Unnatural Issue Page 6

  Peter bit his lip. “My lord, if a distraction is all you want, I can provide it from London, or better still, from Paris or Milan.”

  The old man snorted. “I have plenty of people to provide distractions. What I need is someone who can reliably find a beginning necromancer. Don’t play the silly ass with me, Almsley. I know you too well. You can chase your opera singers in whatever time we have left after you find him.”

  Peter sighed. “Yes, my lord,” he said with resignation.

  After some idle pleasantry, an inquiry after his mother and grandmother, and another after Peter and Maya Scott, Alderscroft suggested he might want to be on his way. Taking that as the dismissal that it was, Peter finished his brandy. The valet appeared as if summoned and showed him out.

  Frustrating. It was very frustrating. Alderscroft seemed to think that he was some sort of arcane Sherlock Holmes, able to chameleon himself into any shape. I appear to have done my job a little too well, he thought ruefully, as the doorman summoned a taxi for him. Yes, he certainly could find entry into many places on the Continent, but that was because he could fling money about and be the silly English ass that everyone found amusing, use his knowledge of antiques and literature to fit in among the Ancient Aristocrats, and use his knowledge of art, socialism, and American ragtime to find a place among the bohemian crowd. And of course, the bohemian crowd gave him access to the criminal element.

  But he would no more be able to pass as—say—a Basque shepherd than fly. He could—just—manage to get about the London underworld, but it was dodgy, and he’d rather do it under the wing of someone like Peter Scott’s reformed burglar. He could never, not even with someone guiding him every step of the way, pass as an ordinary Yorkshireman.

  He brooded about this tricky problem while he set his valet and general indispensable partner, Garrick, to packing a trunk and a valise. What he needed was someone from Yorkshire to give him houseroom. He might, just might, be able to pass himself off as a harmless and not-too-bright visitor. So long as he had a good reason for visiting, that is.

  Who could he inflict himself on? Do I know any artists out painting the moors? He wondered. Although . . . that was a thought, what about setting himself up as an artist? He wouldn’t have to be a good one, just be able to say he was an Impressionist and put sky colored daubs at the top of the canvas and moor-colored daubs at the bottom.

  He posed this notion to Garrick, and Garrick considered it. “Your artistic friends tend to have very little money and are living in very little space. I fear you would be sleeping in an armchair in a one-room cottage and eating out of tins. Perhaps an old school chum would be a better notion, m’lud,” he said diffidently. “Had you rung up Charles Kerridge yet?”

  Peter blinked. “Garrick, I could kiss you!” he exclaimed. “Just the thing!”

  “Thank you, m’lud,” Garrick replied with a little smirk. “Shall I take the liberty of sending a telegram to Branwell Hall? Although, for the purposes of wandering about the moor, posing as an artist would do very nicely indeed. If I might suggest that you ring up one of your artist friends for a kit suggestion while I make arrangements?”

  “Oh, most estimable Garrick! I shall do exactly that,” Peter replied, feeling much relieved.

  The first artist friend that was actually in and willing to answer her telephone was that rara avis indeed, a member of his own set who was a damn fine artist and was actually making a good living at it. This had enabled her to politely tell her family—who had wanted her to marry this or that moneyed fellow for some time—to go hang themselves. It had caused quite the dust-up at the time, though they had settled themselves down to it when she showed no signs of wanting to marry an anarchist or worse, Take Lovers. When Clarissa heard what he was up to, she invited him over for tea.

  “Get out of Garrick’s way and let him make arrangements,” she chided. “Tell him where you’re going, and have him get you from here.”

  Garrick highly approved of this and wanted to know only one thing: “Train or motor, m’lud?”

  “Motor, of course. That way I can bumble about the moors free and lonely as a cloud,” he said on his way out the door.

  One curiously satisfying tea of thick cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and gunpowder black, and a quick lesson in how to fake being a bad painter who is certain he is good, and Peter was on his way to Yorkshire, with Garrick in the passenger’s seat, the boot stuffed with luggage and Clarissa’s own portable painting kit.

  “You won’t fool anyone if everything looks new,” she had chided, bundling up a couple of stained smocks to go with the paint box and portable easel and stacks of stretched canvas and primed Bristol board. “And remember, light to dark when you are working wet. Once it’s dry, you can layer on all the nonsense you like.”

  “Well, Garrick, I didn’t get the chance to tell you, but Alderscroft has me hunting a necromancer on the moors,” he said, over the Bentley’s rumble.

  “A necromancer on the moors, m’lud? Sounds quite like a Sherlock Holmes tale,” Garrick observed. “And is Lord Kerridge to be informed of this?”

  “I think it advisable. Alderscroft won’t believe it, of course, but to my way of thinking a mage on his own ground is the equal of any Master who is a stranger to the place.” He concentrated for a moment on a tricky bit of curve. “What’s more, he’s Earth. He’ll be more attuned to the place than I am from the beginning.”

  Garrick, who was a minor Water power himself, nodded. “Ah, if I might be so bold again, m’lud . . . does Lord Kerridge have the same family complications as you do?”

  Once again, Peter blinked at his man’s acuity. “By Jove . . . that could be a problem. Could be tricky to find a time and place I can explain this.”

  “Might I suggest, since we have gotten a late start, a slight detour to Heartwood House? You can use your Working Room, overnight there, and continue in the morning.” Garrick coughed. “I am given to understand that there is quite a bit of fauna wandering loose on the moors, and a collision with something weighty at night would be unfortunate.” There was the faintest of disapproval in Garrick’s voice. Peter’s valet was a city man, and he disapproved of unconstrained wildlife on principle. Peter suppressed a smile.

  “I don’t suppose this suggestion would have anything to do with a chambermaid named Daisy, would it?” he suggested slyly, and was rewarded by the reddening of Garrick’s ears. “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about, m’lud,” Garrick replied in a slightly strangled voice.

  The rest of the journey proceeded uneventfully, interrupted only by a stop at a familiar pub for a quick bite, and Peter pulled the Bentley into the packed gravel drive of Heartwood House just as the sun was setting. He was not at all surprised to find some of the staff waiting for him. That would be his grandmother’s doing of course. She would have known he was coming almost as soon as he had decided it. He suspected she had one or more sylphs watching him at all times.

  He waved off the servants who went to the boot. “No unpacking, we’re just staying the night,” he said. “Has my grandmother retired for the evening?” He was safe enough from his mother; she was in London.

  On learning the dowager duchess had gone to her own rooms, he trotted inside and bounded up the stairs. As he expected, she was in her private parlor, waiting for him with a pot of tea and two cups. “You wicked boy, what are you up to?” she asked, as he bent to kiss her cheek. “Or rather, what has that wretched man Alderscroft got you haring after?”

  He took the tea she handed to him, and explained it all to her while she sipped and listened attentively. “Well, as usual, Garrick is right,” she said when he had done. “You’d better contact him now and explain it all to him. It is a great pity you can’t dragoon that charming Maya Scott into helping you with this.”

  “It’s a greater pity the resident Earth Master has turned into a hermit,” he grumbled. “Alderscroft doesn’t seem to have noticed t
hat there is a great deal of Yorkshire to search. All right, I’ll pop up into our workroom; Water to Earth at least should not take too long.”

  He and his grandmother shared a workroom, a former “priest hole” concealed in the back of her maid’s room. It was slightly inconvenient for him, but the inconvenience was more than compensated for by the guarantee of privacy. Two of the family ghosts were waiting there when he slipped the catch on the paneling and stepped inside. One of them obligingly glowed enough that he could see to light the lamp just inside the door.

  His grandmother had anticipated his needs; a pitcher of fresh water and his scrying basin were already on the marble table that served them both as an “altar.” Not that either of them ever performed anything vaguely like a religious ceremony here, but the nomenclature for a table in the center of a Working Circle was an “altar.” The protective Circle in this room was permanently inlaid in the floor except for a tiny bridging piece that fitted into the circle of bronze like a puzzle piece. He fitted that piece in, and the Circle was sealed.

  Once it was, the permanent protections sprang up into life. When a mage had a personal, secure Working Room like this one, it was a matter of great convenience to have magic protections permanently in place. This room had served generations of Almsley mages and, God willing, would serve generations more.

  Peter’s brother Charles knew all about the room, of course, but he would no more have set foot in it than make himself up as a pantomime cow and cavort for the edification of the villagers. Charles took after his mother, the only difference being that Charles knew magic existed, and she didn’t. He had learned about it just as Peter had; he knew that their father had been a powerful mage and that Peter had stepped into their father’s shoes, and he even knew that their grandmother was just as powerful. He just refused to acknowledge anything having to do with magic, as if by doing so he could make it go away. He even ignored the family ghosts to the extent of deliberately walking right through them, which caused no end of ruffled feelings that Peter and the dowager duchess ended up having to soothe.

  So, there was less chance that Charles would barge in here than there was that His Majesty would loom in the door.

  The energy of Air was generally dominant in this room, since it was his grandmother that did the lion’s share of the Work here. Peter rested his palms on the little table and set about investing it with his own Element. Energies of every color of green there was, from the deep near-black of a storm-tossed ocean to the thin tint of aquamarine of a tiny freshet, condensed out of the air like fog. Tender threads, tiny tendrils of power, coalesced seemingly out of nowhere, each one a different shade of green; they sprang up and flowed toward him, joining thread to thread to make cords, streams, all of them flowing to him and into him, and he began to glow with the growing power he had gathered into himself.

  Now he took a carved quartz “singing bowl” from under the table and a pitcher of pure water. He filled the former and cupped his hands around it. Something stirred in the bowl, like a trail of bubbles in the clear water, a momentary fog passing over the surface. The water in the bowl rippled. And then—there, perfect in miniature, was an undine. The two ghosts—too wispy for him to tell which two they were—nodded approvingly.

  “Would you go to the creatures of the Earth Mage Charles Kerridge and ask them to tell him I need to speak to him please?” he said politely. The undine laughed up at him, in a voice that was as much inside his head as in his ears.

  “The Earth Mage already wishes to speak with you, Water Master!” she said gaily. “You have but to clear the bowl.”

  Of course, he should have expected that. With a chuckle, he bade farewell to the undine, who vanished in a flurry of bubbles, and waited for the water to clear and steady. As he looked down into it, drawing on his memory of his old chum and muttering the incantation that would link his bowl with Charles’ scrying plate, the water took on a mirror-like finish. But it was not his reflection that looked up at him.

  “Well, old man,” Charles said, peering up at him with a quizzical expression. “I can’t imagine that you’ve suddenly got a pash for the moors, so why the abrupt need for an invitation? Your man couldn’t be too specific with my man.”

  “That, old fellow, is because it’s magic, as you probably guessed,” Peter replied. “Alderscroft has me stalking the wild necromancer in your parts. Haven’t nosed anything out, have you?”

  Charles shook his head. “Not a hint nor a whiff, but there’s a lot of moor.”

  Peter sighed. “Exactly what I told the Old Lion. Ah, well, I have my marching orders. I reckon to impersonate a gentleman artist. No one expects an artist to act sensibly, and it gives me the excuse to ask all manner of things under the guise of finding scenery and subjects.”

  “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like. We can swap lies about our Oxford days like a pair of old codgers.” Charles grinned. “Actually, you can tell me what’s going on with the blasted Germans. My Elemental friends are not happy.”

  Interesting. Charles, out in the wilds of Yorkshire, had Elementals that were more aware of the Kaiser’s threat than the fellows in London had . . .

  “Your Elementals are right to be unhappy,” he replied with a shake of his head. “Grim times coming, old man. All right, I’ll catch you up on all that when I arrive tomorrow night. Garrick is coming with me.”

  “Top hole. Good night!”

  And with that, the water cleared. Charles was a “mere” magician, not a Master; holding communication open for that long had probably taxed him. Peter dismissed the energies, unmade the spell, took the loose piece out of the circle on the floor, and carried the now inert bowl of water to the window and poured it out. It was just a good idea to be in the habit of clearing everything but the permanent protections on a Working Room when you were done with magic. Some people preferred to leave things that they used often half-enchanted, but Grandmama and Peter’s father had taught him better than that. There was always the chance that someone could break into your Working Room and take something, and if it was half-enchanted, then they had a direct line into the heart of your magic.

  He rubbed his eyes and yawned. It had been a very long day, and there was another long day of driving ahead of him. Fortunately, he could count on Garrick to have his bed turned down, his nightclothes waiting, and the window wide open when he stumbled up to his room.

  “Good night, chaps,” he said to the waiting spirits, who nodded affably and faded into the walls. He closed the door of the Working Room behind him and tottered out to where his grandmother was waiting. She’d want to hear all of it and tender her own opinion on the subject.

  Which, given that she had been a Master more than twice as long as Peter had been alive, would be a very good thing to hear.

  4

  FOR once, the weather decided to cooperate with this journey. Peter had been keeping track, and it was a fact: Four times out of every five that he had to take a long trip by auto, it would bucket down rain. He never had dared to trust his luck in winter; he was afraid that if he did, he and Garrick would not be found until spring at the bottom of a melting snowdrift. In winter, he took the train, or he managed to keep far enough out of Alderscroft’s reach that he couldn’t be sent off on journeys like this one.

  The drive was astonishingly pleasant; Garrick was something of a minor wizard at knowing just where to stop, and luncheon at a crossroads pub in the middle of nowhere turned out to be an absolute delight. Garrick was also very good at interpreting maddeningly indecipherable signs at crossroads; Peter suspected that this was some odd aspect of his minor Air talents, because he couldn’t imagine any other way that his valet could have gotten sense out of signs so faded scarcely a ghost of the lettering remained.

  It was well after dark when they pulled into the drive of the pleasantly situated country house that Charles Kerridge and his family had lived in since the time of George the First. Charles’ family was by no means as exalted as Peter’s—Peter
’s brother was, after all, the Duke of Westbury—but their country house, Branwell Hall, was one of the most impressive Tudor manors he had ever seen, and Peter knew of several palaces that were smaller. Add to that, Branwell Hall was surrounded by an estate of over two thousand acres . . . it wasn’t exactly a cozy little cottage.

  The estate had passed into the hands of the Kerridges as a result of “an unfortunate gambling habit” combined with a complete lack of interest on the part of the previous owner in marrying and begetting an heir. A distant connection had made the transfer of ownership a bit more palatable to the locals, and after two hundred years, the Kerridges were now firmly ensconced in the squirearchy.

  Of course, having Earth magic run in the family had certainly helped that along. Charles, like every Earth magician Peter knew, was a good and careful steward of his land, his tenants, and “his” village. That was abundantly clear in the vibrant health of everything that could be considered within his reach. Even though it was dark when they passed Branwell Village, Peter could feel the rightness of the place.

  As Charles had promised, they were watched for. A light was burning at the gatehouse as they entered the open cast-iron gates, and he stopped the car as the gatehouse door opened, and a figure approached Garrick’s side of the car.

  “Lord Peter?” inquired the surprisingly young man who peered inside, looking at Garrick.

  “Indeed, but I am not Lord Peter,” Garrick said patiently. He was used to this. “Lord Peter prefers to handle this temperamental creature himself. I am Garrick.”

  “Beggin’ yur pardon, m’lard,” the young man said, tipping an invisible hat to Peter and looking embarrassed. Peter suspected that he was more embarrassed for Peter, who was—horrors!—handling the wheel of the auto himself, than he was at his own mistake.