“Yes. Yes. He is exceptional.” She could not help but laugh at her husband.
“When he starts folding glamour, then we may call him exceptional. Until then, he is merely interested.” Herr Scholes crossed his eyes for the boy. “And adorable! To give you better understanding, my daughter’s second child was working glamour the week before he was delivered.”
“Surely not.” Jane was so astonished that her vision snapped back to the corporeal plane. “That cannot have been safe for the mother or child.”
“And how do you tell a baby to stop working glamour? Hm? It never lasted long enough to be a concern, but was quite astonishing.” He winked at Jane. “I should not be surprised if you experienced a similar spectacle some day.”
Vincent cleared his throat. “Are you sure it was not a prank? Recall M. Chastain’s flood?”
“Oh, that was clever. But no. This is a genuine, though rare, event. Your pranks, on the other hand, were far from rare.”
It was unnecessary, but Jane was nevertheless grateful for Vincent’s consideration. Her miscarriage was far enough in the past that remembrances of their childless state did not provoke the sharp pain it once had. Her nephew did much to soothe her, as did the reminder that with infants came a long list of messes that were kept in check by only the presence of a nanny. Still, it was awkward that everyone expected her and Vincent to have children by now. Three years they had been married, while Melody and Alastar had been wed little more than a year and had Tom to show for their time.
Jane let the glamour she was holding unravel back into the ether. “Did you say pranks? You must imagine my curiosity at my husband’s exploits. Pray, do not keep me in suspense.”
Herr Scholes gave a little chuckle. “Oh ho! Well should you pray. Your husband is one of the most devilish—”
Again, Vincent cleared his throat. “I suspect I shall regret this topic.”
“I was only going to tell Lady Vincent about the fishpond.”
“Ah—Um.” Vincent’s blush was most becoming.
Jane asked, all innocence, “Fishpond?”
Her husband shifted in his seat and rubbed his brown curls into an even more riotous mess. “I may have been caught while attempting a bit of subterfuge.”
“Three times! I thought he would never learn. I had only three rules, and one of them was that my pupils must be in the house by midnight.”
“You said it was so that your housekeeper did not need to wait up to let us in. I did not make her wait, did I?”
“Only because you were opening a window and stealing out of it. He left a ladder by the window, Lady Vincent, masked by a glamural, so he could come and go at his leisure. And I do need to give him credit: it was a very pretty illusion. This was before he had developed the Sphère Obscurcie, so he had needed to weave a glamural with all the details of the view that would have been visible if the ladder had not been present.”
“It was not terribly complicated, being against a stucco wall.”
“If it had not been so nicely done, I would have noticed it sooner. Now, the window was not so high, but there was a small ornamental fishpond next to the house, and he used the ladder to span it. The first time, I simply removed the ladder.”
“I was practised at slipping out, so I slid my legs out the window, trusting the ladder was there, lost my balance, and landed in the pond.”
“Woke the house with his swearing!”
“It was cold.”
“You were embarrassed, and the anger came from that.”
Vincent rubbed the back of his neck and gave a dry grimace. “Shall I hold Tom for you? Perhaps he needs changing.” Her usually gruff husband appeared to be an embarrassed schoolboy. Given his height and the breadth of his shoulders, it was an incongruous expression, rather like one might expect from a chagrined bear. He adjusted the cuffs of his coat, a blush still high on his cheeks.
“Tom is perfectly content where he is.” The glamourist tapped the infant’s nose with his forefinger. “Are you not, my boy?”
Tom gurgled with delight, offering no escape for Vincent.
“The second time, he lifted part of the glamour that was masking the ladder and looked before stepping out. But…”
With a pained chuckle, Vincent took up the next section. “But he had placed a second glamour beneath the first to show a ladder there. It was not. Mind you, the illusion was brilliant. The support structure was woven so that it looked like drifting bits of natural glamour. We had not yet begun to study Wohlreich’s treatise on opticks and the possible uses of poorfire threads as anchor points in glamurals. I had not known the etymology of poorfire until then, and find it quite fascinating. Did you know it was a corruption of ‘porphyry,’ after rocks the color of the shellfish blood that the ancient Greeks used to dye their gowns purple?”
“Oddly, I did. It was mentioned in A Girl’s Primer on Glamour.”