Winterwood, page 16
part #1 of Rowankind Series
“All my fault, I expect.”
He shook his head. “She said Will shot the captain in cold blood.”
I shook my head. “Will was the one in danger of being shot. Mother made us both murderers that day.”
“I’m sure she didn’t me—”
“Mean it? Yes, she did. Or at least she meant to have Will charged with stealing her ship and that would have been a hanging offense. My father had always told me that the Heart was my dowry. He knew Will and I had intentions, and we had his blessing even though it had never been formally announced.”
“You hated her, didn’t you?”
“Hated? That’s too strong a word. When I was younger I never wanted anything but her love and approval. I could have been a dutiful daughter, the one she wanted, but magic put an end to that. Why didn’t she tell me? All this time I thought she hated magic, but she was scared of it.”
“Scared of what it meant, I think,” David said.
“Hush, we’re getting close.” I put my hand up to end the conversation. “Be wary.”
Due to my weather-working, it had rained torrents on the night of the fire, so there should be plenty of smoke-damaged remains. With Mother’s will leaving everything to Philip, and Philip being officially deceased, the estate should be tied up in enough red tape to mean that little had been done other than seal off the property.
Had whatever remained of our mother gone into a pauper’s grave? I didn’t like to think about that.
As we approached along the tree-lined avenue, it was obvious that instead of the expected charred and blackened ruin there was a neat space where the house had been. I heard David’s gasp of surprise as he realized that the garden wall enclosed emptiness.
Not quite emptiness.
The soot-stained stones from the house were now stacked in many neat piles some five feet high, wide and long. The cellars had been opened to the light, their vaulting demolished completely, and even the stable had been pulled down brick by brick. Of the contents of the house and all the rubble and debris, there was no sign.
The back of my neck prickled. “I think someone’s watching,” I said.
So we walked straight past, took a turn along the avenue itself and then walked back. I glanced across the street. The opposite house stood still and quiet, no activity behind the high hedge, but plenty of cover for someone to watch from. We kept walking casually. We needed to come back after dark to be safe.
15
Dark Magic
IF WE WERE GOING TO VENTURE back to Twiling Avenue in the dark, we would need a way to be able to see and examine the wreckage. Putting up a witchlight would be foolish in the extreme, so I had to think of a better way. I had seen a well-stocked apothecary’s shop just a few hundred yards from the Twisted Skein and hoped to find what I was looking for there.
The apothecary didn’t have what I needed, but said I was in luck and handed me a handbill which read:
Mr. Reginald Gorton
Optician
Respectfully informs the Good People of
Plymouth that he is Arrived in the Town with a
large Assortment of Spectacles to suit any Age or
Sight. Reading Glasses, Opera Glasses,
Telescopes and Microscopes and being well
versed in the science of optics
he trusts he will give Satisfaction.
He will be in Plymouth for a Fortnight at
the Three Tuns Inn, Market Street.
I thanked the apothecary and David and I went in search of the Three Tuns. Mr. Gorton had reserved a private room and had installed, on a sturdy table, a glass-fronted mahogany display case containing several pairs of eyeglasses of various designs. I wondered how he’d managed to transport it without breaking the glass if he moved from venue to venue every couple of weeks, but there was not a crack to be seen, and the glass was polished to perfection. I dismissed the lorgnettes and a pair of highly decorated eyeglasses which opened up like scissors and needed to be held in front of the face with one hand. I thought that spectacles with wire rims and side pieces that gripped the wearer’s head might be more practical.
“Missis had a pair just like those,” David said with a catch in his voice, pointing to a pair in the style known as pince-nez. They were little more than two round lenses in brass frames, held in place with a precarious nose clip. “For reading. She was forever going to sleep in them at night and losing them in the blankets.”
I looked at the nose clip. Not very practical for anything other than a very sedentary reading experience.
Mr. Gorton was very attentive, showing me pair after pair of eyeglasses, some in metal frames, both silver and brass, some in tortoiseshell
“Dear Lady, I need to examine your eyes, if you would be so kind.” Mr. Gorton indicated a chair and seized upon his own magnifying glass.
“My eyes are excellent, but I would like a pair of spectacles for my sister. She has a little trouble reading by candlelight.”
“But how can I give you the correct lenses without seeing the lady in question?”
“Something of low magnification will be suitable. It’s not a great affliction.”
“Perhaps these?” He selected a pair with tortoiseshell rims and handed them to me. I slipped them on, blinking at the distortion caused by the lenses.
“Something less strong, I think.”
“Try these.” This time he handed me a pair with brass rims.
“Perfect.” I slipped them on and took them off again. “And a second pair the same.”
“Two pairs?” He seemed surprised.
“My sister is forever putting things down and forgetting where they are. It seems prudent to have another pair, does it not?”
“Perhaps I might suggest the same lens in a different frame. Silver, perhaps?”
He’d obviously decided that if I could afford two pairs of eyeglasses, I might be persuaded to the extra expense of silver frames.
“Brass will be fine,” I said, “or tortoiseshell.”
We settled on one pair of brass frames and one of tortoiseshell with the weakest lenses available. I suspected they were little more than clear glass, but that suited me well. We agreed on a price, and Mr. Gorton asked the address for delivery.
“We’ll take them with us,” I said, forgetting for a moment that I was no longer dressed as a man. When I saw Mr. Gorton’s eyes widen I nodded toward David. “You may entrust them to my boy. He’ll wait while you pack them.”
Having recovered from my small breach of etiquette, I left the consulting room without a backward glance.
“Spectacles?” David asked when he brought the package back to our room.
“You’ll thank me tonight.”
I’d been hoping to have an early meal before the dining room filled up, but we were out of luck. The landlord apologized as we entered.
“There’s no private table free, Mrs. Webster, very sorry. Would you care to share or would you rather wait?”
I started to say I’d wait, but then spotted Mr. Corwen across the busy dining room, sitting alone in the corner nook. He looked up and smiled, and seeing the situation waved invitingly to the empty space opposite him. “Well, perhaps I could share.”
“I’ll eat at the kitchen door, ma’am.” David cleared his throat deferentially, and a horrible pang of guilt consumed me. There was no way, in such a crowded place, that the landlord would allow a rowankind table space. I guessed Mr. Corwen wouldn’t mind, and there was room for both of us to squeeze on to the bench, but we couldn’t risk attracting attention by making a fuss.
“Yes, David, run along.”
“Will you be needing me this evening, madam?”
He gave me a meaningful look. I gave him a tiny shake of the head to tell him I’d understood, and he bowed and stepped away like any well-trained servant. I didn’t dare spare him another glance as I joined Mr. Corwen, who stood politely until I sat and then left his meal uneaten on his plate.
“Oh, please, don’t let your dinner cool on my account,” I said.
“It’s no hardship. I find most cooked food too hot for my palate,” he said. “I prefer it at blood heat.”
I smiled back while somewhere in the back of my mind a little alarm bell rang. I knew this man from somewhere—but where? Surely I’d remember someone so striking. I tried to study him without being obvious while we made small talk: the weather, the price of fish, the state of the cobbles in the market square, the French, and the sinking of the Lydia by Redbeard Tremayne due to a terrible misunderstanding about nationalities. Apparently that incident had been reported in the Times and had been the talk of Plymouth, since Tremayne was considered something of a local celebrity, a certain section of the population seeing nothing wrong in defending self and property from marauding redcoats who were altogether unpopular down by the port where innocent vessels were often searched on behalf of the Excise.
As we talked, I tried to recall where I might have seen those cool gray eyes and that thick pelt of elegant silver hair. The hair had almost fooled me at first; I’d thought him older, but Mr. Corwen was not old enough to have grayed with age. Silver-gray was his natural color. The skin around his eyes and on his neck and hands proclaimed him to be in his late twenties, or thirtyish at most. He was certainly not quite what he seemed on the surface. Charming as he was, I began to prickle with unease. That pleasant exterior didn’t mean he was harmless.
Was that a little frisson of magic that I picked up?
Without seeming impolite, I made my excuses as soon as I could and retreated to my room.
I dressed in the breeches and jacket at the bottom of my traveling valise then waited, and worried, until just after midnight, when a scratching at my door told me that David had successfully crept out of the ostler’s sleeping loft.
“Any trouble?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “The head ostler snores like a pig and the two stable lads were almost asleep facedown in their supper. They are dead to the world until dawn.”
We waited for ten more minutes to be safe, and then David and I soft-footed down the steps and out through the inn yard, heading toward our old home. The gibbous moon gave us a little light along the back lane behind Twiling Avenue as woolly clouds scudded across the face of it.
We paused at the back gate to the yard.
“Spectacles,” I whispered.
“Huh?”
I called light into the spectacles and handed them to him. He put them on, and I was pleased to note that from the outside they were completely normal, that is, I couldn’t see them glowing in the dark.
“Ho!” David gasped. “It’s not like daylight, but I can see. What did you do?”
“More or less the same as I did to Mayo’s glass at Ravenscraig. The light should last for an hour or more, but let me know if the effect begins to fade.”
I surveyed the scene through the tortoiseshell pair, seeing things before me clearly outlined. Through the spectacles the night was brighter than in the brightest full moon, showing me washed-out colors and details.
In the natural moonlight I saw the eerie bulk of the stone stacks. Through the spectacles I saw sharp detail: the blackened stones, the care with which they had been lined up, the darker pits of the now-open cellars, the relief of the lines of grubbed-out trenches where walls had once spread their toes deep into the earth.
“Who could have done this?” David raised the spectacles, looked beneath them and then settled them firmly on his nose again.
“I don’t know, but if I had to guess—Walsingham.”
“Who owns it now?” David asked.
“I guess it belongs to the Crown if Philip’s registered dead or doesn’t come forward to claim it. Even if I might inherit it officially, I could never show my face.”
The town, tied up by its usual inefficient bureaucracy and petty corruption, should have been squabbling over what to do with the ruin for years, but instead someone had moved quickly to clear the site. Not only to clear it, but to clean it, a large-scale operation that must have taken a whole gang of careful workers. Not a cinder crunched underfoot. Every last scrap of ash and charcoal had been swept and brushed away and all that remained were these piles of neatly stacked stones. What had happened to the rubble and the charred remains of the house’s contents?
My spine tingled.
I knelt and brushed the floor with gloved fingers. There was a dark patch, dried now, blood, perhaps, from some spellworking.
David shuddered. “Someone’s been looking for something,” he said.
I nodded. “Very thoroughly.” I could feel the echo of a spellworked magical search. “Walsingham’s witch, maybe? Or Walsingham himself?” I frowned. “How many witches might he have at his command?”
“Maybe it’s not Walsingham.” David sounded hopeful.
I shook my head. “I’d bet my pretty captain’s hat that Walsingham is the one Jim Mayo was planning to sell the box to.”
Will’s ghost rose from the stones. You should have done more talking and less—
I rounded on him. You had no right to invade my privacy that night.
He scowled.
I’m a free woman. What I do is my own affair. I was going to continue my tirade, but the look on Will’s face was heartbreaking. I sighed. All right. Forget it.
Will wouldn’t, and neither would I. Think about something else.
I walked over to the nearest bank of stones, almost as tall as I was. If I touched it with my bare skin, would it leave an imprint by which Walsingham could track me? I put my right hand flat against it. My kid-leather glove was fine enough to let me feel the roughness beneath my fingers. I leaned my cheek toward it, not quite connecting. There was a slight tingle, nothing more.
David wiped the palms of his hands down his trousers, rubbed them together, and flicked his fingers away from him as if flicking off water droplets. Then he touched the back of his knuckles to the stone.
“David! Where are your gloves? If Walsingham . . .”
Too late.
He shrugged, wincing slightly as his flesh connected. I watched his face as his expression changed from wary, to interested, and then to dreamy as he turned his hand to touch the stone with fingertips, then palm. His other hand came up and reached for the stones, too, and I saw hunger in his face and a dark glint in his eye. He sucked in a sharp breath and his elbows bent as his whole body leaned toward the stones.
I grabbed him around his waist and pulled, feeling him anchored surprisingly firmly. A darkness shot through my head, like a reverse lightning bolt, sharp, black, and charged with intent. I gasped at the pain and then saw things in my own mind illuminated by black light, things I never wanted to see again. I gagged on a hot rush of acid into my mouth and swallowed hard.
Instead of pulling I pushed sideways, and David’s grip sundered. We both crashed to the ground, and my spectacles flew off. He struggled, and growled at me, an inhuman rasping of vocal chords. His body spasmed and shook. I cradled his head as best I could and clung tightly to his shoulders until his threshing stopped and he stilled.
“All right now?” I asked. “Can I let go?”
“Ye . . . yes.” He cleared his throat between attempts to speak, and the second try came out sounding closer to normal.
“David, what was that?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, but I do know that whoever—whatever—searched here was powerful and . . . and . . . more than just a simple witch. Death was involved in their seeking. A human death for a powerful spell.”
“Death magic!” I felt sick.
“Ross, let’s leave this place.”
Even without the spectacles I could tell his face was pale. I didn’t need him to ask twice. If Walsingham had set a magical watch there might be searchers converging on us any moment. I listened as hard as I could: street sounds in the distance; the soughing of leaves on the neighbor’s trees, stirred by a light breeze; the cry of an owl in the darkness; a barking dog, far enough away to be of no importance, and yet . . . and yet . . . I started to shiver.
“I’ve lost the spectacles,” David said.
“Me, too.” We groped around until we found the brass-rimmed ones, and then David used them to find the tortoiseshell pair.
“Let’s go.” I took David’s hand and, rather than leave by Twiling Avenue or by the back lane, we pushed through the hedge into the neighbor’s garden. It wasn’t as easy as it had been when I was eight and had trespassed to see Lucy Clemmow’s new kittens, or, later, to challenge Josh Clemmow to a childish duel for his bullying of Philip. The Clemmow children were long gone, both carried off by the quinsy in the winter of eighty-seven. I didn’t know who lived there now, but the house was in darkness. We ran around the side of it and exited along a narrow alley that led through to Whinmoor Avenue.
“Do you think . . . ?” David whispered when we were far enough away for the sound of our voices not to carry back.
“I don’t know, but I’m not going back to find out.”
We took a very roundabout route to get back to the Twisted Skein. All the time I was listening hard for sounds of pursuit, but if anyone had been trying to apprehend us, we’d got out in time.
This time.
But we needed to be more careful. There were things here that neither of us understood.
There was still the question of what had happened to the remains of the furniture and items from the house. More than stone should have survived the fire. If someone was looking for something so important, then surely they wouldn’t have disposed of anything. They’d want to check thoroughly. The burnt remains of the interior had probably been taken somewhere more private. But if dark magic, blood magic, was involved, we were out of our depth.
Not only that but I was scared out of my wits. Blood magic wasn’t sanctioned by the Mysterium any more than natural magic was. I’d heard rumors. It was a type of ritual magic often practiced in the Caribbean, most frequently on the island of Hispaniola. Details were scarce, but most sources said it was powerful and dark, calling on ancient gods and wild spirits, strengthened by the power of fear and death. I thought of Mrs. Haldane killing the chicken. Maybe blood magic was an extension of the Mysterium-sanctioned spell-magic.
