“No. It’s no good. I can only live with you if Dad stays in jail. I can’t be happy knowing that.”
Larkin looked away from her, at his luggage beneath the desk.
“Go to the police if you must.” His voice was tired. “But allow me a head start; a week, that’s all I ask.”
“That’s all? It’s a long time for my father.”
“Please, Persephone. If I’ve meant anything to you at all.”
Her eyes brimmed. “I’ll give you three days. On one condition. Leave me the replica Mourners.”
“Why?”
“I need them as proof. You’re in no position to argue.”
“You’re really going to do it then,” he muttered.
She thought how happy she had been an hour ago – no, fifteen, ten minutes ago, though it felt like years – and how he hadn’t simply made her unhappy now; he had damaged her, so she would never trust happiness again. She raised his hand to her mouth, in a kiss.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Dad gave me my hex, at last,” she said. “It’s Fear.”
“You want people to be frightened of me?” The hurt behind his words pained her; his hand was still in hers, and he loved her.
“I want to give people a fair warning.”
“That’s not a warning. It’s a feature.”
“What?”
“You’ve loved Briar for years. You never stopped because you were frightened of him. The two things will always be tied together for you.” He stood up. “You can have the room tonight. I need to get as far away as possible.”
She watched him, in silence, as he donned his trousers, his shirt, his shoes. He raked his still wet hair.
“I’m glad you’re leaving,” she said.
He picked up his coat, which still had no buttons.
“Then it’s a happy ending for both of us,” he replied.
He walked out of their hotel room, and she was left alone.
48
Hedwig and Conrad were by the fire, playing backgammon with the cheeseboard in reach. Backgammon is a game of chance, which posed some challenges for Hedwig; she had greater control over games of skill, which she preferred because she could let Conrad win.
Just as she poured his second glass of port, they heard a visitor at their front door.
“Botheration,” Conrad grumbled. “Do send them away, Hedwig, do. Who knocks on doors at half eleven? Am I to have no moment’s rest, no peace?”
“They’ll be gone in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
She left him spreading Camembert across a cracker. Interruptions plagued this week before Sigillaria, as Conrad suffered visits from their large extended family – although this year had seen less interest from the residents in festivities at Conrad’s house.
When Hedwig opened the door, she saw Persephone there, ashen-faced, her hair heavy with rain.
“Oh!” Hedwig greeted. “Come inside – I can’t let you catch pneumonia!”
Persephone obeyed. The water ran from her fingertips and splashed upon the tiles. “I need to speak to Conrad.”
“Hell’s bells, he’s sozzled, Sephy – I expect he fell asleep as soon as I stepped away. D’you want to join me in the kitchen, and get warm while we talk? No?”
“I don’t need to get warm. I’ll only get wet again as soon as I go outside. If I have to tell you instead of Conrad, here is fine. The first thing is Larkin has gone. We argued, and he won’t be coming back to the eyot.”
“Very well; I’ll pass that on to Conrad.” So Larkin heeded Hedwig’s warning. They could draw a line beneath him.
“There’s a second thing. I need to leave the Tavern,” Persephone continued. “I was only there for Larkin, and your mother hates me.”
“Oh, I don’t know if that’s true!”
“It is. Can I live in the vacant terrace on the lane? I’ll pay the rent. Dad’s house is empty too and I could go back there, but it makes me sad.”
“That sounds so sensible, Sephy. Conrad will agree, you see if he doesn’t!” Guilt made Hedwig generous. Briar passed his hours in jail, instead of in his cottage, while she ate and drank her fill by an open fire. His daughter was before Hedwig; wouldn’t it be recompense to offer Sephy kindness? Wouldn’t that salve Hedwig’s restless conscience? “Dearest, we meant to inform you after New Year, but I say you need some good news sooner. Conrad’s made his wishes clear. He’s offering you promotion. You’re allowed to keep using sorcery, and to sell your work through the shop.”
Persephone’s brow knitted. “He’ll allow what I’m doing anyway.”
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”
“Ignore me. I know I have you to thank. He wouldn’t reach that decision on his own. Don’t argue, Hedwig, he wouldn’t. I’m cynical, because we expect so little of Conrad, and when he gives us less, he expects so much praise. I don’t know how you stand it.”
They said goodbye. Hedwig made her way to the drawing room, where Conrad was awake, against her expectation. Sephy’s words had left her flat and fractious. She’d never felt less inclined to let Conrad win at backgammon.
Conrad smiled at her, genially.
“I’ve given thorough thought to my estate documents,” he said. “The last occasion I amended them was – let me see – November. A great deal has changed since then. It may be time to reinstate you in my will.”
Hedwig hadn’t known she was ever in his will, much less that she had come out of it. Disinheritance must be the penalty for allowing the thief to escape, and now she was to be restored because the doll had been returned.
“Whatever you think best, Conrad.” She took a crumb of Cheddar from her plate, and chewed it absently.
“You’ll be my heir apparent,” he said. “Future mistress of this house, and of the workshop.”
Until the next time she displeased him.
“I thought you were grooming Alastair to take over?” she asked lightly. “He may be surprised.”
“Alastair won’t go without,” Conrad said dismissively. “Anyone would think you were trying to talk me out of remembering you favourably. Don’t you want to run the eyot? Don’t you long to bear my crown?”
“Your generosity leaves me lost for words, Conrad,” Hedwig responded. “And it’s bittersweet. Am I to be happy about your eventual death?”
He smiled indulgently at her. “You flatter me,” he said, and she knew he approved of her answer.
“Shall I telephone your solicitor tomorrow, to arrange an appointment?” she asked.
“There’s no great rush,” he said, vaguely. “I can telephone.”
He rarely made his own calls. Hedwig sipped her port in the silence. She wondered if he would make the change to his will at all; whether he was telling the truth about her being in his will before; whether he had any kind of will in place. Once she had believed Conrad was too self-absorbed to succeed at manipulation. Now she had to acknowledge that unverified promises of wills and bequeathments were a good way to keep people in line.
“I expect you have years, Conrad,” she said. “You’ll outlive us all.”
She kept her tone level. There was no hint of resentment. This time, his smile wavered.
49
Persephone had promised Larkin three days. She rose early on the first morning, having had no sleep, with a foreboding which she partly attributed to unprotected sex. As soon as the lines were open she made an appointment at a testing clinic for the New Year. She knew she should get emergency contraception immediately, and yet she did not take that step. Rather than examine her reasons, she focused on the practicalities of moving out.
She found Mrs Mayhew in the kitchen, cutting a string of sausages.
“You’ve burnt the candle at both ends, haven’t you, dear?” said Mrs Mayhew. “You can borrow my Touche Éclat for those dark rings. Be a pet and check if Larkin wants breakfast?”
“Larkin’s gone,” Persephone said. “He’s not coming back.”
Mrs Mayhew raised an eyebrow. “Met someone else, has he, love?”
“No. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’m afraid we have to. Larkin didn’t want me to say anything but I can’t see any other option now. You’ve not been paying full price on your room, love. He thought it would be too expensive for you and was giving me the shortfall.”
Persephone’s head was splitting. It meant nothing, that he had paid for her and didn’t want her to know; it didn’t mean he cared for her. It meant he could get the principles of enchantment more easily if she was close by.
“If he’s gone, you’ll have to start paying full price.” Mrs Mayhew ran the tap to wash her hands. “You must have guessed he was covering for you? A bright girl like you can’t have believed the rates were that low.”
“I won’t pay you anything extra,” Persephone said. “I’m moving into an empty terrace on the lane.”
Mrs Mayhew, confronted with her personal dislike of Persephone versus the loss of her rent, said: “If you feel you must. I’ll keep the door open if you change your mind. Larkin might come back, you know, love; when the novelty of the other one’s worn off.”
“There isn’t another one. I’m not your love. Sorry, I have to pack.”
*
Packing was a short-lived job. It took less than twenty minutes to stow away her dolls and a couple of dresses. She thought of Larkin’s doctor’s bag, which had also been packed with dolls, and she supposed they had similar priorities to each other.
She heard Mrs Mayhew on the stairs, heading to the bar in readiness for opening. Reassured that they wouldn’t encounter each other for further awkward conversation, Persephone slipped to Larkin’s room, lest she had left any belongings there.
His door was ajar. The familiar scents of doll-making greeted her – the wax and varnish she associated with him – even though much of their work had been cleared from the table. His bed was unmade and some shirts still hung in the wardrobe. The postcard of Lucy Kendrick was pinned to the wall, and Persephone tugged it free, to put in her pocket. She imagined framing it when she had redecorated the terrace.
Her dolls with button masks were stacked in a metal crate. Persephone sat on the floor to look at them again. She remembered Larkin’s first reaction to them. You must be a natural, he’d said, and the words still made her ache. She knew his love was fleeting, and poorly won. She knew he had imprisoned her father. But she still wanted her dolls to please him, because he understood, better than Conrad or Alastair, what made a doll beautiful. When she sketched, when she carved, when she moulded, he was now her imagined audience, every time. It scared her to think she must carry on without the reward of his praise.
She must be self-reliant, and find the inspiration within herself. She pushed the dolls aside in the crate. Underneath lay scraps of fabric; corners of wood. A roll of stiff copper wire, roughly the size and shape of a tennis ball, had acquired a green tinge. As an experiment, Persephone unravelled the wire. With a pair of pliers she twined different sections together, creating variable degrees of thickness and thorn-like protusions. She wound wire round her finger where she wanted curves. Between her palms she shaped the mass of wire into a belly, thighs, a head. The wire might form a woman, twelve inches high, jagged and ridged – a mass of crisscrossing lines that you could see straight through, that could be posed stiffly until her back curved and her arms thrust out from her like horns. You could lick her with the sign for Self-Righteous Outrage. And then Persephone stopped. The woman in her head faded and disappeared. Persephone’s hands were messy with wire that she couldn’t make sense of. The points jabbed her skin. It was as she’d feared. The doll was going wrong, because Persephone had lost her champion. Larkin wouldn’t see this doll. He would never again correct Persephone’s mistakes, and she would never make him feel another thing, not anger or love or anything else.
She crushed the wire back into the crate, desperate to be done with the Eyot Tavern. The postcard fell from her pocket as she stood up. Persephone took another look at the portrait; she wished she’d known Lucy Kendrick. Lucy must have worked without validation, because she was the very first, with no one before her to look up to. She had worked things out on her own. If she could answer questions—
Persephone paused mid-thought. Pictures, she recalled, had strange capabilities at the Eyot Tavern; provided you were influenced by the right enchantment. She was uncertain of her ability to control such an experiment. But it was perhaps worth trying.
She checked the corridor and the kitchen, to verify Mrs Mayhew hadn’t come back upstairs without Persephone noticing. The coast appeared to be clear. Persephone removed her boots, and walked soundlessly to Mrs Mayhew’s bedroom. It looked identical to Persephone’s memory of it: the same nicotine yellow walls, the same painting of the Thief on the Winged Horse. She hastily covered the painting with a satin nightie, which was the first thing that came to hand, because she didn’t want the Thief making a personal appearance.
Scooting under the bed, Persephone was relieved to see the cheap peg doll was once again pinned between the slats and the mattress. She took the postcard out of her pocket, stared at it, and reached for the doll that lay above her head.
As soon as she touched Visionary Delirium, the mandalas printed on the mattress fabric started to spin. They glowed turquoise and coral and their motion so entranced her that Persephone forgot her reason for being there until she felt someone’s shoulder against her own.
Persephone turned her head. There she was; Lucy Kendrick, matronly and reassuring, with fawn curls pinned above her head. Her dress was gathered at the bust, in cotton which varied from taupe to umber to ecru – the same spectrum of colours permitted by the sepia portrait, Persephone noted.
Lucy sneezed. “Crivens! It is dusty under here. Are we hiding?”
“Yes,” whispered Persephone.
Lucy dropped her voice accordingly. “From the Thief?”
“No, I took care of him. We have to hide from my landlady. I wanted to ask you something – several somethings.”
“I am all ears.”
“The wallhanging Larkin found in his room. Was it yours?”
“Jemima made it, during her confinement. She lived in this building after her marriage. The wallhanging was meant for her child – so he might learn the language we were born knowing. But the child died – and she died – and I couldn’t bear to see her handiwork, but nor could I bring myself to destroy it. I hid it beneath the floor.”
And it had been unseen, for two centuries.
“Jemima didn’t run away with a lover?” Persephone watched the bright mandalas fall from the bed, and dissolve on Lucy’s skin. Somewhere, beneath the thick haze of the dream they were in, Persephone’s heart was cracking. “Jemima didn’t take her child to France?”
“The child died, and she died. She never in her life left Oxford.”
So Larkin had lied about being a Ramsay. He’d lied while bathing her cut brow; while sharing a slice of wedding cake; while offering her every hex he owned when she had none. With his arrival everything on the eyot had come unstuck, good and bad. Persephone thought again of the difficulty of creating without him.
“Who do you make your dolls for?” she asked Lucy.
“Why, for me!”
“I thought you’d say that. You don’t need anyone’s help.”
“Ah. There’s a different matter; help is a different matter. I have help from Rebecca – Jemima – Sally! We help each other.”
“The Sorcerers made out it was bad to have help.”
“You’re not an island. You’ll make nothing without help. Nobody does. Have you sisters?”
Persephone thought of Hedwig. She was not sure whether Hedwig had also guessed at the truth of their kinship, or whether she was oblivious to it. Nor was she confident they had anything but Briar in common. Hedwig had never seemed interested in the creative side of their business. Persephone said: “No. I don’t have any sisters.”
/>
“Brothers?” Lucy prompted.
“No.”
“Then you must seek out sisters and brothers, whether or not they’re your blood.”
“How?”
“Help from above is unreliable. Look for who else is in need, for who else has been denied, and see what you have in common.”
Larkin had helped her, after her father and the Sorcerers would not. He had been in need, too. And though his ruthlessness in framing Briar horrified her, hadn’t she benefitted? Without Briar’s absence she would never have known what it was to feel free of him. He would never have given her the hex that was her due.
But she had sent Larkin away, and now he would never help her again.
“What if you find your champion, and then they let you down?” she asked.
“That’s unavoidable; Jemima abandoned me in death. It’s why you need many brothers and sisters. An island of two is not much stronger than an island of one.”
Persephone was yanked from behind by the collar. Her first thought was the Thief had caught her; but she dropped the Visionary Delirium doll, and the world swam back into its usual dim palette of colours, and it was the all-too-real hand of Mrs Mayhew at her neck.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Mrs Mayhew roared.
She towed Persephone out across the carpet.
“I’m sorry,” Persephone said, wincing from a friction burn on her elbow. She could acknowledge she’d crossed a line by crawling under Mrs Mayhew’s bed. But it was not as though they had a friendship to ruin.
“Get out of this pub now. Talk about liberties!”
“That’s rich,” Persephone said, rapidly feeling less penitent. “You had a fucking good rummage in my room from time to time.”
“Because you’re under my roof. There’s no comparison. You really were dragged up, weren’t you? Leave.”
“I’m going,” Persephone muttered. She picked up her suitcase and boots in the hall on her way.
50
The second day came, and Persephone continued to wait. She had no furniture in the terrace, other than a kitchen table with twin stools, and upstairs, a single bed; for now, that was sufficient. Several times throughout the day she picked up a half-finished doll with the intention of working on it, but each time she put it down again as quickly. She absently tugged on a ragged strip of floral wallpaper in the tiny hallway, and progressed to stripping every room of the ground floor; the simplicity of aiming to finish each wall occupied her hands without requiring any creative thought.
The Thief on the Winged Horse Page 25