They’re never going to settle, she thought, scared. They’re going to scream and shout and wail like this all the way through, but most of all when I step on to the stage.
The auditorium door opened and a moment later came a sudden hush. It washed through the audience, which quieted in an instant.
The figure that entered was Carl Thursby. He still wore his top hat and carried his silver cane. Behind him came Philpot Danvers. Then came another gentleman, then another, all dressed the same. They kept coming as Thursby kept walking, as if he were pulling an elaborate chain of rabbits from a hat
“It’s the Grand Society,” Clara whispered in her ear, as they reached the two empty rows of seats in front of the stage. “The whole Grand Society.”
The silence persisted until Thursby reached his seat, right in the centre of the very first row. Then he turned to the audience. He removed his hat and bowed with an exaggerated flourish.
“Tonight, ladies and gentlemen,” he announced loudly, “we will all witness a great undoing!”
His words acted like a signal to the temporarily tamed crowd. They bayed in delight, like hounds with the scent of a fox in their nostrils.
The blood drained from Luciana’s face. She staggered backwards, but Clara held her tight.
“Don’t think about them,” Clara said into her ear. “They don’t matter, not a whit. They’re nothing but stuffed shirts and wasted breath. Look – that’s what I wanted you to see! Up there!”
She pointed up to the balcony, to one of the boxes. Luciana looked and saw her grandmother. Isabella Cattaneo was glaring down at Carl Thursby with an expression of utter disdain. Beside her was Charley’s mother, Agnes.
“She came,” said Clara, hugging Luciana again. “Your grandmother’s here to see you. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Luciana whispered, though she knew Clara would not hear her over the noise of the crowd. “Yes, that’s all that matters.”
She looked up into the rafters, hoping to catch a glimpse of Charley, but all she could see was darkness.
*
The audience did not calm down, not even once the curtain had lifted and the show had begun. Luciana tried to stay in Clara’s dressing room, but in the end she found it worse to sit alone and imagine what was happening instead of seeing it for herself. As she made her way down the narrow dim corridor towards the stage, a figure dressed all in black rushed the other way, a large hat pulled down over its face.
“Hey,” she said to the approaching figure. “You’re not supposed to be here. No one’s allowed backstage. Who—”
The figure didn’t stop but instead barged its way past Luciana so hard that she was thrust against the wall.
“Hey!” she called after them. “Hey, stop!”
The figure did not pause, and there was no one else around to help. Afraid, Luciana ran towards the stage, convinced she would see flames billowing from the wings. But there was no sign of sabotage, or that anything at all was amiss – besides, that is, from the terrible sound of the crowd in the auditorium.
Mr Phipps stood in the dim light of the wings, wringing his hands.
“They’re not here to be entertained,” he said, agitated. “They are here for blood and I am afraid of what will happen if they do not get it! They may rip the theatre apart!”
“There was a man, did you see him?” Luciana asked. “He ran past me just now. I didn’t know who he was.”
“I saw no one,” Mr Phipps moaned, “but I can hear them, right enough!”
Clara came off stage, the smile that had been plastered on her face since the show began failing the moment she was in the wings. Beads of sweat dotted her anxious brow. She faltered as she saw Luciana and tried to put the smile back into place.
“Oh, Luciana,” she said. “You would do well to stay out of sight for now, dear.”
“What’s happening?” Luciana asked. “Is Merritt all right?”
“Oh,” Clara said with a faint smile, “Merritt is always all right. You’ll see, this next trick always wins over a difficult crowd. They always like the severed head.”
But today it seemed not even the astonishing spectacle of Adolphus Merritt severing and then reattaching his own head was enough to quell the savage crowd. The booing just became louder.
“It’s no good,” Mr Phipps shouted to Clara over the din. “They’re only here for the Golden Butterfly. You’ll have to cut the rest of the show before they become complete lunatics!”
As if on cue, a chant started up from the auditorium. It began quietly, almost like a whisper, but grew and grew, louder and louder, the voices becoming rougher by the second.
Golden. Butter. Fly.
Golden. Butter. Fly.
Golden. Butter. FLY!
Golden Butter-FLY!
Golden Butter-FLY!
GOLDEN BUTTERFLY!
GOLDEN BUTTERFLY!
GOLDEN BUTTERFLY!
Clara peered around the curtain and then withdrew with a scowl on her face.
“It’s Thursby,” she said. “He’s got them all chomping at the bit.”
“You must go on,” said Mr Phipps. “You must. I’m going to the box office. Someone will have to send for a constable!”
He bustled away. The chanting went on and on. Luciana took Clara’s place at the curtain as Merritt stumbled off stage. The orchestra started up a new tune, a version of a song that was very popular in the music halls, but no one joined in. Luciana looked out to see Thursby, an ugly smile on his face. As she watched, he stood and turned to the audience. Then he spread his arms wide and gestured to the empty stage. The crowd erupted into raucous laughter.
“Phipps is right,” Clara said. “We have to cut the rest of the show and go straight to the finale. Luciana – can you still do it?”
“Of course I can.”
“Good girl. Then get ready – the costume and rig are over—”
Clara turned and pointed to a table that had been standing just behind a dressing screen to the right of the stage. But the screen was lying flat on the boards, as if someone had tipped it over.
They ran to the table. Luciana expected to find the harness bearing the mechanical wings gone, but it was still there. Yet what was left of it was almost worse than if it had been stolen.
“Oh no,” whispered Luciana. “Oh no.”
The wings had been wrenched open, and the silk of their feathers had been ripped roughly from the frame, so that all that was left were the thin struts, the clockwork bones of their mechanism. Without them they looked flimsy and skeletal. Luciana wasn’t even sure that the audience would be able to see what was left of the wings at all from where they sat.
“This is Thursby,” Clara whispered. “This is his revenge.”
Even behind the mask of Adolphus Merritt, Luciana could see that Adeline’s face was devastated.
“We have to go on anyway,” Luciana said, raising her voice over the crowd.
“We can’t,” Clara told her. “If we go out and perform like this, we’ll be a laughing stock. Not only that, everyone in the audience will be able to see how the trick is done. It’s over. We’re finished.”
Adeline turned away, covering her hidden face with her hands. Luciana looked around, trying to think of a way to save them. Her eyes caught on two small objects that had dropped to the floor as the vandal did his work. It was the leather bracelets bearing the magnesium.
“Wait,” she said, an idea bursting into her mind, as bright as the metal’s white-hot burn. “How much magnesium do you have?”
Clara spread her hands. “Why?”
Luciana grabbed the tattered wings. “Do you have enough to make these blaze?”
Merritt turned to stare at Luciana.
“The strips are thin enough to fit on to the outside of the frame and still allow it to close,” Luciana said urgently. “The wings won’t have feathers but they’ll burn as brightly as a star. I think that’ll be enough of a distraction, don’t y
ou?”
Merritt and Clara stared at her. “We can’t do that!” Clara exclaimed. “We’d need to rehearse with it, test it, make sure that—”
“We don’t have time,” Luciana said. “We barely have enough time to set this up at all. Listen!”
The crowd had become even louder and were stamping their feet so hard that the entire theatre was shaking.
“It’s too dangerous,” Clara said, “and with your fear of fire—”
“I’m not afraid any more,” Luciana said. “Or at least not enough to stop me. I’m angry. I’m more angry than I have ever been before in my life. I am telling you, I can do this. We can do this. I won’t let Thursby win. I will not let him destroy any more brilliant magicians or their magic. I won’t be the one to burn. Thursby will. And I want it to be enough to bury him the way you had to bury my father; the way we buried the Magnificent Marko. So. How long will it take to set the magnesium?”
The magician shook her head. The crowd continued their racket.
“Come on!” Luciana cried. “What? Five minutes? Ten? It’s now or never. If we don’t get this right, you’re going to lose everything anyway, Adeline!”
The magician’s eyes flashed at the use of her real name. Clara gasped, but Luciana ignored it.
“Clara – you’re going to have to buy us time,” she said, already beginning to pull on the rest of the costume.
“Me?” Clara asked. “I can’t do anything!”
“You can do plenty,” Luciana said, passing the harness to Merritt. “Go out there and do every trick you can think of, all on your own. Then finish it with that disappearing number. Let’s see what Carl Thursby thinks of that, shall we?”
“I can’t!” Clara said again. “He’ll take my licence!”
“He won’t have to. If we don’t do the Golden Butterfly by the end of the night we’ll be finished anyway.”
The voice was Adeline’s own, cutting through the melee like a whip-crack. She and Clara looked at each other.
“She’s right, Clara,” said the magician. “You know she is. It’s now or never. Let’s show this snake what we’re capable of, shall we? Come on, my girl. If this is to be our final performance, let’s make it the best yet.”
Adeline and Luciana worked fast over the noise of poor Clara being jeered and heckled by the crowd. When at last she threw her final firecracker and the smoke obscured her trapdoor escape from the stage, they were ready. Adeline took Luciana’s cheeks between her two palms and looked at her from the face of Adolphus Merritt.
“It will burn for five seconds. No more, no less. There is one strip affixed to each wing. You’re sure about this?”
Luciana nodded. “Go!”
Adeline smiled, and then to Luciana’s surprise, leaned forward and quickly kissed her forehead. In the next minute she had gone, vanishing to the shadows at the other side of the stage.
Luciana tried to still herself, listening for the signal to begin her dance. She wished she could talk to Charley, who would have no warning that the trick had changed until the magnesium ignited below him.
Clara appeared, pale and breathing hard, but there was nothing more for either of them to say. Luciana knew the moment Merritt had walked out on to the stage, because the jeers from the audience took on a new tone.
Charlatan!
Cheat!
Imposter!
For the first time, Luciana properly understood Clara’s fear of Adeline’s true nature being exposed. For one of these things was true, wasn’t it?
Then, rising over the chanting, came the tune she had been learning to dance to for the past week. It sang to her above the riotous insanity of the crowd: sweet, familiar. Luciana turned to Clara and smiled. Then she began to dance.
The crowd paused a little in their heckling, but the sight of Luciana appearing from the wings was not enough to stop them wanting blood. Their shouts grew louder once again. Luciana ignored them all, pretending instead that she really was under a spell.
As she reached the centre of the stage, a sense of calm settled over her, despite the tumult that bubbled from the heaving darkness. At that moment Luciana realized, for the first time since she arrived in London, that she really did know what she was doing. She felt it in her heart and in her bones. As strange a life as being on the stage could be, it was hers. It was home.
She reached the line and felt the hook connect with the loop as surely as if it were the old bolt sliding home on the orchard gate in Midford. Luciana spread her arms wide – the signal for Charley to start the winch. For a split second she wondered if he was there, but then she felt the hard pull of the line.
She began to lift from the stage. A sudden hush fell over the theatre. From the audience it must have looked as if Luciana had begun to float. Luciana opened her arms again, a slow, graceful gesture which ended with her flicking her hands against her costume to part it.
She felt the mechanism of the wings activate. The audience was now quiet enough that she could hear the faint click-click-click of them opening, and then the tiny snap! as the last arm locked into place. At the same time she flicked out both arms, striking the tips of the matches she had concealed in her palms against the outer struts.
The magnesium ignited. A great flare of blue-white light exploded behind her, so bright that Luciana could see the looks of utter astonishment on the faces of the audience as she continued to rise into the air. The heckling shouts became noises of amazement.
Luciana tried to keep her head dipped forward, but still she felt the blaze of the flames. The heat of the flames was breathtaking and for a split second the old terror threatened to engulf her. On the stage below she could see Adeline moving into position, ready to throw the firecracker that would signal to Ben to cut the lights. Just a few more seconds, she told herself desperately, just a few more —
Then Luciana’s hair caught fire.
She smelled it, a different kind of acrid stench to the smoke of the magnesium. Panicked, she reached up, almost forgetting how many pairs of eyes were watching her every move. At the last second she turned the movement into a flourish of her arms and brushed the ember from her hair, flattening her hand against the burning strands just long enough to extinguish them. The nascent flames died under her fingers just as the magnesium gave its final brilliant flare. Below her, Adeline deployed the firecracker, an extra distraction for the audience. The lights snapped out and in that instant Charley turned the winch faster, yanking her up, so that by the time the lights came on again a mere second later, there was no trace of the Golden Butterfly. There was only Adolphus Merritt standing alone on stage, victorious.
The audience erupted, not in heckles but in cheers.
Luciana reached the top of the line. Charley grabbed her, hauling her up the last small distance so that she could reach for the rafter. She tried to grasp the rough wooden strut with both hands and almost howled in pain. The palm she had used to quench the flame in her hair was raw and burnt. Shocked, she almost let go, but Charley caught hold of her and held her tight.
Beneath them, the audience was still in uproar. Shouts of More! More! echoed around the auditorium. Charley kept one arm round her and pushed the loop back down to make the wings retract with the other. Then he pulled their black blanket over them both, concealing them from any inquisitive eyes that may look up from below.
They clung there together in silence as below them the show went on.
It was another thirty minutes until the curtain finally came down, but to Luciana it felt like three hours. Adolphus Merritt and Clara delighted the crowd – who just an hour before had been baying for their blood – with many of the illusions they had refused to watch before the Golden Butterfly had been conjured before them. Luciana shivered beneath the blanket, her burnt hand throbbing. Charley rubbed at her arms, trying to soothe her.
The curtain coming down was their cue to finally descend from the rafters. The crowd were still stamping and roaring as their feet made it to the boards ba
ckstage. Clara appeared from the wings before Merritt. She saw them and bounced over as if she were walking on air.
“Quickly!” she said to Luciana. “You need to get the harness off for the curtain call!”
Adeline appeared, flush-faced and happy. Behind her the applause and chants of More! echoed through the theatre.
“You should see Thursby!” she laughed. “He looks as if he’s ready to explode! The other magicians are all applauding – they loved it as much as anyone out there. There’s no way he’ll be able to better that on Tuesday and he knows it.” The magician grabbed Luciana in a bear hug. “Oh, my dear, you were wonderful. You were beyond wonderful!” She held Luciana away from her and then frowned at her pale face. “What’s the matter?”
“She needs a doctor,” Charley said. “She’s burned her hand.”
“It’s nothing,” Luciana said, not wanting to spoil the moment. “Really, it was just a spark.”
“Let me see.” Adeline reached for her hand.
“Well, well, well, what have we here?”
The voice spoke from directly behind Adeline. She froze, staring at Luciana with her eyes wide.
Carl Thursby.
Adolphus Merritt spun around to find him standing there with a nasty smile on his face.
“So you do speak,” he said. “I had assumed you were merely an imbecile, but it seems that you are, in fact, an entirely different type of fool.”
“You can’t be here,” said Clara. “No one is permitted backstage when—”
“Silence!” Thursby barked. “You,” he said to Adeline, “disgust me. You have worked money out of honest folk using false pretences. Even for a woman, this deception is a rank one.”
“Thursby—” Adeline began, but he cut her off.
“You dare to speak back to me?” he hissed. “As if you somehow have something to say worth hearing? I preferred you when you were silent.”
“Oh, I wager you did, Thursby,” Adeline spat. “That you could ever consider yourself a better of mine, that’s the mystery. You who could not perform but half of what you saw accomplished tonight – by a woman. What would everyone out there say to that, eh?”
The Golden Butterfly Page 16
