Splinters of Scarlet

by Emily Bain Murphy

  “Get in,” Jakob whispers, opening the wardrobe door wider, and I step inside. He stands in front of me, straightening the coats to stall, and shields me with his body.

  I can just see the dining room over the top of his shoulder.

  Philip and Helene face off across the length of the table, surrounded by crystal: chandeliers above their heads, flickering candles sending shadows spilling through the goblets and onto the walls. Eve sits between them, her face betraying a look of panic at the amount of silverware. She tries to read the expansive table like a map.

  “Eve,” Philip says, unfolding his napkin, “Helene tells me that you are a dancer. Have you ever been to the ballet?”

  Eve looks up uncertainly. “No,” she answers.

  “I plan to take you,” Helene says to Eve, raising her goblet to her lips. “We’ll go together, soon.”

  “The three of us should go. How about the day after tomorrow?” Philip proposes, and Helene noticeably bristles.

  Brock passes the wardrobe, holding a tureen on a tray, and gives Jakob a funny look.

  “I can’t stall here much longer or he’s going to come investigate,” Jakob whispers to me. His eyes shine, liquid and dark. “I should probably be gone by the time he comes back.”

  I nod, hardly daring to exhale.

  Brock places the tureen in front of Helene and lifts the lid.

  “We are still getting settled in here,” Helene says calmly. “We’ll go at some point.”

  “But the royal family will be there the night after tomorrow,” Philip says as Brock ladles soup into his bowl. “Wouldn’t you like to meet the royal family, Eve?” he asks.

  Eve drops her spoon into her soup and sends it spattering.

  Helene seems careful to ignore the faux pas.

  “I didn’t realize you and the royals had become so acquainted,” she says to Philip.

  “I have a gift for them,” Philip says. “A jeweled necklace for Princess Dagmar. A wedding gift, from us.”

  “My, how generous of us,” Helene says crisply. “Next time, perhaps before you give away thousands of rigsdalers and invite my daughter somewhere, you might consider consulting me first?”

  Brock puts a black rye roll on each plate.

  “Come on, Lil,” Jakob whispers.

  One of Helene’s furs brushes against my cheek. I’m starting to sweat.

  Philip seems amused by Helene’s annoyance. “It’s building a relationship,” he says. He smiles at Eve. “It can only benefit our family to be as close to their good graces as possible.”

  Our family. Eve’s eyes light up, and Philip leans toward her, as if he senses an ally.

  “Do you know they are beginning to call King Christian IX ‘the father-in-law of Europe’?” he asks Eve conspiratorially.

  Helene rubs her fingertips along the edge of her wine goblet.

  “Why do they call him that?” Eve asks, clearly eager to encourage his plan. Meeting royalty—at the ballet, with her family. She could hardly ask for more of her dreams to come true.

  “Because the king’s children are marrying into dynasties across Europe,” Philip says. He begins to draw an invisible map on the tablecloth with the tip of his knife. “This very week, his daughter Princess Dagmar wed the future tsar in St. Petersburg. His son George is the reigning king of Greece.”

  Jakob is listening. He’s so close to me, yet he seems to be very careful not to touch me. “And another daughter,” Jakob whispers. He meets my eyes. I can smell the scent of spearmint on him. His breath is hot on my neck. “Alexandra. The future queen consort of the United Kingdom and empress consort of India.”

  The tip of Philip’s knife gleams. “And there are more heirs still to come. Queen Louise seems to be moving them like pieces on a chessboard.” He laughs. “Like a game of daldøs. Do you play daldøs, Eve?”

  His voice is as pleasant as ever, but Helene is looking intently into Philip’s face, eyes narrowing. The way you would examine an opponent in a game of cards, trying to gauge their tells.

  Or perhaps I’m just imagining it.

  I’m drawn by a reflected light shining into the right eye of a painting of Gorm the Old. Liljan’s signal. Finally. I touch Jakob’s hand.

  His skin is warm, and softer than I would have imagined.

  He opens the wardrobe wide and I throw one last, hesitant glance over my shoulder before Jakob leads us to a door I thought was a closet. Behind it is a hidden back staircase that will take us up two floors. We close the door behind us just as Brock picks up his tray.

  Liljan waits for us in front of the locked library.

  “We almost got caught,” Jakob says.

  “Sorry,” Liljan whispers. “Lara is turning down the beds, and everyone else is busy in the dining room or the kitchen.” My mind is still half downstairs, but I force it to the task at hand when Liljan fits Nina’s stolen key into the lock. “If Nina catches us, she’ll make us stand outside until we turn into living ice sculptures,” Liljan says.

  “She’ll use us as rat bait,” Jakob says.

  “She’ll stick us full of needles and use us as pincushions,” I whisper, and win an approving smile from Liljan.

  We slip into the darkness. The library is a cavernous room with the musty smell of old paper and leather, built like a dark-paneled globe, with books curving around the walls and the rim of a banister marking a second level. The coffered ceiling is carved with a repeating pattern of the Vestergaard hammer and pick. Jakob draws the heavy curtains closed and lights a candle. Liljan locks the door behind us. My fingers itch to open one of the thick old books and hear its spine crack like ice.

  Jakob glances at the clock. “We have roughly twenty-five minutes before dinner ends and they retire to the study for Philip’s brandy and cigars.” He slides a ladder along the shelves, which hold spines in shades of moss and sage and emerald. They stretch up the walls like climbing vines.

  “I asked Liljan to make a copy of the blueprints, just in case, after Helene asked me to look at them,” he says. Sleet patters on the windows outside as he begins to climb.

  “I didn’t realize you were an expert in mine architecture,” I say. “Is that . . . part of your position here?”

  Liljan giggles. “Jakob’s position is being an expert in everything.”

  “I hid the blueprints in a book on ancient botany, but the shelves have all been rearranged since then,” Jakob says. “So this will take a minute.”

  “A minute?” I ask. There are, by my best guess, ten thousand books in here.

  But he begins running his hands along the spines, his eyes narrowing. They flick back and forth in concentration, his eyebrows twitching.

  I watch him with amazement as he moves across one row in a single minute, then two, simply pausing over each spine for a moment with the tips of his fingers. “Are you reading those just by . . . touching them?” I ask tentatively.

  Liljan crosses her arms. “Jakob’s the only person whose magic I’ve ever envied.”

  “It’s like skimming,” he says absently. “I’m not retaining much, just looking for something.”

  “He retains plenty,” Liljan says.

  But I am watching with a mixture of fascination and horror. “Don’t either of you ever worry about the Firn?” I ask. How can these people pour out their magic without the fear of death always being there, haunting the back of their minds like it does to me?

  Jakob’s hand falters for the briefest moment. “I could spend hours and hours and hours looking through every book here, or I can use my magic,” he says, moving on to the next row. “Yes, there’s the threat of the Firn, but perhaps the hours it’s taking are just the ones that I would have spent reading those books without magic. Do you see?”

  “I never thought of it like that, I guess,” I say, turning to Liljan. “And you?”

  “I don’t care to think of it much. Perhaps it will never happen to me.” She shrugs, and my heart folds into itself, when I think of Ingrid lying c
old on the floor. “And—well, even if it does, Jakob’s going to find me a cure.”

  “Liljan, don’t be a dolt,” Jakob says from above us, heat spreading across his face. “A cure is probably a lifetime away, and that’s if one even exists.”

  A cure, I think, dazed. I lean against the shelf. A way to use magic without worrying about the Firn? The thought of it never occurred to me. A cure like that would change everything. My world—my life. I could add beauty all around me, setting things right with a single touch, like I did with Mathies’s awning. I could do what I love. Perhaps even with someone I love.

  Even someone who has magic of his own.

  I flush and try to forget I ever had that thought.

  “You really think there could be a cure someday?” I ask, suddenly shy.

  Jakob shrugs. “I’d like to study under Dr. Holm in Copenhagen to try to find one. I’m going to ask if he would take me on as an apprentice,” he says, jaw tightening. “He’s the one who researched the Firn so we could better understand it. The treatise he published explains that it’s an icy sediment that collects in our veins as a natural castoff of magic—not a curse from the draugar.” He smiles wryly. “The Vestergaards have all sorts of connections in society. I’m hoping my own link to them will help me get an apprenticeship with Dr. Holm.”

  “Connections to the Vestergaards can open all sorts of doors,” Liljan agrees. She whispers: “They’re using us for magic. We can use them right back, as far as I’m concerned.”

  But something else still bothers me, like an itch left from last night on the ice. “How did you know, Jakob?” I ask slowly. “That I already knew about the landslide, and the miners?”

  “It’s common knowledge in Denmark, isn’t it?” he asks, but he won’t look at me.

  “No,” I say. “It was more than that. You were certain.” I whisper: “You can read books with a single touch. Can you read minds, too?”

  He laughs and then clears his throat. “No, but I can read your . . . um,” he says. He clears his throat again. “Your . . . um.”

  “Your undergarments,” Liljan provides helpfully. “Did you write something on them?”

  My memories of my father and Ingrid flood in front of my face. I can feel them in the knots on my petticoats.

  “I’m sorry,” Jakob says quietly. “I promise it was an accident.”

  I flush scarlet and cross my arms defensively. I feel more naked right now than if I weren’t wearing clothes at all. Now I understand the strange look that crossed his face when he caught me last night on the ice, when he grabbed my waist so that I wouldn’t fall. Why he changed his mind so suddenly after that moment. Helene didn’t want to know what happened in those mines. But after that single touch, he must have known that I would.

  “I think we have five minutes, at most,” Liljan reminds us. “Tell her about the obituaries,” she says. The words curl like steam out of her mouth.

  “The landslide killed about half the miners working that day, right?” Jakob says. He uses his weight to slide the ladder to the next section. “Yet they were never replaced. I saw the logs. There’s been very little turnover in the past decade since then. It’s still the same handful of men.”

  “And there was another miner that wasn’t working that day,” Liljan says.

  “As it turns out, he also died that very same week.” Jakob swallows, his hands running over the spines of the books like piano keys. “Could just be a coincidence, I guess.”

  But a distinct chill runs down my back. I feel that bone-deep sense of true fear, a hint of something teeming just beneath a layer of tree bark. All you have to do is pull it back to see what’s really there.

  “Three minutes,” Liljan says, peeking out the window through a sliver in the curtain.

  “Got it,” Jakob says, clutching a book. “Pliny the Elder and Theophrastus on Botany of the Ancients.” He slides down and throws the book open across the table.

  There’s a paper hidden inside, with a map drawn on it. “Here are the blueprints Helene had me study. I examined all the books in this library on mine architecture, on reinforcements and support shafts and ventilation. And this is what I found: they said it collapsed here.” He points on the map. “But that’s impossible. The physics of it. The rocks would have fallen the other way, because of these reinforcements. It would need to have been done deliberately. Through an explosion of some sort.”

  I feel sick.

  I take a deep breath and hug my arms tighter around myself, facing the wall.

  Jakob says quietly behind me: “I thought you deserved to know the truth. If it were my father, I would want to.”

  Liljan comes up to me and touches me gently on the arm. “Are you all right?” she asks.

  My father was likely murdered. And based on what he did with the bank accounts, and the letter he wrote to Ingrid, I think he might have known it was coming.

  There’s a distant burst of laughter downstairs, unmistakably Philip’s.

  My hand curls into a fist.

  “I want to know what happened that day in the mines,” I say. I hear the steel creeping into my own voice. “Can you keep those blueprints safe for a little longer?”

  Jakob nods and folds them back into the book.

  By the time we relock the door and return Nina’s stolen key, I’ve decided something else.

  Philip Vestergaard is taking Eve with him to Copenhagen over my dead body.

  Chapter Twelve

  When Helene calls me to her room the next morning and requests two more formal dresses for her and Eve, it doesn’t take much to guess what she wants them for. The ballet, with Philip, and she wants them delivered immediately.

  Something tingles in my senses, something with an edge of warning. Whatever happened that day in the mines is a secret that might well have died along with Aleks. After all, he was the Vestergaard running the mines back then. But until I find out what really happened to my father—and more importantly, why—I will keep the remaining Vestergaard brother in my sights.

  Which means wrangling a ballet invitation for myself. And if that fails, then . . . perhaps sabotage.

  I step into Helene’s room on the day of the ballet, just after noon. I let her gown fall in a downpour of fabric, the beads hitting the wooden floor like frozen sleet. I see the pleased look on her face, and when she steps forward to accept the dress, I subtly hold it back.

  “You mentioned that someday, you might want me to make dance costumes for Eve?” I ask.

  She nods.

  “I’ve never been to the ballet before. It would be helpful to observe how the fabric moves, in real life.” I clear my throat and keep my voice steady and measured. “Perhaps I could use my salary for a ticket to the pit.” A floor ticket, to the area where the servants, workmen, and officers stand.

  Helene blinks, and for the first time, I’m surprised to see a hint of warmth in her eyes when she looks at me. It gives me the sense that she remembers what it was like to be an orphan, once, a long time ago.

  “Yes, good idea,” Helene muses. She takes the dress and examines the lines. “Bring Liljan, too,” she instructs. “I’ll pay for the tickets. Consider it research. I have a job for both of you.”

  I bite back a triumphant smile, and moments later, I manage to ladle a helping of rich-smelling, wine-soaked beef stew into a bowl just before Dorit takes the dish away.

  “Liljan,” I say, shoveling stew into my mouth. “Ever been to the ballet before?”

  She snorts. “Sure, in the floating carriage made of butterscotch when the king of France was visiting.”

  “Well, I got us two tickets,” I say. I rip off a piece of bread and dip it in my stew. “We’re going tonight.”

  Her jaw drops open.

  “Wait. That seamstress’s been in employ for all of an hour and she gets to go to the ballet?” Lara says loudly as she scrubs the dishes, throwing a glare in my direction. “What am I, a chopped radish?”

  “It’s Mrs. Vest
ergaard’s business. If you want to stew about it,” Nina retorts, “Dorit can throw you in the pot.”

  Which is how, barely three hours later, Liljan and I find ourselves in our room, dressing for an unprecedented evening out with the Vestergaards. Liljan hums as she changes into a dress the color of honey warmed by the sun and then ties a vibrant red cloak around her neck. I pull my own dress on—it’s a faded color that used to be green but now looks more like the fuzzy algae that forms in stagnant ponds—and Liljan fastens the buttons along the back. I’m halfway down the stairs behind her when I realize that the dress is beginning to change right before my eyes. A rich, jeweled tone somewhere between blue and green is sweeping across it, as though Liljan poured dye down my front.

  “Mm, yes, so much better,” she says appraisingly, turning when we reach the bottom of the stairs to admire her work. Then she twirls in front of the staff, who are sitting around the table in various states of excitement and jealousy. “If I don’t return,” Liljan calls over her shoulder, “I’ve run off with a dashing dancer and Jakob can have all my things!”

  Nina splutters, “Miss Dahl!” and I catch Jakob’s eye just as the blue-green color rolls down past my knees. He stands up and follows us to the door.

  “Don’t let her really run off with a dancer,” he says, leaning against the doorjamb.

  “I won’t,” I say. “Promise.” I glance at him out of the corner of my eye as I tie my hat under my chin.

  “You look nice,” he says softly. A hot, quick thrill rushes through my whole body, and he turns and saunters away.

  Outside, Eve is wearing her new coat with the gold embroidery along the sleeves, the silvery beaded edge of her gown peeking out from beneath, and she looks so elegant and suddenly older, as if she put on the Vestergaard name like a garment and instantly became someone else in it.

  “I love this dress, Marit,” she says, lifting up her coat to show more of the silver embroidery, “and you for making it,” and then steps across the snow-dusted walk to wrap her arms around me.