston.
Three months had passed since she’d last stood at this station, her bags packed.
Now she was back, and the thought of following the dark sea of hats away from the hissing train, the soft clank of cooling metal, made her want to step back into the carriage and slam the door shut.
For while she had missed Liverpool, had missed the tide that ebbed and flowed beneath the city, she had not missed everything.
She’d not missed the press of people around her, jostling her as she stepped out beneath a silver sky.
She’d not missed the crush of traffic, the constant rattle of carriages as horses thundered back and forth upon the stone roads.
She’d not missed the weather either, for though the wind was warm it clawed at her, dusting her with a fine spray of rain that made her breath wisp in her throat, and sent her scuttling back beneath the sandstone arches of the railway station.
And she’d certainly not missed Jem.
So then why was her first thought as she stood, watching the sunset smoulder over the city, whether she would see him again?
Whether she would find a reason, any reason, to walk past Manchester Street, and the small apothecary that sat there, to see whether Jem and his mop of copper hair, his crooked nose, stood behind the counter?
Ava stuffed her hand into her pocket and pinched the thought away sharply, turning her attention instead to the crowd of people, trying to pick out her brother’s stocky silhouette.
Oliver had said he would come and collect her, but as the rain turned from a fine mist to fat droplets and doused the fiery sky above her, she wondered whether he had forgotten.
She paused then, her gaze snagging upon another figure, illuminated only by the ebbing dusk and the soft glow of the station’s lamplights.
It wasn’t her brother – he was too tall for that, and lean as a willow whip; not to mention that he was doing what her brother would never do: standing quite contentedly in the rain.
He must be mad, she thought, as she watched him tilt his face upwards, as though he would drink the raindrops from the sky. But it was not mad that rippled through her mind as she watched him remove his hat, ruffling the wetness into his dark hair. It was another word.
Free.
‘Sorry! Sorry.’ Oliver’s voice was loud in her left ear, and Ava jolted.
Pushing his bicycle, his blond hair was slick against his forehead, a raindrop sliding off the end of his nose.
‘I didn’t forget. It’s just harder with this—’ He brandished his left arm, bandaged from his elbow to his fingers, and held in a sling close to his chest. ‘And these.’
He pulled a sodden bouquet from the bicycle’s basket.
The flowers weren’t tied with string, nor wrapped in newspaper, and so Ava wondered whether her brother had simply plucked a bloom from every garden between here and Park Lane.
She felt her throat constrict as she reached for him – crushing the blooms between them as she hugged him, gripping him tightly.
Oliver’s free hand patted tentatively at her back. ‘… Ava?’
‘I missed you,’ she said, trying to stop the tears from welling into her eyes. ‘I really missed you.’
She felt her brother’s laugh rumble through her chest. ‘If you missed me so much you might’ve written more.’
He was trying to wriggle from her grip – but she held him all the tighter, for though staying had felt unbearable after everything had happened, leaving him had felt awful, too.
There weren’t enough words to try and explain how she’d felt as though she’d carved herself in two when she’d left Liverpool, and how she could feel herself splitting again even now – and so she pressed it all into her embrace instead, hoping he knew, hoping he understood.
When she stepped back, she saw the flowers he’d bought her were crumpled.
‘You only give gifts when you feel guilty,’ she said, her gaze flicking to her brother’s face. ‘But why should you feel guilty?’
‘What do you mean?’ Oliver pushed the stems into her hand, plucking up the largest of her suitcases. ‘I haven’t seen you in almost three months! And thanks to someone not answering my letters—’
‘Remember when you spent your entire wages buying Pa that new pen … ?’
‘Because his old one was ancient—’ Oliver said, his voice strained as he tried to balance the bicycle and contort the rigidly rectangular suitcase into the soft, wicker basket. ‘Practically biblical.’
‘Not because you accidentally charred the nib of his old one atop the stove and then tried to hide it from him … ?’
Oliver huffed an exasperated breath through his teeth. ‘I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition for a handful of flowers.’
‘Think of this as three months’ worth of questions, condensed.’
‘Perhaps if you’d written more you wouldn’t have to bombard me now. Tell me this at least: did you find what you were looking for? In Edinburgh?’
Ava’s eyes flicked back to where the man had been. He was gone now, a carriage rattling past the spot where he’d stood, casting a puddle of rain across the cobbles.
‘In a way,’ she said softly.
‘“In a way”?’ Oliver repeated, conceding defeat with the largest suitcase, and plucking up her smallest bag instead. That fitted snugly inside the bicycle’s wicker basket, and he turned a triumphant smile back to his sister. ‘In what way? Did you find work at the theatre there?’
Ava pursed her lips together. ‘I’m not sure the theatre is for me anymore, Oliver.’
He made a face. ‘Because of one poor review?’
‘It was more than one, Oliver.’
‘Still, it’s no reason—’
‘I lost my nerve up there,’ Ava said, her voice coming out a little louder than she’d intended. ‘I froze. And there was an entire audience of people there to see it.’
Oliver wrinkled his nose as though that were a trifling worry – and not a career-ending mistake. ‘All the same, people still talk of you, you know. The act? “The Memory Binder”.’
Ava gave her brother a flat look. ‘I’m sure they do.’
‘I imagine Lillian would have you back. Even after—’
‘I don’t want to work for that woman again,’ Ava said sharply – and her mind stamped the thought down with: and I never shall. The Mersey would have to up and leave Liverpool before she agreed to that. ‘In fact,’ she continued. ‘I’ve made the decision to put the whole thing quite behind me.’
Oliver raised one, questioning eyebrow. ‘The whole thing?’
‘Mesmerism,’ Ava said. ‘Memory work. All of it.’
Oliver’s expression slackened. ‘What—? Why? ’
‘I just believe it’s time to turn my attention to something new.’
She ignored the bewildered look upon her brother’s face, and gripped the bicycle’s other handlebar, to help steady it. Oliver had broken his dominant hand, and so they would both be forced to try and walk the thing home with their off-hand, which no doubt would make it zig and zag all the way.
‘But it’s your gift,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s your passion. And you’re good at it! And … and …’ His eyebrows furrowed. ‘And what about Pa?’
Ava felt the old tick of something in the pit of her stomach, a clockwork spoke long quiet that had begun to coil again. She turned her focus to the sky instead, and the heavy clouds pulling inland.
‘How is Pa?’
Oliver tilted his head up and frowned. ‘Bad.’
‘How bad?’ she asked, curling her cold fingers more firmly against the handlebar.
‘You’ll see soon enough,’ said her brother quietly. ‘Now come on. The rain looks like it has eased.’