Veronica’s father opened the gate and went up to the door.

  The knocker made a heavy sound as it fell on the wood.

  The family’s housekeeper opened the door, a middle-aged woman with a red-cheeked face.

  A female voice from inside the house said, “Mira, let them through to the sitting room, will you?”

  The servant, obviously her name was Mira, bowed, and said, “This way, please.”

  She led the family through the hall.

  Their footsteps sounded muffled on the lush carpet. The house smelled of soup and perfume, with a faint whiff of dinner being cooked.

  “In here, please,” Mira said.

  She gestured at the door while staying in the hallway herself.

  Veronica followed her father into a large high-ceilinged sitting room. Large windows let in plenty of light.

  Jasper sat on the couch, dressed in a dark blue suit and shirt with a ruffled collar, so very different from the plain shirt and trousers he wore to school.

  He met Veronica’s eyes, his cheeks blushed, and he looked down.

  Jasper’s father, Oliver Bloom, sat in a big chair near the fireplace. He was wearing a velvet suit, and white socks and shoes with buckles.

  His hair was rather thin on the top, but he didn’t wear a wig as so many men of his age did.

  A tray with a teapot and cups stood on the table.

  Jasper’s mother, Selena, came out of a door on the other side of the room. “Welcome to our house,” she said. “I hope we can address you by your first names.”

  “That’s fine,” Veronica’s mother said. She sounded nervous.

  “All right then, Jonquil and Robina, please make yourselves comfortable.”

  Veronica’s father sat down on the couch facing the one where Jasper sat, her mother sat next to him, and Veronica sat next to her mother at the end of the couch. She felt like sinking through the floor. She didn’t want to do this, especially not in the face of a colleague from work.

  “We are happy that you are keen to discuss this proposal with us,” Jasper’s mother said. Veronica didn’t know her very well. Her cultured speech suggested that she came from the city.

  Jasper’s father stared at his knees. He certainly didn’t look too happy about the proceedings. Why would a family like Jasper’s be interested in having their son marry a peasant girl, even if she came with a decent education?

  Veronica could only think about bad reasons, like they didn’t have the money for a dowry to appeal to other, more ambitious families. Maybe they had financial trouble themselves?

  There was a moment of awful silence in which the wooden clock against the wall went tick-tick-tick. Then Jasper’s mother said, “Well, let’s discuss the details while we send the young couple off into the garden, so that they can get acquainted with each other.”

  Jasper got up as if somebody had put a spring in his seat. “Veronica, please?”

  Veronica would much rather have stayed in the room, so that she could supervise any horse trading done in her name. She didn’t think her parents would be strong in their demands.

  But she had to leave, and followed Jasper out of the room, down the corridor, into a spacious study, and out the glass door into the garden.

  The garden was beautiful. Veronica normally loved gardens, because they were such frivolous, useless places with flowers like roses that were not good for anything except simply being extravagantly beautiful.

  “Come,” Jasper said, walking ahead. “I will show you my secret spot.”

  He led her over a gravel path between little clipped hedges and beds of roses, to a trellis covered by creepers with purple flowers. On the other side, they came to a secluded area in between hedges. A fountain burbled in a pond with lots of blooming water lilies. The beds surrounding the fountain were pink with flowering roses.

  “So many flowers,” Veronica said. She hated to think about all the crops her father could grow on this rather large block of land.

  “Well, our family name is Bloom. We have to keep up appearances.” He laughed.

  There was a stone bench on one side, and he led her there.

  “Let’s sit here.”

  They sat, and then neither knew what to say.

  Veronica didn’t want to say anything about being forced into this, and now she had this feeling maybe that was the same for him, so she said, “This is kind of awkward.”

  “Tell me about it. And then with this silly investigation at school. What do you think has happened to the spellbook?”

  Veronica grabbed the diversion with both hands.

  “I’m supposed to find out. I don’t really know.”

  “It seems that everybody is so adamant that Barnaby has done it.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because everybody wants him to be guilty. But to be frank, I don’t really think he has any of the connections to sell the book. He can’t read very well himself, so what would he do with this book?”

  Jasper shrugged.

  Veronica asked, to prolong the conversation, “Do you think he’s guilty?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I do respect Mrs. Everhart a lot, though.”

  “So do I, but that doesn’t mean that she can never be wrong.”

  “I like it that you stand up for other people,” Jasper said. “This is why I asked my parents to write your parents the proposal.”

  Veronica stifled a chuckle.

  “Because I stand up for other people?”

  That was a strange reason to want to spend his life with her.

  “That’s important to me. It means that you’re honest. The same as you said to Mrs. Everhart that the school needs solid proof before accusing Barnaby Green of stealing the book.”

  Veronica frowned. He hadn’t been there when she said that.

  “Mrs. Wild told me that you said it. I thought it was brave.”

  What a strange conversation.

  Almost as if he had no idea what to say. As if he was also forced into this arrangement as much as she was.

  “Do you really want to marry me?” she asked.

  He looked away.

  “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.” But of course, that was wrong. His position would require for him to get married. It was not an option for her, either. Her parents were desperate. “We can just… wait.”

  “I don’t want to wait.”

  What was the rush?

  “Tell me, was it your idea for your parents to propose for you to marry me?”

  “My father doesn’t like it.” That wasn’t really an answer, and why wouldn’t he look at her?

  “I think I can tell. I think he probably wants you to marry a woman from a better family. “

  “Yeah.” He looked down, and he shrugged.

  “So why?”

  “Because you’re smart.”

  “But my family is poor.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “To your family, it does.”

  “You have an education. You won’t stay poor. My father wants to buy harvesting machines and because you know magic…”

  That was no argument either. He knew magic, too.

  “But why choose me? Why not choose someone with money and a good family to help you buy those machines?”

  “I don’t like those girls. They’re vacuous and demanding. They talk about things I have no interest in.”

  “And I am different?”

  “You are… respectable. You seem like fun.”

  He looked down. His cheeks turned bright red.

  All right, this could be about something else altogether. The family had a fallout with another family in town and Jasper’s mother sought to withhold her son from a promised relationship?

  “Tell me, would you rather have someone else?”

  “No. I would never…”

  “Are you then trying to get away from another proposal?”

  “No, I just like you!” But he still didn’t look at her.

  Chapter Seven

  Veronica didn’t know what to say, and so they went back to chatting about comfortable subjects like the school and teachers.

  But her mind churned.

  She looked at her hands and her knees and the part of the garden to the right, so she didn’t have to look in his direction. If he had orchestrated this meeting, and asked his parents to write to her parents about this proposal because either he or his mother wanted to slight another family, then what should she do with that information?

  Could she back down?

  But she’d disappoint her parents, because they clearly expected more.

  She only knew him as a colleague, and didn’t have any particular opinions about him, because she’d barely spoken to him since she started working at the school. Clearly, he expected some kind of magic to happen.

  Wait a minute. Magic.

  He had just given her his motive for stealing the spellbook: to put a spell on her so that she would be smitten with him and agree to the marriage he and his mother so clearly wanted.

  He had access to the tower and the key in his department’s office.

  He’d taken the spellbook and found a spell to use on her. That was why he’d been so keen to take her into the garden.

  She hadn’t noticed him speaking the spell when he’d walked ahead of her coming here. And not all spells needed to be spoken. They could be written. They could be whispered behind someone’s back. They could be folded up and sewn into the hem of someone’s shirt. There were many other ways to deliver a spell.

  But now he found that it wouldn’t work, because by pure chance, she was wearing the spellcraft charm that she won at the Academy. Because she was too poor to own other jewellery.

  This meeting was so awkward because he expected magic to happen.

  And if he was someone who would do that sort of thing, and she could prove it, then was that really someone she wanted to spend the rest of her life with?

  He seemed nice enough, but she could never live with that. But she couldn’t live with the thought that her parents had to leave their farm because of her, either.

  What was she going to do?

  Fortunately, the situation was rescued at that moment by the sound of footsteps on the gravel path. Jasper’s mother came into the area under the trellis.

  “I thought I’d be able to find you here,” she said, her voice sweet. “We have finished our talks for today. Would you like to come inside?”

  Jasper and Veronica got up without saying a word, and followed her through the garden into the house.

  When they returned to the living room, Veronica met her father’s eyes and cringed with the expression of hope she saw in there.

  This was so awkward.

  Her mother used to accuse her of being a chatterbox, but she couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  Veronica sat down, clamping her hands between her knees.

  The silence got even more awkward.

  Jasper’s mother announced, “Well, we have decided that today’s meeting was fruitful enough that we will have another meeting. There are some additional details to be hashed out, unless either of you have any strong objections.”

  She looked from one to the other.

  Jasper didn’t object.

  Veronica didn’t feel she could object, either, not without proof, because she might be terribly wrong about this.

  They said their polite goodbyes, and walked down the steps to the front door through the yard to the street, and turned back in the direction of their little farm.

  “So, how did it go?” her mother asked. Veronica hated the hopeful tone in her voice.

  “He seems all right. I already know him from work. He seems competent.”

  “And?”

  Her father had clearly expected more.

  “What did they say to you? Did you promise them anything? Did they want anything?”

  “We talked about the farm and about harvesting machines. It appears true that they want to get those machines to harvest crops on their land. Oliver said I could play a role.”

  “But they don’t own our farm and you don’t know magic.”

  “No, but you do. Oliver said that learning the right kind of magic would be important in the future.”

  And clearly Oliver had done a good job at selling his opportunities to her father. Whatever happened to Mr. Bloom and did this mean her father was all self-important now?

  And he was getting involved in the feud between Pure magic and machine magic? She didn’t like this development.

  “Did you talk about me at all?” Veronica asked. “Or just about business?”

  “You know what men are like,” her mother said with a sigh.

  “Oh, come on,” her father said. “She is old enough to talk about herself. We don’t need to do that for her.”

  “Have you then found out what they want from us?” Veronica asked.

  “You are what they want, dear daughter. You, and maybe a manager for their farms who knows about farming. And we don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing.”

  Veronica sighed. The Bloom family had even hinted at the fact that they might want something related to farms. It didn’t quell the unrest in her mind, but she’d run out of arguments.

  “I’m happy to see him again whenever you organise another visit.”

  She hoped that would give her a few days to check the situation with the spellbook. Maybe, by that time, the book would have been found, and everybody could go on living like it at all been a terrible mistake. Whether she actually wanted to marry Jasper was another matter, but one thing was sure. She didn’t want to marry a thief. And she was sure her parents wouldn’t want her to marry a thief, either.

  Chapter Eight

  Augustus Fairweather was by far the oldest teacher in the school.

  He was one of those people you approached with a certain degree of trepidation, not because he would lash out—to the contrary, he was very nice—but because you felt unworthy to occupy his time.

  Whispers went around the school about how far he was beyond the official retirement age. But nobody really knew how old he was.

  With his tall, bent figure and long white hair, he looked ancient. His hands were knobbly and his eyes cloudy, but he didn’t miss anything, and it was said that he could recite the precise ingredients of more than a thousand magical potions.

  Teaching was his only ever vocation, and he took to it with a slavish determination. Jokes went that he would probably also die on the job.

  If you were at school early enough, you could see him shuffling through the corridors, with his walking stick, wearing a blue wizard’s hat and the blue cloak, which signified his status as a top student at the Academy.

  And it was still early when Veronica had come to school. But the door to Mr. Fairweather’s large and cluttered classroom stood open, and Veronica went in, feeling a little apprehensive.

  Mr. Fairweather taught the craft of making potions, one of the most powerful magical skills as old as time.

  Mr. Fairweather was the only teacher who could tell the principal off, and she would actually listen. He sowed terror in the hearts of many students who feared failing his long and difficult exams. He never came to the staffroom and only engaged with any of the other staff when he absolutely had to.

  Veronica knocked on the open door, and he turned around, raising his bushy white eyebrows at her.

  “Yes?”

  She suspected that he didn’t say her name, because he couldn’t remember it, and didn’t think she was important enough, having worked at the school for only a bit over a year.

  “I would like to ask you for a favour, with the blessing of the principal.” She crossed the room, holding the letter that Mrs. Everhart had given her the previous day, the one describing her authority to ask favours and questions as long as it served the purpose of finding the spellbook.

  “The blessing of the principal, eh?” He chuckled and looked at the paper in her hand. “Let’s see it, then.”

  Veronica gave him the letter.

  He read. His eyebrows went up. True to his character, he had not been at any of the meetings the principal had called about the spellbook. Had he honestly not heard anything about it?

  Then he looked up at her.

  “A missing spellbook? What is my involvement with a spellbook? Spells are a very inexact discipline. It’s impossible to distinguish fact from imagination. And that is imagination that the spells are working. I dare say the world would be a better place without spells and the belief in them.”

  “The mayor needs the spellbook to open the first session of the council year,” Veronica said.

  “The mayor…” He spread his hands. He obviously cared nothing about the mayor.

  “Mrs. Everhart doesn’t want to damage the reputation of the school by having to admit we can’t find the book.”

  “Ha. Reputation is a poison that makes people do unworthy things. I dare say the school’s reputation has already been blown up to the level of an angry pufferfish. Just like the pufferfish, reputation is full of poison. A high reputation makes all sorts come to the school who shouldn’t be here. Those who seek to misuse the power of magic for their own influence.”

  “I’m sorry, but I still need to find the book. It was written by Felix Morningvale and is quite valuable.”

  “Hmph. What does that have to do with me?”

  “I was wondering if you could make me a truth potion.”

  Now he fully looked at her for the first time. “A truth potion, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know truth potions are very powerful?”

  “Yes.” She itched to remind him that she wasn’t one of his students. “I want it to find out who stole the spellbook. As I said, the mayor will need it when he opens the council next week.”

  He waved his hand. “I know I know. The mayor is so attached to all his silly rituals, as if the spellbook will help him. But he knows no magic and he can’t do anything with the book, if anything could be done with spells in the first place, and the book has no importance for the council. Did you know that? You can replace it with a different book and he would never notice.”

 

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