A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  Eliot nodded. “He did. He proposed on day eight. Apparently, she was very handsome indeed. And, as it transpired, very much in love with him.”

  Of course she was. That was exactly the sort of thing that happened to Wilberforce, simply and innocently and with no complications.

  Eleanor was twenty years old too. In a flash of complete honesty, he knew that what he had told Eliot when he had asked why he didn’t simply marry her was the truth. He wished he could. He simply hadn’t wanted to know it.

  It wasn’t fair, he caught himself thinking, which was ridiculous. But it was also true.

  Somewhere, Pitt managed to find a smile. “How wonderful for him.” He stood. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”

  Pitt went to his study, wrote his letter, and put it on his desk with the pile for the post. Lord Auckland would receive it that evening, at the same time that the king would receive his report on the state of the navy. While he remembered, he wrote to Wilberforce as well, congratulating him on his engagement and reminding him that when he was next in town he would welcome the opportunity to discuss Bonaparte and the enemy with him. He hoped it didn’t sound as terse as it did in his head.

  He came out and resumed his conversation with Eliot. After a while, he forgot why he felt so cold inside, and then he forgot to feel it at all, most of the time.

  The talks with the navy were almost complete on the day Kate made her way along the wharves, though she knew very little about what was going on in the halls of power. She was headed to the house around the corner where her friend Dorothea Willis and three other women took in laundry. Kate had been forced to give up the house she had once shared with her family and move down a smaller, dirtier street, away from the brown water of the Thames. It wasn’t only a question of money. Many of the dockworkers didn’t like Commoner magicians near the Great Pool anymore.

  “Those ships are taking supplies out to the troops,” her old landlord had said pointedly. His eyes narrowed, to match his pointed chin. “They’re supporting the war effort. We can’t risk them being poisoned or set alight by rebel magic.”

  “I can’t set anything alight,” she said heatedly. Christopher had always said she didn’t know when to keep her mouth shut. “I’m a weather-mage. If I had my magic and wanted to hurt your stupid ships, I’d send a storm to sink them to the bottom of the ocean. Only I can’t, because of this thing around my wrist, and I wouldn’t, because I’m not a traitor.”

  She couldn’t prove it was why she had been thrown out the moment she couldn’t pay, or why many of the workers who had once brought her mending stayed away, but she could guess.

  Kate worked all day at washing now, with Dorothea and her girls. It was backbreaking labor: by the end of the day her hands burned, and the soapy water slicked her bracelet and itched behind it when it dried. And yet that day, as she carried a basket of men’s shirts against her hip, the commotion around the Great Pool felt friendly, at least to her. The day had a fresh-scrubbed look, as though the river had washed it clean.

  “Good morning, Kate,” Danny Foster called from one of the ships nearest the bank.

  “It was until I saw your face,” she called back cheerfully, and he grinned.

  Danny was a year younger than them, and had been Christopher’s best friend since they were children—a wide-eyed, ruddy-cheeked boy, whose strong body still had a soft, unformed look, like fresh-made dough. Kate was very fond of him, but lately their conversations had become a dance, with her keeping him at a carefully managed distance with alternating smiles and warnings. She knew he would marry her if he could, and she didn’t want to hurt him by telling him he couldn’t, not now. There were whispers in the street that the navy was going to be allowed to take on female magicians as a way to settle the mutiny. Her magic would be perfect for the navy—it knew the waves and the wind better than that of any Aristocrat. She could escape, as Christopher had. She might even see him again.

  She was still smiling when she pushed through the door of the washerwoman’s house. So it startled her when Dorothea looked up to meet her with tears in her eyes. Dorothea was a sturdy woman, her face aged beyond her forty years by toil and childbirth. Kate had known her all her life—she had been their neighbor, and almost a second mother to her and Christopher. In all those years, she had never seen her cry.

  “What is it?” she asked, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m so sorry, love.” Dorothea’s face was serious, somber. “It was Christopher’s ship.”

  Something inside her broke then—her heart, or something more important. She didn’t know why yet, but she felt it happen. “What was?”

  “One of the three the kraken took, off Spain. It was him.”

  Something was shaking Kate’s head for her now, in disbelief she didn’t feel. “No—no, Christopher wasn’t on a ship,” she said, very calmly, as though a tear hadn’t just coursed down her cheek. “He joined the army. He never liked the sea.”

  “There were troops on board being transported to Spain.” Dorothea’s voice came from a very long way away. “That’s all it said. But it was his company. I looked, so I could tell you if… Well. I didn’t want you to see it first. None of them survived.”

  Spain. Christopher had always wanted to see Spain. She’d only ever wanted to sail foreign oceans, but as they’d lain in bed at night he’d tried to entice her to come on land, making her giggle with his increasingly wild stories about Spanish wine and food and sunshine.

  “They have magic that grows peaches as big as your head,” he’d said gravely. “Your head, Kate. No, I swear, their Aristocrats perform it. Don’t you want a peach as big as your head? Are you some kind of monster?”

  He’d known nothing about it, really, just a few stories from the sailors in port and a few more he’d made up. But he’d longed for Spanish towns, and for the sunshine. He hated being cold.

  He was cold now, at the bottom of the ocean. He had been for weeks. Kate had been so sure that she would know if something happened to him. She hadn’t.

  Dimly, she was aware that Dorothea was still speaking. “You can come stay with us, if you need to. If—”

  “Thank you,” she said, or tried to. Her chest was tight, so it was hard to breathe. “I’m all right where I am. But thank you. Thank you for telling me.”

  She turned and walked home. She walked past the Great Pool and its seething mass of ships, past the sailors shouting their commands and their curses, past the vendors selling pies on the corners. She stumbled once as a man pushed past her, and she hit the ground hard. She got up and kept walking, not feeling the sting of her scraped knee. She walked back to her rented house, with its one dingy room her brother had never seen and now never would, and closed the door tight behind her.

  It was only then that she collapsed to the floor, and it took her a long while to realize the gasping, strangled cries she could hear were her own.

  In May, Wilberforce married Barbara Ann Spooner. They had known each other for six weeks.

  Shortly after that, the navy returned to work. They had been granted their first increase in pay in more than a hundred years, and improvements to the squalid conditions in which they worked. They were also allowed, for the first time, to accept select female battle-mages on board.

  The week after that, Anton Forester made his move.

  London

  September 1797

  Wilberforce looked out the window as the carriage turned down the familiar road that led to his home at Clapham. He and Barbara had been traveling for two days; he should have been pleased to see it, and the cool leaf-encrusted autumn evening outside. But sad news had brought them home, and there didn’t seem to be room for anything inside him but grief—and doubts, which were worse.

  That summer, at the Temple Church in London, a breakthrough in magical repression had been made by Master Templar Anton Forester. By adjusting the alchemical composition of the metal bracelets, he had found that they could not only heat in the presence of
magic, but suppress that magic entirely. A Knight Templar with a strong strain of telekinesis volunteered to wear one and found himself unable to lift so much as a feather. A Templar with an unusual strain that allowed him to see in the dark locked one around his wrist and walked straight into a door. It was deemed a great success.

  “It’s monstrous,” Thomas Clarkson had said, as he and Wilberforce worked late into the night within his cell at the Tower of London. The Tower, so frosty in the winter, was stifling in the July heat. The tiny window offered only the faintest breeze, and it carried with it the putrid smell of the Thames.

  “Is it?” Wilberforce sighed. “Or at least, is it really any more monstrous than the old bracelets? The bearers wouldn’t suffer physical pain, at least.”

  “They won’t have the chance to. Their magic will be entirely cut off from them, even in battle. It was possible to push through pain and defy the old bracelets—the French Commoners proved that.”

  “They did. And when the Republic of Magicians began to lock them up, they had to intensify the alchemy to the point where the pain was unable to be borne. There are those in the House who would be quite happy for us to do the same. The Forester bracelets are at least less cruel.”

  “Agreed. But there’s something to be said for open cruelty. It demands to be stopped. This kind of quiet repression is more insidious. That’s one reason why slave traders fight so hard to keep spellbinding. It’s easy to ignore victims when there are no screams.”

  Wilberforce didn’t argue. There was too much truth to it. “They’ll never be used,” he said instead. “The alchemy is too expensive and too specialized. The government doesn’t have money or magicians to spare, what with the war on France.”

  “The war is precisely why they’ll be used,” Clarkson said. He leaned his elbows on the table; his own bracelet gleamed silver in the candlelight. It had been five years since Clarkson had been imprisoned for his role in aiding the Saint-Domingue uprising. He had grown white and gaunt over the years of his imprisonment, but his eyes still held their old gleam. “The war of magic. The breaking of the Concord. Most of all, the Revolution. The government knows that had France been in possession of these new bracelets, the Commoners would never have been able to storm the Bastille. They would never have seized the Tuileries. The Temple Church wouldn’t have been forced from France. The royal guard could have fought them off, and there would still be a king on the throne. And now discontent is rising in England, and magic is loose on the battlefield. Can you wonder that the government are afraid?”

  “This isn’t France,” Wilberforce said firmly. “Nor is it America, or Saint-Domingue. There will be no revolution here.”

  “Are you certain of that?”

  “No,” Wilberforce conceded. “I only hope there won’t be, with all my heart.”

  “You and I hope differently,” Clarkson said. He said nothing more—they had stopped poking that point of difference long ago. “But the government won’t be content to hope—and certainly the royal family won’t be. You’ll see.”

  He had.

  He and Barbara had been away in the Lake District for their first summer when the news had come that Parliament was opening a week early in order for the House of Commoners to vote that every bracelet in the country be replaced with the Forester bracelets. The king had already approved their use wholeheartedly. Commoner magicians were still to be used in the war overseas. If the new bill passed, there would be no possibility of Commoner magic on English soil.

  Their new household in Windermere was easy enough to pack up, and they did so quickly, hurriedly, in the whirl of controlled chaos that already characterized their domestic life. As a result, they had nearly missed the second letter from London that came to the Lake District, this one from Pitt. Wilberforce expected it to concern the Forester bracelets, so he was unprepared when he opened it.

  Downing Street

  September 20, 1797.

  My dear Wilberforce,—I know what your feelings will be on receiving the melancholy account which I have to send you, that a renewal of Eliot’s complaint has ended fatally and deprived us of him.

  After the attacks he has had, it is impossible to say that the blow could ever be wholly unexpected, but I had derived great hopes from the accounts for some time, and was not at this moment at all prepared for what has happened. You will not wonder that I cannot write to you on any other subject, but I will as soon as I can.

  Ever sincerely yours,

  W. Pitt.

  His face must have shown his shock and his grief, because Barbara frowned. “What is it?”

  He handed it to her, wordlessly, and sat in numb silence as she read it. Eliot was dead. It wasn’t wholly unexpected to him either, but it was heartbreaking nonetheless.

  Eliot had been with Wilberforce and Pitt in France when the first shadow had come into their lives; he had laughed with them through so many perfect sunbaked days at Wilberforce’s country house and so many long nights at London clubs; he had stayed without complaint in the shade as his two friends had blazed in their respective orbits. He had been the bridge between them during the last difficult few years, blunting the prickly edges of their differences with sheer goodwill. It felt like one further link with the old, safe world had broken.

  “Are you thinking about Mr. Eliot?” Barbara asked now from next to him.

  He pulled himself away from despair and back to her. He couldn’t quite find a smile, but he took her hand in his own. “Partially,” he said. “I’m thinking about things ending.”

  She squeezed his hand in sympathy. When she next spoke, there was a touch of hesitation in her voice. “We’ve been married for four months,” she said. “I think it might… also be time to start thinking of things beginning.”

  It took him a moment to realize the import of this. When he did, it was with a jolt, as though something in his heart had shifted, or the world had. “Really?”

  “It’s too early to say yet for certain. I didn’t want to raise your hopes. I know how much we both want children, and if I’m wrong…” She stopped and looked him directly in the eyes. Her own were startlingly dark in such a pale face. “But I don’t think I’m wrong. I know I’m not.”

  Unusually for him, he didn’t know what to say. After a moment, he kissed her—a tender, fragile kiss that mingled awe and wonder and fledgling joy. From her response, it was all the reply she had wanted.

  Barbara was not quite a natural fit for the Clapham sect. Her depth of religious understanding matched theirs, it was true, but their religious interests were political and philanthropic. They wanted to let their beliefs guide them to do good in the world. Barbara didn’t care about politics or social causes. She didn’t even really care about housekeeping and visitors and what was usually considered the domestic sphere. Her sphere was tighter and more intimate: it centered around the people she loved, and it moved with them. At the moment at least, that sphere was fixed entirely around Wilberforce, and his friends trying to enter it understandably found it rather restricted. They had difficulty understanding that he needed it—not as a substitute for the world of politics and philanthropy, but as a way to remind himself there was life outside it, the kind of life he was fighting for.

  Because of her, and the flicker of hope she had stirred, he was able to greet the Thorntons with a small smile when the carriage pulled up on Clapham Common, when the sight of his own grief reflected in their eyes might otherwise have brought him to tears. Marianne embraced him tightly, then, with just as much warmth, embraced Barbara.

  “It’s wonderful to see you both,” she said. “I’m sorry you have to return under such circumstances.”

  “So am I,” Wilberforce said. “And I’m even more sorry I wasn’t here when Eliot died. I…” He paused, fumbling for words, but his mind could only grasp on to the usual commonplaces. “Did he suffer?”

  “If he did, it wasn’t for long,” Thornton said. His voice was steady, but heavier than usual. “It was very
sudden. Fortunately his daughter was with her grandparents.”

  “Poor child.” Harriot Eliot, Harriot Pitt’s daughter, was now an orphan. It was commonplace enough, and as orphans went she was fortunate. The Pitt family provided for their own, and Eliot would have seen she was looked after. She would want for neither love nor finance. But it was still terrible, and he didn’t see why he should pretend otherwise.

  Marianne embraced him again. “Come on. Let’s go inside. We can talk about it there. And then we can talk about the bill.”

  The bill was heard on a brilliant-skied autumn evening, as the late sun slanted through the high windows in the House of Commoners. It was unseasonably warm and bright, but the room seemed full of shadows.

  Pitt, as predicted, rose fairly early in the proceedings to make the case for the Forester bracelets. He was convinced, and convinced a number of others, that the increased expense could be well supported by the nation, and that it was worth the cost to protect the country from further uprisings. It might seem overly repressive, but in fact it would preserve the current liberties of the Commoner magicians, who would otherwise face far more unfair strictures and suspicion as the Revolution continued on the Continent.

  “Here we go,” Thornton murmured as Pitt sat down and Fox shot instantly to his feet. By the satisfied anticipation that swept the galleries, this sentiment was echoed by the spectators. Fox had only solidified his position as one of the Revolution’s strongest supporters since the beginning of the war, and the pitched battles between Pitt and himself had blazed to such heights lately that people with no interest in politics at all drifted in to watch. The passionate fury on one side and the dignified, perfectly measured sarcasm on the other had the walls reverberating with intricate symphonies—once or twice the debates had needed to be suspended to let the magic quiet down again.

  That was the trouble with the magic that bespelled the walls of the House of Commoners. It responded to eloquence, not truth. Wilberforce had once, a very long time ago, thought the two were interchangeable. Now he knew it was just as easy to be eloquent and wrong as it was to be eloquent and right.