Death by Silver (2 page)

Nevett replied promptly by the first morning post, saying that an afternoon appointment would suit him, and after lunch Ned took himself off by cab to the man’s house. He tapped the knocker firmly against the door and then straightened his coat sleeves, trying to project the dignity expected of the profession.

A scrubbed-looking little parlormaid answered the door, looking as if she couldn’t have been long in her situation herself, unless she’d started as an infant. He felt an amused pang of fellow-feeling.

“My name is Mathey,” he said, presenting her with his card, on which was engraved
Mr Edward Mathey, MMA, The Commons
. “Mr Nevett should be expecting me on a business matter.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Take your hat and your bag, sir? You can wait in the parlor, sir, I’ll tell Mr Nevett you’re here.”

He surrendered his hat but not his leather case, seeing little point in having to fetch it back again once he could get down to work. The parlor was cluttered with a variety of decorative objects, rather more of a variety than Ned thought strictly necessary; he wasn’t sure that a cage full of stuffed birds with baleful expressions really contributed to the appeal of a table already laden down with wax flowers and a crystal dish of lavender sweets.

None of the ornaments visible in the parlor was silver, which he did note.

“Mr Mathey, I presume?” Nevett said, appearing at the parlor door. He was ruddy-faced and solidly built in a way that suggested he had been athletic in his youth but had put on weight with age. Though his dark hair was thinning, Ned could see the resemblance to his sons; they’d all been cut from the same pattern, dark and sturdy.

“Mr Nevett,” Ned said, and shook hands. “I understand you’ve been having trouble with your silver.”

“It’s through here,” Nevett said without further ceremony, and led him across the hall to the dining room.

An impressive array of silver platters, serving dishes, and boxes of cutlery were laid out on the long mahogany table, with an elaborate tea set that might have poured for an entire regiment having pride of place. A few heavy candlesticks, clocks, and curiosities of various sorts crowded in at the edges of the table, some precariously balanced.

The proliferation of specialized but matching pieces suggested the silver was fairly new, although unquestionably of good quality. Ned opened a pair of ornamented tongs curiously, wondering precisely what they were intended for. The shape suggested asparagus, although he doubted it mattered, unless Nevett was suffering specifically asparagus-related misfortunes.

“Tell me what first made you suspect a curse,” he said.

“It’s an old family trouble,” Nevett said. Ned wondered if he was imagining the note of satisfaction in the man’s voice. “It’s always been said that it brings ill luck to have too much to do with our family’s silver. The story is that there was an ill-meant wedding gift to one of my ancestresses, from a jealous suitor. Of course there’s no telling for sure if it’s true or not, but I suppose you’ll be able to find out.”

“I expect so,” Ned said. “Have there been any recent incidents?”

“There’s definitely an unsettling feeling when you handle the stuff,” Nevett said, which wasn’t exactly an answer to the question. He ran his fingers along the rim of a chafing dish, leaving a smudge behind. “And one of the kitchen maids slipped and twisted her ankle the other week. Carelessness, but when you look at it a certain way, you could say it’s bad luck as well.”

“You certainly could,” Ned said politely, although he was beginning to feel an annoyed suspicion rising that he wouldn’t find a thing wrong with the silver except its lack of an impressive history. He wasn’t entirely above being paid to be the equivalent of a physician dispensing colored-water tonics to ladies who liked to be thought delicate, but he preferred being actually useful. “I’ll need to make a proper examination. It’s not very entertaining to watch, I’m afraid.”

“Quite all right,” Nevett said, but made no move to volunteer that he had other business he could attend to while Ned worked. Ned hoped Nevett didn’t seriously suspect him of intending to pocket the forks. Probably he just wanted a bit of theater for his money. Ned shook his head in what he hoped passed for serious consideration of the metaphysical problem before him, and set one of the smaller platters flat on the tablecloth in front of him.

It was the ideal piece to work on, having a large, flat surface. He forbore from pointing out that it was probably the only piece that needed to have been brought out of the kitchen; if they were dealing with a true malediction, it would have long since spread to affect every piece of silver in the house. An ordinary curse would have remained centered on a single object, but it also would have likely produced results more dramatic than an atmospheric sense of unease.

He made an effort to master his annoyance. He suspected much of it was actually that it still rankled that Nevett had described him as “having been at school with my son Mr Victor Nevett” as if that were what established his respectability. Reginald Nevett had been the one in Ned’s year at Sts Thomas’s, a good enough sort if generally found in the middle of a crowd following along like a genial sheep. He wouldn’t have minded if Reggie had put him up for the job – would have dropped him a note to thank him, probably.

Victor was a different matter. He’d been a prefect at Toms’ when Ned was a New Man, and had exercised his authority enthusiastically and without any apparent sense of fair play. It was hardly reasonable to hold a grudge over schoolboy punishments, at least not on his own account – it had probably built character – but all the same he didn’t like the idea of being assumed to be Victor’s friend.

He dismissed unprofitable thoughts and opened his case, which contained a well-worn copy of the second volume of the
De Occulta Philosophia
, carried more out of lingering schoolboy habit than any likelihood that he’d need to refer to it, a memorandum-book with his own notes on recently coined vocabulary, and lead pencil and paper in case it was necessary to use any of the truly elaborate metaphysical squares. All he wanted to begin with was his wand, a plain one in the Oxford style with no decoration other than the sharp silver cap at each end.

Best to begin with the standard series for curse detection, even if he suspected the result. The first sigil in that series was “light,” one of the simplest, but he made himself focus properly, envisioning the square of the sun superimposed on the flat silver face of the platter. The square of the sun was the alphabetic square, its thirty-six numbers standing for the thirty-six letters of the metaphysical alphabet; he’d memorized it at thirteen, through dint of effort he’d thought painful at the time.

The metaphysical word for “light” was only two letters, the letter that itself meant “light” and the one that meant “end,” tacked on as shorthand to make single-letter words possible to draw on a square. Right to left across the bottom row of the square, then, a short horizontal line that acquired its particular meaning through concentration on the numbers that began and ended it. He sketched the line, his pulse quickening as he completed it; there was always that slight exciting element of danger, a chance that he was dealing with one of the rare enchantments that would react disastrously with the standard tests.

Instead there was no reaction at all. The most common curses were laid down using some version of the word for “bring” in connection with some specified form of ill-luck. Adding “light” should have made at least a momentary flicker of light play across the surface of the platter. The next most common ones used “remove,” or “darken;” he carried lucifer matches in his case, but there was a convenient sunbeam slanting across the table, and he tilted the tray into the sun while sketching “light” once more.

The light thrown off by the tray didn’t falter. The next of the standard tests switched tactics, testing for a limiting factor. A malediction was most usually limited to a particular set of objects, to things residing under a particular roof, or by family blood. “Silver,” in this case, which wasn’t particularly useful, or “house,” or “blood.”

He glanced at Nevett, who could at least be a source of useful information if he insisted on hovering. “Did your wife bring any silver into the house when you married? Anything not bought as a wedding present, but perhaps part of a dowry, or a gift to her as a child?”

“I expect so,” Nevett said. “I didn’t pay much attention.”

Ned doubted that – the collection of silver in front of him hardly looked like one assembled by a man who didn’t know or cared what he owned – but there was no sense in arguing about it. “No reason to, I’m sure,” he said easily. “And what was her maiden name?”

“Her people are Winchesters,” Nevett said. He frowned, looking genuinely troubled for the first time. “What are you implying?”

“If there is a curse on the silver, it’s possible it came through a piece that was in Mrs Nevett’s family. It probably wouldn’t be anything she was aware of, perhaps not even something that was a problem while the silver was in its original home. Some things take badly to being moved.”

“But it’s not that she’s done something to the silver herself.”

“Certainly not,” Ned said. The last thing he needed was for Nevett to decide that he was insulting his wife.

Nevett made a non-committal noise, but seemed mollified, and Ned returned to looking through the pieces for something with a lid. Thankfully, not many of the pieces seemed to have been enchanted at their manufacture, which would have confused the issue considerably. He found a salt cellar with a lid, set it deliberately ajar, and then sketched the fish-hook sigil for “close” without adding a specifier. If the enchantment had been build around “in this house” or “under this roof,” the combination would have formed
close all under this roof
, which tended to show its effects even through a variety of cluttering prior sigils.

The silver lid didn’t twitch. He added the sigil for “roof” himself, and watched the lid snap shut, feeling the light flutter of effort deep in his vitals, not strong enough to make him catch his breath, but definitely a perceptible expenditure of energy. That was all his own doing, not prompted by any residual energy in the salt cellar.

The blood of the family might have been specified instead. The easiest test for that would have required piercing Nevett’s thumb, and Ned didn’t feel he’d ingratiate himself that way. There were some of his clients who were pleased by the hoariest traditional methods, the bloodier and more gruesome the better, but he doubted Nevett was one of them.

Instead he ran through a number of sigils that should have reacted with “blood,” with no result. He tipped the platter up so that its reflected light played across the wall, and tried “yourself”; in combination with any enchantment relying on “name,” it should have reflected back the sigil “name” in response, at least as a momentary flicker of light.

Say your name,
he remembered the prefects demanding in school, to which the answer was properly
name, sir,
not actually saying your name, unless you were asked “What are you called?” Julian had pointed out in scathing tones at one point that that particular piece of the Canon had clearly once been “Name yourself,” and that generations of Toms’ students apparently hadn’t been clever enough to repair someone’s long-ago slip of the tongue.

As Ned recalled, he’d pointed it out in the presence of one of the school prefects, and been sorry for it afterwards, as much as Julian was ever sorry for such things. Ned had pointed out that generations of Toms’ students probably hadn’t felt it worth being beaten to contradict Senior Men about school tradition, but Julian hadn’t seemed satisfied with that answer.

He brought himself back to the present with an effort, startled and annoyed by how easily distracted he was at the moment by memories of school days. He’d put away boyhood feuds long ago, or at least so he would have said, and it irritated him that having dealings with Victor Nevett even second-hand seemed to be putting his every nerve on edge.

He ran through the rest of the standard tests for curses proper, and then set himself to the more tedious task of testing to see if any of the individual pieces were enchanted in any troublesome way. For that he did bring out pencil and paper, neatly and quickly constructing Agrippa’s squares through the square of the Moon, which was nine by nine and required careful penmanship to fit in its place on the page.

It was a couple of hours of tedious work, and Nevett eventually grew bored enough to leave him to it, which was welcome. He reached the end of the tests for enchantments constructed by the Moon without a single speck of evidence that there was anything wrong with the silver in front of him at all. He’d found nothing more sinister than a couple of pieces glamored not to tarnish, a springless silver clock that relied on magic to tell the time, and one shoddy jam pot with a lid that snapped itself shut hard enough to pinch unwary fingers when the spoon was withdrawn.

“There’s no sign of a curse as such,” he said the next time he looked up to see Nevett hovering in the doorway. As he suspected, the man looked a bit disappointed. A family curse on the silver was the sort of affliction suffered by the best families, and might have gone some distance to discourage burglars as well. “However, to be entirely certain that there aren’t any lingering malevolent influences, I think it’s best to perform a cleansing on the silver.”