Valentina was distressed that Charlotte was the one who followed her to the balcony. She should have been thinking of Lord Jamison, to use her hat’s magic, and clearly she had been wasting her thoughts on her irritating rival, instead.
Further, Valentina regretted admitting as much as she had to Charlotte. Not that it was false—she was well-established and financially secure—but her careless words might have seemed vain, and any information that she served her opponent was power that she lost.
She should have made Charlotte think her feelings were genuine and preyed on her sympathy, especially now that she had all but confirmed that Charlotte was not looking for a love match either.
Cursing herself for the missed opportunity, Valentina drew up her skirts and prepared to retreat to her house, conceding the night as lost.
She would have her housekeeper make her a pot of tea and plan her next advance with insight about her new adversary. And in the morning, she would coordinate her next attack, beginning her campaign in earnest. She would not be distracted by the fact that Charlotte Jones blushed beautifully. She would be a good candidate for rouge, Valentina mused, but it would spoil the fun of watching her color when a good jibe came in under her guard.
Then she realized that over the sound of the wailing wind, there were screams from the ballroom.
She bolted down the deck to the doorway, forgetting decorum in favor of speed. Charlotte was undoubtedly in the thick of whatever drama was happening, and if she was involved, Lord Jamison surely would be.
The other attendees were crowded thick in the doorway, abandoning the dance floor altogether in headlong flight, and Valentina wished she were bold enough to wear heeled shoes like Charlotte, to have a chance of seeing over the crowd. There was a pulsing beat in the room, like hoofbeats of a runaway horse.
Valentina struggled forward and finally made it through the press with an elbow that she followed with a trilling apology as if it had been accidental, to find Lord Jamison cowering on the floor with a hand over his face, covered in what Valentina thought for a heart-stopping moment was blood. Charlotte was already standing protectively at his side, her ridiculous sword drawn.
She was facing down the specter of a black horse, rearing and striking out with heavy feet, tossing its head and stomping.
As Valentina tried to decide whether she was terrified or excited, the horse snapped towards Charlotte, and then vanished, the drumming sound fading away into the alarmed chatter of the room.
“Is he hurt?” someone asked.
“What was it?”
“Did you see?”
“Spirits!”
“Magic!”
“The cityship is cursed!”
The area was strewn with broken glass. “Are you hurt?!” Valentina cried, pushing through the last few figures. “Oh, are you hurt, my lord?”
Charlotte turned and gave her a mixed look of disgust and admiration.
“I assure you, I am all but untouched,” Lord Jamison was swift to answer as Valentina threw herself towards him. The red stains on his white coat had a particularly fruity odor. “I fell back into the punch bowl, that’s all.”
“The apparition materialized from nowhere!” Mrs. Smithers said, fanning herself.
“Unlicensed magic!” someone in the audience guessed. “Perhaps his lordship has an enemy?”
“It was a vicious kelpie!” another suggested.
This turned to an argument about how kelpies were freshwater spirits, not ocean-going, nearly leading to blows between two fiery young men.
Valentina didn’t have to work hard to convey convincing horror. She managed to cut her hand on a piece of the broken punch bowl as she knelt beside Lord Jamison and wondered if it would hurt her cause or help it to bring it to attention. Just as she decided to make a show of the injury, there was another flurry of activity.
“I’ll need to ask you all some questions,” an officious man in an Inspector uniform said, battling through the crowd with even less grace than Valentina had managed.
Valentina ignored her hand—the blood was unremarkable in the spill of red punch—and hurried to attach herself to Lord Jamison’s side, annoyed that Charlotte had gotten there first. The Inspector questioned everyone with obvious irritation.
The lord was good-natured about admitting that the crash into the punch bowl was his own clumsiness, though both Valentina and Charlotte were swift to assure him that anyone would have been unsettled by the apparition.
“It was very cold,” Mrs. Smithers observed. “Like a cold chill went over the room. Oh, and Miss Jones was so very brave!”
“Magic!” the Inspector spat unhappily, circling back to the freshly bandaged Lord Jamison. “I hate cases with magic. Where were you when it happened?” His dark eyes drilled into Valentina.
“I was outside taking in some air,” Valentina answered, hoping her expression was the proper mix of innocent and alarmed. “Isn’t this just dreadful?” She wished now that she was not wearing a magic hat designed to draw attention to herself and thought fixedly of anyone but the Inspector.
She never capitalized on her magical talent in her business of hats, but she also knew that quiet rumors of enchantment stitched into the seams and ribbons certainly didn’t hurt her commerce. She had never discouraged the speculation until now, but it would not in any way help her campaign to become a suspect simply for her unusual abilities, so she hoped that the Inspector was not savvy to the gossip around women’s hats.
Charlotte was questioned next and she managed to imply modestly that she single-handedly stopped the creature with a show of courage. Apparently, threatening it with her sword drove it away.
“Steel?” the Inspector confirmed.
“The coldest,” Charlotte said, showing her blade.
This, of course, led to many speculative murmurs about fae and specters. Did kelpie have the same aversion to iron that the fae did?
Valentina asked the Inspector anxiously, “Is his lordship in danger?” She wondered if wringing her hands would be going too far. The pain from her cut discouraged the action.
The Inspector shrugged. “There’s no way to know. Maybe it was just a spell gone awry or a random spirit. I will call up the Supernatural Authorities.”
“We can’t discount the possibility,” Charlotte said firmly. “I shall appoint myself your bodyguard, Lord Jamison.”
Curses. Valentina wished she had not cultivated quite such a soft appearance. She’d been playing on Lord Jamison’s protective side, not guessing that he might himself need protecting.
“Yes, we should keep you in company,” Valentina said swiftly. She couldn’t leave Charlotte any more time alone with the lord to strengthen her suit than she already had. “You should not be unaccompanied until we are quite sure the danger has passed.”
They managed, between the two of them, to get Lord Jamison to laughingly accept their chaperonage to his house, each of them taking an elbow.
“I have my sword at ready,” Charlotte promised as they walked out onto the dimly lit deck and down into the merchant district.
“I am sure that the horse was very impressed by a sword,” Valentina said.
“Well, I’m sure it wouldn’t have been impressed with a hat,” Charlotte retorted.
“Certainly not that hat,” Valentina sniffed.
Lord Jamison snorted a laugh and Valentina scolded herself for letting Charlotte under her skin and for speaking so frankly. Being catty wasn’t going to win her a wedding ring, even if Lord Jamison seemed amused by the cut.
“You must forgive me,” she offered at once. “It was such a scare, seeing his lordship wounded. My nerves are not as strong as yours, I fear. Say you will forget my unkindness?”
Charlotte was still for a moment, backed into a corner of politeness. Finally, she nodded. “As forgotten as the mainland dock behind a cityship,” she agreed expansively.
The rest of the walk was spent in carefully casual small talk about the rodent infestation, the lack of feral cats and the terrible shortage of fresh baked goods.