A Matter of Magic

by Patricia C. Wrede

  “That spell is draining.” The prince smiled a little wanly. “It is an old one, used in Russia to keep wolves off a sleigh. One use is all that is generally needed, so recovery does not need to be quick. If those men had soon returned, I would have been in . . . difficulty. I am in your debt.”

  “Spells,” Jack said bitterly. “He said you didn’t have no spells. Chicken-hearted gooseberry.”

  Kim felt Mairelon go tense beside her. “Mannering told you that?”

  “How’d you know it was him?”

  “Never you mind. What else did he tell you?”

  Jack was disinclined to answer, but by the time they reached the Ministry, Mairelon had pried most of what he knew out of him. It was not much. Mannering had ordered Prince Durmontov brought to the cellar of a pub in Smithfield and left there; he had assured his men that Durmontov would not be capable of using spells against them; they were to pick up their payment from the clerk in Mannering’s office the following day. Jack had no idea where Mannering was hiding, only that something had sent him scurrying for cover.

  With that unsatisfactory information, they were forced to be content. They turned Jack over to Lord Shoreham, who accepted with equanimity Mairelon’s muddy arrival and even muddier prisoner. Returning to the carriage, they found Prince Durmontov looking much more himself.

  “Where now?” Mairelon said. “Back to the George?”

  “No, if I may impose a little upon you,” Prince Durmontov said. “I am concerned for family friends who may be also of interest to the man behind those—those—”

  “Footpads,” Kim offered.

  “Yes,” the prince said. “So I would like to go at once to Hampstead, to warn my friends.”

  21

  Kim and Mairelon stared at the prince for a long moment. “Hampstead?” Mairelon said at last.

  “Yes, to Duc and Duchesse Delagardie,” Prince Durmontov replied. “They are only just returned from Edinburgh, and—”

  “By all means,” Mairelon replied. “And we have a great deal to discuss on the way. How fortunate that it is such a long drive.”

  The prince blinked, but gave Hunch the direction. Hunch scowled disapprovingly at Mairelon, but climbed back onto the box without comment, and in a few moments they were under way once more.

  “How is it that you know the duc and duchesse?” Mairelon asked.

  “One of my aunts knew them many years ago in France,” Durmontov replied. “It is, in fact, partially on their account that I came to England.”

  “That would be the former Mademoiselle Jeannette Lepain? One of the seven French wizards once known as Les Griffonais?”

  “Yes,” said the prince, frowning. “How is it you know this?”

  “I have had occasion to find out,” Mairelon said. “Perhaps it will enlighten you somewhat if I tell you that some years ago, my father purchased a copy of Le Livre de Sept Sorciers: un livre de mémoire by one Madame Marie de Cambriol, and that someone has twice tried to make off with it in the past month.”

  “Three times,” Kim corrected.

  “I don’t think you can count Lord Starnes’s little excursion last night,” Mairelon said. “His heart really didn’t seem to be in it.”

  “What is this?” the prince said, his frown deepening.

  “Wait until we reach the duc and duchesse,” Mairelon said. “There’s no sense in going over everything twice. Besides, you were about to tell us what your aunt’s former associates have to do with your being in England.”

  Prince Durmontov studied Mairelon for a long moment, then capitulated. “Very well. A little time ago, my aunt received a message of a . . . magical nature. It involved an obscure threat to the Duchesse Delagardie and advised my aunt to bring her livre de mémoire to England. Though this message was not entirely clear, it disturbed her greatly. She is, however, deeply involved in an extended study of magic on the Indian subcontinent, and did not wish to break it off at a critical point to make so long a journey, most particularly because she could not be positive that it was necessary.”

  “Ah. So she sent you instead.”

  The prince inclined his head. “As you see.”

  “And since your arrival . . .?”

  “I have been very much confused,” Prince Durmontov admitted. “First there seemed to be no threat—the Duchesse Delagardie was not even in London. Then, at Lady Greythorne’s musicale, came that scrying spell which sent you hurrying off, and when I returned to my lodgings, someone had gone through my protections and stolen my aunt’s book. I felt then that it was urgent to speak with the Duchesse Delagardie, but she had not yet returned. So I went to look for her.”

  “And found her, I take it,” Mairelon murmured.

  “She had been visiting a friend in Edinburgh named Lady MacKay, and had broken her return journey in York. She, too, was much puzzled when I told her of my aunt’s message, and very troubled that someone had succeeded in removing my protections and stealing her livre de mémoire. The spells I had used were, you understand, some of those that the Duchesse Delagardie and my aunt and their friends had invented for their own use, and it would take more than a common wizard to avoid them.”

  “There is at least one extremely uncommon wizard in this somewhere,” Mairelon said grimly. “Go on.”

  “I have little more to tell,” the prince said. “We returned last night from Edinburgh. When I returned to the George this morning to arrange these last few matters, I found a note waiting for me, bidding me to a certain public house to learn more of the matter which brought me to England.” He shrugged. “There was also your message. Had I answered it first—But one cannot live in might-have-been.”

  “No.” Mairelon’s voice had an undercurrent of irony, and Kim knew he was thinking of his ill-fated attempt to trace the scrying spell at Lady Greythorne’s musicale.

  There was a brief lull in the conversation; then the prince looked at Mairelon and said, “How is it that you performed such a timely arrival?”

  “We hurried,” Mairelon said.

  Kim choked back a snort of laughter.

  “And how did you know that it was necessary to hurry?” the prince asked politely, looking from one to the other.

  “We had it from an inept gentleman-burglar late last night,” Mairelon said. “He mentioned, somewhat in passing, that you were likely to be set upon. When we reached the George to leave you a warning, and discovered that you had already been and gone . . . well, hurrying seemed like a good idea.”

  “But why should anyone attack me?” the prince said, frowning.

  “If we knew that, we’d be considerably further along than we are,” Mairelon replied.

  “Maybe Mannering wanted to find out where this Duchesse Delagardie is,” Kim suggested.

  “Mannering?” said the prince. “Who is—” He broke off as the familiar tingle of magic swept over them. “Ah!” he said, and raised his hands in an arcane gesture.

  Kim lunged across the coach and grabbed his wrists, forcing his arms down before the gesture could be completed and ruining whatever concentration the spell required. “No!” she said forcefully.

  The prince and Mairelon both stared at her as the tingling receded, the prince with restrained anger, Mairelon with a mixture of alarm and speculation. “Another scrying spell?” Mairelon said tentatively after a moment.

  “I don’t know,” Kim said, sitting back. “Something, anyway. And it’s gone now, like the other ones.”

  “There is some reason why you did not wish this spell traced?” Prince Durmontov said coldly.

  Kim looked at Mairelon, who sighed. “We would very much like that spell traced,” Mairelon told him. “Unfortunately, tracing it seems to have . . . unpleasant consequences.”

  “Indeed?” Durmontov looked skeptical but interested. “Yes, I recall that at Lady Greythorne’s musicale you took a backlash from the spell. But—”

  “It was more than a backlash,” Mairelon said harshly. “It was a trap. A particularly nasty
one.”

  The prince raised an eyebrow inquiringly, but Mairelon did not continue. After a considerable pause, Kim said, “He needs to know. If we hadn’t been here, and he’d done that trace. . . .”

  “Yes, yes, all right,” Mairelon said testily. He looked at Durmontov. “When my tracing spell connected to the scrying spell at Lady Greythorne’s, it got sucked straight into it. Along with everything else.”

  Durmontov blinked. “Everything else . . .?”

  “I haven’t been able to sense a spell in process, much less work one of my own, for nearly two weeks,” Mairelon said, clipping the words off sharply. His face was stony, defying comment or sympathy.

  Prince Durmontov’s eyes widened and he sat back heavily against the squabs. “I . . . see.” He turned to Kim.

  “I would appear to be doubly in your debt.” He hesitated, looking at Mairelon. “I can see that you do not wish this to be talked of. Nor would I, in your place. But when we reach the duchesse, she must be warned.”

  “Of course,” Mairelon said without enthusiasm.

  The conversation died. Kim thought of half a dozen questions she would have liked to ask, but in the face of Mairelon’s heavy silence and the prince’s contemplative one, she didn’t quite dare. She found herself torn between sympathy for Mairelon and annoyance at his behavior. She knew, none better, how difficult it was to reveal a weakness or a vulnerability, even to a friend—but she also knew that if Mairelon hadn’t blown the gab, he would have blamed himself for whatever grief the prince came to later on. He knew it himself, but he was sulking like a sweet-stealer with a pain in his tooth.

  They reached Hampstead at last, and descended from the coach in front of a small white stone house set well back from the street. A flagstone walk led to the doorway, past short clumps of new-green plants and some kind of thorn-covered vine that was just leafing out. Inside, a housemaid showed them to a small drawing room that looked as if it had been hastily and rather incompletely tidied, and left to fetch her mistress. On closer examination, the air of disorder proved deceptive. The books and papers on the corner tables were arranged neatly between bookends, the silver candleholders gleamed, and the chairs and woodwork shone with beeswax. It was the number and variety of books and furniture that gave the impression of confusion.

  A few minutes later, a short, plump, bespectacled woman entered the room. She wore her ginger hair unfashionably long and loose beneath her proper lace cap, and her blue velvet gown, while clearly expensive and in the best of taste, was not in the latest mode. “Good morning, Alexei,” she said. “You have brought friends to meet me? But you have had some accident!”

  “No accident,” said Prince Durmontov. “I was set upon but, thanks to these two, I am not harmed. Allow me to present Miss Kim Merrill and her guardian, Mr. Richard Merrill. This is the Duchesse Camille Delagardie.”

  “You have no notion how happy I am to make your acquaintance at last,” Mairelon said with feeling.

  The duchesse’s eyes twinkled behind her spectacles. “No? Then you must at once seat yourselves and explain, and I shall have Liza bring in tea. For it is obvious that there is some long explanation to come, and I find that long explanations always go well with tea. It is an English custom of which I thoroughly approve.”

  They followed this program at once. The account took some time, for, somewhat to Kim’s surprise, Mairelon did not play off any of his tricks for avoiding explanation on the duchesse. Instead, he gave her a more detailed version of the story he had told Lord Shoreham, compressed but complete in all the essentials. The duchesse lost her twinkle almost immediately, and listened in thoughtful silence. Her expression grew grave when Mairelon described the trap that had caught him during Lady Greythorne’s musicale, but it was not until he reached the previous evening and Lord Gideon Starnes’s tale of the treasure vault in France that the duchesse was betrayed into exclamation.

  “But that is absurd!” she said. “Or rather—No, go on. I will know the whole of it, before I take my turn.”

  “There’s not much more to tell,” Mairelon said. “Starnes mentioned that his compatriot had said something about setting footpads on Prince Durmontov, and we thought it best to warn him. When we got to the George, he’d already been and gone, so we went after him.”

  “And arrived in a most timely fashion,” the prince put in. “I thought it wise to tell you at once, since it seems connected with that peculiar message my Aunt Jeannette received. And then during the ride here came another of these scrying spells, and only Miss Merrill’s prompt action kept me from falling into the same trap as Mr. Merrill.”

  “Very good,” the duchesse said, nodding approval at Kim. “I, too, am in your debt. I would not like anything unfortunate to happen to Jeannette’s nephew, though he is in general quite capable of taking care of himself.”

  “And that,” said Mairelon, “is all. If you can shed any light on the matter . . .”

  “I do not know that I can,” the duchesse said slowly. “You see—no, I shall begin at the beginning.” She eyed Mairelon apologetically. “It is no great matter, you understand, only that it is a little uncomfortable to admit the follies of one’s youth.”

  “I am all attention,” Mairelon said. His tone was polite, but the tension in the set of his shoulders had returned.

  The duchesse sighed. “It was twenty-six . . . no, twenty-seven years ago. Things had been growing more and more difficult in France, and it was plain to all of us that some sort of upheaval was soon to come. And it was likewise clear that the nobility and the wizards would have the worst of it. And since the seven of us were all wizards and all French aristocrats—”

  “Except for Monsieur Karolyi,” the prince put in. “He is Hungarian.”

  “Very Hungarian,” the duchesse agreed with a smile. “He is, however, a wizard and a dear friend of the Vicomte de Bragelonne, and as such, we expected that he would fare no better than the rest of us. So the seven of us came together and placed our most precious possessions in a vault—actually, it was a very large room in Marie’s cellar. Well, it had to be, with all the books.”

  “Books?” Mairelon said with interest.

  The duchesse nodded. “Marie stored almost her entire magical library, as well as her silver and most of her jewels, and Eustacie had at least as many, and Henri and Jeannette, also. And there was my library, too. We were days hauling it all down. László put in only those things he had with him in France, of course, which was not quite so much. When we finished, the seven of us worked a spell to seal the room completely. It was a very good job, I think. The sans-culottes could have burned the house overhead, and the fire would have stopped at the ceiling boards. Not so much as a speck of ash would penetrate.”

  “That sounds . . . thorough.”

  “Marie and I were worried about mice getting at the books,” the duchesse said placidly. “When one stores such things in a cellar, and there are no cats about, it is a reasonable concern.”

  “So the treasure vault is real,” Mairelon said thoughtfully. “And the seven livres de mémoire are the key?”

  The duchesse shook her head. “But no! That would have been folly. We did not know, of course, that poor Henri’s ship would go down so soon after we left France, but with the times so unsettled we could not be sure that all seven of us would be able to return to open the vault, or even send a key with someone else. And to make the key a book, which is so vulnerable to fire and damp . . . no. That is why I said this Lord Starnes’s story was quite absurd.”

  “Then how did you reopen the vault?”

  “The key is quite a simple spell, very easy to remember,” the duchesse replied. “I don’t believe any of us even wrote it down in our livres de mémoire. But we never went back to reopen the vault. The Terror . . . was worse than we expected anything to be, and lasted longer, and after that came Bonaparte. By the time he relented somewhat toward wizards, we had all made our lives elsewhere, and we did not feel the risk was worth it.” She
smiled slightly. “As long as we left everything there, you see, it was quite safe, but it would be easy enough to confiscate it once the spell had been removed. And transporting all those things out of France without attracting attention. . . .” She shook her head.

  “You mean it’s all still there?” Kim said. “The silver and the jewels and everything?”

  “It is the books I regret most,” the duchesse said.

  “My aunt, also,” said Prince Durmontov, nodding.

  Kim blinked at them both in disbelief and shook her head. She saw the corners of Mairelon’s mouth twitch in amusement. Toffs! she thought. I’ll never understand them.

  “I’m surprised Madame de Cambriol’s husband didn’t return, even if none of the rest of you did,” Mairelon said. “From what we know, he had a thin time after she died.”

  “He considered it,” the duchesse said. “But he was not himself a wizard; one of us would have had to accompany him to cast the spell to open the vault. He would not ask us to take the risk. Besides, he was always quite certain that his next hand of cards or the next horse race would render the trip unnecessary, and his luck did indeed run well now and then.”

  “Gamesters often feel so,” Mairelon said. “Then as far as you know, the vault is untouched?”

  The duchesse nodded. “That is why Louis and Eustacie have returned to France: to open the vault and retrieve our belongings at last. I do not know what we shall do with Henri’s and Marie’s portions. They have no living relatives I know of.”

  Mairelon raised a hand to rub his temples. “So we might just as well have given Lord Starnes the de Cambriol book and wished him godspeed that first night,” he said bitterly. “He and Mannering are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp; even if they get hold of all seven books, they won’t be able to open the vault in France, and even if they could, they’ll find it empty by the time they get there. And none of the rest of this would have happened.”

  “If the treasure is all they want,” Kim said.