“But they started it,” Eve mutters.
“You’re right. And we rarely succeed in removing those slivers of glass through the use of force or even arguments of sense or rationality. But sometimes with beauty and awe—with art, with books, even perhaps with dancing—we can gain access to hearts as hard as rocks. We can make them cry and think, and sometimes that’s enough to get the splinter out. Sometimes, through the door of beauty, they might let us slip in deep enough to change their own minds.”
Eve is quiet for a moment before she says softly, “That sounds hard.”
“Hard? Terribly. Is it a burden that should fall on you to carry? No, Eve, nothing about this is just or fair. But is it possible? Yes, I believe it is.” Helene reaches for Eve’s downturned face. Cups her cheek.
The first microscopic crystals are beginning to form along the string. Eve stares at them, her forehead creasing in thought. I picture my heart, its broken edges turned out to form spikes. Perhaps I pay a price for turning sadness to anger. Maybe the cost is a heart that becomes a little bit harder each time.
“You don’t ever wear jewels,” Eve comments to Helene. She touches the Vestergaard crest on her necklace.
Helene shakes her head. “I like glass best,” she says simply, and I watch her from the shadows. She gestures toward the window. “Glass is fragile but strong. It allows us to see through the walls we’ve built around us.” She pulls out a small silver pendant from her pocket. “It never calls attention to itself but always to what’s beyond it.” The pendant opens to reveal an image of Aleks resting behind the glass. She gently touches his face. “It can protect things from damage. And yet, when you aren’t careful with it,” she says, smiling ruefully and picking up the crest around Eve’s neck, “watch out.”
Her words seem so genuine that I no longer know what to believe. Seeing the way Helene acts with Eve, that delicate balance of challenge, belief, and encouragement, makes the realization slice through me like a paring knife.
Helene Vestergaard is actually a good mother.
The kind I would want for Eve, if I could pick.
“I think these are ready now,” Helene says, handing her one of the sugar cakes. Eve sinks her teeth into it. She smiles and licks her lips. “Thank you,” she says shyly.
Helene smiles and picks up a cake for herself. “Perhaps our favorite dishes will be a combination of something West Indian with something Danish. Like we are.”
“I am ready to practice now,” Eve says, standing. She juts out her chin, and that flowing ease has returned to her muscles. She looks graceful, but more than that, she looks as though there is pure power flowing through her. “Would you like to see what I’ve been working on?” she asks, with kindness layering into her voice, and I look up with sudden hope that she has decided to forgive me, after all.
But she isn’t speaking to me, or to Helene. She’s reaching out her hand to the cook.
Dorit looks surprised, but after an uncertain glance at Helene, she nods and moves to take off her apron. Eve leads her toward the ballroom, and for the first time since Ivy died, Dorit’s weathered face turns up into a smile.
“Go to work on the costumes, Marit,” Helene says. “Do whatever it takes to make her shine.”
I clear my throat. “Yes, ma’am,” I say, and Helene’s skirts swish out the closing door.
It stings to be left alone here in the kitchen.
I walk to the glass jar. To the crystals forming in a small crust on the string.
A Vestergaard loves Eve. And—the thought is like a dagger to my heart—is doing a better job of it than I have done.
I turn the glass jar in the light and suddenly, though my heart is aching, I know how we’re going to borrow Philip’s ring and compare it to my father’s stone.
All without Philip ever even realizing it’s gone.
Chapter Twenty-Four
That night, I pause in front of Brock’s door, hand raised to knock. Hesitating.
When he opens the door, his face registers surprise to see me standing there. I bring a finger to my lips to keep him quiet. Then I shove my heavy books of jewels into his arms and begrudgingly gesture for him to follow me up the stairs.
“Our party is growing,” I announce without enthusiasm as I lead Brock into Jakob’s attic nook. Jakob extends a handshake to Brock as I sink into a large pillow beneath the skylight, carefully balancing the glass jar with Eve’s sugar crystal in my hand.
Liljan pours hot chocolate into chipped china cups.
“Helene didn’t accept my idea about the costume stones,” I say, settling into my oversize pillow. I set Eve’s crystal jar on the floor. The glass paperweight Ivy gave to Jakob is perched on his desk, and Brock’s gaze keeps drawing toward it.
“Disappointing,” Liljan says, “but not altogether unexpected.” She stirs her hot chocolate with a long, thin pretzel stick studded with salt. “So we move on to the secondary plan, then.”
“I’ve volunteered to take over Philip’s care once Dr. Holm leaves,” Jakob says. “Perhaps I can make some excuse to get us in there.”
“But simply looking at the ring won’t be enough, of course,” Liljan says grimly, handing us each a hot chocolate. “How else can you tell what type of jewel it is unless you look at it under the microscope?”
“Right,” I say. “Which is why we’re going to borrow it.”
Jakob chuffs in disbelief. “Wait. You want to steal a ring off Philip Vestergaard’s finger?”
“Not steal,” I correct him. I shoot a meaningful look at Brock. “Borrow.”
Brock bites into his pretzel with a crack. “She wouldn’t want to get rusty.”
“I plan to put it back,” I insist. “And for him to never even realize it’s missing.”
“Ooh,” Liljan says, rubbing her hands together and crossing her legs. “Do go on, little Marit.”
I hold up Eve’s crystal.
“Do you think between the four of us, we could make a convincing imitation? Something like this, to buy us a brief amount of time while we look at Philip’s?”
“I don’t know,” Jakob says skeptically. “Gemstones are notoriously difficult to falsify.”
I take the jewel dictionary from Brock. “That’s what this book says, too. Mostly because we don’t have the tools to do it. The closest anyone has come is with Venetian glass, but clearly no one would mistake that for an emerald or a ruby. It’s too dull; the colors aren’t accurate. Unless . . .” I turn winsomely to Liljan. “You had the magic to do it just right.”
Brock looks at the crystal growing in the jar at my ankle. “Are you saying you want us to make a convincing imitation of a gemstone—to trick a gentleman who handles gemstones for a living—out of table sugar?” he asks in disbelief.
“No.” I stand and reach for Ivy’s paperweight on the desk. “I thought maybe we could make an imitation jewel out of glass,” I say.
And as my fingers close around it, an idea hits me like a gust, so powerful that I almost sink to my knees.
I lower the paperweight slowly.
An imitation jewel, made out of glass.
I suddenly remember that day we saw Philip Vestergaard in the glass shop.
Why did he pay a visit to Ivy and then never order anything?
Why was he there with her on the road that day she died?
“Marit?” Jakob says. “Are you okay? You look as though you’re about to faint.”
I can smell the rich chocolate wisping from my untouched cup.
“I just had a terrible thought,” I whisper.
So terrible. But it would explain so many things.
“What if . . .” I say, my heart thundering in my ears. “What if the jewels that come from the Vestergaard mines aren’t really jewels at all?”
My thoughts come spilling out into the stunned silence.
Oh, hell’s bells, it all makes so much sense.
“The Vestergaards haven’t always had gemstones in their mines,” I say. “
They were discovered little more than a decade ago.” I drop to a kneel and set the paperweight on the floor next to me. “We’ve thought all along that those miners might have been murdered,” I say, turning to Jakob. “To cover something up—to keep something terribly important a secret. What if they were trying to expose that the jewels aren’t real jewels?”
“Wait,” says Jakob. He runs his hand through his hair, pulling it in thought. “How could that be true? It’s almost impossible to make a false gemstone. We don’t have the tools. You just said so yourself.”
“But people with magic do. Think about it. It could be possible to forge a passable gemstone if, say, you had a very special ability to manipulate glass.” I hold up Ivy’s paperweight. An intense, murderous look is gathering across Brock’s face like a storm. “And a very special ability to dye it any shade you wanted.”
“A combination,” Jakob says slowly, “of what Liljan and Ivy could do, you mean.”
Liljan is silent. Her hands have turned bone white around her teacup.
“What if . . .” I say, and swallow, “the stones that have made the Vestergaard fortune aren’t made in the mines, but by magic? The average person—even royalty—would never be able to guess. The only people who could tell the difference would be jewelers. And you should see all the payments the Vestergaards make to the single jeweling family in Denmark. Maybe they pay them off to confirm the jewels as genuine and look the other way.”
Yes. I remember the eagerness on the shopkeeper’s face when he offered to get me a stone in any shade I wanted. How could you promise that—unless you had the ability to control exactly what shade a stone would turn out to be?
“But if that’s true, then attacking Ivy makes even less sense,” Brock says, with barely contained fury. He stands. “Why would they kill Ivy? They wouldn’t want her dead. They would want her very much alive.”
I hesitate. “Perhaps she refused. Perhaps . . . this isn’t a job you take voluntarily. Except . . .” My breath shortens. “Perhaps they underestimated her.”
What made her useful to them also made her dangerous. “Maybe they approached her on the road, when she was alone. To get her into the carriage and take her to the mines.”
Brock’s eyes are sharp and bright. He pulls out the small fragment of glass. “But she fought back.”
Jakob swears under his breath.
It would provide a motive for killing any miners who were threatening to expose the system. Miners like my father.
It could explain why my father wanted the king to investigate what was going on.
It could be why Ivy wound up dead and the last people who saw her alive were the Vestergaards.
My heart pounds like a storm in my chest. Is this the secret my father wanted us to find ten years ago? Could we have stumbled upon a massive cover-up scandal that starts right in the Vestergaard house and reverberates throughout all of Denmark?
“So what do we do next?” Liljan whispers. Her eyes are like shining stones in the dark. “How would we ever go about proving it?”
“We get a jewel we know to be from the Vestergaard mines,” I say. “Helene doesn’t really wear jewelry. The only one we can realistically get our hands on is the one Philip wears. And Jakob can determine whether it’s glass.”
A thought suddenly occurs to me: Maybe that’s why my father left me that jewel in the bank. He gave me a real jewel, possibly one of the only real ones in Denmark, to give us something to compare the false ones to.
Maybe that’s what those men were coming to find the night Ingrid died.
I close my eyes.
“But how are we supposed to make the switch on Philip’s finger without him waking up and catching us?” Liljan asks.
I hesitate. “I don’t know.”
“We’ll drug him,” Brock says at the same time.
Jakob winces. “All right—wait—just a moment,” he says, tugging harder through his hair. “If what Marit is saying winds up being true, then it’s horrendous, possibly even evil, and Philip deserves whatever’s coming to him. But I’m supposed to be taking care of the man. He could be innocent. And drugging and robbing him seems to go somewhat against the medical code of honor.”
“So close your ears and look the other way,” Brock says. “Dorit will slip the drugs into his food.” He gives his knuckles a loud crack. “With pleasure.”
I hesitate. “I’ll be the one to take the ring,” I volunteer. “Your hands can stay clean.”
“And I can grow anything you want for a sedative. You’ll be doing him a service. Otherwise I can give it my best guess,” Brock says, his face darkening further, “but I can’t guarantee I won’t kill him.”
Though my theory is thrumming through me at full tilt, I feel the briefest tug of warning. What we do next could hurt the Vestergaards—and Eve. It could destroy every single one of our futures, cost us our employment and livelihoods. It could make a lot of people very mad.
Powerful, dangerous people with much at stake. People who have killed before.
And if Eve thinks I betrayed her once already, could she ever forgive me for my involvement in this?
The cloud of doubt recedes slightly when I think back to the records I saw, the rows and rows of Vestergaard jewels that filled the profit margins over the past ten years. How much glass magic would it take to make that many jewels, after all?
Certainly much more than a single person could manage.
The magic of ten people?
Twenty?
More?
And . . . are they there of their own accord, like we are here in the house?
Or could something even worse be happening in those mines?
“If they hurt Ivy,” Brock says, running his finger dangerously over the raw edge of his cracked china cup, “they are going to wish they had never met me.”
Our candles flicker along the walls as we slip back to our rooms, through dark corridors that run like veins deep into the house. If a Vestergaard scandal really starts here, with these people, in this home—then its end is going to come from the last place they would ever expect.
From inside their very own walls.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The house explodes with activity. The salon is still moving forward, and the royal family is coming here in less than four weeks. I tell Nina that Brock and I are meeting about designing stage curtains and flowers, and instead we join Liljan and Jakob in the attic and map out our plan.
I am going to find out Philip’s exact schedule and make our strategy.
Jakob will research the sedative that Brock will grow.
Liljan will make the decoy stone using glass from Ivy’s paperweight. Jakob unearths instructions about ways to cut and shape glass using ground-up stones and oils instead of modern tools we can’t easily secure.
Brock will approach servant networks in the neighboring houses and shops in Copenhagen, sending out questions like droplets of dew to slide through the web and collect more information. At the glass shop that day in Copenhagen, Hanne said other servants have gone missing. If we’re right, there should be some sort of pattern as to who they are: servants with glass magic, color magic, metalwork, gold—anything that could be used to help create realistic-looking gemstones.
Philip is growing stronger, though, even walking around. I glimpsed him through the twining flowers in the foyer, leaning on his cane with strain on his face as he contemplated attempting the stairs back to his room.
I keep the glass jar on my windowsill. Every time I see the sugar growing inside, assembling bit by crystalline bit, it makes me think of Eve.
Because our relationship was that way, something that formed over time, with each moment and memory building on the last. My lie shattered it all, like taking a sledgehammer to something precious and delicate.
It makes me want to win her back.
I watch her in the ballroom, in the makeshift studio. The parquet floors gleam with winter sunshine. Eve dances next to an older g
irl with light brown skin who speaks Italian and teaches her how to spot an object so she won’t get dizzy in the midst of her turns. Helene is calling in all the favors she has. The ballet contacts she’s made over the course of her career arrive for overlapping visits with their trunks packed to stay for four or five days at a time. They teach Eve fouettés, with accents that fly off their tongues and their ideas about what ballet could become bouncing off the walls, arguing and rising and falling and blending like music. But Eve remains distant with me when I fit a potential costume on her. Her thank-yous are perfunctory; she looks at my forehead instead of my eyes.
Dorit throws herself into deciding the menu for the salon as though she can channel her grief into something of beauty. For two weeks, she lets the rest of us taste the leftovers after Helene has cast her vote: Edible flowers, rum custard, and lemon tarts that practically fizz on my tongue. Sirloin packed with pepper and flaked with gold leaf, pies heated to golden brown with real violets encrusted with sugar on top. Wreathed layers of kransekage, this time tinged with the essences of mango and coconut. And these are the dishes she hasn’t even used magic on yet. “I’m getting too old to spend magic on practice,” she says. She adds dashes of syrup and berries while I dot corsets and shoes with beads and branches and jewels. “I’ll save that for the day of the king.”
I walk beneath the barren trellises of the old wisteria corridor each afternoon, watching for when Philip’s curtains are closed and opened, timing the length of his rests. I steal glances up at Eve’s window, too, remembering the time I was eleven years old and I secretly made an embroidered piece by hand at the Mill. It was a portrait of my family. I gave Ingrid a flower crown and my father a book, and I did the whole piece without relying on any magic at all. I was actually proud of it until Sare dredged it up out of my things one day and said the faces looked like boiled eggs wearing wigs, and after that I couldn’t see my work any other way. I threw it in the garbage. But Eve fished it out and kept it for herself.
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