It wasn’t possible. To hold even three or four cards as if they were one was a delicate enough act, but to manipulate that many with two fingers and thumb? With a crowd surrounding him on three sides? It was no card trick she had ever seen before.
Her breath hitched. Perhaps the boy wasn’t ordinary. Perhaps he was like her.
The owner of the wallet now in Ilsa’s purse was shifting as if he’d noticed something awry. Any moment now, his hands would go to his pockets.
“Ilsa,” Martha hissed urgently, but Ilsa couldn’t move. The boy finished his act by tossing the entire deck into the air and letting his cards rain down on the audience. She tried to keep her eyes fixed on a single card as it descended, but amidst the motion of the crowd as they patted themselves down and searched around their feet, she lost it – and all fifty-one others.
The realisation among the punters was slow, and met with nervous laughter. The cards had vanished. The crowd had seen them – heard them – fall all around, and now they weren’t there. It was too unreal to be a trick, and not fantastic enough to be real magic.
Or so the crowd thought. Ilsa, on the other hand, had seen real magic. She had performed it herself. As the onlookers dispersed – Martha slipping away with them as their victim looked frantically about – Ilsa cornered the boy magician. He was scooping up his cap, in a hurry to leave, but she stalled him by fumbling in her bag and gathering some stolen change.
“That weren’t just a card trick, was it?” she said. The boy blinked in surprise but didn’t answer. His hands shook as he collapsed his tiny folding table. “I know it weren’t. I know what you did.” It wasn’t true. She was mystified. But she could see her chance disappearing, and she was desperate.
“Please—” she began, but he was already running. If he vanished, she might never know, so she gripped her skirt in one hand and took off after him.
The afternoon matinees were letting out, and the West End streets were teeming with people. Ilsa couldn’t move quickly, but neither could the boy. He took the first turn he came to, and as Ilsa rounded the corner after him, she saw him dash into a narrow alley.
She had been him once. She had hidden from both coppers and other thieves – not to mention pimps and drunkards – in the secret corners of these streets, and she knew that unless he planned to climb the wall and sneak into the Beringer Hotel, the alley was a dead end.
With soft breaths and softer footsteps, she approached the corner. But he must have heard her anyway, because he bolted from the alley and nearly escaped again. Ilsa snatched at his jacket collar, nearly missing, and yanked him backwards hard enough that he lost his footing. His folding table clattered on the cobblestones.
“—the bloody ’ell off me!” he yelled as he struggled.
“Who are you? Where’re you from?” She stood him upright and shook him as though the answers might fall out. “I got some money. Please.”
“Ilsa?”
Ilsa jumped and spun around, but she kept her hold on the kid. Martha stood in the entrance to the alley, gripping the wall for support, her cheeks flushed from the effort of the chase. Her brow was knitted in confusion as she looked from Ilsa to the boy she was accosting and back again. “What’re you—”
Martha’s eyes grew wide and she cut off just as Ilsa felt the boy slip from her grasp. She made to grab him – only he’d vanished as completely as his pack of cards. Her fingers clutched at nothing. The alley was deserted save for the two of them.
Ilsa didn’t have time to process this; she knew what was coming next. She lunged for her friend and clapped a hand to the other girl’s mouth before Martha could let out a cry. “Don’t go bringing no coppers down on us, Martha. Not when I got some fella’s wallet in my bag.”
Martha made a smothered shriek of protest and pointed to where the kid had vanished.
“It’s a trick,” Ilsa lied. “Not even a clever one. I do it myself, every night of the show.”
Martha wrenched her hand away. “That weren’t no trick,” she said, eyes sparkling with unguarded awe, and a hint of fear. “Madam Rosalie told me about beings like that. It was a spirit messenger! From the beyond!”
Ilsa cringed. She knew better than to discount such possibilities, but if Madam Rosalie was correct then it was entirely by accident, as the woman was a charlatan. Ilsa had told Martha so, and Martha had rolled her eyes and called her a sceptic. She couldn’t guess how closely Ilsa had studied the medium. How she’d watched the woman’s ‘niece’ – Ilsa had no doubt the girl was in the medium’s pay – shift slyly in front of the trick wall of their parlour to let a draft gutter the candle flames at the precise moment. How she could tell from the set of Rosalie’s fingers that she was guiding the planchette across the Ouija board as her guests gasped.
Martha’s revered medium was one of the hundreds of dead ends Ilsa had reached in her search for answers. And while she hadn’t ruled out the existence of spirit messengers or those who could build a bridge
