“Helen!” I cried, stepping in front of her before she could pass.
She looked at me through the spiderweb shadow cast by the heavy lace veil. “Hello, Ava,” she said as if not at all surprised to see me. “How nice to see you. Have you come to town for my wedding? I’m afraid the weather is frightful.”
I gaped at her. “I’ve come to town to stop your marriage to van Drood!”
“You always did have a wry sense of humor,” Helen replied, nonplussed. “What larks we had at school.” She tilted her head back and forth as if looking for those memories.
“She seems to remember who she is and who I am,” I said to Omar, who had come up beside me and was peering curiously at Helen. “That must be a good sign, right? She’s not completely lost.”
“Of course I remember you, Avaline Hall of the Manhattan Halls. We were roommates at Blythewood, where we learned dancing and deportment and had cocoa parties and midnight feasts. It was all jolly good fun, but now I’m ready to take my place in society. So you see, I am not at all lost. I know exactly where I am—at Number Twelve Belgrave Square. Mama and I are guests of my betrothed, Judicus van Drood. We are to be married tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow!” Marlin cried, stepping between Helen and me.
“Yes, tomorrow at the Grosvenor Hotel, which is located conveniently adjacent to Victoria Station. We are leaving for our honeymoon tour of Europe directly after. Please do come. The ceremony is at eleven o’clock.”
“That’s an hour before Nathan’s meeting with Drood,” Raven said. “Drood is double-crossing Nathan.”
“Nathan? Is he here?” Helen blinked her blue eyes. She looked as if she had an eyelash caught in her eye—or as if she were trying to see past the web of shadows over her face.
“Yes,” I told her. “Nathan found out the location of the third vessel to bargain with van Drood for your freedom. But if you refuse to marry van Drood he won’t have to give it to him.”
“But why would I refuse to marry Mr. van Drood?” Helen asked, blinking again. I wondered why she didn’t just push the damned veil away. Helen had never cared for veils. She had always thought they were fussy and old-fashioned. Why cover my best asset? she’d once remarked with candid pride in her own beauty. “He’s the richest man in New York, perhaps in all the world. Mother and I will have no more money worries once I am wed. I’ll be able to buy all the dresses I want and have a house in town and the country and summers in Newport and grand tours of Europe. I’ll have servants to tend to my every need and I’ll throw parties and be invited to all the right parties. I’ll never have to worry about anything ever again.”
“But he’s old enough to be your father!” I cried.
“Many girls marry older gentlemen,” she replied. “It’s quite the done thing and often the best course for a girl of my temperament. I need a steady hand to guide me. I’ve been rather fickle on my own.”
Her eyes had drifted to a spot over my shoulder. I turned and found Nathan standing there. He was wearing a black raincoat and a low-brimmed hat that cast his face in shadow.
“Yes,” Nathan said, stepping forward. “You have been rather fickle, haven’t you? You haven’t been able to decide between me and him.” He jerked his chin toward Marlin and I saw Marlin flinch.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Marlin said, moving closer to Helen. I could tell by the way his shoulders rippled under his duster that he wanted to unleash his wings and mantle them over Helen’s head. “I’d say that Helen chose me.”
“Only because she was frightened of her feelings for me,” Nathan said, moving closer to Helen. Her blue eyes were flicking from one to the other, darting beneath the veil like a pair of birds trapped in a net. “When I told you how I felt about you last summer you didn’t trust me . . . I suppose I may have expressed myself poorly.”
“You said,” Helen said, her blue eyes fixing on Nathan, “‘As long as Ava’s chosen Raven, you and I might as well throw in our oars together.’”
“You idiot!” I cried, swatting Nathan on the arm. “You know perfectly well that it’s always been Helen you loved.”
“Yes, I do know that now. And I know what an idiot I’ve been, thank you very much, but I’m trying to make things right.” He turned back to Helen. “Damnit, Helen, don’t you know how I feel? I’ve loved you since you climbed trees with me even though you were terrified of heights because you knew I didn’t really want to be alone. I love you because despite all the damn fool things I’ve done you’ve stood by me. You’ve always seen the good in me even when I couldn’t see it myself. Just as I see my Helen here, even under van Drood’s spell, fighting to get free and out from under that dreadful veil.” He lifted his hand to Helen’s veil, but she flinched away.
“That was a very pretty speech, Mr. Beckwith, but hardly an appropriate one to make to a betrothed lady. Of course I, too, have many fond memories of our childhood escapades, but that’s all they were. I have put aside my childish ways now and I suggest you do as well. I believe you have made a business deal with my betrothed. You have something he wants. You may think that you will be able to trick him into releasing me without holding up your end of the bargain but I will warn you, for the sake of the friendship we shared, for the sake of old times”—her eyes flicked to me—“you will fail. Judicus van Drood always gets what he wants. And as for bargaining for my release—it is pointless. I am bound to him by chains that none of you can break.”
She stared at each of us defiantly, blue eyes blazing beneath her veil. Nathan’s hands were balled into fists, Marlin’s wings were stirring beneath his coat, but it was Omar who stepped forward in front of Helen and met her challenging stare.
“It is the trick of the master mesmerist to make his victim believe that there is no escape, that the bars of her cage are unbreachable, the irons that bind her unbreakable. But no cage is inescapable if the captive believes escape is possible.”
“Then I am truly doomed, Mr. Omar, because I do not believe escape is possible.”
“But you know you’ve been mesmerized,” Marlin cried. “Shouldn’t that make it easier for you to break his spell?”
“I have not been mesmerized,” Helen said, her voice so icy I shivered. “I have simply been shown the truth. Mr. van Drood has removed the scales from my eyes and shown me what the world truly is. I have seen the polite smiles of ladies turn into jealous sneers, the benevolent regard of gentlemen exposed as lecherous leers. I have seen my mother’s maternal care revealed as craven fear of her own poverty and disgrace. Even your pretty declaration of love, Nathan, is only a desperate attempt to save yourself from self-loathing. Just as your attempts to save me”—she turned to Marlin—“come out of your guilt that you gave up on that Blythewood girl who stood you up in the woods. It’s occurred to you that she might not have come because something happened to her. But instead of looking for her you went off to sulk.”
“That’s not fair . . .” I began, but Helen rounded on me, her blue eyes freezing the words in my throat.
“You’re the worst of all, Ava. My dear friend, Avaline, so unselfish in your pursuit of the righteous cause. The phoenix, avenger of injustice, hero of the working girl. But you didn’t save your friend Tillie, did you? Or your mother. You’re afraid that if you don’t save me you’ll never be able to live with yourself.”
“That’s true enough, Helen,” I said, tamping down the dark thing at the base of my spine that threatened to rise up and slap Helen in the face for the hurtful things she’d said. It’s van Drood talking, I told myself. My best friend in the world doesn’t see me as a craven hypocrite. “I won’t be able to live with myself, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”
“I never said you didn’t. I know you love me, but I also know you love yourself more. Don’t be offended, Avaline, it’s true of everyone, myself most of all. That’s what Mr. van Drood has shown me by removing the scales from m
y eyes. The world he is creating will be so much simpler. Everyone in his or her place, no one trying to rise above her station. It will run smoothly, like a well-oiled machine.”
I winced, recalling my dream of factory girls sewing themselves to their machines, van Drood lapping up their blood, and then I remembered what Gillie had said about van Drood’s factories in the future.
“Helen,” I said, lifting my hand to her veil, “you can’t want a world like that. What has van Drood done to you?”
She flinched as my hand touched the web of her veil. The lace felt peculiar—damp and spongy, as if it were . . .
“Alive,” Omar breathed. “The net on her dress and veil is living. That must be how she is entrapped. If we could remove it . . .”
“Oh dear,” Helen said, “imagine what people would say if they saw you ripping my dress off in the middle of Belgrave Square. And besides . . .” She plucked at her veil, lifting it a few inches from her forehead—tugging her skin with it. The veil was attached to her skin by tiny shadow stitches—a nightmarish echo of my dream of the factory girls sewing themselves to their machines. “If you rip my veil off I will bleed to death. You see, it’s sewn to my skin.”
21
“THAT MONSTER. I will flay him alive.”
“So you’ve said a hundred times,” Raven said to Marlin, a wing draped around his shoulder. “And I will gladly help you. But first we ought to figure out how to get that thing off Helen’s face.”
“How can such a thing even be possible?” Agnes asked.
We were in the second-floor parlor of the house that Agnes and Sam had secured from “friends of the Order,” conveniently located across the square from van Drood’s house. When Helen had revealed that the shadow net was sewn to her skin, Nathan had made a strangled sound and fled the park.
“I’d better keep an eye on him,” Kid Marvel had said, quickly slipping into the fog.
“Yes, perhaps you should,” Helen had said, turning to leave. I’d reached out to grab her arm and she had screamed at my touch. Then she had looked over her shoulder at me and smiled sadly. “Who’s the monster now?” she’d asked before vanishing into the fog.
“I have heard stories about such things,” Omar said, sipping a cup of tea. We’d all needed something hot when we’d come in from the fog. “A net of shadows stitched to a man’s skin—there’s even a reference to it in one of your children’s books—Peter Pan.”
“Do you mean when Wendy sews Peter’s shadow back on his feet?” Agnes asked, appalled. “But that’s supposed to be amusing!”
“Dark truths often lurk in your fairy tales and nursery rhymes,” Omar said ominously.
“It’s a little like the selkies, isn’t it?” I asked, turning to Raven. “They can slip out of their skins. Maybe they can help Helen.”
“I could go to them and ask,” Raven said.
“And I will go to the British Library to study the ancient texts concerning shadow magic,” Omar said. “The rest of you should make a plan to remove your friend from van Drood’s hold.”
“She made it pretty clear she didn’t want to leave,” Marlin said.
“That’s the shadow net talking,” I said firmly, as much to convince myself as the others. The things Helen had said still stung. “It makes her see everything in the most negative light. She only sees the selfishness in people, not the good.”
“Hmph,” Sam said, “I had a law professor who sounded like that. Cui bono? he would tell us to ask. Whom does it benefit? There’s a certain truth in it.”
“But not the whole truth,” Agnes said. “Helen must see that. After all, she selflessly saved Nathan.”
“And she told us that she was to be wed to van Drood at eleven o’clock,” I said. “An hour before Nathan’s meeting with van Drood at Victoria Station. Why would she tell us unless she wanted us to rescue her?”
“So that’s what we’ll do,” Marlin said. “We’ll go to the Grosvenor Hotel at eleven o’clock and rescue Helen.”
“Yes,” Raven said, clapping his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “But we’ll need help.”
“Did someone say they needed help?”
We all turned to the doorway where Daisy stood flanked by Jinks and Collie. A crowd of boys jostled in the hallway behind them. I heard Bottom shout for them all to “pipe down!”
“Have you brought the whole school?” I asked.
“They all wanted to come and help Becky and his friends,” Collie answered. “Is he here?”
“No,” I said, “but he’ll be at Victoria Station tomorrow, and when he sees all of you . . .” I looked at all the bright shining faces of the schoolboys, many of them still streaked with blue war paint and what I suspected were the remains of the raspberry biscuits they’d eaten on the train, all of them ready to risk their lives for their friend. For a moment I wondered how Helen would see them. Would she see selfishness and greed on their eager faces? But no, even the shadow net couldn’t dim these faces. “He’ll come back to us. Helen, too; I’m sure of it.”
“Then we’d better get planning,” Kid Marvel, who’d come in with the boys, said. “Have you boyos ever played a con?”
I turned from Kid Marvel as he began mustering the Hawthorn boys into a coherent team and noticed Sam and Agnes standing by the window whispering to each other.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Sam has a concern,” Agnes began.
“I don’t mean to be a worrywart, but when you asked why Helen might have told us that she was being married at the Grosvenor at eleven . . . well, there is another explanation. If she is under van Drood’s power she could have told us that because it’s a trap.”
We spent the night planning Operation Thousand Ships (“Because of Helen of Troy,” Jinks explained patiently to me). It reminded me of last year when Kid Marvel had taught us to play a con to rescue Etta’s sister from the Hellgate Club—only Helen had been there then. I tried not to think of her alone in van Drood’s house, trapped in that awful shadow net. Does she have to wear the veil to bed? Does it hurt all the time? Instead I busied myself making tea and keeping the Hawthorn boys full of raspberry biscuits and bread and butter. Marlin was perched on the roof keeping an eye on Helen’s window. Raven had left to talk to the selkies, and Agnes and Sam had gone to the Grosvenor to “get the lay of the land.” Mr. Omar and Collie had gone to Victoria Station to “obtain” porters’ uniforms.
The plan was rather simple for one of Kid Marvel’s cons. Agnes, Daisy, and I would go to the wedding posing as bridesmaids. I would grab Helen while Agnes and Daisy held van Drood at dagger point. Raven and Marlin would be nearby, as well as Sam and Mr. Omar. The Hawthorn boys, posing as bellhops in the hotel and porters in the station, would form a cordon around us to keep van Drood’s agents from interfering with us. We would take Helen directly to a train and get her as far away from London as we could—to an “undisclosed location,” which only Agnes knew, a school chum’s house in the country where she would be safe while Omar endeavored to free her of the shadow net. A simple plan, really, which the boys attempted to complicate by adding maneuvers from Caesar and code names from Kipling, which Kid Marvel good-naturedly humored.
“After all,” he remarked to me when he got up to help himself to a biscuit from the tea tray. “They’re going up against the evilest creature in creation. They need some fun to buck themselves up.”
“Are we wrong to let them help?” I asked. I was sitting in the window seat behind the tea table, anxiously keeping an eye on van Drood’s house across the square even though I couldn’t really see it through the fog.
“Do you want your friend back?”
“Yes . . . but doesn’t that make me as selfish as Helen said I was? That I’m willing to sacrifice these boys for my friend’s safety?”
Kid Marvel hoisted himself to the window seat and tapped his nose. “You got
a case of the dismals, I see. You’re seeing things as if you’re the one wearing the shadow suit.”
“It’s kind of hard not to once you start looking at things that way. Maybe it’s not a spell. Maybe it’s just the way the world is.”
“And what if it is?” Kid Marvel surprised me by asking. “What if we’re all out to save our own skins and there’s no rule in this world but eat-or-be-et? Do you think that hasn’t occurred to me working at the freak show at Coney?”
“No, of course not,” I said, embarrassed that I’d been complaining to Kid Marvel, who’d no doubt had it harder than any of us. “That must have been hard.”
“Well, it weren’t no bed o’ roses, I’ll tell you that, but as my friend Gloria the bearded lady once says to me, ‘I coulda spent my life shaving or made my fortune on the gawker’s dime.’ Sure, I useta think it was every man for himself, but then Mr. Omar and Delilah opened my eyes and I saw little kindnesses all around me. I thought youse ding-dongs were the worst, but then I met you and your friends. You all saved those girls from the Hellgate Club last year—not just your own girls but the girls from the street, too.”
“Helen would say I was just trying to feel better about myself.”
“Helen might be right,” he replied. “But so what? What good does it do to think that way? I figure there’s little enough good in this world to look at it with a gimlet eye. So I choose to look at what we’re doing as good, no matter who might benefit from it. And as for these boys . . .” He looked around the room. Half of the Hawthorn boys had fallen asleep on the couches, chairs, and rugs; the other half were playing cards with Daisy, who was teaching them flush and trophies. “What do you think will become of them if Nathan gives Mr. van Drood the location to the third vessel? What good will come of that?”
“None,” I answered, shivering at the memory of the list of Hawthorn casualties on Mr. Bellows’s corkboard. “None at all.”
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