Luciana remembered the fear that had coiled in her stomach when she’d first met Thursby.
“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice thick.
Clara rubbed a hand over her face. “I don’t really want to tell you details, Luciana. But several theatres have burned down. One fellow’s horse spooked and threw him, breaking his back in three places. Unpleasant, terrible incidents.”
Clara’s mention of fire brought Luciana’s nightmare of the night before back again in a flash that made her catch her breath. It had been her in the flames this time, surrounded by burning walls that blocked her every escape. She swallowed hard.
“Her leg,” she said. “Was that…”
“No, that was a genuine accident. But the murmurs were that it perhaps saved your grandfather a worse fate than the one he ended up with.”
“What do you mean?”
“Two accidents in close succession at the same theatre might have been a little too suspicious. Especially given poor Adeline’s history.” Clara saw Luciana’s questioning look and sighed again. “Adeline was married once. Her husband was a magician – the first double act of which she was part. They were very good, by all accounts. Too good, perhaps. He died when the theatre they had been performing in caught fire, poor soul. Adeline herself only just escaped the flames.”
For a moment, the darkness at the edge of the stage seemed to reach up and tangle Luciana in its depths. She felt as if she were falling into a dark pit, and at the base of it was her greatest nightmare. She saw a man engulfed in fire, burnt, burning—
“Luciana?” Clara asked, gripping her arm, looking worried. “Are you all right? You look as if you’re about to faint.”
“Well, well, well,” boomed a voice from the darkened wings. “What’s happening here? A private tour? You know I don’t allow that. If someone wants to come into my theatre, they work or they pay the ticket price. No exceptions!”
They both turned to see a man with greying hair and a neat moustache stalking towards them. His face was pale, round, and bore a look of controlled annoyance. Luciana focused on him, willing her dream to dissipate.
“It’s not a tour, Mr Phipps,” Clara told him. “This is Luciana Cattaneo. She’s Mr Merritt’s newest assistant.”
“Aha.” Phipps picked up the monocle that hung on a chain around his neck and jammed it into one eye, squinting. He looked Luciana up and down and then glanced at Clara. “Replacing you already, is he? What have you done, girl?”
Clara coloured a little. “Oh no, Mr Phipps. I’m not leaving the show. Luciana is an additional assistant.”
Mr Phipps’s eyebrows rose in surprise. His monocle dropped back on to its chain. “An additional assistant! Well, he needn’t think his fee will be increased to accommodate the extra help!”
“This is simply for a special performance, Mr Phipps. Luciana is the granddaughter of the Magnificent Marko. She is going to step on to the stage as part of a great illusion that will honour his memory. He died recently, you know.”
Phipps picked up his monocle again, peering through it at Luciana with renewed interest. “Is she, by Jove? Well, well, well. That will bring the punters in. And when is this illustrious performance going to take place?”
“On Saturday, Mr Phipps.”
“Saturday!” Phipps straightened up. “Well then, where the devil is Merritt? He should be here rehearsing!”
As if on cue, the tapping of a cane sounded against the polished boards of the stage. Adolphus Merritt appeared out of the darkness. The magician walked towards them, chin up, calm gaze levelled directly at Mr Phipps.
“Ah,” said Phipps, his bluster of moments before deflating. “There you are, my good man. Your girl here has told me all the details. Very good. We’ll fill this place, what? I suppose that the girl’s papers are all in order. Seal of approval from the Grand Society and whatnot. Of course they are, of course. Well, I shall leave you to get on with your work. Good day, ladies, gentleman.”
With that he shuffled off into the darkness. Once his footsteps had echoed away, Clara turned to Merritt with an anxious look on her face.
“The licence! We hadn’t thought of that! What are we going to do?”
Merritt took out his notepad. Don’t worry, he wrote. It’s in hand.
After their tour of the stage, Merritt went back to his dressing room while Clara returned to their digs to retrieve the angel. Luciana found herself alone again in Clara’s room, which they had to share for the time Luciana was working at the theatre. She sat on the old chaise longue and looked around her, wondering what her grandfather would make of where she’d ended up. She wondered what Charley was doing at that moment too, and a fresh well of guilt and loneliness sprang into her gut. They’d never argued before, or at least not in earnest. Luciana knew it was her fault. It was hours since he’d left, so he was more than likely already home, which meant that it was also very likely that her grandmother now knew exactly where Luciana was. Would he, though, tell Isabella Cattaneo who she was with, truly? Charley had vowed to keep Adeline’s secret, and Luciana had never once known her friend not to keep his word, but how far would that vow extend if the price of breaking it meant setting her grandmother’s mind at rest? After all, the knowledge that her granddaughter was with an old friend of her grandfather’s, even one of whom she disapproved, would surely be better than thinking that Luciana was with a complete stranger.
When Clara returned, her eyes were full of worry. Her clothes were wet with melting snow even though it shouldn’t have been more than a ten-minute walk back from where she and the magician were staying.
“Someone was following me,” she told Luciana and Merritt. “I think they were waiting outside our rooms when I came out. I took a detour to make sure they didn’t tail me straight here.”
“Did you see who it was?” Luciana asked, immediately suspecting Turner or Danvers.
Clara shook her head. “They were quick enough to stay out of my eyesight,” she said.
“It must be one of Thursby’s men,” Luciana said.
“But if that’s the case, why bother?” Clara asked. “Surely they already know the theatre where I am performing? Anyway, I didn’t want to confront them, not when I was carrying this.”
Clara put down the bag she carried over one shoulder and pulled out a large package wound in a white sheet, unwrapping it to reveal a porcelain doll dressed in a shimmering gold gown with a white cloak. In one slim hand she held a golden trumpet. Clara set her down on the edge of the table and then reached under the doll’s blond locks. She gave a swift tug at something and there was an audible click.
As the three of them watched, a pair of wings appeared from the angel’s back. They were a different shape to those of the Golden Butterfly, but they were recognizably the same type of construction. They unfolded gradually, with the same series of clicks, into wings that were larger than the angel herself – their shoulders higher than her head, their tails lower than her bare porcelain toes. The biggest difference though, was that as they opened, dozens of white feathers made of thin silk unfurled from around the wings’ metal struts. By the time they were fully open, the little porcelain figure stood before them with a pair of white delicately feathered angel’s wings.
“That’s so clever!” Luciana exclaimed. “And the way you’ve done the feathers too! I’ve never seen anything like it, have—” She turned around, looking for Charley, because just for a moment she forgot he was no longer by her side, where he had always been. A lance of pain stabbed Luciana through the heart and she swallowed, hard, her eyes blurring with tears. She blinked, turning back to the angel, feeling wretched.
Adeline silently turned the doll around and parted her hair to show Luciana how the housing for the wings had been set directly into the angel’s back. To remove them would require shattering her torso. The magician pointed to the tiny loop between them, at the top of the device. She drew an invisible line from the loop up to the ceiling.
“I
f we use these wings for the Golden Butterfly, that would be how they activate,” Clara said quietly.
“I see,” said Luciana, trying her best to recover. “A line comes down from above?”
Merritt nodded.
“It’s … it’s a very small loop,” Luciana said, her voice quavering a little. For the first time, it occurred to her to be nervous. How she wished that Charley were there!
Clara reached out and took her hand, squeezing it gently. “You don’t have to do this,” she said.
Luciana looked directly into the face of Adolphus Merritt and took a deep breath. “Adeline Morrell did this. I can too.”
The magician smiled.
Clara, on Merritt’s behalf, placed the entire building under lockdown – no one was allowed in or out and even Ben was under strict instructions not to come near the auditorium. Still the magician did not speak, relying instead on written notes and diagrams.
Luciana’s first task had nothing to do with magic. She had to dance.
“To the audience it must seem as if you are enchanted,” Clara advised her. “Raise your arms, spin, weave in and out of the light – be an apparition, a fairy.”
Luciana did as she was told and started from the wings, taking a low turn on her tiptoes to move on to the stage. At first she wanted to ask what dancing had to do with magic. Then she realized that Merritt was standing at the other end of the stage with one hand raised. The magician’s fingers flicked this way and that, mirroring the direction of her movements, as if the two were connected, and Luciana remembered how the Golden Butterfly had started that one and only time it had been performed: with Adeline coming on from the shadows in a trance.
Of course, Luciana thought. The audience is to think that I am being controlled by Merritt’s magic rather than moving of my own accord.
After that, she found it easier to throw herself into the spectacle. She pretended that she could feel the pull of an invisible force wrapped around one wrist like a rope, coaxing her on to the stage.
“Very good!” Clara cried. “Stop now, for a moment. Come and try this.”
Clara had been sitting to one side of the stage with a sewing kit and one of her stage costumes. It was made from length after length of diaphanous gold fabric that shimmered when the light hit it. Clara got to her feet and held the garment up to Luciana’s shoulders.
“I think it will fit,” Clara said. “It will still be long – you’ll have to be careful not to tangle yourself in it as you dance.”
“What about the angel’s wings?” Luciana asked. “How are we going to make that work?”
Merritt placed a hand on her shoulder and shook his head.
“All in good time,” Clara told her with a warm smile. “Now, I’ve got to get up on to the bridge.”
“The bridge?” Luciana asked, mystified.
Clara pointed into the darkness above them. Just visible was a criss-cross construction of wooden rafters that hung below the roof. It looked as if it were made of matchsticks and driftwood and it was very high. “That’s where the line will drop from.”
“But Merritt said you were scared of heights,” Luciana whispered. The bridge was very high, and though she had no fear of heights herself, she knew what it was to be so terrified of something that you could hardly breathe for thinking about it.
Clara pressed her lips into a tight line, which was not close enough to a smile to be a denial. “I’ll be all right. The show must go on, isn’t that so? Don’t worry about me. Just concentrate on what you have to do.”
Luciana was humbled by Clara’s bravery and determination. She watched the woman vanish into the darkness before turning to Merritt, guilt and worry churning in her heart.
“There must be another way,” she said.
The magician took his notepad from his pocket and scribbled a quick sentence.
I trust Clara more than anyone else I know. I trust her with my life. More importantly I trust her with yours. Is there anyone you trust that much?
“Charley,” she whispered painfully. “I trust Charley.”
The magician nodded and gave a sad smile and a shrug. The meaning was clear. Charley wasn’t here and so the only other option was dear, sweet, brave, terrified Clara.
*
They worked all afternoon and long into the evening, until Luciana was tired, hungry and irritable. It had taken poor Clara an age to make her way up to the rafters over the stage. Once she had secured the line she dropped it down to the stage. In unravelled silently and so invisibly that without the piece of scarlet ribbon secured to the end of it, neither Merritt not Luciana would have seen it at all. Merritt grasped the end of the line and measured the length it would need to be, then cut it off and attached a tiny silver hook before letting it go. It swung away from them. Luciana tried to follow its progress but it was almost impossible to see.
“How will I know where it is?” she asked. “I can’t dance out on to the stage and then spend an age looking for it!”
Merritt smiled a little and made a circular, repeating motion with one finger. Practice.
And so they did, over and over until Luciana was dizzy with spinning, her feet hurt and she had a headache from searching the gloom of the stage for the line. She had no idea what time it was when the magician finally called a halt by clapping loudly and holding up his hands. He looked up into the rafters above and waved at Clara, hidden somewhere far above them.
Luciana collapsed in a heap in the middle of the stage, almost too tired to speak.
Clara reappeared a few minutes later, her face pale but with a smile plastered determinedly across it. When she pulled Luciana into a hug, the younger woman could feel her trembling.
“I’m so sorry,” Luciana said, hugging her back, hard. “It’s terrible that you have to do something that scares you so.”
“It’s all right,” Clara told her. “The world is full of obstacles to be surmounted. Next time I will take one of my long scarves and tie myself to one of the rafters. That way at least I will know I can’t fall, even if it feels as if I might.” She looked up at Merritt. “You owe us both dinner, maestro, and a decent one at that.”
Outside, the weather had swapped snow for the sort of rain that pretends not to be there, so as to better insinuate itself between your collar and your neck. Luciana shivered as it settled on her cheeks. A shadow flickered into her periphery as they walked the gaslit street. It was gone by the time Luciana had turned towards it, but left the impression of a person, melting back into darkness.
They ate ham and eggs by dim candlelight in the fuggy bar of the Rising Sun on Winchurch Street. Merritt had a piece of paper and was sketching something. It looked like a draft of a playbill, but Luciana was too weary to ask. She was looking forward to curling up on the chaise longue in Clara’s dressing room.
“Tomorrow we will rehearse with the dress,” Clara told her. “We must see how well you can move in it, or whether I need to make more adjustments before we introduce the wings. I’ll also take you up to the bridge so that you can get used to being up there. It takes some practice to stay still enough that no one notices you.”
Luciana yawned widely and Clara grinned around a mouthful of her food.
“I don’t know how you do it every day,” Luciana admitted. “I’m so tired I can barely eat.”
“Well, it’s not every day,” Clara said, pointing at the large clock on the wall with her knife. “You’ll notice we’re not on stage tonight, for example. We never perform on Mondays. But yes, it’s hard work. Especially for the assistants. It’s far gentler a life on the magicians themselves.”
Merritt looked up at that, arching an eyebrow above eyes that twinkled with laughter as Clara jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow, laughing too. Luciana felt a jolt. The expression in the magician’s eyes seemed familiar and she knew that it belonged entirely to Adeline, rather than to Adolphus. When dressed so meticulously as the magician it was easy for Luciana to forget who was beneath it all, but every
now and then a flash of memory took her by surprise. No, she couldn’t even think of it as a memory – it was just a feeling, a sensation that there was something Luciana had once known but had now forgotten. In a flash, she heard Adeline’s voice:
Sometimes, after all, it is better not to know.
Her face must have given her away at that moment, for Clara reached over and placed her hand over Luciana’s. “Are you all right?”
Luciana looked at Merritt. Those blue eyes studied her carefully. Luciana wanted to say something, to ask a question, but the pub was crowded and who knew who was listening? And what, exactly, did she want to ask?
“Just tired,” she said eventually.
Outside, the rain had taken on an edge of ice. They hurried along with their heads bowed until, at the corner of Nuttall Street, the magician motioned for them both to stop. He made two small gestures with his hands that indicated they should go ahead of him.
Clara complied with no more than a nod, tucking Luciana’s hand into the crook of her elbow and then striking up a bright line of chat as they continued to walk. Luciana looked back but could see nothing save the dark pools between the gaslights and the indistinct shapes of the buildings looming into the night.
“Don’t worry,” Clara murmured, “Merritt knows what he’s doing.”
She led them around another corner and a moment or two later there was a muffled shout behind them, followed by a brief scuffle. Clara and Luciana turned to see the magician tussling with a smaller figure, both of them obscured by shadow.
“Stop it!” shouted the smaller figure. “Get off me!”
Luciana gasped. She knew that voice!
“Charley?”
The magician grasped the boy by the shoulders, turning his face to the meagre light which was filtering down with the cold rain. Charley was shivering, his hair and face wet, his sodden clothes hanging heavy on his small frame.
“Oh!” Luciana ran to him and threw her arms about his neck, hugging hard. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you back home in Midford?”
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