The Rowanwood Curse (Hal Bishop Mysteries Book 1)

by Elizabeth O'Connell

  THE ROWANWOOD CURSE

  Elizabeth A. O’Connell

  Text Copyright © 2016 Elizabeth A. O’Connell

  All Rights Reserved

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER ONE

  The events surrounding Rowanwood Hall and Sir Jasper Pryce in the winter of 1895 have naturally provoked their share of speculation and gossip, but the truth of what happened there is far stranger than any rumour could account for. The inhabitants of the Hall, wishing the truth to be known, have asked that my brother give an accounting of what happened there—and my brother, as is his wont, has passed the task on to me.

  Our involvement began in December of that year. I had, at that time, been apprenticed to my brother Hal in his magical practice for six months—though there didn’t seem to be much of a practice at all. Hal had taken the practice over from our father after his death the previous year. Father had been an industrial magician of some note; his discovery of the elemental spirits of aether had been the spark that started the Industrial Revolution in England. But his death had been preceded by a long, debilitating illness, which had depleted his estate and nearly ruined his practice. Hal had been forced to sell the family home and take rooms in London to pay out the debts of the estate, and it had been decided that I should leave school and take up my apprenticeship in order to be of some use.

  Father’s death had been particularly hard on Hal. My brother was an unsociable creature at the best of times, but now he was a virtual recluse. He showed no inclination to follow Father’s footsteps in the field of industrial magic. The majority of his practice was consultation in probate—reviewing the enchanted items left behind by an estate to determine whether and to whom they could be passed. The remainder of his time he spent reading obscure tomes of magic that I had never read or even heard of. I wondered at it, but my questioning was met with all the responsiveness of a stone wall.

  A practice in which the majority of the clients were deceased might have suited Hal’s misanthropic soul down to the ground, but for my part I found it both dull and morbid. I spent many hours staring out the window of our study, wishing for a client to come and shake my brother from his self-imposed exile—and, incidentally, free me from the endless drudgery of cataloguing estates.

  I was thus occupied on that afternoon in early December. It had been a damp, dark day, of the sort common to London at that time of year, and the streetlamps were already lit, though it was only half-past three. I was watching a shadowed figure wending his way toward our rooming-house through the soupy fog below.

  “Jem,” my brother said impatiently. “This one is defunct. Mark it.”

  I sighed and turned away from the window to the ledger that sat on my desk. Hal sat at his own desk, perpendicular to mine, examining a goblet. One would not have thought we were brothers, to look at us. For one thing, Hal seemed much older than he was. He was only twenty-four, seven years my senior, but even at that age he had spent several years looking after the practice and Father, to say nothing of myself, and it told on his face. For another, we differed in looks as much as in temperament: Hal favored Father, being tall and lean and dark, where I resembled our mother, with fair hair and hazel eyes. It sometimes seemed odd that we were related.

  I dutifully marked down in my ledger that the spell on the goblet was defunct. Whatever the goblet had been enchanted to do, the spell had been made to last only the life of its owner; now it was nothing more than an ordinary piece of glassware.

  I pushed back the ledger, and turned back to the window. The shadowy figure was gone, and I felt a stinging sense of disappointment. “When are we going to have real work to do?”

  “What do you call this?” Hal swept his hand over his desk, indicating the pile of cutlery, jewelry, and assorted knick-knacks that he had been examining all that day.

  I scowled. “You know what I mean. Real work. Spell work.”

  He turned away from me, and began packing the collection back in the crate. “This will do for now.”

  My ears pricked up at the last part of that sentence, and I sat up eagerly. “What do you mean, ‘for now’? Are you expecting something?”

  He set the lid back on the crate, still facing away from me. “Perhaps. There’s a particular kind of work that I’m interested in just now—and I haven’t found anything in that line yet.”

  A dozen questions formed in my brain at once, but before I could get any of them onto my tongue, there was a knock at the study door, and our landlady, Mrs. Evans, entered.

  “Mr. Rupert Bonham to see you, sir,” she said.

  Hal’s entire demeanor changed, so abruptly that it was as though he had been struck by lightning. He stood up, shoving the crate aside, and told her to send Mr. Bonham up at once. Mrs. Evans left, closing the door behind her, and Hal turned to me.

  “You may be getting your wish after all, Jem.” There was a spark in his eyes that I had not seen since Father died—it was a look he used to get when the solution to a problem came to him after hours of fruitless effort. “This may just be the work I’ve been waiting on.”

  I was dumbfounded by this sudden change, and wondered at Mr. Bonham’s being the cause of it. I knew of him, of course; there was scarcely a magician in England who didn’t. Rupert Bonham was not a magician himself, having neither the talent nor the training for it, but as a solicitor he had made a sort of specialty of magic. He had a positive genius for finding the right work for the right magician, and he had connections with some of the wealthiest and most prominent men in England. I felt a pricking of anticipation at the back of my neck; whatever work Mr. Bonham had for us was bound to be interesting—and lucrative.

  There was the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and then Mr. Bonham himself was shown into our rooms. He always struck me as odd-looking, though I could never say precisely why. Perhaps it was the strange grey-green eyes, or the shock of silver-white hair that framed his face in muttonchops. He smiled as he shook my brother’s hand, and the effect on his face was not altogether pleasant—not that it was malicious, but rather it seemed ill-suited to him.

  Hal introduced me, and Mr. Bonham inclined his head, acknowledging my presence, then turned back to my brother. Hal directed him to a sofa in front of the fireplace, then took a seat in Father’s old wingback chair across from him. I took up a post leaning against the mantelpiece behind my brother—the better to see our visitor’s face.

  Hal leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. His face was lit with a strange energy; plainly, this visit from Mr. Bonham was one he had been waiting on for quite some time. “What do you have for me?”

  Mr. Bonham smiled again, the flickering light of the fireplace making his eyes stand out starkly against his face. “I’ve come on behalf of Sir Jasper Pryce.”

  My interest was piqued at once. Sir Jasper was one of the wealthiest men in England; the coal from his mines drove every sort of engine imaginable, and along with Father, he had been responsible
for the development of the aether-engines. A commission from him would be just what we needed to get the practice going again.

  I turned to Hal, but one look at my brother told me that he did not share my thoughts. He leaned back in his chair, frowning dyspeptically.

  “I told you I’m not interested in industrial magic,” he said. “That was my father’s area, not mine.”

  I stifled a sigh, disappointment stinging again. I could not understand Hal’s opposition to industrial magic—it was, after all, what he had been trained in, and it had made Father very wealthy before his illness had destroyed almost everything he worked for. And given Hal’s reticence on the subject, I doubted I ever would understand.

  But Mr. Bonham did not seem in the least fazed by Hal’s reaction; he smiled his strange smile again and leaned back against the cushions of the sofa. “Yes, you’ve made yourself quite clear on that point. Fortunately, it is not industrial magic Sir Jasper wants.”

  “Then what?”

  Mr. Bonham reached into his pocket and drew out a little envelope, tossing it on the tea table in front of him. “Tell me what you make of that, Mr. Bishop.”

  Hal picked up the envelope. The moment he opened it, the room seemed to grow darker, and I felt a chill creep into my bones; it was as though the fire had been dampened, though I could still see it burning steady as ever. I watched, with a curious sense of dread, as Hal reached into the envelope. To my surprise, it contained only a single lock of dark hair, bound with a bright red ribbon.

  Hal turned it over in his hands, examining it, before putting it back into the envelope and tossing it back on the tea table. “Dark magic, I would say—and rather powerful, at that. How did you come by it?”

  “Dark magic?” I stared at Hal, startled by his offhand manner. Dark magic wasn’t a thing to be treated lightly—men had gone to their deaths, and worse, over it. Getting no response from him, I turned to Mr. Bonham. “Why would you bring it here?”

  “Because I asked him to,” Hal said brusquely.

  “But why. . . .” I started, but he looked at me with an expression that made it clear that I was not to interrupt again. I closed my mouth.

  He turned back to Mr. Bonham. “Now. How did you come by it?”

  Mr. Bonham laced his hands together over his stomach, still smiling. “That hair was lately on the head of Cecilia Pryce.”

  Hal frowned. “Sir Jasper’s daughter? Surely she’s not been dabbling in dark magic.”

  “No,” Mr. Bonham replied, a twinkle in his eye. He was clearly enjoying the effect he was having. “Sir Jasper believes she has been cursed.”

  “That’s a matter for the magicians at Scotland Yard, I should think,” I said, forgetting that I was meant to be seen and not heard.

  Mr. Bonham smiled indulgently. “Sir Jasper wants to avoid scandal, if he can. Now if the Yard were to be involved, the newspapers could hardly be kept out of it. But if the son of an old friend came to visit, and merely happened to inquire . . . .”

  “Then the matter could be resolved privately,” Hal finished. He was looking at the envelope on the tea table, a strange expression on his face. “Sir Jasper is certain the girl is cursed?”

  “Not entirely—but it seems very likely, if I understand the circumstances. She has been ill for some time, and he has engaged all manner of specialists. None could so much as give a name to the illness.”

  “That’s suggestive, certainly,” Hal said, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. “But hardly enough to be conclusive. Why has he sought help now?”

  “The idea of magic had occurred to him—being familiar with your father’s work, he was more inclined to that possibility than another might have been. So he spoke to the local yarbwoman.”

  I had heard of yarbwomen before; folk practitioners, sometimes called hedgewitches. They were not trained nor licensed magicians, and could work very little real magic, but some of them had the knack for sensing it. “What did she tell him?”

  Mr. Bonham’s smile subsided, and the flickering shadows on his face made him seem very old, all at once. “She told him that she did not know what spirit held the contract for the spell on his daughter, and that she did not care to know.”

  Hal frowned, tapping at the arm of his chair more vigorously. “So we have a spell, but no means of identifying the spirit who holds it. Has Sir Jasper any idea who might have cast the curse?”

  “None whatsoever,” Mr. Bonham said, the cheerful note coming back into his voice.

  “So I’m to unmake a spell without knowing the spirit or the caster.” Hal raised an eyebrow. “Rather difficult.”

  “Indeed,” Mr. Bonham said, almost gleefully now. “And that is why Sir Jasper is willing to pay so handsomely for someone to break it. What do you say—isn’t it exactly what you asked for?”

  Hal looked back down at the envelope on the table, the strange expression back on his face. It was a curious mix of fear and excitement, and something else I couldn’t identify. It gave me an uneasy feeling in my stomach. But when he looked back up at Mr. Bonham, the look was gone. He nodded. “When does Sir Jasper want me there?”

  Mr. Bonham reached over and plucked up the envelope, replacing it with another. “I took the liberty of securing two tickets on the early morning train to Manchester. Sir Jasper’s driver will meet you at the station and take you on to Rowanwood.”

  With that, Mr. Bonham took his leave. Hal saw him to the door, and I sank down onto the sofa, staring dumbfounded at the tickets Mr. Bonham had left. I looked over at the crate that sat behind Hal’s desk, and could hardly believe that only a short time before we had been engaged in so mundane a task as cataloguing an estate.

  Hal, returning from the door, settled himself back into the chair. “You look startled, Jem.”

  “That’s because I am startled,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t understand this at all.”

  Hal smiled, a bit sardonically, I thought. “What’s there to understand? I asked Mr. Bonham to find me a job, and he did. I thought you’d be pleased. You’ve complained enough about the probate work.”

  “But why this sort of job?” I looked back down at the envelope, and remembered the feeling that the lock of hair had given me—the chill, dark feeling creeping up my spine, and shivered. “Curse-breaking is nasty work, Hal. It’s—people have gone mad doing it, you know.”

  He stood up abruptly, walking over to the mantel and taking down his pipe. He filled it, tamping down the tobacco and lighting it without looking at me. “Men have gone mad doing other things, too,” he said at last, very quietly.

  That startled me more than the curse-breaking. We never spoke of Father’s illness; but I remembered the holidays at home, Father shut up in his study and scribbling nonsense on reams of paper, the maid scrubbing writing from the wall, and Hal reassuring me that it was only the pressure of work, that Father would be all right once he had rested. We had never acknowledged, even between ourselves, that Father had been mad—but it could scarcely have been anything else.

  I sat for a long a moment without speaking, watching Hal puff at his pipe, until the silence grew too uncomfortable. “If industrial magic frightens you, then that should go double for curse-breaking.”

  He looked at me coolly, raising one eyebrow. “When have I said I was frightened? Industrial magic doesn’t interest me. Curse-breaking does. That’s all there is to it.”

  I picked up the envelope with the train tickets in it. “One day to decide. That’s not much time.”

  “There’s nothing to decide.” He sat back down, puffing away at his pipe. “I’m taking the job.”

  “Don’t I have any say in this?” I tossed the envelope back down. “I’m only your apprentice, after all. Not to mention your brother.”

  He blew out a ring of smoke and smiled at me with an irritating air of patience. “Of course you have a say. You needn’t come along if you don’t want to.”

  I folded my arms over my chest and scowled at him. It was n
o good arguing with him; I could see that. He had made up his mind to take this job long before I even knew about it, and nothing I said was going to change his mind. But whether I would go was another thing entirely—and I had almost no time to make the decision at all.

  “It isn’t as though there would be nothing to do,” he continued, looking up at the ceiling. “There’s another crate coming in tomorrow.”

  I looked over at the crate we had just finished packing. All the crushing boredom of the past several months seemed to crash in on me at once. I didn’t like the idea of facing down a curse, but I knew I didn’t have it in me to go through another crate of jewelry and silverware. I sighed. “Fine. I’ll go.”

  Hal sprang to his feet. “I thought you might. Don’t look so glum about it, either. I should have thought this sort of thing would appeal to you—saving the beautiful young lady from the terrible curse, and all that.”

  It did sound appealing, put that way, but I saw no reason to tell him so. “Yes, all the fun of hunting down black magicians in Manchester in winter. I’m sure it will be a delight.”

  If he caught the sarcasm in my tone, he took no notice of it, taking down one of the obscure volumes from his bookshelves with a gleam in his eye. “That’s the spirit, Jem. Best get out some paper—I have some notes for you to make.”

  I went to my desk without further comment. I had the curious feeling that I had been conned into something—but it was overshadowed by knowledge that for at least the time being there would be no more estates to catalogue.

  CHAPTER TWO

  We arrived in Manchester the following afternoon, and were met at the station by Sir Jasper’s driver, as promised. He was a sullen, silent man of about forty, who took our bags and opened the doors for us without any words beyond those needed for common politeness. I settled myself into the seat of the aether-carriage, finding it a comfort to be out of the wind; but Hal had lapsed into one of his dyspeptic moods. He lit his pipe, and the smell of sage and tobacco smoke soon filled up the interior of the carriage.