Murder by magic: twenty tales of crime and the supernatural

by edited by Rosemary Edghill

  “By the evidence of the lights: within hours of retiring.” The deputy indicated a pair of ornate candelabra in heavy silver, on a stand by the bed. “He distrusted the dark and always burned candles throughout the night. As you may see, only one branch was lit and allowed to burn down. The candles were never replaced.”

  Once more, Jaucourt began to pace. “And the guards outside heard nothing—on that night or at any time after?”

  Buffon shook his head.

  “And though there were women who… visited… from time to time, there was no one admitted the night in question?”

  “According to the guards, there was a lady four or five nights ago who stayed very late. I say a lady,” Buffon was careful to explain, “because she came in and went out still heavily veiled.”

  At this, there was an explosion of laughter from Montjoye. “Much good that would have done her if de Rouille still lived! He liked to boast.”

  Jaucourt ignored him. “I suppose, Lieutenant, that we can trust the word of the mercenary guards? At least provisionally?”

  “Their employer distrusted them—as a matter of policy—but I see no reason why we should also. Three of the six are former city guardsmen who served with honor under the late Duke.

  “Besides,” Buffon added with an expressive shrug, “if there was a visitor, male or female, how do we explain the locked and bolded door?”

  “We don’t,” said Jaucourt with a grim smile. “But I hope we may do so eventually.”

  Ordering the door repaired and locked, he prepared to leave. “When you are finished, send me the key at my lodgings.”

  Outside, in the cool, clean air, Jaucourt and Montjoye hired a passing fiacre to take them home.

  The hour was late—or early—and the streets were otherwise deserted; the lamps on every corner were growing dim.

  “A hired assassin of no little resource.” Montjoye spoke in the darkness of the carriage. “You’ll have a pretty time assigning the blame. There’s half the court had a grudge against de Rouille.” There was a jolt and a bump as the wheels passed over a stretch of rough pavement. “He all but ruined poor Champavoine. Belrivage, Mont Azur, Moncriff—they all hated him. Laurent, Chamfort—have I forgotten anyone?”

  “You are forgetting the ladies,” said Jaucourt. “Madame de Ambre-ville—her father is dead, her brother an exile, thanks to de Rouille. Madame de Fontenay—there is some history there, though I don’t know the details. Madame Deffant—he published her letters out of idle malice.”

  The carriage turned a sharp corner, and light from one of the lamps briefly illuminated the interior. “A woman scorned—or violated,” said Montjoye. “I rather lean toward that notion myself, considering the circumstances.”

  “The horn of the black monoceros, not the unicorn,” Jaucourt reminded him. He opened a window and a draft of damp air invaded thecarriage; they were approaching the river. “But how was it accomplished? How did the assassin enter? How did he leave?”

  Montjoye laughed. “But my dear Gabriel, surely that part is perfectly obvious. The assassin came into the room before de Rouille, wearing a cloak of invisibility. Such cloaks are rare these days, it’s true—but still to be found, if you know where to ask, in the Goblin Quarter. Concealed in his cloak, the murderer waited, and struck when his victim fell asleep. After that, he had nothing to do but to wait for Buffon and his men to break down the door—and steal away in the confusion afterward.”

  Jaucourt, however, was unconvinced. “Your conclusion is logical enough. But it flies in the face of Human—or Goblin—nature. Do you really believe that the murderer would elect to remain in that room for seventy-two hours with the body of his victim when he could have left by the door that first night and successfully evaded the guards?”

  “It was caution. He could not be certain of evading the guards, invisible or not.”

  There was a clatter of iron wheels on cobblestones as some swifter conveyance raced by.

  “Inhuman caution,” rejoined the Constable. “Inhuman determination—as the hours went on and the body began to decompose. Not to mention most uncommonly careless: to provide himself with the cloak but no weapon and rely instead on whatever came to hand. Improbable, Simon!”

  Montjoye sniffed in the darkness, not best pleased at hearing his theory demolished. “But what other explanation can there possibly be?”

  “I begin to believe,” said Jaucourt, “that the assassin did not leave the room because he could not—in which case, he may be there still.”

  The little man protested with an incredulous laugh. “No, really. The way we were all swarming around that room, how could anyone remain undetected—no matter how invisible—without someone tripping over him sooner or later?”

  “But let us suppose,” said Jaucourt, “he were not invisible, merely, but incorporeal.”

  “I would never suppose anything of the sort,” replied the irritated Montjoye. “You suggest the impossible.”

  “Perhaps.” The carriage came to a halt, and the Constable obligingly opened the door. “But in examining such problems as this one, when you have eliminated the improbable, whatever remains, no matter how impossible, must be the truth. Any magician would tell you that.”

  Montjoye hesitated before stepping down. “And how do you propose to prove this incredible theory?”

  Jaucourt looked out. A pale streak of light was growing on the eastern horizon. Somewhere across the river, a clock tower chimed the hour of four. “Tonight, at Chateau Lezard%z. You are welcome to meet me there if you choose. Let us say—at a quarter past eleven.”

  Shortly after eleven, the two friends met in the dead man’s bedchamber. While Montjoye watched, Jaucourt drew up two high-backed mahogany chairs to the hearth, where a small, hot fire was already burning.

  “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Only that we may have some little time to wait,” said Jaucourt, throwing incense on the fire. Though the corpse had bene removed so many hours earlier, there was still an unpleasant suggestion of something in the room.

  Taking one of the seats, he gestured to his friend to do likewise. “You are here to help me observe what occurs, and I would ask you to be particularly alert around the hour of midnight.”

  The next three-quarters of an hour dragged by, as the two men made halfhearted attempts at conversation. As the time passed, Montjoye experienced an increasing sense of oppression; he wondered what had possessed him to accept Jaucourt’s invitation. When a longcase clock in the corridor outside began to strike, both men fell silent.

  As the last chime continued to reverberate, Jaucourt reached out to touch his friend on the sleeve. Across the room, over by the cabinet of curiosities, something intangible stirred in the air; then, slowly, slowly, a misty form began to take shape.

  The form lengthened, broadened, became the semitransparent figure of a powerfully built man. He was clad in a filmy shadow of elaborate court dress: long-tailed coat, knee breeches, and silver buckles.

  At Montjoye’s exclamation of surprise and dismay, the head of the specter turned his way. For the length of a heartbeat the living and thedead gazed deep into each others eyes. Then the translucent shape began to fray and dissolve into mist.

  Jaucourt sprang to his feet, but the phantom went out like a blown candle before he could reach it.

  Montjoye gave a shaky laugh. “Is that what you were expecting? But, my dear Gabriel, you can’t arrest a ghost, you can’t charge him with murder—he is quite beyond your ken.”

  “It is not exactly what I was expecting, no,” said Jaucourt with a troubled glance. “I was expecting a ghost, certainly—but this particular ghost? How could I?”

  At Montjoye’s look of blank incomprehension, he went on. “You did not, perhaps, recognize our recent visitor. It was Damien Alincourt, the late Duke’s chamberlain, who died five years ago.”

  The Constable resumed his seat by the fire. “I was expecting, you see, the restless spirit of someone who suff
ered a violent death in this very house, this very room. That would explain why he was bound to this particular spot and could not escape. But why a man who died in his own home—on the other side of the city, of natural causes—should be haunting this bedchamber, that I can’t comprehend. Unless—” He furrowed his brow, sat several moments in concentrated thought.

  Suddenly, Jaucourt jumped to his feet again. “Unless there is some devilry at work that I never suspected!” Crossing to the curio cabinet, he flung open the doors and began rummaging through the clutter of exotic and dubious objects on the shelves.

  “A necklace of crystals—no! The knucklebone of a giant—hardly! A thunderstone, a miniature portrait, a tiny sandstone idol—no, no, no! Ah!” With an exclamation of surprise and disgust, he turned back toward Montjoye. “Tell me, Simon, what you think of this.”

  Approaching the cabinet with a doubtful step, Montjoye saw that his friend was holding out a slender silver object, a flask or a phial, sealed with a great knob of crimson wax and decorated with magical symbols: the figure of a sphinx, an eye wreathed in fire, a five-pointed star.

  “I have no idea what to make of it, but by the expression on your face, I would imagine that you do.”

  There was a flame of fury in Jaucourt’s eyes, which Montjoye hadnever seen there before, yet when he spoke, his voice was soft and controlled.

  “It is, in common parlance, a soul trap—a device for capturing a spirit as it departs the body. Once the ghost is captured, it becomes totally enslaved to the magician’s will. Whatever its master requires, the spirit must do, no matter how immoral, how degrading the task. You thought such things were only a myth? The magicians who trained me at the university thought otherwise, though it has always been assumed that the spell was lost.”

  “Yet now rediscovered,” said Montjoye in an awed voice. “By de Rouille? Surely not. I have heard him accused of any number of vile things, but never of sorcery.”

  “Rediscovered by one of his countless enemies,” said Jaucourt. “Or at least—at least the spell somehow fell into the hands of someone with a grudge, who did not scruple to use it.”

  Placing the phial back on the shelf, Jaucourt covered his face, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes. “Do you know, until this moment, it seemed to me that it did not matter very much whether the guilty party was punished or not. Oh yes, as a matter of professional pride—or of personal honor, whatever that means in this day and age—I thought it necessary to make the effort, though it’s difficult to feel any genuine outrage because de Rouille was murdered.”

  He dropped his hands. “But this. Whoever was capable of this monstrous thing—that even the dead should suffer, in Tourvallon, that even they should be violated and degraded! For once, I’m determined to see justice done.”

  “And how will you do that?” asked the increasingly bewildered Montjoye.

  A shudder passed over Jaucourt’s sturdy frame. “By the use of spells little better than those of the magician I seek to discover. By summoning and binding. May I be forgiven for what I do, in a just cause.”

  Pulling a fine linen handkerchief from his coat pocket, he took up the soul trap again. “But I’ve not the means for drawing the pentacle here. I must go home and assemble the necessary materials.”

  Moving swiftly toward the door, he paused on the threshold, glanced back at his friend. “No blame to you, Simon, if you’d rather not accompany me. Indeed, I would not ask it.”

  Montjoye drew a deep breath, seemed to gather resolution. “Yet I will go with you, if you don’t mind. Having come this far, I believe I should like to see the thing through to the end.”

  Two days later, in her sumptuous mansion beside the river, the beautiful Albine de Ambreville was reclining on a sofa draped with leopard skins when a servant came in to announce visitors.

  The Countess declined to rise when Jaucourt and his friend entered the room, though she did extend a pale, somewhat damp and trembling hand to the Lord Constable.

  He sketched only the briefest of bows, and Montjoye hung back by the door, looking haggard, haunted, and sleep-deprived. They had spent the last forty-eight hours experimenting with unclean magics, and the taint was still on them.

  “I take it,” said Albine to the Constable, “this is not a social call?” The hand he had so pointedly ignored with withdrawn. It fell into her lap, where it lay like a broken piece of shell, against the sand-colored satin of her gown.

  “Madame, it is not,” Jaucourt answered sternly. “I have come to arrest you for the murder of Prosper de Rouille. Though there may be charges of fouler things as well, by and by.”

  She regarded him with heavy-lidded eyes. “But why, Jaucourt, should you suspect me? What brings you here?”

  “Not what, but who: Damien Alincourt. I had some difficulty bending him to my will; the spell that was on him was amazingly powerful. Then, too, I began by asking the wrong questions. I wanted to know who it was that enslaved him, but that was a name he was unable to speak. When I finally thought to ask who carried the soul trap to Chateau Lezardz, he gave me your name readily enough.”

  “I see,” said Albine with a lazy movement. “But why, after all, should I deny anything? I’m not ashamed of what I have done. That is,” she admitted with a faint blush, “one need not apologize for crushing a snake like de Rouille, though the means I employed were far from clean. About that much I do feel some shame. But I had a father and a brother to revenge. And I mean to release Alincourt’s spirit eventually—which is better than he could have expected from the man who sold him to me!”

  She rose slowly to her feet, her hands extended before her, her almost impossibly slender wrists held together. “What, Lord Constable, no chains? No manacles? But this is a most genteel form of arrest!”

  “Madame de Ambreville,” said Jaucourt, “there will be chains and manacles enough, later on. In any case, I am not your gaoler. Our of respect for the Count, your husband, I thought we might accomplish this in a dignified fashion.”

  He felt, rather than saw or heard, Montjoye make an embarrassed movement by the door. “But before we go, perhaps you will answer one question for me: who was the black magician that sold you the soul trap?”

  She tilted her head, regarding him obliquely. “If I give you his name, would it go easier with me later?”

  Jaucourt shook his head in quick denial. “Unfortunately, I can make no such promise. Indeed, madame, I can promise you nothing.”

  The lady shrugged. “Nor would I have believed you, whatever you promised. Yet it appears I’ve wronged you: you are an honest man. Who would have supposed that any such—” She gasped and was unable to finish the sentence as a deadly weakness suddenly assailed her.

  He caught her as she fell, and lowered her gently to the floor, every vestige of color had drained from her face, and her breath came in short, ragged gasps.

  Moving at last from the door, Montjoye hovered indecisively. Even to his inexperienced eye, it was plain that the Countess was in genuine distress.

  “Madame de Ambreville,” said Jaucourt with a terrible ferocity, “what have you done to yourself?”

  Her lips moved silently, as though she would answer him but lacked the strength. She continued to struggle for several minutes. At last, she rallied a little and forced herself to speak. “Poison. When I heard—you were at—my door.” She laughed weakly, and tears rolled down her cheeks. “Vanity, perhaps—to wish not to be exposed at a trial.”

  “You were about to tell me,” said Jaucourt, “the name of the magician.”

  “Was I? Perhaps—I was.” A spasm passed over her, and it seemed for a moment she had left it too late. Then, with a final effort, shegasped out the words: “The apothecary—Doctor Palestrina—at the sign of the phoenix.”

  Later that same afternoon, Jaucourt was in a carriage with Buffon and two muscular uniformed guardsmen, heading across the city. He had, with some difficulty, located the apothecary shop, on the fringes of the Goblin Quarter.


  “We can only imagine,” he said to Buffon, “the extent of his wickedness. A doctor—even a simple apothecary—is called in so often to ease the dying. And when he seems to be offering comfort—a word, a moment, a gesture—and the spell is wrought, he catches their souls and binds them to his will.”

  Buffon nodded without making any comment, and the carriage clattered on. Meanwhile, the Constable experienced a restless discomfort, a frustrated impatience; this trip across town was taking far too long.

  When the carriage finally lurched to a stop, Jaucourt was out of the door on the instant, moving toward the modest little shop of brick and timber. “At the sign of the phoenix,” he said under his breath. “Where the dead rise, not to new life, but to slavery and degradation.”

  A swift, comprehensive glance around him, and he knew that he had arrived too late. The windows were shuttered, but the door stood half-open and the interior was dark.

  Pushing the door aside, Jaucourt moved past it, into the shadows. The hearth was cold; a lantern above the door unlit. On the high counter, a shattered oil lamp lay on its side amidst crystal shards of glass. The shelves had been cleared of bottles and jars—the shop was empty.

  He stepped back into the street, grinding his teeth in sheer frustration. “There must have been someone watching outside of de Ambre-ville’s house. Still, had we acted more quickly, we might have caught him.”

  Buffon shrugged. To him, the matter of the apothecary seemed if minor importance. A man firmly rooted in the mundane details of daily existence, his business was with the living, not with the dead. “But the lady has punished herself,” he replied with stolid satisfaction. “Weneedn’t do so. Moreover, we’ve been spared the uproar of a trial, the ugly excitement of an execution.”

  The wooden sign with its picture of the mythical bird creaked overhead; a vagrant breeze caused a stray bit of yellow paper to skitter past, over the paving stones.

  “De Rouille is dead—and the beautiful Albine,” Jaucourt said with a bitter laugh. “But a man more wicked than either of them has escaped.”