The Wizard of London (43 page)

And
then, how long before the Magicians extended their hands over the ordinary
people who had neither Gift nor Talent?

Then
what?

There
were many possibilities, and all of them were chilling.

All
of this ran through her mind while the child sat there, solemn-eyed, watching
her.

“Things
could be very bad if his heart stays frozen, couldn’t they?” Sarah
asked quietly. “Your face went all still, Mem’sab. It only does
that when you’re thinking that things could be bad.”

Isabelle
sighed. “Yes, Sarah. Things could be very bad. The trouble is, I
don’t know how to put them right.”

Sarah’s
eyes never left hers. “Mummy says that the way to start putting things
right is always to start with forgiveness.”

Isabelle
felt as if someone had struck her a blow. Forgiveness! It was the one thing she
did
not
want to give him! And yet—

“Mummy
says not forgiving someone hurts you worse than it hurts him,” the child
persisted. “Even if he doesn’t deserve to be forgiven. She says not
forgiving someone is like not pulling a thorn out of your foot just because you
weren’t the one that put it there.”

Isabelle
regarded the child steadily, and the old soul looked back at her out of
Sarah’s eyes. Somehow she doubted that Sarah’s “Mummy”
had said anything of the sort. No, this was all coming from a source that
Isabelle would be wise to heed.

“So,
we start with forgiveness,” she said, struggling with her own rebellious
heart. “But where do we go from there?”

Sarah
looked uncertain. “Maybe—Robin?”

Isabelle
blinked. That was not a bad notion. The worst that would happen would be that
he would tell them it was none of his business.

And
even if he himself declined to help them, he might be willing to give them some
idea of which way to go.

Yes,
it was a very interesting idea indeed.

How
to approach this, however. Well, the best thing might be to follow the advice
of Lewis Carroll. “Begin at the beginning, go on until you reach the end,
then stop.”

And
the beginning was forgiveness.

“You
can go, Sarah,” she heard herself saying. Obediently, the child nodded,
and hopped down off the settle to walk quietly out of the parlor, leaving
Isabelle alone.

I
don’t want to forgive him
—

The
mere idea made her angry, so angry she could feel a headache coming on.

Coming
on?

She
put her hands to her head and gasped as a lance of pain transfixed her,
stabbing into her temple.

And
it was that pain that finally awoke her to the reality of what she was doing to
herself.

The
child was right. The rancor she held for David Alderscroft
was
like a
thorn in the foot that she refused to remove because she had not put it there.
Nevertheless, it was stabbing deeper with every step she took. How long before
it began to fester?

Judging
by her strong reaction, not long at all.

“Bother,”
she said aloud. “I am
not
very good at this sort of
thing—”

How
to forgive when you really didn’t want to?

Convince
yourself that you do, of course
.

With
a sigh, she resigned herself to the inevitable. She went upstairs to the
bedroom she had been given, and got a thick pile of foolscap out of the desk.
Pen in hand, she sat down to make a list.

She
was, by nature, a very methodical person. It was in her nature to approach a
problem by writing a list.

She
divided the paper in half with a line down the middle. On the one side she
would write out all of her grievances; on the other, write the reasons why she
should give the grudge up.

One:
he broke my heart
.

Broke
it? Not really. Oh, it had
felt
like a broken heart at the time, and
certainly she had been horribly unhappy, but with the perspective of time it
was not—quite—a broken heart. She wrote that down on the other side
of the line, then something else occurred to her.

If
he had not cast her off, she would never have gone to India and never met
Frederick.

So
Frederick
, she wrote on the right-hand side of the page.

So
if he had not broken her heart—
He hurt my pride
.

True
enough, very true. And hardly the reason to carry a grudge. Pride got hurt all
the time, it always went before a fall.

So
true
, she wrote on the other side, and added
and no harm done
.

He
drove my friends away
.

That
was a lie. She had
run
away, and as she had discovered, her true
friends had not been driven away, and had, in fact, only been waiting for her
to approach them again.

So
false
she wrote on the right-hand side.

He’s
arrogant
.

True,
but if she began to hate everyone who was arrogant, she would soon be spending
all her time seething in a self-made mass of anger, too tied up in knots to
actually get anything accomplished.

He
thinks no one is right except himself
.

Also
true, but—the same argument held.

Down
the lists on both sides she went, until she had three full pages of reasons why
she should not forgive him—and six pages of reasons why continuing to be
angry at him was foolish.

She
stared at her lists and began to chuckle.

She
never could hold a grudge in the face of logic. The logic here was
overwhelming, and with a mocking nod of self-deprecation, she acknowledged
that.

She
put down the pen and stared out the window at the neatly ordered gardens.
“I forgive you, David Alderscroft,” she said aloud. “I
forgive you for being an arrogant ass. I forgive you for being cruel to the
poor fool I was. Because if you had not been cruel, I would not have Frederick,
and for that blessing I can forgive you just about anything.”

She
felt some of her rancor ease. Not all, by no means, not all—but she would
repeat this vow of forgiveness as often during the day as she remembered to do
so, and eventually—probably sooner rather than later—she would feel
it unreservedly.

And
in a way, it would be a better revenge than continuing to hate him, because the
last hold on her he had would be gone.

She
laughed, put the foolscap into a drawer, and went down to the kitchens. She
needed to find out how long the house party he was attending would last. And
the servants knew everything. This might not be a matter of any urgency, but
she really dared not take that chance.

***

Cordelia
nibbled the end of her pen as she considered which of her social contacts would
best be able to get her invited to the house party David was attending. Under
most circumstances this would have been the very last thing she cared to do,
but after due consideration, she had realized something quite vital.

It
had occurred to her somewhat belatedly that it would be better, far better, if
the transfer of souls took place somewhere other than in her own home. If it
was to occur during something like this house party, for instance, there would
be no breath of scandal attached. But to have David here in her London town
house overnight—people would talk. There was no reason for him to stay
overnight. Even if he drank too much, which of course he never did, he would
not be put to bed here. In a manor or a big country estate, such things were
done, because of the distances, but in London? No. If he were to be sick enough
to be put up in the home of a single woman, there had better be a doctor called
and two nurses in attendance. A gentleman capable of going up a set of stairs
to a room would insist on going home in his carriage.

She
wanted no taint attached to David, since shortly she would
be
David.

But
a country house party? Ideal. Any stigma would attach to the owner of the
house, the host of the party. The usual difficulties of explanation involved
when a lady was found wandering late at night near the room of someone who was
not her husband would not come into play. Her magic would prevent anyone from
seeing her going to and from David’s room. Once she was in David’s
body, she could carry the lifeless corpse of Cordelia back to her own room to
be found in the morning. It seemed like a flawless plan.

So
her first step; find out how much longer the party was to continue, and her
second; somehow contrive to get invited to it.

Both
were trivially easy for someone with Cordelia’s magic and social
experience. To ascertain the first, she sent to David’s housekeeper to
find out when he was expected back. An unexceptional, perfectly ordinary
question and one she had asked the housekeeper many times before. One’s
housekeeper was always the first to be informed of a prospective absence or
return, often before one’s spouse knew. Of course, she did not ask
directly; her secretary took that task. The answer came within the hour: in
about a week.

He
had already been there a week at this point. It was an unusually long time for
a house party, but this one was hosting a number of quite important
politicians, but not all at once, since many of them were not on speaking terms
with each other. Such were the ways of politics; one’s deadliest foes
were generally in one’s own party. Still, at the moment David was both an
unknown and someone to be courted, and David was staying on as an extended
guest to meet all of them.

Now,
since she did not know the host directly, she had to contrive an indirect means
of getting an invitation. But she was the mistress of the art of the indirect
by now, since no mere female ever got anything done directly. No, they had to
sneak and cajole and bargain. Any direct approach was unthinkable. A man could
pay a call on a successful host at his club and say “Look, old man, I
need to be invited to your soirée this weekend.” No one would
question such a request. But a woman, particularly an unmarried woman—

Tongues
would wag and people would speculate about lovers.

Surely
nothing other than a lover could prompt such behavior out of a woman.

So
she would have to go about this carefully, though there was nothing
particularly complicated about what she needed to do, only tedious.

An
hour in her workroom, scrying in her ice mirror, got her the names of those to
be invited for the next week. She put on her walking suit, hat and gloves, her
engraved card case, called for her carriage, and sallied forth to make calls
with the determination of a Wellington planning a campaign. A set of morning
calls for the least important, afternoon calls for the most, with tea reserved
for the best target.

She
loathed making calls. If there was a more useless waste of time she had yet to
find it.

Normally
this would not have involved the list of calls, but normally she would have had
weeks or months for her little child ghosts to whisper in the ear of the
intended victim and persuade said victim that she could not possibly go, but
that dear Cordelia would provide the perfect substitute. The all-important
matter of the guest list (or in this case, lists) were arranged very carefully
at these parties. When guests were not accompanied by their respective spouses,
an equal number of gentlemen and ladies must be arranged. When single ladies
were required, they had to be above reproach in all ways. She certainly
qualified on that score. No one had ever breathed a single word of scandal
about her. She had never encouraged anything but the most restrained and polite
of male attentions. Her pedigree was exceptional, her acquaintances wide and
all of the best society, and she was, in public, neither too educated nor too
ignorant. She made the ideal guest. She knew when to keep her mouth shut, when
to amuse, and what topics were safe.

Your
son and your husband were safe from her attentions. She could be relied upon to
be seated next to a boring old man and appear fascinated, to play whatever game
of cards you required a partner for, to shoot adequately if you wanted women
along at a shoot, and to not complain if you didn’t. She could not sit a
horse, but she could help amuse her fellow females when the hunters went out.
She had no sense of humor, but that was scarcely obligatory in a mere female.
She could play badminton, croquette, lawn tennis, and lawn bowls without
complaint. She had no history of attempting to curry favor.

After
careful weighing and measuring, which was the point of all that exercise going
from town home to town home, she knew which of the rest of her
“friends” was the likeliest provider of the invitation. She found
her quarry, a plain and uninteresting cousin of the host, who was being invited
merely to “make up” the rest of the party. She paid a call on the
cousin who was a timid thing and not inclined to make a fuss—and really
did not want to go to this party anyway.

When
she was done, the cousin was feeling really very ill, and not inclined to go
off to a strange house in the country, away from all her creature comforts.
Though London might be warm in the summer, it at least had the benefit of
containing all that was familiar, and a few close friends who were just as
plain and uninteresting as the cousin herself. She could spend her week in her
usual round of pursuits or go off to the country to be bored and unhappy, and
probably looked down upon.

And
here was a substitute, sighing wistfully and saying that she was tired of both
London and her own Thames-side house, and longed for the tranquillity of
“true” country life for a week or so.

Cordelia
watched with satisfaction in her ice mirror how the cousin sat down that very
afternoon to write regrets and a suggestion.

And
Cordelia’s little ghosts stirred uneasily until she picked just one to do
her bidding and whisper encouragement into the ear of the host as soon as he
got that letter. They were not happy about being sent out now, not after the
way in which Peggoty had been sent out and had not returned.