The Great Game (Royal Sorceress) (34 page)

Gwen frowned. Lord Mycroft had said that Hiram Pasha was a spy for the Sultan, who was presumably bankrolling his business. With that advantage, he
could
afford to undercut everyone else... but it would make him enemies, who might have a good reason to publicly question the value of a Turkish alliance. And it would put British citizens out of work... it didn’t take much to spark the fires of xenophobia in London.

Howell’s voice suddenly sounded a great deal more rational. “I can forgive you the mess you have made of my home,” he said. “You can release me; I’ll destroy the evidence I accumulated on your mother and give you what I found on the men who are supposed to work for you. There will be no need to mention this to anyone...”

Gwen felt her temper snap. “Damn you,” she snapped, Charm flowing into her voice. “What do you have on my mother?”

“I... I won’t tell you,” Howell said. Blood was leaking from his nose. It happened to Talkers who pushed themselves too far, but no one was quite sure why. “You’ll have to bargain with me.”

“No,” Gwen hissed. She turned up the pressure as far as she could, hitting him with enough Charm to make an army surrender without a fight. “You will tell me...”

There was a sudden rush of...
something
and Howell slumped in his chair. Gwen swore like a trooper, realising that he’d been pushing against her mind all along, and peered down at him. Drool was dripping from his opened mouth; the stench reaching her nostrils suggested that he’d soiled himself. Carefully, she touched his forehead and sensed... nothing. His mind seemed to have completely gone.

What the hell had she done?

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I
think I broke his mind,” Gwen confessed, as Sir Charles stepped back into the wrecked room. “Did you find anyone else?”

“A couple of maids and a cook,” Sir Charles said. “I tied all three of them up and left them in the kitchen.”

“Good,” Gwen said. She looked down at Howell’s twitching body and tried to tell herself not to feel guilty. “I don’t know if he can recover from what I did to him.”

“There is no shortage of people who will thank you,” Sir Charles said, rather dryly. “I dare say that half of London will be singing your praises by the end of the day.”

Gwen shrugged. Maybe he was right... or maybe they would just end up more scared of her than ever. Had Master Thomas ever snapped a person’s mind? Some talents caused madness, particularly if they were developed too early, but she’d never heard of anyone being driven into a catatonic state by an outsider.

“Maybe,” she said, looking over at the safe. “I need you to go get the police – again.”

“You’d think that someone would have called them already,” Sir Charles pointed out. “This is a wealthy area...”

“Howell wouldn’t have thanked them for calling the police,” Gwen said. It was quite possible that he’d had something on all of his neighbours, something to keep them minding their own business at all times. “Take the carriage and see if you can find someone senior – and discreet, if Lestrade isn’t around.”

Sir Charles gave her an odd look, then nodded and walked out the room. Gwen turned her attention back to Howell and frowned, wondering if his mind was trapped inside itself, unable to break free. Or maybe it had completely departed his body, leaving nothing more than an empty shell. There was no way to know, but Gwen was sure of one thing. The body would die unless someone fed and watered it every day.

She turned and walked towards the exposed safe, reaching out with her mind to study it. In some ways, it was simpler than Sir Travis’s safe, suggesting that Howell hadn’t fully trusted any magician. On the other hand, even the most competent Mover would have trouble breaking in; the locking mechanism was astonishingly complex. And she would have bet half her salary that Howell had been the only one with the combination to get inside.

Gritting her teeth, she used her magic to carefully unpick the lock. It was clever, she realised, devilishly clever... and if she hadn’t been so good at multitasking, it might well have defeated her. Pull the wrong part of the lock with magic and heavy bolts would fall, sealing the safe beyond hope of access. It made her wonder, as the safe clicked open, why someone hadn’t simply sealed the safe before. But Howell had just been too intimidating to challenge openly.

She pulled the door open and looked inside. It was larger than she’d realised, easily the size of a small office, the walls lined with shelves. The shelves were covered in paper folders, each one marked in neat precise handwriting. Gwen picked up one of the folders and glanced at it, absently. It was marked Lord Horatio Nelson. Inside, she found a handful of papers and stared down at them, slowly realising that they dealt with the birth of Lady Hamilton’s love child. But everyone knew that the poor child was Nelson’s illegitimate daughter. There was no blackmail value in
that
.

Slowly, a scandal began to emerge as she read through the papers. Nelson’s wife had died in 1805, taken by an illness that – some suspected – might have been poison. What if Lord Nelson had killed her so that Lady Hamilton could take her place? But she hadn’t... Lord Nelson had never married her. Had Howell played a role in ensuring that such a marriage never took place?

Carefully, feeling almost defiled, she put the papers back in the folder and returned the folder to its place, before looking along the list of names. Several jumped out at her, including Lord Mycroft; surprised, she opened it and saw a simple note written in the same handwriting.
Where is his sister
? Gwen frowned; Lord Mycroft had never mentioned a sister to her, but then he was an intensely private man. Apart from his brother, she knew nothing about his family, not even where they came from. She turned the note over and read a second piece of handwriting on the back.
Connections to France through Horace Vernet?

“Not exactly something you could use for blackmail,” Gwen muttered to herself. The Royal Family had strong ties to monarchies on the continent, even the French or Spanish. There weren’t
that
many upper-class families that didn’t have at least a vague connection with the world outside Britain. “But what if he used it at a crucial moment?”

She put the folder back and started hunting for Sir Travis’s folder. It was at the front of the safe, suggesting that Howell had looked at it recently; she took it off the shelf and opened it, half-afraid of what she might find. But there was almost nothing, apart from a note stating that Sir Travis owed four thousand pounds – maybe more – to the Golden Turk. The other papers consisted of biographical notes, including the titbit that Sir Travis was a Sensitive. That explained, Gwen decided, why Howell hadn’t risked reading Sir Travis’s mind. The Sensitive would probably pick up on it and react harshly.

But there was no motive for murder in the files.

Cursing herself, she tossed the folder out of the safe and started looking for others, wondering how many of them she dared read. The Earl of North Hollow was accused of having had his sport with a young noblewoman against her will, although there was no proof and Gwen suspected that it was only good for nasty gossip. She’d met the Earl once and had ended up feeling thoroughly disgusted. His family, equally disgusted, had largely barred him from London.

An oversized folder belonged to another nobleman Gwen knew, someone who had served in India, America and even France during the brief and aborted attempt to capture Toulon in 1801. His folder branded him a liar, a cheat, a braggart and an adulterer – and finished with a note from his manservant, claiming that he’d cheated in a duel of honour with another man in the same regiment.
That
would ruin a man’s career, even if the rest of it might be shrugged off. Gwen put the file back on the shelf, then looked down at one marked LADY ELIZABETH BRACKNELL. Bracing herself, she opened the fire and found the compromising letters.

Lady Elizabeth had been a charming – and explicit - correspondent, she realised. Gwen had spent the last nine months in Cavendish Hall and
she
didn’t know half as much as Lady Elizabeth had done, when she was younger... how had she found out so much? It was difficult to imagine Lady Bracknell reading the trashy romantic novels that gave printing presses a bad name... but how else? No
wonder
Howell had been so convinced that the letters would destroy Lady Elizabeth’s engagement. Poor Sir Travis would have had no choice; he would have
had
to assume that his fiancée was an
experienced
woman.

Gwen pocketed the letters, intending to return them to Lady Elizabeth, then started looking for other names. Somewhat to her surprise, the next one she saw was her own. What had Howell known about
her
? She pulled the folder off the shelf and read through it quickly, allowing herself a moment of relief when she realised that he hadn’t really known much, beyond what was already well known to Polite Society. There was a snide suggestion that her chastity might be in doubt – after all, she
had
slept in Cavendish Hall without a chaperone – but little else.

The next folder was marked LADY MARY CRICHTON.

Gwen argued with herself for a long moment. Part of her wanted – needed – to know what Howell had held over her mother’s head; part of her really didn’t want to know the truth. The secret could die with Howell, unless he’d taken precautions to ensure that his death resulted in all of the information being distributed... she didn’t really
need
to know, did she? And then she remembered how often her mother had forbidden her from reading specific books, stunting her education. She’d been so ignorant that she’d thought that she was dying when her body finally started to mature.

She opened the folder and flicked through the pages. The handwriting was different; an older woman’s, she decided, written to confuse rather than to reveal. Gwen had plenty of experience with David’s handwriting and it was still difficult to parse out the words. But when she did, she almost fainted for the second time.

“She couldn’t have,” she said, out loud. But Lady Mary had been
terrified
of Howell. She’d known that he had something on her, something that could never see the light of day. “She...”

Abruptly, she felt rage and magic billowing up within her. How could her mother have lied to her for so long? How could she? The temperature rose rapidly; the folders started to blacken, then burst into flames. Gwen, lost in her fury, barely noticed until her trousers started to catch fire, shocking her back into full awareness. Choking for breath, she stumbled out of the safe towards the holes the fight had smashed in the walls. There was fresh air from where they’d cracked the side of the house.

Coughing, she turned and watched as Howell’s collection of dirty little secrets were reduced to dust and ash. Pompey would have approved, she thought, remembering the copy of
Life of Pompey
by Plutarch that she’d borrowed from David. He’d burned thousands of incriminating letters after the end of the fighting in Spain, hoping to put an end to the civil unrest gripping Rome. It had worked, for a time.

But it hadn’t entirely been her choice, had it? Her own thoughts mocked her. What would she have done if she hadn’t lost her temper? So many famous names, so many belonging to people who had mocked and sneered when she became Royal Sorceress. If she’d taken the files, could she have used them to ensure that no one ever sneered at her ever again? Or maybe she should have revealed everything, exposing the hypocrisy and deceit that ran through Polite Society. What sort of mayhem would
that
have caused?

She looked back at Howell, remembering her first impressions of the man. He’d been a monster, far worse than any of the noblemen or criminals Jack had killed in his campaign to unsettle the establishment. Howell’s activities had shattered lives, ruined reputations and created nightmares that had never truly ended. Everyone he blackmailed must have been left wondering if they would hear from him again, no matter what assurances he offered. They would have been looking over their shoulders for the rest of their lives.

It would have ruined her, she realised numbly. If she’d kept all the secrets, if she’d
used
them, it would have destroyed her soul. She might have got away with it, but she wouldn’t have been the same person afterwards. Master Thomas had stepped over the line to preserve society, the society he’d fought to upheld throughout his adult life. What would
her
excuse be?

And yet she was still angry at her mother. How
could
she?

She put the folder to one side, beside the one for Sir Travis, and then looked into the safe. The papers had been destroyed and the flames were slowly dying down, having scorched the metal walls, leaving nothing but ashes. Gwen watched the final flames flicker away and die, then drew on her power, scattering the ashes so completely that no one, even Mycroft’s brother, could hope to put them back together. Perhaps Sir Charles was right. There
would
be thousands of people who would thank her for what she’d done.

“Lady Gwen,” Inspector Hopkins said, as he entered the room. “What... what in God’s name happened here?”

Gwen smiled, although she felt no real humour. Hopkins had always considered himself a more intellectual detective than Lestrade, but he had never really accepted Gwen’s authority on the grounds that she’d come into her position through good luck rather than earning it fairly. In some ways, Gwen understood him better than she did Lestrade, yet there was no time for an argument. Or even a frank exchange of views.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, tightly. “This is very much a magical affair.”

She ignored his cross look and continued. “Mr. Howell needs to be taken to the hospital, where one of the Healers can take a look at him,” she said. “If the Healers manages to actually
Heal
him, he is to be treated as a rogue Charmer and gagged as well as cuffed. He is to
remain
cuffed and gagged until I see him personally.”

Hopkins nodded. Scotland Yard had good reason to be nervous around Charmers – or any other kind of magician, for that matter. They turned the world upside down.