The Wayward Star

by Jenn Stark

  I murmured something polite and dismissive, feeling out of my depth. I’d come to this home girded for battle, but I wasn’t sure I was up for a full attack of Southern politeness.

  The butler turned and extended equally warm greetings to Nikki as if they’d been friends for years, then led us back through the house. It was a larger mansion on the inside than I’d expected, with wide, airy corridors, tall doors with transoms above, and lazy ceiling fans throughout. The floor was inlaid wood, polished to a high sheen, and the furniture all appeared to be antique. And there wasn’t too much of it either, the light, delicately carved pieces also lending an aura of coolness to the home.

  “Madame Beauchamp asked to see you on the back patio, if that wouldn’t be an inconvenience. She enjoys being out there when the weather isn’t quite so stifling.”

  Nikki and I shared a glance. While not as hot as the Las Vegas desert, New Orleans more than made up for it in humidity. But if Madame Beauchamp preferred to sit outside, then sit outside we would.

  The butler finally reached the back of the house and opened another door, which led out onto a space that was about as close to your average patio as the Vatican was to a country church. The gracious deck extended for easily thirty feet and was topped with a covered porch. Suspended from the porch’s ceiling were more swirling fans and huge hanging baskets filled with ferns, their verdant leaves rustling in the breeze. A large fountain played merrily just past the back steps, and I could see that the property nestled up against a narrow, babbling creek, which lent the property an air of fairy-tale splendor.

  As we stepped out onto the porch, a figure I hadn’t at first seen turned to stare at us. She was elegant and erect, seated on the edge of a wingback chair in the center of the back deck. And she was easily ninety years old.

  “Oh, you came,” she said, and the strength of her voice caught me up short. “I am so pleased to make your acquaintance. Malcolm, go ahead on, we’ll be fine.”

  Beside us, the butler executed a short bow. “I’ll be back in just a few minutes. Madame Beauchamp doesn’t want to keep you waiting. Please, make yourselves comfortable.”

  He disappeared into the gloom of the house again, and we moved forward quickly enough that Madame Beauchamp didn’t stand. Honestly, I wasn’t sure she could. After she waved us to sit down, she eased back into her chair. Nikki and I settled into the wicker chairs to either side of her, curved around a coffee table on which sat a large, leather-bound book.

  Madame Beauchamp’s gaze lingered on the doorway where Malcom had disappeared. “I don’t know quite what I would do without him,” she said, her voice pitched just loud enough that I was certain that Malcolm heard, at least if he’d remained hovering in the hallway. I imagined his gentle smile as he returned to his duties, as used to the compliment as his mistress clearly was to giving it.

  Then Madame Beauchamp turned back to us and practically drilled me into the back of my chair with a hard glare.

  “Now then, we should get down to business. But I implore you, speak quickly and directly. The moment that man comes back, he’s going to be hovering over me like I’m some damned baby bird. It’s absolutely exasperating, but he is a man of a certain temperament, and there’s simply no shaking him.”

  Nikki tilted her head, regarding the woman with curiosity. Madame Beauchamp seemed strangely vibrant in her manner despite her advanced age, a core of steel beneath all the lace and powder.

  “Are you a revenant?” Nikki asked abruptly, referring to the closest that any Connected had ever gotten to true vampire status, that of a very long-lived but still decidedly human society.

  “Don’t be a ninny,” Madame Beauchamp scoffed. “I’m simply Southern, and Southern women were born strong. I could affect the appearance of a woman far younger than my years should I wish to do so, but I most assuredly do not. That nonsense is for children.”

  “Fair enough,” I said evenly. “You were gracious enough to invite us into your home. How can we help you?”

  “The question is more how I can help you,” she said. “And I will get right to it, we’ve not much time. You are well aware of the existence of the Shadow Court. I don’t have to tell you about their strength or the danger they represent, not only to the Council but to any family that is as independent as it is strong. Such families as the Beauchamp’s have no interest in joining any collective of sorcerers, no matter the purpose. We simply wish to be left to our own devices to conduct our business as we see fit—and to conduct our magic as we have done since it was first granted to us.”

  I nodded, as there wasn’t much to say to this. Madame Beauchamp kept rolling.

  “My family is long-lived and very proud, and we are also, to a fault, dedicated record keepers. When I learned of what happened to the Magician, of course I was mortified on his behalf—such a terrible, terrible tragedy—but I was not surprised. I knew the Magician, once upon a time.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “Oh, I know full well that he’s chosen you to be his consort, though I tried my level best to catch his eye, I’m not ashamed to say. But even back when we met and danced our dance, the Magician demanded a certain ruggedness to the woman that would win his heart. As strong as I am, I am also not ashamed to say that ‘rugged’ would never be used to describe me.”

  She glared at me expectantly, and I had no idea what to say.

  “I think you are probably far stronger than you would let on to most people,” I finally managed, and that seemed to be the right thing.

  “Exactly so. But the heart wants what the heart wants, and the Magician always did think rather poorly about his own true nature. It is my understanding that certain elements of that nature have now come home to roost, so I guess we will see whether his fears were well founded.”

  I barely kept my expression neutral. How did she know this? The Arcana Council hadn’t exactly put out a press release.

  “In any event, when I learned there was this rival council who had appeared, then disappeared, then reappeared anew, of course I had to look into it myself. It had long been a legend since I was a little girl that there had been gaps in our own family history. Sections of the great book that had clearly once been filled but now were mysteriously blank. All of it in longhand, of course, so there was no telling what had been written, only that it had been removed by magical means. Try as we might, we were never able to break that spell and discover the missing text, but when I heard about the Magician’s strange reinstatement of his memories, I also remembered our book. And so I checked to see if the Magician alone had something to add to their mysterious tale.”

  She pointed to the massive leather-bound tome on the table in front of her. “You want to know about the Shadow Court? Well then, let’s have a look.”

  24

  The book was already helpfully bookmarked at the appropriate pages, indicating where the key passages lay. It was clear that Madame Beauchamp had already read the book and knew its contents.

  I glanced at her. “You want to simply give us the rundown?”

  She fluttered a hand, her eyes glinting with an emotion I couldn’t quite pinpoint. “Oh, go on. I believe you’ll find it stimulating reading.”

  Something about this old woman didn’t sit well with me, but I didn’t know what it was, exactly. Was I merely prejudiced against anybody with a butler, or did I genuinely mistrust her? Beside me, Nikki leaned forward with interest as I opened the book to the first marked page, so I suspected my ill will was probably unfounded.

  “This entry’s a sharper color than the entries before and after it,” Nikki said, flipping back a few pages and then forward. “You mean to tell me that the missing sections reappeared out of the blue? How were they not noticed earlier?”

  “You need to understand, these records were kept sporadically, and the last missing entry that we had in the book was recorded in 1851. The dozen or so entries erased by the spell that afflicted the Magician’s memories didn’t disappear until 1853. By that time, t
here was no reason to go back over entries now at least two years old. It was another, oh, probably fifteen years before someone randomly went through the book again and made a notation that a section or two was missing in this volume. An admittedly paltry attempt was made to determine what other entries had gone missing, but as we had no way of knowing what topics to search for, it was a less than satisfactory search. Ultimately, we gave up focusing on what was past and merely focused on what was present. To my knowledge, no other sections of text were removed in subsequent volumes of our history besides the ones marked here. The anomalies seem to be restricted to the years from 1622 to 1853.”

  “What happened in 1622?” I asked.

  Madame Beauchamp merely shrugged. “At that point, we were still living in Paris, quite happily. We didn’t come to the New World until a few years after New Orleans was incorporated as a city in the early seventeen hundreds. There is nothing in our history to indicate that we had had any problems with the Shadow Court before or since 1622. That was merely the time period of the first lapse in our logs. The others were as you see marked in the book. It’s possible we did business with the Shadow Court before 1622. We certainly had arrangements with a number of prominent families of the day. But as you can read, the entries regarding them are quite innocuous. I frankly can’t see why some of them had gone missing in the first place, other than to obscure the limited connection between their organization and our family.”

  I nodded. As Madame Beauchamp indicated, the first three entries were purely transactional in nature, detailing several shipments of wine and spices the Shadow Court had specifically gathered for the Beauchamp family. In another entry, it was the Beauchamps who were providing products, with the Shadow Court offering payment. The details of this transaction were distasteful, to say the least.

  “You trafficked in slaves,” I said bluntly.

  Madame Beauchamp waved off my reaction with haughty unconcern.

  “I make no excuses for the poor judgment of my family’s past generations. They were creatures of their time. What we now consider abhorrent, they merely considered to be the business of the day. To their credit, at least they saw the errors of their way sooner than most. They eventually made some measure of retribution, releasing the slaves they had bought, buying back those they could still find and releasing them as well. We came to realize there were worse things than going against the status quo.”

  I managed not to respond to that and flipped ahead to the next entry. This detailed a social event in 1756 with a familiar name on the guest list. “Randolph Fuggeren,” I observed.

  Madame Beauchamp tittered coquettishly. “Also well before my time, but it seems that Herr Fuggeren was quite a popular man in his day. Now, granted, it was considered to be quite a coup to get an invitation from the Beauchamp family for our spring fête, but he did us the service of agreeing to attend our little celebration.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, trying to read the cramped writing. It was written in French, which, fortunately, I could understand, another one of the free-gifts-with-purchase of my advancing Connected abilities. What struck me most, however, was that no matter how positive and even effervescent the language was, there was something about the writing itself that struck me as odd. It was feminine and given to frills and rolls, but there was also a hasty quality to it that seemed at odds with the careful penmanship most of the entries featured. “Who was the scribe for the Beauchamp family at this time?” I asked.

  Madame Beauchamp fluttered her hands. “I dare say I don’t know off the top of my head. The obligation of the owner to write in the family logbook was always given to the women in our line. You just couldn’t seem to trust men to take down all the information that was necessary.”

  “Was she sick?” Nikki asked abruptly.

  “Sick? My word, what a strange question.”

  I leaned forward, because I could understand why Nikki asked the question. That was what was wrong with her handwriting. It wasn’t sloppy so much as shaky, in the manner of a person who needed to get the information down but didn’t know how long she would have to be writing it. I scanned the lines of copy, wondering why it was so important. She was discussing a high society party, probably not too dissimilar to the party I’d just attended in Switzerland, and she listed a whole roster of names. People I’ve never heard of, their names each copied down in precise order—alphabetical order, I realized. Who would do that? And why?

  Someone who wanted to convey a message, I realized suddenly. A hidden message. I leaned forward, peering intently at the list of names. What message was it, though?

  Madame Beauchamp must’ve picked up on my intensity. “Well, what is it? Have you learned something interesting?”

  “Only that the Beauchamp’s party must have been the hottest ticket in New Orleans,” I said, sighing with an air of defeat. “At least in 1756, you must have owned this city.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “You have discovered something, and you simply must tell me what it is. I deserve to know. It’s my family’s book.”

  I turned my gaze blandly back to Madame Beauchamp, with no intention of spilling my half-figured-out realization, but it was Nikki who spoke next. “And family’s important to you, I take it?” she drawled.

  Madame Beauchamp’s eyes widened in disapproval at Nikki’s tone. “Well, I declare, that certainly isn’t any sort of way to speak to your elder. Especially if your elder is an old woman,” she replied with a snickering laugh. “I understand that you are not from the South, Ms. Dawes, but surely they did a better job teaching you manners in Memphis, Justice Wilde, did they not?”

  I lifted my brows. “You’ve done your research on me.”

  “It wasn’t all that difficult to do,” she assured me. “Just about everyone who is anyone wants to talk about Justice Wilde. You are quite the popular one.”

  She’d used that word before with peculiar emphasis. Popular. It seemed to have a great deal of meaning to her, in a way I didn’t quite understand.

  I flipped forward a few more pages, the diary moving on to the late 1700s. This was written in a different hand, one that was stronger, bolder, younger. And in this case, the entries were signed.

  “Elizabeth,” I said, “That’s a pretty name.”

  To my surprise, Madame Beauchamp sniffed in disdain.

  “Elizabeth,” she said dismissively, effectively distracted. “Now there was a flighty one. It’s hard for me to believe that she ever settled down enough to put any entries into the book. She didn’t believe the log was all that important, certainly not as important as her parties or young men. Still, she knew her duty, and I suppose she did what she could. We all must, if we want to earn the name of Beauchamp.”

  “You’ve done the name proud,” Nikki said. This time, her tone was more respectful, and the obvious flattery had the intended effect.

  “Well, I can hardly expect those who follow me to understand. Nobody has a sense of history quite like an old woman. We all must simply do what we must.”

  “And what is it you think you must do now?” I asked. My mind was churning, trying to understand the game being played in front of me. “You’ve certainly sacrificed a great deal in your life to keep the story safe, to ensure it remains as it should be told. You’ve even brought me here so that I might learn that story in its entirety, haven’t you? So that I might see what’s about to come.”

  “To whatever extent you’re able, yes.” Madame Beauchamp said. “You have to have an understanding of the history you’re up against. The power. The family ties. The Shadow Court wasn’t some ragtag group of marauders pieced together by happenstance, you know. They had a sense of history the Arcana Council is sorely lacking, one it patently ignores, even when given the chance to create some real and meaningful connections.”

  “And you need me to recognize the value of those connections.”

  Her eyes glittered fiercely. “Oh, I think you already comprehend them quite we
ll. I could not be more delighted about that. You will want to read those final entries before you go, though.”

  Despite Madame Beauchamp’s belief, I didn’t quite understand. I was close, but the message the scribe had wanted to convey back in 1756 remained elusive. Beside me, Nikki practically quivered with the same confusion I felt, so with no other recourse, I continued turning the pages. More slowly now, as the entries regarding the Shadow Court grew fewer and farther between, the references cagier, almost coy. Elizabeth’s handwriting had been taken over by another hand, a young woman who signed her entries Angelique, her penmanship flawless and flamboyant. I found myself reading them more closely, even when they weren’t pertinent to the Shadow Court.

  “Well now, I don’t know why you’re paying attention to those pages. I told you that the missing passages were clearly marked,” Madame Beauchamp said with a fluttery laugh. A fluttery, satisfied laugh. I glanced at the date of the current entry. March 14, 1838.

  “I’m afraid I simply can’t help myself,” I said as sheepishly as I could manage. “It’s all so interesting, and this writer’s penmanship is beautiful. I barely learned to write my name in cursive.”

  Madame Beauchamp tittered again, clearly pleased with the flattery to her family. “I can see there is quite a bit they didn’t teach you in Memphis, Justice Wilde. Such a pity.”

  “What is this entry in 1838? Another grand party, it seemed. I’m not sure what was going on in the world at that time but here…the level of detail is extraordinary. It totally brings it to life.”

  “I should say so. There was already far too much bloodshed and distress in the world,” Madame Beauchamp said. “Why not share the beauty of our days as well?”

  “Of course,” I agreed. I turned another page, and then I saw it. The entry I was searching for. The whole reason we were here, actually.