Unnatural Issue (10 page)

“A very good point.” Michael nodded. “We can certainly start making concerned noises and see who responds.”

“For that, I am in your debt,” Peter replied. “Now, for pure investigative purposes, Garrick and I are going to haul artistic kit all over the moor. It’s a wonder how much you can do when you’re pretendin’ to paint. Especially when you are pretendin’ to paint bad Impressionist work. You can slap up anything at all, and as long as you’re sufficiently enthusiastic, people will shake their heads and tell each other that it’s a good thing you’ve money, for you surely don’t have talent, and they’ll look no further than that.”

“Oh, very clever, Lord Peter,” Elizabeth exclaimed in admiration. “And every good, practical Yorkshireman knows artists are mad. It won’t matter what you do out there; they’ll put it down to harmless insanity.”

“I’m counting on that,” Peter replied solemnly. “Now, I take it that no one will mind if I set up my own Work Room somewhere about?”

“I put you in the Green Suite,” Elizabeth told him, with a hint of pardonable smugness. “It already has a little Work Room specifically for Water mages. Branwell Hall has been playing host to mages and Masters for two hundred years, Lord Peter. We’re quite prepared to have the entire White Lodge housed here, should the need arise.”

“May it never arise,” Peter replied fervently. “First of all, the only thing I can think of that would need the entire Lodge would be an arcane invasion of England. And secondly, Owlswick would send you mad in white linen within a week.
I
wouldn’t wish Owlswick on the Kaiser himself.”

“On that note, m’lord, I came to advise you that all is in readiness,” Garrick put in diffidently.

“We keep country hours, Lord Peter,” Elizabeth advised, before he got a chance to respond. “Mind, if you choose to loll in bed until the sinful hour of ten, you certainly can, but breakfast will be but a memory by that time.”

Peter laughed. “My dear lady, I had scarcely a day in London before being sent off here. Before that, I was at the tender mercies of my grandmother, the dowager duchess, who keeps country hours and does not believe in bed-lolling. This is probably why my mother escapes to the city as much as possible.”

“Or your grandmother keeps country hours to keep your mother
in
the city,” Elizabeth observed shrewdly. “Well, good. I should also point out that to preserve your character of an artist, you naturally will want to take advantage of all the light.” She paused and looked puzzled. “I’m not sure what that means, exactly. When I’ve had occasion to talk with Sebastian Tarrant, he raved about light for at least an hour, and on the few occasions I have been to a gallery, there was quite a lot of talk about light . . .”

“I’ve had a thorough groundin’ in artistic palaver,” Peter assured her. “I can babble about light with the best of them. And you are correct, it would look deuced irregular if I didn’t wander about at dawn a few times, at least. And if I recall my fakery instructions correctly, a ‘dawn’ paintin’ would be a vague pinkish blur with some gold-colored streaks runnin’ across it, above a vaguely purplish blur. That’d be dawn coming up over the heather, don’t you know.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” chuckled Michael.

“Well, with your kindly permission, Garrick and I will take our leave and take full advantage of your hospitality,” Peter said, rising.

Goodnights were said, and with an inclination of his head, Garrick conducted Peter to his suite.

For suite it was. Most country houses afforded their guests a bedroom, with perhaps a shared bath. Peter was now the inhabitant of a five room suite: a sitting room, a bedroom, a bath, a Work Room, and a room for Garrick. And it was clearly decorated to soothe a Water Master’s mood; everything was in greens with a touch of blue, with watery motifs and decorations everywhere. Peter stopped dead in the middle of the sitting room just to stare and admire.

“Well!” he said, finally, “They certainly do the thing handsomely, don’t they?”

“They do indeed, m’lord,” Garrick replied, making no attempt to conceal his admiration. “Oh, I took the liberty of gaining you a brief repast. You will find it waiting in the bedroom. Is there anything else I can arrange for you, m’lord?”

“Most estimable Garrick! No, not a bit. Toddle off to your own well-deserved rest.”

“Very good, m’lord.” With a faint smile, Garrick withdrew to his little room, and Peter passed on into the bedroom.

He was immediately struck with envy. And then struck with the determination that, no matter what he had to put up with back at the familial estate, his own rooms in his town house were going, by god, to be modeled after these. He had never felt so relaxed on entering a room in his life. The level of sensitivity to a Water Master’s comfort was extraordinary.

“You know, Garrick!” he called.

“Yes, m’lord?” Garrick immediately came to the door.

“Make sure we introduce the Scotts. It’d do Maya good to come out here now and again, and it would do our hosts good to have a Master who is also a physician about once in a while.”

“Very good, m’lord. I quite agree.”

Garrick knew his master very well after all this time. There was a little toast, a little smoked salmon, tea. The decanter of Peter’s own single-malt had been unpacked but the box remained unopened; Peter would not touch anything strong until after he had discovered whether or not the tale he’d been sent to investigate had any truth to it. And the food was such that it would keep until after he had conducted a little preliminary Work.

As he expected, the Work Room was on the other side of the bedroom, beside the bath. It had probably once been an enormous closet; now a brace of handsome wardrobes served to house the clothing of any guests in this room. He passed through the chamber and into the Work Room with scarcely a glance at the waiting food or the comfortable bed; to linger for even a moment would be to invite temptation. The Work Room was all ready; Garrick had brought his valise of Tools in and left a lamp burning.

In short order he had cleansed the room, sealed it (temporarily) to himself, and set up his shields and wards. Now, should the need arise, he and Garrick could take shelter here from the worst arcane attacks. Although he did not for a moment suspect his old friend, it did not do to be too complacent. There were too many times when treachery came from the source least suspected.

Only when that was done did he return to the bedroom.

While he had been busying himself, a bat had flown in through the open window and was chasing moths around the ceiling. He smiled, finding that quite reassuring. Bats were very sensitive to the arcane and avoided places that had been contaminated with evil.

“And unlike me,” he told the little creature, who had managed to catch all but one of the moths in the time he’d been watching it, “you work for a living.”

Well, at least he didn’t require his manservant to undress him, as if he were a powdered and periwigged seventeenth-century dandy, like some of his acquaintances. And while he missed the electric lighting of his flat, the oil lamp on his bedside table was quite good enough to allow for a little bedtime reading.

The bat flew out of the window again as he picked up his book, having skillfully cleared the ceiling of anything it could eat. With his tea beside the lamp and the plate balanced on the coverlet beside him, Peter turned his attention to his reading.

It was not something for those inclined to nightmare; he had decided to take Alderscroft’s task at face value and assume that there was a necromancer in these parts. So this volume was a handwritten account, taken from his father’s personal arcane library, of the tracking and defeat of a particularly crafty necromancer roughly a century before. Like this one, the necromancer had practiced his art out in the country. Like this one, he had been very difficult to find.

Peter made a number of notes as he read; the necromancer in question had not been an Elemental magician, which had made finding him problematic from that standpoint. He had learned his art during a stint in Jamaica, where he had managed to save the life of one of the local lads that did that sort of thing. The author of the book speculated that this had been cunning on the then would-be necromancer’s part, that the man had himself been responsible for putting the Jamaican in danger in the first place in order to gain access to his knowledge. If so, that was both clever and unscrupulous.

Once he had mastered his craft, if such horror could be called that, the newly minted necromancer had returned to England and settled in Cornwall, as far from anyone who might trouble him as possible. Clearly he had been aware that
someone
in magical circles would take an interest in him and his work.

He had been the black sheep of a family of wealth and means, who gladly gave him a generous allowance to stay quiet and far away from them. Hence, the jaunt to Jamaica and the ability to settle anywhere he cared to. Once installed on the coast he had done something more clever still. He bought children from orphanages and the indigent from workhouses; oh, it wasn’t called slavery, but it was the same thing. The highly respectable citizens who ran such institutions did not much care what happened to those in their charge so long as they were gotten off the poor rolls—and they themselves were “rewarded” for their cooperation.

He murdered them, of course; he used both their spirits and their bodies. Some of the spirits he bound to serve him as immaterial servants, the others, he bound back into their bodies to serve as his very material slaves. This got him a houseful of silent, obedient servants who never made any trouble. He had to replenish them from time to time, of course, as their bodies wore out and fell apart, but there were always more in the workhouses.

Eventually he got the bright idea to reopen a mine on his property and created yet more dead-alive creatures to work it. Remote as he was, it took some time before his activities came to the notice of the Lodge, and it took longer still before they could actually
find
him. He had layers and layers of protections and shields, and many years to build them up.

Peter’s tea was down to dregs by the time he got through the litany of all the things the Masters of the Lodge had tried in order to ferret the fellow out. The details encompassed several chapters, and Peter wisely decided that he didn’t want to read the actual confrontation just before sleeping.

He set the book aside and turned the lamp down, extinguishing the flame. “Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof, old boy,” he said to himself. After all, first he had to find out if this particular wild hare even existed.

There was one good thing at least. These days, it wasn’t possible to just walk up to an orphanage or a workhouse and purchase a wholesale lot of orphans or the indigent. Oh, you could certainly still buy a child, or even an adult, in the larger cities—you could probably buy as many as you liked, women especially. But you couldn’t get them in job lots anymore. It would take time, a great deal of time, and a great deal of money. So this fellow would not have the means to produce the sort of army that the Cornish necromancer had built up. He could, possibly, have amassed a houseful of servants, but—

But someone would have noticed. Country people knew everything about their neighbors, and someone with a big house but no one coming to church or chapel, the village or fairs, would certainly be noticed, and someone would have told Charles and his family by now.

So
if
he existed, he was probably a lone recluse, off in some little cottage on the moors.

So it wasn’t likely that Peter would find himself confronted by several hundred walking dead.

“For these blessings, thanks,” he muttered ironically to himself, and then sent himself to sleep.

T
HE best way to approach this is obliquely,
Richard thought. He had to be careful about this. He had to be convincing.

He heard Agatha tap on the door, heard the door open and close again. He was standing at the window, as he always did when she turned up. “I saw a strange young woman on the property,” Richard said peevishly to his housekeeper, without turning away from the window. “You know I don’t like strangers here. If you’ve hired a new girl, you should have consulted me first. And if she is a visitor, you know I don’t allow visitors.”

The woman put down the tray with his lunch on it. The crockery rattled as she did so. He must have annoyed her. Good. He wanted her to be the one that brought up the girl. “That, sir, is no stranger.’Tis tha’ own daughter.” Her voice rose; it sounded as if he had provoked her. Even better. “And I know tha’ said never to speak of her, sir, and I know tha’ can dismiss me for it, but ’tisn’t right, the daughter of the house brought up no better than tha’ meanest servant! And now she’s a young ’oman, and what’s to become of her? She’s not fit for her own class and not right for ourn!” She must have been very angry; her Yorkshire accent thickened considerably when she was angry. This was the first time in twenty years that she had shown her temper with him. He could hear the trembling in her voice. She was probably sure that he was about to give her the sack.