The Wizard of London em-5

by Mercedes Lackey

  As for David, as Bea had said, his father approved of her entirely, though His Lordship was a tragic case. He and a handful of other Elemental Masters had been forced to deal with an occult circle led by a renegade Fire Master, and as Isabelle understood the story, he had stepped in between the Master and his own men, and absorbed most of the power of an awakening Phoenix himself. He had not been the same man afterward; he acted like one lightning struck, with tremors, facial tics, and an inability to speak clearly. But he was able to convey to David that he approved of Belle.

  Probably because I read him newspapers and books for hours on end.

  Of course, she and Bea could both have misread the poor man. Maybe he thought David was planning to engage her as a companion, and not that David was interested in making her his wife…

  She stared at her hands, fingers entwined in her lap, and sighed. No. No, she was sensitive enough to know, although she had not actually read the poor man’s mind on the subject, that the late Trevor, Lord Alderscroft had liked her for herself, and would have been perfectly happy to see her take a wife’s place beside his son.

  No, she didn’t think old Lord Alderscroft had anything to do with what happened after Lady Cordelia appeared on the scene…

  Without his father, David had had no one to properly train him. There was no truly strong male Fire Master in that part of the country. But Lady Cordelia was one of those rare creatures that though she was a Master of Air also had just enough of Fire to do as a teacher, and she volunteered to train David the day he turned eighteen. David’s father must have consented to the plan, for Lady Cordelia was soon a long-term guest at Harwinton House, the Alderscroft ancestral home—when she wasn’t living in her own town house in Cambridge.

  None of this, however, filtered down to the girls at Isabelle’s school, nor even to Isabelle. All she had known at the time was that David had just begun his university education. David was attending Cambridge, most of the girls’ brothers were either going into the military as officers, too young or too old for university, or going to Oxford. David himself never wrote to Isabelle—after all, it would hardly have been proper, and any letters from a young man not one’s brother would have been confiscated by the headmistress. There should have been no reason for anyone to inform Isabelle about anything having to do with David Alderscroft.

  Isabelle brooded out the carriage window, staring at nothing. That, of course, was the official version. The unofficial version was that she and David had come to what was known as an “understanding.” Or at least, she had thought so. He had said, and more than once, that he was going to speak to her father when she came of age. If he had meant the comment in jest, she thought she would have sensed that. She’d had every reason to think he regarded her with deep affection, even love, and she had certainly felt the same. She had dreamed, not of what life would be like as Lady David, but of what life would be like as an occultist Warrior of the Light and a Master, working together.

  I honestly don’t recall ever thinking much about the prestige, or the money, or the title. She sighed, and closed her eyes, leaning back against the seat cushions. The carriage was stalled in traffic, and had this been a cab it would have been a great deal less pleasant. It would have been even worse in a ‘bus. This made a good place to think about the past, truth to tell. Surrounded as she was by the noise of traffic, she was conversely as isolated as if she had been on top of a mountain, or sitting in splendid silence in a deserted temple in the jungle.

  No, it wasn’t that the money and the title meant nothing, it was that she didn’t regard anything above and beyond what constituted a “comfortable” life as being terribly important. Pleasant, yes, but not vital. So far as her ambitions, well, they had always been centered on the realms of the Esoteric rather than the mundane, and she really, truly, did not think she had thought covetously about what being married to one of the wealthiest peers in the county would have meant.

  If her memories were correct, the largest part of the equation had been that she felt very strongly about David—and if it was, perhaps, “only” first love, it was still the most powerful emotion she had ever experienced at the time. True, they had done nothing except walk and talk together for hours at a time. But that was far more than many of their contemporaries ever did. The “understanding” that they had was something she had clung to, dreamed about, and cherished. She had been so certain that the bond between them was such that she didn’t need letters to know how he felt, nor to confirm the depth of his feelings toward her.

  Ah, but understanding or not, that all changed the moment Lady Cordelia came into his life.

  The next time she saw him, at a shooting party, he was literally a different person. When he greeted her, although it was polite enough, there was no mistaking his tone of detachment. He treated her exactly as he treated all the other girls insofar as affection went—but insofar as the level of courtesy—

  To her utter shock he had added to his demeanor with her a touch of arrogance that clearly said, “You are tolerated here because you are polite and well-mannered, but you do not, and never will, belong.”

  And that was that.

  His attitude clearly surprised and puzzled the other girls, but they said nothing. Perhaps they assumed he and Isabelle had had some sort of lovers’ quarrel. At any rate, it was one of those situations where nothing was said, but everything was understood.

  And the moment when Isabelle first saw Lady Cordelia, she had known deep in her heart who was to blame.

  You could not have said that David danced attendance on Her Ladyship, because he did not. And there was nothing remotely loverlike about the way he treated her. If anything, his attitude was of deference, as of the disciple to the great teacher, as if she were conveying some great favor to him by giving him her attention. It was the sort of attitude one would expect if she had been a great and wise philosopher of the sort that Isabelle eventually found in India…

  But the pupils of those great and wise teachers grew more humble in their attitudes toward others, not more arrogant.

  The abrupt change in David’s attitude was, perhaps, the worst and most painful experience of Isabelle’s short life. Perhaps it was just as well that the encounter had occurred at teatime; she had been able to plead a headache and retreat to her room, not to emerge even for dinner. The headache had been real; she had cried for hours, until her eyes were swollen and her head pounding. And, fortunately, the friend that had invited her in the first place quickly took pity on her and arranged for her to return to the school the next morning so that there were no more such encounters.

  She never accepted another invitation again; instead, she concentrated on her studies, both academic and occult, and set her eyes on the goal of leaving the country altogether and somehow getting to India. Since that had also been a longtime ambition of her benefactress, they had arranged for a trip for the two of them, with Isabelle as the lady’s companion. Her father had been bewildered, but accepted it. Her friend, the London bookshop owner, gave her people to contact.

  And when she had met Frederick—everything changed for the better.

  “Well,” she said aloud. “Now I know that my memory of things matches Bea’s.”

  That, too, had emerged from their morning of “catching up.” She had not been mistaken, everyone around her had assumed that she and David Alderscroft were going to make a couple as soon as she came of the proper age to do so. She was not the only one who had been shocked by his change of attitude.

  But perhaps most importantly, there had been one fundamental mistake that she had made. Her immediate circle of friends did not condone David’s behavior toward her, much less share it. Now, there probably were some girls at the school, and there were certainly some young ladies in the exclusive social circle in which David resided, who applauded what he had done and felt that Isabelle had been pushing herself in where she did not belong. But her real friends, though she had been blind to it at the time, were incensed by his tr
eatment of her. Their doors were still open to her, just as Bea’s had been.

  And that was of vital importance, for she was going to have to try to find some way of discovering who had set the trap for Sarah and Nan without the aid of the tacit leader of the Elemental Masters hereabouts.

  She laughed aloud, remembering what Frederick had once said to her. When you want something done, you ask a man. When you want it done quietly and without any fuss, you ask a woman.

  Perhaps a circle of old friends wasn’t a bad place to start.

  6

  DAVID Alderscroft looked out over the tree-shaded boulevard in front of his town house and frowned. Too many people, too many untidy people, clattering back and forth along the pavement. A nurse pushing a pram, some wretched boy running an errand, two carriages, and a tradesman’s van—too many people. How much better it would have been had there been no one out there, the pavement spotless, the street silent—

  Better still had it been winter. Everything lightly coated in snow, all the imperfections invisible beneath the frozen blanket. That would be ideal—

  It would be so tidy if winter remained year round. No mess, people properly remaining inside their own four walls, tradesmen keeping to their proper place in the alleys. He entertained himself with a vision of the frozen city for a moment, everything as pure and white and clean as new marble, with nothing to mar the shining perfection of it.

  He shook his head slightly. He shouldn’t be obsessing over such trifles. He had some serious campaigning to do, if he was going to penetrate the circle surrounding Her Majesty, Queen Victoria.

  It wasn’t a circle he would normally have entrée to. The Queen was very particular about those she allowed near her. He wasn’t a family man, nor was he particularly fond of children. Her Majesty was not noted for her partiality to young men, nor was she inclined to put her trust in them. But she was susceptible to men in general, in the sense that she tended to rely heavily on them, and to be manipulated by them—not easily, but when you knew what to say to her, when and how to say it, she tended to defer to your judgment, over and above her own.

  David didn’t know what those things were, nor when and how to say them—but Lady Cordelia did. So if he did his job correctly, and managed to get into that magic circle, the rest would be easy. So she had told him, and he believed her. Nothing she had told him thus far had ever been wrong.

  He turned back to his desk, and the frown smoothed. Here, in his office, everything was precisely as it should be. The books had all been shelved in their proper place along the walls, his massive mahogany desk was dustless and polished until one could see one’s face in it. The Turkey carpet was newly swept, the ashtrays washed, the two leather chairs on the far side of the desk the exact distance from the desk that he favored. The blotter was precisely in the middle, and his pens, pencils, paper and ink right where he wanted them. This was more like it. Here was order, everything properly arranged and tidy. He glanced at his pocket watch, saw that it was precisely ten o’clock, and sat down to begin his correspondence for the day.

  Parliament would not be in session again until October; there would be nothing to occupy him there until the summer recess was over, but that did not mean that he would not be planning for the opening.

  Politics was something of a new field for the Alderscrofts. His father had taken no interest in his seat in the House of Lords and neither had his grandfather, but David had, on Lady Cordelia’s advice, been active since before his father died. He had been taking his seat nearly every day when Parliament was sitting for the past three years, and had been making a quiet name for himself there, in the cleverest way possible—as a voice of moderation. No one expected a young man to be the voice of moderation; he was attracting attention for that reason. It was good attention, too; the Queen approved.

  He worked steadily until luncheon; his secretary James came in twice, quietly and unobtrusively removing what he had finished with and bringing him new correspondence to deal with. Some of it was political, much was social, a very little was business relating to the running of the estate. He spent very little time there, since his father had died; the old manor troubled him in a way he could not define. Perhaps it was simply that there were too many memories there. In any event, he left most of that business in the hands of his estate manager. “Pay competent people who know the job,” Lady Cordelia had said. “Do not try to attempt things you are not expert at and do not care for.” Good advice, and he had gratefully left the estate in the hands of Colin Foxward. The report was good, neither too much rain nor too little, crops looking favorable, and he dismissed the estate from his mind with a feeling of relief. It was more of a burden than a blessing, so far as he was concerned—except, of course, for the income. And these days no one held it against a gentleman if his income derived from investment rather than land. If it were his choice… but it wasn’t. And besides, the old place was useful in the shooting season. Near enough to London to take the train, far enough for good hunting, and his gamekeeper did a fine job in making sure there were plenty of pheasant, duck, and quail. It was useful socially, and would become more so as he rose in social circles.

  At noon, precisely, he rose from his desk. He did not need to call for his carriage, for his household knew his habits; it was waiting at the door to take him to his club, where he lunched. He then spent precisely three hours making social calls, not returning home until teatime. He couldn’t abide taking his tea as a social call; difficult enough to make calls on ladies when they were merely receiving, for at least then one could escape when the level of chatter grew too high. One was trapped at tea, and the clatter of china was only eclipsed by the chatter of gossip. Lady Cordelia was the only female of his acquaintance who eschewed gossip; she was the only female of his acquaintance who showed any sense about the matter. Now that he was not busy with politics until the October opening, she had resumed his lessons in Elemental Magic; she would be here for tea, and then, a lesson.

  Precisely on time, no more than ten minutes after he had arrived, he looked out of the window to see her carriage roll up to the front entrance. It was a distinctive vehicle; most carriages in London were black or dark shades of red, green or blue. Hers was white, trimmed in light blue, and it was probably the entire job of one servant to keep it clean and shining in the filthy air of the city. Her horses were matched grays; her coachman’s livery was light blue. A moment after the carriage rolled to a halt, the footman opened the door, and Lady Cordelia, dressed in her customary colors of pale-blue and white, descended from the carriage. She moved with a cool grace he had never seen in any other woman; she glided as if she was on wheels.

  She was curiously ageless; her hair so white a blond that it was not possible to see any silver or gray in it, her face as smooth and unwrinkled and serene as if carved from alabaster. Her eyes were a pale blue-gray, her form as slender as a young birch, but as erect and straight as a wand of silver, and all in all, there could not possibly have been a more perfect physical representation of an Air Master. There was nothing about her of the occasional giddiness or spontaneity of an Air Master and no sign at all that she had a touch of the passionate Element of Fire in her.

  But Lady Cordelia had too firm a grip on the reins of her character and her Element to allow passion to come into play. In fact, she had taught David that passion, especially when dealing with Fire, was dangerous. She had instilled in him a discipline and control he had no notion existed before she began teaching him, and taught him to keep his Elemental creatures under firm control and tight rein.

  She had also taught him something else, something he had never seen nor heard of before. The absence of fire was cold; she taught him how to harness his Element in a way that allowed him to create an arctic chill instead of furnace heat.

  And there were Elementals that thrived in that atmosphere, odd creatures of negative Fire, if that was possible. Strange little Ice Fey and Frost Fey; a kind of counter-Salamander, creatures of snow and glacier,
and—or so she claimed—even the famous Yeti, though it was highly unlikely he would ever see one of those in England. They were utterly obedient to his will, never fighting him, as opposed to their flame-driven brethren. Perhaps this was why he liked them so much, preferring them over the common aspect of his Element. One would have thought that water, in the form of snow and ice, being inimical to his Element would have made these creatures just as hostile. But in fact, this was Water locked away in a crystalline form that rendered it unreachable by Water Elementals. In a sense, this was where Fire conquered Water.

  Sometimes, though, he looked back on the days of raw power, of careful negotiations with a Phoenix, with nostalgic longing. Still, those were the days when he was very young, childish in fact. Only children preferred chaos over order, uncertainty over certainty. Children did not understand control and self-control. Cordelia had set him straight on that path.

  There was a crystalline order to cold that appealed to him as well. As every snowflake was an orderly lattice, mathematical and precise, so was the matrix of spells that controlled the cold. The only flaw in the situation, and it was a small one, was that the Elemental creatures he had so far encountered were inferior in power to those of Flame. Still, it wasn’t as if he was going into Duel Arcane any time soon. Those unhappy days were over.