Brother's Ruin

by Emma Newman

  There was a knock on the front door as she flipped through the pages, looking for the best sketch. It was loud and frantic, making her pause. Surely the debt collector wasn’t going to come early?

  “Mrs Gunn!” It was Billy, who lived next door. The boy’s voice could be heard through the glass of her bedroom window that overlooked the street. “Mr Gunn!” He hammered again.

  The door was opened and Charlotte could hear the soft tones of Hopkins’s voice but not well enough to understand what he was saying.

  “Me gran!” the boy said on the doorstep. He was crying. “She’s dead! I dunno what to do! Please help!”

  Charlotte abandoned the sketchbook, put the floorboard back into place silently and covered it with the rug as the sound of her parents comforting the boy came from downstairs. She hurried down, past Hopkins, who had drawn back to the foot of the stairs to remove himself from the drama.

  Billy was sobbing on the doorstep. Mother wrapped her arms around him as Father put on his boots. “She was ill, but not that bad. Then this mornin’ she couldn’t get out of bed and then I made her a cuppa and took it up and she told me to go and do me round and she’d be fine. I just got back and she’s all . . . she’s . . .” He broke down and sobbed into Mother’s shoulder.

  “I’ll take care of everything,” Father said.

  The door to the dining room opened and Ben came out, ignoring Master Judicant’s protestations. “What’s happened? Who’s died?”

  “Mrs Cartwright,” Charlotte said, going to his side.

  “Come into the kitchen and have a cup of tea,” Mother said to Billy. “I’ve got a spare currant bun in the tin. Come and warm yourself up by the stove. Mr Gunn will send for the right people.”

  Ben put an arm round Charlotte’s shoulder as they watched the boy being steered through the house. Billy’s parents died shortly after Ben had returned home, struck by the same flu that had ravaged the neighbourhood early that year. What would happen to him now? Poor child.

  “I’m sorry, Master Judicant,” Ben said, turning to speak to him as he came to the doorway. “It’s our next-door neighbour. She died. Could I have a moment?”

  Master Judicant nodded. “Come back inside when you’re ready.”

  Charlotte watched him go back in to take his place and realised that the mechanism was in plain sight, only a couple of yards away. She drank in as many details as she could in as long a glance as she dared risk, and then shut the dining room door.

  “I’m not sure I can do this one, Charlie,” Ben whispered to her as he embraced her.

  “Try your best,” she whispered back. “It’s all going to be fine.”

  He went back into the dining room and Charlotte looked over to Magus Hopkins, but he wasn’t by the stairs. The front door was still open, so she guessed he’d gone out for the walk. She closed it, checked on Billy, who was being cared for in the kitchen and then went back to the hall, planning to sneak upstairs to work on the clock. To her surprise, Magus Hopkins was standing at the bottom of the stairs again, doing up the buttons of his burgundy coat.

  “Oh, I thought you’d gone out, Magus Hopkins.”

  “I’m just about to.” He smiled, a brief smile that had a hint of self-satisfaction, and then left.

  Altering the clock’s mechanism from memory, rather than sight, was the hardest task she’d ever attempted. She stared down at the top of the clock, trying to imagine what the mechanism inside would look like from above. She wasn’t even entirely sure which parts made the hands turn—she hadn’t intended to make the first timepiece change, after all—so all she could do was try to deduce which parts looked like they could move. In the end, she settled upon two small cogs that clearly interacted with each other in the timepiece she’d sketched and looked similar to what she’d seen briefly downstairs. After a couple of minutes that didn’t seem to be making anything except a headache happen, she saw Master Judicant lean forwards, checking the hands of the clock. There was the hint of a smile, so she forced her concentration to its sharpest peak and was rewarded with a horrible grinding sound from the clock.

  “I think it best to stop there, Latent,” Master Judicant said. “You’ve moved the hands enough to pass the test.”

  Hopkins was summoned back into the room once he’d returned from his walk and, with raised eyebrows, noted the time the hands displayed. “Well,” he said, surprised. “A remarkable feat.” He turned it and peered inside to look at the mechanism. Charlotte mirrored his wince. “And that’s why we don’t usually do this sort of test,” he muttered. “Jolly good, Latent. I will report back to my college and an offer will be with you in the morning.”

  “Thank you,” Ben said, doing his best to seem responsible and slightly guilty about the broken clock.

  It was only when Hopkins left that Charlotte realised how much the test had tired her out. She took off the crinoline cage, lay on the bed and dozed off, worrying about Billy and where he would go, wondering what Magus Ledbetter’s test would be and making rudimentary plans to sneak back to the cell in the small hours and alter the mechanism.

  The sound of the front door slamming shut woke her with a start. Magus Ledbetter’s booming voice rumbled through the house and Charlotte sat up, suddenly alert. The quilted coverlet that her grandmother had sewn was covering her, and she realised that her mother must have found her fast asleep and covered her up. Thank goodness she’d had the presence of mind to replace the floorboard and rug before she’d let herself rest.

  Magus Ledbetter didn’t waste any time on pleasantries, and the door to the dining room was shut before Charlotte had folded away the coverlet. Soon she was back in spying position, though she didn’t have to listen as carefully to hear his instructions.

  “As I told you yesterday, son, the esoteric art of Dynamics is all about strength, coordination and concentration. Not physical strength, mind you, but mental strength. Now, being an untrained Latent makes it far more likely that a test of ability for this college is dangerous, so we like to ask candidates to do something small. Not the sort of thing them Kinetics fuss with, something that can’t do much damage is all.”

  He, too, had a leather case—his was brown with a rectangular shape embossed below the clasp and outlined in red. Charlotte grabbed her opera glasses, but by the time she’d returned to spy through them, the case had been laid flat. Ledbetter took out a long wooden box and slid off the lid, which again had something embossed onto it. He removed a curved wedge of wood that looked like one of half of the letter C, with two grooves carved into it. Then he took out two perfectly spherical metal balls the size of walnuts and dropped them into place at the bottom of both grooves, making a heavy thunk sound.

  “It’s simple enough,” Ledbetter continued. “All you have to do is push these balls up the curve of the wood. Start with just the one, I’d say, and if you’re able, move the two of them. If you can push one of them up, don’t worry about keeping it there. It’s all about you having the mental strength to fight gravity. Understand?”

  Ben nodded and Magus Ledbetter looked to Master Judicant for confirmation he’d explained everything to his satisfaction. At Master Judicant’s nod, Ledbetter excused himself and went out of the room. As with all the other tests, Master Judicant moved the materials into a different position on the table—presumably to stop the Magus influencing anything with the memory of its location—and gave Ben the nod to start.

  Charlotte started to focus and then was distracted by the sound of Magus Ledbetter stomping through the house to the kitchen, probably in search of a slice of cake. As she attempted to gather her thoughts again, Charlotte’s gaze brushed across the lid of the box that had been left next to the case. Curious, she peered at the rectangular shape through the opera glasses.

  It was the same design as the hallmark she had seen embossed into the lid and base of the debt collector’s cell, and the sight of it made her freeze. For a moment, she doubted herself. Surely it was a mistake? But no, she had drawn that exact
pattern of overlapping symbols, the marks of her pencil on the paper of her notebook clarifying the blurred shapes in the metal into the very same design she was looking at now.

  Magus Ledbetter was involved? Then she remembered the name of the doctor who had signed off all the deaths at that house, how she’d thought it mere coincidence, given the common name, but now it seemed to be far more than that. Brothers, perhaps? Cousins? Was the conspiracy of murder being kept within the family as far as possible? Whatever the arrangement, it was clear that the magus and the doctor were colluding to hide the deaths of those poor people from the authorities. What an abuse of power and privilege!

  The rage she’d felt the night before as she’d listened to those foul men discussing the monetary benefits of murder began to rise again. She remembered the young magus talking about his “guvnor” and how he’d described him as a “bullying old bastard,” and then any ordered thoughts were buried beneath a fury that had remained unexpressed for far too long.

  The metal balls rattled in the grooves and then shot up the curved wood so fast she lost sight of them before hearing a smash of glass. She only connected the two a beat later. Master Judicant yelled out, calling to Ben to stop, as the lid displaying the hallmark cracked in two, rapidly followed by the dining room table. The case, the smashed box, the curved wooden slope, all came crashing down as the two halves of the table collapsed inwards.

  “Magus Ledbetter!” Master Judicant called, rushing to the door. “Magus Ledbetter! We need your assistance!”

  Ben had stood up now and was shouting, too. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I want it to stop!”

  His distress penetrated enough to make her try to rein herself in, but it was so hard. Charlotte looked away from the room below, focusing instead on the wooden chest in her room and squealed when a crack splintered through its lid. She squeezed her eyes shut, clenching her fists, imagining herself folding inwards, shrinking back inside herself, until she was left with a pain in her chest and a better sense of control.

  “Blood and sand!” Ledbetter boomed from the doorway into the dining room as he took in the wreckage. “You put the balls through the bloody window!”

  “I’m sorry,” Ben stammered. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Don’t be sorry, ye silly beggar! That was bloody marvellous! Well done, lad!” Ledbetter gripped Ben’s hand and pumped it up and down, the handshake nearly knocking Ben over. “Never in all my days have I seen a test passed so bloody well! And don’t worry about all this.” He waved a hand at the table. “It’s just ’cos your untrained. We’ll give you a mark and it’ll help keep you focused. Don’t be afraid of your power, son. D’ye hear?”

  The sight of him still shaking Ben’s hand made Charlotte feel sick. That rectangular shape, was that Ledbetter’s “mark”? Or did it mean the entire college of Dynamics? She’d leapt to the conclusion that Ledbetter was personally involved and she shouldn’t have. All that damage, just because she’d leapt to a conclusion without checking first.

  Her head pounded and she couldn’t stop shaking. Charlotte pulled away from the gap in the floorboards to lie next to it as the room started to spin. Ledbetter’s voice rose up through the gaps, denying her rest.

  “You’re on the brink of turning wild, boy. Your father did the right thing. Now you can see why this is so important. Don’t try anything else now, not a thing, you hear me? It’s not safe. Now, rest up, you look like you’re about to keel over. I’ll be in touch with the offer from my college. I’ll see you tomorrow! Good day to you, Master Judicant.”

  The front door slammed shut moments later and she listened to the magus whistling merrily as he strode off down the street. There was the sound of her mother fussing over Ben downstairs, Father and Master Judicant talking about the broken window and the table, and it all felt too loud, too much. Charlotte pressed her temples with her fists and started to cry. What if it wasn’t all lies, like the man at Speaker’s Corner said? What if she was turning wild?

  Chapter 12

  CHARLOTTE HELD UP THE candle to the mechanism, still panting from the exertion of lifting it out of the space below the cell and clicking it into place so it didn’t retract once more. It was long past midnight and she was shaking with fear, but she had to do this. She couldn’t let her father die.

  Examining the central dial and comparing it to the sketch, she noticed that Magus Hopkins hadn’t just added a couple of arrows to mark where she needed to change the mechanism; he’d added details to the markings on the dial itself.

  It wasn’t difficult to make the adjustments; in fact, it seemed to have been designed to have a variety of settings. That Hopkins knew what the markings on the dial were worried her, until she realised that it may simply be a common part used in several different machines, just as she’d seen in the timepieces. Ben had mentioned to her that trains and factory machinery contained the same parts, simply arranged differently to suit their purpose. She wished she understood what this machine did, but it wasn’t the time to lament her ignorance. At least if the worst happened and she couldn’t persuade her parents to visit their family in the southwest once Ben had made his choice, her father wouldn’t die. At worst, he would be put in debtor’s prison once he’d seen the magistrate, and then the money from Ben’s recruitment would come through and the debt would be paid. All that would be left to fathom was a way to put an end to the conspiracy. Perhaps an anonymous letter to Master Judicant would suffice, a few days after Ben’s recruitment. At least there was hope again.

  Once she was done, Charlotte lowered the mechanism back into place and screwed the plate back into position, using a screwdriver she’d borrowed from her father’s dusty tool box. She didn’t dare risk using any esoteric arts, not after what Ledbetter had said.

  After packing away the sketchbook in her satchel and closing the unlocked cell door so all was as she had found it, Charlotte went to the window, blew the candle out and opened the curtains. As she climbed out, the satchel strap got caught on the clasp and in frustration, she wriggled herself free of the bag and tossed it out into the yard ahead of her.

  Just as she was climbing out, the fabric of her dress got caught on the same clasp. With one leg inside and one leg dangling out of the window, it was the worst possible time. Cursing women’s clothing everywhere beneath her breath, Charlotte struggled to twist around and untangle it, just as the sound of one of the front door locks being tumbled echoed through the house.

  Panicking, she tried to find where her dress hem was snagged, but there was so much fabric it was impossible. She heard the front door creak—had all the other locks been left open?—and desperately tugged at the dress. She heard it tear but not enough, banged her head on the lower sash of the window and gave the dress another yank, making another impressive tearing sound as the young magus and his father came into the room.

  “It’s a bleedin’ girl!” said the magus, just as Charlotte managed to rip the last of the dress free.

  The window sash slammed down on her leg with a wave of the magus’s hand, and she cried out. The father grabbed her booted foot, the window sash was moved up again and she was pulled back into the room and thrown onto the floorboards. Her leg throbbed, as did her head, and when she tried to get to her feet, the magus pushed her over again with a rough shove to her shoulder.

  “Bloody hell! It’s that bloke’s daughter!” said the broom-moustached man, holding the lantern up to her face. “What you doin’ ’ere?”

  “I . . . I came to ask that you give my father more time to pay the debt!”

  “At half one in the bleedin’ mornin’?” The man laughed mirthlessly. “You gotta come up with summat better than that!”

  The magus looked at the cell and back at her. “Was it you who broke in yesterday?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “We was tipped off,” the father said. “Who sent you?”

  “No one sent me! I told you, I want you to give my father more time to pay his debt!”


  “Who’s her father?” the magus asked.

  “Mr Gunn, the one we talked about.”

  The magus knew her name—Charlotte could see the flash of recognition on his face. “Was it Hopkins that sent you?” the magus said, grabbing her coat at the collar and hauling her to her feet. He was much stronger than he looked.

  “No! He doesn’t know anything about the debt! I found the address on the letter you gave me!” she said to his father. The magus hadn’t let go and his grip had tightened the collar uncomfortably. “Please, I just couldn’t sleep and I thought I could find out how much he owed and leave you a letter . . .” It sounded terrible, even as she said it, but she simply couldn’t think quickly enough.

  “This is all bollocks,” the father said. “Who’s this Hopkins?”

  “Another magus, a dodgy one,” his son replied. “He don’t like my guvnor and the feelin’ is mutual. I reckon he’s got her to come ’ere and snoop about.”

  The father tugged at his moustache. “Don’t like this. What kind of scum sends a girl to do his dirty work?”

  “What did he tell you to do?” the magus yelled at her, shaking her until her collar started to choke her. She clawed at his hands, coughing.

  “Nothing,” she gasped. “Let me go!”

  The magus dragged her across the room, opened the cell door and threw her inside, slamming her against the bars so hard it knocked the wind out of her.

  “Son? What you doin’?”

  “My guvnor said no one could find out what was goin’ on ’ere. No one. This stinks of Hopkins. I’ve heard about this Gunn family, about her brother bein’ tested and turnin’ out to be some bloomin’ prodigy or summat, and Hopkins was one of the testers. I reckon she blabbed to ’im about Daddy’s debt, flutterin’ her eyelashes, beggin’ ’im for help, and he said he would if she came ’ere an’ sniffed about.” He closed the cell door and held it shut. “What did you find last night? Were you ’ere the same time as us?”