“I went t-to the st-station, but I c-couldn’t b-bring myself to b-buy a ticket,” Charley said, stuttering with cold. “C-couldn’t just l-leave you h-here with strangers.”
“So it’s you who’s been following us?” Clara asked. “But why?”
Charley pulled away from Luciana and looked her in the face. “I k-know y-you don’t w-want me h-here,” he said. “B-but I l-love you, L-Luciana. Y-you’re f-family t-t-to me. I h-had to be s-sure you w-were s-safe, e-even if I h-had t-to do it in s-s-secret.”
Luciana’s eyes filled with tears and she hugged him again. “You’re family to me too. I’m so sorry for what I said. I didn’t mean it, Charley. I really didn’t. Come on. We’ve got to get you into dry clothes before you catch your death.”
Back at the theatre, they persuaded Ben to give up his second pair of trousers with the promise that they’d get him a brand-new pair at the earliest opportunity. Merritt pulled out a shirt and a jacket of his own – too big, of course, but better than the wet mess that Charley’s had become.
“I can’t believe you’ve been out there at all hours in that weather,” Luciana said, once he was in dry clothes and the two of them were sat in front of a fire in the magician’s dressing room. Every time Luciana looked at the flames, the fire threatened to bring back her dream again, but she refused to give in to the fear. It was more important for her to sit beside Charley as it warmed him. Besides, with him there, she felt as if she could defeat anything. “Where were you planning to sleep?”
“I saw that boy who took us to the Peacock at Charing Cross and asked him if he had a place I could stay. He said he’d wait until ten past closing time and if I needed somewhere he’d take me to where he sleeps. I think it’s under the station somewhere.”
Luciana shook her head. “You should have gone home. I wouldn’t have blamed you. I’m so sorry that I said you didn’t belong. I didn’t mean it. The thing is, I’m not even sure I was talking about you. I think I was talking about myself, really.”
Charley gave her a confused look. “What do you mean?”
Luciana was quiet for a moment, trying to assemble the right words in the head. She felt she needed to explain, but to do that she had to go right back to the beginning.
“Just after we found the first part of the Golden Butterfly, something happened with my grandmother,” she began. “She … wanted to talk to me about you. She said we were on different paths and that we’d get further and further apart as we got older. It was so confusing. Scary too. It felt as if with Grandfather gone, everything was changing and I didn’t have any say over any of it. I think that’s one reason why I was so determined to solve the puzzles and save the Golden Butterfly. It’s all part of my past, when everything felt … I don’t know, right. Then we found Adeline and Clara, and in a funny kind of way everything made sense again. And now, if I can do this – if I can make the Golden Butterfly work – then maybe everything will be all right, whatever the future brings. Does that make any sense?”
Charley frowned. “I think so.”
“You’re the best friend I’ve got, Charley,” Luciana told him. “It’s always been us, together. But this … this is something I must do. I have to. I can’t just go back home to Midford and forget about it. Not yet.”
Charley sighed and looked around the dressing room. “I used the last of the money to send a telegram back home, to let them know that we’re safe. I didn’t tell them where we are, just that we were with old friends of your grandfather’s and that they shouldn’t worry.”
“Thank you.”
Charley looked back to her, a serious look on his face. “They will worry anyway though. You realize that, don’t you?”
Luciana dipped her head, ashamed. “I know. But—”
“—this is just something you have to do,” Charley finished for her.
“I can’t let Thursby win,” she said, desperate for him to understand. “Not just for me, but for Adeline and my grandfather too. He took Marko’s profession away from him. He took Adeline’s whole life. Now he’s taken her invention and he wants to take the limelight, just when she’s made a new life and a new name for herself. It’s not right. There’s nothing I can do to change the past, Charley, or the fact that my grandfather’s gone, but I know I can do this.”
Charley reached out and squeezed her hand. He still felt cold, although he’d stopped shivering. “I know. I do understand Luciana. And if it’s what you have to do … then I’ll help. I’d rather do that than trust someone else to look out for you.”
There was a brief knock at the door before it opened. Luciana was surprised to see Adeline Morrell walk through the door, all trace of Adolphus Merritt scrubbed away. She smiled at Luciana’s expression.
“It’s past midnight. Even Ben is fast asleep. The only people here are the ones who know me for who I really am. Charley, are you feeling better?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Adeline drew up a chair and sat down beside the fire. “Look, Luciana, I have been impressed by you today. You have worked so hard. But tomorrow will be harder, and the day after that harder still. We haven’t even started working with the wire yet, and that’s where the danger really comes in. We can stop now. We don’t need to do this. You can both go home.”
Luciana and Charley looked at each other. “No,” Luciana said. “I’m not going home. I’m not going anywhere. I want to do this.”
Morrell took a deep breath, and then held something out: a scroll of white paper.
“All right then,” she said. “In that case, you should look at this. If you’re really sure you want to do this, I’ll take this to the printer in the morning.”
Luciana took the paper and unfurled it. It was a design for a playbill, announcing:
The next day Clara fitted Luciana into the dress she would wear for the performance. The fabric was nowhere near as light as Luciana had imagined it would be. It tangled around her legs as she spun, it conspired to trip her as she leaped. It made reaching the goal of the wire and hook even harder.
While she struggled below, Merritt and Charley laboured above. They climbed up to the rafters with a toolbox and a winch, and for several hours all that could be heard overhead was banging and clattering as the pair of them fixed it into place. The line vanished and Merritt reappeared on the stage, though without Charley. The magician indicated that Luciana should climb up into the rafters herself.
“He’s right,” Clara added. “You need to get used to being up there too. No – don’t change. Keep the costume on.”
“But how am I to climb in it?” Luciana asked.
“Barefoot and as best you can,” Clara answered. “And do try not to tear it!”
The ladders that led up above the stage were bolted flat against the rear walls. By the time she reached the point where she had to cross from the first to a second, Luciana’s arms ached, her feet hurt, and she was hot and tired. As she reached the bridge and began crawling on hands and knees to Charley, she decided she was sick of the whole venture.
“So,” he said cheerfully, as he sat on one beam, dangling his legs. There was a single lit candle on the rafter beside him, casting his face in a weird glow. Luciana tried not to think about how close it was to the wooden beam. She wouldn’t ask Charley to work in the dark, not this high off the stage, however afraid she was of what a stray flame could do to that wooden structure, no matter that she’d had her nightmare every night since she’d been in London. “How are you enjoying being a magician’s assistant so far?”
“It’s just plain horrible,” she grumbled as she reached his side.
“Watching you from all the way up here, dancing in that glittering cloth, you look like a ghost, or a sprite,” Charley said. “It’s quite eerie.”
“Well, I don’t feel like a sprite,” she said. “Right now I feel more like an old dish rag.”
Charley laughed and bumped her shoulder. “You’re not scared to be up here then?”
“A litt
le dizzy when I look down, perhaps, but not scared.”
“That’s good.”
Luciana nodded to the winch. The line had been fed around it. “Show me how that works.”
Charley cranked the handle clockwise and the mechanism turned smoothly as the line dropped towards the stage. He wound it anticlockwise and it came back up again. It was completely silent.
“I’ll have to keep it well oiled,” he said. “Can’t have any sudden squeaks or jerks that’d give the game away.”
Luciana watched as Charley repeated the movement and the line with the hook on dropped quickly towards the stage below. She tried to imagine being on the end of that line, being pulled upwards into these rafters. It seemed like a very long way up – and down.
“When you get here, I have to grab you and pull you on to this beam,” Charley told her. “Then we both have to sit here, still as statues with no bits of us showing, until the curtain comes down at the end of the show. Oh, and just to make it a fraction more of a challenge,” he added, leaning over and blowing out the candle so that the space around them sputtered into darkness, “we have to do it in the pitch-black. Merritt says we’ll have a blanket to cover us completely on the night.”
“Wonderful,” said Luciana.
Charley grinned. “All right then. We’d better start rehearsing the next bit. I’ve got to be able to pull you all the way up from the stage as smoothly as a bubble rising through beer.”
“It’ll be harder with me on the end of it,” Luciana observed.
“Best get cracking then.” he said. “Although this won’t be the first time I’ve held you on a rope now, will it?”
*
When they broke for a quick lunch Merritt went out, returning sometime later with two parcels – a small one wrapped in what looked like an old woollen scarf and another large oblong one wrapped in sturdy brown paper. The magician unwrapped the larger one first. Inside were the printed playbills, resplendent with red and black printing against a stark white background.
Luciana and Charley looked at it together. Neither of them said anything for a while. Luciana’s name stood out in very large scarlet letters.
“What do you think?” Clara asked. “It looks good, doesn’t it?”
“Very good,” Charley agreed, although Luciana could tell he was thinking the same as her: that suddenly this all seemed a lot more real.
Merritt unwrapped the other parcel. Inside were the angel wings, although they had changed a little since the last time Luciana had seen them. Instead of being part of the doll, they were attached to a harness of thin leather straps made to go over a wearer’s shoulders and around her waist.
“I’ve tested it myself as much as I can,” Clara explained. “It’s comfortable enough, and strong.”
Luciana reached out to touch the harness. The leather straps were about an inch thick, but quite soft. “Won’t the audience be able to see it?”
“It’ll be hidden beneath your costume,” Clara told her. “The wings will be under a layer of fabric so that when you turn, the audience won’t see them.”
“They won’t really look like butterfly wings, will they?” Luciana asked. “Not with the feathers on them.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Clara said. “They’ll be so amazed by the overall spectacle it’s unlikely they’ll even notice. From a distance you’ll be moving so quickly that they’ll shimmer – the audience won’t even see what they’re made of. Now, when the time is right, you’ll have to part the fabric of your dress with your hands –” here she made a flicking motion with her wrists – “so that the hook can find the loop. You’ll have to time it exactly right and rehearse so that the motion blends in with the rest of your movements.”
Luciana felt sick as the true enormity of her task hit her. It was down to her to make this believable. If she slipped up at any point, even just once, the game would be up and the trick ruined completely.
“Well,” she said, a little shakily. “I’d better get that on so that we can start practising, hadn’t I?”
“There’s something else we need to show you,” said Clara.
She pulled out two more strips of leather – shorter ones this time with ties on each end – and slipped them on to each wrist. Merritt stepped forward to pull the ties closed so that Clara wore them like bracelets. Running around the middle of each leather cuff was a very thin strip of dull silver-white metal. Clara held out both wrists so that Luciana and Charley could see them. Then she flicked her fingers and showed them the matches that had been concealed in her palms. A shiver ran down Luciana’s spine, because she had just remembered the final aspect of the trick and she knew what was about to happen.
Merritt walked to the edge of the stage and picked up a bucket that had been hidden behind the curtains. When the magician returned, Luciana saw that it was full of dry sand.
Clara stepped back, then lifted her arms up and out in a swift, expansive flourish, crossing them in front of her as she brought them down again. There was the swift rasping sound of a match being struck, and then a sudden fizzing noise and Clara’s wrists burst into a fierce blue-white flame. Luciana jumped and took a step back in fright, grabbing hold of Charley’s hand. The flame silhouetted Clara in its glare, and the strange fire grew so bright that Luciana couldn’t look at it without squinting. The light flared around Clara’s wrists, turning her incandescent in its cold white glow for a handful of seconds. Then they snapped out of existence as swiftly as they had appeared. All that was left was a strange chemical smell and a last plume of thick grey smoke vanishing up into the dark cavern of the theatre’s roof.
“What is it?” Luciana asked, once she found her voice again, the after-image of the fire still burning in her retina. She let go of Charley. “It’s such a strange flame.”
“It’s magnesium,” Clara said, as Merritt loosened the bracelets. “A peculiar metal that photographers use for their pictures because the light it creates is so great. It’s the final distraction that completes the trick.”
Merritt held up the two leather straps. They were still smoking.
“Let me see,” Luciana said, trying to be bold. She took one of the bracelets between her fingers. The metal strip that had run around it was now curled and burned, and as she looked at it closely it flaked into ash and drifted away.
“It looks like burnt ribbon,” Luciana said.
“Lucky for us, it’s one of the ways they manufacture it,” Clara said. “It’s thin and narrow enough to conceal at a distance.”
Luciana swallowed. “What would happen if one of those bits of burning ribbon were to fall on my skin?” she asked.
“It burns very hot,” Clara admitted. “Very hot indeed. But the leather is thick enough to protect you, and the burn isn’t long enough for the flame to catch it.”
Luciana nodded at the sand. “That was in case you needed to put the fire out quickly wasn’t it? Why sand, not water?”
“Because throwing water on burning magnesium would cause an explosion,” Clara said calmly. “As I said … it’s a very strange metal.”
Charley’s face was masked with worry. “But what if a spark fell on to her costume?”
The thought made Luciana feel sick. Fear prickled along her skin. Though she tried not to, all she could think of was her nightmare. That terrible image of a figure trapped by huge orange flames, a wall of fire so fierce that there was no hope of escape. She felt Charley’s hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently, and tried to tell herself that it was just a dream, that nothing like that could ever happen in real life. Except that only a day or so before, Clara had told her about theatres catching fire, and up there above their heads was Charley’s lone stub of candle, waiting to be lit on the wooden rafter that helped to hold this whole place up.
“We won’t lie,” Carla said seriously, her words cutting into Luciana’s worries. “It is dangerous.”
Luciana still stared at the leather cuffs. “It didn’t burn for long, did it?” she
asked.
“Four seconds,” Clara told her. “We’ve timed it precisely. Here’s what will happen: You dance on to the stage. You hook yourself on to the line. Charley begins to lift you up even as the wings are opening. You will rise. The magnesium burns. The flames will die and at the exact moment that they do, every light in the auditorium will go out, just for a second. When the lights come back on again, you will have vanished. Charley will haul you up on to the bridge and wrap you both in a black blanket. You’ll stay there until the final curtain comes down.”
“But Luciana is so afraid of fire,” Charley said. “She always has been, ever since she was little. It’s the only thing she is afraid of.”
Merritt looked at her with serious eyes. For a moment Luciana thought the magician was actually going to speak, but the moment past and he just tightened his jaw instead, frowning.
“It’s not fair,” Charley went on. “It’s not fair to make her do that when—”
“It’s all right,” Luciana interrupted, proud that her voice stayed steady even though her stomach was churning. “I’ll do it.”
“You really think you can?” Clara asked.
Luciana handed back the leather bracelet with a shrug and a watery smile. “Yes. I can. I will.”
Merritt stepped forward and put his fingers under Luciana’s chin, tipping her face up so that he could look into her eyes. He looked deadly serious for a moment. Then he smiled. It was just a small smile, and a sad one, Luciana thought. It was far more Adeline than Adolphus.
“The show must go on,” Luciana said, quietly. “Isn’t that right?”
Luciana and Charley practised in the harness and with the magnesium for the rest of the afternoon and into the following day. The first time she lit the bracelets, Luciana was so fearful she thought she might faint clean away. Charley stayed by her side the whole time as they did that part of the trick over and over again. Luciana was determined not to let her fear win, however hard her heart beat every time the matches struck. After all, her grandmother had been right about at least one thing. Luciana had beaten her fear of fire once, and whatever had brought it back, she knew she could beat it again. They worked so hard that by the time Merritt and Clara began to get ready for their own evening performance, both Luciana and Charley were in sore need of a rest.
The Golden Butterfly Page 13
