The Wizard of London Read online

  The one thing that had kept the practitioners of the arcane from meddling as much as they could if they chose, was that they had kept themselves out of “secular” life, so to speak. There was little or no interference on their part with the lives of those who were not so gifted, except, perhaps, the occasional rescue.

  And thus far, there had been no one who was really willing to take that step into the lives of those who were not Elemental Mages. There was an unspoken accord between the Mages and the Gifted and Talented that they would not interfere with one another either.

  But combine a powerful Elemental Master, the circle he had founded, political ambitions, and the absolute certainty in that Master’s mind that he was right and what he wanted was what was best for all—

  Add to that the unwillingness on the part of that Master to admit he could ever be wrong—

  It would start small, of course. Such things always began small. First political contacts, and then, to a chosen man or two in very high places, the proof that magic existed and it could be used to produce real effects. Pointing out that using magic for the good of the Empire was the only patriotic way to proceed.

  Then it would begin, with the Elemental Mages cautiously being given political and governmental positions and power. Perhaps there would be a special Ministry in charge of the Arcane. And at first, its work would be entirely benign. Renegade Magicians would be tracked down, rounded up, and possibly laws put through so that they could be made accountable for what they did. And in David’s circle there would be a sort of policing force ready-made. They would all have official government sanction, and a certain amount of power. Power could be very addictive.

  But then—how long would it be before all Magicians were asked to register with this Ministry? How long until any Magician that had elected not to register was deemed a “renegade” and registration was no longer voluntary? How long before it wasn’t just Magicians, but all the Gifted and Talented as well?

  And then, how long before the Magicians extended their hands over the ordinary people who had neither Gift nor Talent?

  Then what?

  There were many possibilities, and all of them were chilling.

  All of this ran through her mind while the child sat there, solemn-eyed, watching her.

  “Things could be very bad if his heart stays frozen, couldn’t they?” Sarah asked quietly. “Your face went all still, Mem’sab. It only does that when you’re thinking that things could be bad.”

  Isabelle sighed. “Yes, Sarah. Things could be very bad. The trouble is, I don’t know how to put them right.”

  Sarah’s eyes never left hers. “Mummy says that the way to start putting things right is always to start with forgiveness.”

  Isabelle felt as if someone had struck her a blow. Forgiveness! It was the one thing she did not want to give him! And yet—

  “Mummy says not forgiving someone hurts you worse than it hurts him,” the child persisted. “Even if he doesn’t deserve to be forgiven. She says not forgiving someone is like not pulling a thorn out of your foot just because you weren’t the one that put it there.”

  Isabelle regarded the child steadily, and the old soul looked back at her out of Sarah’s eyes. Somehow she doubted that Sarah’s “Mummy” had said anything of the sort. No, this was all coming from a source that Isabelle would be wise to heed.

  “So, we start with forgiveness,” she said, struggling with her own rebellious heart. “But where do we go from there?”

  Sarah looked uncertain. “Maybe—Robin?”

  Isabelle blinked. That was not a bad notion. The worst that would happen would be that he would tell them it was none of his business.

  And even if he himself declined to help them, he might be willing to give them some idea of which way to go.

  Yes, it was a very interesting idea indeed.

  How to approach this, however. Well, the best thing might be to follow the advice of Lewis Carroll. “Begin at the beginning, go on until you reach the end, then stop.”

  And the beginning was forgiveness.

  “You can go, Sarah,” she heard herself saying. Obediently, the child nodded, and hopped down off the settle to walk quietly out of the parlor, leaving Isabelle alone.

  I don’t want to forgive him—

  The mere idea made her angry, so angry she could feel a headache coming on.

  Coming on?

  She put her hands to her head and gasped as a lance of pain transfixed her, stabbing into her temple.

  And it was that pain that finally awoke her to the reality of what she was doing to herself.

  The child was right. The rancor she held for David Alderscroft was like a thorn in the foot that she refused to remove because she had not put it there. Nevertheless, it was stabbing deeper with every step she took. How long before it began to fester?

  Judging by her strong reaction, not long at all.

  “Bother,” she said aloud. “I am not very good at this sort of thing—”

  How to forgive when you really didn’t want to?

  Convince yourself that you do, of course.

  With a sigh, she resigned herself to the inevitable. She went upstairs to the bedroom she had been given, and got a thick pile of foolscap out of the desk. Pen in hand, she sat down to make a list.

  She was, by nature, a very methodical person. It was in her nature to approach a problem by writing a list.

  She divided the paper in half with a line down the middle. On the one side she would write out all of her grievances; on the other, write the reasons why she should give the grudge up.

  One: he broke my heart.

  Broke it? Not really. Oh, it had felt like a broken heart at the time, and certainly she had been horribly unhappy, but with the perspective of time it was not—quite—a broken heart. She wrote that down on the other side of the line, then something else occurred to her.

  If he had not cast her off, she would never have gone to India and never met Frederick.

  So Frederick, she wrote on the right-hand side of the page.

  So if he had not broken her heart—He hurt my pride.

  True enough, very true. And hardly the reason to carry a grudge. Pride got hurt all the time, it always went before a fall.

  So true, she wrote on the other side, and added and no harm done.

  He drove my friends away.

  That was a lie. She had run away, and as she had discovered, her true friends had not been driven away, and had, in fact, only been waiting for her to approach them again.

  So false she wrote on the right-hand side.

  He’s arrogant.

  True, but if she began to hate everyone who was arrogant, she would soon be spending all her time seething in a self-made mass of anger, too tied up in knots to actually get anything accomplished.

  He thinks no one is right except himself.

  Also true, but—the same argument held.

  Down the lists on both sides she went, until she had three full pages of reasons why she should not forgive him—and six pages of reasons why continuing to be angry at him was foolish.

  She stared at her lists and began to chuckle.

  She never could hold a grudge in the face of logic. The logic here was overwhelming, and with a mocking nod of self-deprecation, she acknowledged that.

  She put down the pen and stared out the window at the neatly ordered gardens. “I forgive you, David Alderscroft,” she said aloud. “I forgive you for being an arrogant ass. I forgive you for being cruel to the poor fool I was. Because if you had not been cruel, I would not have Frederick, and for that blessing I can forgive you just about anything.”

  She felt some of her rancor ease. Not all, by no means, not all—but she would repeat this vow of forgiveness as often during the day as she remembered to do so, and eventually—probably sooner rather than later—she would feel it unreservedly.

  And in a way, it would be a better revenge than continuing to hate him, because the last hold on her he had w
ould be gone.

  She laughed, put the foolscap into a drawer, and went down to the kitchens. She needed to find out how long the house party he was attending would last. And the servants knew everything. This might not be a matter of any urgency, but she really dared not take that chance.

  ***

  Cordelia nibbled the end of her pen as she considered which of her social contacts would best be able to get her invited to the house party David was attending. Under most circumstances this would have been the very last thing she cared to do, but after due consideration, she had realized something quite vital.

  It had occurred to her somewhat belatedly that it would be better, far better, if the transfer of souls took place somewhere other than in her own home. If it was to occur during something like this house party, for instance, there would be no breath of scandal attached. But to have David here in her London town house overnight—people would talk. There was no reason for him to stay overnight. Even if he drank too much, which of course he never did, he would not be put to bed here. In a manor or a big country estate, such things were done, because of the distances, but in London? No. If he were to be sick enough to be put up in the home of a single woman, there had better be a doctor called and two nurses in attendance. A gentleman capable of going up a set of stairs to a room would insist on going home in his carriage.

  She wanted no taint attached to David, since shortly she would be David.

  But a country house party? Ideal. Any stigma would attach to the owner of the house, the host of the party. The usual difficulties of explanation involved when a lady was found wandering late at night near the room of someone who was not her husband would not come into play. Her magic would prevent anyone from seeing her going to and from David’s room. Once she was in David’s body, she could carry the lifeless corpse of Cordelia back to her own room to be found in the morning. It seemed like a flawless plan.

  So her first step; find out how much longer the party was to continue, and her second; somehow contrive to get invited to it.

  Both were trivially easy for someone with Cordelia’s magic and social experience. To ascertain the first, she sent to David’s housekeeper to find out when he was expected back. An unexceptional, perfectly ordinary question and one she had asked the housekeeper many times before. One’s housekeeper was always the first to be informed of a prospective absence or return, often before one’s spouse knew. Of course, she did not ask directly; her secretary took that task. The answer came within the hour: in about a week.

  He had already been there a week at this point. It was an unusually long time for a house party, but this one was hosting a number of quite important politicians, but not all at once, since many of them were not on speaking terms with each other. Such were the ways of politics; one’s deadliest foes were generally in one’s own party. Still, at the moment David was both an unknown and someone to be courted, and David was staying on as an extended guest to meet all of them.

  Now, since she did not know the host directly, she had to contrive an indirect means of getting an invitation. But she was the mistress of the art of the indirect by now, since no mere female ever got anything done directly. No, they had to sneak and cajole and bargain. Any direct approach was unthinkable. A man could pay a call on a successful host at his club and say “Look, old man, I need to be invited to your soirée this weekend.” No one would question such a request. But a woman, particularly an unmarried woman—

  Tongues would wag and people would speculate about lovers.

  Surely nothing other than a lover could prompt such behavior out of a woman.

  So she would have to go about this carefully, though there was nothing particularly complicated about what she needed to do, only tedious.

  An hour in her workroom, scrying in her ice mirror, got her the names of those to be invited for the next week. She put on her walking suit, hat and gloves, her engraved card case, called for her carriage, and sallied forth to make calls with the determination of a Wellington planning a campaign. A set of morning calls for the least important, afternoon calls for the most, with tea reserved for the best target.

  She loathed making calls. If there was a more useless waste of time she had yet to find it.

  Normally this would not have involved the list of calls, but normally she would have had weeks or months for her little child ghosts to whisper in the ear of the intended victim and persuade said victim that she could not possibly go, but that dear Cordelia would provide the perfect substitute. The all-important matter of the guest list (or in this case, lists) were arranged very carefully at these parties. When guests were not accompanied by their respective spouses, an equal number of gentlemen and ladies must be arranged. When single ladies were required, they had to be above reproach in all ways. She certainly qualified on that score. No one had ever breathed a single word of scandal about her. She had never encouraged anything but the most restrained and polite of male attentions. Her pedigree was exceptional, her acquaintances wide and all of the best society, and she was, in public, neither too educated nor too ignorant. She made the ideal guest. She knew when to keep her mouth shut, when to amuse, and what topics were safe.

  Your son and your husband were safe from her attentions. She could be relied upon to be seated next to a boring old man and appear fascinated, to play whatever game of cards you required a partner for, to shoot adequately if you wanted women along at a shoot, and to not complain if you didn’t. She could not sit a horse, but she could help amuse her fellow females when the hunters went out. She had no sense of humor, but that was scarcely obligatory in a mere female. She could play badminton, croquette, lawn tennis, and lawn bowls without complaint. She had no history of attempting to curry favor.

  After careful weighing and measuring, which was the point of all that exercise going from town home to town home, she knew which of the rest of her “friends” was the likeliest provider of the invitation. She found her quarry, a plain and uninteresting cousin of the host, who was being invited merely to “make up” the rest of the party. She paid a call on the cousin who was a timid thing and not inclined to make a fuss—and really did not want to go to this party anyway.

  When she was done, the cousin was feeling really very ill, and not inclined to go off to a strange house in the country, away from all her creature comforts. Though London might be warm in the summer, it at least had the benefit of containing all that was familiar, and a few close friends who were just as plain and uninteresting as the cousin herself. She could spend her week in her usual round of pursuits or go off to the country to be bored and unhappy, and probably looked down upon.

  And here was a substitute, sighing wistfully and saying that she was tired of both London and her own Thames-side house, and longed for the tranquillity of “true” country life for a week or so.

  Cordelia watched with satisfaction in her ice mirror how the cousin sat down that very afternoon to write regrets and a suggestion.

  And Cordelia’s little ghosts stirred uneasily until she picked just one to do her bidding and whisper encouragement into the ear of the host as soon as he got that letter. They were not happy about being sent out now, not after the way in which Peggoty had been sent out and had not returned.

  She considered sending the new one, and rejected the idea, picking instead a scraggly little boy who had been very reliable in the past. While not precisely fearless, he was certainly not as fearful as some of them.

  With that particular task completed, she sat back in her crystal chair. There was no reason to leave the workroom just now, and every reason to stay. Not the least of which was that the temperature here was that of a brisk late-autumn day, with frost on the ground, and the temperature of her parlor, indeed, of the rest of the townhouse, was considerably higher.

  Ah. Now you understand.

  That voice again. She looked up from contemplating her hands and saw that the surface of the entire table was frozen over, creating a mirror an inch thick, in which she could o
nly see a pair of enormous ice-blue eyes, blue as the light in the heart of a glacier. The eyes stared at her in amusement.

  Now you understand. I wish to hold this place for myself and my kind. I wish to bring winter forever to this island of yours.

  That actually startled her, because she had never guessed that at all.

  “Why?” she asked it, as visions of a frozen London came and went in her extra mirror. The visions actually did not look particularly unpleasant, actually. The Thames was frozen solid and being used by a few hardy souls as a highway. Snow drifted up against most buildings as high as the second story, then froze hard, so that people had to either tunnel their way out or come and go through the windows.

  There were remarkably few people about. Now that might have been because it was so difficult to get around in the Arctic landscape, but Cordelia didn’t think that was the case. No… not when so few chimneys were smoking… not when there was no sign that any one was coming or going at the Houses of Parliament.

  It certainly looked as if London had been abandoned—

  And then an image of Hyde Park, and someone driving through it in a sleigh, a sleigh drawn not by horses, but in the Finnish fashion, by reindeer. Clever that; horses were ill-suited for running on snow and ice. A closer look—it was David Alderscroft in the back, being driven by a servant muffled to the eyes in furs. But something told Cordelia that it was her living in that body, not the original owner.

  Better and better.

  When I hold this island through you, you will need no longer fear discovery. You can collect your own circle of Elemental Masters to serve us. You will be the King—or Queen, if you so choose to revert to a female body—in all but name. Eventually, as the years pass, you will become the monarch. Have we a bargain?

  “There is always a price,” she said aloud. “What is it?”

  Your heart will be mine.

  She was startled for a moment. Surely the creature did not mean—