LONDON, SPRING 1815
Most young ladies were expected to feel nervous upon attending their first ball, but this was probably not because they feared they would accidentally make the paintings on the walls come to life.
Lady Theophania Worthington, however, feared this exact thing, and so when she was announced at Lady Russell’s grand ball, she froze at the top of the stairs for what felt like an hour and a half before her panicked, darting gaze landed on her sister-in-law’s expression of tight fury. Elinor had been drilling her on this for weeks. Everything had to be perfect. She must not do anything wrong at all. Her entire future depended upon this very moment.
Fear thrummed through her, made her palms sweat inside her gloves, made the chalked patterns on the ballroom floor begin to swirl and move…
No! Not now! Please not now!
She tried desperately to make them stop moving, lost her footing, grabbed for a handrail she hadn’t a hope of reaching, skidded for a terrible, heart-stopping moment, and fetched up in the arms of a pirate.
‘Are you all right?’ His eyes were the colour of rich dark chocolate and he had a scar on one cheek. ‘Miss?’ His hair was black as night and curled wildly. ‘Are you hurt? Miss…?’
‘Tiffany,’ whispered Tiffany, who had always hated being called Theophania because it was surely the name of a dusty old bluestocking or querulous maiden aunt.
‘Lady Tiffany,’ hissed her sister-in-law, and then hurriedly corrected herself, ‘Lady Theophania. We are not in the schoolroom any longer, are we, my dear?’
The pirate raised an eyebrow as he straightened Tiffany, who felt her face heat up. Of course it was of more concern to Elinor that Tiffany was addressed correctly than that she was unhurt. Must she be so obvious about it in front of this handsome stranger?
‘Thank you, Mr…?’
He looked very amused. ‘Santiago, Lady Tiffany,’ he said, and gave an elaborate bow. The sort of bow that had gone out of fashion a generation ago—as had wearing green velvet to an evening event, Tiffany thought as she took in more of his appearance. And a brocade waistcoat. And a neckcloth tied so loosely he looked like a labourer.
A very handsome labourer with twinkling eyes and lips that looked like he was trying very hard not to smile.
‘You have our thanks, Mr Santiago,’ said Elinor, with tightly restrained disdain for the sheer foreignness of his name and demeanour. She was already shepherding Tiffany away. ‘Come along, Theophania. There are people I want you to meet. They say the Lost Duke of St James has returned, and wouldn’t it be a coup for you to become a duchess…’
Tiffany glanced over her shoulder as she was led away from the pirate. As he grinned at her, a hint of gold twinkled in his ear. One eyelid flickered in a wink that made heat blossom inside her.
It was at this point that the chalked arabesques on the floor came to life.
* * *
As he escaped out of the window, Santiago reflected that he had been greatly misled about English Society.
Nobody had told him it was quite so boring, or that the Ton was so very cold towards anyone who didn’t look exactly like everyone else, or that the chalk drawings on the floor would come to life.
Santiago had seen purple fire play along the mast of a ship, had seen lava that burned blue and plants that ate small rodents, but had never seen chalk drawings move and start tripping people up.
Had it been an illusion? Some trick played on the guests? After all, nothing here was as it seemed. Including him.
He could still hear people screaming and bellowing as he stepped into a flowerbed and looked around. None of that was entirely necessary, he thought. Really, only a few people had been tripped up and the rest had just been a sort of ripple effect.
Only one lady hadn’t fainted or screamed, and that had been the vision in silver who had already taken a tumble into his arms. She had simply bolted.
Her hair was pale, like moonlight, her cheeks flushed the palest dawn pink, her eyes like a storm-tossed sea. Her dress was of some silver gossamer, like pearls or shimmering starlight. A mermaid. A siren.
He shook himself. She was merely a human woman, and part of this absurd merry-go-round to boot. She was a lady. Lady Tiffany. It had a soft, silken sound to it. A shame her chaperone appeared to be some kind of harpy.
Once, in Singapore, he had been chased by thieves down an alley, and had escaped by shinning up a decorated pillar as if it was the ratlines of a ship. But there were precious few ratlines in Lady Whatsherface’s garden, and besides, he didn’t suppose Lady Tiffany had spent much time on a ship.
He made his way towards the arrangement of hedges and arbours that appeared to have been designed to hide trysting lovers, considered whistling, and rakishly decided not to. The crunch of his boots on the gravel was probably enough to alert anybody to his presence.
Anybody, at least, who wasn’t running with her silver skirts bunched up in both hands and her head quite foolishly turned to look behind her.
‘Lady Tiffany,’ he said, as she collided—not unpleasantly—with him. Her wide blue eyes stared up in panic. Her hairstyle had lost its neat curls and half its pins, and was slowly collapsing down the side of her head. Her white bosom heaved in a gown cut so low one slightly deeper breath would expose all her charms to him.
Santiago reluctantly reminded himself that he was trying to be a gentleman tonight, and dragged his eyes up to her face.
He gestured to a small alcove in the hedge. ‘I think we’re alone now,’ he said.
* * *
The pirate led her to an alcove with a bench tucked into it. A stone lion gazed out despondently at the early roses. ‘Sit down. Are you all right?’
Tiffany stared up at him. In the darkness she couldn’t make out very much of his features, but the moonlight showed his white teeth and the gleam of gold in one ear. Perhaps he really was a pirate, the kind who kidnapped innocent travellers and sold them on the Barbary Coast. He had an accent Tiffany couldn’t work out, but that was probably because Tiffany never met anyone who didn’t have the exact same accent she did. But why would he be at this ball? How had he got in?
‘Why are you wearing green?’ she blurted.
He shrugged. ‘I like green. Why are you wearing grey?’
Tiffany bristled. ‘It’s not grey; it’s silver.’
A flash of white teeth in the darkness. He was laughing at her! ‘My mistake,’ said the pirate gravely.
‘Gentlemen don’t wear green in the evening,’ Tiffany told him.
‘I noticed,’ he said. ‘Don’t you find it dull?’
Tiffany blinked at him. Yes, she did, but she’d never allowed herself to think it before. Gentlemen wore black in the evening, with snowy white linen, and that was simply how things worked. Nobody questioned it.
‘That’s just … how things work,’ she said, frowning.
‘What happened in there?’ he asked. ‘With the … chalk? It seemed to become…’—he waved his hand elegantly—‘animated.’
Tiffany wanted to hunch over and curl into a ball with her feet pulled up on the bench, but that was not a very ladylike thing to do and besides, thanks to her benighted bosom she was wearing long stays with a busk that made even sitting down an exercise to be practised. It was chilly out here, and her skin was damp from exertion. She carefully arranged her skirt over her slippers.
‘The chalk,’ he persisted. ‘Is that … usual?’
‘Usual?’ Was he simple-minded? ‘Do you think it is usual for chalk drawings to come to life at Society balls?’
He shrugged. ‘I have never attended one before.’
‘Have you ever attended any event where a chalk drawing has come to life?’
‘No.’ He considered this. ‘But I have tried opium a few times and the things I saw were stranger than that.’
Tiffany began eyeing escape routes. ‘Have you taken opium now?’
‘No. Alas.’ He grinned again. ‘Perhaps it would have made the evening more entertaining.’
‘You don’t find balls entertaining?’
‘You ask a lot of questions, you know?’
‘So do you,’ Tiffany said sulkily.
He sighed and sat down beside her, leaning back against the stone bench and stretching out long legs. He at least wore dark knee breeches and stockings, although the buckles on his shoes were frankly vulgar.
She watched as he fetched a slim case from his hideous coat and opened it to reveal a selection of cigars. He offered it to her, and she stared for a second before mutely shaking her head. He shrugged and lit one for himself.
‘Are these parties all like this? A list of people attending, some skipping up and down, nobody speaking to anyone they don’t already know, everyone wearing the same thing? The ladies at least have some variation,’ he conceded, ‘but why is everyone in this country allergic to colour?’
Tiffany smoothed her silver skirts over her ivory slippers once again and tucked a strand of pale hair behind her white ear. She’d seen a lovely deep blue dress at the modiste’s, but apparently that sort of shade was vulgar. She’d only managed to get the silver dress because Elinor had left her unsupervised. That wasn’t likely to happen again.
‘The officers are in their regimentals,’ she pointed out. Plenty had cashed out after peace was declared a year ago, but there were still enough of them in scarlet and blue to make the place look decorative.
‘And every other man?’
‘Everyone wears black and white in the evening.’ Surely this was well-known?
‘But why?’
Tiffany blinked. ‘My sister-in-law says bright colours are vulgar,’ she said.
‘Do you agree?’
No. But while she lived in Elinor’s house she had to follow Elinor’s rules, and since Elinor believed every single word she read in La Belle Assemblée there was no point in arguing with her about it.
‘All those gentlemen in black,’ he sighed. ‘It looks like a funeral.’ He added, ‘I suppose I had better get used to it. My dock foreman said nobby people wear black for years when someone dies.’
Tiffany choked a little, and said, ‘What … sort of people, did you say?’
‘Nobby.’ He glanced at her, and laughed. ‘Ah. I see that is another word which is unacceptable. There seem to be so many of them. Perhaps,’ he mused, ‘it was an error to take etiquette advice from a Limehouse docker.’
Tiffany laughed incredulously. Who on earth was this man? ‘Have you no one else to ask?’ she said.
Mr Santiago shrugged. ‘No. My father is dead; my mother is in a convent and my grandfather is both hundreds of miles away and dead.’
He said it as if he was describing his grandfather’s hair colour or height. My grandfather is from Yorkshire; he is of average height and quite dead. ‘I am so sorry—’
‘Why? We have never met and were never likely to.’ He sighed when he saw her expression. ‘You think I am cold. But he— he was not a part of my life,’ he said with a careless shrug, and Tiffany wondered what he had been about to say. ‘And I have no attachment to him. I am only in town to hear what his solicitors have to say, and then I shall probably be on my way.’
‘Your way to where?’ Tiffany asked politely.
He gave an expansive hand gesture, the glowing cigar transcribing an arc in the air. ‘I do not know. Perhaps I shall return to the Americas. Perhaps Europe.’ As an afterthought, he asked, ‘Do you enjoy travel, my lady?’
Tiffany had been raised in her brother’s house in Hertfordshire, travelled to London occasionally, and once been taken to Brighton, because it was terribly fashionable now with the Pavilion. But the seagulls upset Elinor and so they had not repeated the experience.
But…
‘I would like to travel more,’ she said diplomatically. ‘Paris, Venice, Florence.’
Mr Santiago looked bored. ‘Ah, the haunts of every young Englishman,’ he said.
Tiffany looked him over in the moonlight. His velvet coat was dark, but still recognisably velvet, his neckcloth was a shambles, and his hair was a tumbled mess. A gold ring gleamed in his ear, and the cigar end glowed as he puffed on it.
‘Suddenly you know the exact habits of young Englishmen,’ she said.
He acknowledged the blow with a smile. ‘I listened,’ he said, tilting his head in the direction of the ballroom. The music had restarted, and the sounds of people milling on the terrace had faded. ‘And yet I notice it was only the men boasting of their travels.’
‘Yes,’ said Tiffany shortly. She rested her hand on the cool stone of the lion’s head.
‘English women do not travel?’
‘No,’ said Tiffany, even more shortly.
One dark eyebrow rose. ‘I see,’ he said.
No, thought Tiffany, suddenly furious, you don’t see, and you’ll never see, because you are wearing a green velvet coat to a ball and you just used the word ‘nobby’ to describe the Ton, and however you got in here you will never be a part of this world.
The lion’s stone fur began to soften beneath her hand.
Abruptly, she got to her feet. ‘I should go,’ she said.
‘I have upset you?’ said the strange man with the pirate earring. He did not stand.
‘Upset me? Mr Santiago, you don’t have the faintest idea…’ She tried to calm herself. There was no point in shouting at this stranger. She’d probably never see him again.
Although on the other hand, she’d probably never see him again…
‘You truly don’t know anything about Society, do you?’ she said. ‘And worse, you don’t seem to care. You don’t even seem to realise how dangerous it is for us to be out here alone like this. But let me explain one thing to you, and if it is the only thing you do learn about English Society, I hope you take it to heart.’
‘I am all ears,’ he said mildly.
‘Good. Then learn this: you might find a ball such as this to be pointless and trivial, but I assure you it is of deadly importance to every woman in that room. And that is because every woman in that room is looking for a husband, either for herself or her daughter, and that is because without a husband even the daughter of an earl’—she gestured to herself—‘has nothing. No money. No home. No power of any kind in the world. The reason I have not travelled, Mr Santiago, is because I had the misfortune to be born a daughter and not a son. My brothers all went on a Grand Tour of Europe. I have been to Brighton. Once. I have but one purpose in life, and that is to become somebody’s wife. And bear him children. And then marry them off, and then die.’
‘That is four purposes,’ he said, looking vastly entertained, and that made Tiffany want to kick him in the shins.
‘That is the life of a farmyard animal,’ she hissed. ‘You might get to swan in here in your green velvet coat with your earring, and use stevedore words to describe all the people in that room, but your future does not depend upon them.’
‘I assure you,’ he said, face much straighter, ‘it does.’
‘Then take it seriously, Mr Santiago. Find a proper tailor. Find a valet. Learn the rules. This all seems entertaining to you, but it is very serious to me.’
She turned to go, feeling somewhat haughty and magnificent, but his voice stopped her.
‘Do you want to become somebody’s wife?’
No. The answer in her head was immediate and vehement. She did not want to become like Elinor, whose only interests in life were clothes and gossip and who to befriend and who to avoid, because her only purpose was to marry off her children so that they could live in immaculate, cold marriages and raise children whose only purpose was to be married…
She didn’t want to be a wife, a woman who only existed in relation to her husband, who didn’t even get to keep her own name. She didn’t want to spend hours achieving the correct hairstyle or chatter about music she didn’t like, or gossip about who might have broken one of the million self-imposed dashed stupid rules the Ton lived by. She didn’t want any of it.
Wouldn’t it be a coup for you to become a duchess?
The stone lion’s mane quivered. Tiffany glared at it, and it was still.
‘Not even if he is a duke,’ she said.
She had walked several steps before his voice followed her again. ‘How did you do it?’ he said. ‘Make the chalk come to life?’
Tiffany felt herself go very still, and then she turned back and said deliberately and clearly, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
* * *
‘Morning,’ said the newspaper at the head of the table. ‘There’s post for you, Tiff— Theophania.’
Tiffany murmured a greeting to the newspaper in the assumption that her eldest brother was behind it, and helped herself to eggs from the sideboard. Coffee, too, since Elinor was still abed—with a ‘stomach complaint’ apparently, which was in no way related to the glasses of Madeira she had partaken of last night—and not here to tell her that chocolate was more fashionable.
‘Anything from last night?’ asked Cornforth, in a tone so neutral she couldn’t tell what he wanted the answer to be. He seemed neither inclined nor disinclined to help her find a husband, and Tiffany was under no illusions that this was because he valued her company so much that he couldn’t bear to lose her. Quite often, she thought he forgot she wasn’t one of his own many children, and it was only since her hems had been let down that he recalled that she was actually his sister.
‘A few cards,’ she said. ‘And a letter.’ It was not a masculine hand, for which she was grateful. Tiffany was in no mood for suitors. She might have hoped that falling down the stairs last night had put paid to her chances, but it seemed that everyone else had taken a mysterious tumble shortly afterwards, and so nobody recalled her misdemeanour at all. She’d even had to dance a few times.
‘Ah?’
‘From…’ Tiffany opened the letter and scanned to the end. ‘A Great Aunt Esmerelda, apparently.’
‘Ah.’
His tone did not reveal whether he had heard of her or not, which didn’t help Tiffany very much. She knew every member of her family to the fourth degree of removal, and had most of the Peerage memorised besides, but she had never heard of any Esmerelda. It was definitely the sort of name that stuck in one’s mind. Rather like Theophania.
‘My dear Tiffany,’ the letter began, which had Tiffany sitting up a bit straighter in her seat.
Please do forgive the intrusion over your breakfast. I regret very much that we were not able to speak last night at the Russell ball, but I greatly admired your extraordinary accomplishments.
Accomplishments. Tiffany’s neck prickled.
I would be delighted to receive you at your earliest convenience. Please do call upon me. I believe we have much in common and foresee us spending much of our future together. Yours, Esmerelda Blackmantle.
Tiffany glanced up furtively to see if Cornforth was watching her, but he appeared absorbed in the newspaper.
This was surely the strangest letter she had ever received. The address given was a very smart one in Mayfair, and the quality of both paper and penmanship were excellent.
Thoughtfully, she returned her attention to her eggs, which had gone somewhat cold, but the letter by her plate kept drawing her attention. Extraordinary accomplishments. What could that mean? Had Great Aunt Esmerelda seen her dancing and been moved to write her a letter about it? Tiffany could dance in a tolerable enough fashion, but absolutely nobody would consider it worth writing about. What else? She had demonstrated no other accomplishments last night, such as singing or playing the pianoforte—which was just as well as she was terrible at both. And as for her drawing and watercolour painting…
Viscount Cornforth, heir to the Earl of Chalkdown, had married when Tiffany was a mere babe, and as such her nieces and nephews were close to her in age. This meant that she had been raised in the same nursery and taught by the same governess, dancing master and music master. The story of the drawing masters, however, was something that nobody in the household could account for.
Except for Tiffany.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t draw. She could: very well, in fact. So well that her drawings appeared lifelike. So lifelike that they … well, that they came to life.
Which had caused more than one drawing master to quit the household. Sometimes at speed. Occasionally screaming.
Elinor, of course, believed none of this nonsense and eventually decided that drawing masters were simply too highly strung to bother with. It was probably the only time Tiffany had been grateful to her sister-in-law for her dogged adherence to conformity.
Extraordinary accomplishments.
She put down her fork, and glanced at the letter as it lay beside her plate. Then she excused herself from the table and said to the footman, ‘Send Morris up to me, will you? I’m going for a walk.’
* * *
Limehouse was the sort of area you got in every large city—squalid, heaving, constantly falling down and being built over. Santiago had spent half his life in places like this. He thrived in places like this. He’d learned to pick pockets and dodge fights in places like this, learned to beg and lie and sell anything he could, including himself. He’d learned to be charming, and devious, and he’d expected that would stand him in good stead when he began commanding his own ship. He hadn’t expected it to be quite so useful now he owned a whole fleet of ships, and got to attend nobby parties with girls in silver dresses.
Nobby. Hah! Santiago had learned Spanish from the cradle, and a smattering of other languages since, but it seemed the English his father had reluctantly passed on was going to need some updating—and not from dock foremen.
He stepped out of the way as a private carriage rattled past, bearing the crest of some lord or another. There was a carriage like that waiting in the mews behind his grandfather’s house. Santiago felt a terrible fear that if he set foot in it, he’d never come back to Limehouse the same man.
That kind of wealth and privilege had turned his grandfather into a cold, unfeeling man, and his father into a monster who cared for nothing but himself. And Santiago had spent far too long striving not to become his father to risk that happening to him.
He approached the high walls surrounding de Groot’s compound on foot. All the warehouses here had massive security fences around them, surrounded by men carrying muskets they’d brought home from Cuidad Rodrigo and Seringapatam. Santiago, who carried an interesting variety of semi-lethal weapons about his person, had made a point of befriending as many of them as possible.
‘Morning, Señor,’ said one of them, a cheerful fellow with powder burns on his face from Salamanca. He gestured at the corresponding scar on Santiago’s cheek. ‘Tangled with any more pirate queens, have you?’ He grinned at his own joke.
Santiago smiled back. ‘If I ever cross Madam Zheng again, you’ll come to my funeral, won’t you?’ he said, and the old soldier laughed and waved him through.
When Santiago closed his eyes, he could smell the jasmine tea that had been brewing as the knife cut into his face. She’d offered him a cup afterwards. He couldn’t drink it now, the sense memory spoiled by the coppery taste of blood in his mind.
‘Ah, mijn vriend Santiago! Hoe gaat het vandaag met jou?’
‘Estoy muy bien, gracias,’ Santiago replied, turning to greet de Groot. The man was well-named, a huge blond giant with a massive beard. He dwarfed Santiago in a hug, and gestured expansively at the yard where cartloads of goods were being unloaded.
‘Look! The Marijntje came in, bringing jasmine tea and opium. I sell this to the teahouses down the road. They carry it themselves, on their backs!’
‘I thought it smelled familiar,’ said Santiago. When he smiled, his cheek felt tight.
‘I don’t care for it much myself,’ said de Groot. ‘I like the African tea we had in Swellendam, hey?’ He grinned, and added in a terrible approximation of an East London accent, ‘You fancy a cuppa?’
‘You’ve gone native, mi amigo,’ said Santiago, following the big man into the shady interior of the offices.
‘It is my special skill,’ said de Groot. He waved at an underling, who rushed off to do his bidding. ‘Now, what can I do for you, mijn vriend?’
Santiago took a seat. De Groot’s office was much better established than his own, and as a consequence much more cluttered. A plate of crumbs sat on his desk, and there was a child’s wooden horse on the floor.
He’d made a home here, started a family, done all those things Santiago had put off thinking about. The Dutchman even looked like a business owner, in his fancy waistcoat and gleaming pocketwatch. Santiago wasn’t so sure about the wisdom of that. Time was, he’d have robbed a man looking like de Groot.
How did I get from robbing rich men to being friends with them?
You worked on ships, and then you ran ships, and then you bought a ship. And then you bought more, and suddenly you had a business and the Revenue wanted to check inside your brandy barrels and then a neat little man turned up and told you your grandfather had died and—
His father had always told him this day would come, but Santiago had never fully believed it. Partly because he hadn’t wanted to, and partly because his father was barely able to remember the truth most of the time, let alone tell it.
He could leave London at any time, could leave his business affairs in the hands of men who would be happy to get rich from managing them. He did not have to settle, and fill his office with children’s toys. He could go back to the sea, get his hands dirty, and tangle with wild women. Maybe even with wild men. Nobody would know and nobody would care.
Thinking only of himself. Just like his father.
‘Tea,’ said de Groot, handing him an earthenware mug. ‘Just like we had in Swellendam.’
‘It didn’t do much for my hangover then, either,’ said Santiago.
He’d met de Groot in a fly-infested compound in South Africa, where Santiago had been carefully constructing blanket boxes to conceal packets of tea and de Groot had been mixing diamonds into clay to be fired into pots. Each others’ ingenuity having been duly admired, they proceeded to get roaring drunk on Santiago’s smuggled brandy, and had woken the next day with matching chicken tattoos and earth-shattering hangovers.
‘Sometimes I tell people about my friend with a cock on his ankle,’ said de Groot, eyes twinkling.
‘And I tell them of my friend with a cock on his back,’ replied Santiago. ‘Did you ever remember what the joke was that made us get them?’
‘Nee. I don’t think I understood it in the first place,’ de Groot lamented.
‘The Marijntje,’ Santiago said. ‘She came in on time?’
De Groot shrugged. ‘On time for China. Storms around the Cape, but there are always storms around the Cape.’
‘The Epunamun hasn’t been seen since Marseilles,’ he said. ‘Last month the Sirena never made it to Porto. And the Pincoya was last seen from a place called Foulness, but hasn’t come in yet.’ He squinted at the map behind de Groot. ‘This must be a made-up name, yes?’
De Groot laughed. ‘It is real, mijn vriend. The English have a strange sense of humour.’
Santiago shook his head in wonder. ‘Have you had any ships coming in late? Or nor at all?’ It had better not just be his own vessels.
De Groot frowned deeply for a moment, then said, ‘The Linneke and Anneloes never came in either. I haven’t lost this many ships since your people attacked us at Celebes.’
‘Not my people,’ Santiago reminded him, trying not to think of that liveried carriage and the house it came with.
‘Hah! People are curious about you, my friend. The Spaniard who is not Spanish?’
‘I’m not Spanish,’ Santiago agreed.
‘They say your mother was an Aztec princess.’
‘Incan,’ said Santiago, ‘and you can believe that if you like.’ He’d heard every variation of the rumour. His father had enjoyed spreading them.
His father had enjoyed many things Santiago did not agree with.
‘But your father’—de Groot leaned forward—‘was an Englishman. And not just any Englishman.’
‘An exiled Englishman,’ said Santiago, warning in his voice. ‘Disgraced. And we were talking about ships.’
De Groot didn’t look as if he was convinced by the change of subject, but he said, ‘We were. You have lost three? So have I. And a few others—Pernice, Damsgaard, Muller en Zonen—have been waiting long waits. The Company—’ by this Santiago knew he meant the East India Company ‘—have posted losses but they haven’t given names. Price of brandy has gone up.’
‘Price of brandy always goes up,’ said Santiago vaguely. ‘What about the French importer in St Katherine’s? The one people say they buy their wine from.’
‘When really they buy it from you, mijn vriend,’ said de Groot, winking. He got up and pointed to sections of the Atlantic on the big map behind his desk. ‘I heard of a Portuguese ship sighted off Tangier that never came in. But these things happen.’
‘These things used to happen,’ said Santiago, getting to his feet and coming over to the map. ‘The corsairs were supposed to have been outlawed.’
The Dutchman, about whom there were rumours of Caribbean piracy, said nothing.
Santiago peered at the map, trying to make sense of it. ‘Do you have the dates of when they were last seen?’
‘Mine, yes. The others, you’d have to ask around,’ said de Groot. ‘Why? You think this smells bad?’
Santiago’s gaze slid up the English coast, past Dover, past Broadstairs, past the mouth of the Thames, to the marshland of south Essex where the Pincoya had last been seen. To the large island with the strange name. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It smells of foulness.’
* * *
She had walked past the house four times now. Eight if you counted return trips.
It was a perfectly nice house on a very respectable street. The front steps were neatly kept with little topiaries either side of the door, the railings painted a smart blue, and there was a small garden square opposite where the spring flowers were beginning to bloom.
She had dispatched Morris to the shops, knowing full well that the head housemaid had a young man who worked on New Bond Street and would be gone for hours. ‘I shall just sit on this bench here in the garden for a while,’ Tiffany had said, that first morning when she’d ventured towards Mayfair, ‘and read my book while you run those errands.’
They both knew the errands did not exist. But they also both knew that Morris was not about to tattle on Tiffany, if Tiffany did not tattle on her.
Now she was out in Society, Tiffany had wondered if she might have a maid of her own, but Elinor had declared that taking on a second woman ‘just to do your hair, Theophania,’ was profligate.
Tiffany privately suspected that when Harriet, her eldest niece, made her come-out, a maid would be hired in an instant.
She had intended to approach the house and make herself known to this Great-Aunt Esmerelda. She really had. And yet she had found herself walking speedily past the house, eyes down, and only stopped on the corner to pretend to tie her shoelace.
So far, she had pretended to tie her shoelace on the same corner three days running.
But today would be different. Today, Morris had explained that she had to run to the apothecary and the lending library and there was always a terrific wait at both, which Tiffany took to mean her young man had the afternoon off. Morris was certain to return with her hair ruffled and her lips swollen from kissing, far later than usual. Tiffany had time to knock on the door of Great-Aunt Esmerelda’s house.
She definitely had time.
Any minute now she’d go up there and do it.
The house was perfectly pleasant, with stucco walls and elegantly arched windows. Tiffany had visited dozens of houses just like this in London. Possibly, given her attention on carriage rides was always commanded by Elinor and her many lists of things not to say and do, on this very street.
If Elinor had been here, quite assuredly she would disapprove of Tiffany stooping to tie her lace again. But if she just made it to the corner of the square, she would be out of sight of the house and—
‘Perhaps you need this?’
Tiffany turned, startled, to see a lady holding a bootlace. She felt her face begin to heat.
‘I have observed that you frequently need to stop and fasten your lace by the end of the street,’ said the lady. ‘I cannot imagine why it should always break precisely as you walk past my house. Perhaps Nora cast a curse here and subsequently forgot about it.’
Tiffany couldn’t think of a single word to say.
The lady addressing her was of average height, although Tiffany would always think of her as much taller, and elegantly dressed in deep blue. Her bone structure was impeccable, her age undetectable, and her complexion darker than any Tiffany had seen in the fashionable drawing rooms of the Ton.
‘You are Lady Tiffany Worthington, are you not? You look so like your mother.’
The words were out before Tiffany could stop them. ‘You know my mother?’
There was a slight tightness in the lady’s face as she said, ‘Of course, my dear. I know everyone. Now. Perhaps a cup of tea?’
With that, she swept away across the street, towards the very house Tiffany had been trying to find the courage to approach.
She called me Tiffany.
The possibility of not following her didn’t seem to be an option, and so she found herself stepping past the blue railings and the topiaries and the smart red door, and into a hallway painted a fashionable green, with a handsome stone staircase.
‘Do come and sit down,’ said the lady in blue, who could not possibly be Great-Aunt Esmerelda. Great-aunts were surely elderly people, querulous and frail. Tiffany vaguely recalled her grandmother, the dowager countess, as a papery old lady who required assistance to stand, and always shouted at people because she was quite deaf.
The morning room to which Tiffany was led had striped wallpaper and comfortable sofas. An upright pianoforte stood against one wall, and the occasional tables were inlaid with fine marquetry. Upon one of them stood a tea set, with steam curling from the pot.
‘Were you expecting…’ Tiffany began, and faltered. The tea must have been made while she was standing outside. And the water boiled and the leaves steeped and the milk brought up and the sugar placed in the bowl—
‘I expected you. Now, lemon?’
The lemon was freshly sliced. Tiffany could smell it from here. She nodded and watched as steaming tea was poured into a cup. She had absolutely no idea what the etiquette was for being invited into the home of a stranger you’d been waiting outside of for three days.
‘You have the advantage of me, ma’am,’ she tried.
‘Do I?’ The elegant lady smiled slightly. ‘You did receive my letter? I assumed that’s why you came.’
‘Your— But you’re—’
You’re too young to be my great-aunt, and besides I don’t even think I have a great-aunt, and how can we be related when you look like that and I look like this and I’ve never even heard of you before!
‘Esmerelda Blackmantle. You can call me Aunt Esme.’
‘And you may— But how did you know I prefer to be called Tiffany? Lady Cornforth—’
‘Lady Cornforth’, said Aunt Esme, her nostrils flaring, ‘is your sister-in-law, not the Queen. If you prefer Tiffany, then Tiffany it is.’
Tiffany felt a smile break out. She purely hated being called Theophania. But how did this Great-Aunt Esme know that?
When Tiffany didn’t take the teacup that was offered, Aunt Esme put it down on the table beside the sofa Tiffany didn’t remember sitting on.
‘I intended to make your acquaintance at the Russell ball, but unfortunately I was called away. Not, however, before I saw your distinctive accomplishments. Making the chalk come to life: that’s a neat trick, I thought.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Tiffany automatically, ice flushing away her smile. ‘Chalk doesn’t come to life.’
Everyone knew that, and ‘everyone’ included Tiffany. Chalk did not come to life, and neither did watercolors or sketches or the contents of the Royal Academy. Tiffany was very firm about this. Perhaps, occasionally, out of the corner of her eye, a painting might appear to move. Maybe sometimes she might imagine that a statue had winked at her. And as for that time she had idly doodled a daisy in the margin of a notebook and then found one lying on the table … why, surely all that had happened was that she had swept it up on her hem and someone had picked it up.
Yes. It was all perfectly explicable. There was probably a clever fellow at Oxford or Cambridge who could explain it all to her in a scientific manner.
Esme raised one neat eyebrow. ‘Half the ballroom simply tripped at the same time, is that the case? How fascinating.’
‘I was out of the room,’ said Tiffany, her heart hammering. ‘My hem.’
‘That’s what you told that bulldog of a chaperone, is it? I mislike her, you know. Father made a fortune in sugarcane, and we all know what that entails,’ she said darkly. ‘I spent five minutes in her company at Lady Russell’s and that was quite enough, I assure you. You, however, Lady Tiffany, I am quite interested in.’
Tiffany felt herself doing it. Becoming unnoticeable. She’d been doing it since she was a child when her governess wanted to teach her something boring or the drawing master had run off to tell Elinor his charge was possessed of the devil. She’d done it at the Russell ball. It was like a hedgehog curling into a ball, or one of those lizards her brother Phileas went on about that could change their colour.
‘Now now, none of that,’ said Aunt Esme. ‘It might work on ordinary people, but you and I aren’t ordinary.’ She gestured at a painting on the wall, a rather dramatic scene of crashing waves and a coastline like rocks with teeth. ‘Do you know, when you walked past, the waves began moving?’
‘I’m so sorry,’ whispered Tiffany. She worked so hard to control it, and now she was so rattled, and—
‘Why? It’s marvellous. To make a glamour is a wonderful skill. Even more so to manifest it into a physical object. What about your own illustrations?’ she said.
‘I don’t draw,’ said Tiffany, tightly.
Esme’s brows rose. ‘Come now. The daughter of an earl and you were not taught this basic accomplishment?’
The screaming drawing masters. She complied with almost everything else Elinor demanded of her, no matter how much she hated it, but drawing and painting, those were her lines in the sand. They had to be. For her own protection.
Nobody could know about her … peculiarities. Especially not Elinor. She’d be packed off to an asylum for the rest of her natural days, and never spoken of again. Elinor had made it clear, so very many times, that there was no room for Tiffany to have any notions about herself.
‘I don’t mean to,’ she whispered, once more a frightened child in the nursery, so afraid of her own power.
‘But what if you did?’ Esme’s eyes were bright with excitement. ‘Have you— No, it’s all right. I don’t mean to frighten you,’ she said as Tiffany shrank back against the sofa. ‘I won’t force you into anything. I’m simply fascinated. Look.’ She waved her hand at the fireplace, where a fire had been laid but not lit.
Esme narrowed her eyes at it, and the coals burst into flame.
Tiffany nearly spilled her tea. ‘How— That’s not— How did you—’
Esme simply smiled at her. It wasn’t a knowing smile or a cruel smile or a smug smile. It seemed infused with genuine enthusiasm, like Tiffany’s brother Phileas when he met someone else who got as excited about colour-changing lizards as he did.
‘It’s witchcraft,’ said Aunt Esme. ‘I’m a witch, Tiffany. And so are you.’
* * *
The morning mist hung low and eerie across the marshland. It clung to Santiago’s clothes, his hair, his skin, clammy and unpleasant. The inn where he’d reluctantly spent the night had been dank and inhospitable, the locals seeming to resent his presence entirely. He didn’t know if it was his accent or if they just hated everyone. Maybe it was both.
Nobody had any information on the Pincoya. There had been no storms. No wrecks. The sandbank was marked by the lightship—it was visible now, just off the coast. Someone recalled that the tide had been higher than expected, but that was about it.
Foulness lived up to its name. The locals pronounced it, somewhat pointedly, with the emphasis on the second syllable, but that didn’t stop it being any less cold, damp and treacherously marshy.
The morning mist made travelling slow, not helped much by the lack of proper roads and tracks in this godforsaken place. With no more horses available to hire, he plodded miserably on foot along a slimy, seaweed-coated path. The locals called it the Broomway, since it was marked out by broom-like sticks that were only visible when the tide was out. The whole path, it seemed, was only visible when the tide was out—and the tide was known to come in extremely quickly—but despite its utter impracticality it appeared to be the only method of accessing the whole of Foulness Island.
Santiago had been counting the hours carefully, since nobody at the inn would give him any indication of when it was safe, and he calculated he had perhaps an hour to get off the path before the incoming tide made it too treacherous.
‘Oi, mister!’
It was a boy, scrawny and scruffy, appearing out of the mist. Santiago wouldn’t have been surprised to discover he was the ghost of some poor child who had drowned out here when the tide came in too fast. Until he spoke again.
‘I heard you was after hearing about a boat what went missing?’
‘Yes?’ said Santiago, wondering how much coin he had left. Everybody he’d spoken to wanted money even when they had nothing to tell him.
‘Only I found summink in the mud this morning and it might be from a boat.’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s too big to carry. Here, look, down this headway.’ The boy led him down a path of questionable stability, and Santiago followed cautiously. You heard tales of wreckers, people who led ships onto rocky shores to murder the crew and plunder their goods. Did they exist on land, too? Was this boy luring him to a boggy, watery death in the endless mudflats of this godforsaken place?
Just when he was about to stop, the boy gestured to something pale sticking out of the mud. ‘Here, mister. It’s one of them ladies you get on boats.’
His blood ran cold at the sight of the pale face. ‘Ladies—’
It was the remains of the ship’s figurehead, carved into the likeness of a beautiful young woman with her arms upraised in dance. Only now her arms had broken off and there were vicious deep gouges on her torso.
Claws? Teeth? What on earth swam the Thames that could take a bite that size from the ship? Santiago gazed around, but all he saw was mud and mist.
‘But they said there had been no wrecks,’ he said, running his hands over the cold, dead wood. La Pincoya’s carved face stared back unseeingly.
‘That’s the funny thing. I didn’t see nuffink. Or hear it. Nobody did. Cos they ring a bell and that for people to help if there’s a wreck, yeah? But I didn’t hear it. Just saw the wave and then stuff started turning up in the mud.’
‘What kind of stuff?’
The boy looked shifty. He was grubby and skinny, his clothes ragged and muddy. Despite the chill, he wore no shoes. Santiago had seen children like him further upriver, foraging in the muddy banks of the Thames for bits and pieces washed in on the tide. Mudlarks, they were called, as if they were wading birds hunting for fish, and not children hunting for the means to feed and clothe themselves.
For a while, on the Rio de la Plata, he’d done something very similar.
‘Show me,’ he said, ‘and there’s a guinea in it for you.’
‘A guinea?’ The boy looked disbelieving. ‘Nah. What’d I do with a guinea?’
Santiago gave him a questioning look. A guinea was quite a lot of money. He’d have to unpick one from the lining of his coat.
‘Nobody’d take it off me,’ the boy explained. ‘Nobody round here got change for a whole bean. Someone’d nick it off me.’ He gave Santiago a calculating look. ‘How many shillings you got? Shilling coins, I mean.’
‘Er,’ said Santiago. He tried to remember how much he’d spent at the inn and what he had left. English money was stupid, with its pennies and crowns and groats and bobs and guineas. There seemed to be a coin or a word or both for every conceivable amount of money. He had half a mind to miss the simplicity of the dollar. Even the French had worked out a decimal system.
‘I’ll do it for ten bob,’ said the boy, to whom this—less than half a guinea—was probably enough to live on for weeks. Maybe months. ‘Ten actual single bob. I don’t want no crowns or coach wheels.’
‘Done,’ said Santiago. He looked around at the chilly grey sea mist, the mud and the marshes, the eerie shapes of sea birds and the distant, ghostly clang of ship’s bells. He really had to get off this terrible, treacherous path and back onto terra firma. ‘After you’ve shown me what you found.’
The boy looked sceptical. ‘Half a crown now?’
‘I thought you didn’t—fine. But if you trick me into drowning in a bog, I will come back and haunt you,’ Santiago warned.
‘Mister, if I tricked you into drowning in a bog, I wouldn’t get my ten bob,’ reasoned the boy, and Santiago couldn’t fault that logic. He handed over the coin, and off they set.
* * *
‘I do prefer my house in Cornwall,’ said Esmerelda Blackmantle, who insisted Tiffany call her Aunt Esme. ‘There is good, honest work to be done there, and it makes the film-flam of Society seem somehow so … tawdry. That said,’ she added, glancing at a pile of invitations on a silver tray, ‘the parties are fun.’
‘Have you lived there long?’ asked Tiffany, for want of anything else. Her great-aunt had fetched a decanter and poured Tiffany a small measure of something strong and sweet.
‘Not long. That is, since…’ Esme faltered, which already seemed to Tiffany to be a rare occurrence. ‘Since before you were born,’ she finished.
‘I have never been to Cornwall,’ said Tiffany. She had never been anywhere.
‘It is a wild and beautiful place,’ said Esme. ‘Untouched by the revolutions of the modern world. A much better place to grow witches than Mayfair.’ She gave a delicate shudder. ‘I always think a witch ought to be in communion with the earth, and that’s rather difficult when one is surrounded by paving stones and gravel. But then you did not grow up in Town, did you?’
‘No, ma’am,’ said Tiffany, as if all this talk of witches was completely normal. ‘My brother’s house is in Hertfordshire.’
Esme’s face suggested she might as well have grown up in a chicken coop. ‘I did hear as much. Dreadful place. The very ground rejects us. Do you know what they build into their houses? Hagstones,’ she said, making a shape with her hands. ‘Lumps of flint and bits of grit all mixed into a giant pudding by nature, said to guard against witches. I mean, it doesn’t, not in the slightest, because it’s just some bits of rock. But the belief is there. People will do terrible things to avoid us.’
‘Us?’ said Tiffany warily. Esme was uncovering dishes on the sideboard and taking nibbles of whatever she found there.
‘Witches.’ She tilted her head. ‘You must have known? Suspected? That you are not like other people?’
Tiffany felt her face heat. She’d gone to such pains to hide it!
‘But of course, in Hertfordshire—and with that gorgon of a guardian—permit me to guess, my dear, that strong emphasis was placed upon conforming to the rules, and not being any different from anyone else?’
Tiffany nodded, unable to speak. Those were almost exactly Elinor’s words. Tiffany had a position as an earl’s daughter and Cornforth’s sister, and she must always act accordingly. There were no exceptions for her: she was not special, and must behave just as all the other young ladies did.
The very worst crime Tiffany could ever commit in Elinor’s eyes would be to embarrass the family.
‘Ah,’ said Esme, and in that syllable was a world of understanding. ‘It is a pity you did not have other witches around to guide you, but— No, it could not be helped.’
‘There are others?’ Tiffany said weakly.
‘Oh, yes. Just Gwen and I in residence right now, but Nora and Madhu are on their way. And plenty more, all over the country. I don’t suppose you go much to Essex? No? Don’t worry, Tiffany, we will teach you what you need to know. How to guide and control your magic. How to use it safely and responsibly.’
‘Are there rules?’ asked Tiffany. Everything had rules, even if no one said them out loud.
‘Rules? Hmm. Not really. Promise a thing three times and it becomes binding; if you make a bargain you may find yourself bound to it; what you do comes back to you sevenfold; that sort of thing, so use it for misdeeds at your own peril. But all of that thrice widdershins by moonlight nonsense is bobbins.’
She leaned in, her eyes dancing, and said, ‘What magic is, my dear, is possibility. Don’t think about what you can’t do. Think about what you could do.’
Tiffany smiled weakly, fighting a sudden urge to cry. Because what was Society except an endless of things one couldn’t do?
Perhaps Esme was simply very eccentric, and liked to fancy herself a witch. After all, what evidence was there, really? Perhaps Tiffany had some disorder of the eyes that made her believe she was seeing paintings come to life. Yes, that was it. She ought to ask Elinor to find a doctor; although, any mention of eye disorders might raise the terrible prospect of spectacles, which Elinor believed to be a handicap worse than spots or freckles.
‘Pippin!’ called Aunt Esme. ‘I found the cheddar.’
‘Cheese! Mmm! I love cheese!’
Tiffany looked around, expecting to see a child, but Esme was leaning down to feed a grey cat.
‘There you are. No, don’t snatch. What have we said about manners?’
‘Bugger manners,’ said someone.
‘There you go. No, no more, or you’ll get fat and lazy and we’ll be overrun with mice.’
‘Sod the mice,’ said the voice, and Tiffany stood up to look around for the speaker. There was nobody else in the room, apart from herself, Esme, and the cat.
‘Oh, Tiffany, this is Pippin. Head mouser and greedy little so-and-so.’ Esme gestured at the cat, who was sniffing around on the ground.
Pippin glanced at Tiffany, and she heard a childish voice say, ‘Cheese?’
She stared. Pippin the cat hissed at her. ‘Piss off!’
‘They don’t like it when you stare. It’s an aggressive gesture to a cat. Blink slowly, and look away,’ said Esme.
Tiffany, wondering if this was what it felt like to go mad, did so.
‘Hmph.’ Pippin sat down to wash his paws.
Tiffany moved past him to the sideboard, picked up the decanter, and poured herself a large glass of whatever was in it.
Esme waited until it was nearly to her lips before she said, ‘How did he sound to you?’
Like a child. A young, extremely selfish, rude child. Who uses words I’m not supposed to know.
‘Cats don’t talk,’ she said, and took a drink.
‘No, but they do have thoughts and feelings, and we pick up on them.’
‘We?’ Tiffany said again, helplessly.
‘Witches.’
‘But witches aren’t real,’ wailed Tiffany, as the flowers on the wallpaper began to dance. ‘They’re just some silly story told to children!’
‘That doesn’t mean something isn’t real,’ said Esme sensibly. ‘Besides, look at the evidence of your own senses. I’ve never met a witch who couldn’t understand animals. Haven’t you heard them before?’
Tiffany shrugged, and drank some more, the alcohol burning down her throat.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever been this close to one,’ she said, and then realised that couldn’t be true. There were cats everywhere. But Elinor did not approve of pets. ‘I mean … not inside a house.’ She wasn’t much of a rider, always having been too nervous and distracted by the chatter of the grooms—
She closed her eyes momentarily. It had been the grooms chattering, hadn’t it? Not the horses themselves?
She peered around again, still half convinced it was a trick. ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ she asked Pippin.
The cat went on washing his paws. ‘Some,’ he said. His mouth didn’t move, but she heard the voice anyway.
‘What colour is my dress?’ she tried.
‘Bored,’ said the cat. ‘Cheese.’
And right then Tiffany felt a peculiar sensation, as if something was terribly, awfully wrong with the world. Worse than drinking brandy at lunchtime with a talking cat. Much worse than that.
‘I don’t think he quite understands the concepts of numbers and colours the way we do,’ began Esme, and then broke off, her head snapping towards the ceiling. Without a word, she bolted from the room, as Tiffany heard footsteps running above.
‘I felt it,’ Esme was saying as Tiffany followed her into the hall. ‘What is it?’
‘The beasty with them squirmers,’ said a woman from the top of the stairs. ‘In the sea, like.’
‘The one you felt last week?’ said Esme, rushing up the stairs in an unladylike manner.
‘Aye. Pure nasty one. Not sated. Seeking another.’
‘Another what?’ said Esme. She was at the top of the stairs now, and Tiffany was halfway up before she realised it was an imposition. She craned her neck to see who Esme was talking to, and saw a woman with a shawl clutched about her shoulders, who appeared to be only wearing one shoe. Her greying hair streamed loose down her back.
‘Can’t be telling. It’s hungry. So hungry.’
Esme nodded, and moved along the hallway. ‘Where?’
‘Can’t be saying. But I can be showing.’
She and Esme disappeared along the landing, and then Esme’s voice came back, sharply: ‘Tiffany! Either come with us or leave now.’
‘Come where?’ said Tiffany, even more bewildered. At her feet, Pippin the cat twined around.
‘Door thing,’ he said boredly. ‘Nothing to eat there.’
‘Do you want to see what witches can do?’ said Esme, and Tiffany’s feet took her up the stairs before her brain could intervene.
* * *
The headway the boy led him along was one of the rough paths that led from the Broomway back inland, towards farms or cottages. Santiago didn’t really want to visit one of these, since by the time he made it back the Broomway would be covered with water and he’d have to wait for low tide again. Unless he could find someone with a boat to take him back. Perhaps he could steal one. He was getting very, very tired of this horrible place.
‘Here, mister,’ said the boy, gesturing to something half submerged in the water. ‘Box of stuff. I tried opening it but it’s all sunk in the mud.’
Santiago peered at it. A crate, the kind they packed textiles in. If he squinted, he could make out some letters stamped on the side: the lacemakers in Saint-Pierre-lès-Calais from whom he’d bought a large amount of lace, some of which he’d even declared to the Revenue.
There was a small fortune in that crate, now ruined and irretrievable.
‘There’s some more bits of wood and that,’ said the boy. ‘And, a … er…’
‘A what?’ said Santiago, wondering anew how a whole ship could simply vanish into the mist like this. ‘Any survivors?’
‘No, mister. That’s what I was trying to say. There was some … bits of people. Um. A hand, and bones that … well, could’ve been from anything really, but I don’t see as why no cows or horses or that’d be in the water.’
Santiago glanced back at the sea. ‘We’ll be in the water soon if we don’t get off this path,’ he said. ‘It will be covered in less than an hour. Can we get to dry land by then?’
‘’Course,’ said the boy. ‘There’s this ken where I kip up here. For cows and that, but it’s out of the water and cows are nice and warm.’
‘A … ken?’ said Santiago, following him. Sometimes English baffled him.
‘Yeah. Where you kip,’ said the boy, as if this cleared it up.
Figuring that the boy probably wouldn’t risk his own life just to rob a stranger who’d promised him ten bob, Santiago followed him, glancing back at the misty sea distrustfully. Which was why he saw it begin to boil before the boy did.
The ground beneath his feet seemed to shudder. His skin prickled. Something was very, very wrong—
‘The tide,’ he began, but that was like no tide he’d ever seen. And he’d witnessed the tidal bore of the Qiantang River and a monsoon in the Gulf of Khambhat. The water that had been lapping calmly at the land seemed to suddenly riot, the muddy shore rising up and forming into tentacled arms.
‘What is that?’ said the boy, horrified. He was backing away. ‘I ain’t never seen—’
‘No,’ said Santiago. ‘Run, boy! Vamonos!’
He ran too, but the path was narrow and the tide was covering it now. The boy, ahead of Santiago, was reaching higher ground, and he just glanced back over his shoulder at the exact moment the water grabbed Santiago by the ankle and threw him up into the air.
* * *
Esmerelda Blackmantle stopped on the landing of her elegant house in Mayfair, between two semicircular tables with Queen Anne legs, and opposite an oil painting that looked—even from the corner of Tiffany’s untutored eye—suspiciously like a Reynolds, and faced a door painted incongruously green.
‘What—?’ Tiffany began, but she was shh’d by the gray-haired woman, who placed her hand on the door.
Aunt Esme closed her eyes and pressed one finger of her left hand to the bridge of her nose. Her other hand fitted a heavy iron key into the lock of the door, and she said clearly, ‘Take us to the site that Gwen has seen. Open the other side of my door painted green.’
Oh, this was nonsense. All of it was some silly trick. Surely the cat’s voice had been provided by this Gwen, and now they were trying some stupid prank and—
‘Oh holy God,’ Tiffany gasped, as Esme turned the key and the cold, damp scent of rotting seaweed came in through the door. It was swiftly followed by a rolling mist, the sound of screams, and an extremely muddy child.
‘Missus, missus! You got to— What is this? This ain’t my ken!’
‘No, child,’ said Aunt Esme, striding through the door in her pleasant blue day dress. ‘Who is screaming?’
‘Er,’ said the boy, staring around the hallway with its striped wallpaper and elegant side tables. ‘It’s, uh, this guv’nor, he’s … well you come see, I s’pose…’
Tiffany gaped. The door opened onto the outside, and not the outside of a Mayfair street or garden or anywhere in London. Through this door—this upstairs door—was a shoreline. Wet, muddy sand, bordered by a grey-green sea that heaved and swelled uneasily. A rocky jetty ran half-heartedly out into the sea, most of it covered with slime and seaweed. The smell was overpowering, rotten and sulphurous, borne in through the door on a breeze that blew her hair around her face and stirred the flowers on the table.
A seagull screamed. Tiffany could see them circling around something on the beach.
‘Well? Come along-a-me,’ said the grey-haired woman, Gwen, and stepped through after Esme and the muddy child.
‘But it’s a cowshed,’ said the child, standing on the wet shore and peering uneasily into the pleasant hallway.
‘It’s a house in Mayfair,’ said Tiffany distantly.
‘No, miss, it’s a cowshed on Foulness.’
They both looked at each other, the child on the muddy sand and the lady on the Axminster carpet. Tiffany had a split second of wondering if Esme had put something in her tea, but it was broken by Esme’s sharp voice.
‘Tiffany! Stop mithering and come here!’
So Tiffany stepped through the door into the cold, damp air that smelled of seaweed, onto a muddy shore. She glanced back, and there was a cowshed, on the edge of the dry land, with a door that opened onto the upstairs hallway of a Mayfair townhouse.
‘I’m going mad,’ she muttered. But last week she had made a chalk drawing come to life and today she had conversed with a cat, so why not walk through a door in Mayfair onto a beach?
There was a low wall, like the ha-has that bordered the parkland at Dyrehaven, separating the drier ground from the shore. Esme and Gwen had already gone over it, and were striding along the slimy jetty that disappeared into the mist.
‘Fortune favours the brave,’ said Tiffany, and picked up her skirts to follow them.
Ahead of her through the mist she could see Esme’s blue dress as she knelt by something on the ground, and whatever it was, the gulls were very interested in it. Gwen was taking off her shawl and roughly wadding it up, and as Tiffany squelched across the sand in half-boots that had definitely not been designed for the purpose, she found that the object they were kneeling over was a person. A man.
He was unconscious; he didn’t stir as Gwen put her shawl under his head. His clothes were torn and so sodden Tiffany didn’t realise at first that they were wet with more than water. He was bleeding from a dozen wounds and breathing shallowly.
‘He saved me,’ the boy was babbling as Esme and Gwen began unfastening the man’s clothing. ‘The sea came up like … like this wave thing, and he saw it and if he hadn’t told me to run it’d have got me.’ He looked mystified. ‘Why’d he care about me?’
‘We are all God’s children,’ Esme said without looking up. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Billy, miss.’
‘Billy. And this gentleman is?’
The boy shrugged. ‘Dunno, miss. Some swell asking around after a boat what sunk.’
‘A shipwreck? Here?’ The two older women exchanged glances. All around them the mud flats were … well, flat. There was simply nowhere for a shipwreck to hide.
‘No. Sort of. It just sort of … vanished, like. There was this big wave, and … not like the wave now, that was like… I ain’t never seen nuffink like that.’
‘Can you describe it?’ said Esme. She still hadn’t looked up. She and Gwen had got the man out of his coat and were working on his waistcoat, the buttons of which did not appear to wish to co-operate.
‘The wave? It … sorta…’ The boy waved his hands for a bit, then said, ‘Er, no.’
‘Can you draw it?’ said Gwen, and Tiffany backed away sharply.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Please don’t.’ She did not feel in control of herself right now. If the boy drew something and she made it come to life—
Esme did look up at that, somewhat sharply, and nodded. ‘Quite right. Cut these off, Gwen. Tiffany, go back into the house and fetch a blanket. Any one from any of the beds. And for heaven’s sake don’t let the door shut.’
Tiffany made herself look back at the door that shouldn’t exist. In the rickety cowshed, from which she could hear cows, was carpet and wallpaper and Queen Anne tables.
She swallowed.
‘Now, Tiffany,’ said Esme, and her tone demanded such absolute obedience Tiffany found herself complying without even thinking about it.
She stepped back inside the house, and it smelled like furniture polish and cut flowers and the perfume Esme wore. When she turned to go towards the nearest door, she caught a glimpse through the hall window, of the Mayfair street outside.
None of this makes any sense.
She went into a bedroom, an ordinary, pleasant bedroom with calm blue curtains. There was a blanket folded on the bed. She picked it up, a nice ordinary thing from a nice ordinary room. Then she went back into the hallway where the door still opened onto a beach and her great-aunt was tending to an unconscious stranger.
An unconscious stranger who had now been divested of all but his shirt and was being thumped on the back until he coughed up water.
‘Oh, there you are. Lay the blanket out here.’
His shirt was very fine and very wet and clung to his skin. It clung everywhere.
‘Should I cut his shirt off?’ said Gwen, brandishing a pair of scissors.
‘No!’ gulped Tiffany, who really wasn’t sure if she could cope with much more masculinity on display.
Esme glanced at her face, smiled a little, and nodded. ‘To preserve your modesty, then,’ she said, as Tiffany’s gaze glued itself to the dark hair on his legs.
Beneath the sand and the pallor was a scar on his cheek. Gold glinted in his ear. His hair was thick and dark and longer than the fashion.
‘He’s the pirate,’ she said in surprise.
‘Is he now?’ said Esme disinterestedly. ‘Help us get him onto the blanket. Take his arm. No, his arm not his hand, this is not a country dance.’
His arm was heavy, clothed in clammy linen, and unyielding. And his hand was bare. She had never touched a man’s bare skin before.
Tiffany had to move into an unladylike squat in order to reach the blanket. It was virtually impossible to bend very much at the waist, thanks to the busk in the long stays that her benighted bosom required. She didn’t think she was a lot of help in hefting him onto the blanket, and when she was instructed to pick up a corner of it she saw she was carrying less weight than the boy Billy.
‘Come along. Into the house, before the door closes of its own accord.’
To Tiffany’s alarm, the door did indeed seem to be slowly creaking shut. Would they be trapped out here on this godforsaken beach? She hurried across the sand, the low sea wall, and tried not to think about the heavy weight of the unconscious man she was carrying in a blanket that kept slipping from her hand.
‘Hurry, hurry,’ urged Esme, and Tiffany did, but as she tried to pick up her skirts she lost her grip on the blanket and the pirate began to slide off it.
‘No!’
She stumbled, hauling her corner up, trying to push his leg back onto the makeshift stretcher, but it cost them precious seconds. The door banged as it closed, and all four of them froze.
‘Um,’ said Tiffany.
‘Well, in that case, I’ll have to—’ began Esme.
The door fell off its hinges. A cow’s pink nose poked through the gap.
Esme exhaled a juddery breath. ‘Find another door,’ she said.
‘We can’t just go through the opening?’ Tiffany asked.
‘No. It has to be a door. One that opens. Latch, hinge, that sort of thing. I’ve tried it with archways and openings. Doesn’t work. We need hinges.’
The chalk arabesques tripping up the dancers. The daisy that left the page. The screaming drawing masters…
‘Um,’ said Tiffany. Her fingers twitched.
This strange peculiarity she had always denied. Had hidden and covered up and run away from.
The talking cat, the fireplace coming to life, the impossible doorway…
‘Yes?’
If Elinor heard about this, Tiffany would never see the light of day again.
Then we’d better hope she never does.
She squared her shoulders and took a decisive breath. ‘If we just need hinges … I might be able to help.’
Esme raised an eyebrow, then nodded at the door, as if granting permission.
Tiffany looked around her. She didn’t carry drawing materials, as a rule—a hard and fast rule, since things always went wrong when she drew anything. The drawings writhed and came off the page. Flowers bloomed. She knew better than to draw animals.
But a door hinge…
Tiffany gently laid down her corner of the blanket, and the others did the same. ‘Can you help me?’ she asked the boy, who looked dubious, but helped her prop the damp, noisome door in place. ‘I don’t suppose you have any chalk, or charcoal…?’
He shook his head, and watched in consternation as Tiffany sighed and scooped up some mud with her hands. At least—given their proximity to the cow shed, she really hoped it was mud. The cowshed door was really just a few planks of wood nailed together, with very simple two-part hinges. A leaf of metal on each side, one with a pin and one with a hole. Tiffany remembered once watching a door being set into place on a barn or a stable or something when she was a child. The principle was simple.
Using one finger, she painted a crude replica of the pin hinges at the top and bottom of the door, and then turned to do the same on the door post. As she did she heard the boy gasp.
‘How did you—’
There were rough hinges there, quite as if they’d been set by a blacksmith. They were brown and sort of smudgy, but they were physically real.
‘Help me lift it,’ she said, and in the end it took all four of them, but the door was slotted neatly onto its new hinge.
Aunt Esme laid her hand on it, murmuring, and Tiffany could swear she saw light flash across its surface.
‘That will do,’ she said, and opened the door into the Mayfair hallway. Tiffany felt her shoulders slump in relief, then hurriedly straightened, because a lady does not slump.
Esme pointedly wedged open the door with a rock, and then they went back to fetch the unconscious pirate, who was beginning to groan.
Tiffany thought she might collapse as her feet stepped onto the carpeted floor. A sudden scream had her dropping her corner of the blanket in shock, and then something flew at her face, and she screamed back at it.
‘It’a seagull,’ said Esme briskly, shutting the door a fraction too late. The gull had flown in, and in the chaos they all let go of the blanket, letting the pirate thump to the floor as the bird screamed madly around the hallway.
It knocked over the flowers and left a greasy smear on the painting that might be by Reynolds, and then Esme had the door open and was shooing it out.
‘Bloody flying rats,’ she snapped as she locked the door behind it, and the silence that followed was deafening.
Tiffany had never heard a woman swear before. She’d heard Cook mutter about the kitchen boy being a blimmin’ thief, and she’d heard the maids giggling over ‘clicketing’ with a man, which certainly sounded like swearing even if she didn’t actually know what it meant; but she’d never heard a lady swear. Not words she actually knew were swearing words.
‘Come on then,’ said Great-Aunt Esme, picking up her corner of the blanket. The pirate was beginning to stir. ‘The blue room will do. One, two, three … and up!’
Still shocked, Tiffany helped them get the pirate onto the bed in the room she’d taken the blanket from, and then Gwen was dispatched to the stillroom to fetch medicines and the boy Billy to heat water in the kitchen, and Tiffany was left standing with Esme, both of them muddy and wet and perspiring in a way ladies definitely weren’t supposed to do.
‘Well,’ said Esme, as they regarded the nearly naked man sprawled on the bed. ‘Nice work with the door, by the way. Those hinges just … popped into life, as if they had been made by a blacksmith. Is it permanent?’
‘The drawing? No. They don’t last long. A few hours, maybe. I’ve never drawn with mud before.’ Her hands were so filthy. She looked around for something to wipe them on, but her gaze kept being drawn back to the pirate as if he was magnetic.
His arms and legs had short dark hair on them. Did all men have that? Tiffany didn’t allow herself to stare at artworks of naked men, because nobody at all needed them coming alive, so she had no idea if that was usually depicted. Surely she’d have noticed? It was so … unmissable.
‘I see. Useful nonetheless. Not exactly how I imagined our first meeting, but now I suppose you can’t doubt the truth of the matter, can you?’
‘The matter?’ said Tiffany. The leg hair was damp and flat. Would it be soft when it dried?
‘That you are a witch.’
Tiffany blinked at the pirate. The sleeve of his sodden shirt was torn and revealed a black mark inked into the brown skin of his arm, visible through the hair. Was he truly the man in the green coat she’d seen at the Russell ball?
‘Well,’ she said distantly. ‘I believe you are. You have a magic door.’
‘Bird?’ chirped a childish voice behind her, and she looked around to see Pippin the cat sniffing around hopefully. ‘Bird gone?’
‘And I suppose I am too,’ said Tiffany, her shoulders slumping. A lady’s shoulders didn’t slump, but maybe a witch’s did. She could hear the cat’s thoughts. It was madness. ‘Why couldn’t I hear what the bird was saying?’
Esme shrugged. ‘Birds don’t say much. Gulls mostly scream. Corvids are reasonably intelligent, though. On that note, if you ever need me, ask a raven.’
‘Ask a raven what?’
Somewhere, a clock chimed, and a sudden panic rose in Tiffany.
‘Oh no. My maid will be waiting. I must go—’
‘Looking like that?’ said Esme, and Tiffany looked down at herself. Her skirts were muddy to the knee, and sandy in a way she could never explain. Her boots were ruined. Her hair was falling down all over the place. She could feel the perspiration on her face and neck and her hands were unspeakable. She thought the seagull might have left its doings on her shoulder.
‘Oh no,’ she said again. She dashed to the window and looked out into the street. Yes, there was Morris, sitting neatly on the bench, a couple of packages beside her.
‘Perhaps I can lend you something,’ said Esme.
‘And tell Morris what? She dressed me in this!’
‘Ah,’ said Esme. ‘Yes. Well, perhaps you could say … you spilled something and…’
Tiffany went to rub her hands over her face, then stopped, because they were disgusting. ‘There’s no time. All right,’ she said, and darted a glance at the pirate, who still appeared to be asleep. ‘Just … don’t, um, tell anyone about this.’
‘Dear, I am a witch.’
This was a trick almost as useful as becoming invisible. It didn’t last for long, unless she concentrated hard and gave herself a headache, but it was useful for balls and soirées and events where she wanted to look a little different. To curl her hair or flatten it, to hide a blemish or manufacture one, to make her gown more becoming or to fit somewhat worse. To make herself look more or less appealing, and nearly always the latter.
Now she concentrated on making herself look like she had that morning. The sand and mud on her skirts vanished, her hair wound itself back into its previous style, the bird doings disappeared. The mud from her hands disappeared, and her complexion evened out, although she could still feel the dirt and sweat, gritty and uncomfortable on her skin.
In a few moments, she was a neatly turned-out young lady who had simply been visiting her aunt.
‘Now that is an excellent trick,’ said Esme, walking around her.
‘It won’t last. I’ll have to think of some excuse why everything is all dirty later,’ said Tiffany. She glanced at herself in the glass over the dressing table. Yes. Perfectly presentable. ‘I’m so sorry. I must go.’
‘Siempre…’ murmured a voice from the bed, and Tiffany whipped around to see the pirate’s eyelids fluttering. He had ridiculously long lashes. ‘Siempre huyendo,’ he mumbled, and smiled sleepily at her before his eyes closed again.
‘What did he say?’ said Tiffany, her cheeks flushing.
‘He said “always” and then… I think “always running away”,’ said Esme, her head tilted to one side. ‘What do you suppose that means?’
‘I cannot imagine,’ said Tiffany, and all but sprinted for the door.