“Good,” the fairy said, resting her forehead on Sir Jasper’s. “Then keep the boon I’ve given you. Let us not trouble ourselves further.”
Sir Jasper closed his eyes, and for a moment I thought all was lost. Then Cecilia spoke, a single word, spoken to no one in particular. She raised her hand, letting bits of dirt fall from it, staring into the darkness. “Papa,” she said.
Sir Jasper’s whole body jerked, and he broke away from the fairy. “No—no. For my child, I will suffer. I will let it happen—I will let all the years of my life pass as you say. But give her back. Let me take her place.”
The fairy’s eyes glinted, her icy face twisting until it no longer resembled a woman’s face—it was something terrible and old, a face from a nightmare. “You ask me to break my contract?”
“To make another,” Hal said evenly. “That is permitted.”
The fairy howled, a screeching wail like the north wind bringing in a storm. I drew my coat about me and hunkered down closer to the stone.
“Yes,” she hissed, staring at my brother with unmitigated hatred. “Yes. The offer is made.”
“And your answer?”
She turned back to Sir Jasper, who was staring at his daughter with tears in his eyes. She circled him. Her face slipped back into something almost human, and she stopped before him, cupping his face in her hands once more.
“It is good,” she said. “There will be suffering—much suffering. And there is a symmetry to it. Yes, it is good.”
She bent down and laid her icy lips on Sir Jasper’s forehead. The dark black lines crept out from beneath her hands and lips to cover his face, and from the ground more lines crept up to wrap around his legs, his arms, his chest, until the whole of him was engulfed in them. The fairy’s cloak of night wrapped around him, and there was a gust of biting wind, and all the candles went out. The fairy was gone, and Sir Jasper with her, and in the center of the circle sat Cecilia, shivering in a shawl far too thin for the weather.
Hal picked up the lantern we had brought and went to her. She drew her shawl around her, eyes wet with tears. From the shadows there emerged another figure—tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair and one blind eye. Sir Jasper but not Sir Jasper—something in his face was strange. I understood—this was the fetch that would replace him.
“Papa,” Cecilia said, reaching out to him—and dropped her hand as he turned and walked away from her without a word, heading in the direction of the cart.
“Miss Pryce, he is not . . . .” Hal began, but Cecilia shook her head.
“I know,” she said, voice trembling. Tears gathered in her eyes and slid down her cheeks. “I know what he did—and what he has done for me. I know.”
Hal shrugged out of his coat and draped it over her shoulders. She pulled it around herself, still shivering. The tears were sliding off her chin now, and she was watching after her father’s fetch.
Hal pulled his pipe from his pocket and began filling it. He did not seem to notice the cold. “How do you know?”
Cecilia snapped her head around to face him. “She told me. She delighted in it, because it hurt me. She showed me—I watched poor Father worry over that—that thing. And Marcus—oh God, Marcus! Is he safe?”
Hal turned away from her, looking down toward the fields where the sheep lay. “I believe so—but we shall have to wait and see.”
He lit his pipe and stuck it between his teeth, the familiar smell of sage and tobacco drifting on the cold wind. He bent and held a hand out for Cecilia. “Come now. It’s time to go home.”
She wiped the tears from her face with a trembling hand and let him help her up. When we reached the cart, Sir Jasper’s fetch was already there, sitting ramrod straight and staring ahead.
Mr. Gilley, who was watching the fetch with a wary eye, looked up as we approached. His face transformed into a disbelieving smile. “Miss Pryce! I don’t believe it. You’ve worked a miracle, Mr. Bishop.”
“No.” Hal frowned. “Only magic.”
Mr. Gilley shook his head, and wisely asked no more questions. The ride back to the Hall was silent. Cecilia wrapped herself in a quiet that was as thick as Hal’s greatcoat. The tears had stopped, but she watched her father’s fetch with an expression of sorrow so profound that it seemed to have a physical weight, and lie over her like a blanket.
I looked to the fetch, who sat straight and tall and silent just as Sir Jasper had on our journey out, and it seemed like a mockery to me, a mimicry of the quiet dignity with which Sir Jasper had faced his fate.
I was glad when we reached the Hall. Cecilia was set upon at once by a flurry of staff; Hal’s coat was flung back at him and handed over to Reeves, and in a trice Cecilia was bundled into a blanket, seated before the fire, with a basin of warm water at her feet, and a warm mug of tea with a drop of brandy in it tucked into her hands.
“Oh, it’s good to see you, Miss,” Jenny said, tucking the blanket more closely about Cecilia’s shoulders. Her nose was red and her eyes were watery, but the gladness in her face made it wonderful to see. “We’ve been that worried.”
“Thank you, Jenny,” Cecilia said absently. The fetch had crept away during the excitement, and no one seemed to notice that it had gone, save Cecilia, who watched after it with haunted eyes.
Hal stood before the fire, warming his hands. His pipe sent great clouds of smoke billowing in the air. I went to stand beside him.
“Why do I feel like we’ve done nothing good?” I said, keeping my voice very low. “Look at her face.”
“She is grieving for him,” Hal said quietly. “He was her father. But she has her life back—and if you wait a moment, I think you will see she is glad of that.”
There was a sudden commotion in the passageway—raised voices, and the sound of shuffling feet.
“Stand aside!” The loudest voice rang through the corridor. “I say stand aside! This is my house, and I will not be kept out of it. My house!”
Cecilia looked up sharply, the mug of tea falling from her hands and shattering on the stone floor. The door to the library swung open. A young man stood framed in the doorway—a wild-eyed young man, covered in dirt, with matted hair, barefoot and dressed in clothes so ill-fitting that they must have been stolen. But all the light came back into Cecilia’s face when she saw him. He held out his arms and she went to him without a word.
For a long moment they held each other, and I am certain that in their minds nothing else even existed in that moment. Then Cecilia pulled back, laughing, with tears in her eyes. She turned to us.
“This is Marcus,” she said, without letting go of his hand. “I think you’ve met him before.”
Marcus rubbed the back of his head sheepishly, looking at the sling on my arm. “I’m sorry about that—I wasn’t . . . wasn’t exactly in my right mind.”
I rubbed my elbow, and realized that the pain had almost entirely gone. “It’s—don’t worry about it.”
He let go of Cecilia’s hand and went to my brother. He shook Hal’s hand, grasping it in both of his. “I can’t—‘thank you’ doesn’t begin to cover it. What you’ve done . . . .”
“Never mind.” Hal looked at a fixed point somewhere behind Marcus’s left ear, a certain sign that he was embarrassed. He cleared his throat. “I only did what I set out to do.”
“But what you did saved both our lives.” Cecilia linked her arm through Marcus’s. “Thank you.”
That is the picture I remember when I think of Rowanwood now—Cecilia and Marcus standing together, happiness shining on both of their faces. Hal was right—Cecilia was glad to be alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Two days later, we arrived back in London to find the other crate in our probate consultation waiting for us. “I never thought I should say this,” I said to Hal. “But I shall be glad of something as dull as probate for once.”
“I am pleased to hear you’ve regained your enthusiasm for probate work,” he said drily, without looking up from the stack of l
etters he was going through. “We need the money. Somehow I feel that consigning our employer to the spirit world will not result in payment.”
“Probably not.” I went and flung myself onto the sofa before the fireplace. “But we did save two lives, didn’t we?”
“Yes, but . . . .” Hal broke off suddenly, and I turned to look at him. He was holding up a calling card, looking pale. “Well. It seems that our adventure was not altogether unprofitable, after all.”
“What is it?” I sat up, a bit alarmed at his appearance. “Is something wrong?”
He held the card out wordlessly, and I went and took it from him. It was a plain white card, decorated with nothing but a rather intricate rendering of a black spider web in ink. I turned it over; there was no name, no address, nothing but a single sentence: I see you.
It gave me an unpleasant crawling sensation at the back of my neck. I handed it back to Hal. “What does it mean?”
“It means that we have been noticed,” he said grimly. He filled his pipe and lit it, sticking it between his teeth. “Whoever T.S. is, he knows that we have interfered in his affairs.”
“But how could he know already?” I said. “We’re scarcely home—surely no one could have told him what happened in less than two days.”
He shrugged. “A spider notices a fly on its web long before the fly notices the spider. Perhaps he was watching all the while, and we never knew it.”
The skin on the back of my neck crawled again. “What an unpleasant thought.”
“Unpleasant indeed.” Hal walked around his desk and took out a set of keys, opening a bottom drawer. “But it stands to reason that anyone who is encouraging people to cast curses and then blackmailing them over it can hardly be pleasant.”
“I suppose.” I rubbed at the back of my neck to rid myself of the crawling sensation, and watched him curiously. He had taken a lock box and a set of keys from the drawer; he opened the box with one of the keys, and dropped the card on a stack of scrap papers covered in writing. “What’s all that?”
He shut the box, and a strange expression came over his face. For a moment, he seemed to struggle with himself. “It’s—I kept the clues that Father left me,” he said finally, without looking up from the box. “I thought perhaps—I thought they might mean something, after all. And now, after this case . . . .”
“It seems more likely than ever,” I finished quietly. I looked at the box and felt a lump rise in my throat—it contained all the last words of my father. “Perhaps—perhaps we might try going through them again. It might—two heads are better than one, right?”
He looked up at me, his mouth quirking into its familiar half-smile. “Perhaps.” He looked back at the crate. “But first we must earn our living.”
As it happened, Hal was wrong about our getting paid, although we didn’t learn that for several weeks. We had moved on to another probate consultation by then, and Rowanwood had faded into memory. Much to Hal’s relief, my arm had healed quite well—my only souvenir from our adventure being a half-moon set of scars on my left forearm. Hal had a set of scars himself, much smaller and fainter, from the scratches Cecilia’s fetch had given him. We had heard nothing more from either the people at the Hall or the mysterious T.S., and the whole thing had begun to seem a bit like a very strange and lucid dream.
The letter from Cecilia came on a day remarkably similar to the one on which the case had begun—gray and damp and dull. I had my ledger before me and was staring out the window, waiting dutifully for Hal to tell me whether the spell on the latest object he was examining was defunct or not, when a knock came at the study door.
Mrs. Evans showed Mr. Bonham in, and he shook my brother’s hand, his gray-green eyes gleaming. “I gather your little outing to Rowanwood was a success.”
“Rowanwood?” I said, startled. “Why should you mention that now?”
He turned to me, an indulgent smile spreading across his face. “Why, because I’ve had a letter. It seems Lady Marquardt was quite pleased with your work. She asked me to give this to you.”
He handed Hal a small white envelope, sealed with wax. Hal took it with a bemused expression. “Lady Marquardt? Why should she be writing to me?”
“Why shouldn’t she? You saved her life, after all.” He chuckled at our surprised expressions. “Oh, I see. You haven’t heard—they’ve been married now.”
It took a moment for it to dawn on me. “Oh—oh! I see. Well, how splendid for them.”
“Yes, very splendid.” He put a hand to the brim of his hat. “Well, I must be off—but do mind you open that letter, Mr. Bishop. It wouldn’t do for it to become mired in your desk—unless I’m much mistaken, it contains a cheque.”
And then he was gone, quite as suddenly as he had appeared. Hal sliced open the envelope and drew out two pieces of paper. One was indeed the cheque that Mr. Bonham expected, and the other was a note. It read:
Dear Mr. Bishop,
I do hope you will forgive my tardiness in sending this to you. There has been so much excitement of late that it quite slipped my mind. But I have not forgotten you—nor will I ever. You have given me back my life and my happiness, and for that I can never thank you enough.
And yet, I fear I must ask one more small favor. I hope I do not presume too much in asking, but you are the only person who can do this for me. You see, there has been a great deal of unpleasantness in addition to all the happiness of late, and it has begun to weigh on my mind.
Father—that is to say, his fetch—died not very long after you left, and rumors began to spread almost before he was laid in the ground. I am afraid Marcus and I rather exacerbated the situation by our seeming haste in marrying—for his quarrel with Father was well-known. But if they had known how long we had waited already, and under what circumstances—well, I do not think it would seem quite so hasty then.
I am anxious that my husband not be troubled by these rumors—he is already consumed by managing the estate and the mine (though he leaves the mine principally in Peter’s very capable hands). I am also anxious that people do not think ill of him, when he is the very best of men.
Most of all, I want the truth of my father’s death to be known. It is a shameful thing that he did, but it will put to rest some very unpleasant speculation about my uncle’s death. And I want it to be known that whatever he did in life, his end was a noble one.
I am asking that you write an account of your time here. I know it is a great deal to ask, and that you have already done much for me, but I would be forever in your debt if you would do this one last thing.
Whatever your decision, I remain
Yours respectfully,
Cecilia Pryce, Lady Marquardt
“Well, what do you think?” I said, laying down the note. “Will you write it?”
“Certainly not.” Hal frowned dyspeptically, blowing large clouds of smoke in the air. “It is distasteful—and I am not in the habit of dwelling upon my failures.”
“Failure? Has Oxford redefined that word when I wasn’t looking?” I picked the note up, waving it in his face. “She’s writing to thank you. In what world is that a failure?”
He slapped the note aside and sat down behind his desk, leaning back and closing his eyes. “I was sloppy—careless. I solved the case only in the very last minute, on a chance remark by the fairy itself. And I very nearly got you killed.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t be dramatic,” I said, rubbing my arm. “I’m fine now. And you saved two people.” I picked up the cheque, letting out a whistle. “And it seems Lady Marquardt rather agrees with me.”
He opened his eyes and frowned at me. “Don’t be vulgar.”
“Anyway, I think you should write it.” I took the note and sat down at my own desk. “She’s quite right—it isn’t fair for Lord Marquardt to suffer such terrible rumors. Besides which, isn’t it a fine opportunity to warn people of the dangers of dark magic? You’ve said yourself that people are woefully ignorant.”
&n
bsp; He closed his eyes again and steepled his fingers under his chin. He was silent for a long moment. Finally, he opened his eyes. “Very well—on the strength of your last argument only. And because you are so eager, you may write it.”
He said it with the air of having done me a favor, which I resented, but there was no arguing with it. If it was going to be written, I was going to do it. “Fine.”
“Good.” He sat up, pulling over one of the knick-knacks on his desk. “That’s settled. Now, where were we?”
“Item A5,” I said, opening my ledger with a sigh. “The candlesticks.”
He began rummaging on his desk for them, then stopped short, and looked at me with an odd expression. He took a set of keys from his desk, and opened the bottom drawer.
“I think,” he said, without looking up at me, “in light of the payment we have just received, that probate may wait a moment.” He cleared a space on his desk, setting the lock box down. “Perhaps we should look to our own inheritance first.”
I shoved the ledger aside, and went to join my brother in sorting out the words our father had left us.
The Rowanwood Curse (Hal Bishop Mysteries Book 1) Page 18