“Why don’t we go for a walk?” Charley suggested, as he and Luciana headed backstage. “I don’t know about you, but I could do with some fresh air.”
They went down to the river, the noise of the city evening bubbling all around them. When they reached the Thames the tide was in, the inky water lapping high against her greasy banks. The river curved away in both directions, wide and deep, oily and dark, festooned by the myriad lights that lit buildings on both sides of the water. They reflected on the waves, watery sparks of yellow and white, rippling like fleeting magic. The river smelled of filth and salt, but she looked beautiful, enchanted.
Charley sighed.
“What is it?” Luciana asked.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said about our futures and about belonging. I’m trying to imagine going back to the attic room in Midford now. And actually, I … can’t.”
She was surprised. “But you’ve been trying to go back home since we got here.”
“I know. What about you? Can you imagine it?”
Luciana thought back. It was only a few days since she’d last woken in her own bedroom, and yet it seemed so much longer. She tried to think of exactly what she had done with her days before coming to London, and couldn’t remember a single significant thing.
“No,” she said. “I can’t either.”
Charley nodded, staring down at the water. “We’ll have to go back though. Won’t we? Or … you will, anyway.”
A cold knot formed itself in Luciana’s heart. “What do you mean?”
“Sitting up there in the rafters, I’ve had a lot of time to think,” he said. “When this is over, you’ll go back and look after that big old house. But I need to get a job. And I think I’d rather do that here than in Midford.”
“You’re going to stay in London?”
Charley shrugged. “I know people now – I’m friendly with Ben, and there’s Timothy Fervent. Clara and Adeline, even. They’ve all got lives here. Maybe I could make one too. What have I got back in Midford except a bedroom I share with my mother and a job cutting grass for the vicar?”
Luciana stared down at the water and felt herself sinking like a stone, although it wasn’t the Thames that was swallowing her up, but the thought of her own future. What would she do in that big old house for all those endless days except wait until someone wanted to marry her? Then the house would become his, his name would become hers, and she would have nothing of herself left. She wouldn’t even have Charley. She supposed that this was what her grandmother had meant about different paths.
She couldn’t bear to think about it, so she stood up. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go and get some dinner. By the time we’ve eaten, the performance will be over. I want to rehearse some more before we go to bed.”
*
They got back to the theatre shortly after 10 p.m. The noise of angry voices hit them even before Ben opened the stage door.
“What is it?” Charley asked. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Mister Carl Thursby,” Ben whispered, his voice shaking. “He’s in a mighty temper. He’s in Mister Merritt’s dressing room, yelling blue murder, so he is.”
Luciana grabbed Charley’s arm. “He must have seen one of our playbills!”
“So what if he has?” Charley asked. “What can he complain about? That he’s not the only magician in town?”
“If it’s not that, then … what?”
The answer occurred to both of them at the same time. Had Thursby discovered Merritt’s true identity?
“Come on.” Charley led the way down the corridor towards Merritt’s room. As they got closer, snatches of shouted words made their way from behind the closed door.
“…a disgrace! It will not be borne! You pledged to uphold the agreement and now…”
They reached the dressing-room door. Charley raised a hand to knock but Luciana stayed his arm.
“…you will not even speak to defend yourself, sir!” Thursby finished.
Luciana opened the door. Inside was a tableau: Thursby, red with anger, faced an equally angry-looking Adolphus Merritt. Clara stood by, still in her stage costume and behind Thursby … stood Philpot Danvers. Luciana looked around each of them in turn before her gaze fell on Danvers.
“So it is true,” she said. “You are nothing more than a spy. My grandfather didn’t give you that puzzle box at all, did he? You stole it because you thought it held the Golden Butterfly.”
Danvers had the good grace to look away.
“Well, well,” sneered Thursby. “The prodigy who imagines she has a right to step on to the stage.”
“We’ve met before,” Luciana reminded him. “You ransacked my house on the day of my grandfather’s funeral.”
Thursby ignored her words, turning back to Merritt instead. “You have violated the trust of the Grand Society, sir, by allowing an unlicensed child to play at being an assistant. You have broken the most sacred of our laws and you will pay dearly for it.”
“What is it you’re really angry about?” Luciana asked. “That another Cattaneo is about to make a fool of you?”
Thursby spun back towards her again, his rage almost apoplectic. “You? Make a fool of me? Your grandfather was nothing but a charlatan, a half-rate trickster who would have done well to stick to touring with a grubby little circus on the Continent.”
“And yet you spent so many years searching for the Golden Butterfly, and in the end the only way you could get it is by stealing from a child. What sort of charlatan trickster does that make you, Mr Thursby?”
Thursby curled his lip back against his teeth. “You are nothing. You are not worthy of the breath I have already expended in acknowledging your existence. You will never step on to this stage again. Phipps has already been warned that if you do, he will be blacklisted from hosting any magician in this theatre, ever. As for you,” he said, turning back to Adolphus Merritt, “beyond these sins already enunciated, I have reason to believe that you are using a trick of dubious origin, one that seeks to mimic my own Golden Butterfly. You will show me its workings immediately. Only then will I, as the Grand Master of the Society, decide whether or not you can proceed with your advertised performance.”
“You have no right to demand that,” Clara said, angry. “There is nothing in the Grand Society’s Charter that says any magician must show you the workings of their illusions.”
“Silence, girl!” hissed Thursby. “Who are you to speak against me? And what would you know of the Charter anyway? I’d be astonished if you can even read your own name.”
“You still don’t know how it works, do you?” Charley asked. “The Golden Butterfly. You still can’t work out how to use it.”
“This is not so!” Thursby exclaimed. “It was I who designed it, you ignorant whelp, it is my greatest creation, and mine alone.”
“You are a liar,” said Luciana. “More than that, you are a poor magician. And by next Tuesday night everyone will know it.”
Thursby forgot himself in his rage. He raised his hand to strike Luciana across the mouth, but before he could a figure in black blocked his way.
“Strike a grieving widow and her granddaughter would you, Carl Thursby?” said Isabella Cattaneo. “Now, what would the papers say about that?”
“Get out,” said Luciana’s grandmother to Thursby. “Now, this instant. I will deal with this.”
Thursby stepped back, straightening his coat. “See that—”
“GET OUT,” bellowed Mrs Cattaneo.
The two men left in silence. As Philpot Danvers passed her, Luciana’s grandmother thrust a velvet purse against his chest.
“Repayment, as promised,” she said. “With extra for letting me know the whereabouts of my granddaughter. Take it.”
Danvers clasped his hand around the pouch and opened his mouth but Isabella waved one pale, imperious hand.
“Wait,” Luciana said, before he could turn tail and leave. “The puzzle box.”
Danvers
flushed red. “I must go.”
“You could never work out how to open it, because the puzzle was never meant for you, was it?” Luciana said. “My grandfather knew you had the box, but he also knew he’d never get it back alone. So he hid a second puzzle box in the Peacock Theatre, one that had your name and address in it. He hoped that one day, someone – I – would get back what you had stolen from him. You should be ashamed, Mr Danvers. Completely ashamed.”
Danvers clearly had nothing to say to that. He turned and left. Silence reigned inside the room as the two men’s footsteps echoed towards the stage door and then were cut off by its abrupt slam. A few minutes later Ben appeared in the doorway, his eyes large with fright.
“All the doors are locked? The theatre is empty save us?” Mrs Cattaneo asked him. When the boy nodded, she held out a copper penny. “Good. Now leave us. And if I catch you eavesdropping…”
Ben fled.
“Charley,” she said next. “Stand in the open doorway. I want you to hear this but I also want you to make sure we are not disturbed. Speak if anyone enters the corridor.”
Charley did as he was told.
“Grandmother—”
“Don’t,” Mrs Cattaneo cut Luciana off. “You,” she said, pointing at Adolphus Merritt. “You are the one I want to speak to first. Take it off.”
They stared at each other for a moment. Then the magician reached up and pulled at the nose that was his greatest illusion. A few moments later, Adeline Morrell stood before them.
Isabella didn’t even blink. Instead she took a roll of paper from her pocket. In one deft movement she shook it out to reveal the playbill for Luciana’s performance. She held it up.
“This?” she asked in an icy voice. “This is how you choose to repay everything that I have done for you?”
“Luciana came to us, Isabella,” said Adeline. “She found me.”
“You should have turned her away. You should have sent her back to me.”
“I tried, but it was too late,” Adeline said. “She already knew, the moment she saw me, even if it took her time to realize it.”
Luciana’s grandmother tossed the paper to the floor in disgust. “So you put her on the stage?”
“She wanted to be there.”
“How dare you? How dare you? And to use Marko’s name! When you knew Thursby would never let her perform anyway! Why?”
Adeline looked at her in silence, as if waiting for her to realize something. The older woman grew pale.
“No,” Isabella said shortly, as if comprehending something for the first time. “You thought – what? That I would see the light and give you what you need to make this work? Absolutely not. No.”
“This is not how it has to end, Isabella. You know that.”
Mrs Cattaneo turned away and for an alarmed moment Luciana thought she was going to faint.
“Grandmother,” she said, reaching out a hand.
Her grandmother grasped it and pulled Luciana to her before turning to look at Adeline again.
“You wanted to force my hand,” she said. “I thought it was Danvers who sent me the playbill, but it wasn’t, was it? It was you. You knew I would come to retrieve Luciana, you knew I’d have to confront you – and what? You were relying on your powers of persuasion to wear me down?”
Adeline shook her head. “I just wanted you to see what Luciana can be if given the chance.”
Mrs Cattaneo gave a hard, strangled laugh. “What? A plaything to be dressed up and painted like any other magician’s assistant … like her mother?”
Adeline flinched at that, and that single, tiny movement unsealed a locked box at the back of Luciana’s mind.
“That’s not fair, and you know it,” Morrell said, though her voice seemed distant.
“What then?” Mrs Cattaneo demanded. “What?”
Adeline said nothing. Instead she turned and opened a drawer in the desk behind her, pulling out a pack of cards. She threw the deck to Luciana, who caught it in one hand and then shook off her grandmother’s hold to open it. It had been a few days since she’d had time to play with the cards. Having them back in her hands felt natural. Luciana started to shuffle and turn them as her grandmother watched.
“She’s a magician, Isabella,” said Adeline. “She’s a magician.”
Luciana continued to move the cards between her hands, casting trick after trick without pausing to look up. Focusing on the cards stopped her thinking about what had unlocked in her head, that little door that led to a huge room full of things she could not bear to look straight at. If she did, Luciana was afraid that she would begin to spin apart, that all the certainties of her life would scatter in opposite directions, a thousand tiny pieces that she would never be able to put back together. But even concentrating on the cards couldn’t stop the world from turning around her, or stop her hearing the conversation going on over her head.
“You wanted her to have a better life,” said her grandmother.
“She’s had a better life,” said Adeline. “She’s had the best life she could ever have had with you and Marko. I could never have given her what you did, not after what happened. We both would have ended up on the streets if not for the two of you.”
“Stop,” Luciana heard herself say. “Stop.”
She looked up to find Adeline and her grandmother looking at her with sad, anxious faces. It was Adeline’s that she studied though, trying to make sense of the connections her mind was beginning to make.
“You,” she began, but her voice gave out and she had to start again. “Are … are you my mother?”
There was a moment of silence. For a second Luciana thought the world would continue as it always had. That Adeline would laugh, and her grandmother would laugh too, and then Luciana would be able to laugh as well, all at the sheer absurdity of such a suggestion. Except part of her knew that it wasn’t absurd at all, because maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t the first time Luciana had asked herself that question. And when the magician did use her voice, it was not to laugh.
“Yes,” said Adeline Morrell, quietly but clearly. “Yes, Luciana. I am.”
Luciana’s eyes filled with tears. She looked down at the cards she held, and felt as if she were looking at a stranger’s hands. Then she looked at Isabella Cattaneo, whose fire had been dampened by a look of weary defeat.
“So … then … you are not my grandmother,” Luciana said. “And the Magnificent Marko wasn’t my grandfather. Was he?”
There was another moment of silence.
“No,” said Isabella Cattaneo in a faint voice. “Though we always loved you as if we were.”
Luciana wasn’t sure how much more she could take, but there was one thing she needed to know.
She looked at Adeline again. “Who is my father?”
Adeline looked away, though only briefly. When she looked back, there was a shadow in her eyes. “Anthony,” she said. “Anthony Morrell. My husband, God rest his beautiful soul.”
At these words another connection clicked into place.
“He died in a fire, didn’t he?” Luciana asked, feeling as if she were one of Adeline’s clockwork toys, unfurling mechanically as everything opened and snapped together in her mind, click-click-click-click-click. “Is that why I am so afraid of fire and why I have such terrible dreams? Was I there? Did I… Did I see it?”
This time it was Adeline’s eyes that filled with tears, and she did not blink when they ran down her face. “Surely – but no… Surely, surely you don’t remember that?”
“I do,” Luciana said. “I always have. But until now I never realized it was a memory. I thought… I thought it was just a horrible nightmare. That’s what my grandfather – what Marko and Isabella always told me. But it was real, wasn’t it? It was all real.”
Adeline wiped away her tears with one hand and took a deep breath. “You were so little. We always took you to the theatre with us. When we rehearsed, we put you in a basket in the corner, and every night when we performed
you would fall asleep in the wings. We’d check on you every time we came off stage, and you were always so good. Most of the time you slept right through.” Adeline frowned and shut her eyes. “The fire started one afternoon, while we were rehearsing. Your father was under the trapdoor beneath the stage, waiting for my cue, and suddenly the place was alight. The flames were in the rafters before we even realized what was happening. I couldn’t save you both. I tried, but I was too late. I only had time to undo the trapdoor and then run to pick you up from your basket as the flames began to surround us. Anthony got out of the trapdoor but by then we were separated by the fire. I hoped…” Adeline’s voice trembled. “I hoped that he’d be able to find another way out while I ran for the stage door with you. But when I got out on to the street, I couldn’t find him, and it was too late. I’m so sorry that you remember it, Luciana. It haunts me and always will, but I thought – I hoped – that you would be too young.”
“Was it Thursby?” Luciana asked. “Did he start the fire?”
Adeline looked away. “It was never proven. But he hated Anthony. He hated our show, because it was better than his.”
“And then you just … gave me away?”
Adeline shut her eyes with a frown, and more tears slipped down her cheeks. “I didn’t want to. I kept you as long as I could. But no one would hire me with a baby. Not until Marko, and even then I had to keep you hidden so that the theatre managers didn’t find out. I lied and said I had left you with relatives – no one knew that your father and I had no one but each other. You were still so good, but you were growing and anyway…” she trailed off.
“You wanted a better life for me,” Luciana finished. Her voice sounded hollow, even to her own ears.
“Yes,” Adeline whispered.
The Golden Butterfly Page 14