Trifles and Folly 2

by Gail Z. Martin

  “I take it that his bargain was successful?”

  Sorren’s lips twitched upward in a predatory smile. “More than Dow intended. Dow went to a cliff overlooking the sea and began to play. But he forgot that his sons weren’t the only ones to lose their lives to the dark water down below. His sons came home, all right, along with hundreds—maybe thousands—of drowned souls who heard the song of the pipes and followed it. They found him on the cliff, the pipes still in his hands, dead. Heart stopped.”

  “And the pipes?”

  “One of my associates acquired them through family connections, knowing how dangerous they could be in the hands of a dark wizard. They’ve passed from caretaker to caretaker until they reached Captain Balfour, who was supposed to bring them back from Scotland and deliver them to me. Unfortunately, he died of a fever before he could do that, which is why I need you and Coltt to retrieve them before someone else does.”

  Sorren was the silent partner behind the curio shop in Charleston run by my Uncle Evann. Three years ago, when Coltt and I had been the only survivors of a pirate raid on our small fishing village, we’d taken our stolen ship and fled to Charleston, hoping Uncle Evann could give us sanctuary. We’d killed the pirates who had murdered our families, and had a haunted necklace to show for it, one that I knew for a fact was evil. I thought Uncle Evann would know what to do with it.

  As it turned out, Uncle Evann’s shop, Trifles and Folly, was more than it appeared. Sorren was one of a small, secret group of mortals and immortals pledged to keeping dangerous magical objects out of the hands of those who might misuse them. Sorren and Evann kept an ear open whenever objects with unusual pasts came up at auction or were part of an estate being distributed. One way or another, Sorren made it his business to take those objects out of circulation. Evann handled the legal acquisitions. Coltt and I now took care of the rest.

  “And the other item?”

  Sorren looked thoughtful. “I know who has it, but I’m not totally certain exactly what the item is that we’re looking for. But I do know this—it’s even more dangerous than the Dow pipes.”

  “If you don’t know what I’m looking for, how are Coltt and I supposed to ‘acquire’ it for you?”

  Sorren frowned. “I’ve had my eye on a man named Galoshin Lawry for a while now. He comes from a family of minor magical talent and few scruples. On his own, Lawry is a bit player. But lately, there’s been talk of him trying to acquire ‘soul cash’ and that put him in my sights.”

  “Soul cash? Lawry’s selling souls? To whom?”

  “I don’t know, and that worries me. By himself, Lawry doesn’t have the magical power to raise the dead or tamper with spirits, so my hunch is that he’s gotten his hands on a dark object, something that has power over souls.”

  “Like the Dow pipes.”

  Sorren shrugged. “There are more dark objects that tinker with souls than you want to know about. The Dow pipes are benign compared to most of them. Lawry is heading to Philadelphia on a ship from Scotland. I want you to be there when he arrives. He’s connected to some wealthy people, so there’ll be parties in his honor. I’ve arranged to get you into some of them, so you can try to get an idea of just how his ‘soul cash’ works. Meanwhile, Coltt can search his rooms. Between the two of you, I expect that you’ll make short work of it.” He paused. “Oh, there is one more thing. Both Captain Dow’s widow and Galoshin Lawry take extreme pride in their Scottish heritage. So of course, you’ll wear a kilt when you’re in their presence.”

  Which is why my knees were freezing.

  The lid to the old trunk creaked open, and Mrs. Down removed a protective sheet of muslin that had yellowed with age. Beneath it lay a finely crafted set of the most beautiful pipes I had ever seen. The bag was a black and red plaid, and the drone cords and their tassels were crimson. The chanters were a dark wood, and the slides were bone or ivory. Even at a distance, I could feel its magic, but Mrs. Balfour seemed completely oblivious to its power.

  “It is a beauty, isn’t it? Never could understand why my husband would never play them.” She looked up at me. “Do you play? I’d love to hear these, just once.”

  No, Mrs. Balfour certainly couldn’t feel the magic resonating from the pipes, or she’d have never asked me to play them. Pipes, I’d learned from my Scottish grandfather, are almost a living thing in the hands of a master piper. He fills them with his warm breath and holds them in his arms close to the warmth of his body, intimately, like his beloved. Those damned pipes held a residue of Ian Dow’s spirit in them; even several paces away, I could sense his despair and overwhelming grief. No bloody way would I breathe life into to those pipes.

  I hoped my weak smile looked appropriately contrite. “I’m sorry, but much to my grandfather’s chagrin, I’ve no talent for the pipes myself. But I was a Dow on my mother’s side, so there’s a bit of sentimental value, if you know what I mean.”

  Mrs. Balfour sighed. “Ah well, I had to ask.” Her eyes took on a harder glint. “Did you bring money to pay for them?”

  I took a bag of gold coins from the fur sporran that hung from a chain around my waist and held the coins out to her. I waited as she counted them.

  She smiled when she looked up at me. “As promised,” she said with a nod. “They’re yours now. Take them with you. And I hope your dreams are more peaceful than mine have been.”

  I looked at her and frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’ve heard pipes playing in my dreams twice now. Once, the night my husband died, and then again last night. Woke up with the cold shivers, like someone was walking on my grave.”

  Ask not for whom the pipes play… they play for thee.

  “I’m sure I’ll sleep well, and so will you,” I assured her with a confidence I did not feel. I had a bad feeling about what it might mean to hear the Dow pipes in one’s dreams, and a suspicion it was a harbinger of death. From the look in her eyes, Mrs. Balfour thought the same.

  “Well, off with you. I’ve enjoyed visiting with you, but there’s work to do and potatoes to peel,” Mrs. Balfour said, closing the trunk and dusting off her hands. She saw me to the door and gave a last, mistrustful glance at the bundle in my arms.

  “You’ll see that the pipes are kept safe, won’t you? My husband seemed to think they were quite valuable.”

  That, I could assure her in good conscience. “They’ll be very safe. I promise you.”

  Coltt was waiting for me in a closed carriage down the lane from the Balfour home. “Did you get them?”

  I nodded. “How about you?”

  “Lawry is the toast of the town,” Coltt replied. “I spent the day helping out with deliveries to two of the houses where he’s going to be a guest at parties in his honor. Got inside, had a look around, and loosened up a back window to make going back in later all the easier,” he said with a grin.

  I had magic and enough of a flair for schooling that Sorren made a gentleman of me when circumstances required. I was passable at several accents and could blend in amid high or low society. As Sorren put it, I “cleaned up well.”

  Coltt, on the other hand, wasn’t quite as versatile, but while he lacked magic, he had a natural agility I could never match, which made him the perfect choice for climbing into windows and scaling walls. Where I was Sorren’s protégé when it came to smuggling and magic, Coltt was his apprentice thief.

  “I want to get these pipes stowed aboard the Vengeance before we do anything else,” I said. “I’ll lock them up in my cabin. I won’t feel right about storing them anywhere else.”

  I paused. “Any news to report?”

  “I got a glimpse of Lawry.”

  “Not enough for him to recognize you, I hope.”

  “Doubt it. I was with the servants, and everyone knows servants are invisible.”

  “And?”

  Coltt’s eyes darkened. “I don’t like him. I don’t have a magical bone in my body, but Lawry gives me the creeps. Can’t imagine how he got the soci
ety folks eating out of his hand.”

  I shrugged. “Don’t underestimate magic. Sorren told me that some wizards can work an attraction spell that’s very specific. Maybe his spell is focused on money or pedigree or connections.”

  “The question is, what is Lawry after? And where does the ‘soul cash’ come in?”

  I didn’t have an answer, so I asked another question. “Did you find out where he’s staying?”

  Coltt nodded. “Lawry is staying with the different families that are hosting his parties. Normally, I’d say that was going to make it easy to break into his rooms, but he’s got magic, so it’s probably not going to be simple to get in and get out without being noticed.”

  “I thought you and Sorren worked something out on that.”

  “We did. But what it means is that I’ll have to rely on some of Sorren’s tools to do my spying rather than going in personally. More chance to overlook something, if you ask me.” He paused. “Oh, I did overhear some talk as I was helping unload. Seems like our Mr. Lawry is soliciting contributions for an expedition he’s heading up in a week. The families hosting him already have contributed to his cause, and he’s hoping that their guests will be equally generous.”

  I rubbed my chin as I thought. From what Sorren had told me about Lawry, he didn’t seem the scientific type. “What kind of expedition and what exactly is his expedition hoping to find?”

  “Not sure. Maybe you’ll find out at the party tonight. Whatever it is, Sorren must be pretty certain that it’s connected to that ‘soul cash’ Lawry’s interested in.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do. Did you overhear anything else of value?”

  Coltt thought for a moment. “Not sure whether or not this has anything to do with Lawry, but I heard the servants talking, and there’ve been a number of servants and day laborers who’ve turned up dead rather mysteriously.”

  “Oh?”

  Coltt nodded. “Not the sort of folks whose deaths get a lot of attention. Scullery maids, dock workers, some vagrants. Oddest thing about it is, none of the dead had a mark on them.”

  “They had to die of something.”

  “That’s just it though. It’s quite the buzz below-stairs, and in the tavern where I took in some stew and ale for lunch. They weren’t stabbed or strangled, and there’s no sign of poison. Most were too young to have had a bad heart. The police are dismissing it as water from a bad well, but talk at the pub says they weren’t all from the same area, so they would have gotten their water from more than one pump. And besides, if it were the water, more would be sick.”

  “Anything that ties the deaths to Lawry?”

  Coltt met my eyes. “Only the fact that they began the night Lawry arrived in Philadelphia.”

  “Would you care for another brandy?”

  “Thank you.” I watched my host pour a measure of the dark liquor into my glass, and then returned my attention to the evening’s gathering. Tonight, a group of about twenty of Philadelphia’s captains of industry and pillars of society mingled at the home of Mr. Everston Willard Cummings, III. Cummings had made his fortune in the shipbuilding industry. I looked around the room. There was Robert Towars, whose glass furnace had risen right before the outbreak of war with England. Chatting with him was John Hewson Sr., famed for the calico and linen prints his company produced. There were others, wealthy men who had built fortunes copying English and French designs in porcelain, textiles, silver, and fine furniture when the war cut off trade between the former colonies and the Continent. They were shrewd men, known for their eye for a good deal, and Lawry had their full attention.

  “If you’ll pardon my saying so, Mr. Lawry, I wonder about the soundness of your expedition.” All eyes turned to Everston Cummings, the man whose deep, authoritative voice rang out over the small room. “You’re asking for quite a tidy sum of money to fund your research in Bermuda, but I’d like to know why there and not somewhere closer?”

  Lawry smiled, and I wondered if he had somehow planted the question with Cummings because from the smug expression on Lawry’s face, it was exactly the issue he’d been longing to raise.

  “An excellent question, Mr. Cummings. You’re correct that there are many stretches along the coast of this new United States of America that have been the sites of numerous shipwrecks. Indeed, there are no shortage of such sites all over the world, and my new invention has the potential to make us very rich from all of them,” he said with a knowing wink that brought greedy chuckles from the assembly.

  “But Bermuda has the enviable position on old, established trade routes to make the waters around it home to a most unique graveyard of ships. Merchant ships, galleons, ships laden with the treasures the Spaniards gathered in the darkest jungles of South America. Bermuda itself is divided on its loyalty to the crown. In fact, I’m sure I’m not alone in believing that, by proximity alone, it should belong to these United States rather than to a faraway monarch.”

  Lawry leaned into his crowd, and I saw that he fingered a mirrored cube that hung from a silver strand around his neck. The surface shimmered strangely in the light, as if it reflected and distorted the faces of the men clustered closely around Lawry. “The delicate instrumentation in this small cube, coupled with its larger mate that rests safely under lock and key in my room, enables me to calibrate changes in the wind and barometer as well as the temperature and currents of the sea, to find wrecks that have long evaded treasure hunters. Working with men like yourselves—in fact, with some of you in this room—I have hired a uniquely skilled group of divers from the Orient who are used to deep dives and outfitted them in special suits to protect them from cold and pressure. We have everything we need to take the lost gold of the Spaniards and the sunken treasures of the East India Company for ourselves: everything except the money necessary for a journey of the duration that would be most profitable.”

  Lawry leaned back. As a fisherman, I recognized the movement. He had them hooked, now he just needed to reel in the catch. “I have enough to mount a small-scale expedition right now, but of course, once that happens and the results become known, there will be a clamor for investors to get in on the opportunity. I’d like to make this as profitable as possible for the people who had faith in my vision by limiting the number of investors.”

  I watched as the fat fish practically jumped out of the water and into his creel. The merchant princes of Philadelphia withdrew bank notes and vowed to have promissory notes delivered the next day. Only a few hung back with me at the fringe of the feeding frenzy. With the pretense of going to refill my brandy, I slipped from the room before I would be notable by my lack of sponsorship. I’d gotten what I wanted, although I didn’t have any idea of what it meant. I could only hope that Coltt’s night had been more illuminating.

  I found Coltt waiting for me at our rooming house. “Were you able to get a look into Lawry’s room?”

  Coltt nodded. “Not in person, since he had the doors and windows spelled shut. But the magic telescope Sorren gave me worked perfectly. With it, I could see in the dark, and I got a good look around. I was also in a good position when Lawry came in a few hours before the big party.”

  “Came in from where?”

  “Don’t know. But he pulled a necklace of some sort out from under his shirt. It had a small box on a chain, and the box was glowing. He placed the small box on top of a larger box and then the big box picked up the glow. Damnedest thing was, I could have sworn something was flowing out of the small box into the big one, and for a moment, the light inside the big box seemed to swirl and move. Then they both faded and Lawry put the necklace back on and started to get changed for the party.”

  “I saw him wearing that necklace at the reception. But it wasn’t glowing. I couldn’t really tell what the small box was made of, but it had some kind of magic; that, I’m sure of.”

  “What do you reckon he’s up to?”

  I shrugged. “Well, what he told the men at the reception was that he’d develop
ed a very delicate scientific instrument to help locate shipwrecks, and he was sailing for Bermuda with a crew of specialized divers to make a fortune bringing up sunken treasure. He also hinted that he’d like to see Bermuda break away from the crown, which played well to the audience.”

  “But where does the ‘soul cash’ come in?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t know, but he took in enough hard cash to provision a nice expedition.”

  “Do you think it’s possible that he’s gone straight?”

  “Doubt it. Sorren was sure Lawry was up to something, and Sorren’s sources aren’t wrong often. No, I think Lawry may be telling a half-truth at best. I’m sure he’d like to get his hands on some of Bermuda’s lost treasure. But I doubt his investors will ever see any return on their money—or that Lawry will show his face in Philadelphia again.”

  I dressed for bed and yawned. “Tomorrow, I need to hire replacements for the crew that shipped out so that we’re ready to sail on a moment’s notice. I don’t believe the timetable Lawry’s given us. I think it’s more likely that he’ll skip town unexpectedly, and I want to be on his tail when it happens.”

  I spent the bulk of the next morning in the waterfront pubs looking for replacements for the crew members who decided to leave us in Philadelphia. I kept the crew of the Vengeance deliberately light at twenty-five men because most of our runs weren’t the usual for smugglers and I wanted to keep portside talk to a minimum. I’d expected to replace eight men and was none too happy to find myself hiring ten when two of my crew went missing.

  Since nearly all of our runs were at Sorren’s behest, the Vengeance worked a little differently than most pirate ships. We often carried cargoes of tobacco or whiskey to cover expenses. When we raided a ship, we had a specific prize in mind, one of Sorren’s missing magical objects. Sorren didn’t mind if we helped ourselves to anything else of value that was easily carried off, but the crew had to be disciplined enough to understand that we weren’t in the business of pillaging every ship we encountered. Sorren made sure that the crew was paid well and paid promptly, which kept the grumbling about not seeing enough “action” to a minimum.