A Matter of Magic (31 page)

“And a proper mull ’e made of it,” Stuggs put in, looking scornfully at Jasper Marston. “Went around askin’ this one an’ that one, with no more sense nor a baby. Word was all over St. Giles before the day was out.”

“How was I to know?” Jasper complained. “ ‘Find this Merrill person,’
she said; well, how do you find one man in the whole of London without asking?”

“Which explains how Bow Street heard of my return,” Mairelon said, “and undoubtedly how Mr. Laverham heard of it, as well.” He glanced at Dan, who glared and said nothing. “Bow Street arranged for Mr. Stuggs here to keep an eye on Mr. Marston. At least, I presume it was Bow Street.” He threw a sidelong look at the Earl of Shoreham.

The Earl laughed. “Right again, Richard. Stuggs has done a job or two for me before, though this wasn’t one of them. How did you guess?”

“He recognized you when you arrived just now,” Mairelon answered. “And only one of your people would call you ‘sir’ and not ‘my lord.’ ”

Lady Granleigh sniffed, but a look from her husband kept her from saying anything.

“Once he found Mairelon the Magician, Mr. Marston hired Kim here to look through my wagon for the Saltash Bowl. I, er, found her in process and persuaded her to come with me after she completed her commission from Mr. Marston.”

“Cloth-head,” Kim muttered, not entirely sure whether she meant Marston or Mairelon.

“I suspect it was Laverham’s men we gave the slip to on our way out of London,” Mairelon went on blandly. “It doesn’t matter, though. Shore-ham told us where the platter was, and we came here to recover it. I’m not sure how Renée found out where we were headed—”

“Lord Shoreham told me,” Renée said. “And since Monsieur Andrew Merrill was of an unhappiness, and had besides heard some of the rumors, and since I also heard that the Bow Street Runners were of an interest, I thought, me, that it would be best to come here and arrange matters myself.”

“Renée!” Shoreham looked horrified.

“Oh, I was very discreet,” Renée assured him. “No one knew I was not in London, except of course Madame Bramingham and her guests, and Monsieur Andrew stayed at the inn in that town with the dreadful name I cannot remember.”

“Swafflton?” Mairelon murmured.

“Yes, that is it,” Renée said. “And it has all turned out well, so there is no reason for you to pull your mouth down, so, and make faces as if you have the stomachache.”

“You should have left matters to me,” Shoreham said, shaking his head.

Renée opened her eyes very wide. “Truly? But it does not seem to me that you have done very much.”

“It wasn’t necessary,” Mairelon said. “Any more than it was necessary for you to come.”

“Well, but it might have been,” Renée replied, unperturbed. “And it is better to be too ready, is it not? Also, I do not see that you would explain anything at all to me if I had stayed in London, and I do not wish to perish of the curiosity. So I am glad I came, and I do not care if you look very sour about it.”

Mairelon rolled his eyes, and Kim laughed. She was beginning to like Renée in spite of herself.

“I don’t know whether Lady Granleigh knew that the Saltash Platter was in Ranton Hill when she came down to Mrs. Bramingham’s house party,” Mairelon went on after a moment, “but I rather think not. It didn’t take her long to discover it and send for her brother, though, and the roads and weather being as they’ve been, both of them were settled in before we arrived.

“Laverham must have known the platter’s whereabouts for several months, at least, but he was being very cautious. He arranged for James Fenton to take a job as footman to Freddy Meredith, intending to have Fenton steal the platter for him later. Fenton had other ideas.”

Dan Laverham muttered something under his breath and glared at Mairelon. Mairelon smiled, and Kim shook her head. He was enjoying this altogether too much, she thought.

“Fenton’s family was respectable, and his brother was a silversmith. Fenton persuaded him to copy the Saltash Platter exactly. Perhaps the original idea was to cover up the theft of the platter for as long as possible, but he must have realized fairly soon that he could make a tidy sum selling copies of the platter to each of the, er, interested parties. Since he
wasn’t a magician himself, he didn’t know that the forgeries would be childishly easy to spot.

“When the copies were finished, Fenton replaced the real platter with a copy and hid it in the druid’s lodge.” Mairelon waved at the gaping hole in the floor in front of the hearth. “But he was stretching his luck; making the copies had taken a long time, and Laverham was beginning to worry, particularly since by then he’d heard that I was back. So Laverham sent Jack Stower there down to Ranton Hill to check on Fenton.”

“Then he didn’t follow me at all!” Kim exclaimed, remembering how frightened she had been by Jack’s unexpected appearance at the inn in Ranton Hill.

“No, but it was as well that you kept out of sight,” Mairelon said. “Think of the trouble we’d have had if Laverham had arrived a few days earlier than he did.”

Kim shuddered.

“Richard,” the Earl of Shoreham said. His tone was mild, but Mairelon sighed and returned to his story.

“Just to thoroughly confuse matters, at about this time Freddy Meredith lost the false platter to Henry Bramingham in a game of cards. Henry knew that his uncle,” Mairelon nodded at Gregory St. Clair, “collected oddities of that sort and proposed to give it to him. That brought St. Clair down to Ranton Hill posthaste and set off an interesting round of burglaries at Bramingham Place. Kim and I were privileged to observe most of the parade.”

“What, what?” said Mr. Bramingham.

“We hid in your priest’s hole,” Mairelon explained.

“Priest’s hole!” Kim said, disappointed. “Is that what it was? I thought it was a spell.”

“Bramingham showed it to me last time I visited,” Mairelon said. “Next time your household is roused in the middle of the night, Bramingham, you should remember to check inside it.”

“Yes, but what’s this about burglaries?” Bramingham said. “Somebody broke into the library a couple of nights ago, but—”

“Several somebodies,” Mairelon interrupted. “Actually, I believe Renée was the first, but she recognized the platter for a fake and left it where it was. She was long gone when Kim and I got there.”

“I knew I ’adn’t ought to ’ave gone to London and left you ’ere with ’er,” Hunch said.

“It wasn’t my idea!” Kim protested.

“I didn’t figure as it was,” Hunch said dryly, and Kim blinked in surprise. Then she grinned at him.

“We were interrupted by Mr. Stower’s arrival,” Mairelon said with a quelling look at Hunch. “Stower was interrupted in turn by Marston and Stuggs, who were interrupted by Jonathan Aberford.”

“Jonathan?” Robert Choiniet said, startled. “Are you sure?”

“He has a turn of phrase that is unmistakable,” Mairelon answered.

“Have you got maggots in your head?” Robert demanded, glaring at Jonathan. “Or have you suddenly gotten as bacon-brained as Freddy Meredith? Why in heaven’s name would you try to burgle Bramingham Place?”

“I thought it would work,” Jonathan said sullenly.

“He hadn’t counted on the, er, competition,” Mairelon said. “In the end, Lady Granleigh managed to obtain the platter by as neat a trick as I’ve seen. You might consider taking her on, Shoreham; she’s got the nerves for it.”

Lady Granleigh looked as if she did not know whether to be pleased or insulted by this remark, and Kim hid a smile.

“Lady Granleigh quickly discovered that her platter was a forgery, which left her in something of a dilemma. She couldn’t return it to the Braminghams without awkward explanations, but she didn’t want to keep it, either. And Jonathan Aberford was hanging about Bramingham Place and making a nuisance of himself; if Lady Granleigh and her brother made any attempts to locate the real platter, Jonathan was sure to notice. So she decided to give the forgery back to the druids and solve two problems at once.

“Miss D’Auber and I had agreed to meet this morning near here to compare what we had each learned. She was delayed”—Mairelon gave Andrew a quick look, and Andrew smiled wryly—“so I was here alone
when Lady Granleigh and her party arrived. I, ah, accepted the platter on Mr. Aberford’s behalf.”

“By what right?” Jonathan demanded.

Mairelon looked at him without answering. Stuggs made a peculiar noise that Kim realized, after a moment, was a smothered chuckle. Jonathan turned very red and subsided, muttering, and Mairelon turned back to the Earl of Shoreham and continued his tale.

“Meanwhile, Fenton was proceeding with his own plans. He gave or sold the second of his fakes to Jack Stower and presumably made arrangements to meet with a couple of other prospective customers.” Mairelon glanced toward St. Clair, who did not react. Jonathan Aberford, however, scowled and shifted uneasily. Mairelon smiled. “Yes, I thought so.”

“Get on with it, Richard,” the Earl said. He sounded amused but determined.

“You have no sense of the dramatic, Shoreham,” Mairelon complained.

“I have as much as I need,” the Earl replied in a dry voice. “Though I will readily admit that I have not spent the last few years on a stage. No doubt it’s a grave failing in my education.”

“No doubt,” Mairelon said, looking somewhat disgruntled. “Well, Stower was on the point of returning to London with his platter when he spotted Hunch in Ranton Hill. He followed Hunch to our camp and attempted to take the false platter we had collected; instead, he lost his own and prompted me to head to Bramingham Place to find out what was going on.

“I found more than I expected.” Mairelon paused, staring at the far wall, and something in his stance kept the others from commenting. Then he shook himself and looked at Mr. Bramingham. “When you get back, you’d best send someone down to the wood by the Long Avenue. There’s a body and two more copies of the Saltash Platter hidden there.”

“Richard!” said the Earl, his voice carrying clearly over the confused babble that broke out among the rest of the listeners. “Who? What happened?”

“The body was the unfortunate and ambitious James Fenton,” Mairelon answered. “As to what happened, I can only speculate; Kim and I heard the shot, but we didn’t get a look at the man who fired it.”

“Speculate, then!”

“I think Fenton had arranged to meet someone in the Long Avenue. Two someones, actually; he couldn’t very well have sold both fakes to the same person. I think he miscalculated badly—remember, he didn’t know that a magician could easily tell the difference between his forgeries and the real platter. So when he tried to pass off one of the fakes, St. Clair shot him.”

“Unlikely,” Lord St. Clair said into the horrified silence that followed.

“Not at all,” Mairelon said with exaggerated politeness. “You, Laverham, and Aberford there are the most logical people for Fenton to pick as possible customers for his remaining forgeries. Laverham, or rather, Laverham’s man Stower, already had a platter. Aberford would clearly do a lot to get his hands on his, er, Sacred Dish, but I doubt he’d commit murder. Besides, if he’d killed Fenton, he wouldn’t have held up Laverham’s coach half an hour later, looking for the platter.”

Jonathan jerked. “How did you know—”

“It’s the only reason you’ve done anything for the past week,” Mairelon said. “You were supposed to meet Fenton, too, weren’t you? How did you find out that he was hoping to sell the platter to someone else?”

“I heard him bragging about it at the inn,” Jonathan said sullenly. “I didn’t kill anyone!”

“Yes, I know,” Mairelon said. “You thought you’d save yourself some time and trouble, not to mention money, and hold up the coach instead of paying Fenton.”

“This is all speculation,” St. Clair said. He acted as if he were calm enough, but there were small lines of tension at the corners of his eyes, and a muscle in his jaw twitched now and again when he was not speaking.

“Not entirely,” Mairelon told him. “A moment ago, you told Laverham and Stuggs that they couldn’t prove anything against you without Fenton, but no one has mentioned Mr. Fenton’s unfortunate demise until now. If you didn’t kill him, how did you know?”

“I was not referring to this Fenton’s death,” Lord St. Clair said coldly. “I merely meant that no one knew where he was.”

“Convince the Runners of that.” Mairelon nodded at Stuggs.

“You were the man he was to meet!” Jonathan said suddenly, staring intently at St. Clair. “You were the one to whom he would have sold the Sacred Dish!”

Robert Choiniet rolled his eyes. Lady Granleigh looked shocked. The Earl of Shoreham frowned. “How do you know?” he demanded.

“He was at the inn; I saw him hanging about while I was . . . following Fenton.”

“Hardly convincing,” St. Clair said.

“I doubt that the Runners will have any trouble finding proof, one way or another,” Mairelon said.

“Now that they’re looking at the right man,” Andrew muttered.

“In any case: St. Clair shot Fenton, but Kim and I interrupted him. Laverham and Stower interrupted us and brought us here. I presume St. Clair followed us. Fenton had hidden the platter under the hearth; we found it and had a small disagreement over its ownership. I expect Stuggs can tell you the rest; he was here for most of it. And that’s all.”

It wasn’t all by a long shot. Everyone wanted a chance to object, explain, or ask questions, and it took all the Earl’s considerable force of character to keep them more or less under control. Mairelon was no help whatever; he took immediate advantage of the commotion to dodge past Hunch and corner Lord Granleigh, whom he began cross-questioning about recent magical developments at the Royal College of Wizards.

After a few minutes of chaos, Stuggs brought the confusion to a halt by pointing out that he ought to take his prisoners into town and make arrangements for them to be transported to London.

“There’s another one asleep on the box of the coach outside,” Mairelon said, turning his head. “I don’t know what he’s done, but I’m quite sure it’s something nasty.”

Stuggs frowned. “ ’E ain’t a wizard, too, is ’e?”

“What, driving a coach?” Jonathan said scornfully.