by Olivia Waite
“What?”
Mr. Giles’s exclamation rippled through a quarter of the audience. More heads turned, and an irritated whisper rose from the crowd.
On stage, Sophie’s hand slipped, and the first wrong note marred the waltz.
Mr. Roseingrave held out the papers, as Sophie struggled on. But the weight of attention had shifted now, to the drama playing out in the front row.
Mr. Giles snatched the pages from the piano maker’s hand and peered at them, shuffling through them slowly and then faster and faster. Maddie knew what he saw there: every page bearing the same three letters, tall and bold and mocking:
IOU
Maddie watched realization dawn on his face and turn it a pale and sickly green.
Concert utterly forgotten, Mr. Giles leaped up from his seat and raced down the aisle. Mr. Roseingrave hurried after him. Listeners cried out as the figures blocked their view, and a few voices called out objections.
The spell that had held the audience rapt was finally shattered. Sophie’s waltz broke off entirely.
She twisted on the piano bench, her face horrified as the murmur of the audience grew more urgent. People were standing up, turning to face the back of the hall, craning their necks to see what all the fuss was about.
The sudden break in the music left a gap—something had to fill it.
Maddie stood from her chair and began making her way toward the exit.
Mr. Giles reached the back and looked wildly around. Finally, his gaze lighted on Alice. where Alice stood guarding donations like a dragon guarding its hoard. “Where is she?” he demanded, anger making his voice heedlessly loud.
The audience all swiveled to see.
Alice—fair, slight Alice, who looked so fragile and meek, and who was anything but—could only shake her head.
Mr. Giles cursed.
The murmurs of the crowd acquired a disapproving color. Maddie saw one gentleman she knew to be a trustee of the Carrisford Bank of Savings come up to take Mr. Giles gently by the elbow, whispering something softly in his ear.
“No!” Mr. Giles shook him off, his eyes wide and white, the red coming and going from his cheeks as he grappled with this disaster. He demanded again, turning wildly toward all corners of the room. “Where is Mrs. Money?”
Heads shook, shoulders shrugged.
By the door, Maddie pulled in a breath. “She went this way!” she cried.
And turned to run.
They found her easy enough to follow, thanks to all those silver spangles on her dress. By the time Maddie reached the street, there were a handful of people running alongside her: Mr. Giles sprinting with all his panic and power, Mr. Roseingrave with his long legs eating up the ground, quick and lithe Alice. They slowed a little as they poured out the doorway, searching for signs of the older woman’s flight.
“There!” Alice cried, pointing. A green-clad figure at the end of the street, running left to right. Gold rosettes stood out against the green bodice, and the hem bristled with flounces.
Judith Wegg—not Mrs. Money—but not even Maddie could tell from so far away.
With Maddie in the lead, the crowd took off in pursuit.
Another corner, another dress—impossibly far ahead. “How could such an old bitch move so fast?” Mr. Giles hissed, panting. Maddie didn’t spare the breath to reply; she was busy trying to keep at the head of the hunt.
They passed by the Mulberry Tree, blazing like a beacon in the night. A few gentlemen several sheets to the wind stopped to holler in outrage as the crowd roared around and past them.
“To the left!” Maddie panted, pointing to where a green-clad woman sprinted toward St. Severus.
Mary Fisin, Maddie thought as she wheezed for breath, had a surprising turn of speed.
They followed for another two turns before the figure vanished once more. They were close to the castle now, and the crowd was flagging. Mr. Roseingrave dropped out and was replaced by a young man who looked like a consumptive clerk but who ran like the wind. Alice was now at the head of a tangle of older boys baying with delight like a group of hounds let loose on the tail of a fox. “She’s heading for the river!” one of the boys cried, as the figure in the green gown dashed across the top of the old ramparts.
It was Mrs. Money in truth this time—the twists and turns Maddie had taken had given the older woman plenty of time to get here ahead of her pursuers.
The crowd burst out of the streets and onto the rampart just in time to see their prey hasten down the river stairs toward the rushing water. A small boat was tied to a dock there—the woman scrabbled into it, the skiff bobbing and bucking in the current. She reached for the metal cleat where the boat was tied and began yanking at the ropes.
The ramparts were high enough above that everyone could see what happened next.
The mooring rope came free and the woman pulled her wrist away—but the purse had caught on the cleat, and tore in two with a sound that made half the listeners flinch.
One thousand pounds in Carrisford bank notes burst out into the air and were immediately snatched up by the wind.
They spun tight and thick at first, then less so, some of them landing on the surface right away and some of them dancing down more leisurely. But all of them, all of them lost in the cold rush of the river, a fortune borne away beneath the roiling waves.
Mrs. Money’s boat was caught by that same current, too swift for any runner to catch. She sat there, head bowed and hands empty, as the River Ethel carried her away.
Chapter Eighteen
Sophie basked in the chaos in the concert hall.
Everyone was talking. As the story of Mrs. Money’s perfidy spread through the audience, it quickly came out as well that in order to meet her price Mr. Giles had mortgaged his shop to the Carrisford Bank—the trustees of whom were almost all present in the audience. The gentlemen held a hurried and anxious conference to one side of the hall. It was clear they were most upset to see their faith had been so misused. They had entrusted him with a great deal of money in a very short span of time—but evidently Mr. Giles’s judgment was not to be relied upon.
Sophie watched the hungry sharks turn to rend one of their own.
Mr. Roseingrave returned and explained what had become of Mrs. Money. “I know just how you gentlemen feel: I have been the victim of a very similar swindle not so long ago . . .” His open face and kindly manner had the usual effect as he told the story. The relieved trustees shook his hand and clapped him on the back and thanked him for his sympathy.
Sophie went to compliment Miss Muchelney on her performance, and saw Mr. Frampton and Miss Slight slip out the side door, with Miss Narayan and Mr. Samson following soon after. She held her smile and did her duty until the Moot Hall was mostly empty, with only Roseingraves and members of the Weavers’ Library left. The latter began vanishing as well. Sophie fought against impatience and exhaustion both. It had grown late by now, but they had not played the finale quite yet.
Sophie and her father bid good-night to her mother and siblings, and walked down the road to St. Severus’s Church.
The graveyard that had seemed so stark and sinister before now glowed sweet and silver in the moonlight. Tombstones with faded letters listed as if they, too, had been worn out by the evening’s events. Night birds called out from the nearby trees, and old snow crunched underfoot. Sophie and her father went along the path and around the corner, past the great marble stones of the wealthy and to the smaller, humbler set of plots where the weavers and tailors and shoemakers were buried.
Everyone was waiting for them, gathered beneath the concealing branches of an ancient willow. Mr. Samson and Miss Narayan, Miss Slight and Mr. Frampton, Alice Bilton and Judith Wegg and the rest of the Weavers’ Library.
And, of course, Maddie Crewe, her silver spangles now hidden beneath her cloak. Beside her, wrapped in a dark shawl and a plain hat and wearing anything but Pomona green: Mrs. Money.
Sophie and her father joined the loose cir
cle around one small gravestone. “Well?” Sophie asked, hardly louder than the breeze. “Did it work?”
Maddie’s lips opened in a silent laugh. “Almost too well. Mrs. Money’s ‘escape’ looked so real I almost believed it myself.”
Mrs. Money’s head tilt was as proud and pleased as an actress curtseying for an ovation.
“And you, sir,” Mrs. Money said to Mr. Roseingrave. “You missed your calling, not taking to the stage.”
Mr. Roseingrave flushed and ducked his head. “Oh, I think I’ve suffered enough nerves tonight for a whole life’s worth as an actor,” he said.
“How did it go with the bankers?” Maddie asked.
Sophie chuckled. “The last we saw of them, they were trading tales of Mr. Giles’s unreliability, and wondering that he should have gone on so long without being called to account before this.”
“They’re sure to consider him poison after this,” Mr. Roseingrave put in. “I imagine it will be quite difficult, if not impossible, for him to repay them such a sum.”
“They’ll take his shop,” Judith said, satisfaction rich as velvet in her voice.
“Good,” Mrs. Money said. Her vowels had lost their aristocratic patina, and were now as true and honest in accent as Maddie Crewe’s.
“I only wish we could have ruined all the trustees, too,” Alice put in. “They were perfectly willing to go along with his scheme, underhanded as it was, so long as they profited from it.”
“Next time,” Maddie Crewe promised, with a wicked smile.
Mr. Roseingrave, to his credit, only blanched a little at this promise of future crime. “Are you coming home, Sophie?” he asked.
“Not just yet,” Sophie said. She was still quaking too much for sleep.
Her father nodded, bowed to the gathering, and began his cheerful walk back through the stones. One by one, the others followed, until only Mrs. Money, Maddie, and Sophie were left.
The organist of St. Severus’s began her evening’s practice: haunting music and lantern light spilled through the tall stained-glass windows, designed to mimic the effects of woven cloth. Bright bands of every color slanted over and under one another in a dizzying spectrum. Sophie watched the colors fall protectively over the small grave, and let her eyes trace the letters carved there: Marguerite Crewe, Beloved Weaver, Mother, and Friend.
The organ notes floated in the air, soft as moonlight at this distance.
Mrs. Money’s eyes were clear as she looked at her lover’s grave; her tears had been shed long since. “I suppose I should be making my escape in truth,” she said. Earlier this week she had presented Mr. Giles’s letter of credit at the bank; that thousand pounds, in cash, now belonged to the Weavers’ Library, with Mr. Giles none the wiser and thus unable to ask for it back.
Jenny Hull’s vengeance was complete.
Mrs. Money’s hand rested briefly on the gravestone in a final farewell, then she straightened and looked at Maddie. “Last chance—if you feel the need to flee Carrisford for a while, come by the Mulberry Tree an hour after dawn.”
Sophie’s heart stuttered in her chest.
Mrs. Money didn’t wait for a reply, but strode off into the night.
Maddie was still staring down at her mother’s headstone. “I swear every time I come here, the letters are worn down a little more,” she said. “I don’t want her memory to fade with them.”
Sophie swallowed the lump in her throat, as the willow tree shivered in the breeze overhead. “My mother is urging me to go out into the world—and you feel yours would want you to stay. Where does that leave us?” But she was afraid she knew. It always came down to this: Sophie wanted someone more than they wanted her.
The moonlight, the graveyard, even the music—it was a farewell scene, and it made Sophie’s heart ache.
Maddie spoke low. “Do you want to know a secret? My mother died angry. She didn’t regret attending the meeting at St. Peter’s Fields, but she was furious that her life was ending in such a fashion. It was like theft, she told me. The soldiers who killed her stole the rest of her life. From her, from me, from all of us—she had so much more work she wanted to do. The Weavers’ Library has always honored her sacrifice, and I have tried to carry on as she would have, but . . .”
Sophie reached out and took Maddie’s hand, then gently took both hands when she felt how chilled Maddie had become.
Maddie turned and drew their joined hands up. “I think if I tried to live the rest of her life in her place, that would be a kind of theft, too. I’d be stealing from myself—and I know I would have regrets, very strong regrets, about what I’d have to sacrifice.” She pressed her lips to the back of Sophie’s hands, one after the other. “But I promised I’d never lie to you, so let me say it clearly. I love you, Sophie. I can’t give you up. I don’t want to stay here if you’re leaving.” She pulled in a shaky breath. “If you ask me to come with you, I’ll say yes.”
Sophie feared she was dreaming. Here was fierce, beautiful, audacious Maddie Crewe offering her heart and her future. The Sophie of one year ago would have felt too small and sparrow-like to accept, would have worried this was something she had to earn instead of a gift freely given.
The Sophie of this moment, however, was an opportunist. Her flirtation with worthwhile crime had taught her to see the true value of things.
There was nothing in all the world she valued more than Madeleine Crewe.
So she bounced up on her toes, pulled Maddie down for a thorough kiss, and grinned in the moonlight. “I love you, too,” she said. “Come with me.”
“Now?” Maddie laughed.
“Now—and every day after.”
Maddie swooped Sophie up in her arms and whirled her about, there among the gravestones and the stained-glass rainbows. She was still laughing when Sophie kissed her again; Sophie swallowed up the sound of that laugh until it lit her up like the flame inside a lamp.
Maddie set her down at last, and for a moment they simply breathed together, as the sound of sacred music filled the air around them.
Chapter Nineteen
Mr. Giles, it transpired, had been extremely busy extremely quickly with the full amount of the loan from the Carrisford Bank, which exceeded even what Mrs. Money had demanded: with this vast sum he had consulted expensive experts on factory production and bought his usual gifts and bribes to smooth his way into this new branch of the industry. Many of these expenses were unrecoverable, and as the trustees began making stern sounds about the courts and the magistrates his desperation mounted by the hour.
In the end, Mr. Giles had to sell everything—his wares, his shop, his house, his furniture. He did make a case before the magistrates, and tried to call the Weavers’ Library members as witnesses to prove they’d helped defraud him. But every girl stood before the bench and testified she’d been hired to work the loom, had been blindfolded, had no idea the dye didn’t work as promised, or how that fraud had been sold to him by the deceitful Mrs. Money.
The magistrates, who’d had several quiet meetings with the trustees, turned a baleful eye upon Mr. Giles. Furious and disgraced, he left town to go live with a cousin somewhere in Cornwall, and everyone spared a moment to pity the cousin.
The elder Mr. Samson once more made an offer on the empty factory. Mr. Obeney, still grieving the loss of his utopia, sold hastily and moved away, while Mr. Samson began updating the old looms and hiring weavers and overseers, negotiating hours and wages with the Weavers’ Library—now once again the Weavers’ Library and Reform Society, the old name revived as soon as the ink had dried on the repeal of the Combination Acts. Full of funds and bolstered by legality, they were already strategizing about Mr. Prickett’s silk mill, the employees of which were threatening a strike.
The chief strategist would be not Maddie Crewe, but her stepmother: Mrs. Crewe had learned of the silk mill’s many faults of management from her observant daughters, and was earnestly and rather terrifyingly set on correcting them. The Weavers’ Library had use
d some of Mr. Giles’s own cash to purchase his empty storefront and made it the center of a cooperative retail society. Soon lace makers, shoemakers, tailors, piece workers, and others became members to show goods in the fledgling store, while Mrs. Crewe and her two daughters kept eagle eyes on stock and customers alike.
The running of the Weavers’ Library and Reform Society was now left to Judith Wegg and Alice Bilton, and Maddie was still staggered by the relief she felt at stepping down from a job she’d seen as a duty for so many years.
And then, six months after the concert, Mr. Frampton the elder had a letter from a friend and former fellow musician in Westminster. A gentleman he knew had a daughter mad for the piano but terrified of performing in public, and he wondered if Mr. Frampton might know someone who would know how to teach her.
Mr. Frampton was happy to say that he did, and passed along Sophie’s name. Several letters later, Sophie had a job, a new pupil, and a journey to pack for. Harriet Muchelney’s teaching would continue under the auspices of Mrs. Halban, an older woman with kind eyes who brooked absolutely no nonsense.
The week before the journey, the Aeolian Club and the Weavers’ Library threw a farewell soiree for Miss Sophie Roseingrave and Miss Maddie Crewe.
It was a lively mix of weavers, trade folk, and musicians, and inevitably someone called for a dance. The pattern books were tucked out of harm’s way, the chairs and tables were pushed aside, and someone pulled out a guitar and launched into a sprightly piece. Three couples formed the first set: Miss Narayan and Mr. Samson, Mr. Frampton and Miss Slight, and Maddie and Sophie.
Sophie glowed in a rose silk dress, her cheeks pink with small beer and delight. You’d never know by looking just how nervous she was to leave her family, but Maddie had no doubt Sophie would rise to the challenge.