A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  All at once, tears rushed to her eyes. It had been such a long time since she had cried—so many long years both spellbound and free—that at first she did it without feeling, half-numb, half-wondering. Then her grief caught up with the harsh, jagged sobs tearing themselves loose from her body; she buried her head in the pillow, and her shoulders shook. She didn’t know if she was crying for herself, or for Toussaint, or for Molly, or for Saint-Domingue or for Jamaica or for the entire world.

  The next time she woke, she found sunlight and the sound of childish laughter spilling through her window. She turned and stretched drowsily beneath the sheets. The light still felt cold and strange, but she had rarely heard anything so peaceful.

  There were clothes waiting for her on the chair by the fire. She stood, stiff and shaky from her old injuries and her long rest, and went to wash and put them on.

  Clapham Common in daylight was the greenest place she had ever seen. In her heart, she had been braced for the gray cold of the London streets. Instead, she opened the door to a broad, flat expanse of grass and trees and flowers. The English light had a golden cast, very different from the crystal clarity of the Caribbean: it gave the scene in front of her the hazy, long-ago quality of a memory even though it took place in front of her.

  She saw Wilberforce at once, without needing to cast for him with her magic. A group of children, aged between perhaps three and ten, ran laughing and shrieking through the garden; they were too fast and too intermingled for her to judge numbers. Wilberforce was among them, holding the hand of a very small boy with brown hair. As she watched, he scooped the child up and spun him in a circle.

  A little blond-curled girl standing nearby caught sight of Fina at last and called out to Wilberforce. He spun the boy to a halt and turned to face her breathlessly.

  “Fina.” His hair was disarrayed; he brushed a stem of grass from it. “I’m very glad to see you up.”

  “I couldn’t see anyone downstairs,” she said, for lack of anything else to say.

  “Couldn’t you? I do apologize. The servants can be difficult to find around here, and Mrs. Wilberforce went to call on the Thorntons. Nobody wanted to disturb you. We didn’t disturb you out here, did we?”

  She thought of the laughter that had come through the window. “No,” she said. “You didn’t.”

  The little girl was looking up at her with interested eyes, blue and clear like the surface of a tidal pool. Wilberforce put his hand on her shoulder.

  “This is Fina,” he told the two children. “Fina, this is Marianne Thornton, and this is my son, little William—although we mostly share children around here, as we do other blessings. Or burdens.”

  “I’m not a burden!” Marianne protested. “I’m five.”

  “Oh, I do apologize. I didn’t realize the two were mutually exclusive.”

  William tugged at his sleeve, too young to be very interested in any grown-up. “Will you spin us again?”

  “Absolutely not. You’re far too heavy.”

  “You said I didn’t weigh anything because I was little.”

  “I forgot that I’m quite little too, and I don’t have the advantage of being still growing. It’s now your turn to spin me, by rights, but as I’m already dizzy I’ll forgo that pleasure in favor of going in to breakfast with you. Marianne, would you like to join us?”

  “I had breakfast at home.”

  “Would you like another?”

  The child nodded, her face crinkling into a smile.

  “Run and see if any of the others would like to come, would you? I meant the children, obviously. I suppose if you find any adults, you should invite them, too, but try to keep it quiet.”

  Fina watched the little girl run off into the mess of other children, curls bobbing behind her, and felt something bitter and painful happen to her heart. She could dimly remember playing like that, before her body had been locked into servitude. Children played in Saint-Domingue, of course, even in the midst of a war zone. But they played differently—half in the game, half out, one eye alert for danger. These children knew they were completely safe.

  To her surprise, several of the boys running about the lawn were dark-skinned. They were perhaps ten years old and dressed like the white children in breeches and jackets.

  “They’re from Sierra Leone,” Wilberforce said, at her expression. “We founded a colony there a few years ago. Their parents have sent them over to be educated—Zachary Macaulay looks after them, and they go to school in the village. One or two of them have taken ill with the cold here, poor little souls, but they’re some of the most intelligent and engaging children I’ve ever met. I’m so glad you’re feeling better. The invitation for breakfast extends to you, by the way. You’re welcome to either join us or take it in your room, whatever feels most comfortable.”

  She looked up at the pale sun in the sky. “Isn’t it late for breakfast?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he confessed. “But don’t worry, nobody else in my house will have either. I’m afraid staying at Broomfield is less a matter of accepting our hospitality and more a matter of trying to survive our chaos.”

  “I promise,” she said, “I’ve survived much worse.”

  “I’m sorry that you were turned away at our town house.” He must have known that hadn’t been what she meant; she suspected his mind was simply running on its own track. “That was Branson, I imagine. He’s under strict instructions to help anyone who comes to ask for it, but he thinks I’m too easily imposed upon.”

  She almost smiled then. “You let your servants have their own opinion on your orders?”

  “I don’t see that there’s any way to stop them. I could be harder on them, I suppose, or replace them, but I hate to do that. As long as it’s only inconvenience to me, I don’t mind at all, and most of our guests are perfectly capable of shifting for themselves. Your case, though, was far less forgivable. I’ll reprimand Branson, I assure you.”

  Fina could have told him not to worry, but she didn’t see much point. She suspected that Branson’s reprimand, though sincere, wouldn’t be unduly harsh.

  “In the meantime,” Wilberforce added. “We have a short time before breakfast is properly underway. Would you like to talk in private?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I think we need to.”

  The chaos at breakfast was indeed overwhelming. By the time Fina and Wilberforce emerged from his study, the table was all but submerged by the children from outside, and it was difficult for her to find a place to sit and help herself to squares of cold, burnt toast, stale cakes, and weak tea. She had to help herself, it transpired. Barbara Wilberforce sat benevolently at the head of the table, having plainly given up on the madness; Wilberforce himself seemed usually to forget that there was anything on the table at all. Little Marianne’s parents, the Thorntons, had arrived as well: Henry Thornton gentle and courteous, the elder Marianne shrewd and kind. They spoke to her and listened attentively to her answers, but otherwise she didn’t offer anything, and they respected this.

  “I’ve been considering our best course of action,” Wilberforce said after the children had run off, the Thorntons had left more sedately, and the breakfast dishes sat empty. “And if you think you’re strong enough to travel, I really think it would be best if the two of us went to Walmer Castle. Pitt’s there for the rest of the summer. We can discuss what you have to impart there in more secrecy. And certainly you’d be safer there than you are here.”

  Fina felt her face go blank, as it did when she most wanted to hide.

  “Wilber, you can’t take Fina all the way to Walmer yourself,” Barbara said from amid the crumbs. “She’s an unmarried woman. People will talk.”

  “Oh, let them,” he said. “There are plenty of other equally entertaining rumors about me. Besides, I mean for nobody to hear of her at all. Of course, if Fina would rather have a chaperone—?”

  Fina wasn’t even sure what a chaperone was, or why she would need one. She hadn’t moved
past the more immediate issue. “You mean for me to stay there?”

  “You won’t be neglected. Lady Hester returned from Europe earlier this summer, when the war broke out. Her grandmother passed away last winter, so she’s living with Pitt now. She’d love to have you. I think you’d like her—she’s very impetuous, but she’s kind.”

  “And what about Mr. Pitt?”

  “Far less impetuous, also kind. What about him?”

  She didn’t know how to put it into words. They had spoken about Fina’s impressions of the stranger, of course, and had agreed who it was that Fina had heard the stranger speaking to in England and why. She knew what Pitt was, above and beyond the leader of the country that had once enslaved her. That, to her, was reason enough for caution. “I thought I was staying here.”

  “We’d love you to stay,” Wilberforce said, and she actually believed him. “But I’m concerned that it might not be safe. Not if the enemy—the stranger, I mean—not if he’s looking for you. He’ll know too well how to find you here.”

  He was more right than he knew. She hadn’t told Wilberforce about the man standing outside his house that night. She was uncertain, still, about how much information she could entrust him with. But if the stranger had indeed been behind that man’s eyes, then he knew exactly where she was now.

  “He’ll know how to find me at Mr. Pitt’s house too. Especially if he speaks to him at night.”

  “Well, yes. Very likely he will. But he won’t be able to do anything about it—that place is quite literally a fortress. Also, to be blunt, if the stranger knows that you’re there, he’ll know he’s too late. You’ll have told Pitt everything, and he has no reason to silence you.”

  He would still have a reason. He didn’t just fear her for what she knew, although that was part of it. He feared her for her own power. It might be true, though, that he could do little to harm her in an English fortress, miles from French territory.

  “Of course, where you go, who you want to talk to, and on what terms are completely your decision,” Wilberforce said after the silence had drawn out. “As I said, you’re very welcome here. And if there’s anywhere else you’d prefer to go, I’ll do everything in my power to help you get there instead.”

  “And Mr. Pitt?”

  “If I tell him you’ll only meet with him here,” Wilberforce said firmly, “he’ll come here to meet you. What you’ve imparted to me is far more important than anything taking place on the coast. And if you tell me you won’t meet with him at all, he’ll abide by that too.”

  “No.” She raised her chin. “I’ll go.”

  It wasn’t for fear of the stranger, in the end. She had simply learned, in all her years with Toussaint, that there were times when it was a victory to make your enemy come to you, and times when it was stronger to ride into enemy country, unafraid.

  Two days later, Fina set out on another journey—a far shorter one, and more comfortable, though Wilberforce’s coach driver seemed determined to make the two-day road trip as tumultuous as possible. They followed the line of the coast, under a clear periwinkle sky; the sea glittered, not the brilliant blue Fina had been used to but a pale, quiet twinkle that faded to a white haze on the horizon. The cliffs that towered above them were stark white, patched with green. It would have been idyllic had it not been for the red coats dotting the shore and the ships clustered in the ports.

  “They’re preparing for an invasion,” Wilberforce said. For someone with no magic, he did a very good job of following her unspoken thoughts. “God willing it won’t be necessary. Addington thinks it won’t. Pitt thinks otherwise.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I never know what to think about military matters,” he said. “I only know what I hope, and what I fear. Acting on fear can be dangerous, I know. But at the moment, I worry that the government is acting far too much on hope. So does a lot of England. It’s why there have been so many calls for Pitt to come back to take office lately, although of course they criticized him when he was there and they’ll criticize him again if he does.”

  “Do you want him to?”

  “As a politician, yes. I trust him to fight a war more than I trust Addington, and I think that if we’re going to stop the stranger, we need to be able to fight as well as we can. As his friend—I don’t know. He nearly died a few years ago. And the new elixir isn’t working as well as he pretends it is.”

  He fell silent for a while, looking out the carriage window. Out of curiosity and habit, Fina cast her magic out and slipped behind his eyes. Again, as on that first morning, his mind opened to her so quickly and so completely that she barely needed to push: she just blinked, and the world was a little dimmer and softer. She felt the rapid beat of his heart; the sharp, painful tug of the old wound below his ribs dulled by the haze of laudanum; the uncomfortable jolt of the carriage. These were faint, though: unusually, his worry and fear came through stronger, shot through every now and then with a jolt of beauty as something caught his eye. She felt him speak, and slipped back into her head quickly so she could hear him.

  “Did you say something?”

  “Forgive me—I asked if you were inside my head, right then.”

  She debated not admitting it, but she had been there when he had first asked the question. There had been no flicker of hostility, only curiosity. “Yes.”

  “How interesting. I wondered if I’d felt it the first time we met; I certainly did then. Like a tickle. What did you see?”

  “Well, you should know,” she said, without thinking. “You were looking at it.”

  He laughed. “In all honesty, I don’t think I was looking at anything very much. I was lost in thought.”

  “I can’t see thoughts, only feelings. But yours are very clear. I can’t usually feel so much with someone I don’t know well.”

  “It’s probably because I have not an ounce of magic of my own. There’s nothing to keep you out.”

  “Perhaps,” she said.

  She was actually sleeping when they at last came up to the castle. The motion of the carriage, both like and unlike the rhythmic sway of the ship, lulled her first into reverie and then into a light doze. She woke only when it ceased, and Wilberforce called her name.

  “Forgive me,” he said, when she flinched. “But we’ve arrived.”

  The wind tore at her hair as she stepped out of the carriage; her borrowed dress, rather too loose, billowed at once. She shivered. The sky was blue but the sunlight was pale; the beach was an endless stretch of colored pebbles; the castle, round and looming, was gray. It felt lately that she would never be warm outside again. The beach, like much of the coast they had followed from London, was arrayed with soldiers on foot and on horseback.

  At first there was nobody at the castle to meet them but a silver-haired white man who from Wilberforce’s greeting was the butler. It wasn’t until they walked around to the entrance of the castle that a call came from the beach, and they turned to see two riders peel away from the lines of troops on the beach to join them.

  There were two of them, a man and a woman. The lady was the more striking of the two: very tall, in a scarlet riding habit, dark-haired but with the whitest skin Fina had ever seen. Her face, flushed by the wind, was lively and animated; she might have been in her late twenties, but looked younger. Perhaps it was only that Aristocrats in England tended to look younger than women in the West Indies of the same age.

  The man looked entirely unremarkable by contrast. But she knew immediately what he was, as she had known the stranger on the beach. It wasn’t just that she had indeed seen him, as she and Wilberforce had theorized, in the stranger’s mind amid the shadows and sunlight of his own childhood. Her magic knew. It reached out for him, and it recoiled.

  “Mr. Pitt, Lady Hester,” Wilberforce said, “this is Fina.”

  She nodded. Sometimes, she had learned, it was better to say too little than too much.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” Pitt said. “I’
m sorry we weren’t here to greet you. Things are very busy.”

  “We’ve probably traveled farther today than you have,” Hester said. “It’s been parade after parade, up and down the coast, all at least twenty miles apart.”

  “Not quite,” Pitt said, more cautiously. “Some were closer to fifteen.”

  “Well, if you want to be pedantic about it…”

  “It’s the military, Hester. You can’t order an army to advance at least twenty miles when you mean fifteen.”

  “As a general rule, if an army can manage to advance at least twenty miles, it’s probably better that they do so rather than stop at fifteen.”

  “I’m so glad you’re here to impart these general rules. The defenses would be in such a state without them.”

  “How are the defenses?” Wilberforce asked. “Please bear in mind that my knowledge of the military stops at ‘are they satisfactorily defensive?’”

  “The troops themselves are both satisfactory and defensive, I think,” Pitt said. “If the French attempt to land, I’m confident our battalions will make a very good account of themselves. Honestly, though, the preparations for defense overall are very far short of what they should be, and what they could easily be. I want to get 170 gunboats stationed between Margate and Hastings, and the administration are being more of a hindrance than a help. Please don’t tell me that you told me so.”

  “In that case, I’ll only say it serves you right. Truly, though, does an invasion by France seem likely at the moment?”

  “I believe Fina might know that better than we do,” Pitt said. It was the second time he had looked at her directly. She raised her head to meet him.

  “Yes,” she said evenly. “I don’t know about France, as such. But your enemy means to invade.”

  Pitt nodded. “Please, go inside and make yourselves at home,” he said to both of them. “Dinner will be served shortly. We’ll talk then.”

  Fina had been inside one castle in her life, and that had been in the stranger’s memory. Its physical details had blurred in her mind, given what else she had had to concentrate upon, but what stood out clearly was the feel of possession. The stranger had belonged to his castle, and it had belonged to him; he knew every stone of it.