Witherward Read online

  “Be safe, Martha,” she said. The other girl shot her a weak grin and hurried on down the street. When she had vanished in the crowd, Ilsa swallowed her fears for her, went into the theatre and slipped backstage.

  2

  Ilsa could put Martha out of her mind, but the boy who had vanished from between her fingers was not easily forgotten.

  Her years of chasing clues had helped her recognise when she needed to charm someone. She was usually sweeter; asked better questions. But she had panicked.

  She could make herself disappear if she wanted to, but not into thin air like the boy had. Nor could she vanish a pack of cards. Perhaps the boy would have known nothing of who she was or what she could do, but Ilsa ached to be sure. Seventeen years was too long to wonder.

  She hurried into the makeshift dressing room in the hope of letting Mr Blume in on her encounter before they went onstage. Blume – or The Great Balthazar as he was known professionally – was Ilsa’s exception; the one person in the world who knew her secret. In the five years they had been working together, he’d never treated her like a monster. Ilsa recalled the matron of the orphanage’s nails drawing blood from her arm as she was dragged to her punishment, and felt a rush of affection for the once-great magician.

  He was trying to straighten his ascot when she entered, but he was only making it worse. The half-empty bottle of scotch on the vanity in front of him told her why. Ilsa sighed.

  “Here, sir. Let me.” She pulled up a stool in front of him and started fixing his ascot, his waistcoat, his hair. He’d had enough practice at holding his liquor. He never stumbled or swayed, and if she could make him presentable, only the slurring would give him away.

  “I saw a boy disappear today,” she said as she smoothed his collar. His pale blue eyes narrowed.

  “A magic trick?”

  “It weren’t no magic trick I’ve ever seen,” said Ilsa, and she told him about the impossible snap change; about confronting the boy and seeing him vanish. “I was holding him by the shoulders, and then I was holding air. Just like that.” Above them, the variety show they shared the billing with was wrapping up. A comedy duo descended from the stage and Ilsa paused until they passed. “You ever seen anything like that?”

  Blume must have seen hope on her face, and Ilsa saw her answer on his. He believed in real magic, for he had seen things too, but he shook his head.

  Deflated, she ducked behind the screen and changed into her costume. As a twelve-year-old, she had worn little trousers with a red tailcoat and top hat, like a miniature ringmaster in a circus. But as she’d turned into a woman, Mr Johnston had insisted on tighter, shorter, more provocative attire: a satin bodice, with a bead skirt barely touching her thighs, and a plume of red feathers hiding her bottom. It was thoroughly indecent, and Ilsa was glad. Anything to distract from what she was really doing on stage.

  As she fastened her garters and helped herself to a finger of Blume’s scotch, he wondered aloud about the disappearing boy.

  “To be that young,” he said. “Do you think he was born with his talents, as you were?”

  “Yes. He must’ve been.” She had more questions than she did answers, but of one thing Ilsa was sure: she’d had no say in what she could do. Yes, she had practised her talents to master them, but she would never have suffered the way she did as a child if she’d been given a choice.

  “In any case, he must have practised,” said Blume quietly. Below stage was beginning to fill with other performers. They were all preoccupied with shop talk and props, but Blume still lowered his voice and leaned closer – close enough that Ilsa could smell the whisky on his breath. “Perhaps with a teacher of sorts. This card trick you speak of… if you don’t mind me saying, Ilsa dear, you had no such technique at his age.”

  She didn’t mind him saying. In fact, she was thinking the same thing. She had been performing magic “tricks” on the street when Blume found her, but without an ounce of the young magician’s finesse. If the boy had been trained, there had to be others. Her heart raced at the thought. “I’m gonna find him after the show. I got to.”

  Blume nodded, and mumbled solemnly. Not out of drunkenness, but to spare her feelings. He knew, as did Ilsa, that in a city of millions, the odds of rediscovering one boy – one disappearing boy – were as slim as the likelihood that his debts would ever be paid off. But it was the first hint of real magic Ilsa had seen in months.

  * * *

  As The Great Balthazar took the stage, Ilsa slipped into the back of the auditorium, the noise of applause and the flare of the theatre lights providing cover. Not that anyone ever noticed the magician’s assistant’s entrance. Ilsa’s talent made sure of that.

  “Good ladies and gentlemen! Thank you for gracing me with your patronage this evening, my fine, fine guests.” Balthazar let out a long, contented sigh, and that was the moment Ilsa realised he was a sentimental drunk tonight; the worst kind. “Almost sober” was best, of course. “Surly” gave him an enigmatic stage presence if they were lucky. But “sentimental” unsettled the crowds. It didn’t fit with the awe and mysticism they expected of a magic show. His greeting was met with a thick silence.

  “I hope you have joined me tonight with an open mind. A courageous mind! For you may find yourself entertained, but you may also feel fear” – Ilsa held her breath as he conjured a flame with the gas lighter hidden in his coat sleeve, and breathed again when the trick played out safely – “trepidation” – that was Lighting’s cue to insert red filters – “and dread.” He slipped the trick knives from the hidden pockets of his tailcoat and threw one, then the other at the wheel he would later strap Ilsa to. “There is danger on this stage, be assured. But, thank God, I have only slaughtered two assistants this year.”

  He was improvising, but Ilsa took that as her cue. As the audience laughed half-heartedly, she transformed. A force pressed in on her from every angle and shrank her; the pressure almost too much to bear, but over in an instant. Her skin prickled sharply as feathers erupted from it. Her hands blunted, her elbows pivoted grotesquely, and she spread wings.

  The first time she had finally become a bird, Ilsa had been nauseated by the feeling. Eight years later, she had grown to appreciate it. It was the proof of what her body could do, a pittance of a price to pay for a thing so powerful: her freedom. Her power to cheat the laws of the universe at their own game.

  As Balthazar raised a large black cloth like a bullfighter, she soared, unseen, to the ceiling of the auditorium, and prepared to make her grand entrance over the heads of the audience.

  “Allow me to introduce my current partner in crime while she is still breathing. My dearest Ilsa, where are you?”

  She swooped to the stage, straight at Balthazar and his outstretched cloth. Darkness descended when the material fluttered over her tiny dove form. But she was no longer a bird. The audience gasped when the fabric fell on the figure of a woman – gasps that turned to riotous applause when the magician swept the cloth away, and Ilsa raised her arms triumphantly and beamed her biggest smile into the blackness beyond the lights.

  As far as they would ever know, it was the second most astonishing magic trick in all of London.

  The first was yet to come.

  3

  Delivery was everything. Even with The Great Balthazar’s impossible illusions and show-stealing assistant, they would never threaten the box-office of London’s best magic shows. They were the one act in town every critic agreed on: awkward and lacklustre, Balthazar’s days were numbered.

  And it meant Ilsa’s were too. She was regularly offered better pay by better magicians who hoped to lure both the captivating assistant and Blume’s methods onto another stage. Little did they know, Ilsa was his method. Not only that, but she was all the charisma and allure of his act. She was everything that kept him on the billing. Blume needed her, but the real reason they would go down together was this: Ilsa would go back to picking pockets before she told another living soul what she could do.<
br />
  She held a smile on her face and feigned gusto, as always, as The Great Balthazar fumbled and slurred his way through the set. He drew belongings from his top hat and returned them to their bemused owners in the audience; things Ilsa had slipped from their pockets in the foyer. He sawed her in half. He made her “vanish”, and she would become a mouse, and scuttle unseen to the other side of the stage to reappear. Ilsa’s skills let them perform the illusions in a way no other act could: over and over in rapid succession. She would bounce around the stage and the auditorium like a rubber ball. It was her favourite part of every evening.

  They ran through their mix of standard magician’s tricks and real sorcery to middling applause, but as the audience sensed the big finish looming, the excitement in the auditorium crackled. This was what they came for: the most unforgettable magic trick they would ever see.

  As Balthazar began his monologue about mystic teleportation, Ilsa hid herself beneath a hooded cloak and shifted again. Rival magician’s spies had been known to crop up in the corridors as Ilsa was getting into position, and so they enlisted some of Mr Johnston’s men as sentinels. One acted as a bodyguard to the cloaked, anonymous figure who climbed from below stage to the door of the box. He left her at the near end of the corridor, while another stood guard at the opposite end. When Ilsa was alone, she shed the cloak, and underneath she wore The Great Balthazar’s red beard and gangly limbs; his straight, proud nose and his finely wrinkled skin.

  She straightened her white gloves and smoothed her emerald waistcoat. It took a great deal of concentration to shift her clothing, but this too, she had perfected – it was better than leaving a duplicate of Blume’s costume lying around the dressing room. Then she took the compact mirror from her breast pocket and checked her accuracy. From a distance, blanched by the spotlight, the minute twitches that cursed all her borrowed faces would be invisible. Nevertheless, she massaged her jaw in a futile attempt to smooth them away. The twitching aside, it was perfect.

  All apart from the eyes. Blume’s were blue; Ilsa’s were not.

  It had taken a lifetime to perfect, and a great deal of observation, but Ilsa could perform magic on every other part of her body. She could grow her hair until it trailed along the floor. She could fatten herself until she was too heavy to stand. She could – and it was a point of pride – be an anatomically correct man, thanks to threepence, a fellow street urchin named Tom, and a deal that would have cost her one hundred Hail Marys back at the orphanage.

  But whether she was The Great Balthazar, Queen Victoria, a dove, a bloodhound, or a ferret, her eyes were always stubbornly, distinctively hazel.

  Ilsa tucked the mirror away and was listening for her cue when she felt a prickle on the back of her neck. She spun around, stomach plummeting, expecting to find someone behind her – but the corridor was deserted. She peered this way and that, listening hard, but even as she proved to her eyes and ears that she was alone, another sense told her otherwise.

  Ilsa knew when she was being watched. It was something one learned fast when swiping coin purses and pocket watches on crowded streets. Yet even as the hairs on her neck stood higher, the uncanny surety growing, she was unprepared when she finally saw him. He appeared in the corner of her vision as he emerged right from the wall: a man in a long black coat, with a flash of metal at his belt. In the sliver of time it took her to turn her head, he disappeared around the corner with the speed of a bullet leaving a gun.

  Another child of the devil’s realm. This time, Ilsa wouldn’t miss her chance.

  The audience gasped; Balthazar had fallen through the trapdoor in a cloud of smoke. Ilsa was meant to emerge in the box across the auditorium, but instead, she was chasing the stranger towards the lobby.

  She didn’t get far. As the tail of his long coat vanished through the first set of doors, Ilsa caught a glimpse of her sentinel on the other side. He barely seemed to register what was happening. Perhaps he thought the flash of a coat zipping by was a new part of the act, but if Ilsa followed, too much would be revealed.

  She couldn’t leave the corridor looking like The Great Balthazar, and she couldn’t leave the corridor looking like anyone else. The only way out was to finish the trick.

  It had been less than ten seconds since Balthazar had vanished, but that was long enough for the auditorium to fill with murmured voices. She had already damaged their finale, so she returned to the door of the box, took a steadying breath, and stepped through as if nothing had happened.

  * * *

  As far as Mr Johnston was concerned, Ilsa wasn’t part of the finale. As he lambasted Blume about the blunder, she stood silently to one side and felt the magician’s quiet rage hang thick in the air.

  His anger was stoking Ilsa’s own, so much so that any guilt she might have felt for doing wrong went skittering away. He ought to see how it felt to see his livelihood fail through no fault of his own.

  “This bloody farce of a magic show is poor enough as it is, Blume,” spat Johnston. He was pacing about the dressing room as Blume sat at the table, his second post-show drink cupped in his fist. “If you had any respect for your standing engagement here—”

  “I have every respect, Mr Johnston. These things happen in the theatre.”

  “They happen” – Johnston advanced on Blume and flung the tumbler from his hand. Ilsa tensed as it shattered against the wall – “when their performer is too sodding drunk to do any better! This is your very last warning, do you understand?”

  Blume’s eyes bore into Ilsa’s skull as Johnston left. The unspoken tension that plagued their relationship was palpable. Both of their careers relied on the other, and it wasn’t a comfortable state of affairs for anybody.

  “What happened?” he said in a low voice, producing another tumbler from a chest near the vanity. “Where were you?”

  “I’m truly sorry I was late, but we both know you got no right to be angry. This ain’t the first time the show’s got messed up, and I don’t mean by me,” said Ilsa, reining in her frustration as much as she could manage. It was difficult; losing first the boy, then the man in the long coat had shortened her fuse.

  “No right?” he hissed. “Answer the question!”

  Ilsa opted for a half-truth; he wouldn’t be kind about it if she mentioned the boy again. “Someone got into the corridor. I din’t see who. I was distracted. It won’t happen again.”

  “A spy?” Ilsa shrugged dismissively. He didn’t deserve to know. “And why didn’t Bert see anything?”

  “Did you ask him? P’raps he did.” Blume narrowed his eyes at her, and she stared him down. “Before you go telling me to get my act together, sir, consider this: if that trick’d come off, it would’ve been the only solid note we hit tonight, and it would’ve been because of me.”

  “Because of you,” he slurred. “Aren’t we a team?”

  Ilsa gritted her teeth, turning to gather her coat and bag so he wouldn’t see. When she got to the door, she looked over her shoulder at him, then wished she hadn’t. Blume was slumped low in his chair because he couldn’t hold himself up. The expression she had taken for anger was concentration as he tried to keep a grasp on the conversation. Something part-way between pity and disgust dissolved her anger, leaving her tired. “You ain’t a very good teammate, Mr Blume.”

  He called after her as she left, each cry more remorseful than the last. Ilsa blocked them out. He deserved to stew a while.

  Most nights, when Ilsa left through the stage door, she ducked into the next alley and shifted into a man; the tall, brawny type of man who wouldn’t have trouble walking home alone at night. But not tonight, because Martha was waiting for her outside the stage door, and a deep bruise was forming along her cheekbone. Ilsa’s stomach lurched.

  “Martha?” There were finger marks on her neck. Her lower lip was swollen, and had been bleeding. As Ilsa took hold of her, she started to tear up.

  “Ilsa, I’m sorry. I didn’t know where to go and my feet just carried me here.
” Her voice shook. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”

  “Don’t say that. You were right to come find me.”

  She herded her in the direction of home, and between her tears Martha told her what had happened.

  “I thought it was a clean lift, but I’d only got ten paces when I heard him shout. I din’t even look back. I just ran. He was drunk, and he was with his friends and… I should’ve dropped the wallet, only—” She let out a sob. Ilsa pressed her arm tighter around her and bit her cheek to hold in her anger. “Only I’ve had no luck all night, and I’m out of change, Ilsa.”

  Ilsa tried not to picture the scene – an alley, a group of men and Martha on the ground, boots in her ribs – but it was all too familiar. Ilsa had taken her fair share of beatings as a street urchin, and witnessed plenty more. She remembered all the fates she had once pictured for herself – a knife in the gut; a brutish john who liked to make a woman hurt; shackles and the workhouse – and felt a pang of remorse for the way she left things with Blume.

  As they reached the river, the buzz of Soho gave way to the lapping of water below the balustrade. The phantoms of ships’ bells sounded faintly from downriver. Half a dozen seagulls cawed over the remnants of a heel of bread, scattering like shadows in a candle flame when they girls cut too close. Martha had cried herself calm, and Ilsa had just resolved to approach Mr Johnston about a job for her again when her companion froze in her tracks.

  Ilsa followed her line of sight. The mist off the Thames was mingling with the smog, and through it four figures were lurking by their next turn. There was no doubt they were looking in the girls’ direction.

  Others might have brushed off their trepidation in that well-mannered way that got women into trouble, but Ilsa and Martha knew better than to trust in human decency. It was why Ilsa tended to disguise herself as a man when she walked home at night.