Chapter Eight
Seph woke before daybreak on the tenth, with the assumption that she’d need to dress, pack, and walk to Starling’s Rest to retrieve Rhys and the coach.
He must have anticipated her over-preparedness, because shortly after her kettle began its high-pitched aria of mercy, there was a clatter downstairs and a ring of her bell.
She found him waiting for her, dressed in a red waistcoat and a fluffy, sage-green scarf, his brown curls each styled into perfect ringlets on his brow.
“Stop dawdling,” he teased, green eyes sparkling with mischief. “And stop looking so surprised.”
So she did.
She left the hot tea in the kettle and climbed into the coach, an empty trunk for her purchases lodged overhead, and her mind still bleary from sleep as they lurched off in the direction of Lewes.
He proffered a flask at her, his fingertips poking out of maimed gloves, and shook it a bit for good measure. “Coffee,” he said. “For your vim.”
“Coffee and what else?” she asked warily, plucking it from his grasp.
“Milk,” he answered, as though it were a confession. “Alas, I did tamper with it.”
She snorted and took a swig, sighing in pleasure at how it spread through her chest, and then, with renewed and clearer eyes, looked him over. “You seem much recovered.”
“Aye,” he agreed, tightening his lapels and giving her a snobbish view of his profile. “Good as new.”
“I hate catching chill,” she said, scooting back and bringing her legs up under her skirt to rest behind her on the seat. “Not so bad as a sour stomach, but close.”
“It wasn’t so bad,” he assured her. “No fever, and plenty of fussing, which is the best part of any illness. Besides, it convinced our cook to make a cawl for me, something she’d been vehemently opposed to prior to seeing me in such a sorry state.”
“I’ve never tried it,” she confessed. “Admittedly, I’m not even certain what it is? Something like haggis?”
Rhys pulled a face. “Absolutely not. It’s just a stew. A very tasty stew.”
“I like haggis,” she said mildly, tipping the flask back into her mouth. “The trick is not to think about it too much.”
“That’s always the trick,” he agreed, pulling a matching flask from his inside jacket pocket and spinning the lid free. “And good advice, besides.”
They jostled out of Brighton and past the barracks onto Lewes Road, the scenery growing grayer and rockier with dots of wilting grass visible through the fog.
Seph had always loved this time of year. The smell of rich, loamy decay. The tingling, wet chill. The colors. She found it more comfortable to move in than the oppressive heat of summer or the icy reprimand of winter winds.
She suspected this was not a popular opinion, however, and often kept it to herself.
“There was not enough time for proper inquiry,” Rhys said, having leaned back entirely on his side of the coach like the seat were a fainting couch.
He had one leg dangling off, his heel tapping quick, uneven staccato on the floor, and one arm draped over the top of the upholstery while the other toyed with his curls.
“If we’d gotten the missive sooner, I could’ve confirmed for certain with letters to my friends afield, but I did have a lot of time to think while I was stuck in bed. ”
“Oh, dear,” she said with a blink. “That’s a frightening thought.”
“Ho ho,” he mocked, rolling his eyes. “Anyhow. I ran through the last few years in my mind. Merlin the Illusionist is still very much an active performer. We thought he was an old man because we were children ourselves. Can you recall what age he actually seemed to be?”
She wrinkled her brow, her mind reaching backward for those long bygone summer fairs.
Merlin, a man in a domino made of some sort of pitch-black agate, sprinkled through with silver dots like the night sky. He’d had a cape too, with the same pattern. He’d taken it off often after shows, so his face hadn’t been a secret, but the mask itself had been a thing of beauty.
He had performed many wonders, but he had also attended many of the other shows that were plentiful during the Brighton high summer. Including Seph’s. And Rhys’s.
And Seph and Rhys together, back when that had been a reality.
But no, she could not rightly place his age. He might have been twenty-five or forty-five or seventy-five, and he would have looked generically adult to a twelve-year-old girl.
“He had gray hair,” she recalled. “So not a young man, right?”
“Perhaps,” said Rhys, shrugging. “Our family’s barrister, Harcourt, has been white-haired since his university years. I have no idea how old he is, but to me, he looks exactly the same as he ever has.”
She nodded, dredging up the image of Julian Harcourt in her mind’s eye. Handsome, healthy, and upright. Likely in his forties or fifties at the latest. But yes, Rhys was right, he’d gone gray very young. Or white, as it were.
“Hattie remembers Merlin as old too,” she pointed out. “And she was older than us.”
“Perhaps he was older than young, but not elderly,” Rhys suggested, shrugging. “He stopped coming to Brighton, though, after … or around the same time as … well …”
He trailed off, pulling a face.
Seph felt a twinge of shame creeping up to her cheeks. “Yes, that’s how I remember it too.”
“Was he there?” Rhys said suddenly, as though the idea had just slapped him hard in the mouth. “The day you sabotaged the Changeling. Do you recall?”
She recoiled at the sound of it. Of the word changeling in his mouth. She opened her own lips to argue with his phrasing. To argue with his interpretation of events. To argue for the sake of it. And then closed it again.
“I don’t know,” she muttered, squeezing her arms around herself. “My focus was elsewhere.”
“It certainly was,” he grumbled.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” she said firmly, turning her face with a click through the window, blinking away the unbidden memory even as it overtook her.
Even as it haunted her.
The Changeling had been their crowning glory as an illusionist duet, a pair of sparkling youngsters who had drawn crowds in those late summer throngs.
It had been a trick of misdirection, choreography, and folklore.
A combined effort of illusory genius and stage chemistry that might have made them rich if they hadn’t ruined it.
If he hadn’t ruined it.
If she hadn’t.
She squeezed herself tighter, that bright summer day clawing at her temples. She had made him disappear and reappear. He was supposed to do the same.
She had just chosen to never resurface.
She had fled the pavilion entirely.
She had left him there to be humiliated. Alone.
And he had deserved it.
“I’ve just never been able to figure out why you did it,” he grumbled, like he could hear her thoughts. “I’ve run it through a thousand times. And I’ve never landed on why.”
“If you haven’t figured it by now,” she said, brisk and snappy, “you likely never will.”
“You could always bloody tell me,” he pointed out.
And to that, she didn’t respond at all.
*
It had started to drizzle by the time the carriage had reached Lewes, which somehow both thickened the fog and segmented it into long, jagged tufts like crop rows, at least on the grassy outskirts of the city.
Farther in, the cobbles dispelled most of the ground-level fog, leaving only an odd, head-height cloud mist to muddle through.
In any event, it was lunch time, even if Rhys couldn’t see the damned sun, and he was starving.
“Lunch?” he said as he hopped out of the carriage, landing on the pavement a few feet behind Persephone Boswell. His voice was a bit raw from having to sit in silence for so long. Or perhaps it was a remnant of his sniffle.
Either way, it wasn’t his fault.
Seph spun around, as though the mere act of him daring to speak to her had slapped her across the face, those wide, blue eyes blinking in disbelief. “With me?”
“Well, I’d ask the horses, but I have a feeling we’d disagree on fare,” he said, shooting her what he hoped was an easy smile. “How many shops do you have to visit today?”
She hesitated, then gave a little sigh and turned toward him completely. “Three,” she said. “I sent orders ahead of time to two of them and the third always has enough stock for me to simply stop in and make my purchase.”
“Three shop visits won’t take us until midnight,” he pointed out. “Let’s eat first, go to your three shops, and then I get to choose three, to keep things fair.”
Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “Is that fair? I’m doing actual business, not mere sightseeing.”
“And I’ll buy luncheon,” he threw in. “More than fair. And no reason you can’t do both, Seph.”
“If you say so,” she agreed, though that wariness had not left her tone. “But I need to go to at least the first shop ahead of luncheon. I’ve an appointment.”
He nodded and sank his hands into his pockets, following her along. He was wearing gloves, of a sort, but he always cut the fingers out of them. It was a trick Hughes had taught him, all those years ago.
He’d tried, of course, to wear respectable gloves. Or worse, mittens.
But Rhys just didn’t like having his fingers constrained.
He thought that was sensible enough.
He followed her down the High Street and into the narrow Twittens, where specialty shops were located, places where work-a-day folk who only spent their coin on grocery and sundry did not often venture, save perhaps to look for Christmas gifts or solve an unexpected problem.
Rhys liked these alleys best. They were his favorite part of Sussex.
He stopped a little behind Seph as she murmured to herself, counting the numbers above each door, to peer into the window of a taxidermy shop, where an aged woman with impressive and beautiful wrinkles all over her face was carefully reconstructing the remains of two erstwhile little birds with the most spectacular orange-and-black plumage over their heads.
“Seph,” he called ahead. “I’ve found my first shop.”
“Do not dally,” she called back impatiently. “You will get lost.”
He chuckled and turned, speeding up to match her. “I’ve never been lost in my life, cariad.”
She paused.
And he did too, frowning.