A Matter of Magic (25 page)

While Jonathan spluttered and Kim repeated her performance with another piece of rope, Dan held a brief conversation with Jack through the open carriage door. According to Jack, Jonathan had come galloping out of the trees, blazing away with his pistol. The frightened carriage horses had reared, tangling their harness and causing the coach to bounce to a halt. When Jonathan, with typical single-mindedness, had turned his back on the coachmen in his eagerness to open the carriage door, Jack had jumped him.

“Not badly done,” Dan said. “However, we’ve wasted enough time here. Go help Ben with the horses.”

“I ain’t no horse coddler,” Jack grumbled, but did as he was told, and in a few minutes the coach began to move again.

Now, Mr. Aberford,” Dan said, settling back against the rear wall of the coach, “tell me what you thought you were going to accomplish with your little masquerade. And please, don’t try to put me off with that tarradiddle about a bet. What were you really after?”

“I had a bet,” Jonathan repeated doggedly. “With—with Robert Choiniet. He said I couldn’t pull it off without being recognized.”

“He was right,” Mairelon murmured.

“Quiet,” Dan said. “I’m afraid I don’t believe you, Mr. Aberford. I think you were after something else. The Saltash Platter, perhaps?”

“The what?” Jonathan’s puzzlement was unfeigned. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“You call it the Sacred Dish,” Mairelon put in.

Jonathan jerked upright in his seat as if someone had stuck a pin in him, banging his head against the roof of the coach. “What do you know of the Sacred Dish?”

“Not nearly as much as I’d like,” Mairelon said. “For instance, how did you and your druids get hold of it? And how does it happen that you don’t have the smallest notion what it really is?”

“I told you to be quiet,” Dan said.

“When Queen Dick rules,” Kim muttered, her annoyance with Mairelon momentarily getting the better of her fear of Dan. She was as curious as Mairelon about the druid’s behavior, but
she
knew enough to keep her mouth shut when someone had a pistol pointed at her.

Dan gave her a piercing look, but just then the coach slowed and lurched through a sharp turn, distracting him. He leaned sideways and peered out the window. “It doesn’t matter now. We appear to be arriving.”

“Not quite yet, but soon,” Mairelon said. “The lodge is around the back side of the hill.”

“You aren’t—you can’t—what are you going to do?” Jonathan said.

“Look for something I . . . mislaid a few years ago,” Dan answered. “And you are going to help.”

Jonathan’s jaw tightened. “No. I won’t. I won’t let you desecrate our meeting place.”

“Let? My dear boy, how do you propose to stop me?” Dan said, shifting his pistol just enough to call attention to its presence.

“Yes, and what do you expect us to do?” Mairelon asked Jonathan in tones of great interest. “Or to put it another way, just what would ‘desecrate’ a place where you and your friends drink, dice, and wench until almost dawn?”

Jonathan turned a dull red and did not answer. The coach bumped to a stop and Dan reached through the window and unlatched the door. “Out,” he said. Mairelon shrugged and climbed out, steadying himself awkwardly with his bound hands. Jonathan sat back, looking stubborn.

Dan sighed. “Don’t be foolish, dear boy. If you stay here, you have no hope of keeping me from doing whatever outrageous things you think I am planning. And I assure you that if you decide to be obstinate, I shall make it a point to think of something particularly outrageous.”

Jonathan hesitated, then gave in. Wearing a ferocious scowl, he crawled out of the coach. Kim started to follow, but Dan put out an arm and blocked her. “After me,” he said. “And from now on, you are to do nothing and say nothing unless I tell you. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Kim said sullenly.

“Good. Now, after me.”

When Kim came blinking out into the light, she saw Jack Stower holding his pistol on Jonathan Aberford while Dan kept Mairelon covered. She glanced longingly at the woods, but she did not try to run. There was no cover close by, and Dan wouldn’t so much as pause to consider before shooting her. Even the unexpected failure of his control spell wouldn’t slow him down. She’d stand a better chance of nicking the Queen’s garters at high noon on the steps of Buckingham Palace than she would of getting away now. Reluctantly she joined the others.

“Ben, you wait for us here,” Dan commanded. “The rest of you will come inside and help look for the platter. You first, Mr. Merrill.”

Mairelon walked over to the door of the lodge. “It’s locked.”

“It shouldn’t be. We never—” Jonathan stopped short and pressed his lips together, as if he were afraid he was giving vital secrets away to an enemy.

“No matter,” Dan said. He waved his free hand in a sweeping invitation. “Kim! Open the door.”

Even more reluctantly than before, Kim walked forward and pulled her bit of wire out of her pocket. As she knelt in front of the lodge door, Mairelon gave her an encouraging wink. She did not dare respond, for Dan was watching her, but her hands did not shake at all as she inserted the wire in the keyhole and began wiggling it against the tumblers.

The lock was nothing special, but Kim took her time with it. After her experience with Mairelon’s magic trunk, she was not inclined to take chances, particularly since this lodge also belonged to a bunch of frog-makers. Then, too, she didn’t much want to flaunt her skill in front of Dan. It’d only give him another reason for wanting to get his dabbers on her.

“Losing your touch, dear boy?” Dan said. “I hope not.”

The threat below the words was plain. Kim gave her wrist a final turn, wondering as she did whether Dan had forgotten that she was supposed to be acting under his command or whether he just enjoyed threatening people. “It’s open,” she said, rising.

“Good. Mr. Merrill?” Dan nodded toward the door. Mairelon gave him an ironic bow, shoved the door open, and went in. Jack followed, at Dan’s direction, then Jonathan and Kim. Dan himself came last.

The interior of the lodge was dark and smelled of smoke and old wine. “Who’s pulled the shutters to?” Jonathan demanded. “Blast it, can’t anyone do anything right?”

“I fail to see—” Dan began, when a voice from the far corner of the room interrupted him in mid-sentence.

“Jon? That you? Well, of course it is. Nobody else would be so put about by a little thing like shutters. It’s all right, Marianne, it’s only Jon.”

“Freddy!” said an agonized female voice in a piercing whisper. “Sshhh!”

“But it’s only Jon,” the first voice said, and a shadowy male figure rose from behind a clump of high-backed wing chairs. He stepped forward,
peering through the gloom, then stopped short and said with considerable indignation, “I say, Jon, who are all these people you’ve brought along? Not the thing, old boy, not at all the thing. This lodge is supposed to be private, y’know.”

“Meredith! I might have guessed,” Jonathan said in tones of loathing. “What are you doing here?”

“Might ask you the same thing,” Freddy pointed out. “
I
ain’t the one who came barging through a locked door with a country fair’s worth of people.”

“That door isn’t supposed to be locked! The Sons of the New Dawn should be free to come and go as they please; we agreed on that at the very beginning!”

“This is all very interesting,” Dan said in a bored voice, “but I do have a few things to do here, and time presses. If you—and your no doubt charming companion—will just join the others here, Mr. Meredith, we can begin.”

“Who’s this?” Freddy said without moving. “Some jumped-up Cit? Really, Jon—”

“Freddy!” The female whisper was, if possible, more agonized than before. “Make them go away!”

Freddy turned his head back toward the corner. “I’m trying, Marianne. But it ain’t an easy sort of thing. Jon’s a stubborn fellow. Maybe he would if you asked him,” he added hopefully. “I mean, favor to a lady and all that. Jon’s a gentleman, after all.”

“But I can’t! Oh, I can’t!”

“The lady doth protest too much,” Mairelon murmured.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dan Laverham said, ignoring Mairelon. He seemed a little put out by Freddy’s determined thickheadedness. “Mr. Aberford isn’t the one you have to convince. Do as I tell you.”

Freddy looked at Dan with an expression of polite hauteur that changed quickly to incredulity. “Jonathan! That fellow has—” He broke off and glanced back over his shoulder, then lowered his voice and continued, “I think that fellow has a gun.”

“He certainly does,” Jonathan said, disgusted. “And only a sapskull like you would take ten minutes to notice it.”

“Enough of this nonsense,” Dan said. “Kim, find something to tie them with, and open the shutters while you’re about it. We can’t hunt for the platter in this light. Jack, get that blithering fool and his doxy over with the rest of them.”

“Right,” Jack said with an evil smirk, while Freddy spluttered a halfhearted protest. He sidled between a settee and a low, solid-looking table toward the darkened corner from which Freddy had emerged. Kim threw back the first pair of shutters, letting the dusty grey sunlight light up another cluster of chairs and a side table stacked with cards and mother-of-pearl marker chips.

A moment later, there was a quavering feminine shriek from the far corner. “A pistol! Oh, it isn’t loaded, is it?”

“Be a lot of use that way, wouldn’t it?” Jack sneered. “Move it.”

Kim glanced back as she opened a second set of shutters, and her eyes widened in surprise. The distraught and somewhat disheveled young woman whom Jack was pulling, with evident relish, from her hiding place was the lovely blonde who had been with Lady Granleigh in the carriage at the inn, that first day in Ranton Hill. Kim cudgeled her brain and summoned up the girl’s name: Marianne Thornley. She blinked as a few other bits of information came together in her head, and almost smiled. So this was the heiress Lady Granleigh intended for her scapegrace brother! From the look of things, Jasper wouldn’t have much luck, no matter how persuasive his sister was. Miss Thornley seemed to have her own plans.

“My, my,” Dan said. “Gently, Jack; it’s not a doxy, it’s a lady.”

“Miss Thornley!” Jonathan gasped. “Freddy, have you run mad?”

“Freddy! Oh, Freddy, do something!” Marianne cried. With a sudden spurt of strength, she jerked her arm from Jack’s grasp and ran to Freddy, where she wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her head in his shoulder, effectively preventing him from doing anything even if he had wanted to.

“Now see what you’ve done,” Freddy said reproachfully to Dan. He patted Marianne’s shoulder in awkward and meaningless reassurance.

“Kim, where’s that rope?” Dan called.

“There ain’t none,” Kim said, throwing open a third set of shutters.
Even with three windows uncovered, the room was not well lit, but at least it was now possible to move around without tripping over a footstool or a bench. From where she stood, she could even make out the wreaths carved into the mantel above the big fireplace, if she squinted.

“Well, find something! And hurry it up.” Dan’s temper was beginning to fray.

“Are you quite sure you want to keep on with this?” Mairelon asked with an air of polite concern. “You’re accumulating rather a lot of witnesses, you know, and these three”—he indicated Jonathan, Freddy, and the shrinking Marianne with a theatrical wave of his bound hands—“will be missed before long.”

Marianne looked up, as if she were about to say something, but before she could speak, the door behind Dan swung open. “Good day,” said Gregory St. Clair. “I hope I’m not interrupting, but I was getting tired of waiting.”

In the momentary silence, St. Clair stepped into the lodge and pushed the door closed with his silver-headed walking stick. He was dressed for all the world as if he were paying a morning call at the height of the Season in London: Wellington coat, striped pantaloons, and Hussar buskins. His cravat was a snowy expanse of starched linen, and his gloves were grey kid. Looking at him made Kim’s fingers twitch acquisitively.

Both Mairelon and Dan Laverham were staring at St. Clair with unconcealed dislike. Jack didn’t seem to know whether to aim his pistol at the new arrival or continue pointing it at Jonathan and Freddy, who wore identical blank expressions. Marianne, on the other hand, clung more closely to her puzzled escort and said in faltering tones, “Oh, Freddy, it’s Lord St. Clair!”

“Good,” said Freddy, relaxing. “For a minute, I thought it was another Cit.”

“St. Clair,” Mairelon said in a flat voice. “I should have expected you.”

“Gregory has a habit of turning up where he is not wanted,” Dan said. He spoke as if responding to Mairelon’s comment, but his eyes stayed on Lord St. Clair and his voice was cold.

“You have a great many unappealing habits of your own, Daniel, but I don’t regard them.” St. Clair’s expression made Kim want to crawl behind
one of the wing chairs; he looked exactly like Dan in his worst and most unpredictable moods. He glanced around the interior of the lodge, then added, “This time you seem to have outdone yourself, however. I expected Merrill, but who are all these other people?”

“Lord St. Clair!” Marianne shrieked as his gaze reached her. “You must do something, or we shall all be killed!”

“I doubt it,” St. Clair replied. “Even Daniel isn’t that foolish.”

“But he wants to bind us!” Marianne said dramatically.

“Typical.” St. Clair looked at Dan. “You should have gagged her. I begin to see why you’re still standing here waving a pistol about instead of collecting the Saltash Set.”

“The Sacred Dish is not for the likes of you!” Jonathan cried. St. Clair raised his eyebrows in polite incredulity. “That is, if we still had it,” Jonathan added in a resentful tone, glaring at Freddy, “which thanks to him, we don’t.”

“You ain’t still harping on that, are you?” Freddy said. “Burn it, Jonathan, I told you what happened!”

“You had no right—” Jonathan began hotly.

“Quiet,” Dan commanded without turning. “How did you get past Ben?” he asked St. Clair.