Page 8 of The Trick of It

Carpe Noctem.

“Be uffar?!” he muttered to himself.

Welsh, tutored and perfected under a noblewoman’s care, which translated to What the hell?!

He forced himself to swallow and pushed the card to the side. Staring down at the still-sealed parcel that remained.

This one was creamy, glossy paper in a deep, emerald green. It had a white wax seal on the back.

And most importantly, it was not addressed to Rhys at all.

It was, instead, addressed to the very last person in all of Brighton to whom he wished to speak. It was addressed to his nemesis. His rival. The woman who existed simply to make his life more difficult.

There, in a glinting ribbon of ivory ink, read the addressee:

Miss Persephone’s Oddities and Curiosities

Attn: Miss Persephone Boswell—Brighton’s Premiere Illusionist

(Invitation Enclosed)

Chapter Two

Miss Persephone’s Oddities and Curiosities was closed on Sundays.

Ostensibly, this was because Sunday was for attending mass. Never mind that in the eleven years Seph’s caravan had been stuck in Brighton, they’d never once been allowed into a mass house, even with other Irish. Never mind that at all.

They’d had a sort of observational collective near their settlement over the years. Not every Sunday, of course, but many of them. Saints’ days especially. Twice on Christmas.

But her curio cabinet was closed on Sundays, despite all that.

It was the day to be closed, and that was all there was to say about it.

Used to be, she used Sunday to visit her family, even if there was no mass. But the caravan had finally moved on, almost a month ago now, for the first time in a decade. The war had been over for long enough for things to begin to return to normalcy on the caravan route. Paris was open again. And the Channel wasn’t getting any warmer.

Seph, however, had stayed.

She’d stayed because of the shop. And because of the apartment above the shop. And because she hadn’t lived as a nomad for even a single day of her adult life.

She stayed and it had cost her.

But even so, she was closed on Sundays.

It gave Seph time to stock inventory, to run to the docks and intercept new shipments, to do her numbers, and to dust the damn place for once.

Today, she was hanging up a sign. A new sign. One she’d ordered back in July that had taken its sweet time being made. She was doing so alone, wearing an old pair of her cousin’s cast-off trousers, suspenders pulled as tight as they would go as the garment sagged around her waist.

She had an old hammer. She had a stepladder. And she had hands.

What Persephone Boswell didn’t have was patience.

The sign was teak wood, polished, carved, and painted. It had come with two holes in the top for the hooks she’d hung from the rafters. It read Edible Oddities in bright, red paint.

And it would finally replace the paper sign she’d had on a stick for the last six months.

The sign kept getting oddly shriveled, surrounded as it was by tins of sugar and oil and acid. She’d had to replace it half a dozen times already.

The display was a good one. The products were selling. The only problem was the damn sign. And the too-big trousers. And the uneven stepladder.