Genevieve snapped from a reverie. Discord was jangling in her head: she met Reuben McAvey barely two months later.
She had. She had met Reuben a few months after meeting Oliver. Until now, she’d remembered it as the other way around. And by then, wasn’t she – didn’t they—
Oliver, gaze averted, was running a hand compulsively over his cleanshaven scalp, the dark bristles of his younger days regularly razored away. She was struck by the impossible impulse to run her hand over the bare skin there, to caress the tender nape of his neck, to feel the glide where prickle used to be. Her fingers were tingling, not with heat but with the echo of sensation.
A soft but rapid knock came on the doorframe behind them. Genevieve turned, as tranquil as an expectant mother should be.
Mass was hovering, looking nervous. His eyes had finally faded from Whitely’s green, and were a deep, dark brown, much like Oliver’s. ‘Miss Delacorte sent me to ask…’ He stared at the uncovered paintings, and the array still leaning in their swaddling.
‘The tea.’ Oliver rose from her side and started for the door.
Genevieve didn’t quite see what happened then. Mass tripped, she thought, and stumbled forwards, risking the integrity of the paintings. She yelped in alarm; she could not bear to waste a single one of her mother’s lost-and-found artworks, and it seemed for a moment that Mass’s bodily flail risked the lot.
But even as Oliver reacted too slowly, putting out one massive arm that would miss catching the boy, Mass wrenched himself away from potential disaster, landing in an awkward crouch well away from the makeshift gallery along the wall. His eyes flashed green again as he hunched, panting.
He looked up at them, agonised, mouth twisted, eyes bright, almost aglow. Then he blurred into his cat form and fled. Oliver shook his head and made to follow.
Genevieve’s feet tried to start off after him. She planted them, looking again at the uncovered paintings, and then at the row of shrouded ones. ‘Go on without me.’
Oliver hesitated. ‘You should eat, and rest.’
‘One more,’ she said.
In the doorway, Oliver slowly straightened to his full height. Taller than her, taller than the twins. Almost as tall and broad as the doorway itself. ‘Come away, Genevieve.’
Genevieve heard Whitely’s coolly mocking voice: did you know Mr Oliver has a stern voice?
Yes, I did know that, Mr Whitely, she thought. ‘Please, Oliver.’
She wasn’t asking for his permission. She needed no one’s permission to put aside her own bodily needs to look at her own mother’s paintings. She was asking for…for his help. With what, she could not fathom.
Before she’d touched the painting, she would have struggled to give an autobiographical précis of that phase in her life. The lost memory had played like a magic lantern show of the sort that had been faddish around that same time, in the early ’40s. Now it had shimmered back to the forefront of her mind, it didn’t feel like it had ever been lost, but rather merely something she hadn’t needed, nor wanted, to think about. How many more memories did she have like that, not lost but hiding in plain sight? Hiding, more aptly, in a fog that needed a strong breeze to dissipate it?
Yet even as the desire to charge onwards peaked, she felt capitulation on its heels. Yes. She should go to tea. She shouldn’t waste time on old paintings she’d have disposed of long ago, if she’d known about them.
Oliver paced heavily towards her, face blank, and for one horrid moment, she truly believed her friend would seize her and drag her from the storeroom.
He knelt and pulled at the next wrapping, big body angled in such a way that it blocked Genevieve’s view. He became still, as if he held his breath. She tucked in beside him, heedless of her shoulder bumping his in her eagerness to see it.
Her own breath rushed out of her. It was another from her mother’s private collection, and it couldn’t have been painted so very long after the last. This portrait was of Oliver, the younger Oliver, black hair chopped into those unfashionable bristles. Mother had depicted his face illuminated as if from a bright source beyond the purview of the canvas’s eye. The broad, stark planes of his face were left unflattered by the play of shadows, but his lips were pursed as if for a kiss, and his dark, warm eyes had the lustre of brushed velvet, the way they crinkled and lit up whenever he was amused or fascinated or when he – when he—
‘The matches,’ Oliver said, and she felt his fingers wrap around hers, and they remembered.
The great difficulty of being an untrained weapons Artisan whose Art manifested purely, and entirely without her volition, as flame was that errors were horrific to contemplate.
This was the salient point that earned Oliver his ticket past the barricade of class. Certainly, both Genevieve’s parents raised curious brows when Alex marched a tattooed labourer through the front door the afternoon following his disgrace – terrified of missing the appointment at St James’s Park, Genevieve had deployed the merciless Lulu to roust her ailing and not nearly apologetic enough brother from his bed and out the door – but neither openly disputed their nephew’s unexpected guest. All that affable brass had its uses.
Indeed, Genevieve suspected her father was quietly thrilled to be seen to be so open-minded, harking back to his own youth spent on the periphery of radicals and bohemians. She was also beginning to suspect, with a cynicism she did not like to turn against her beloved sire, that Father had not spent all that long there – and that his dabbling had ended the moment he’d seen the open path to making his fortune in trade and investment.
Still, he’d been among the fringes wholeheartedly enough to meet and subsequently marry an up-and-coming woman artist despite the opposition of his strictly conventional middle-class parents. And Antoinette, at least, shook Oliver’s hand with true pleasure and not a hint of disfavour, not even when Lulu and Genevieve joined the young men in the rear parlour to take tea.
Genevieve was, however, shortly summoned away to her father’s study, for a gentle remonstration about the care she must take to maintain a snowy reputation, her greatest treasure, so easily and irreparably lost.
Her cousin – both cousins – could keep company as they wished, or as their guardian allowed, notwithstanding that Sir Kingsford had taken their father’s death as permission to absent himself from London permanently. She could not keep company as she wished, not if she wanted to remain untarnished.
She bit her tongue and asked him to call in Mother, then set the contents of the wastepaper bin on fire in front of their eyes.
To say her father was astonished and her mother delighted would be an understatement – but all three of them were shortly distressed when they discovered that they could not quench the flames, not by smothering, not by dousing with soapy mop-water from a full bucket snatched from a startled maid, not by ill-advised stomping with slippers. This last, in fact, scattered the flames, and it looked for a terrifying moment like they would lose not only Father’s study but the entire house.
The twins burst in, responding to the spreading shouts of alarm, Oliver circumspectly in their wake. Even as Alex and Lulu rushed to try the same techniques that had already done nothing but dispersed the Art-flames wider, Oliver placidly spun his warding Art to contain the incipient inferno.
He turned to Genevieve. ‘Do you think you can quell this now? My wards won’t slow it for long.’
‘If I could,’ she half-shouted; even with the worst averted, she was watching the expensive rug burn to ashes and the flames weren’t dying, because they weren’t the sort of mundane flames that needed mundane fuel to keep burning. ‘I would have already!’
He held out his hand. Puzzled, and not without a glance her father’s way, she took it. Artisan’s hands – both were bare. Their fingers interlocked as if they were about to dance. A wave of calm swept over her.
‘Were you annoyed?’ he murmured.
She’d barely noticed it, but she had been. She’d been quietly seething about the hypocrisy that saw every Locke but her free of the strictures of high society. She’d been seething because she’d been so looking forward to seeing Oliver again, and treating him properly this time, upstairs, and Father had called her, and only her, away.
The moment she was given to notice her own temper, she found it was under her control. It still took an inordinate amount of time and effort – she had a mental image of groping her fingers through the dark to find a lost key – before the wildfire finally guttered and then went out.
Oliver squeezed her fingers in silent congratulations before letting her go. He put his hands behind his back and turned to face her father, a sailor before his irate captain: he fully expected to be dismissed for touching the bare fingers of the daughter of the house, and he fully intended to accept the dismissal and leave forever without a word of complaint.
‘Mr Oliver is a wards Artisan,’ Genevieve announced, with more strategy than she’d known herself capable of. ‘He can stop me burning the house to the ground.’
In the mingled surprise of their daughter transforming from debutante to Artisan, and the shock of discovering what that actually meant, there was no demurral. Oliver would be allowed to become a regular visitor, to assist Genevieve in gaining control of her flagrant Art.
‘As long as Miss Lucinda is with her,’ her father rallied enough to dictate to Oliver, who nodded gravely in acknowledgement.
‘Of course,’ Genevieve said, hating the way he was speaking to Oliver in the civilly brisk tones he used with the servants, and thus obstinately inserting herself into a conversation that had been entirely about her in the first place. ‘She’s her own talent to cultivate.’
Father turned to her. ‘And you will begin accompanying your mother to your engagements again?’
Her stomach gave a sickening swoop. Only in her head and not yet by word or action beyond daydreams with Lulu, she had begun to fulminate against his plan for her, which had been her plan too, a few weeks, if not days, before. She realised now how much lighter she’d felt, the moment she’d embraced her Artisan self; it was possibly why, aside from her irritation with being summoned from the parlour, she had made her demonstration so dramatic, and subsequently so unexpectedly dangerous.
She felt as if she had been in a stuffy drawing room, crammed with useless ornaments destined for nothing grander than daily dusting by maids, and she’d managed to fling open a window to let a gale in. It had tumbled over all those useless, pretty ornaments, but it had cleared her mind and lifted her spirits as well. And now her father was blocking the window and trying to drag a curtain back across.
She could not abide it, but she also could not, yet, openly defy her father’s wishes. She could, however, bid for time, enough to find a way to wedge the glorious window open. ‘Once I can be sure I will not burn others’ houses down.’
He gave a curt nod and turned away. Genevieve lingered in the face of the dismissal. She considered herself the least argumentative of the Lockes – the cousins and her mother might disagree – and the most dutiful of daughters, but she could not cede the advantages Artistry gifted her without at least a murmur of protest, if only she could find the right words.
Mother, apparently recognising what the twins called her dissection look, caught her attention with a shift of posture, giving her the smallest shake of the head.
Satisfied that she had enlisted one parent in a gentle campaign against the other, Genevieve retreated with the twins and their guest.
Oliver returned the very next day; Genevieve did not flatter herself that this was a betrayal of some sign of partiality on his part. Indeed, his manner, quiet, calm and standoffish, bespoke a continued reluctance to remain entangled with the Lockes at all. He was here, she suspected, because he felt a moral duty to prevent her from accidentally murdering herself and her entire family and household staff by misadventure with fire, as readily as any small child discovering the wonders of matches.
Indeed, he’d brought along a large wooden matchbox, carrying it out to meet her in the garden. Mother was there, painting in the dappled shade of the plane tree, and the twins, idling in the chancy sunshine.
Genevieve had overheard a conversation that morning between her parents, about her cousins. It had been not quite unintentional. A convocation of drafts within the house meant that a position on the stairs was conducive to catching the drift of conversation from her father’s study, even with the door closed. Knowing her mother had just entered with a tea tray and a determined mien, Genevieve had lingered in the hope of hearing how the campaign to allow full Artisan status was progressing.
But the conversation had been about Alex and Lulu. Antoinette professed her concern as to the complete lack of boundaries their Uncle Theodore was seeing fit to establish. She could administer the care and the cautionary words, but she felt they needed a firmer hand from a father figure.
This finally enlightened Genevieve that the twins’ gratuitous licence, that she was so very envious of, was a sword not entirely without its double edge. Her father’s response had been cavalier, to say the least.
Oliver turned from politely greeting the other Lockes. ‘If you are amenable, Miss Locke, we will begin.’
He opened the matchbox. The matchsticks had lumps of red at their tips, which Genevieve puzzled over; the matches she was accustomed to came from a small tin box and had yellowish heads.
‘Lucifers are indeed of the very devil,’ Oliver said gravely, noticing her silent curiosity. ‘These are new.’ He paused, watching her for an understanding that didn’t come. ‘Safer for the matchmaker girls, Miss Locke. Phossy jaw.’
She flushed. She shouldn’t have needed it explained. The newspapers had covered the problem. ‘Everyone should be using these, then.’ She looked back at the house. ‘We should be.’
‘Only two factories use the red yet.’ Again, he paused.
This time, she did see the issue. ‘They must be expensive. Allow us to reimburse you. That is, you do intend to use these, in helping me learn my Art?’
He nodded.
‘And for your time, too,’ Genevieve said, now entirely inspired.
But here he held up his large, capable hand. ‘My time is my own, I offer it freely.’
She hesitated, as uncertain of the etiquette here as she was in the grand ballrooms of the upper class her father wanted her to pave the way into. Oliver was of the labouring classes; his time was all he had to bargain, and it deserved recompense, especially if she was taking him away from paid work. On the other hand, he had said he was offering his time freely, so would it insult him if she—
She caught him smothering his smile and demanded, ‘Can you read minds?’
‘I read faces well enough,’ he said. ‘That’s not Art, though. Do not do yourself an injury, Miss Locke, I am here because I want to be.’
Oliver took up a match, big fingers delicately plucking the stick free from the rest. He ran it along the sandpaper glued to the side of the box. The friction sparked the chemicals, and the match burst into flame.
He then held it out to her. ‘Extinguish it.’ As she frowned, he added, ‘The usual way. No Art needed.’
‘I…I do already know how matches work, Mr Oliver,’ Genevieve said, hovering somewhere between asperity and uncertainty.
‘Bear with me, Miss Locke.’ He lifted the match higher. It would burn his fingers soon.
She leaned towards him, and pursed her lips to puff a sharp breath. The flame guttered and went out. He looked at her over the pungent waft of smoke issuing from the charred end. She couldn’t have guessed what he was thinking.
As she straightened self-consciously, he took out from his coat a small tin, holding different matches. ‘These are weatherproof,’ he said. ‘They make them for shipside.’
The heads of these ones, she noted, were the sickly yellow of the matches she was familiar with. He once again drew a stick free with that surprising precision, striking it into life and holding it out to her.
This time her puff made the flame dance and dip to the side, but not extinguish. Oliver nodded, satisfied. Genevieve, without thinking, pinched the flame between her forefinger and thumb, and hissed in surprised pain – she’d been working with her own Art-fire for a few weeks now, and hadn’t realised that she could still be singed by mundane flame.
Oliver collected the bucket he’d had Alex fetch, seized her wrist in a gentle but implacable grip, and dunked her whole hand into the cold water. They stood side by side, her shoulder brushing his arm, looking down at their two submerged hands, his fingers still about her wrist.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he murmured, and let her go. Stepping away and wiping his damp hand absently on his coat, he said, ‘Keep your fingers in for a spell longer, Miss Locke.’
‘Not immune to other people’s fire, then,’ she said lightly. She was braced for a lecture about being more careful.
‘Now you know,’ Oliver said. He made a formless gesture, invitational. ‘We’ll resume when you’re ready.’
He moved further from her, blunt fingers tapping the buttons of his coat. He looked a little flushed now himself, cheeks darkened.
‘You can take the coat off, Mr Oliver,’ she said. ‘Artisans are allowed.’
Again, she earned his mild smile. ‘There are ladies present, Miss Locke.’
Genevieve looked over at the others. Her mother was lost in her work, focus absolute as she made one of her rapid sketches, that she would later develop with oils. Lulu had left off muttering over fashion plates – sleeves grew ever tighter, waists ever narrower, and both were proving challenging – to relax back in her chair and watch Genevieve’s first lesson.
Alex, beside his sister and equally at ease here in the garden with his closest relatives, waved at her. He had three small jars before him, and a big box of old buttons his aunt had found for him. Oliver had suggested a sorting task might help him practise the focus he needed to control his flailing talent. Alex had enough respect for Oliver to try.
She tsked at her insouciant audience. Withdrawing her hand, she discovered her fingertips had reddened but not blistered. She nodded to Oliver.
‘Light the match,’ he said, holding up one of the large red-tipped matches from the wooden box. ‘Art, yes. But make it like the weatherproof one. I shouldn’t be able to put it out.’
Bewildered, Genevieve said, ‘Mr Oliver, my problem is that I’m creating unquenchable flame already.’
‘Not to contradict you,’ he said, ‘but to define your problem more precisely: you are creating unquenchable flame when you do not mean to. First, learn to mean it. Then you can learn to not.’
It took three full weeks, weather permitting, and twice as many full boxes of safe matches.
Three weeks out in the back garden on the days when the sun shone, never daring to try it inside on the rainy days, or even under the mews roof, which seemed terrifyingly flammable now she had more knowledge under her belt.
Three weeks of making a minuscule dollop of Art flame precisely dance atop the matchstick, a feat in itself.
Three weeks of watching Oliver extinguish the tiny flame with one exhale of air and Art, quick as a stolen kiss. She’d not spent so much time staring at a man’s mouth in her life.
The lack of progress might have been frustrating – the youngest Lockes soon gave up being an avid audience to such repetitive theatre, though Mother was always appropriately nearby, in the throes of painterly creation, even when Lulu forgot her chaperone duties – except Genevieve could feel a creeping awareness within herself.
The sensation of groping blindly to find a key, the feeling she’d had in Father’s study within the ambit of Oliver’s wards, grew stronger and stronger. But it was not as simple as reaching out in the dark. She had to feel out the shape of it, inch by painstaking inch. It was, for those weeks, all she thought about, all she read about, until her very dreams were invaded, though she did not make any practical attempts without Oliver standing patiently by with his safe matches and his bucket of water and his warding Art.
And then came the day he directed his puff of breath at the flame dancing on the head of the matchstick, and it did not go out.
He paused, lips still pursed. His gaze came up to meet hers, both wide-eyed with surprise. His smile bloomed in direct proportion to hers.
They were still smiling at each other in that perfect moment of stillness – her blossoming sense of achievement, a whole world unlocked inside her mind, and his wholehearted and genuine respect for it – when the match burned down far enough for the flame to lick his skin.
He grimaced and flicked the match into the bucket by his side. Far from guttering, the flame spread merrily across the surface of the water.
‘Greek fire,’ Oliver murmured, eyebrows raised.
‘Should we… Sand, perhaps?’ Genevieve asked, hands twisting together, remembering her father’s rug. She didn’t know why Oliver wasn’t using his own Art like he had then.
‘We have a little time before we need concern ourselves,’ Oliver said in his thoughtful way, though he was closely watching the wooden sides of the bucket, which were beginning to smoke in preparation for charring. ‘You know what to do, Miss Locke.’
He wasn’t using his Art, she realised then, because he expected her to competently employ her own. That was all the incentive she needed. Leaning over the bucket – Oliver made no move to hold her back, because these were her flames, and she couldn’t be harmed by them – Genevieve once again reached into her own mind and discovered the key to hand. Her Art functioned at her discretion, not its own.
The fire went out in a wink, as if it had never existed. The water underneath simmered in a low roil. Genevieve knew how it felt. She held both hands over her mouth, staring down at the bucket, a strange mix of triumph and terror making her breathing unsteady.
How powerful she was, with this Art. How destructive she might be, with this Art.
‘Oh, I thank my lucky stars for you, Oliver,’ she said, holding out her hand to him.
Oliver made no move to accept the offer of her bare fingers. ‘The control is yours, Miss Locke. My wards merely slow real Art down.’
She let her hand drop, embarrassed and chagrined. She had been impetuous and presumptuous, terrible sins in the eyes of her husband-catching handbooks, and in the eyes of the wider circles she was meant to move in, as well.
‘I beg your pardon.’ She clenched her hand by her side. ‘I meant only to express my deep gratitude for your assistance, Mr Oliver.’
‘Yes.’ Oliver’s gaze was abstracted; he was either deep in thought, or refusing to look at her, or both. ‘I—’
The brand-new clock tower over in the square began its short hourly chime; it had embedded Art within its workings, and was thus both accurate and automated, much to the disgust of Mr Belville, who made a living selling Greenwich time to subscribers and did not relish Artisans superseding his trusty Arnold.
The tower chimes were not loud, respecting the wealthy and willing-to-complain residents, but Oliver stopped anyway. He and Genevieve waited until the St Paul’s bells over by Knightsbridge began to belatedly toll, stridently clamorous.
The London News had described the Artistry-infused clock tower in unflattering terms – a grotesque erection has lately sprung up, to the great amusement of the less mature in the household – but since St Paul’s itself was also recent, as indeed, the whole Belgravia scheme was recent, there was no call on tradition to have the clock tower silenced. Hence the petulance of the sexton. It was likely to rebound badly: the chime of the clock tower was regular and quiet, while the tolling from the church was vociferous and venturing far from the usual sermonising and funerary habits. The neighbourhood would not tolerate the incessant disturbance for long.
They waited, much, Genevieve reflected, like Artisans as a class patiently waiting out the Church whenever it descended into one of its periodic vituperations regarding Artistry and the historic taint of witchcraft. Like the clock tower, Artisans were far too useful to Crown and country for any real threat to arise from the occasional nostalgia for witch-hunting tyranny.
The church bells, having successfully drowned out the clock tower, fell silent. Oliver cleared his throat. ‘I have to go.’
Genevieve, now more wounded than embarrassed, awkwardly said, ‘You won’t take tea before you depart?’
He had, previously, in the garden, with her and the twins, Mother ever in the background behind her easel. It had given Genevieve the chance to observe that Alex had let go of his tendre for Oliver without evidence of an overly battered heart.
‘I— There’s a meeting.’ The man was practically sidling away from her! ‘The Society advocating for the establishment of a protective body specifically for Artisans.’
She had heard of it; or, at least, now she was an Artisan herself, she had begun to peruse the reports in the newspapers, though not nearly as vigorously as she had been researching Artistry itself. There had been a great deal of discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of a formal body, and some fearmongering about what it would mean to mundane people if Artisans, as solitary as cats, began to work together. But Oliver’s attendance confused her.
‘Isn’t that only for—’ She bit her tongue. She had been about to say, Isn’t that only for men?, not forgetting – it would be difficult to do so – that Oliver was a man, but unintentionally applying a certain narrow and ingrained definition of enfranchisement. ‘…people who may vote?’
Oliver paused in his retreat to indulge her with one of his crooked smiles. ‘If we only allow people who may vote to have their say in this proposed agency’s formation, then whole rafts of Artisans will continue to not be allowed to vote, to their great detriment.’
This was the first time, and not the last, that it occurred to Genevieve that her embodiment as a woman, Oliver’s embodiment as a labourer, others’ embodiment as anything other than the trifecta of wealthy and English and male, tarnished the edges of the lauded Artisan status she had been so eager to snatch up and hoard.
It was also the most she’d heard Oliver speak since their first night down in the kitchen; it must, then, be something he felt quite strongly about, enough to override his stiff reticence around her parents.
Her mother, she noted from the corner of her eye, had finally lifted her attention from her sketchbooks and canvas on the other side of the long, narrow garden to look with some approval at Oliver. Theodore Locke had, after all, plucked her from among the sort of people who were likely Chartists now.
With the horrible feeling she was rather letting both her mother’s politics and her own sex down, Genevieve said, ‘May Artisan women attend these meetings, then?’
‘Very many Artisan women already do.’
‘I’d best come, then, shouldn’t I?’ Genevieve said. ‘I could be helpful, in my position. I could speak for them.’
She wished she’d had the foresight to bite her tongue again even as the words came treacherously out of her mouth. She didn’t dare look over at Mother, who probably had her head in her hands at the sheer ignorance of the daughter she had raised.
Oliver was kind enough to merely say, with a gravity that belied the soft amusement in his eyes, ‘You’ll find they are speaking for themselves already.’
‘I will never not make a fool of myself in front of you, will I?’ she lamented.
He offered a shallow bow in lieu of a too-honest answer. ‘They will be glad of your support, Miss Locke.’