Albert Garrick hammed it up for Chevie, striking a pose, then he gave a deep bow.

“Albert Garrick, West End illusionist and assassin-for-hire at your service, young lady—come down the chimney to introduce myself proper.”

As he bowed, a drop of someone else’s blood fell from his nose, landing on Chevie’s forehead, and she was struck to her core with a terror that she could barely contain.

“Now I understand,” she said.

Victoriana

LONDON. 1898

Albert Garrick had been apprenticed to the Great Lombardi for more than ten years, and in that time the little Italian became like a second father to the orphan boy. But young Albert never forgot his first father, who had killed for him, and it was years before the nightmares of those cholera days in the Old Nichol faded and he stopped worrying every time a patch of dry skin appeared on his elbow or his eyes seemed a little sunken.

Lombardi worked him hard but was not cruel and never once struck him unless he deserved it. They traveled the length and breadth of England, working the theaters, and once even took the Boulogne ferry for a summer season in Paris’s Théâtre Italien, where sections of Lombardi’s act were woven into a street scene for a Verdi opera. Lombardi wept at the final curtain every night and often told young Albert that he saw working with Verdi as the crowning achievement of his career.

“I have searched all my life for real magic,” he said some years later as he lay dying from tuberculosis in their digs in Newcastle upon Tyne. “And I found it in the music of Verdi. An Italian. Dio lo benedica.”

Lombardi died that night, forcing his apprentice to appear in his stead at the Journal. The night was not an unqualified success, but many of the doves survived, which encouraged young Albert to adopt the Lombardi name and to fulfill his master’s engagements.

Garrick inherited not only his master’s bookings but his assistant, too. Sabine was the most exotic and beautiful creature Albert had ever seen, and he’d been in love with her since that first day, when he had watched, slack jawed, as she emerged unscathed from Lombardi’s Egyptian saw-box.

THE GARDEN HOTEL, MONMOUTH STREET. LONDON. NOW

And now, in the Garden Hotel, Garrick felt an echo of the passion of his youth as he took his first proper look at Chevron Savano.

She looks like Sabine, thought Garrick, gazing down at the girl.

He cupped Chevie’s jaw in his hand, tilting it back. It’s uncanny, the resemblance.

And another part of his brain told him, There’s a passing likeness, nothing more. Garrick was shaken, all the same. His resolution to pierce this maid’s heart had evaporated like morning mist.

What is happening to me?

Garrick bowed once more to Chevie. “Beg pardon, Miss Savano. I need a moment to gather my thoughts.”