The first time she had finally become a bird, Ilsa had been nauseated by the feeling. Eight years later, she had grown to appreciate it. It was the proof of what her body could do, a pittance of a price to pay for a thing so powerful: her freedom. Her power to cheat the laws of the universe at their own game.
As Balthazar raised a large black cloth like a bullfighter, she soared, unseen, to the ceiling of the auditorium, and prepared to make her grand entrance over the heads of the audience.
“Allow me to introduce my current partner in crime while she is still breathing. My dearest Ilsa, where are you?”
She swooped to the stage, straight at Balthazar and his outstretched cloth. Darkness descended when the material fluttered over her tiny dove form. But she was no longer a bird. The audience gasped when the fabric fell on the figure of a woman – gasps that turned to riotous applause when the magician swept the cloth away, and Ilsa raised her arms triumphantly and beamed her biggest smile into the blackness beyond the lights.
As far as they would ever know, it was the second most astonishing magic trick in all of London.
The first was yet to come.
3
Delivery was everything. Even with The Great Balthazar’s impossible illusions and show-stealing assistant, they would never threaten the box-office of London’s best magic shows. They were the one act in town every critic agreed on: awkward and lacklustre, Balthazar’s days were numbered.
And it meant Ilsa’s were too. She was regularly offered better pay by better magicians who hoped to lure both the captivating assistant and Blume’s methods onto another stage. Little did they know, Ilsa was his method. Not only that, but she was all the charisma and allure of his act. She was everything that kept him on the billing. Blume needed her, but the real reason they would go down together was this: Ilsa would go back to picking pockets before she told another living soul what she could do.
She held a smile on her face and feigned gusto, as always, as The Great Balthazar fumbled and slurred his way through the set. He drew belongings from his top hat and returned them to their bemused owners in the audience; things Ilsa had slipped from their pockets in the foyer. He sawed her in half. He made her “vanish”, and she would become a mouse, and scuttle unseen to the other side of the stage to reappear. Ilsa’s skills let them perform the illusions in a way no other act could: over and over in rapid succession. She would bounce around the stage and the auditorium like a rubber ball. It was her favourite part of every evening.
They ran through their mix of standard magician’s tricks and real sorcery to middling applause, but as the audience sensed the big finish looming, the excitement in the auditorium crackled. This was what they came for: the most unforgettable magic trick they would ever see.
As Balthazar began his monologue about mystic teleportation, Ilsa hid herself beneath a hooded cloak and shifted again. Rival magician’s spies had been known to crop up in the corridors as Ilsa was getting into position, and so they enlisted some of Mr Johnston’s men as sentinels. One acted as a bodyguard to the cloaked, anonymous figure who climbed from below stage to the door of the box. He left her at the near end of the corridor, while another stood guard at the opposite end. When Ilsa was alone, she shed the cloak, and underneath she wore The Great Balthazar’s red beard and gangly limbs; his straight, proud nose and his finely wrinkled skin.
She straightened her white gloves and smoothed her emerald waistcoat. It took a great deal of concentration to shift her clothing, but this too, she had perfected – it was better than leaving a duplicate of Blume’s costume lying around the dressing room. Then she took the compact mirror from her breast pocket and checked her accuracy. From a distance, blanched by the spotlight, the minute twitches that cursed all her borrowed faces would be invisible. Nevertheless, she massaged her jaw in a futile attempt to smooth them away. The twitching aside, it was perfect.
All apart from the eyes. Blume’s were blue; Ilsa’s were not.
It had taken a lifetime to perfect, and a great deal of observation, but Ilsa could perform magic on every other part of her body. She could grow her hair until it trailed along the floor. She could fatten herself until she was too heavy to stand. She could – and it was a point of pride – be an anatomically correct man, thanks to threepence, a fellow street urchin named Tom, and a deal that would have cost her one hundred Hail Marys back at the orphanage.
But whether she was The Great Balthazar, Queen Victoria, a dove, a bloodhound, or a ferret, her eyes were always stubbornly, distinctively hazel.
Ilsa tucked the mirror away and was listening for her cue when she felt a prickle on the back of her neck. She spun around, stomach plummeting, expecting to find someone behind her – but the corridor was deserted. She peered this way and that, listening hard, but even as she proved to her eyes and ears that she was alone, another sense told her otherwise.
Ilsa knew when she was being watched. It was something one learned fast when swiping coin purses and pocket watches on crowded streets. Yet even as the hairs on her neck stood higher, the uncanny surety growing, she was unprepared when she finally saw him. He appeared in the corner of her vision as he emerged right from the wall: a man in a long black coat, with a flash of metal at his belt. In the sliver of time it took her to turn
