“I’m so sorry,” I say. “Everything I did was to try not to hurt you, and I roughed it all up anyway. The truth is that I don’t know exactly how I fit here, with you, either. I haven’t handled it well. And, if I’m being honest . . .” I say, and take a deep breath, “sometimes I might be the smallest bit jealous of Helene.”
“Helene?” Eve asks incredulously.
My face burns with the shame of that truth. “For being able to give you something I couldn’t, and for swooping in when I’m the one who loved you and looked after you for so many years.” I swallow. “It’s not that I don’t want a better life for you. I absolutely do. I just wish that . . . I could have been able to give it to you.”
She nods at my hands. “What’s that?” she asks, almost shyly.
“Oh,” I say. “I made it for you. Your costume for the salon.” I pull it out. Tighten my lips in a line. “There’s something special in it.”
I open the folds of the tutu and show her the small stitches. “It’s in Morse, but it’s memories. Of you. Of us.”
She comes closer and I say, “This one is about how when you were eight, you hid your cooked carrots in the cracks of the floorboards because you said they tasted like rotten pumpkin mush, and when Sare told on you, you stuck one up her nose when she was sleeping.”
Eve surprises me when she giggles. “I remember that. I remember when you stood guard for the next few nights and let me fall asleep.”
I say, “I solemnly promised to make sure Sare didn’t stick a retaliatory carrot up your nose.”
“You kept a lot of your promises to me, Marit,” Eve says softly.
Those were my favorite moments, when she fell asleep before I did. When stillness and peace fell over her as real as a blanket of fresh snow in those magical, vulnerable moments right before sleep.
Her fingers trace over another set of my silver stitches. When you were nine, I gave up my designated cup of milk for the month of March so the cook would bake you a cake. I wanted it to be so good for you, but it was dry and crumbly, and the icing was like tar when you gave me a bite of it.
“I’d forgotten this,” she says. Her fingers curl. “But now I’ll remember it forever.”
“You choked down every crumb of that cake,” I say. “You said nothing had ever tasted so good.”
She giggles. “It really did taste like tar,” she says.
She pats the bed and I tuck her in like I used to, sealing her up in the sheets like a letter in an envelope. But there’s one more confession I have to make. There will be no more convenient lies of omission. No matter how painful the truth is to tell.
“Eve, you know that thing that can happen when you use too much magic?”
“The Firn?”
I nod. “I’m going to have to leave this job. I can’t stay here and be what Helene needs or wants any longer.”
She sits up straight. “Are you in danger?” She takes my hand in hers, and I’m careful to keep my wrists pointing down. “Don’t lie to me, Marit.”
“I’m not in danger as long as I leave,” I say. “And never use magic again.”
She looks at me for a long time with her wide, brown eyes. “Marit, you hurt me. And sometimes you do things that you think are giving me cake when really I’m choking on crumbs. But,” she says, “you are the family I chose all by myself. My sister, not through blood. And it doesn’t matter where you go or what you do. I want you to be in my life. I love you.”
I close my eyes. All I’ve ever wanted was for someone to choose me. But what I wanted all this time was something I already had. I take a deep breath of air as though I’ve been cut free from a corset. It’s the first moment I’ve felt better since Ivy died.
“Now do the face thing,” Eve commands. “Maybe I can hire you to just live here and do this every night.” She closes her eyes and whispers, “I have the best dreams on the nights you do it. Maybe you have some sort of sleep magic, too.”
I brush her eyebrows with my thumbs, then sweep them over her cheekbones.
“There. I’ve brushed away anything ugly or bad left over from today,” I whisper. “Now go to sleep, and we’ll both wake up fresh tomorrow.”
Her eyelids flutter just a little, as if she’s dreaming. I love the way she smells like violets and the charcoal from her toothpaste and faintly of palm oil.
There’s a long moment of silence, and I wonder if she’s gone to sleep.
“Honch, honch, honch,” she whispers, squinting open one eye, and I hug her close and let my muffled laughs work deep through me like peals of light.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
In the morning the ballroom overflows with the scent of flowers and lemons and soap. It is steadily turning into a verdant, living courtyard, like spring erupting in the frozen heart of winter. Swaths of plush green moss form a carpet around the gilded wooden stage, and my curtains gush in dark streams of velvet on either side.
I have another dress and two uniforms to finish for the salon, but at least I got them halfway done before the Firn. It will be close, but if I work hard, I can complete them by hand. I promised Eve two things before I left: I’d stay through the salon to see her dance for the king—and I wouldn’t use another drop of magic. They are promises I fully intend to keep.
With nerves fluttering in my stomach, I climb the stairs to Jakob’s attic nook. I find him curled over his desk, poring over historic treatments for diseases such as cowpox and smallpox.
“Do you want to take a look at what I found?” he asks, his voice strong and friendly. He gives me an easy smile, to show that there aren’t any hard feelings between us; that even after what happened in the greenhouse, we can still be friends.
I nod and he shows me the blackened ring. Yet my pulse warms and quickens at this nearness to him, confirming to myself that friendship isn’t what I want.
“I returned the real ring last night. But this one,” he says, holding it up to the light. “This blackened one—it’s almost as if it’s been burned.”
Something jogs in my memory. “When I was stitching Philip’s wounds, there were all these scars on his body,” I say slowly. “Old ones, new ones. Marks that almost looked like burns.”
“Were they from whoever attacked him that day?” Jakob’s brow furrows. “Or from something else?”
“The new ones could have been. Maybe. But what of the old ones?”
“From the war?”
I hesitate. Perhaps that’s all they are.
“Marit,” he says. “Dr. Holm accepted my apprenticeship. I’m leaving my job at the Vestergaards’.”
Though I expected this, it still feels like taking a swift, silent blow. I knew Jakob was going to leave. I know that I have to, too. And I realize now, that ever since I was six years old, brokenhearted during those first years at the Mill and not wanting to get close to anyone who could leave me, how fatalistic I’ve been about my future. Or when I was stuck at Thorsen’s, disbelieving there was going to be anything other than a life of caution and loneliness for me. But now that the Firn is actually threatening my future, I want to fight for it more. “When will you leave?” I ask, careful to keep my voice nonchalant.
“Next week. I’ll stay through the salon and then go.” He looks at me and gently adds, “And it’s possible Liljan is coming with me.”
I still don’t have the answers I want. I am starting to accept that I might never know what my father sought to tell me. Trying to find out almost got me killed too. But what a brief, bright moment I have had here—a sweet taste of home that has both strengthened and weakened me. It gave me friendship and love and the Firn, and I’m going to leave here with all those things still in me.
I don’t regret it.
“I—” I start to say.
But there’s a knock on the half-closed door. “Hello,” Brock says, pushing it open. He looks between us. “Marit, can I show you something?”
The words die on my lips. I bite back a sigh. “Yes,” I say. Jakob gives us a s
mile that seems distant, as if he’s already not here anymore. He pockets the blackened ring and ducks out the door.
My heart feels as though it’s blooming thorns, but I turn my attention to Brock.
“What did you find?”
“I know we don’t really believe the stones are glass magic anymore, but I’d already started putting out word to the other servants in the area.”
“And?” I ask.
“There’s no pattern. The missing are young and old, male and female. They went missing on different days, in different places.”
“And their magic?”
“All different kinds. Random, even seemingly useless magic, sometimes—like smoothing wrinkles with a touch, or making snow.”
“But they did all have magic?” I ask.
He nods. “The police didn’t pay much attention over the years when it was just servants going missing, one at a time, and no bodies. But now they can work on volume. Now that they have a body, and Philip’s testimony, they might finally start paying attention. Maybe something good will come out of this after all. Maybe we will have stopped someone else from being killed.” He meets my eyes. “And then at least Ivy’s death won’t be for nothing.”
“I hope she gets justice too,” I say softly. “So Philip was telling the truth about the attack.”
“Is it wrong to feel a little disappointed? Because there’s still something I really don’t like about that man,” Brock says, and I bite back a dark laugh, because I feel the same way.
My eyes fall on the silver stripe of Jakob’s skates, lodged between his heavy books. “Brock—can you do something else for me?”
“Anything,” he says.
At the picture in my mind, I bend to touch the winking blades and smile to myself.
* * *
With two days left, the Vestergaards are in considerably good shape to host the salon and welcome the king. I haven’t told anyone yet, but after the salon, I’m going to Copenhagen to seek employment, whether it’s as a dish maid or laundress. Something without magic. Something that keeps me close enough to see Jakob and Liljan and Eve on occasion.
Maybe to even see her rise through the ranks of the Royal Danish Ballet.
Liljan stays up with me late into the night, helping me sew any inner parts of Eve’s salon dinner dress where clumsier, more amateur stitches can be concealed.
“Did you tell Jakob yet?” she asks, pulling the silver thread through the eye of her needle.
“No,” I say. I adjust my pincushion cuffs. The Firn hasn’t grown or spread since I swore off using magic, and it makes me wonder—if enough time passes—if the Firn could ever fade or dissipate. “But I will tomorrow,” I say, as much a promise to myself as to her.
So when I’m sitting in the windowsill of my tiny workroom the next afternoon, and Jakob knocks on the door, my heartbeat starts pattering in my chest like softly falling rain.
I check my reflection in the window glass, smoothing and pinning my wayward hair, and then open the door.
“Hi, Marit,” Jakob says. The corners of his mouth twitch slightly when he sees me. “I found something that might be of interest.”
In his hands is the thick tome on gemstones he gave me for Christmas.
I move out of the way to let him in. Something like thunder is building low in my abdomen.
He taps his finger on the book. “There is an entry here about a stone that changes color. It happens when it is exposed to light.”
“Oh?” I ask. I feel a tug of interest as the pages fall open to a small painting.
“The stone is called proustite. It doesn’t seem to have immense value, and as far as I can tell, it isn’t attached to any particular myths or legends. But I thought you’d like to see it, just in case.”
“Proustite,” I say. The image is of a small red stone that looks sort of like my father’s. Sometimes called “ruby silver,” proustite is a rare specimen with a vibrant red metallic sheen, I read. The stone must be kept hidden away and never displayed, because it darkens a little more with every exposure to light, until eventually, it turns to black.
A stone that darkens, just like Philip’s did.
Jakob’s eyes meet mine.
He sets the book gently on the table and turns to leave.
But when his hand is on the doorknob, I say: “Jakob—wait.”
He pauses and slowly turns to face me again.
“I think I might be able to help you,” I say. I swallow as I fiddle with my wrists, heart hitching. “With your research.”
I unbutton the cuffs and tentatively hold out my wrists. And if I ever doubted whether he cared for me, that uncertainty vanishes completely when I see his face. It’s raw and painful and devastating, and it tells me more than anything he could ever say.
“Marit,” he says, taking a step toward me. His eyes are both dark and bright, and he makes a sound low in his throat. “That makes me—” His hands tighten into fists at his sides. “I promise,” he says, through gritted teeth, “I’m not going to stop looking until I’ve found something that could help you.”
Though everything in him is clenched, he comes to take my wrists so gently in his hands and runs the very tips of his fingers along my veins, like mining for ore. The sensation is heady and trills over my skin, lighting every sense of feeling I have.
“I want you to take a sample of it with you,” I say quietly. “Before you leave for Dr. Holm’s.”
Because just like Ivy’s death might cause the police to pay more attention to the other missing servants, maybe my misfortune could help someone else too. Misery fights so hard to gain the upper hand, but there’s always something left in its gleanings: the seed of something good that ensures despair can never quite win. Sometimes I think about how if I could go back and keep my sister from dying, I would in an instant. And yet, if she hadn’t . . . I would never have met Eve, or Liljan, or Jakob, at all.
“I will,” Jakob says, and I even manage a slight smile.
“That night when we hid from Nina and you first told me about the mines,” I say, remembering us together on the glowing-white ice lake, under a sky lit with glittering stars. “You said you might know someone who can teach me to skate?”
He nods, his fingers leaving my skin.
“How about now?” I ask.
I push away from my workstation. I still have Eve’s dress to finish. But this feels like my last chance at something, and I realize how much I want it.
I tilt my head to indicate follow me and am careful to keep him an arm’s length away as we grab the skates stashed in the attic. The Vestergaard house is thrumming at full tilt with people preparing for the performance tomorrow. Servants below us move in and out of the doors, streaming like ants, carrying furniture and flowers, polishing the front windows.
“Nina’s going to kill us if she sees us taking a break,” I whisper.
“I’m already leaving,” he says. “Nina can’t fire me.”
Me too, I think. Even if she doesn’t know it yet.
Instead of taking Jakob through the kitchen and out to the lake, I lead him to the back door. Toward the greenhouse.
Every nerve in my body is electric, and it’s making me lightheaded.
But when we step outside, my worries soften and melt into delight.
Brock’s done what I asked him to—everything, and more. Pure white wisteria falls in layers as light as a whisper. The strands dangle like delicate curtains of icicles and lace to shut out the rest of the world.
“Here,” I say. I part the wisteria and step into the corridor.
Inside is cool and dim, dizzy and lush with the scent of jasmine. Soft bursts of lavender wisteria drape down to where I can reach up and graze them with my fingers.
“What is this?” Jakob asks. He takes a step forward and slides.
The path in front of us is a smooth, translucent sheen. Brock helped me pour a thin layer of water, which crystallized into ice. Rae will melt it when we’re done, and Li
ljan is doing her best to keep Nina distracted. The lush wisteria tickles my arm. I set down my skates.
“Jakob,” I say hesitantly. I take a deep breath. I’ve been very careful not to let him touch my clothes. Not until I was ready.
I take a gliding step toward him and catch his wrist in my hand. I feel the pulse there quicken, just like it did on Christmas Eve. But this time, I pull his hand toward me and place it lightly on my waist. I feel his whole body tense at the exact moment he reads what I’ve written.
I’m sorry.
I think about you all the time.
I’ve sewn the secrets into my petticoats.
Where only he could find them.
I’m scared.
I might be in love with you?
“Marit?” he says hoarsely, and warmth stirs in my body, and something seeps into my chest and through my arms and legs that feels like pure gold.
I bring my face to meet his and feel the heat of his mouth and the softness of it. The way he smells and tastes, his breath catching, his heart beating hard through his shirt. His spectacles slightly knock against my cheek, and I pull him against me and kiss him deeper, my feet slipping on the ice underneath us. The taste of his breath is cool, like snow and mint. I shiver with that pleasure, the tingle and chill that climbs all the way up my spine to the roots of my hair, that yearning of wanting more. And it feels better than I ever imagined. Even if it’s only for this moment, I feel that transcendent crackle I thought I’d never get to feel again.
Magic.
From the corner of my eye there are flowers blooming around us, curling tendrils of lavender and iris and Gallica roses, and I know Brock is somewhere nearby—that this is his way of saying thank you for saving him that day in Philip’s room. I smile against Jakob’s mouth and he takes my face in his hands. I’ve never seen him look at anyone the way he’s looking at me right now, and I think I’ll be able to revisit this moment for the rest of my life. Every time I catch the hint of new flowers blooming their short-lived sweetness into the world. Jakob runs his fingertips over the skin just behind my ears. His touch leaves the most delightful shiver, and my whole body—my breath, and the air just between us—heats to a degree that his spectacles half fog over.
Splinters of Scarlet Page 23
