The Wizard of London (18 page)

Isabelle
sighed, and nibbled a biscuit for the sake of politeness. “This was
deliberate, you know. Whoever did this intended to frighten or harm my charges.
I’d like to know who set it.” She braced herself, knowing she was
unlikely to get an answer to that statement that she would like.

“Well—this
is really something that the Elemental Masters should deal with, Belle,”
came exactly the reply she had expected. “We do try to police our
own.”

Run
along, little girl, and don’t bother your pretty head about it
. The
old Isabelle would have snapped something rude at her old friend. Over the
years, although diplomacy did not come naturally to her, she had been forced to
acquire it.

“It
isn’t precisely an issue internal to the Elemental Masters anymore,
Bea,” she said gently. “Whoever did this mounted an attack on
Talented children. My charges and my charges specifically were lured there and
locked in to be attacked. Someone sent a cabby to the school to ask for them by
name. Two boundaries have been violated, the one that says that the Masters are
not to attack the Talented and vice versa, and the one that holds that children
are off-limits. At the very least I would like to know why, if not who. There
may be more such attacks, and I am the protector of these children; I have the
right to know who I am protecting them against.”

Bea
had the grace to flush. “That’s true enough,” she admitted.
“I’ll see that you’re told whatever it is you need.”

Whatever
you think it is I need
. Still, it was the biggest concession she was going
to get out of them. She nodded, and changed the subject to that of her old
schoolmates. She needed to find out what they were up to anyway.

***

She
stayed through luncheon at Bea’s insistence. It was definitely a treat;
it wasn’t as if the Harton School could afford the sorts of dainties Lady
Nigel could put on her table.

She
had arrived by cab; she went home in Lady Nigel’s carriage. The congested
streets that slowed the carriage’s pace to practically nil allowed her to
sit back against the velvet cushions and think about her old friends, the
young—now, not so young—women she had gone to school with.

That
school was home to mostly young ladies of rank and privilege. She had, in fact,
been given a scholarship, or her family never could have afforded it. Her
benefactress had been a Talent of no mean ability herself, and knowing that
there was no school for Talented girls had found and sent her to the next best
thing. Presumably, the idea had been that she would get the sort of education
fit to make her a governess, but whatever had been in the donor’s mind,
Isabelle had found herself in the company of those who also recognized her
Talent for what it was, and shared with her the secret of their own powers. For
the first time she had found herself among girls from whom she needed to hide
nothing, for she had been sent to a school populated entirely by, and taught
by, the daughters of Elemental Masters and Magicians. There was only one other
school like it, and that one was for the sons of these same families. She was
not the only girl on scholarship there; nor was she the only one who did not
share a spot in
Burke’s Peerage
. But she was the only one of the
less-privileged lot who was comfortable around the titled, the legacy of
hundreds of tea parties, tennis parties, and dinner parties accompanying her
father to “the Great House” since her mother was no longer alive to
do so. In English polite society, the vicar was the one man who was welcome in
the drawing rooms of the rich and the front stoops of the poor, and Isabelle
was well used to accompanying her father to both venues. Had it not been for
her limited and modest wardrobe, she could not have been told apart from any of
the girls of rank and title.

Isabelle
had a knack for making friends, for being a warm and caring companion, and for
acting as both a sounding board and a peacemaker. Once again, of course, such
traits were invaluable to the daughter of a vicar. As she had soothed tempers
around the tea table of the Lady’s Friendly Society, she now soothed
ruffled feathers at the school, and was accepted as a friend by all. As a
consequence, she was brought along on every possible excursion, and if her
wardrobe was lacking, the clothes’ chests of all the other girls were
flung open and at her disposal.

And
that, of course, was how the trouble really started. There was no way for David
Alderscroft to have known that she was
not
in his social circle. Her
(borrowed) clothing did not betray the fact, nor did her manners. Whenever
there was a party that was a girl short, Isabelle, with her wonderful manners,
got an invitation, since the parents in question would always think, “Ah,
now she’s not an Elemental Mage, nor has she independent means,
she’ll be no competition for
my girl
.” And it was true
enough that she should not have been—most of the young men in question
already knew of her and her status, and while they laughed and flirted with
her, it was lightly, and with no intent on either side.

Not
so David Alderscroft. He had no idea she was only a vicar’s daughter; he
had been schooled at home, by private tutors, and was not privy to the crucial
information that she was, in the delicate terminology of his class, “not
quite up to the mark,” at least in the sense that a marriage to her for
any of the scions of these noble houses would have been a marriage far beneath
them.

But
she had flattered herself, when he began to pay her attention, that perhaps she
was not so “ineligible” as all that. After all, although she was
not a Magician, she did have arcane abilities of her own, inherited from both
sides of the family. Her father, the vicar, was sensitive to spirits and to the
emotions of others. Although she barely remembered her mother, her older
sisters hinted that Mariana Carpenter had been even more Talented than Isabelle
was. And vicar though he might have been, her father saw to it she was properly
trained in the use of her unusual abilities, and looked the other way when that
teaching skirted close to things that might be called “pagan.” He
himself did not have the strength of Talent to become a Warrior of the
Right-hand Path and a Light Bringer, but he was terribly proud when she proved
to have that level of ability. By the time she was enrolled in Madame
Grayson’s Academy, in her late teens, she had already achieved that
accolade, and it was one acknowledged by the Elemental Masters as well as the Talented.
The families of the Elemental Masters themselves were known to acquiesce to
marriage across class boundaries, so long as both parties were Masters, and
surely the title of Light Bringer was the equivalent. So there was every reason
for her to consider herself David Alderscroft’s equal and carry herself
that way.

As
for David, as Bea had said, his father approved of her entirely, though His
Lordship was a tragic case. He and a handful of other Elemental Masters had
been forced to deal with an occult circle led by a renegade Fire Master, and as
Isabelle understood the story, he had stepped in between the Master and his own
men, and absorbed most of the power of an awakening Phoenix himself. He had not
been the same man afterward; he acted like one lightning struck, with tremors,
facial tics, and an inability to speak clearly. But he was able to convey to
David that he approved of Belle.

Probably
because I read him newspapers and books for hours on end
.

Of
course, she and Bea could both have misread the poor man. Maybe he thought
David was planning to engage her as a companion, and not that David was
interested in making her his wife…

She
stared at her hands, fingers entwined in her lap, and sighed. No. No, she was
sensitive enough to know, although she had not actually read the poor
man’s mind on the subject, that the late Trevor, Lord Alderscroft had
liked her for herself, and would have been perfectly happy to see her take a
wife’s place beside his son.

No,
she didn’t think old Lord Alderscroft had anything to do with what
happened after Lady Cordelia appeared on the scene…

Without
his father, David had had no one to properly train him. There was no truly
strong
male
Fire Master in that part of the country. But Lady Cordelia
was one of those rare creatures that though she was a Master of Air also had
just enough of Fire to do as a teacher, and
she
volunteered to train
David the day he turned eighteen. David’s father must have consented to
the plan, for Lady Cordelia was soon a long-term guest at Harwinton House, the
Alderscroft ancestral home—when she wasn’t living in her own town
house in Cambridge.

None
of this, however, filtered down to the girls at Isabelle’s school, nor
even to Isabelle. All she had known at the time was that David had just begun
his university education. David was attending Cambridge, most of the
girls’ brothers were either going into the military as officers, too
young or too old for university, or going to Oxford. David himself never wrote
to Isabelle—after all, it would hardly have been proper, and any letters
from a young man not one’s brother would have been confiscated by the
headmistress. There should have been no reason for anyone to inform Isabelle
about anything having to do with David Alderscroft.

Isabelle
brooded out the carriage window, staring at nothing. That, of course, was the
official version. The unofficial version was that she and David had come to
what was known as an “understanding.” Or at least, she had thought
so. He had said, and more than once, that he was going to speak to her father
when she came of age. If he had meant the comment in jest, she thought she
would have sensed that. She’d had every reason to think he regarded her
with deep affection, even love, and she had certainly felt the same. She had
dreamed, not of what life would be like as Lady David, but of what life would
be like as an occultist Warrior of the Light and a Master, working together.

I
honestly don’t recall ever thinking much about the prestige, or the
money, or the title
. She sighed, and closed her eyes, leaning back against
the seat cushions. The carriage was stalled in traffic, and had this been a cab
it would have been a great deal less pleasant. It would have been even worse in
a ‘bus. This made a good place to think about the past, truth to tell.
Surrounded as she was by the noise of traffic, she was conversely as isolated
as if she had been on top of a mountain, or sitting in splendid silence in a
deserted temple in the jungle.

No,
it wasn’t that the money and the title meant nothing, it was that she
didn’t regard anything above and beyond what constituted a
“comfortable” life as being terribly important. Pleasant, yes, but
not vital. So far as her ambitions, well, they had always been centered on the
realms of the Esoteric rather than the mundane, and she really, truly, did not
think she had thought covetously about what being married to one of the
wealthiest peers in the county would have meant.

If
her memories were correct, the largest part of the equation had been that she
felt very strongly about David—and if it was, perhaps, “only”
first love, it was still the most powerful emotion she had ever experienced at
the time. True, they had done nothing except walk and talk together for hours
at a time. But that was far more than many of their contemporaries ever did.
The “understanding” that they had was something she had clung to,
dreamed about, and cherished. She had been so certain that the bond between
them was such that she didn’t need letters to know how he felt, nor to
confirm the depth of his feelings toward her.

Ah,
but understanding or not, that all changed the moment Lady Cordelia came into
his life.

The
next time she saw him, at a shooting party, he was literally a different
person. When he greeted her, although it was polite enough, there was no
mistaking his tone of detachment. He treated her exactly as he treated all the
other girls insofar as affection went—but insofar as the level of
courtesy—

To
her utter shock he had added to his demeanor with her a touch of arrogance that
clearly said, “You are tolerated here because you are polite and
well-mannered, but you do not, and never will,
belong
.”

And
that was that.

His
attitude clearly surprised and puzzled the other girls, but they said nothing.
Perhaps they assumed he and Isabelle had had some sort of lovers’
quarrel. At any rate, it was one of those situations where nothing was
said
,
but everything was
understood
.

And
the moment when Isabelle first saw Lady Cordelia, she had known deep in her
heart who was to blame.

You
could not have said that David danced attendance on Her Ladyship, because he
did not. And there was nothing remotely loverlike about the way he treated her.
If anything, his attitude was of deference, as of the disciple to the great
teacher, as if she were conveying some great favor to him by giving him her
attention. It was the sort of attitude one would expect if she had been a great
and wise philosopher of the sort that Isabelle eventually found in India…

But
the pupils of those great and wise teachers grew more humble in their attitudes
toward others, not more arrogant.

The
abrupt change in David’s attitude was, perhaps, the worst and most
painful experience of Isabelle’s short life. Perhaps it was just as well
that the encounter had occurred at teatime; she had been able to plead a
headache and retreat to her room, not to emerge even for dinner. The headache
had been real; she had cried for hours, until her eyes were swollen and her
head pounding. And, fortunately, the friend that had invited her in the first place
quickly took pity on her and arranged for her to return to the school the next
morning so that there were no more such encounters.