The Wizard of London (32 page)

Frederick
nodded. “I completely agree.” He rose, cracked his knuckles, and
held out his hand to assist her to rise. “And there is no time like the
present.”

Cordelia
was angry.

The
servants sensed it, and stayed as far out of her reach as possible. She would
have taken her anger out on David, but
he
had gone off to a country
house party for the next several days. She had been invited, but she had turned
the invitation down; the host bored her, the hostess was worse, and it would
have been one stultifying round of lawn tennis and croquet in the afternoons,
and rubbers of bridge and politics in the evenings. Except she would have been
excluded from the politics, relegated to gossip and amateur theatrics with the
ladies, and the politics were the only part of the house party she would have
found interesting.

But
several important men had been invited, which meant that David had to go. So he
was not here to suffer the sting of her anger either.

She
sat in her exquisite parlor, and after long, hard consideration, she leveled
her gaze on an extremely expensive porcelain vase David had given her, full of
water and white lilies that were nearly as expensive as the vase. She stared at
it; obedient to her will, the little cold Elementals that looked like white,
furred snakes wrapped themselves around the lilies and began to freeze them.

Within
moments, they were solid enough to hammer nails with. They were lovely in this
form, but as soon as they began to thaw, they would turn into a blackened mess
that the maids would have to clean up. It would take them hours, especially if
any of the ruined, rotting blossoms dropped on the tabletop and marred the
finish. They would be waxing and polishing half the day.

The
gesture didn’t appease her wrath, but it did vent some of her feelings.

For
the quarry had escaped! Before she could do anything about those wretched
children, someone
else
had the unmitigated gall to invite them to his
estate for the summer! She had no idea who, nor where it was. Her agents had
been unable to get anything out of the few reticent servants left, and efforts
to follow Frederick Harton had all ended in failure. She hired different
agents, to the same end. It was immensely frustrating. The man was utterly
ordinary, a commonplace soldier-turned-merchant. To be sure, he had
some
occult power, but it could not possibly be a match for that of an Elemental
Master!

She
was left to pursue the quarry through the only route she had left: Isabelle
Harton’s friends among the female Elemental Masters. She was forced to be
extremely circumspect about it, for she did not want Isabelle to get wind of
the fact that she was hunting for her and wonder why.

Her
rage, like all her emotions, was icy and calculating. It was a force to be
conserved and put to good use. And it occurred to her suddenly that there might
be one more way of finding those wretched children. She could use her rage to
best effect with it right now. But it would take exceedingly careful work if
she was not to tip her hand.

She
closed her eyes and took several long, slow, deep breaths, then rose, and went
to her workroom.

She
closed and locked the door behind herself, and sat down before her worktable.
No Ice Wurms to be summoned today… but she left a single gray feather on
the table in front of her.

She
sat in her crystal throne, folded her hands in her lap, and began to still her
body.

Her
heartbeat slowed, her breathing became shallow and almost imperceptible, and
within the half hour, anyone looking at her would have thought her dead, or
near it.

In
this state, it was easy to slip across the barrier between the living and the
dead. Not far, but enough across the line to shadow-walk. Enough to talk to the
ghost she herself had created, though she could not speak to nor see any of the
others that she had no hand in making. Enough to be able to call one of her
little servants to her, or to see them, enough to travel to a limited extent
herself, in spirit, though she could not move far from her body.

She
had a particular child ghost in mind, a dream-raptured little thing who in life
had been mute, and in death was just as mute. If Isabelle caught the ghost, she
could interrogate it all she liked; she would learn nothing from it.

The
waif actually knew she was dead, but did not care. She had never seen the
inside of church or chapel in her entire life, and so had no expectation of any
sort of afterlife. What she did know was that she was no longer hungry,
thirsty, or cold. This was a distinct improvement over her lot when she had
been alive. While it was true that spirits saw the living world but dimly, as
if they wandered about in a London “pea-soup” fog, this did not
seem to trouble little Peggoty in the least. She had never owned a toy, she had
never slept in a bed, she had never had a permanent roof over her head, so the
lack of them did not trouble her either. She had been brought to one of
Cordelia’s “shelters” dying of starvation and tuberculosis,
and while it might have been possible to prolong her life, Cordelia had simply
taken advantage of the situation by putting the mite out of her misery in the
usual way. Since then, she had been useful for simple tasks that did not
require much thinking.

As
nearly as Cordelia was able to tell, Peggoty passed her days as a ghost in the
same way that she had passed them as a living child—wrapped in some
strange dream world, half-awake and half-asleep. What it was that she
daydreamed about, no one would ever know, for she lacked the means to tell
them.

Whatever
it was, she seemed content to “live” there in her daydreams between
times when Cordelia needed her.

In
that half world of mist and shadow, Cordelia moved, cutting through the mist to
wherever it was in the townhouse that Peggoty had put herself. She could have
summoned the child to her, of course, but she knew from past experience that
would frighten the waif, who associated being “called” with punishment.
Normally, this would not be a problem, but if Isabelle’s pupil was
somehow able to see and interact with Peggoty, the last thing that Cordelia
wanted was for Peggoty to cling to that little girl for protection.

No,
Cordelia wanted Peggoty to be her usual dreamy self, with nothing to cause
alarm in her behavior. That way, the worst that would happen if she were
discovered would be that Isabelle would succeed in sending Peggoty on to the
next world—

Wherever,
whatever the “next world” was for Peggoty. She was such a passive
little spirit that “the next world” might only consist of a
brighter version of the fog of dreams she moved through now.

Passing
through the real world in her ghostly equivalent, Cordelia found Peggoty
physically haunting the attic of her town house. The child stood dreamily at
the window staring at what to her must have been a sea of gray, marked only by
vague, shadowy forms, appearing, disappearing, looking more like ghosts to her
than she did to the world of the living. Even here, halfway into the spirit
world as Cordelia was, the child was nothing more than a wispy wraith, a sketch
in the air of transparent white on dark gray. Although her head, hands, and
chest were detailed enough, the rest of her was blurred, as if the drawing was
incomplete and unfinished.

“Peggoty,”
said Cordelia, in her sweetest, gentlest voice.

The
child turned and looked up at her mistress with large, dark eyes in a colorless
face, a face thin with years of constant near-starvation, and as expressionless
as a tombstone. Those eyes seemed to look
through
her, and Cordelia,
although she was used to that look, still felt just a fraction or two colder
than she had a moment before.

“Peggoty,
I need you to go and find someone,” Cordelia continued. “It is
another little girl.”

There
was one thing that the Berkeley Square misadventure had produced; a handful of
small feathers, gray and black. Peggoty could not touch them, of course, but
she could get a kind of “scent” from them, and follow it the way a
bloodhound would follow an actual scent.

Of
course, Cordelia could have used the feathers to locate the girls with
magic—had they not been protected by Masters of all four Elements.
Cordelia made no mistake in underestimating her opponents just because they
were women. They were, in fact, rather more likely to be supremely competent
than not.

Any
magical probe would be met by alarms, and if she was very unlucky, the instant
response from whoever was responsible for setting up the Fire Wards. Cordelia
knew that she was good, but she was not good enough to erase her tracks before
another Master could identify her. Her magical “signature” was
quite unique.

But
a spirit, especially a harmless little thing like Peggoty, could slip in and
out without ever being noticed.

She
led Peggoty to her workroom, drifting through the walls, where she had left one
of the tiny feathers on the table, and Peggoty’s big eyes rested on it.
“The little girl I want you to find has a bird, and this is one of its
feathers. If you find the bird, you’ll find the girl. I want you to go
and find her, and when you do, come back here and show me where she is. Can you
do that?”

Peggoty
nodded, slowly, her eyes fixed on the tiny feather as she “read”
whatever it was that told her where it had come from. Then, without looking
again at Cordelia, the wraith turned in the air and floated silently through
the wall.

Cordelia
sighed, and with a mental wrench, brought herself straight back into her own
body again.

This
would take time, but Peggoty did not need to sleep, did not even tire, and was
not easily distracted once she had been set a task. Perhaps the children
enjoyed being given tasks as a change in the unvarying condition of their
lives. It was difficult to tell, especially with one like Peggoty, who had never
been a normal child.

Of
course, the annoying thing was that none of this would have been needed if
Cordelia had just been born a man.

She
rose carefully from her chair—carefully, because after a session like
this she was rather stiff—and left her workroom. After the chill of that
room, the summer warmth felt like the sultry breath of a hothouse in July, and
she winced. Burgeoning growth… meant burgeoning decay.

There
had been another tiny line in her face again today, near the corner of her eye.
She had preserved her beauty for so long—but even magic could not hold
time back forever, it seemed.

Soon
people would stop wondering if David was her lover and start wondering if David
was her son.

It
was enough to make her break into a rage, but rages were aging, and she had
already indulged in one today.

If
she had been born a man, no one would think twice about wrinkles and gray hair.
In fact, such signs of aging would have been marks of increased wisdom and she
would have more respect, not less, for possessing them.

Galling,
to have to depend on someone else for the power she should rightfully have had
on her own. And doubly galling to see David making his own decisions, without
consulting her, as he had been doing more and more regularly of late.

She
hated summer. She hated the heat, the unrestrained growth of nature. She hated
being forced to relocate to that wretched house on the Thames just so she could
continue to attract the right people to her parties. She hated the relaxation
of etiquette that summer brought, although the relaxation of conversation was
useful, very useful—but the same relaxation could be brought about with
the proper application of fine spirits and a warm room.

It
was far, far more difficult to collect children to make into her ghostly servants
in the summer. Sleeping in alleys and staircases, even on rooftops and in
doorways was no longer such a hardship in summer. It was easier to find food;
things spoiled by the heat were tossed out all the time. Haunting the
farmers’ markets brought plenty of bruised and spoiled fruit and
vegetables. They didn’t come to her recruiters, and it was harder to
summon the cold to kill them.

She
stood at the window, looking out unseeing at the street just beyond her walls.

It
was such a waste, too… those lives, those years that she could use, that
youth she needed, all going for nothing. There was no way to capture that youth
and transfer it to someone else, and even if she could, there still remained
the insurmountable barrier of her sex. As long as she was a woman, she would
never be taken seriously enough to achieve any kind of power in her own name.
She breathed in the scent of summer life, green and warm, and hated it.
From
hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and from hour to hour we rot and rot, and
thereby hangs a tale
, Shakespeare had said. Ripe turned to rot all too
soon, but sooner for women than men.

And
it was a bit too late now to try masquerading as a man. Even if she wanted to.
It would take far too long to establish that male persona in the position to
which she had gotten David. The door of opportunity was slowly closing.

Her
hand clenched. Unfair, unfair!

If
only she could somehow
become
David, to control him directly instead
of in this maddening, roundabout fashion! After all, what had he done with his
life on his own? Reorganized that silly little Master’s Circle of his!
And of what use was that?

If
only—

And
at that thought, her mind stopped.

She
mentally stood stock still to examine that thought again.

If
only she could become David
.

Was
it possible?

Was
it desirable?

The
answer to that second question was an unequivocal yes. It was very desirable.
It wasn’t as if she had gotten any great use from her femininity in ages.
Rather, it was something to be suppressed, as was evidence of her intelligence.
If she was a man—if she was David—in order to masquerade as a man
she would have to sacrifice what was amusingly called a “love
life.” There was no way she would be able to simulate lovemaking as a
man. But she would be living a life no less chaste than she was now. It was no
great sacrifice to give up something she wasn’t “enjoying” in
the first place. And in its place, she would get that access to power she
craved, and the respect of those to whom she could display her full and unfettered
intelligence.