Martha didn’t miss the look on her face. “You still don’t believe!” She pointed to the spot where the boy had vanished. “Well, what do you think just happened?” Then her gaze turned suspicious. “And why’d you take off after him, anyhow?”
Ilsa took Martha’s arm and tugged her away from the alley, but she was just trying to buy herself time to put together a lie.
Martha was a confidante and a true friend; the first girl she had come to ally with when she moved in across the way from her in a bottom-of-the-barrel boarding house. Two years older than Ilsa, Martha had taken it upon herself to watch out for the new arrival, and had inserted herself into Ilsa’s life the day she arrived.
“Where’re your family?” she’d asked, poking through the sad contents of the carpet bag containing everything Ilsa owned.
“Don’t have none.”
“I’m an orphan too,” said Martha with a grin so cheery that Ilsa could see right through it. She knew they were alike even before the other girl had plonked herself down on the narrow bed and shared her story. They had both lived on the streets; Martha after her mother had died, and Ilsa when she had run away from the orphanage where she had grown up. They had both picked pockets to scrape by, and been good enough at it to avoid the pimps. Those were the hardships she knew Martha could relate to, but the strangest of Ilsa’s secrets? Those, she couldn’t bring herself to share.
Because Ilsa had her own ideas about what they had just witnessed. Ideas she loathed but couldn’t shake. They had been planted in her mind by the woman who had raised her, the matron of the orphanage Ilsa had fled from at the age of nine.
Devil’s get, she’d called Ilsa.
Any desire to tell Martha the truth fled at the sight of Ilsa’s memories. To the matron, mysticism and mediums were nearly the pinnacle of evil, second only to Ilsa – a child of the devil’s earthly realm, told this back when she was too small to question what even the cruellest of adults said. She thought it was from the Bible, like everything else the matron subscribed to, but when she’d worked up the courage to talk to a priest, he’d known of no concept like the devil’s earthly realm.
Ilsa knew she wasn’t evil. She didn’t go to church, nor study the Bible, and she cursed, and lied; and yes, perhaps she had stolen from a man that very day just to be petty, but those were the worst of her sins. And yet the suspicion that there was some truth in the awful things the matron had hissed at her – Demon. Devil’s get – clawed at the back of her mind. At the heart of Ilsa’s search for answers, it was the theory she needed to prove or disprove. For if there was no such thing as the devil’s earthly realm, then what was she? And if there was… what was she then?
Martha was still waiting for an answer and Ilsa wanted to give her the truth, but every time she thought of confiding in her friend, the very worst possibilities reared their heads. Martha would tell and the wrong person would find out. Miss Mitcham would hear of it and track Ilsa down. Most of all she could not stand to think that Martha herself would be afraid of her if she learned the true nature of Ilsa’s magic.
“Thought I knew him, was all,” Ilsa lied, her heart heavy.
“Break a leg,” said Martha a short while later when they stopped outside the Isolde Theatre. “The shop”, they called it when they were pretending they had more respectable jobs. Martha’s shop was the busy thoroughfares of Soho, where she stumbled into drunkards, batted her lashes, and helped herself to their belongings. “Oh lord, Ilsa. Let me fix your hair.” She started pushing pins back into place around Ilsa’s ears.
“I’ll redo it inside. Yours is worse,” Ilsa warned her. Their nearly identical golden-blonde hair often had them mistaken for sisters, but Martha’s was finer, and right then it was bursting from its pins in a halo of wispy curls.
Martha snorted a laugh. “Ain’t no one going to notice.”
Ilsa knew Martha would forget about the boy. She would tell her friends she saw a spirit messenger, they would shriek and ask questions, someone would suggest a séance, and then the story would fall into myth like every other, to be recounted piecemeal by a friend’s sister’s husband’s cousin next time something supernatural happened.
But pickpocketing came with real dangers, like the gaol. Ilsa squeezed Martha’s hand and kissed her on the cheek. Every time she saw her off, she wondered if this was the night she wouldn’t return. She had tried to get her work at the Isolde more than once, but the manager, Mr Johnston, must have suspected her for a thief, or perhaps even a prostitute, because he found her “unsuitable”. Instead, she persuaded Martha to take scraps from her plate on the weeks when she couldn’t afford meals at the house. They managed that way. They were both better fed sharing two plates a day than they had been as street urchins.
“Be safe, Martha,” she said. The other girl shot her a weak grin and hurried on down the street. When she had vanished in the crowd, Ilsa swallowed her fears for her, went into the theatre and slipped backstage.
2
Ilsa could put Martha out of her mind, but the boy who had vanished from between her fingers was not easily forgotten.
Her years of chasing clues had helped her recognise when she needed to charm someone. She was usually sweeter; asked better questions. But she had panicked.
She could make herself disappear if she wanted to,
