Death by Silver

by Melissa Scott

  “Why confess?” Ned asked.

  “I couldn’t live with it. I killed my father. That’s wrong, and I’ve got to pay for it.” Victor raised his chin. “I’m no coward,” he said. “I did it and I’ve got to pay the price for it. I’m ready to take my punishment.”

  “They’re going to hang you,” Ned said. He wasn’t sure he could bear it if Victor went on talking as if they were back in school, with only a beating at stake.

  “That’s for the court to decide,” Hatton said. “But I want you to understand, Mr Nevett, that this is a very serious charge.”

  “I know it’s the drop for me. So let’s get on with it, all right? I’ve nothing more to say.”

  It was a straightforward enough confession, and Ned expected it would be enough to see Victor Nevett hanged. He might even have been satisfied at the prospect, if only he’d believed a word of it.

  He didn’t believe for a moment that Victor knew enough metaphysics to have taken this curse from a book. If he’d said he’d paid someone for it, then, maybe…but he’d never worked it out on his own. And Ned found it hard to imagine his old nemesis tormented by remorse. If Victor had killed someone, he’d have first persuaded himself that his victim had it coming to him, and it wouldn’t have troubled him further.

  He tried to catch Julian’s eye, but Julian was watching Victor Nevett with an expression that suggested he felt that Victor was about to get what was coming to him, and that Julian very well might enjoy it.

  Hatton said nothing to either of them until the constables had taken Victor away. “Well, that’s that.”

  “I’ve known Victor Nevett a long time,” Ned said. “He couldn’t have done that enchantment. Not and had it work properly the first time. I doubt he could even have worked out how it should be done.”

  “They teach metaphysics at Sts Thomas’s, I understand.”

  “Grammar. The very basics. Not methods of murder. He never went on with it at Oxford.”

  “All the same,” Hatton said, and held up a hand when Ned would have interrupted him. “Let’s say for a moment that I believe you. I have no evidence but your word, and as you say, you’ve known him since you were in school. In fact, he came to you when we first suspected murder, and you’ve been looking for someone else to blame it on ever since. Do you see how it looks?”

  “If that’s what you believe –”

  “It’s not,” Hatton said. “But he’s confessed, he had the opportunity, and he’s had at least a bit of metaphysical training. I’ve got no proof he didn’t do it, and no evidence that anyone else did. And your word isn’t going to persuade a jury, not when you’re old schoolmates.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mathey. But I can’t go on grasping at straws. If you have some actual proof that it was someone else who killed Nevett, bring it to me before the trial. If not…” He shook his head again.

  “If not, he’ll hang,” Julian said, and sounded as if that might not bother him at all.

  On the sidewalk outside Scotland Yard, Julian jammed his hands into his pockets, trying to ignore the tangle of his feelings. Beside him, Ned looked pale and unhappy, as though it genuinely grieved him that Victor had confessed. More probably it was that he didn’t believe the confession, and that was something Julian was not yet prepared to consider. He checked his watch, and squinted into the sunlight that dazzled the busy street.

  “The Mitre should be serving by now and I’m starving.”

  “Yes,” Ned said, after the slightest of hesitations, and pulled out his whistle to summon a cab.

  It wasn’t a long ride to the Mitre, but they were both silent, Julian unable to rid himself of the thought of Victor Nevett in the dock, the bewildered bluster giving way to silence as the black-capped judge declared the sentence. It would ruin the family – well, Reggie or Freddie might salvage something, but the women would not, would lose their friends and their place in society and probably their house, and all because Victor was fool enough to kill his father. Ned was wrong, Victor could have picked up enough metaphysics at Oxford to create the enchantment, surely, or at least enough to make it up out of a book. And there were plenty of texts out there that offered methods of murder – proscribed, to be sure, and hard to come by, but available. Ned was simply wrong.

  At the Mitre, he paid off the cab, and led Ned into the narrow dining room. It was nearly empty, this early, and the waiter hovered. Julian took another look at Ned, still frowning and silent, and ordered a pint of claret as well as the day’s ordinary, and poured them each a generous glass as soon as it arrived.

  “Drink up,” he said.

  Ned pushed the glass away. “I’m not –”

  “It’s upsetting. One wouldn’t have thought it, even of Victor.”

  Ned gave him a sharp look. “You can’t seriously think he did it.”

  “He’s confessed –”

  “And he’ll hang for it,” Ned said.

  “Well, if he did it –”

  “You know as well as I do that Victor Nevett isn’t capable of writing a curse that would cause a hangnail, never mind something as sophisticated as this. He’d have brought the entire shelf down, or made all the silver fall over, not aimed one candlestick at a specific target.” Ned took a quick swallow of his wine. “He has to be protecting someone.”

  “Does he?” Julian took a bite of the shepherd’s pie. It was a specialty of the house, and a favorite, but somehow it tasted less delicious than usual. “Look, I’ll agree that he couldn’t have written the enchantment himself, but there are books out there that have all manner of questionable enchantments in them. And he certainly knew how to draw one efficiently.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” Ned said.

  “We all left Toms’ knowing that much,” Julian said, with more confidence than he felt. They had been taught the basics of metaphysics, as much as a gentleman needed to know to hold his own and supervise a professional, but they’d been strongly discouraged from anything practical, or from actual practice. Which at the time had seemed to be a wise decision, even if it had reduced him to sketching enchantments in the bathroom, using a peeled stick for a wand. The results had been largely disappointing, and he’d known a bit more about the matter than most. “And he could have learned more at University.”

  “He was sent down the term after we got there,” Ned said. “And he wasn’t studying metaphysics.”

  Julian scowled. “He knew enough to use a maledictor. You can’t argue that.”

  “I can, and I do,” Ned answered. “But, all right, I’ll grant you that. Let’s say he could use a handbook. And let’s say that there’s a maledictor out there that has enchantments as neat and clean as this one was, even though I’ve never seen one. Do you think Victor Nevett would know where to find one?”

  “I could find five,” Julian said. “Easily.”

  “You’re you.”

  Julian looked away. “You could get one, I’d wager.”

  “I’d know where to start looking, yes,” Ned said. “But do you think anyone would sell it to me?”

  “Probably not,” Julian admitted. And that meant the dealers in questionable texts probably wouldn’t have sold anything to Victor, either, or at least nothing more dangerous than French novels with curious illustrations.

  “He’s lying,” Ned said. “I know he’s lying. And I don’t think he realizes they’re really going to hang him.”

  “If he’s lying,” Julian said, reluctantly, “he’s protecting someone.”

  Ned nodded. “His mother or his brothers, would be my guess. Or I suppose his wife, though I don’t know that she’d have cause.”

  “The same cause any of them did,” Julian pointed out. “She and Victor would have had the same motive, to get a place of her own – and that I do believe, by the way.”

  “Yes, I think he was telling the truth about the house,” Ned said.

  “Which is the most solid motive we’ve heard so far,” Julian said.

  “Except for what
you said you found out last night. I don’t like to think it, but men have killed for that.”

  “It does rule out the servants,” Julian said, after a moment. “I can’t see Victor protecting anyone who wasn’t family. For that matter, I can’t see Victor protecting anyone –”

  Ned glared at him. “For God’s sake, Lynes. Do you really want to see him dead?”

  Yes. Julian swallowed the answer, appalled to find that he did still mean it, that he did still want to see Victor twisting at the end of a rope.

  “He couldn’t have done what he said,” Ned went on. “You know that. And if you want to put the worst face on it – do you think Victor has ever felt guilty for anything he’s convinced himself he could get away with?”

  Julian flinched at that. It was true, Victor had never been the sort to admit guilt or feel remorse, and probably it wasn’t justice to hang a man for bullying, no matter how bad it had been, but even so… God, he did want it, and the shame of it burned through him. He shook his head slowly, not sure whether he was agreeing with Ned or rejecting the entire matter. “If he didn’t do it,” he said, “then he’s protecting someone. And of the people he could be protecting – he’s the worst of the lot, you know, and he knows their worth better than we do. Maybe we should let him do it.”

  “We can’t,” Ned said, sounding startled. “You know we can’t do that.”

  “Why not?” Julian laid out the pieces of his argument like a conjurer, slipping quickly past the dubious bits. “Look, if it was any of them – if it was Mrs Nevett, God knows she probably had cause. We don’t know how he mistreated her, all these years. Reggie and Freddie, whichever one of them is Lennox’s friend, you said yourself you didn’t want to see that come out. We could let Victor protect whoever it is – it would be the one decent thing he’s ever done in his life.”

  Ned opened his mouth, then closed it again. Julian could feel the color rising inexplicably in his cheeks, and quickly drained the last of his wine.

  “Murderers get a taste for it,” Ned said at last. “If it works once, it becomes an obvious solution, and to smaller and smaller problems. I can’t let that happen.”

  Julian looked at his plate. Ned wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t entirely right, either, or at least something wasn’t right. Maybe it was just his own feelings, but everything was so tangled that he couldn’t find the words. He needed to get away, to go somewhere alone and work this out, and he managed a grimace like a smile as he pushed himself away from the table. “No. I suppose. Look, Mathey, I need to get back to my lodgings – I need to see if Bolster’s sent word about Mrs Makins.”

  “Of course,” Ned said, his expression troubled. Julian set a handful of coins on the table, and turned away before he could change his mind.

  Miss Frost was still about her investigations when Ned returned to his chambers, which at least spared him having to tell her whether to continue them. He turned the pages of books without seeing them until it was late enough that he could justify leaving, and then stood indecisive on the front steps of the building. He should probably find dinner, but he didn’t have much appetite for it. Or go and find Julian, if only he could think of what to say.

  He couldn’t bring himself to believe that it would be better for everyone if Victor was hanged to spare the unfortunate murderer. Whatever his sins, Victor wasn’t the one who’d planned to kill in cold blood. And now someone had learned that killing was easy and profitable. If one of the other servants knew too much, like poor Sarah, or if a second husband proved as unpleasant as the first, or someone else threatened exposure, it would surely be easier the second time.

  More than that, it would be entirely unjust, and he had to believe that mattered. There had to be some measure of justice beyond who one liked or disliked, some rules that weren’t the arbitrary creations of schoolboys. And a rule against murder had to be one of them, or the streets of London would surely run with blood.

  After all, they’d come close enough to being murderers themselves.

  It was sometime in their second year that Julian had started talking about it. Ned couldn’t remember now exactly what had prompted it, only that it had been a comforting fantasy at a time when they’d both been on the edge of despair.

  “We really could kill him,” Julian said. “It’s been done before, I expect. Look at all the chapel markers for students who died while they were at school.”

  “The school’s been here for hundreds of years,” Ned pointed out. “Some of them were bound to die of something.” He cupped his hands around the candle end that lit the tiny room, the heat scorching his palms. It was really the unfinished space between two attic rooms, which Julian had found a way into the year before; it was cramped and cold, but it gave them a place to sit and talk in private, and was becoming a magpie’s nest of books and small luxuries smuggled up from below.

  “Even so,” Julian said. “It would solve everything, don’t you think? Get him up on the roof and push him off –”

  “Why would Nevett follow you onto the roof?”

  “All right, no. Stab him in his sleep?”

  “Too messy,” Ned said, warming to the spirit of the game. “Pushing him down the stairs would be better.”

  “You’d be seen. And he might just break a leg or something.”

  “That would be an improvement,” Ned said. “For that matter, breaking your own might be. At least you’d be sent home.”

  “I don’t want to go home,” Julian said. “And suppose I wasn’t? Suppose I had to get around with a crutch, or was in bed in the infirmary and couldn’t even get up?” He looked grim enough at the thought that Ned reached for his hand, twining his fingers through Julian’s in a way that wasn’t exactly against the rules, but still was beginning to seem to him perhaps not entirely licit, either.

  “Also you might be killed,” Ned said. “And I suppose I really meant me, anyway. And it’s a stupid idea. Better to do away with Nevett.”

  “There’s always poison,” Julian said. “We could poison the lot of them.”

  “There’s a nice thought,” Ned said. “We’ll be rid of them eventually anyway when they leave school.” The prospect seemed so far away, though. Julian came back from every session in the prefects’ parlor hard-eyed and furious, even when he wasn’t much hurt, and Ned couldn’t help thinking that he’d do a great deal to have it all be over.

  Julian pressed his shoulder hard against Ned’s. “Eventually’s not soon enough,” he said. “We ought to kill them.”

  “There’s something nice to think about,” Ned said.

  It made a pleasantly macabre bedtime story to tell himself, in which the prefects died in a variety of improbable ways, killed by elaborate traps Julian and he had set or stabbed through the heart with a cursed toasting-fork, and Toms’ became very peaceful thereafter. Ned wasn’t sure how long he went on thinking of it that way, only that it ended the night that he found a small box wrapped in brown paper tucked into a corner of their attic retreat.

  “What’s this, then?” he said, sniffing at it.

  “Don’t do that,” Julian said, more sharply than usual. “It’s arsenic.”

  “What?”

  “Arsenic. They sell it for poisoning rats. I got it easily enough.”

  “What for?”

  “Because it’s the best thing. You can’t taste it, and it makes you sick at your stomach first. It would make it easy for people to believe they’d just eaten something that had turned, and gotten food poisoning from it. There might not even be an inquest, that way.”

  “You’re serious,” Ned said, a cold knot settling in his stomach.

  Julian frowned at him. “Of course I’m serious. What did you think?”

  “I didn’t think… Lynes, you can’t.”

  “Why not? The prefects keep their own tea and sugar in their parlor. All we’d have to do is sneak in –”

  “Oh, is that all.”

  “I can do it. Put the arsenic in their sugar, burn the pac
kage it came in, and wait for them to poison themselves. They all take sugar in their tea, you’ve seen them at breakfast a hundred times. It’ll work.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?” Julian looked up at him, his dark eyes intent. “We’d be rid of them. So would everyone else. I expect more than one of the New Men would thank you.”

  “Yes, but…it would be murder.”

  “Self-defense,” Julian said, so quickly that Ned knew he was ready for the accusation. “You can’t tell me you’d really be sorry if Nevett died. Or Staniforth, or any of them.”

  “I wouldn’t be,” Ned admitted. “But murder won’t do. Non licit.”

  “I don’t care about the school rules.”

  “It’s against the law.”

  “The same law that says that you’re not allowed to steal people’s things? Or that says you’re not allowed to walk up to a man and trip him, or have him beaten for your own amusement? The law doesn’t apply to us, Mathey. This is school.”

  “It’s wrong,” Ned said.

  “It would make it stop.”

  “It’s still wrong. And we’d get caught. You’d get caught. What if someone remembers you buying the arsenic?”

  “I didn’t get it at the village shop,” Julian said.

  “Wherever you got it. Someone will remember.”

  “And get themselves into trouble by admitting they sold it to me, when I’m underage and didn’t sign a poisons register?”

  “Are you willing to risk it? What if someone catches you coming out of the prefects’ parlor – no, don’t say they wouldn’t. They might. We’re not the only ones who are ever up after lights out.”

  “They wouldn’t,” Julian said, but there was a note of doubt in his voice for the first time.

  “They might. And if they did, or someone remembered you buying the arsenic, then you’d probably be hanged. We both would, if I helped you.” Ned shook his head. “It’s not worth it. Nevett and Staniforth can’t kill us.”

  “They could,” Julian said. “They just probably won’t.”