“Oh good,” Sophie said wryly. “Something to look forward to.”
Her father laughed. “See? Three months ago you wouldn’t have made that joke. You’re getting better every moment.” He squeezed her hands. “And let’s say the worst happens. Let’s say the concert goes terribly. You forget your music, the crowd throws vegetables, a storm blows in and tears the roof off the concert hall—”
“Someone interrupts my performance and denounces me as a fraud,” Sophie muttered.
“—at least you’ll know you tried,” Mr. Roseingrave said gently. He squeezed her hands to emphasize his point. “It might be worth a little failure to learn how strong you truly are.”
For the next part of the swindle, they needed to make an impossible fabric. So Maddie invited Sophie, Miss Slight, and Mr. Frampton up to her attic, to show them precisely how a Jacquard loom worked so that they might devise a convincing impossible process with which to cheat Mr. Giles.
And then, because it was the end of a long, bleak winter, she decided to make it a party.
Maddie made the room festive with unsold ribbons and silk scraps, and Sophie brought lamps to brighten the attic to its corners. The odd blue silk made a dazzling cover for a small table heaped with pies, and beer was served in whatever mismatched glasses people chose to bring along with them.
By sunset, the attic was full and chattering, the noise a chorus above the beat of the silk mill thrumming through the house. John had stayed below to finish a difficult pair of slippers, but Emma had persuaded Cat to take a glass with her; the two sat on the bed with their knees tucked up, laughing at something Judith Wegg was saying. Alice Bilton joined Miss Slight, Mr. Frampton, and a bright-eyed Sophie as Maddie demonstrated the working of the loom and the action of the Jacquard head.
Mr. Frampton, it transpired, was familiar with the theory of M. Jacquard’s invention, but not the practice. “Show us again,” Mr. Frampton asked, watching keenly.
Maddie flicked her wrist and sent the shuttle—threadless—flying through the shed. The pedal shifted the warp threads—the up went down, and the down went up—and the beater pressed the weaving tight and ready for the next thread row. Another flick and pass of the shuttle, another thump of the beater.
The mathematician nodded. “I assume you’ll want something more showy than substantive?”
“I agree,” Miss Slight put in. “You need the Jacquard head because its presence tells Mr. Giles that the process is a fast one. He’ll know that much about the machinery, I’m sure. But you need the illusion to behere,” she said, pointing to the shed—the space between warp threads where the shuttle flew back and forth. “This is where his focus will be, so this is where you want the trick to happen.”
“You have to decide what you want it to look like first,” Alice put in expertly. “Always start with the sparkle, that’s what Wizard Falcetti used to say.”
Maddie’s hand tightened on the handle of the loom cord. “I want it to dazzle him,” she said, low and fierce. “I want it to be so beautiful that he can’t resist it, and so impossible that only sheer greed persuades him of its truth.”
“If it’s beauty you want,” said Mr. Frampton, “then Miss Slight is your expert. I’ve never seen mechanisms as lovely and elegant as the ones she builds.”
Miss Slight’s blush was a lush and lovely thing. She turned wide, pleased eyes on Mr. Frampton, who went ruddy under her gaze but offered her a shy smile in return.
Alice elbowed Judith, who snorted, and the spell was broken.
Miss Slight traced her clock maker’s hands over the warp threads. Maddie hadn’t changed them out for the new season yet: they were still the soft cream she’d used as a background hue for gold brocade ribbons. “What if you had the full spectrum of hues showing—but only here? The resulting fabric stark white. Like a prism in reverse.”
“That would save us having to purchase dyed silk thread, at least,” Maddie murmured.
Alice leaned forward to peer up into the mechanism. “Could we put a magic lantern in the Jacquard head? The Wizard Falcetti used one for some of his effects. Easy enough to paint panes of colored glass and turn undyed silk a whole rainbow of colors.”
“Yes!” Mr. Frampton leaned forward. His voice warmed with excitement. “You’ve got the holes and the punch cards already—why not make them work for you?”
“How do you mean?” Maddie asked.
“The cards already pass in front of the lantern. The holes block or allow light from certain panes. Certain colors.” He let his hand hover over the warp. “Not just a rainbow: a rainbow in motion.”
“We could go even further with that,” Miss Slight put in. “There are certain ways of arranging colors next to one another so that they appear to move and shimmer, even when they are quite still. They can quite confuse the eye.” Her smile was broad now, her gray eyes sparking with excitement. “The harder he looks, the less he’ll see what you’re actually doing.”
“But how do we explain it to Mr. Giles?” Maddie said. “We need the story to go with the show.”
“Resonance.” This from Sophie, who’d been standing silent at Maddie’s elbow until now. She stepped forward, her musician’s hand stroking the warp threads as though they were a harp. “You’ve got these strings in every color. You tell him that’s the special dye Mr. Money discovered. But it’s not stable on its own: it only fixes into one hue when a magnet is passed over it.” She tapped the shuttle. “You fix a magnet here—maybe with a wire or two, for show.”
Maddie felt like the idea was so close to complete that she could reach out and take it in her hand. “So how do we explain the color change of the finished fabric?” Maddie asked.
“Chemical affinity?” Mr. Frampton suggested. “Or perhaps—something about tuning the dye to a particular frequency.”
“What beautiful nonsense,” Miss Slight said. “I rather wish it were true.”
Maddie nodded sharply. “That’s perfect. That’s the feeling we want him to have. He’s an opportunist—we want him so focused on reaching out to seize this chance that he overlooks any risks or dangers.”
