Lavinia Petronilla Scalara (donnapericolosa) wrote in lightning_war, @ 2008-11-06 10:56:00 |
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Current mood: | working |
Early Wednesday evening, 16 September 1942, at Lavinia Scalara's office in the War Bureau...
“Mrs Scalara, Mr Rosenthal to see you,” said the girl, whose name Lavinia had to wrack her brain to remember—oh, yes, Maddy Grey. It was strange, having her own office after being at the War Bureau less than a month, having people who worked for and with her instead of sharing Edward’s reception area with Penelope Davies. But it was better, too. She and Penny could work together, but they would never be friends, and she needed Miss Grey and Mrs Levy to keep track of the minor details so she could work out the big picture.
Vince had obviously caught the last train from Bletchley and was even a little windblown, but Lavinia teased him anyway. “It would be just like you to make it in here just as I’m getting ready to pack everything in,” she said, shaking her head. “Are you trying to get yourself invited to dinner?” Of course she would feed him, there was a meeting—but his father was a much better cook. Just not a better baker. “Michel’s in his office and he’s not invited to this conversation just yet, but he’s got a stack of letters from his little girlfriend so I think he’ll be all right for a while.”
“Girlfriend, huh?” Vince asked, amused. Michel hadn’t had a girlfriend in ages—not for at least five or six years—and he certainly hadn’t mentioned one. He was in for some teasing. “No, much as I enjoy your cooking, I don’t think I have time for it. Séverine and de Valois were last seen trying to leave Armorica, but that was over two weeks ago, and nobody’s heard anything since.”
“Oh, he doesn’t know she’s his girlfriend yet, but she is,” said Lavinia, chuckling. “I don’t know if she knows or not. They’ve been writing to each other at least three times a day since she surfaced.” She rolled her eyes in the direction of Michel’s office. “Sit down, Vince, you’ve got time to talk to me and I’m fairly sure you even have time to eat. I need to pick your brains and I need to do some charts as well. Michel can do the arithmancy and I’ll do the astrology—but not before I’ve asked you some questions.”
Vince nodded and sat down. “Go ahead.”
“Are you sure that the birth data your brother has for Séverine and Juliana is accurate?” Lavinia asked pointedly. “Séverine more than Juliana. He got the latest data for Juliana directly from her, and she believes it’s accurate.”
Vince frowned thoughtfully. “If he says it is, I’d trust him. He knows how important that sort of thing is to your work.”
“I trust him. I even trust your girls,” said Lavinia. “But birth data is not something we can record for ourselves and you know what their family was like. I’m sure his rectification skills are quite good, I just want to know if there is any chance these charts are turning out the way they are because of rectification errors.”
Vince nodded. “I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets when I say that Séverine is no Malfoy. Her family would have lied if they thought there was any advantage to that, but I’m not sure what that would have been in her case. Is there any way you can tell? Maybe, I don’t know, run some calculations about something I should know about and have me confirm whether they match up?”
Lavinia sighed. That was what rectification was. “Michel and I have done that. I just don’t like the results. Your girl’s in the Channel Islands somewhere. Or rather she will be, sometime between Saturday night and Sunday morning. Right now she’s not anywhere. Right now, she doesn’t exist. Everything’s void of course in the horaries; we get equations that can’t be resolved. In order to get any meaningful results at all for the next three days, I have to do the harmonic charts. It is as though she has died, or been bodily assumed to some other sphere of the World-Tree.”
Vince frowned. “Doesn’t exist?” he echoed, and very carefully closed off his emotions, concentrating only on the cold hard facts, sparse and inconclusive though they were. “That doesn’t sound good. But you know where she will be?”
“That’s right,” said Lavinia. “It doesn’t make sense.” She searched his face, wondering what he was thinking, wishing that she were a mesmerist like her Edward was, able to see into men’s minds through their eyes.
Vince shook his head and grinned. “I’m used to trusting things that don’t make sense. It does worry me a bit to hear you say it, though. But if we can’t find her, what are the chances that the enemy can’t either?” He was determined to put the most positive spin on it possible.
“What are the chances that the enemy sent her wherever it is that she’s…not?” Lavinia countered, frowning.
Vince frowned. “I’m not sure even my brother could calculate those odds,” he said. “We just don’t have enough information. I do know the Germans are moving mundanes, especially foreign nationals, off the islands, so I don’t think it would make sense for them to be sending her there.”
Lavinia sighed. Vince did most of his work in mundane space with mundane affairs and, while he’d travelled through Faerie often enough, was never going to really understand the difference between arcane space and mundane space, other than that there were doors he could see and open that mundanes could not. That was okay, she supposed; it wasn’t his job to understand those things. It was hers, and his brother’s. “I agree. I didn’t mean that the enemy would have sent her to the Channel Islands, I meant that they sent her wherever it is that she isn’t existing, right now. I don’t think she’s meant to end up in Guernsey or Jersey; I just think she will. They mean for her not to come back here from wherever it is that she isn’t.”
Vince had no answers for that one. He frowned.
Lavinia sighed again and looked down at the charts laid out on her desk. “There’s something very personal about this. It’s personal on the side of the enemy. And it’s personal for you, too. Vincent, this French agent…she’s like a lucky star for you, and you’re the same for her. I know this composite for the two of you is probably accurate, simply based on her dossier. The two of you pull things off together that neither one of you could pull off alone. That’s why I told Edward that he’s got to send you, because if you’re not factored into these equations, she is never seen again. She reappears for a day or two in the Channel Islands, and then she’s just gone.”
Vince nodded grimly.
Lavinia sighed yet again. She wanted to know what he was getting out of this conversation, but she knew how hard it was to get him to talk about anything. If she were the French girl, he’d talk to her. But she wasn’t. “I should point out that we are aware of your history and of the known issues with her stability, and we’ll expect her here for debriefing. But I think that only you can bring her in.”
Vince nodded. “We weren’t together very long, but we did do some amazing things together.” He smiled; it would be good to work with her again. And anything else that might happen, that would be good too, but he didn’t dwell on it. “Whatever it takes, I’ll get her and de Valois back here safely.”
“Five years,” said Lavinia, raising an eyebrow. Vince did tend to minimise things. “That’s what your brother said. Five years, off and on, and when you worked as partners, you had the damnedest luck. Bring her back here and her people. But be careful.” She shrugged. There was the other matter, too. “What about her cousin Juliana? What do you know about her?”
Vince frowned. “Not much. She was one of my brother’s students. Fairly bright, as I recall.”
“You lived in the same house with this girl for over a year, and that’s all you can tell me?” Lavinia raised an eyebrow, exasperated. Michel had told her that Vince had lived with Séverine for a while, and that Juliana had lived in the same house during all of her school holidays, preferring it over either the Malfoy or de Marigny households. “I’m not asking Michel for a reason, Vince; I need an objective assessment.”
Vince shrugged. He needed to be objective to concentrate on the mission, not to think about the time he’d spent living with Sevvie. “She spent most of her time at school, and I wasn’t there that much. Like you said, off and on. She seemed nice enough.”
Lavinia sighed heavily. “Vince, Juliana had something to do with this. And off and on, you were in the house for at least a year, sometimes for months at a time. Michel is not objective where this woman is concerned. Not even remotely. But from what he’s told me about her work? She made this mess.”
Vince’s eyebrows went up and he laughed, in spite of himself. “She did it? She’s just a child.” He shook his head, and then he frowned, because Juliana would be seventeen, at least, by now. “Or was. A lot can change in two years. Sorry, the most we ever talked about was Quidditch strategy. It was always that or maths with her.”
Lavinia shrugged. What was she thinking, expecting Vince to have any idea of a woman’s emotional state? He was good with people he rescued, as long as they needed him, and he was a good leader; he understood combat psychology well enough. But as good as he was with children, he probably didn’t understand them consciously. “She’s involved in this,” said Lavinia, suddenly aware that Vince might think Juliana had done this to Séverine on purpose. “I didn’t say she put her cousin into that mess. She turned her work over to us; if she were working for the enemy, she wouldn’t have done that. But I’m fairly sure she broke the Seven Bridges of Brocéliande last year, and that your girl is lost between them. I wouldn’t let Michel correspond with her if I thought she was on the wrong side…but I need to know what she was like, because he’s not objective.”
Vince nodded, and reluctantly searched his memories, but came up with almost nothing. “She was just a kid. Smart, I remember that. She could keep up with my brother. Not many people can. I imagine that she could break the bridges, but that’s really more Sevvie’s style, and even then she’d have to be desperate.”
“Séverine could not possibly have broken the bridges,” said Lavinia. “Not unless the girl gave her the equations. And if the girl gave her the equations, wouldn’t she know not to go where she’s not? Besides, you do know what one of the ways they try to claim faerie lands is?” She didn’t want to say it. If she didn’t say it, maybe it wouldn’t have happened—irrational, she knew, but she’d learned a bit about observer effects from Michel, so perhaps not completely irrational.
Vince shook his head. “I’m not saying Sevvie did it—for one thing, you’re right that she wouldn’t have run straight into her own trap. It’s just that it’s her style.” He grinned. “Maybe Juliana took lessons from her.” Who else would she have got them from?
Lavinia nodded. “So you’re telling me that this girl has been through hell, because she wouldn’t have done this when you knew her?”
Vince frowned thoughtfully. “Yeah. That would explain it.” He was as uncomfortable with the notion as Lavinia was, and the fact that she was visibly uncomfortable herself just made everything worse. He wasn’t going to think about it too hard because if he did, he would just get too angry to think at all, and he didn’t know where Juliana was, but clearly she was safe now.
Lavinia nodded. “Your brother is going to need you,” she said in a softer voice. “I talked to Michel about this. I wanted to hear your side of it. I figured if you both told me the same story, it’s got to be as close as we can get to the truth. He’s been writing to this girl every two or three hours since yesterday.”
Vince nodded slowly, taking it all in. Lavinia thought there was something between Michel and…Liane? That was a little ridiculous, the girl had probably just figured out something new and exciting, but…Michel would take it hard anyway. “I should talk to her. Michel has read reports about what happens over there, but he’s never really had to deal with it.” He was torn; he wanted to protect his brother—not that he thought Juliana was a threat, but whatever she’d been through, he didn’t think Michel was capable of handling—but he also wanted to rescue Sevvie. But she could help—she had to know what Juliana had been through.
“You can talk to her when you get back. Michel wants us to hire her and I’m going to do it,” Lavinia decided, not that she’d really ever had much of a choice. “I need her, we need her research, I just wanted another…character reference…before I made it official. You know. From someone who can go four hours without writing to her.” She smiled indulgently. Michel was facing his Saturn return in his seventh house, and his progressed sun was hitting the cusp of his eighth house; he was likely to be married by the end of the year, but Lavinia hadn’t told him that; either he knew it himself, in which case there was nothing to discuss, or he was avoiding knowing it, and to make him conscious of it would just distract and destabilise him.
Vince laughed. “You should be used to my brother’s obsessions by now.”
“It’s more than that,” said Lavinia, and shrugged. “There are actual words in the letters. Not just equations. He even tries to spell them correctly.” She looked up at Vince and shrugged. “You have time for dinner, and you also have time to let us try and find the best place in the Channel Islands for you to look for Séverine. The earliest she reappears in even arcane space is Saturday afternoon. You’ll want to get out by tomorrow and scout around, find out what the Germans are doing out there, but you certainly can’t leave tonight.”
Vince nodded. “I’ve got some planning to do, transportation to arrange. Probably best to stay in mundane space.”
“I don’t think you want to stay wholly in mundane space,” Lavinia said, glancing down at the chart. “You will probably not be able to reach her that way. She’ll reappear first in arcane space or possibly even faerie space; I’m advising you to carry as little iron as possible, just in case.”
Vince frowned. “I don’t want to get caught in the same trap, either, but that’s a good point. Anything else you think I might need to do?”
“There are other ways to avoid getting caught in that trap than by playing tag with the Muggles, though you should certainly keep an eye on them.” Lavinia took a deep breath. “The war in Faerie is getting worse. She may have been taken through there, but that’s not where she is right now. We don’t know where she is right now. You need to be prepared to go bronze if you have to.”
Vince nodded, though he had never liked going through seventh-harmonic gates, even with Saunders who knew how they worked and was good at it. It had been a useful tactic before the war had moved into Faerie, but he’d almost been relieved that he didn’t have to do it again after the bridges had broken. Almost.
Lavinia shrugged. “Howard Lovelace and I are trying to program the difference engines to analyse data from diviners and reports of prophetic dreams throughout the Empire. We have black wings on ravens, black wings on angels, the reappearance of the Great Raven, and a whole lot of plain old black wings. The old blood feud between the Malfoys and the Weasleys is also active again, despite the fact that there are no more Weasleys. In the past week, we’ve had one Malfoy nearly die and one former Weasley. The odds are that there will be more near-death experiences in both families and that we will probably lose at least one member of each.”
Vince frowned; none of this sounded the least bit good. “And you think it’s all connected? Well, I haven’t seen much of that sort of thing, but I’ve mostly been working with the Muggles. They’ve got a big operation coming up and I wouldn’t want anything we do to disrupt it.” For the past few weeks he’d been sleeping, breathing and eating Operation Torch.
“I do,” said Lavinia. “I don’t think this has much to do with the projects Edward’s got you on at all.” She shrugged. “Your girl’s acknowledged by the Malfoys,” she said, “even if she’s not blood kin. And Michel’s little friend is for sure a Malfoy. And at least one set of black feathers is connected to her, I think. The rest of them belong to the Farrylls, of course.”
“Don’t worry,” Vince said, trying to reassure her. Sevvie and he had the luck. It would work. “We’ll be careful. In and out, nice and quiet.”
“That’s what you say now,” said Lavinia, smiling at him.
Vince grinned. “Touché. Well, I promise to do my best. Can’t do more than that.”
“Now that I believe,” said Lavinia. “St John Saunders will be going with you, he’s making sure you have the proper gear for all the places we know you might end up, and you’ve worked with St John before, of course. You know the drill, you used to use the seven bridges yourself.”
Vince nodded. “Yes, I have, but if Sevvie’s having trouble getting through…well, we may have to improvise. It might be safer to stay in mundane space as much as possible.”
“I’m not suggesting you go to Faerie if you don’t have to,” said Lavinia, frowning, “but I will be very surprised if she’s even accessible from lead-space, Vince.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Vince said. “I just want to be absolutely certain before I do anything. It won’t do her any good if we get lost too.”
“I don’t see why you would,” said Lavinia. “Arcane space isn’t affected by whatever it is Juliana has done, so far as I can tell.” She frowned. “It shouldn’t be, anyway, and if it is, mundane space is not any safer. Anything that can reach the eighth sphere directly while primarily affecting the seventh and the ninth is not going to have much trouble manifesting in the tenth.”
“I don’t think any part of this is going to be safe,” Vince said frankly, “but I’ll take any advice you can give me.”
“I’ve turned the harmonics part of it over to your brother,” said Lavinia. “He understands it far better than I do.” She looked at him pointedly. “Vincent, this girl…I don’t know what you might run into looking for her, depending on where it isn’t that she is, or is that she isn’t, or who’s taken her. Is there anything other than the Jupiter-Neptune configuration in your composite chart, the one that makes you so lucky together, involved with the fact that she doesn’t come back unless you go on this mission?”
“Well…” Vince said, as he considered everything he knew about Sevvie that might be of interest to Lavinia. “She’s stubborn enough to want to go back after she’s got everyone else out, but not so much that she’d stay if she knew she’d been compromised, and any one of us could tell her that. I don’t know.”
“I meant more along the lines of, if some prince of the Gentry has got her bound, are you the only one who can free her?” Lavinia asked with a wry smile. “Not that you are any Fair Janet.”
Vince chuckled at the idea. Anyone who tried to bind Sevvie would find themselves in more trouble than they could imagine. “I have no idea. Is that what your charts say?”
“Vincent, are you being coy or do you really not know what I am getting at?” Lavinia said, rolling her eyes at him. She was not about to tell him what the chart said unless he asked, and even then, there were things that he did not have the right to know without Séverine’s consent, unless it affected a mission.
Vince shrugged. He knew that true love was real, at least for the faeries; but Sevvie wasn’t a faerie, and neither was he, and he doubted it was real for him. “I know what you’re getting at, but I really don’t know if it applies to us. Sure, we worked well together, but we also had some pretty amazing fights.”
“That’s often how it works,” said Lavinia, and shrugged right back at him. “I’ll go drag your brother out of the harmonics. Or Liane’s latest note. And then we’ll adjourn to our house, because I have it on good authority Saunders is meeting us there.”
vince_rosenthal and donnapericolosa