Lily had lighted the tallow lamp that Emma preferred to work by, and the greasy beef smell permeated the room. It was not a pleasant odour, but its familiarity on such a night, as the rain continued in sheets outside and dynamics shifted slyly inside, was welcome and Lucy experienced an unexpected pang of nostalgia.
She felt very young, suddenly, and longed for nothing more than to be a small child again, for whom everything was black and white, and whose bed was even now being prepared by Nanny, a brass warming pan slipped beneath the covers to shoo away the cold and the damp.
‘Do you want to see a trick?’ Lily Millington did not pause in her cheese-slicing task and Lucy was so far away with her thoughts that she wondered if she might have misheard.
Lily Millington looked up at her then and seemed to stare; she reached across the table, a slight quizzical frown on her brow, and with her outstretched fingers took something gently from behind Lucy’s ear. She opened her hand and a silver coin lay in her palm. ‘A shilling! Lucky me. I’ll have to check you more often.’
‘How did you do that?’
‘Magic.’
Lucy’s fingers went quickly to the skin behind her ear. ‘Will you tell me how to do it?’
‘I’ll think about it.’ Lily took a few slices of bread from Lucy’s board. ‘Sandwich?’
She’d made one for herself, too, and now went to sit on the end of the table nearest the front window. ‘Cook’s prerogative,’ she said, when she noticed Lucy watching. ‘I see no reason that we should rush back. The others have enough to keep them occupied. They’ll not starve.’
‘Thurston said that he was famished.’
‘Did he?’ Lily Millington took a deep satisfied bite of her sandwich.
Lucy went to sit beside Lily Millington on the table end.
Outside, through the window, a rift between clouds revealed a small patch of clear sky above the storm. Within it a few faraway stars twinkled. ‘Do you think that we will ever know how the stars were formed?’ asked Lucy.
‘Yes.’
‘Really? How can you be so sure?’
‘Because a chemist called Bunsen and a physicist named Kirchhoff have worked out how to use the spectrum produced when sunlight passes through a prism to name the chemicals present in the sun.’
‘And the stars?’
‘They say that it follows.’ Lily Millington was also staring up at the distant sky now, her profile illuminated by the hazy light of the tallow lamp. ‘My father used to tell me that I was born under a lucky star.’
‘A lucky star?’
‘An old sailor’s superstition.’
‘Your father was a sailor?’
‘He was a clockmaker once upon a time, a very good one. He used to repair the collection of a retired sea captain out in Greenwich and it was there that his mind was filled with seafaring superstitions. It was in Greenwich that I first looked through a telescope.’
‘What did you see?’
‘I was very fortunate, for Neptune had just been found. A planet both new and ancient at once.’
Lucy wished that her father had been a clockmaker who had taken her with him to the Royal Observatory. ‘My father died when I was only a child; he had a run-in with a carriage.’
Lily Millington turned and smiled at her. ‘Then let us hope that we have better luck than they did.’ She inclined her head towards the table. ‘In the meantime, I suppose it’s time to feed the others.’
As Lucy finished her sandwich, Lily Millington assembled the rest of the bread and cheese and arranged the supper on a porcelain serving platter.
Yes, Lily Millington was different from the models who had come before her, those pretty faces who reminded Lucy of the leaves that fell from the towering lime trees in autumn – the lushest of green in summer, but lasting only one season before they fell clean away; replaced the following year by a fresh new crop. Lily Millington knew about science and had seen the planet of Neptune through a telescope and there was something inside her that came out in Edward’s paintings. Something that had made him tell her about the Night of the Following. Lucy had a feeling she should hate Lily Millington for that, but she didn’t.
‘Where did you learn to do magic?’ she asked.
‘I learned from a French street performer in Covent Garden.’
‘You did not.’
‘I did.’
‘As a child?’
‘A very young child.’
‘What were you doing in Covent Garden?’
‘Picking pockets, mostly.’
Lucy knew then that Lily Millington was teasing. Edward did that, too, when he wanted to end a conversation. As she finished her sandwich, she noticed that the clouds had closed over the gap already and the stars had disappeared.
Edward was just leaving when they arrived back at the dining room, a candle in one hand and Fanny leaning hard against his other side. ‘Miss Brown is tired after the day’s travel,’ he said with careful politeness. ‘I’m going to show her to bed.’
‘Of course,’ said Lily Millington. ‘I’ll make sure to save you some supper.’
‘I know you didn’t mean it, Edward,’ Fanny was saying as they made their way slowly along the hallway, her voice more slurred than usual. ‘I haven’t told a soul. You were just confused. It’s normal before a wedding.’
‘Shh, there, now’ – Edward helped her begin up the stairs – ‘we’ll talk about it tomorrow.’
Lucy did not return to the dining room; instead, she watched them disappear and when she considered it safe to do so started up the stairs herself. Edward, she noticed, had taken Fanny into the room beside her own. It was small but pretty, with a four-poster bed and a walnut dressing table under the window.
All was quiet until Lucy heard Fanny notice that the window faced east towards the village churchyard.
‘It is just a different type of sleep,’ Lucy could hear Edward saying, ‘nothing more than that. Just the long sleep of the dead.’
‘But, Edward.’ Her voice carried through the open door and down the hall. ‘It is bad luck to sleep with one’s feet facing the dead.’
Whatever Edward said by reply he said it too softly to be heard, for the next words came again from Fanny. ‘Is your room close by? I shall be frightened otherwise.’
Lucy changed into her nightgown and went to stand by her own window. The clematis creeper that grew hungrily along the stone wall of the house had woven its way into the room and a sprig of flowers sat upon the damp sill. Lucy picked them one by one, sprinkling the petals over the edge and watching them fall like snow.
She was wondering about Fanny on the other side of the wall, when she heard Edward’s voice on the lawn below. ‘I understand that I have you to thank for this?’
Careful to stay out of sight, Lucy craned to see who else was there. Thurston. The rain had stopped and the chill in the air had lifted. A swollen moon had emerged in the clearing sky, brighter, it seemed, for the preceding darkness, and Lucy could see both men standing near the wisteria arbour that ran towards the orchard.
‘She says that you wrote and told her where to find me.’
Thurston had a cigarette between his lips and was holding his Napoleonic Wars rifle, taking careless aim at imagined adversaries in the chestnut tree behind the house. Now, he let its trigger guard roll around his finger like a pantomime villain and held his arms out to the side. ‘Not at all. I wrote to suggest an appointment and when we met I told her where to find you.’
‘You’re a bastard, Thurston.’
‘What else could I do? The poor girl threw herself upon my mercy.’
‘Your mercy! You’re enjoying this.’
‘Edward, you wound me. I’m simply being a friend. She begged me to help you see things clearly. She said that you’d lost your mind and behaved most improperly.’
‘I spoke with her – I wrote to her, too, explaining everything.’
‘Everything? I highly doubt that. “I don’t believe it,” she kept saying, “does he not know who my father is? What he’ll do to him? What this would do to me?” And then, “Why would he do it? What reason could he possibly have for breaking his promise?”’ Thurston laughed. ‘No, I don’t think you explained everything, my dear Edward.’