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CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Birthday-ish Cake

Bertram abruptly shut down the conversation after that, and Morrigan wasn’t at all sorry about it … even though she was sure she hadn’t yet heard the full story. The moment her uncle recovered from his unsettling episode, he turned to the control deck and began pulling levers, and Arachne’s engine roared into life. The last two words he spoke to her that night were, ‘Where to?’

Morrigan almost said the Hotel Deucalion, but changed her mind at the last second. She had one last stop to make, via her Wunsoc wardrobe.

‘Darling House. But … can you take me right up to my bedroom window?’

Francis was surprisingly cool about being woken at two o’clock in the morning. At first, grumbling and rubbing sleep from his puffy eyes, he’d looked ready to slam his station door in Morrigan’s face. Her first reason for visiting – to show him the green bottle from her grandmother’s safe and see if he could confirm her suspicion about its origins – didn’t impress him much (although he graciously agreed to look into it). But when she decided to push her luck by asking for his help to bake and decorate an enormous cake, he instantly perked up and began gathering ingredients, as if he couldn’t think of a better middle-of-the-night activity. He even helped her carry the finished product back through the station and into Room 85 three hours later, before rushing home to get ready for his Sunday morning extracurricular patisserie class. (Morrigan made a mental note to do something extremely nice for Francis at her earliest opportunity.)

The cake was a big rectangular beast in Jupiter’s favourite flavour – six-layer triple chocolate fudge covered in thick, gooey ganache – and there was a long message to her patron in oozy green icing across the top. Francis had done most of the actual baking while Morrigan entertained Asparagus the schnauzer, but she’d piped all the words herself.

As the sun hadn’t yet risen, her plan was to store it in the Deucalion’s walk-in cold room until a slightly more civilised hour, when she could give it to Jupiter in person. She lugged the great chocolate monstrosity all the way down to the kitchens on her own, stopping periodically to lean against a wall and catch her breath. ( I’m going to have the biceps of a grizzly bear after this, she thought, as she struggled through the final stretch. Thaddea will be proud.)

But when she reached the kitchens, Morrigan was alarmed to find the man himself, piping bag in one hand and palette knife in the other, surrounded by gigantic mixing bowls and puddles of cake batter. He wore a checked apron over a velvet dinner jacket, both blobbed with pink and yellow icing, and his ginger hair and beard had turned ghostly white from a thick dusting of flour or icing sugar. Every surface of the kitchen was littered with the remains of many, many cakes covered in Jupiter’s delirious iced handwriting, furiously crossed out in some places and smooshed to illegibility in others. It seemed he’d been at it for some time.

The Deucalion’s head chef hovered nearby, pressing his palms together as if in prayer over the chaos in his usually pristine kitchen.

‘Captain North, I beg you. Please, please let me to assist!’

‘I DON’T NEED HELP!’ Jupiter bellowed, eyes wild. ‘I have to get this RIGHT, Philippe, and I have to do it MYSELF!’

The chef threw his hands in the air and fled, wailing as he ran straight past Morrigan without even seeing her. ‘ Never work for madman , my mother say! I should have listen her! He is MAD!’ He stormed down the hall, muttering curses in his native Serendese. (Morrigan gasped as she recognised a very rude word that Mahir had taught her.)

‘OH!’ Jupiter shouted over his shoulder at Chef Honeycutt’s retreating form. He clutched his piping bag, returning to the task at hand. ‘So, when I make two dozen cakes in one night it’s MADNESS, but when you make forty-three eye fillets with a red wine reduction it’s the DINNER SERVICE ? Bit of a DOUBLE STANDARD, PHILIPPE, IF YOU ASK ME!’

‘I drafted mine on paper before I wrote it on the cake,’ Morrigan said from the doorway.

Jupiter jumped as if her calm, quiet voice was a thunderbolt, and turned around, dropping his piping bag. It spurted a bright pink arc across the floor.

He stared at her silently, blinking for several seconds, until finally she squeaked out, ‘Could you hurry up and read this please? It’s quite heavy.’

He leaned forward, squinting suspiciously at the tiny words on top of the cake as if he thought she might have written him hate mail in the green icing. Morrigan held the behemoth patiently, her arms now shaking with the effort, and rolled her eyes as Jupiter slowly read the message under his breath:

JUPITER U REALLY R DREADFUL AT COMMUNICATION. IF U HAD JUST TOLD ME ABOUT THE LETTERS U WROTE 2 THE DARLINGS & WHAT THEY WROTE BACK I WOULD HAVE BEEN UPSET BUT I WOULD HAVE UNDERSTOOD & IN THE LONG RUN IT’S ALWAYS BETTER TO KNOW THE TRUTH. THAT SAID, I SHOULD HAVE REALISED U WOULDN’T BETRAY ME OR LIE TO ME ABOUT SOMETHING SO IMPORTANT WITHOUT A GOOD REASON & I’M SORRY I LEFT HOME TO LIVE WITH THE DARLINGS BECAUSE THEY MIGHT B MY RELATIVES BUT U R MY FAMILY. U & JACK & FEN & CHANDA & FRANK & MARTHA & CHARLIE & KEDGEREE. BUT HONESTLY NEXT TIME CAN U JUST TELL ME THE TRUTH EVEN IF IT’S HARD & U THINK IT WILL HURT MY FEELINGS BECAUSE I AM A TEENAGER NOW & I CAN HANDLE IT 4 GOODNESS SAKE U NUMPTY.

KIND REGARDS MOG.

When he got to the bit that said ‘U R MY FAMILY’, Jupiter had to stop for a moment, blinking rapidly. Morrigan busied herself with an examination of the ceiling.

‘How …’ Jupiter began hoarsely, then cleared his throat. ‘How did you make your writing stay so neat all the way to the end?’

‘It’s called having patience. You should try it.’

‘Hmm.’

He tilted his head in concession to her point then moved to take one side of the cake, and together they crab-walked it over to the countertop and set it down with a thud . Finally unburdened of the six-layer monster, Morrigan flexed her fingers and rolled her shoulders in relief. She walked around the island slowly, peering down at the smashed cakes that lay abandoned on the countertop and the floor, and reading whatever bits of iced messages she could decipher. Phrases like one of the greatest regrets of my life and no excuse whatsoever and orange-bearded ninny-headed buffoon and so so so so so so so so so so so so very sorry, so very very VERY sorry indeed jumped out at her.

Jupiter waved both hands in vague little circles above the cakes. ‘What … er, what I think I was trying to, um … to say —’

She held up a hand to stop him. ‘Oh, I think I’ve got the picture.’

‘You do?’

‘You’re not at all sorry and you absolutely refuse to apologise, right?’

‘Very funny. You read my letters?’

Morrigan swiped a bit of pink buttercream with one finger. ‘Yes. I found them in my grandmother’s – in Lady Darling’s study. I saw your name on the back and … well, obviously I had to read them. You’d have done the same.’

‘Absolutely,’ he agreed without hesitating. ‘I’m fantastically nosy.’

‘Mmm.’ Morrigan fell silent, but the moment Jupiter opened his mouth again she cut him off, forcing the words out in a rush. ‘Why’d you let me believe … Why didn’t you just tell me they didn’t want anything to do with me? I could have handled it! I’m tougher than you think.’

‘I know you are,’ he agreed mournfully. ‘But I’m not. It’s pathetic, I know, but … I couldn’t handle how angry it made me. Their casual disregard for you, their wilful ignorance of how glorious you are, how lucky they’d be to know you. And I knew, I knew if they only met you, they’d see exactly what I saw. A child who is funny and clever and kind and stubborn and thoughtful and mischievous and hilarious and … and excellent in almost every conceivable way!’

Morrigan snorted, looking away in embarrassment. He really was a bit much sometimes. ‘Shut up.’

‘You shut up. It’s true,’ Jupiter grumbled weakly. He looked down, rubbing the back of his neck. ‘I didn’t want … I mean, I shouldn’t have let you find out that way. The letters.’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘You should have told me yourself. You’ve had years , Jupiter.’

‘I know. But once they made their position clear, I just …’ He sighed, hanging his head, and rubbed a hand wearily over his eyes. ‘You already had one mostly terrible, uncaring family. Why would I hand you another, I asked myself, when you were so comfortably and blissfully unaware of their existence? You were thriving without them.

‘And I suppose … I just kept hoping they’d come round, eventually, and they’d beg your forgiveness and do everything they could to make up for lost time.’ He stopped, pressing his mouth into a straight, angry line. ‘But I should have found a way to tell you the truth, and I should have trusted you to bear it. I just …’ He trailed off, shaking his head ruefully.

‘When Aunt Margot came to the Deucalion that day,’ said Morrigan, ‘in the Smoking Parlour. When she said the Darlings didn’t know about me. You knew she was lying, and you just … you just stood there and let her lie to me.’

‘Yes.’

Her brow furrowed. ‘Even though you knew it would make you look like the bad guy. Even though you knew I’d be furious with you.’

‘Yes. I’m so sorry, Morrigan, I just—’

‘Cared more about my feelings than the truth?’ she murmured, recalling something Squall once said.

Jupiter sighed, deflating like a punctured tyre. ‘I just wanted the world to be a softer place for you.’

Morrigan found she couldn’t look at him directly just then, and went to rummage through a cutlery drawer for two forks, taking longer than strictly necessary as she blinked her traitorous eyes under control.

‘We should, um … probably get started on these.’ She thrust one fork at Jupiter and used the other to hack into the least damaged of his twenty-four attempts at her favourite cake (lemon-butter raspberry ripple with crumbled meringue pieces and raspberry cream filling).

Jupiter watched her in a weighted, worried silence as she took a second bite of cake, gripping his fork as if it might turn on him and take his eye out. Morrigan stared back at him as she chewed and swallowed. After a long, awkward moment, and a synchronised intake of breath, they both blurted out—

‘There’s something else I have to tell you.’

Another silence.

‘Er. Right. Shall I go first?’ asked Jupiter after a moment. ‘Mine’s … quite bad.’

Morrigan grimaced. ‘Mine’s not great either. But okay.’

‘I’m … ashamed to say I’ve been keeping another secret from you.’ He swallowed painfully, hands clasped. ‘Or, rather, another person —’

‘Is this about my uncle?’

The colour drained from Jupiter’s face, and he seemed to lose the power of speech.

‘My father’s brother, Bertram Crow?’ Morrigan prompted. ‘Another cursed child, whose patron smuggled him into Nevermoor?’ Jupiter remained frozen, so she went on, rather enjoying herself now. ‘Bertram Crow who’s in your Wunsoc unit and knew my mother and made you swear an oath never to tell me about him and you kept that promise all these years even though you didn’t want to because but you had no choice because brothers and sisters, loyal for life ?’ She reached her fork across the island to swipe a corner of the untouched chocolate cake. (Francis had worked hard on that. Someone should eat it.)

Jupiter stared at her, mouth opening and closing like a guppy.

‘Oh,’ she added, wiping a bit of chocolate icing from the corner of her mouth, ‘and you asked him to spy on me in the Silver District and report back to you.’

‘I— W-well. I wouldn’t say spy , exactly, more like …’ He trailed off, looking embarrassed, and cleared his throat. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘Well, you should be, because it made him look very suspicious. I thought he could be the murderer until a few hours ago.’

‘Mmm, I saw the list,’ Jupiter reminded her grimly. He looked as if he had much more to say on that topic, but was holding back for the time being. ‘Look, Birdie and I have never been great friends. But I can confidently say he’s not the murdering type. Even if he wanted to murder someone, he utterly lacks the follow-through.’

‘Birdie?’

‘That’s what we called him in school. He was Bertram, then Bert, then Bertie, then Birdie, because … well, you know.’

‘Crow.’

‘He’ll always be Birdie Crow to me, although he took our patron’s surname when he went into business – for dodgy tax reasons I presume. Styles himself BC Smithereens these days,’ Jupiter said, with an eyeroll and a little flourish.

‘You had the same patron ?’

‘He didn’t mention that? I’m not surprised, he always resented having to share anything.’ He gave her a curious look. ‘What did he tell you? How did this all come about?’

Morrigan recounted the strange events of her night, from the discovery of the letters to the siege of Beauregard House to her brief stint as a jailbird, and finally the details of her enlightening conversation with Bertram in the arachnipod.

‘That must have been a lot to take in.’ Jupiter frowned, watching her thoughtfully. ‘I thought you’d … I mean, you don’t seem … Forgive me, I thought there’d be more, sort of …’

‘Shouting?’ she suggested wryly. ‘Octopus chair?’

‘Mmm, at least.’

‘I don’t know. Finding out about Bertram … It’s not the same as with the Darlings. I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on anything, not knowing him. I’m not even sure I want to get to know him.’ She winced. ‘Does that sound bad? I just mean, he’s a bit …’

‘Disconcerting?’

‘Yeah,’ she agreed, even though the word was insufficient. ‘Being around him made me feel sort of …’

‘Sad?’

‘Yeah.’ That wasn’t quite right either. Morrigan thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done. Not with Bertram … or with the Darlings.’ She looked up at Jupiter just in time to see his shoulders drop, finally relieved of a weight they’d been carrying for three years. ‘I think sometimes there is no right choice.’

Once again Jupiter looked like he might cry, but instead he shoved a heaping, gooey forkful of cake into his mouth.

‘I dun deverve thif cake,’ he mumbled through chocolate-ganache-covered teeth. ‘Buh I’m gad I haff it.’

‘You can thank Francis later.’

‘I wiww. And liffen,’ he said, swallowing as he tapped a section of the green icing letter with his fork, ‘about this bit. Leaving home, not realising I wouldn’t betray you, not realising I wouldn’t lie without a good reason – you don’t need to apologise for any of that. I’m the grown-up here. It’s not your responsibility to read my mind, Morrigan.’

‘Mog,’ she corrected him quietly.

His eyebrows shot upwards. ‘You sure?’

She nodded briskly and stabbed a bit of lemon raspberry cake, grasping for a change of subject as she felt her cheeks grow warm. ‘Do you think we should just write notes next time? Like normal people?’

‘Yes, or a nice card perhaps,’ Jupiter murmured in agreement. He licked a bit of green icing off his thumb, nodding at the cake carnage. ‘But it wouldn’t taste as good.’ He got to his feet, sighing reluctantly as he checked the time. ‘Time to go, I’m afraid. The Guiltghast task force is meeting early to prepare for tonight. Lots to do.’

‘Oh, you volunteered for that?’ Morrigan said, pushing crumbs around her plate. ‘Just what you need. I’ve always said you’re too idle.’

Jupiter rolled his eyes fondly. ‘Ha, ha. I only volunteered because … well, I … didn’t think I’d get to see you on your birthday.’ His face flushed a little. ‘Thought I might need the distraction.’

‘What a fun and terrifying distraction,’ Morrigan said dubiously. ‘Conall’s plan is going to work, isn’t it?’

‘Honestly, I don’t know. I fear we might have bitten off more than we can chew with the Guiltghast.’ He frowned, then noticed her matching look of worry and tried to brighten up a little. ‘I’m sure it will be fine, Mog. Just have to keep our wits about us, that’s all! And tomorrow we can celebrate your birthday properly.’

Morrigan pointed her fork at the cakes. ‘Haven’t we just celebrated?’

He scoffed. ‘This isn’t birthday cake!’

‘It’s birthday ish .’

‘You really think Frank would let you turn fourteen without a shindig of some description? Shins will be dug, believe me.’ Jupiter untied his apron and attempted to bat the flour from his beard. ‘Before I go, what was it you wanted to tell me?’

Morrigan’s mouth hung open slightly. She’d been so relieved to have patched things up, she hadn’t even told him the most important thing yet. The worst thing. Now he had to prepare for Operation Guiltghast, and he was already anxious about the task force needing to keep their wits about them , and having perhaps bitten off more than they could chew …

And suddenly, she realised she couldn’t tell him. Not today. If she told him about Squall and the apprenticeship right now, it would be all he could think about. How could she risk distracting him when the stakes were so high, and the consequences so dire if a single thing went wrong?

‘It can wait,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you everything tomorrow.’

And, for the first time since signing the contract, Morrigan believed her own promise.