Chapter One
Fifteen Years Later
The pocket watch was still missing.
Rhys Caradoc had intended to sleep in today. It was, after all, the night after a major triumph and quite a lot of celebratory drinking.
But for what must have been the thousandth time since returning to Starling’s Rest back in May, he found himself roused from slumber, certain he’d thought of yet another place to look for the damned thing.
It wasn’t there, of course.
He’d tossed his mattress that first day back. He’d cleared the closet after a week. He’d emptied all the drawers after a month.
It was gone. And worse, he knew the only idiot stupid enough to have moved it or lost it was himself. Some earlier version of himself he couldn’t remember very well anymore.
So dawn cracked the horizon with Rhys on his arse, surrounded by books on Welsh language and Celtic myth, old trick boxes, feathers, and sparkly bits, with his head pounding and his patience frayed at both ends.
He thought he’d never sleep properly again until he found the blasted thing.
He’d left it here. That much, he was certain of. He’d left it here because he’d wanted Willa to hold it as collateral every time he left. He’d wanted her to know he’d come back.
Now she was gone and so was the watch.
Wasn’t that just perfect?
He could almost hear old Hughes in his mind, chuckling at Rhys’s misfortune. He could hear his crackly voice, worn rough by years of his well-chewed pipe, observing the state of the room and chortling, “Ha! Twpsyn!”
He sighed and leaned back against the foot of his bed, glancing down at one of the more well-worn books in his collection and the lovely gilt illustration of a golden-haired princess gazing up at her doom. At him.
“Ych yi fi,” he said to her with a sigh. “I’ve lost time itself, Gwenllian, cariad. Smite me. Please.”
She didn’t.
She had never given him an inch, that Gwenllian ferch Gruffudd. She was glorious that way. He sighed and stroked the curve of her cheek before forcing himself to his feet.
If he was going to brood, he might as well do it on a full stomach. And he could smell the kippers from here.
He brought the book with him. And why not? He was entitled to break his fast with the only woman he’d ever loved, wasn’t he?
His siblings, three present at the table, all groaned the instant he appeared, their eyes falling on the book. It made him grin.
Assembled at the table were the once fat boy and slight girl, now perfectly proportionate and attractive adults. Now the Baron and Baroness Selwyn, Elias and Hattie. Well, somewhat proportionate. Hattie’s belly had started to expand to make room for the child inside it.
Seated slightly farther down the table was Malcolm Lennox, the brown-skinned boy he’d once stolen the watch from.
Rhys narrowed his eyes at Mal.
“Her again?” Malcolm said, clicking his tongue at the book. “Really, Rhys.”
“She feels the same way about you, Saes.” Rhys sniffed, pulling out a chair and flopping the book next to his plate.
“I sound English,” Malcolm retorted. “But I’m not. Father’s Scots, you know. Mother was West Indian.”
“And yet,” Rhys replied sweetly, “you’re the most English person ever to percolate through this dining room. No offense to our lord and lady.”
“Absolutely none taken,” Hattie French said immediately, a fluffy bit of pastry suspended on her fork. “I consider myself multi-national, anyhow.”
Hattie Selwyn, Rhys corrected mentally. She was married now, after all. Hattie was married and it was just as odd as everything else about her. He gave her a grin and cocked his head to the side. “That makes sense.”
“Of course it does,” her husband replied with a fond, if dry chuckle. “Which nation are you channeling this morning, my love?”
“Rhys’s, I think,” she said wistfully, reaching out for the book, which Rhys immediately handed over, pleased to have an ally. Hattie flipped it open and considered the illustration. “I always quite admired Princess Gwen and her courageous final stand. Not many princesses are warriors, you know.”
“Ah, yes,” said Elias, looking curiously over her shoulder. “I learned about her at Eton. Our illustration was not quite so fetching.”
“‘Fetching,’ is she?” Hattie replied mildly, slapping the book closed. “I always thought she rather resembled—”
“She doesn’t,” Rhys snapped before Hattie could finish her thought. “It’s a blasphemous, heretical thought and you all can stop voicing it now.”
“Oh,” Hattie said, blinking sleepily, returning the tome to its owner. “All right, then.”
Rhys frowned as he accepted the book, and this time stored it under his chair. Hattie had gone and ruined it.
“I’m more of an Aethelflaed man myself,” Mal said mildly, reaching forward for another bread roll. “She kept her head.”
“If you wish to join her in that feat,” Rhys replied, tearing his own bread in half, “you’ll stop talking.”
“He can’t,” came the singsong voice of the youngest ward, Ruby Little, as she swept into the room, a thicket of mail in her hands. “He’s tried.”
“I have tried,” Mal agreed, winking at her, which only made her wrinkle her nose in distaste.
Ruby was petite, dark haired, and loud. Rhys liked her very well. He especially liked when Mal tried to flirt with her and she reprimanded him. It seemed today the reprimand would be nothing more than a cutting facial expression.
Still good, he decided, if low on her scale of possibilities.
Mal didn’t mean it, anyhow. It was just ribbing in one of the many flavors of ribs.
“Four envelopes for Hattie,” she said, lowering her eyes to the stack and handing them out. “I like the one with the funny letters.”
“Cyrillic,” Hattie said softly, turning the correspondence in her hands. “Oh, it’s from Prince Kontarovsky. How lovely.”
Her husband grumbled something unintelligible.
“Two for you, Mal, but they really should start sending these to your office, not the house,” Ruby continued, holding out what appeared to be business correspondence in crisp, white vellum. “And … oh. One for Rhys.”
“What?” Rhys said, a sentiment echoed by everyone else at the table in dribs and drabs. “Who’s writing to me?”
“I don’t know,” she said, producing a thick, brown envelope, secured with both twine and a seal. “No return address. You could open it and tell us, of course.”
“Maybe a new fan,” Mal speculated, “who saw your turn as Mercutio last month?”
“Well, give it,” Rhys said, flexing his hand at her. “A man always needs new fans.”
It was heavier than he’d expected. It gave him pause.
“I’ll open it later,” he decided, putting it to the side and leaning over the table to grab some kippers, using his bare fingers to do so, the little fried fishies crisping pleasantly against his palms.
“Ugh,” said Ruby, watching this happen. “You are a child.”
“Older than you,” he replied cheerfully. “What else is in that stack?”
“Oh,” she said, frowning down at what was left. “Some seeds for Errol that he ordered from the Carolinas. Some accolades for Libba. An order for me. And one for Monica.”
“Libba doesn’t live here anymore,” Mal pointed out, chewing on his bread. “She’s married and all.”
“Yes, well, do be sure to shout that at the letters so they forward themselves,” Ruby told him with a roll of her eyes, tossing the remaining correspondence onto the table and flopping into her own seat. “How dare she, and so on?”
Rhys tuned them out, his thoughts moving to the envelope. He didn’t like to open things in mixed company unless he was certain what was going to come out of them. But if he was too hasty in departing, it would raise too much interest.
The only thing to do was to get through his kippers and retreat in due course, despite the itching impatience in his fingers to tear the thing apart.
“You were mentioned specifically,” Ruby said to him, startling him out of the low hum of his reverie. “By the London journalist.”
“What?” he said. “Why?”
Malcolm laughed, taking a swig of his tea. “Because you were good, fool.”
“And because of the sparkles,” Ruby added, nodding in agreement. “That was a very good idea and compounded by a very talented chemist, after all.”
Rhys gave her half a grin.
He’d spent the last month portraying Mercutio in their sister Libba’s production of Romeo and Juliet.
Ruby, in all her chemical genius, had taught him how to create little curls of combustible powder in rice paper that would pop and glitter during his big speech.
It had been a highlight of the production, if he did say so himself.
“Well, that dooms you, then,” Mal said darkly. “If the critics are noting you, Libba will force you to act again. And again. I hope you are prepared.”
Rhys scratched at his knotted mop of curls and grinned across the table. “Consistently.”
“I think you’re a natural hand at it,” Ruby commented. “I wish she’d cast me.”
No one responded to that.
Because Ruby was a terrible actress.
And she certainly didn’t notice or catch wise to the connotation of the silence, because everyone would have immediately known if she had.
Rhys was not an actor by trade. Not at all.
Willa had wanted to put his quick hands and fast reflexes to work in a thousand different ways.
She’d let him apprentice with a Swiss clockmaker for half a year, when he’d been twelve.
When he’d been fourteen, she’d sent him to the surgical theater down in Barrel End.
Once, in a pique of madness, she’d brought in a military man who had taught him how to build and disarm traps, triggers, and all manner of locks.
She had regretted that last one.
In the end, Rhys had found his calling before he’d ever entered Starling’s Rest. He just hadn’t realized it right away.
It was those showmen on the beach who had lit the fuse on Brighton’s magic for him, when he had still been a hungry child vagabond.
It had been the flash and spectacle of the illusionists who’d made things vanish or appear, who’d guessed things they could not have possibly known, who’d delighted and astounded in equal measure.
He was, perhaps, the least respectable of the Starling brood, peddling illusions and trickery for coin, but Rhys thought that was all right.
He always had been the least respectable one, anyhow.
And he liked it.
The only concern had been letting the baroness down, once he’d decided on it. But if Willa had been disappointed with Rhys’s ultimate fate, she had never said so. She’d even traveled once or twice to attend his performances afield.
In fact, when they’d been deep in the throes of adolescence, she’d taken them to Edinburgh for Christmas one year, just so Rhys could perform with a gathering of illusionists at the top of the city’s famed hill. He had been thirteen or so by then.
It had been extraordinary.
She had done right by him. Always.
She had made sure he could read, write, and speak proper Welsh. She’d bought him books on his home country and even found historical records of the name Caradoc, though Rhys suspected his name was borrowed, not inherited from medieval giants.
She had been his mother in every sense but name.
But she’d died.
Or at least, that was what the law said.
In truth, Willa Selwyn had vanished. Rhys often vanished too, so he didn’t consider that bit alarming, but apparently, if you stayed gone for seven full years, it meant you were dead.
He’d taken note of that.
Everyone dies, in the end.
After breakfast, he’d taken his parcel and his book back to the boys’ wing, whistling to himself something that was not quite a tune. He’d closed the door. He sat on his bed. And he touched his name on the brown paper, written in bold, black ink.
Perhaps he’d forgotten something back in Cardiff over the winter and the inn had forwarded it on?
Perhaps he’d won something in a raffle from that pub he’d lived in near Kildare? They were always raffling things.
Part of him wanted to keep it sealed so it could continue to be many possibilities forever.
But impulse was louder than desire, and before he’d even decided to do it, the string was popped and the wax seal broken.
Inside was a thick card stock cut into a rectangle and a thick, second envelope, also sealed.
He frowned.
The card stock had a rough sketch on it, done in charcoal pencil. A sketch of a timepiece, a pocket watch, open to show twelve o’clock. The latticing on the top of the thing was very familiar to him. It was twined in metal around the letter ‘S.’
For Selwyn.
In calligraphy, on the front, bold script read: Midnight.
He blinked a few times, his mind reeling, and wrinkled up his nose as he turned the thing over in his hand.
The back also had text. Also in calligraphy.
Carpe Noctem.
“Be uffar?!” he muttered to himself.
Welsh, tutored and perfected under a noblewoman’s care, which translated to What the hell?!
He forced himself to swallow and pushed the card to the side. Staring down at the still-sealed parcel that remained.
This one was creamy, glossy paper in a deep, emerald green. It had a white wax seal on the back.
And most importantly, it was not addressed to Rhys at all.
It was, instead, addressed to the very last person in all of Brighton to whom he wished to speak. It was addressed to his nemesis. His rival. The woman who existed simply to make his life more difficult.
There, in a glinting ribbon of ivory ink, read the addressee:
Miss Persephone’s Oddities and Curiosities
Attn: Miss Persephone Boswell—Brighton’s Premiere Illusionist
(Invitation Enclosed)