by H. G. Parry
Pitt, on the other hand, had shot across the House of Commoners like a meteorite, except, Wilberforce corrected himself, meteorites fell to earth, and his friend had shown no sign of doing so. Within the first few weeks, he had given his maiden speech, and the walls had resounded with a clarity that was still being talked about on slow nights in the club when there was little else to discuss. By the age of twenty-three, he was chancellor of the exchequer. Quite how this had come about, nobody was entirely sure. His parentage helped, of course: the House of Commoners, despite its occasional pretensions to radical democracy, loved tradition and lineage. It helped also that the government of Great Britain had been in a state of flux for years, a situation worsened by the aftermath of the war in America. But Wilberforce suspected that, even with a different background and in a different political climate, Pitt would still have made his mark. The world simply seemed to be sharper and clearer to him than it was to anybody else Wilberforce had ever known. To be fair, he also worked harder and longer than anyone Wilberforce had ever known and, irritatingly, thrived on it.
The government itself, though, was desperately unstable. Since the end of the American Revolutionary War had forced the collapse of Lord North’s government, the House of Commoners had been in a state of upheaval as the king hunted for a prime minister whom he did not actively despise. Shortly before Parliament had disbanded for the summer, another shift had taken place, and the government had switched back to the old prime minister, North, in an alliance with Charles Fox. They had invited Pitt to stay on, despite the furious political battles that had raged among the three of them over the last year or so, but Pitt had declined on principle. Until things shifted again—and they looked to do so very soon—he was out of office.
Wilberforce had been concerned that Pitt would be disappointed to leave the administration without any promise that he would ever be in government again, but in fact Pitt had met him on the evening in question positively buoyant.
“I’ve just become a humble backbencher,” he announced. “Supper?”
“Starving,” Wilberforce replied, and the two of them had joined a general throng of their friends at their club and stayed up all night, talking and laughing until Wilberforce had almost fallen off his chair—although that might have been the quantity of wine he had consumed. Trying to match Pitt glass for glass, he had learned early in their friendship, was no light endeavor.
As they stepped out onto Pall Mall afterward, the day dawned bright and dazzling. Their friends had been talking vaguely of returning to their respective London lodgings to get to bed; at the sight of the perfect blue sky, white stone buildings, and crisp green trees lining the pavement, the two of them mutually agreed that it made far more sense to travel to Wilberforce’s country house and go boating on the river. Their friend Edward Eliot was the only one who agreed with them about this. The young Commoner had been a third in most of their expeditions since before they had all taken seats in Parliament: he shared their love of wordplay, countryside, and politics, and his delicate, rather dreamy face, with its large dark eyes and pointed chin, belied a mischievous sense of humor. Everyone else thought what they were proposing was quite mad, which was true.
It was after this, as they lay on the grass, saturated with sun, river, and the languorous unreality of having been awake for thirty hours, that the decision to go to France was made. None of them had ever been across the Channel nor spoke any French, but in the fine, hot afternoon it had sounded like the easiest thing in the world.
“Do you want to stay near town to see what might happen, though?” Wilberforce asked Pitt. “There’s still talk of a new government being formed.”
“God no,” Pitt replied. “I want to go on holiday, thank you.” He rolled over and sat up, blinking in the glare. “In all seriousness, I shouldn’t be needed in town once the House rises, and there’s very little chance anything will be decided until the next session. The new government should be stable at least for the summer. I’m free to go away—for the first time in a year, I might add.”
And, though none of them said it, for potentially the last time in years to come. Even with only the three of them, it was difficult to gauge what Pitt thought about the whispers currently being traded about Westminster.
Eliot, always sensitive to the feelings of others, was quick to change the subject. “Are we connected with anybody in France?”
“Surely we must be,” Pitt said, a little drowsily. He’d settled back down on the grass and closed his eyes. “Wilberforce knows everybody in England between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five. Statistically speaking, one of them must know somebody in France.”
Between then and jumping on the boat a few weeks later, Wilberforce suspected that conversation represented the longest sustained practical thought any of them had given to the issue, although somebody—opinion now differed greatly as to who—had furnished them with a letter of introduction to a gentleman named Monsieur Coustier of Rheims. That, they assumed, was all they needed to establish themselves in French society.
The morning after they arrived in Rheims, they got up far too late, dressed in their best clothes, and with some awe went to present their letter to the address they had been given. They almost missed it, because it was a smaller house than they had expected, and when they asked in a mixture of terrible French and half-understood English for Monsieur Coustier, they were pointed to a shabbily dressed Commoner standing behind a counter distributing figs and raisins.
Somehow, their only letter of recommendation was to a grocer, and not a very eminent one. They had no means of entering French society at all, and now no plan at all for their time on foreign soil. They knew nobody, and couldn’t speak the language. And they had six weeks of their holiday remaining.
They bid a courteous farewell to Monsieur Coustier, left the building, and stood outside in mutual bewilderment. Then Wilberforce caught Pitt’s eye, and suddenly the two of them were laughing so hard that people around them began to stare. Eliot managed to keep a straight face for longer, but not by much.
After that, they simply bought some wine, bread, cheese, and overpriced pastries they liked the look of, and went back to their hotel. More than a week later, they were still there.
It wasn’t that Wilberforce objected to the situation, particularly. He was enjoying the company, which was excellent: Eliot kept them in a steady stream of lighthearted banter, and Pitt, away from Parliament, was at his most relaxed and high-spirited. He was enjoying France, which was giving them clear, beautiful days of sunshine and warm nights of starlight amid intricate buildings and winding streets. He was even enjoying the wine and food, which although not of the best quality was plentiful and delicious. But somebody had to make an objection; it was Pitt’s job, really, but since he didn’t seem minded to do it and Eliot wouldn’t be concerned if Pitt wasn’t, it fell to Wilberforce. He wasn’t very good at it.
“We should do something, you know,” he pressed. “While we have succeeded in becoming very familiar with the inside of this room and with cheap French wine, we’re probably missing a good deal of the country. We also haven’t made any progress on learning French, which is unsurprising since the only people we’ve really spoken to since arriving are each other.”
“How can it be that none of us speak French?” Eliot asked rhetorically. “We’re Cambridge graduates, for God’s sake.”
“We know some Latin,” Wilberforce offered. “Pitt’s fluent.”
“Wonderful. All we need now is an ancient Roman with a place at court.”
“That wouldn’t help,” Pitt said, apparently quite seriously. “We still wouldn’t have a letter of introduction to give him.”
Eliot shrugged. “We could catch him in a tiger trap and force him to introduce us.”
“What would we use for bait?”
“Something not readily available in ancient Rome, presumably.”
“Shoes,” Wilberforce suggested, drawn in despite his best efforts. Inevitably,
however seriously they started, conversations between the three of them eventually turned down the path of pure nonsense. “And hair powder.”
“Fog.”
“Functional emperors.”
“Tiger traps.”
“Ex–chancellors of the exchequer?” Wilberforce suggested, with a mischievous grin in Pitt’s direction.
“Oh, they had plenty of those,” Pitt returned. “Only they called them by their ancient name: lazy, unemployed pleasure-seekers.”
“What did they call MPs for northern constituencies?”
“Friends of grocers!” Eliot put in, and his glee was enough to set them all laughing until they were struggling for breath and could barely remember what had been so funny.
“We really can’t stay in these lodgings much longer,” Wilberforce said, after they had subsided into giggles. He couldn’t help but feel his argument became less and less convincing the more they did just that. “I know we’ve been trying to ignore it, but they do have fleas.”
“I was trying to ignore it,” said Pitt, stretching out in his chair with a sigh. “Thank you.”
“And this is not very good wine. We’ve probably destroyed at least half our mental faculties already.”
“I am attempting,” Pitt said, “to prepare myself for my inevitable future position. Clearly, a prime minister should have only half the mental faculties of a chancellor of the exchequer.”
Wilberforce snorted, yet he felt a touch of unease. He knew Pitt hadn’t meant anything by the rejoinder, but it came too close to the political realities they had been avoiding.
Pitt evidently caught Wilberforce’s discomfort, because he straightened and rose at once. “You’re right, of course,” he said, crossing the room to refill his glass yet again from the bottle on the mantelpiece. He suddenly looked a little more like the young man who could take down opponents three times his age in the House of Commoners without an eyeblink, and less like the one who had last night lost to Wilberforce in a pillow fight. “We should do something. We do, after all, know one person in town: Monsieur Coustier. And though we vastly overestimated the poor man’s influence, he was very kind to us and is still a respectable tradesman.”
“He supplies to the Knights Templar,” Wilberforce said. “There’s a Temple Church here, not so far away. If he were to effect an introduction to some member of the Order—”
“They might be able to introduce us to the right people,” Eliot finished. He raised his glass in a toast. “I’ll drink to that as a plan.”
“I would too,” Wilberforce said, “but someone’s taken the wine from my glass and filled it with a colorless and tasteless substance. I think they call it air.”
“What barbarian would do such a thing?” Pitt said dryly, offering the bottle. Wilberforce held out his glass, and the wine flowed. The stars were coming out.
Outside the haven of their hotel, the France they had come to was in the grip of social unrest. The American War of Independence had left the country heavily in debt, driving the monarchy to impose taxes that enraged Commoners and Aristocracy alike. Poor harvests had left the country on the brink of famine and created smoldering resentment of the well-fed Aristocracy and still-more-extravagant royal family.
To make matters worse, the king of France had been born that rare phenomenon: a member of a royal family without a trace of magic. His ancestor’s powers had been of such strength that he had earned the moniker the Sun King—partly because those powers were the unusual combination of fire and weather magic, but partly because it was said that during his blazing reign the last of the illegal shadows still haunting Europe after the end of the Vampire Wars had dispersed. Louis XVI could give no such protection: he didn’t need to, perhaps, but it was still not a good omen. Superstition stated that a king’s magic was linked with his country’s, and for a country to be without a mage-king left it vulnerable. The Knights Templar, in response to their monarch’s weakness, had clamped down harder on Commoner magicians than in any era before. They thought they were doing the right thing.
And beneath the surface, something was moving. Something that spoke of change, and of revolution, and of blood.
By mutual agreement, the three English travelers went to bed comparatively early and comparatively sober: half past two in the morning, and with the floor tilting only slightly as they made their way to their respective beds. It was a still, balmy night, and Wilberforce was asleep seconds after his head touched the pillow.
It seemed barely half an hour before a voice woke him, and it was.
“Wilberforce? Are you awake?”
It was Pitt, Wilberforce realized as he forced his eyes open. The room was dark, but he could make out his friend’s tall, thin silhouette in the faint moonlight coming through the shutters.
“Of course I’m not awake,” he said sleepily.
“Shh,” Pitt warned, with a glance at the bed nearest to the door. Eliot, stretched out beneath the blankets, stirred but didn’t open his eyes. “Don’t wake Eliot. It’s not necessary, and I don’t think he’d take it well.”
“Take what well?” His mind was responding more to the seriousness of Pitt’s tone than to his words, but he propped himself up on one elbow. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, possibly.” Pitt hesitated, which was unusual enough to catch Wilberforce’s further attention. He seemed to come to a decision. “If I asked you to trust me on something that might be difficult for you to believe, could you do so without asking questions?”
“Of course.”
“No, I mean truthfully. Wake up a little, and give it thought.”
Wilberforce rubbed his eyes and tried to blink himself back into awareness. It was difficult when sleep and wine were still lying heavy on him, but he found the answer was very simple.
“Yes,” he said, more firmly. “I would trust you on anything.”
“Without asking questions?”
“Well, I can’t promise not to ask, but I wouldn’t object if you declined to answer.” Wilberforce’s mind was clearing, and with it a thrill was creeping down his spine. Whatever this was, it was clearly going to be important. “What is it?”
His bed creaked in the darkness as his friend sat down at its foot. “There’s something stalking this street at night,” Pitt said bluntly. “I think it’s a shadow, and I think it’s a rogue one. Whatever it is, this is the third time I’ve been woken by it going past the window, and I strongly suspect it’s only the third time because it’s only the third time I’ve been in bed at three in the morning.”
Wilberforce felt the thrill turn cold.
Nobody could quite explain what shadows were—even the Knights Templar, after centuries of study, could only speculate. Perhaps they were manifestations of pure magic; perhaps they were beings from another plane of existence, pulled through by shadowmancy. Perhaps, as the Catholic Church had once contended and some of the more rigid religious sects still believed, they were demons. Shadowmancers only shrugged when they were questioned about it: to them, a shadowmancer friend had once told Wilberforce, it was like asking the nature of the sunlight or the wind. What mattered was that they could reach out and summon them forth. Some were frail and wispy; others, summoned with more power or skill, had human shape, and even the beginnings of human features. They had an understanding with their shadowmancers—for them, they could perform certain tasks before dispersing into the ether, or, by less ethical magicians, they could be bound to an object and kept as a curiosity. Wilberforce had been to a dinner only last month where the pride of the table had been the shadow-possessed teapot, bound more than a hundred years ago with an order to obey the bloodline and always keep the tea warm. It was considered rather ostentatious, but perfectly safe.
If a shadow escaped its bonds, however, it was loose in the world. Shadows couldn’t hold a weapon, but the very strongest could kill with a touch. Their motives were inscrutable and unpredictable. And they could be very, very dangerous.
“Have you see
n it?” Wilberforce asked. “I mean, how did—?”
“I haven’t seen it. This is why I’m forced to ask you to trust me. I felt it pass in my sleep—rather like an eclipse, or a sudden plunge into icy water. The first two times it happened, I put it out of my mind. This time, it must have lingered longer. It’s still a warm night, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Wilberforce said, surprised. “A little too warm, if anything.”
“Not to me. It’s at more of a distance now, but I still feel as though there’s a cold mist in the air. I’ve felt like that before, most strongly when I dined at Lord Harcourt’s three years ago. His entire kitchen is shadow-animated.”
“Very well,” Wilberforce said slowly. This, as Pitt had warned, raised more questions than it answered; he had never heard of anybody—even a shadowmancer—being able to sense when a shadow was nearby. But he had been told he would receive no answers to his questions, so he tried instead to turn his thoughts to the matter at hand. It was difficult, because something about shadows made his heart shiver. They always had, even the lowest forms inhabiting trick teapots. Some of this might have come from the chapter of his childhood spent with his aunt and uncle, who had assured him such things were against God. Yet Wilberforce wasn’t particularly religious now, and still the sensation lingered. It was a cold, irrational fear lying beneath his knowledge of their potential danger that had nothing to do with what they were or what they might do to him, and that he had never been able to explain to anyone. Certainly he wasn’t going to tell Pitt, who was never afraid of anything.
“We mean to visit the Templars tomorrow anyway,” he said. “If we could alert them—”
“So you do believe me?” Pitt interrupted.
“Do you mean do I think you to be lying, or mistaken?”
“Do you think me to be either?”
“No, of course not! I can’t think of anybody less likely to imagine something like that, or pretend to. Of course I believe you.”