“I wish I could say the same,” said Nancy’s daughter, Jane, as she bustled into the kitchen to put on her own apron. “I’m starving!”
Miriam’s “cousin” had obviously gotten up early to set herself to rights. Jane’s hair was coiffed and shining, and she was already dressed, nicely, in a dark gray skirt and a fashionably stark white blouse. The cardigan she wore over it was also gray, but the color of smoke rather than charcoal.
Miriam unconsciously glanced down at her tweedy ankle-length skirt. It was one of Nancy’s hemmed and patched-up hand-me-downs, lumpy and too large but suitable for keeping her calves free of muck when she went out to the barns or her legs warm as she worked in the lab and Library. She’d not thought of dressing for Edith’s arrival; perhaps she should have.
“Is it ready?” asked Jane, reaching for the tea before she even really sat down. “I think I shall starve to death if I have to wait any longer!”
“Must you be so dramatic?” said Nancy, turning around with a tray full of bacon and toast, which she set down in the center of the scarred wooden kitchen table alongside the small pat of butter they must share. Jane scowled at the word dramatic and slurped her tea.
“A lady is as a lady does,” remarked Nancy airily, as if this wisdom had just come to her mind unprovoked. At last she sat down and poured herself a cup of tea. Then, from a pocket in her apron, she withdrew a little dropper bottle of smoked glass. She squeezed a bit of clear fluid into her tea before taking her first sip, doctoring the beverage not with milk and sugar, as Miriam liked it, but with a distillate of the essence of her demon, the Patron of Curiosity.
In order for diabolists to comfortably maintain contact with their demons, they had to regularly consume their essences. Every diabolist had their preferred way of doing so, some more elaborate or decadent than others. Nancy, being a no-muss, no-fuss sort of woman, produced a tincture from the unusually beautiful and robust chives she cultivated in pots on her sunniest windowsill.
“And speaking of dressing nicely,” said Nancy, after taking a sip, “I don’t know why you’ve done that so early. You still have to dust and sweep, you know! I won’t have you begging off smartening up the house just because you’ve already smartened up yourself.”
“But I dusted and swept yesterday!” cried Jane.
“It could do with another going-over. This time, use the dust rag on the woodwork instead of talking to it like it’s Clark Gable.”
For a while now it had been Jane’s joy to go see every picture she could at the theatre in Ambleside. She talked endlessly to Miriam about the sophistication and beauty of the women on the silver screen, but Miriam had only Jane’s word for how wonderful they were. She had never gone. It was five miles to Ambleside, and the thought of the bus made Miriam dizzy. In a way, though, she felt she’d seen Meet Me in St. Louis, Cover Girl, and other films; Jane liked to talk over the plots after she got back, doing impressions of the actresses Miriam knew only from still photographs in Jane’s magazines.
Jane was good at impressions—so good she’d managed to incorporate a few little turns of speech and gestures into her everyday manners. And as they were at that age where it was common for girls to quickly become young ladies, only Miriam was pained by her friend growing up.
Nancy, for her part, seemed to find it amusing.
“Edith won’t arrive until around two, so you’ve plenty of time to do your chores and reapply that lipstick before we leave if it gets smudged. Yes, I noticed,” said Nancy, who disapproved of cosmetics. Miriam thought that a bit funny, given that Nancy was a Master diabolist; most people would likely see trafficking with demons as a far greater offense against nature than a bit of mascara.
Jane looked like a little girl as she sullenly poked at her breakfast.
“You’ll trip over that lip if you don’t pick it up,” said Nancy, but her teasing did little to mollify her daughter. “Oh, come now. What would your beloved Edith have to say if she saw you like that?”
“Mother!”
That was another change—Jane had always called her mother “Mum” until lately.
“Oh, come now. If you’d known Edie as long as I have, you wouldn’t feel there was some great need to make yourself up for her,” said Nancy. “She was once your age, you know—and a lot wilder and more scabby-kneed than either of you.”
“Scabby-kneed!”
Miriam was now the sullen one as she stared at her plate. Jane’s affected horror at this information exasperated her. Why should it surprise Jane that Edith had had to put away childish things, just like anyone else? Did Jane really believe her aunt had sprung forth into the world as a stylish adult?
And anyway, squeamishness was not for the ambitious when it came to the Art. Master diabolists saved their hair trimmings, their nail clippings, their scabs, sometimes even their menstrual fluid—anything that could become infused with the essences that diabolists regularly consumed to maintain their connection with their demons. Some diabolists had been known to harvest permanent parts of their own bodies in the service of empowering a particularly powerful preparation—such things could be rendered down to enhance the overall potency of diabolic armamentaria. Scabby knees weren’t a patch on, say, extracting one’s own perfectly healthy molar.
But Miriam didn’t say any of this. She took a discreet, calming breath and pushed her annoyance and anger down inside her, where the shadow within her welcomed her feelings with open arms.
“Edie played rugby with our brothers until the day she moved away,” said Nancy.
“And yet she seems so civilized. I suppose there’s hope for me yet,” said Jane, before finally stabbing a piece of bacon with her fork.
“Oh, no,” said Nancy, with an appraising look at her daughter. “There’s no hope for you—or there won’t be if you don’t finish your breakfast and your chores.”
Jane’s childish, long-suffering sigh made Miriam smile to herself, but she quickly sobered when her aunt turned her attention to her.
“Aren’t you excited about Edith’s visit, Miriam?”
Nancy’s question caught her off guard.
“Of course I’m excited,” she said, but when that sounded a bit flabby even to her own ears, Miriam added, “I’ve been wanting to ask Edith about her research into diabolically enhanced cosmetics. I think it might help me understand the theory behind the Fifth Transmutation.”
This was all true. The only lie was in what she’d omitted.
“Oh, I’d like to hear that too.” Jane wasn’t pouting now. She was bright, alert, and focused: the Jane that Miriam liked.
Jane was also an apprentice diabolist. They’d learned side by side since Miriam had come to stay, but they couldn’t be more different. Where Miriam was pleased to think through the theoretical aspects of an act of diablerie before attempting it, Jane jumped right in to learn how deep the water was.
“The Fifth Transmutation is necessary when attempting Campanella’s Substantive Exchange,” said Jane. Jane was currently working her way through the Twelve Transmutations, a set of practical exercises. “I can’t quite parse it, and I’d like to see a practical demonstration. The Grimoire Italien says that demonic vapors and their impure properties are beneficial, but it’s not clear if it means for the demon or the diabolist.”