A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  “I know you, do I not?” the man said.

  And she knew him as well. Not from Saint-Domingue or Jamaica—whatever war he had seen had not been fought there—but from her first night on English soil. She recognized the lines of him, the broad shoulders that she had glimpsed only as a shadow on a dark road. And she recognized now, as she had recognized then, what was in his eyes.

  His hand went to his waist; Fina had a chance to notice the stumps of two missing fingers on his hand before his coat flicked aside. There, at his belt, was a glint of silver. A dagger. Fina’s limbs turned to ice.

  She had no weapon. She could move into his head, of course, in an instant, and have the dagger in his own hand. But then what? She could hardly make him cut his own throat in the House of Commoners. And in the meantime, her own body would be empty and vulnerable, waiting for a blow.

  The decision was made for her. In the next instant, Hester stepped up beside her. She was as tall as the Englishman, perhaps an inch or so taller, and her dark blue eyes flamed. It took even Fina a moment to realize that part of that flare was the glow of mesmerism.

  “Sir,” she said, her voice dripping ice, “I believe your attentions are unwanted.”

  The man didn’t look at her. His black eyes stayed on Fina, and his handsome mouth twitched in a smile not his own.

  Lady Hester Stanhope was not accustomed to being ignored. She stepped closer, and this time his eyes flickered to her involuntarily. They froze there.

  “I said,” Hester repeated, “leave.” Her voice was still ice, but magic radiated from her like heat.

  The man stood very still, straining against the command, a vein on his temple visible beneath his powdered hair. Then he inclined his head stiffly, dropped his hand, and turned. Fina’s breath left her in a sigh of relief.

  “Was that the stranger?” Hester asked, almost as an aside.

  Fina nodded slowly.

  “I thought so. Not that I would have had any qualms about saying what I did to that odious man either way, and it doesn’t surprise me in the least that the stranger found him a fit vessel. I only wonder that he should soil his mind with him. Even for a practicing blood magician, it must be like sinking into a moral cesspit.”

  The contemptuous bravado rather than the words themselves made Fina smile, though she was still close to trembling. “Who is he?”

  “Colonel Banastre Tarleton. Fought in the American War of Independence, bravely I suppose, but not very honorably. And he’s a notorious rake. Seduced the mistress of the Prince of Wales on a bet, though what she saw in either of them—”

  “He was the one at Clapham,” Fina interrupted. Hester could talk nonstop for hours, particularly when she was nervous, and Fina suspected she was. “The night I came to England.”

  “Really?” Hester turned after him, as if the sight of his departing back could tell her something that the full regard of his eyes had not. “Then he was certainly there to look for you, and no other reason. He wouldn’t be caught within a mile of the Clapham Saints.”

  “He would have tried to kill me just now if you hadn’t stopped him,” Fina said quietly.

  “I had that impression too,” Hester agreed. “I suspect you could have held him off without me, given your history, but I’m glad I could help.”

  “You’re a strong mesmer, you know.” Fina shook off the last of her nerves and looked Hester up and down. “I think even the stranger would have been surprised by how strong.”

  “I told you I was. Did you think I was exaggerating?” Fina didn’t like to answer, and from Hester’s sideways smile she knew exactly why. “I come from a line of blood magicians, remember. I don’t legally qualify as one, thankfully, but I can certainly make Mr. Tarleton back down.”

  “You Europeans and your classifications.” Fina shook her head. “Toussaint said you try to put everything in a box.”

  “Well, the Knights Templar would try to put me in a coffin if they thought I was a blood magician, so I suppose he was quite right.” Hester tucked her arm around Fina’s, her hold a little more protective than her airy manner betrayed. “Let’s get out of sight before anyone else shows up with the wrong eyes.”

  There was a carriage outside. Mr. Pitt and Mr. Wilberforce were waiting for them there, having just come from the debating chambers themselves; when the doors were firmly closed and the carriage itself was on the move through London, Fina gave the names. There were some fifteen in total, but she had sensed the enemy lurking behind still more when the votes had been taken. Without their voices, it had been difficult for Hester to put a name to them.

  A long silence greeted her list.

  “Thank you,” Pitt said at last. “Thank you for those names. That’s extremely helpful.”

  “But how?” Wilberforce asked. He had gone absolutely pale. “For God’s sake, those are half the men on the government benches.”

  “All anti-abolitionists too,” Pitt said, as if to himself. “Which is useful to the enemy, given his plans for Jamaica. Though, of course, whether that’s because the enemy influenced them to be so, or because something about abolition predisposed them to be influenced in the first place, it’s impossible to say.”

  “Nobody needed to influence the likes of Tarleton against abolition,” Wilberforce said firmly. “Nor Addington, I’m sorry to say, although I’d love to believe it. I’ve always considered him a good man.”

  “You consider him a good man because he goes to church,” Hester said, with a spark of her usual fire. She had been unusually quiet since the confrontation with Tarleton. “And Uncle William considers him a good man because our family knows his family and they played together when they were children. That isn’t how the real world works.”

  “The king is already being pressured to dismiss Addington from office,” Pitt said. It was possible he hadn’t even heard Hester. “After Addington’s last failure, he’ll be bleeding political support. If we keep up the attacks from all corners, he’ll be forced to step down.”

  “And then the king will almost certainly ask you to come back,” Wilberforce said. “He has nowhere else to turn.”

  Pitt nodded slowly. Not for the first time, Fina wished she could glimpse what was happening behind his eyes. She still didn’t know, after all her time staying with Hester at his house, whether Pitt was very good at resisting the temptations of power, or simply very good at appearing to.

  “Are you capable of it?” Wilberforce asked.

  “Physically, morally, or intellectually?” Pitt asked with a faint smile.

  “Physically. I have no qualms about the other two.”

  “That’s kind of you. And I don’t see why not, as long as Forester keeps refining the elixir. The difficulty is in keeping those Fina has identified out of government. And, more worryingly, what to do about those who may not have been identified at all.” He seemed to come out of his own head, and sat forward. “Still. We’ll do what we can.”

  “And we’ll keep doing what we can to get the spellbinding broken in Jamaica,” Wilberforce said firmly. “It’s more important than ever now.”

  Fina said nothing. The truth was she couldn’t possibly search the entire country for the limits of the stranger’s reach. She could glimpse him moving, if she was in the right place at the right time; every so often she might catch him out of the corner of her eye. It was true he couldn’t be everywhere, the way he could in Saint-Domingue. But he could be anywhere. And today, with the English sky heavy overhead and the cold streets of London sunk in fog, he seemed to be part of the very air they breathed.

  May 1804

  On the 1st May 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed Saint-Domingue’s independence. It would never be called Saint-Domingue again. Instead, Dessalines returned the name the country had been given by its indigenous population, the Taino. Forever afterward, it would be known as Haiti.

  On the 18th May 1804, William Pitt once again became prime minister of Great Britain.

  On the same day, a
cross the ocean, Napoléon Bonaparte declared himself hereditary emperor of France.

  PART THREE

  THE KRAKEN

  London

  April 1805

  So,” Wilberforce said, as brightly as he could, “how is everybody?”

  “I think we’re all quite miserable, actually, Wilberforce,” Zachary Macaulay said, like a damp rain cloud. “And I can’t imagine you’re anything else yourself.”

  The trouble was, Macaulay was perfectly right. Wilberforce was fairly miserable. But as he was habitually the most cheerful and lively of any group of abolitionists, he felt it his duty to be so this time as well.

  When Pitt had returned to power the year before, Wilberforce had all but promised Fina that they would be able to have the bill for the abolition of the slave trade passed within months. In retrospect, given that Pitt had been in power most of their adult lives without any real forward movement toward abolition, this had been somewhat rash. She had been too polite, or perhaps simply too guarded, to show her skepticism, but he had sensed it nonetheless. And yet, there had indeed been reason to hope.

  The climate was different. Bonaparte, after all, had proved himself an enemy to abolition, which meant in the eyes of the British people that abolition was not necessarily the province of the enemy after all. Liberty was no longer synonymous with sedition. They had support from factions across the House. And Wilberforce knew the supernatural threat they faced now, even if the British public did not. Surely they would be able to at least ensure the outlawing of spellbinding, at least in Jamaica. Surely.

  And yet, once again, their hopes had been unfounded. The slave trade had never really cared about Bonaparte or the politics of liberty, nor had the factions of the government who argued for its interests in the House. For the sixteenth year in a row, Wilberforce had stood in the House of Commoners and pleaded with them to see reason and humanity. For the sixteenth year in a row, the walls had sung the high, sweet notes of truth and freedom about his ears, and swept the House up with them. For the sixteenth year in a row, the House had voted against him.

  Wilberforce had made his peace with failure a long time ago, for his own sake. He had not thought of giving up since the year he had met his wife. If he had to, he would present the bill with new arguments and new evidence every year for another sixteen years, or longer. He would do it until the day he died—as Pitt’s father had famously collapsed and died in the House of Commoners still arguing for American independence. But the hundreds of thousands enslaved on British soil across the world didn’t have the luxury of waiting the rest of his life or longer. Nor did Fina’s people, who every night still heard the voice of the enemy creeping deeper and deeper into the spells that bound them.

  Outside, it was a warm spring day, and the shrieks of his children running around the lawn with little Marianne Thornton drifted through the open window into the library. Normally Wilberforce would jump up at some point and go join them before returning without pause to the conversation, but not today. His sleep the night before had been racked with guilt and dreams, and his limbs and spirits felt made of lead.

  “I was trying,” Wilberforce answered Macaulay belatedly, “not to despair. After all, it’s not as though we haven’t been defeated before.”

  “It was the first time Pitt didn’t support us,” Thornton observed mildly. He had taken the defeat with his usual comforting equanimity, but he, too, was disappointed.

  “He warned me in advance he wouldn’t be able to give us any real assistance,” Wilberforce said. “Almost all his political allies are vehemently opposed to abolition.”

  That, too, was part of the problem. Pitt had agreed to come back to power with the promise from the king that he could choose his own cabinet, which had been intended to exclude many of the ardent anti-abolitionists—particularly given the fact that most of those anti-abolitionists were under some degree of influence from the enemy. What the king had truly meant, it transpired, was that Pitt could appoint any government of which the king himself approved. Most of the brilliant ministers were soundly outside the king’s approval; most of those who favored abolition certainly were. It wasn’t what anyone had hoped for.

  “There’s another matter Pitt hasn’t come through with yet,” Hannah More reminded him. “And that’s the matter of the royal proclamation against spellbinding in Guiana. Pitt assured us he could secure that from the king in a matter of hours. We’ve been waiting eight months.”

  “I know, I know,” Wilberforce sighed. He ran a hand distractedly through his hair. “It’s past ridiculous now—or would be, if the stakes weren’t so high. But it’s hard for me to bother him about it yet again. He’s very busy at the moment.”

  “So are the slave ships,” Granville Sharp said. “So are the magicians churning out their alchemical compounds. So are the slaves in the field, come to that.”

  “I know.” He was frustrated as well, and disappointed, and more than a little worried. Pitt had always been notorious for procrastination when it came to things he would prefer not to do, particularly things that affected only his own life. He would plan taxes five years in advance before he would answer a personal letter. Lately, though, this seemed to be extending to things he very much wanted to do, things he was excited to do, things that involved the lives of others. From what Wilberforce could tell, from the moment he had stepped back into government he had been too busy, too tired, and under too much relentless strain to deal with anything that would not potentially destroy the country if left undealt with. And that was not like him.

  “You are also frequently busy,” Thornton reminded him. “And you always find the time to help Pitt, don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t quite put it like that. I’m a member of Parliament. Helping to run the country is part of what I’m supposed to be busy doing.”

  “And helping the cause of abolition is part of what Pitt is supposed to be busy doing,” Macaulay said immediately. “He is still in favor of our cause, is he not?”

  “He’s in favor of eating and sleeping too,” Wilberforce muttered. “And I haven’t seen him doing much of that lately either. I know,” he added quickly, before anyone else could speak. “This is about the lives of hundreds of thousands. I will talk to him again. I’ll tell him that if he doesn’t act soon, we’ll be forced to push the issue in Parliament, and we will be a group of members from all sides.”

  “Good,” Macaulay said with a nod. “And hope he doesn’t call your bluff.”

  “Of course he won’t call my bluff,” Wilberforce said hotly. “He wants this as much as we do, you know. He’s preoccupied; he’s not our enemy.”

  Unexpectedly, James Stephen spoke up. He alone among the group had not complained yet, which was most unusual for the hot-tempered Scottish lawyer. Now, looking at him, Wilberforce saw that his handsome young face was alight with suppressed excitement.

  “When you do speak to Pitt,” Stephen said, “I wonder if you might enlist his help with another strategy. I’ve been giving this some thought for quite a while now, and I think it’s worth attempting.”

  “Go on,” Wilberforce said at once.

  Stephen drew a single breath, the shiver at the end the only outward sign that he might be about to say something important. “I am in the process of writing a book,” he said. “It will be published in a few months—the end of the year at the latest. It argues that the colonies of Britain’s enemies are prospering despite the supremacy of our navy, because of their freedom to use the ships of neutral countries. Cargoes destined for France are being shipped across the Atlantic under neutral flags, then diverted to their true destination once they reach coastal waters. Obviously, this is allowing the colonies of France and Spain to prosper, but what makes things worse is that it actually gives them an advantage over British colonies, British ships being subject to enemy attack where theirs are not.”

  “That indeed sounds like a problem for the British economy,” Thornton said. “What does it have to do with
us?”

  “That’s the part I’ve been thinking about.” Stephen’s face blossomed at last into a growing smile. “I’ve argued in my book that the Royal Navy needs to be given the power to search and seize ships hiding under neutral flags when necessary, to prevent goods from reaching enemy colonies. Once my book is published, I have every expectation that this will be quickly addressed in Parliament. It should pass without a problem, shouldn’t it, Wilberforce?”

  “I would think so,” Wilberforce agreed—cautiously, but with flickering excitement. He thought he had some inkling of where this was going.

  Stephen was talking faster now. “I haven’t mentioned the slave trade in my book so far, and I don’t plan to. So what those patriotic little politicians so keen on British interests won’t realize is that such a motion would absolutely devastate it. France and Spain will no longer be able to ship slaves to their colonies without facing intervention from the Royal Navy, which, since we own the seas at the moment, is the same as saying not at all. This, in turn, means that their Caribbean colonies will be unable to receive or export goods from Europe; their economies will virtually collapse, putting an end to their demand for more slaves.”

  “That won’t stop the British slave trade, though,” Sharp said.

  “I haven’t finished,” Stephen said. “You see, a lot of these ships trading with France under neutral flags are in fact British. With this rule in place, they will no longer be allowed to continue, not without being subject to seizure by our navy. Obviously, it won’t stop them supplying to British colonies. But nonetheless, with this act in place, the British slave trade would be reduced by half virtually overnight.”

  “Good Lord,” Thornton breathed. “Stephen, that is brilliant.”

  Stephen’s smile broadened.