by H. G. Parry
“They do deserve more money,” Spencer said. “And they’ve been working under intolerable conditions since the war began. They also fear the kraken. They fear, too, the use French ships have been making of magic since the Revolution. They remember what happened at Saint-Domingue two years ago.”
“We all remember that,” Dundas said grimly.
Toussaint’s storm had in many ways been more disastrous for the British government than for the navy. The death toll had been lower than Pitt had dared to hope from the glimpse given to him by the enemy: devastating, but in the low thousands rather than the tens of thousands, and the major ships of the line had limped back to Jamaica. Yet this was luck, or possibly Toussaint’s mercy, rather than good management. It had been a gift to the opposition. They had demanded that Britain withdraw at once from Saint-Domingue, arguing that the whole affair had been hopelessly mismanaged—and, to be fair, it was increasingly evident that they were right.
“I understand their fear,” Pitt said carefully. “And we’ve done what we can to shield them against weather magic. But they don’t have to face the undead. The army does. For the most part, magic is still more important on a battlefield than it is at sea.”
“I understand the army needs magicians. But so does the navy. Britain needs more magicians in general, frankly. And a good deal more magic.”
“We should start conscription of Commoner magicians,” Dundas said, his Scottish brogue firm as usual. “We should have done it a year ago. Press-ganging, after all, has a long and honorable tradition.”
Forester spoke up. “Out of the question.”
“I think you’ll find it isn’t your decision,” Dundas shot back.
“It’s dangerous enough having unbraceleted Commoner magicians on ships isolated from civilization when they volunteer to be there. Can you imagine the harm that could be done by one unwillingly conscripted fire-mage mutinying at sea?”
“As opposed to the entire navy mutinying now?” Spencer demanded. “Mr. Pitt, Mr. Dundas, does this man really need to be present?”
“Mr. Forester is King’s Magician,” Pitt said. He might have let a note of irony creep into his voice. “He decides where he needs to be.”
Forester gave him a very cold look. “If you can’t see that a press-ganged magician would be a danger to an entire ship, then you are not as intelligent as I believed you to be.”
“I have no idea how intelligent you believed me to be.” This time Pitt matched Forester icicle for icicle. “But I do in fact see that. I don’t believe we can force conscription of magicians—France tried that, under Robespierre, and they ended up with civil war. There is one further possibility, however.”
“What is it?” Dundas asked.
“At present, the exemption for Commoner magicians in the army only applies to men. We can widen it to apply to women as well.”
Dundas had heard this before—it had been discussed before the bill itself, and decided against. Spencer had not. His eyebrows shot up. “You propose to let women in the armed forces?”
“As battle-mages only, yes. Would the navy be amenable to that, if it could be done?”
The Lord of the Admiralty thought it over carefully, which Pitt appreciated. It was a somewhat startling question to have forced upon him at midnight after a long day’s travel.
“I can’t speak for every captain,” he said slowly, “but most have no issue with wives and so forth on ships. And magic, after all, is practiced by ladies in society—it’s considered a feminine art as well as a masculine one. It would be a different thing if you proposed they man the cannons. I think they would accept the proposition. The difficulty would be in getting it through the Houses of Parliament—and past the king.”
“If you put any such idea to the king, His Majesty will ask me what I think,” Forester said flatly. He clearly saw no reason to consider the idea carefully, or at all. “And I will advise him against it. You’re welcome to try anyway, of course.”
Dundas rolled his eyes. “I don’t like it any more than you do, man! But these are desperate times. We have a war to win.”
“You made that abundantly clear when you broke the Concord,” Forester returned. “Had I been King’s Magician at the time, I would have advised him against that too. But I am King’s Magician now, and I have no desire to see this country fall even further from the principles that have kept Europe safe for hundreds of years.”
“And yet if we hadn’t broken the Concord,” Pitt couldn’t resist adding, “then you would not be King’s Magician at all. His Majesty would have no need of such a thing.”
“True. Perhaps that was something you should have taken into consideration.”
Silence. The tension in the room crackled like suppressed weather magic. Pitt broke it by turning back to Spencer, and tried not to take too much petty satisfaction in the fact that this allowed him to turn his back on Forester.
“I’ll put the question to the king,” Pitt said. “If he agrees, I’ll propose it in Parliament when the House next convenes. In the meantime, I can promise to divert at least some of the magicians currently assigned to the army.”
“How many?”
He ran over the lists in his head quickly. He had glanced at them only yesterday, so he was reasonably confident of the numbers. “At the very least, I can assign one more to each ship of the line.”
Spencer nodded, mollified. “That might satisfy them in the meantime. And what can I tell them about the pay increase?”
“That I will promise them, with all my heart.”
“Can we afford it?” Dundas asked shrewdly. “The bank narrowly avoided collapse last month.”
“France has a kraken,” Pitt said. “We have to.”
Dawn was beginning to lighten the sky by the time the admiralty men left, yawning and grumbling, to get what little rest they could while the terms were whispered along the daemon-stones to Portsmouth. Forester, considerably more awake, was about to follow them down the stairs when Pitt stopped him.
“I have a question for you,” he said.
Forester looked at him, understandably surprised. “About magic?”
“About the kraken.” He paused, choosing his words with care. It was a question he would rather have asked someone other than Forester, but there were few magicians with quite Forester’s knowledge. And the question had been eating at him all day, stronger than ever after his dreams the night before. “I had confirmation of it earlier today, from the daemon-stone in Switzerland. It was summoned by a young French officer in Italy. What form of magic would it take to summon a kraken from the depths and control it?”
The Templar considered, though surely he must have already thought it over himself. Perhaps he was considering how much to reveal. “To control it is a matter of simple mesmerism—though an unusual kind.”
“How unusual?”
“Difficult to say—it might be more usual in Commoners, but we don’t classify them so precisely. A number of Aristocrats, though, possess a strain of mesmerism that is technically weak but is surprisingly effective with animals. I believe your niece falls roughly within that category.”
Pitt had four nieces, but he didn’t need to ask to whom Forester referred. Eliot’s daughter Harriot was ungifted, and Lucy and Griselda were fire-mages like their father, the Earl of Stanhope. Only Hester Stanhope had the Pitt mesmeric strain—without, mercifully, any other complications. She had recently come to town for her first season and had blossomed from a gawky, headstrong girl into a spark of cheerful hellfire. At six feet tall, with voluminous chestnut hair and expressive blue eyes, she had little choice but to stand out from the crowd of debutantes, and she had clearly taken this as a challenge. But Knights Templar did not involve themselves with the London season. There was only one thing about Hester that Forester could possibly be interested in, and that was the magic in her veins—the same magic, in fact, that was in Pitt’s own.
“I’m not quite sure,” Pitt said carefully, “why yo
u know that.”
Forester clearly understood he had gone a step too far. “I made no special study of it, I assure you. Your family bloodlines are very interesting, and my mind traps records and writings—useful, in my line of work, though often tiresome. I only meant that the strain of mesmerism is unusual but not unheard of, and easily explained. What I don’t know how to explain is how the officer in question found the creature in the first place.”
Pitt, after a hard look, accepted the change in subject. “There have been kraken in the Mediterranean before, I believe.”
“But they strike without warning. The church had confirmation of its own regarding the summoning of this kraken. From all accounts, the French ship was waiting for it. The young officer who enslaved it—Napoléon Bonaparte, his name is—knew it was there. That is not a skill that accompanies mesmerism.”
“What is it?”
“Quite honestly, I don’t know. I intend to find out.”
True blood magicians could feel any magic within their territories. A kraken wasn’t human, of course, but they did possess a primitive magic of their own. And the port where the young officer had stood had recently become the territory of the French Republic of Magicians.
Napoléon Bonaparte. It was a name he had already heard from the reports coming out of Italy. He had another reason to remember it now.
“If you do,” Pitt said, “I would appreciate you informing me.”
Forester inclined his head.
Word of the kraken and the naval mutiny had reached Bath by the morning. Wilberforce read it in the papers over breakfast, sitting across the table from Henry Thornton and his new wife, Marianne, his heart sinking with every bite of toast. By the time the three of them made their way back from Bath Abbey after services, the street was rife with it. Until now, Bath had felt somewhat removed from the war—though there were more men in army uniforms than usual, some with bound wounds and missing legs, and many of the wealthy here to recuperate were shadowmancers touched by the mysterious sickness that plagued the king. Today, despite the clear blue sky over the yellow-gray buildings, the doom-laden whispers gave the distinct feel of storm clouds gathering.
“The kraken is a disaster for the war,” Thornton said.
“Yes. It is.” Wilberforce’s own concerns were elsewhere. “But the mutiny could be a disaster for us. It’s a magical uprising—or it will be, told in the right way. The papers already reported that the leader is a young Commoner fire-mage. This is what Forester and those like him have been warning of, and waiting for. They’ll use it the way the anti-abolitionists used Saint-Domingue: as an excuse for harsher penalties against free magic.”
“Can they be any harsher?” Thornton said, his long, solemn face grim. It was a rhetorical question, but Wilberforce answered it.
“Oh yes,” he said. “They can always be harsher.”
Thornton and Marianne exchanged glances that he was not supposed to see. They were worried about him. They knew he had lately been at the breaking point physically and mentally, and that they were two of the few people capable of looking past his customary brightness and seeing it. The winter had been hard on all of them. The last few years had been hard on all of them.
“Are you going to go back to London, then?” Marianne asked him, with careful nonchalance.
“Do you think I should?”
“I think you came here to rest, and you should stay,” Thornton said firmly. “There’s nothing you can do about the mutiny now. Our battle will come later. But we also know that you’re likely to insist on going.”
“I do want to go,” he conceded, “but not quite yet. I have something important to do first.” He hesitated. “May I ask you something?”
“That depends,” Thornton said, but there was a touch of amusement in his voice beneath the anxiety now. “Is it about Miss Spooner?”
Wilberforce managed a very small smile. “It might concern her, yes.”
The irony was, he really had not come to Bath to find a wife, although it was certainly the motive for many gentlemen in his position. The town had grown up around its famed magic spring, said to possess healing properties, and every season people flocked in their thousands, supposedly to drink the water in the Pump Room or bathe in one of several luxurious spas. But for most the real joy of the Pump Room was the crowds of people who gathered to gossip every day, and the real joy of Bath was the balls and assemblies almost every night.
Wilberforce usually enjoyed these things immensely, and always had, despite an uneasy feeling that so much sociability wasn’t good for his spiritual well-being. This time, though, the reason for his visit really had been to try to get well and recover his strength before Parliament opened, and nothing more. The shadow-wound from years ago had flared into fever and pain again over the winter; he was overworked and hopeless and drained of everything except determination to keep going. Even that felt more habit than purpose lately. Nothing he did made any difference. Certainly the world outside had seemed far too dark to contemplate starting a family. It had seemed too dark for a lot of things lately.
It had been raining on the day he had been introduced to Barbara Spooner in the Pump Room. She was the guest of mutual acquaintances of theirs, the Babingtons, and Wilberforce had been unusually reluctant to meet her. Thornton seemed so insistent he do so that he knew he was being set up for marriage. But he had liked her at once.
She was, as Thornton had said, very handsome: a little shorter than him, with a slender, graceful figure and a pointed face framed by dark red curls. He had found himself wondering how he appeared to her. People tended to like the look of him: his features were generally friendly and playful, and he’d been told once that he had an irresistible radiance about his person. He’d never, as far he knew, been described as handsome, and at that moment his shoulders were damp with rainwater and he probably looked small and boring. And yet she had smiled to see him, and it turned out she wasn’t smiling out of politeness but because she had read the book about religious thought he had published last year. Many people had—to everyone’s surprise, it had sold out its first print run in days. But she had cared about it, and she had wanted to meet him.
They had talked about his book, and about religion, and even, a little, about politics, though he didn’t want to think about it and to his relief neither did she. Her interests were in theology and family, not public life.
“I do know about your work for abolition and for free magic,” she said, as though afraid he’d be offended. “I admire it.”
“I thought about retiring from politics this winter,” he heard himself say. It was true, but he hadn’t said so even to the Thorntons. It had been for the pages of his diary only, like all his very worst thoughts. “Or giving up, really. I suppose I’m still thinking about it.”
“Why?” she said. There was no judgment in the question, only curiosity and concern. “Aren’t things worse than ever?”
He was about to say that was exactly why he had felt like giving up, but the truth of her question struck with simple, profound force. Of course, if put that way, giving up because things were terrible was giving up at exactly the wrong moment. His only excuse was that everything being terrible made him very, very tired, and that felt like no excuse at all.
“I suppose,” he said instead, “because it’s so difficult to know how best to make a difference.”
“It must be different for you,” she mused. “I’ve never made a difference—not the sort you mean. The only person affected by what I do is me, and my family. I only have to try to work out what the right thing to do is, and then try to do it.”
He laughed without quite knowing why, and the conversation had moved on to other things.
But he had been thinking about it ever since. And, increasingly, the thoughts had been a window opening, and there had been a glimpse of sunlight beyond—not the gentle kind, but the hard, bright, unforgiving light of a winter’s morning. He had wanted to make things better for so very long,
and still did. It hadn’t occurred to him that perhaps the right thing needed to be done even without hope of making things better. It wasn’t a comforting thought. He wasn’t sure he wanted it to be true. But by that light, many things that had seemed muddled and hopeless were illuminated, and if they were still hopeless, at least they were no longer muddled.
Because of this, he had also been thinking of Barbara. And that, in the midst of everything, was neither muddled nor hopeless.
“I seem to recall us talking about Miss Spooner before we arrived,” Thornton said, pulling him back to earth. “I said she was handsome and intelligent, and I suggested she might be a suitable wife for you. I seem to recall you saying, that same conversation, that you would never be married.”
He kept his reply light. “I never said it was a rule I’d set in stone and laid at the foundation of my house. I just said that at this stage of my life, with the country in the state it was in and all the calls on my time, it was looking very unlikely.”
“And we said,” Marianne said, “that you’re still relatively young and relatively healthy, despite your attempts to work yourself to an early grave, your finances are sound, despite your attempts to give most of your money to worthy causes, and you were never, ever going to remain unmarried. You love people too much.”
“I do love people, for the most part,” he conceded. “But I believe to get married you have to love one specific person.”
“And now you think you do.”
Perhaps it was simply the right time, or the right place. Perhaps, despite his protests, his heart was simply open for someone to love, and she was the first to walk in. He didn’t care. He didn’t even think so. He had met beautiful women before; he had even, when he was younger, been in love with them. He had never met anyone who had looked at him and told him the right thing to do, right when he needed to hear it, and never even realized she had done it.
