Death by Silver

by Melissa Scott

  “It could be done, yes. It’s been done before. I suppose if I were setting out to do it myself, I’d try to bribe one of the…” He stumbled over the words for a moment, not wanting to risk making his hypothetical beloved a gentleman, even if he’d only been putting himself in Louisa’s place. “One of the lady’s servants, to administer it in her meals every day.”

  “You wouldn’t have to be there?”

  “Not if the enchantment were connected to me in some way. Written out in my blood, say, or in ink mixed with my blood. It’s still a risk, because if she missed even a day, the lady might realize something’s wrong. But if not…” Ned shook his head. “The papers are right enough about one thing. It’s worse than seduction. No reputable practitioner would do it.”

  “It seems seduction would be easier than getting all the way to the wedding day. If a man induced a young woman to do things she ought not…”

  “So that she’d have to marry him or be ruined? I expect it happens. Metaphysics isn’t safe, Hatton. There are any number of dreadful things that can be done with it.”

  “You mean like bashing men’s heads in with candlesticks? I know. And men do all manner of things to entice decent young women to marry them, some that would curl your hair if I told you about them, which I won’t. But it’s a lady we’re talking about doing the enchantment, in this case.”

  “She might have induced the gentleman to take indecent liberties, and then insisted he salvage her honor by marrying her,” Ned said, feeling increasingly unsettled by the entire topic. He supposed that was what it was to be a policeman, though, to have to think about such things on a daily basis. “Or if she were clever enough, she might be able to keep up the enchantment until the wedding, I suppose.”

  “I’m inclined to think she must have,” Hatton said. “Because bewitching him to have his way with her would have been considerably more trouble than just claiming he’d done it. And I wouldn’t put it past Edgar to have said either way that he hadn’t done anything of the sort, and that she couldn’t prove he had, and that she could ruin her own reputation if she wanted to claim it.”

  “Her father might have threatened to shoot him.”

  “Her father might have done any number of things, but he’s been dead ten years, so we can’t ask him. And there may be nothing to any of this but jealousy in any event. But I’d like you to look into it. There must be practitioners who would do this kind of thing. If not at the Commons, then unlicensed men.”

  “I expect there are,” Ned said. It was against the law in modern times to style yourself a metaphysician without a degree from a reputable university, but there were still a few elderly men who’d learned their trade in a time when all that was necessary was a sharp mind and a gift for salesman’s patter, and who carried it on without a degree. There were younger ones, as well, who had picked up a bit out of books or as unlicensed apprentices, and who made their living selling dubious cures and household enchantments in back-alley shops.

  “There’s supposed to be an initiative one of these days to expose some of the unlicensed men, sending in undercover officers and all that. I expect that’ll happen about the time we get the new building. Most of them know better than to call themselves metaphysicians, anyway. If someone puts up a sign that says ‘rat-catching, knife-sharpening, and odd jobs done,’ that’s not unlawful, however he catches the rats or sharpens the knives.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” Ned said. “We do clean up a fair bit of work that’s been done by amateurs messing about. This couldn’t be a rank amateur, though, even if it’s someone without a license to practice. The magic’s a tricky piece of work, not something that a novice could draw out of a book.”

  Hatton drummed his fingers on his desk speculatively. “If she did bewitch him, and something went wrong with it after all these years –”

  “It’s not the kind of thing that could be carried on for years, though,” Ned said. “That does strain credibility. Most spells that work to dominate the will lose their potency over time. It might work for a few months, maybe a year at best.”

  “Long enough to be married.”

  “If they were quick about it. But it would have worn off decades ago, not recently.”

  Hatton shrugged. “So maybe I’m wrong. But it’s worth looking into. We’ve got few enough good leads.”

  “I’ll let you know whatever I find out,” Ned said. He very much wanted to add by the way, I had a look at a dead man who seems to have been murdered, as he suspected he might currently technically be an accessory to a crime. Instead he shook hands with Hatton again and went out, wondering exactly how law-abiding a man would have to be not to find leaving the Yard to be a considerable relief.

  More so than himself, he concluded, and headed back to his chambers, hoping he might get through the morning without committing any further crimes.

  Julian bent over the notes Ned had given him on the structure of the enchantment that had rendered the poison inert. He had to acknowledge that it was a neat piece of work, prepared by someone with solid metaphysical training at either Oxford or Cambridge – or someone whose teachers had been to one of those universities – but beyond that, there wasn’t much to work with. It was simply written, the grammar terse but correct, and it had clearly been entirely effective. If he had to make a guess, he would have said the author was a Cambridge man, based on the placement of the limiting tag before the temporal statement, but it was hardly conclusive. The overall composition of the enchantment made it somewhat more logical to place it there rather than after.

  He pushed the paper aside, scowling, and dug his hand into his hair. Why the Devil had Shanley had to come creeping about just at the moment they’d discovered Makins had been poisoned? Because he’d been keeping an eye on them for Mrs Makins: the answer was obvious, and he scowled again at his own carelessness. At least Bolster would be able to reassure her, once Bolster answered his letter.

  Bolster’s response didn’t come until eleven, and then it was only a terse note, telling him that Bolster would see him at half past twelve, and naming another public house further into Limehouse. That was meant to intimidate, Julian knew; he acknowledged the note and went to change into his third-best suit, frowning thoughtfully.

  The Pillars of Hercules was a sagging two-story building off Ming Street, close enough to the West India Docks that the smell of mud and tar hung in the air, and Julian was glad he’d carried his weighted cane. He ducked into the badly lit public room, and to his relief saw Bolster already seated at a table in the far corner. The place was busy, the customers mostly watermen and workers from the docks, and Julian did his best to remain unobtrusive as he worked his way through he crowd. Even in his worst suit, he was conspicuous, though at least he could pass for an engineer or a marine architect, but he was glad to fetch up at last at Bolster’s table.

  “Mr Bolster.”

  “Mr Lynes.” Bolster looked at him unsmiling. “Hell’s teeth, what were you doing, to frighten Annie like that?”

  “I had no intention of frightening her. “ Julian knew better than to sit without being asked, but he could at least defend himself. “And in fact there’s no cause. Her husband was poisoned, right enough, but I can prove she had no hand in it. I would have told her so myself, if I’d been able to find her.”

  Bolster stared at him for a long moment, then kicked a chair away from the table. Julian took that as an invitation and seated himself.

  “What’s Shanley to her?” he asked, and the corner of Bolster’s mouth twitched in something like a smile.

  “Tom Shanley courted her before she married Joe, that’s true, and he’d like to try again now he’s dead. And before you ask me, yes, he’s the assistant sexton there at St. Mary’s, and made the arrangements for her.”

  Julian nodded, seeing the connections form a tidy pattern, very close to his expectations, and Bolster lifted a hand for the waiter. They each ordered a pint, and Bolster leaned his elbows on the table. />
  “But that doesn’t change the fact that you frightened her badly, Mr Lynes.”

  “I didn’t frighten her,” Julian said. “Shanley did that.”

  “Poison’s a woman’s weapon,” Bolster said “You had to think she’d run.”

  “Joe Makins died of prussic acid,” Julian said. “Had she access to it?”

  “Of course she did,” Bolster answered, and Julian swore.

  “Murtaugh’s shop. Metal polish or electroplating?”

  “Both, I’m told.”

  “But that still doesn’t change the important thing,” Julian said. “The poison was enchanted, held inert until the enchantment wound down, and only then did it take effect. Not only does that mean the poison wasn’t in Makins’s dinner, it makes it very unlikely that Mrs Makins could have administered it.”

  “And how long did it take you to find that out?” Bolster leaned back as the waiter slammed their pint pots onto the table.

  “A good hour and more, though we knew from the start there was something wrong about it.”

  “And who’s ‘we’?” Bolster’s eyes narrowed over the rim of his pot.

  “I called in a colleague of mine,” Julian said. “A friend, Edward Mathey. He’s a metaphysician, and a damn good one. I trust him implicitly – and, what’s more, I told Mrs Makins I was bringing him in.”

  Bolster nodded, conceding the point, and Julian pressed his slight advantage.

  “Which brings me to a question for you, Mr Bolster. Does Mrs Makins know anything about metaphysics?”

  “Not that I know of.” Bolster said. “Nor her kin.”

  “What I wanted to ask Mrs Makins was whether she knew who might have done it,” Julian said. “Who’d have wanted to.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Bolster said, without conviction.

  “The person who hired him for his job?” Julian asked.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Bolster said again. “And I wouldn’t ask too much about that if I were you, Mr Lynes. That’s outside both our businesses.”

  “If Mrs Makins knows, she could be in danger,” Julian said.

  “I’m sure she has that well in mind,” Bolster answered.

  There was a little pause, and then Julian nodded. “I’d still like to talk to her,” he said. “First, I owe her my report. Second, if she should choose to go to the authorities, I’d be able to give evidence of the poison. As would Mr Mathey.” And I’d also like to ask her where Joe was the afternoon he died, he thought, but knew better than to say that after he’d been warned off.

  “I’ll tell her so,” Bolster said. “But it’ll be up to her whether she wants to talk to you.”

  “Understood,” Julian said.

  “There must be something to do about Mr Clark’s gate,” Ned said, pushing away the last of his borrowed books. He’d found nothing in them that seemed at all advisable that he hadn’t already tried. He’d set out to tackle the problem first thing in the morning, in hopes that a practical success would restore his general morale, but instead it was leaving him increasingly disheartened.

  “Replace the gate?” Miss Frost offered.

  “We’ve tried that. The enchantment’s tied into the entire fence. He’d have to take down every inch of it to get rid of it, and he’s not willing to do that. Frankly, I’m not sure that would even do it, if he built the new fence in the same place. There’s so much badly done work under the most recent enchantments, and every effort to undo it all just leaves more scrambled fragments behind.”

  “Take it off layer by layer?”

  “That’s what someone should have done a decade ago. I’m not even sure where I’d start at this point; there’s not enough left of any of the previous enchantments to get a sense of the grammar, and they’re all in a tangle.”

  “There’s a way to separate out the layers,” she said, and then hesitated. “I hope you won’t think I’m trying to tell you your job.”

  “I’m beginning to feel that someone should,” Ned said. “If you’ve any suggestions…”

  “Well, then,” she said, reaching into her handbag and withdrawing her own wand. “I’ll need a tangle of some sort to show you.”

  Ned sketched out a square of Jupiter on a scrap piece of paper and set up one of the problems they’d been set at University, a botched attempt to remove ink stains, constructed as “ink, paper, separate” rather than “paper, separate, ink.” The first two sigils tangled, and the last one scattered and snarled them both. He could feel the twist in his belly as the enchantment went predictably awry, and when he touched his pen to the paper again, a blotch of ink spread out across the page, crazing wildly at the edges.

  He added the sigil for “reveal,” and a dim, ruddy snarl of lines appeared imposed above the written-out square.

  “We had this one in school,” he said. “You can’t undo it the usual way, but if you know the original sigils that were used and how the grammar went wrong, you can add layers on top to catch at the trailing ends, and then once you’ve got a coherent structure again, you can undo the lot.”

  “I know that one, too,” Miss Frost said. “But you can also do it this way, look.” She sketched a sigil that Ned didn’t immediately recognize, drawing the tip of her bone-white wand in crisp lines an inch above the paper. As he watched, the snarl of light began to separate itself into three distinct layers, each sigil lying neatly on its own plane. “Now you can clean it the usual way.”

  She nodded to him, and he sketched the sigils to remove each layer, easily now, and then did the stain-removing enchantment quickly and properly. When he rubbed at the paper with a bit of damp blotting paper, the ink came up easily, leaving only a faint smudge behind.

  “That’s well done,” Ned said appreciatively.

  She sketched it for him more slowly. “It’s based on ‘unravel,’ see?”

  “Why don’t I know that one?”

  “Do you actually want an answer to that?”

  “I do, actually,” he said. “That’s remarkably useful. Did they teach that at your college?”

  “Yes, they did,” Miss Frost said. “And the reason you don’t know it is that it’s originally based on a charm for unraveling knitting, which is not the kind of thing that reviewers for serious metaphysical journals can read with a straight face.”

  “It might go in The Metaphysician.”

  “It might, yes, with a lot of little remarks added about how clever the ladies can be in their own domestic sphere, and what curious ideas they do come up with. But the London School of Metaphysics for Women gets its funding from London University, and strangely enough the backers don’t like for the instructors to publish articles that invite mockery.”

  “You might submit it yourself,” Ned said. “But I expect you’re right about how the article would read.”

  “I wouldn’t mind so much myself,” she said. “At least not too much.” She put her head to one side and looked at him curiously. “You’re not suggesting you write it up yourself. That’s rather refreshing.”

  “It would feel too much like stealing, I suppose,” Ned said, hardly certain himself what held him back from it. “I do try to be an honest man. Mind you, if you don’t write it up, I shall be sorely tempted. If we ever come to the end of this Nevett business, that is.”

  “Do you think there’s anything in those rumors about a love charm?”

  “I wish I knew. Mr Lynes is making some inquiries. I should make my own, although it’s hard to know where to start. It’s not as if unlicensed metaphysicians tend to stroll up to the College to advertise their services.”

  “You’re thinking some back-alley man,” Miss Frost said.

  “It seems more likely than someone at the College, surely.”

  “More likely that they’d agree to do it, yes, but…” The doubt in her tone was perceptible.

  “Let’s assume I don’t object to being told my job today,” he prompted. “Detection wasn’t part of my University coursework.�
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  “It wasn’t part of mine, either, but I can tell you that nice young ladies don’t go wandering around back alleys without chaperones even now, and I imagine they did it even less twenty-five years ago. I wouldn’t be looking for an odd-jobs man. That’s not where nice young ladies go for their beauty charms and weather-proof hats.”

  “Where do they, then?” He’d gathered from the ladies he’d known at Oxford that feminine beauty generally involved at least some degree of artifice, but not the details of how it was achieved.

  “It’s not entirely legal,” Miss Frost said. “Not that it’s entirely unlawful either, most of them don’t advertise…”

  “I’m not concerned with the regulations on trade.”

  “Well, then. There are shops. Most of them are something else as well, something that makes a good excuse. Milliners, or lace shops, or maybe a perfumer’s. Most of what they handle is harmless, or near enough to harmless. Beauty charms may make you faint, but they’re no worse than tight-lacing.”

  “But there’s more to it?”

  “Not always. But some of the women are skilled, in their own way – not educated, mind you, but they’ve their own traditions handed down. If you find the right person, you can pay for all sorts of things.”

  “Love charms?”

  “And the reverse. There are plenty of married women who are more interested in getting their husbands to leave them alone. Or who feel they’ve had enough children. It’s a lucrative practice, I understand, if you’ve the temperament to deal with people’s very personal problems, and can be exceedingly discreet.”

  “I had no idea,” Ned said, a bit appalled. “I’ve always assumed that most of those sensational stories about love charms were made up to sell papers.”

  “They probably are,” Miss Frost said. “But I expect it happens more often than you think. Infatuation fades, after all, and if a man finds that he’s less in love with his wife than he was with his fiancée, isn’t that just how it goes?”

  Ned shook his head. “You are a bit of a cynic, aren’t you?”