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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Inside the Silver Bubble

When Morrigan woke the next morning, Emmett tucked comfortably under one arm, it took a full thirty seconds and several long blinks to remember she wasn’t in the Hotel Deucalion.

The night’s events came back in a series of flashes: the terrible fight with Jupiter, an anxious railpod journey and a boat trip with an exhausted-looking Hounslow, during which Morrigan had apologised repeatedly for bothering him after such a busy day.

By the time Morrigan had found herself standing before Darling House again, she was certain she’d made a terrible mistake. She’d been about to turn around, to beg Hounslow to take her back to the station, when the front door was flung open and her aunts surrounded her in a crush of hugs and sweet floral perfume and joyful exclamations at seeing her again so soon.

Morrigan needn’t have worried: the aunts didn’t seem to think her return needed any explanation. They led her to a sumptuous drawing room and fussed over her with supper and hot chocolate and a spot by the fire. It had all felt so welcoming and easy, like being … home.

Sitting up in her comfortable bed, she peered around the room, seeing it properly for the first time in the diffused morning light.

‘Sale at the doily shop?’ she murmured to Emmett.

The curtains were lace. The lampshades were lace. Quilts and cushions and canopy bed hangings – lace, lace and more lace, all in shades of peach, pink and white. Anything that wasn’t made of lace was made of velvet or silk, and anything that wasn’t velvet or silk was fine porcelain or delicate blown glass.

A frankly improbable number of ballerina paintings pirouetted across the walls, and every table and surface was covered with little figurines of floppy-eared bunnies. It felt like the sort of bedroom a princess would have, Morrigan thought. Perhaps it was her cousin Marigold’s room.

As she contemplated getting out of bed to look for her suitcase, there was a knock on the door and a whirlwind of blonde curls burst into the room.

‘Good morning !’ trilled Aunt Modestine, her mood apparently much improved. ‘Up you get, sleepyhead, there’s ever so much to do!’

‘Modestine, one usually waits for a response after knocking,’ said Aunt Margot, following her sister into the bedroom with a long-suffering sigh. She wheeled an overflowing clothes rack behind her, with Aunt Miriam pushing the other end.

Aunt Margot flung open the doors of an enormous oak wardrobe and began transferring clothes from the racks. ‘Forgive the intrusion and the early start, but I’m afraid my sister is correct – there is so much to do today.’

Morrigan jumped out of bed at once. ‘Of course! Sorry. I’ll just get dressed. Um, has anyone seen my—’

‘We’ve had Hounslow put your charming little suitcase in storage, dear,’ said Aunt Miriam distractedly, holding up an emerald-green tea dress against Morrigan with a thoughtful look. ‘Margot, are we sure about this one?’

‘Quite sure. Everything is made to the latest fashions, and Abigail assured me they’d suit her colouring,’ said Aunt Margot. Noting Morrigan’s confusion, she explained, ‘I asked our dear friend Mrs Blumenthal to secretly size you up yesterday – she owns Bloom Couturiers on the Splendid Canal, and has a marvellous eye for measurements. I sent off an order yesterday and her tailors worked through the night, bless them. The whole collection arrived this morning. What do you think?’

Morrigan’s eyes widened. ‘Those are all for me?’

How long did they think she was staying?

‘Of course! Aren’t they splendid ?’ Aunt Modestine squealed. She placed the final hanger in the wardrobe, which now held a rainbow of outfits for every conceivable occasion, in an astonishing array of fabrics and styles.

Morrigan leafed through silk pyjamas and dressing gowns, tennis whites and riding jackets and jodhpurs, jewel-coloured cashmere pullovers and tailored tweed trousers and smart peacoats and more dresses than she could count.

‘Splendid,’ she agreed, with what she hoped was a convincingly grateful smile. ‘This is so generous of you, really, but I don’t need—’

‘Nonsense, darling, of course you do,’ said Aunt Margot matter-of-factly. She handed Morrigan a deep blue dress with a lace collar and ushered her behind a folding screen to change. ‘This will do very well for a morning stroll. Do call out if you need help, won’t you?’

‘I will,’ Morrigan lied, trying to one-handedly fasten a row of fiddly pearl buttons from her wrists to her elbows.

‘What do you think of the bedroom? It’s yours.’ Modestine’s eager voice came from the other side of the screen.

Morrigan froze. Her bedroom?

‘Oh! Um.’ She wracked her brain for something positive to say. ‘I’ve … never seen anything like it.’

‘I knew you’d love it!’ Modestine gushed. ‘Nobody’s been allowed to stay in it before – Mama always insisted we keep it just so. Exactly as she liked it.’

‘Lady Darling must … really love ballet,’ Morrigan said mildly, emerging from behind the screen. ‘And bunnies.’

The three women clapped with delight at the sight of her. Margot and Miriam immediately set to work fixing the clumsily buttoned sleeves.

Aunt Modestine giggled. ‘Not as Mamaaa liked it, silly! As Merry liked it.’

‘Merry?’ Morrigan blinked. ‘You mean this was—’

‘Your mother’s bedroom.’ Aunt Margot smoothed and straightened the long skirt, speaking in a gentle murmur. ‘My sisters were determined you must have it, and I agreed that if anyone may sleep here, it’s …’ She trailed off with a troubled glance at Morrigan’s face. ‘Oh. But perhaps we ought to have asked you first?’

Your mother’s bedroom. Those three improbable words seemed to bounce off the high ceilings. Morrigan felt she was looking at the room with new eyes, and found herself feeling slightly more generous towards the lace-factory-explosion aesthetic. This was, apparently, exactly as her mother liked it.

She reached out to touch the tiny glass nose of a sleeping baby rabbit, feeling her chin quiver slightly. Why hadn’t she realised? Of course her mother loved rabbits. Emmett, after all, had once been Meredith’s.

‘Was it terribly thoughtless of us, darling?’ asked Aunt Margot, frowning. ‘Is it too much? Too soon? Just say the word and we’ll move you to another bedroom at once .’

Morrigan caught sight of her reflection in the mirror and was momentarily stunned by how grown-up and elegant she looked in the dress.

She shook her head, smiling. ‘I’d like to stay here, please.’

If someone had asked Morrigan what her plan was when she’d returned to Darling House after her fight with Jupiter, it certainly wouldn’t have been to spend the next fortnight skiving off school and never leaving the Silver District. And yet that’s exactly what happened.

She couldn’t even have said how it happened. The Silver District bubble simply closed around her, and the normal delineations of time blurred to nothing. The Grand Old Houses didn’t seem to do anything of great importance, or with any particular urgency – their lives were all pleasure and leisure and ease.

Languid days passed by in a dreamy, sunlit haze of boat rides and shopping trips and croquet on the lawn and visits to the theatre. A morning promenade in the Pleasure Gardens rolled seamlessly into a sumptuous afternoon tea in the Mahapatras’ suntrap courtyard, into endless rounds of charades in the Carringtons’ games salon, into a six-course supper in the Babatundes’ formal dining room, into an evening chapel service, into a midnight regatta on the canal or impromptu singalong on somebody-or-other’s candlelit rooftop. Every day brought new surprises; the Silverborn never seemed to live the same twenty-four hours twice.

Surprisingly, Morrigan found she didn’t even hate wearing the parade of fancy clothes that went along with her new busy schedule; it felt a little like playing dress-up or wearing a disguise, and it seemed to please her aunts to see her fit in with them. Every morning, a dozen or so outfits were chosen for her and hung from the ornate iron clothing rack, with a beautifully handwritten note to explain what each ensemble was for, the order she should wear them in, and the precise times she would need to change. She never saw who was responsible for this – the staff of Darling House were so discreet they were just about invisible – but it must have taken a whole team of people to prepare the revolving wardrobes for Morrigan and her aunts every day.

For a family in mourning, the Darlings were still integral to the Silver District social landscape, and none of the other families seemed to find their constant presence odd at such a time. Quite the opposite – Modestine’s stoic attendance of every party, picnic and performance was commended by all, from the sympathetic girls who flocked to her in tearooms, to the old men who murmured in a grandfatherly way about the bravery of ‘that poor Darling girl’.

Morrigan had worried, at first, that she might find herself constantly running into Laurent St James, or Louis and Lottie, or Noelle Devereaux. But the Silver District was a bigger and busier place than she’d realised, and the aunts never stayed anywhere long enough to grow bored, or to have people grow bored of them.

There was one moment when she unavoidably crossed paths with Noelle and her mother, during a walk in the Paramour Pleasure Gardens. Morrigan almost expected Modestine to say something vicious, or Lady Devereaux to snarl the way she had at the wedding. But they surprised her by simply exchanging polite pleasantries before each going their own way. Noelle didn’t even glance in Morrigan’s direction.

As for Louis and Lottie’s horrid father, she supposed Laurent’s nasty political ambitions must be keeping him busy, because she only saw him once, sneering at her from a distance in the Babatundes’ ballroom. Instead of going out of his way to antagonise Morrigan, however, he flushed bright red when she spotted him and turned tail, fleeing the party. If she hadn’t been so stunned, she might have been tempted to shout something at Laurent as he fled, and see how he liked being heckled in public.

Morrigan often found herself the centre of attention in the Silver District, but it felt different here. She couldn’t imagine anyone inside the Silver Gates marching with placards or shouting angry slogans or doing anything to disturb the dreamlike serenity of their water-bound borough. Nobody whispered about her or even cast fearful glances her way. Morrigan could almost have pretended nobody here knew about her being a Wundersmith, except, of course, it wasn’t that at all – not after her dragon-weaving at Dario’s memorial. It was better than that. They all knew … and they were delighted by it.

Whenever guests called at Darling House, the aunts would beg Morrigan to share ‘some splendid bit of magic’, and everyone would erupt in applause and praise for even the most trivial display. Word of these ‘performances’ quickly spread, and soon she was fielding requests for her most popular hits. People went mad for her tiny tornadoes in teacups, and rainbows that bounced around a room.

Prompted by an idea from Aunt Modestine, she perfected a technique of weaving posies and corsages from the colours and patterns of her aunts’ gowns. These unique adornments swiftly became a Silver District fashion, and folks began forming queues wherever Morrigan appeared. The accessories only lasted an hour or two before fading into the Gossamer, but somehow their impermanence only made them more popular.

On the other hand, there were applications of the Wundrous Arts Morrigan instinctively kept under her hat. Her shadow puppet show at the Okwaras’ winter ball was a hit, for example, but she didn’t think anyone needed to know she could also conceal herself with shadows. People were thrilled when she made miniature fireworks from a candle flame in the O’Donohues’ drawing room, but she’d stopped short of showing them she could also breathe fire. And while everyone adored it when she pulled ribbons of sparkling turquoise water from the canals and wove them through the rustling silvergum trees, she refrained from making a waterwhip or mini-tsunami. The idea was to delight people, after all, not to frighten them.

This consistent, repetitive use of the Wundrous Arts was much more practice than Morrigan was used to. Her Weaving, especially, was improving at a rate of knots, and she thought Squall would be pleasantly surprised next time he saw her. That made her feel slightly better about all the school she was missing … and about the fact that since coming to the Silver District, she’d twice ignored the summons of the Hunt of Smoke and Shadow.

She hadn’t really meant to. But between her constant Weaving and a full calendar of social engagements, at the end of each day Morrigan was exhausted down to her bones. On her sixth night in Darling House, a whirlwind of smoke had appeared at the foot of her bed, just as her head hit the pillow.

‘Go away,’ she mumbled. The wolf stayed where it was, red eyes glowering at her from the darkness, but Morrigan burrowed deeper into the bedclothes and was asleep within moments.

The second time it happened, a shadowy hunter on horseback had galloped right up to her in the giant hedge maze in the Paramour Pleasure Gardens, extending a hand in invitation.

‘I can’t go now ,’ Morrigan whispered, but the hunter stared back at her, unmoved. ‘My aunts will think I’ve disappeared!’

‘Morrigan, dear, is that you?’ As if to prove her point, Aunt Miriam’s voice came from somewhere nearby, accompanied by Aunt Winifred’s raucous laughter. ‘Help us, won’t you, we’re ever so lost!’

‘Get out of here. Shoo! ’ she hissed at the hunter, and then ran in the opposite direction, calling, ‘I’m here, Aunt Miriam!’

Of course, Morrigan’s conscience did sometimes prick her about how she’d left things with Jupiter, and all the school she was missing. But that was nothing compared to the guilt she felt over her failure to find the wedding photos for Cadence.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried. The problem was, her days were so heavily scheduled it was almost impossible to sneak away on her own to search the house. She’d managed to cross a few more rooms off of Cadence’s map, but there were only so many times she could claim to have got lost on her way to the bathroom.

And, strangely, the mystery of Dario’s death had seemed much more pressing outside the Silver District than in it. Morrigan knew skipping her lessons with Squall wouldn’t get her any closer to acquiring her next three seals, per the deal they’d made. But the urgency she’d felt to learn Tempus had dulled somewhere along the line of busy, pleasant days that blurred from one into the next.

Morrigan had imagined the Grand Old Houses would be consumed by the question of who the murderer was. But it had become quite clear to her that, as far as they were concerned, the wedding planner was unquestionably the culprit, even if the Stink had dropped the charges against him. Popular opinion seemed to be that the question of Crispin Stirling’s guilt was a silly dispute between the Nevermoor City Police Force (AKA the Stink) and the Silver District Watch (informally known as the Silk, after the distinctive white silk gloves they wore on patrol, pristine against their silver-buttoned, plum-coloured coats).

When Morrigan asked about it one morning over breakfast, Uncle Tobias reassured her that the Silver District was the safest place in the city, and Stirling would soon be brought to justice.

‘The Nevermoor City Police will see reason. They just don’t like being told what to do, that’s all.’ He reached for a steaming silver pot to refill his coffee cup, politely waving away a servant who rushed to help. ‘They resent the Silk for not allowing them inside the gates to conduct their own investigation.’

‘Sunny says we ought to let them in,’ Modestine said quietly. ‘He says the Silk are only good for patrolling summer fetes, and something this serious is beyond their … investigative prowess ,’ she finished, digging the words out of her memory.

Morrigan glanced instinctively at Aunt Margot, noticing the way her mouth tightened at the mention of Sunny Ghoshal. Morrigan found it curious how closely and attentively Dario’s best man had stuck to Modestine’s side since the memorial. Always hovering nearby at social gatherings, fetching her drinks and stepping in when the ever-present well-wishers overwhelmed the young widow. (She made a mental note to mention this to Cadence.)

‘But I’m afraid the law is the law, little sister,’ said Aunt Winifred, ‘and tradition is tradition. The Silver District has always conducted its own policing. If we allow the brownsuits inside for this, they’ll think they can stick their beaks in every time somebody litters in the park or argues over a card game.’

‘The fact of the matter is,’ murmured Uncle Tobias, from behind his newspaper, ‘the Silk have investigated and given their findings, and legally —’

‘I dislike this talk of murderers and police investigations over breakfast,’ Aunt Margot interrupted her husband, with a pointed glance at Aunt Modestine, who had gone pale and quiet. Everyone mumbled their apologies, and turned the conversation to that afternoon’s golf tournament.

That was the only time Morrigan heard the Darlings – or anyone else in the district – discuss the mystery of Dario’s death. It soon began to slip from her mind too, and as the days passed by she found herself unravelling another mystery altogether. Her detective’s notebook was filling up, not, as Cadence had hoped, with clues and observations about the murder, but with something far more compelling.

FACTS ABOUT MEREDITH DARLING

Favourite food: rice pudding.

She loved ballet but only ever took one class. The teacher told her she had bad turnout, awkward hands and horrible posture, so she never went back.

Watching the Nevermoor Ballet always made her cry (from happiness?).

She liked unnimals of all kinds, but rabbits were her favourite.

When she was five, she went through a phase of jumping in the big fountain in the Paramour Pleasure Gardens whenever her nanny’s back was turned.

She begged Lord and Lady Darling for a snow-white pony and finally got one for her tenth birthday, only to refuse to learn how to ride. She just wanted to braid his hair.

Her best friends at school were Ari, Kitty and Maybelle, and the four of them were inseparable.

Her favourite sister was Miriam (all the aunts agree on this except Modestine, who insists she was her real favourite).

She hated broccoli but loved peas.

She had very long, thick, beautiful hair, until her seventeenth birthday, when she hacked it all off just below her ears. Lady Darling cried, but Aunt Margot thought it looked ‘rather chic’.

Morrigan filled pages and pages with fragments of Meredith’s childhood, a patchwork portrait cobbled together from her sisters’ collective memories. Each tiny detail, each silly anecdote they shared was a precious treasure. Slowly, slowly, Meredith Darling was becoming three-dimensional – a living, breathing person, not just a painting in the Hall of Dead Crows. What Morrigan longed for now was to speak to Lady Darling, to find out even more about her mother from the woman who raised her. But she hadn’t seen her grandmother since the wedding ceremony.

When Morrigan inquired about Lady Darling’s health and when she might speak with her again, Aunt Margot gave a small, troubled sigh.

‘Oh sweet girl, we don’t want to worry you. But I’m afraid Mama is quite ill.’ She exchanged a solemn look with her sisters. ‘She hasn’t been entirely … herself for some time. Having these funny turns and tempers. That was why we asked to change the location of our first meeting with you. Lady Darling doesn’t like to leave the Greater Circle these days, you see,’ she explained. ‘She could never have travelled to Proudfoot House.’

Aunt Miriam smiled sadly. ‘But ever since the wedding, she’s been …’ Miriam trailed off, glancing uncertainly at Margot and Modestine. ‘ Much worse.’

Uncle Tobias stepped in, gently taking Aunt Margot’s hand. ‘Morrigan, we think the shock of Dario’s death affected your grandmother quite badly. Her headaches, dizzy spells and confusion are near constant now. Doctor Marks, the family physician, has given strict orders for round-the-clock bedrest.’

‘Tobias is Mama’s best nurse,’ Aunt Modestine said with a sniffle and a fond smile at her brother-in-law. ‘He’s the favourite.’

‘Only since I learned how to make her tea the way she likes it,’ he demurred, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

Aunt Margot smiled at Morrigan, her eyes red-rimmed and overbright. ‘There will be more good days for Mama. I’m sure of it. And when the next one arrives, I just know the first thing she’ll do is ask for you.’