Unnatural Issue (35 page)

Richard Whitestone was in something very like a panic.

He had never expected that he would fail. But he had, and now it was a dead certainty that Lord Alderscroft would have the entire White Lodge howling for his blood.

He abandoned his entire army, leaving the reanimated corpses to drop where they stood. He had come here in the farm cart, assuming he would have Susanne to bring back with him; he went over the wall and sprinted to the place where he’d hidden it. He whipped the horse into as fast a pace as he dared set on a night-shrouded road and tried to think of what he could do next.

He couldn’t go home; that would be the first place they would look. He had not yet established any bolt-holes on the moor as he had planned to do. The only good thing was that Alderscroft could not possibly set the conventional police on him.

He knew he sounded like a madman as he alternately cursed Michael Kerridge for an interfering busybody and thought out loud about where he should go.

Then it struck him: The one place where no one would look for an Earth Master was London.

Furthermore, he had money there, money from Rebecca’s side of the family, money that Alderscroft didn’t know about. He could take a flat or even an entire house, the sorts of creatures he could use flocked there in droves, living off the poison, the misery, the filth. His own tainted magic would be utterly lost in the midden that was London.

And no one would ever look for him there. They thought he was just some country cousin who couldn’t abide the city and was not familiar with how to conduct himself. Well, he had not been able to abide the place before; but that certainly wasn’t the case now. As for not knowing how to conduct himself there—well, he was no country cousin. He had gone to Cambridge. He knew how to move about a big city.

He heard the distant sound of a train whistle above the sound of his horse’s hooves. It was the last train of the evening to London; the very opposite of a “flyer,” it made stops at every town along the way. Yes . . . yes, he could certainly beat that train to Whitby. He could get a ticket there, get on, and vanish. There was nothing to connect the horse and cart with him; he could just abandon them and leave a mystery for the constables in Whitby to never solve.

And once in London it would be trivial to keep track of Charles and Michael Kerridge . . . because besides wanting his property, he wanted revenge.

Curse them. Charles most of all. Charles was the one who had taken Susanne in. Charles was most likely the one who had organized the defense of Branwell against him.

Well, he wasn’t going to give up. He
would
get Susanne back. He
would
complete his transformation.

He
would
have Rebecca back. Nothing and no one was going to stand in his way.

I
T was nearly the end of June, but it felt to Susanne as though it had been years since May Day. Peter had left her with his great-uncle, but then he had been forced to hurry off because of some pother about anarchists and the assassination of a duke or count or some sort of titled German who had been killed in some place she had never even heard of. He had been tense and distressed, but no one here seemed to be.

“Eh,” his great-uncle had said, shrugging his shoulders eloquently. “There will be another to take his place. They breed most efficiently, those Germans.”

Nevertheless, Peter and Garrick went back on the same ferry, and Peter Scott went with them. Fortunately, she had not been entirely alone.

She picked the last of the ripe peas from the vines in the kitchen garden and straightened, laden basket in her arms. She smiled to see “Uncle Paul’s” other guest still hard at work, frowning at whatever it was she had on her easel and occasionally lunging forward to stab at it with a brush. Mary Shackleford was a very aggressive artist. She said she was an Impressionist. Well, if she stabbed any harder on that canvas she was definitely going to make an impression on it!

Mary was English, too, and fortunately spoke fluent French
and
Flemish, which was useful this close to the Belgian border. Uncle Paul was a fine fellow, but his English was heavily accented and—creative. Between Susanne’s Yorkshire accent and Uncle Paul’s eccentric English, half the time they’d never have understood each other if it hadn’t been for Mary.

Susanne took the peas to the kitchen, pausing on the stone threshold in hopes that this time she would be allowed inside the sacred precincts to help. She very much wanted to learn some of the cook’s culinary secrets; she had a way with vegetables that was sublime, and as for the sauces! But the cook took the peas from her and gave her a wordless
look
that told Susanne that she was not welcome in that kitchen. Uncle Paul’s cook had very firm notions of what gentry were and were not to be doing. They might choose to putter about in the gardens; that was respectable. Helping in the kitchen was definitely one of those forbidden things that gentry should never be allowed to try. Susanne turned back to the garden to watch Mary paint a bit more.

Mary had been an addition to the traveling party halfway across the Channel, evidently an old, old friend of Peter’s and a fellow Elemental mage. Peter had recognized her in the first class dining cabin and brought her over to meet Susanne. On discovering that Mary was headed to the Ardennes to paint landscapes and was in dire need of a place to stay, Peter issued an invitation on Uncle Paul’s behalf.

It seemed that Uncle Paul had no trouble with Peter high-handedly inviting not one but two young ladies to stay with him. Perhaps that was the way of things with Elemental magicians. Susanne made a note to ask him about it.

It was true that he had plenty of room. This stone farmhouse was almost as big as Whitestone Hall, though it boasted no grander name than “Paul Delacroix’s house.” It was a beautiful building, two stories plus an attic with bedrooms, constructed of gray fieldstone with floors of terracotta. Paul, his housekeeper, his three maids, his cook, three boys who idled a great deal and occasionally did some useful work, and his farm manager all rattled around in the place, which had bedrooms for eight, not counting the ones for the maids and the farm boys in the attic.

To call this a farm was something of a misnomer, since the land around here was not very suitable for farming. Paul had a vineyard and a great many cattle, which roamed the forested hills of his property at will. Susanne had offered to help in the dairy, but these were not dairy cattle; they were being raised strictly for meat. They had three more cow boys who tended them but didn’t sleep at the house. Paul was a “gentleman farmer” in the truest sense: He was indifferent to whether or not he made a profit, though his manager was adamant about doing so.

Susanne wandered back down into the gardens to see what Mary was painting.

Mary, a tiny doll of a woman whose blonde hair and pink cheeks made her look even more doll-like, was in heaven, and, at the moment, in a trance of creativity. Evidently this part of the world provided endless scope for a painter—or, at least, for her. She was out all day and came back to the supper table with a look of intense satisfaction on her face. Right now, as Susanne discovered, she had found a particularly pleasing view of the farmhouse and was painting it. Susanne could see that two or three Elementals were interested in that painting as well, so she tried not to disturb them. They were a pair of sylphs, hardly more than vaguely human-shaped shimmers in the air. The sylphs flocked around Mary; they thrived on anything creative, according to Peter’s books. They’d appeared the first time she’d stepped outside with her painting rig.

It had not taken the local Earth Elementals long to find Susanne, either. They were a bit more shy than the ones around Whitestone, but that didn’t stop them from spying on her from what they fondly thought was cover. There were some different ones here, but that was to be expected. There were the
fee,
who were very much a mixed bag. Some were like Robin Goodfellow, only not as powerful; some were “white ladies,” who were malicious and harmful. There were the
lutins,
who were like goblins and shunned her presence. The
farfadet
was a species of benign or mischievous gnome that looked a bit like a redcap and, as a consequence, gave her quite a shock when she first saw one. There were probably others she hadn’t encountered yet. She knew there were undines; this was the part of the world where that name came from, after all, but she never saw them.

There was nothing about this life that bore any resemblance to her old one. Even the lessons in magic that old Paul Delacroix taught her were different from the ones that Peter had taught her. And that was what she spent most of her day doing—either learning from Paul or practicing on her own.

And as for the evening—well, that was where Mary came into her own. Mary was everything that Susanne should have been; now Mary, without being obvious about it, was coaching her in the skills and manners of a girl of her proper class. Susanne was an apt pupil, and she knew very well that when this was all over, her father would no longer be the Master of Whitestone.
She
would have to be “squire.” She didn’t want to be a laughingstock, and—

And somewhere in the back of her mind, a little voice kept insisting that once she was landed gentry, once her father had been dealt with, then she would have a chance at Charles Kerridge. But not if she had the speech and the manners of a servant.

Paul Delacroix helped with this as well; he seemed to understand what she wanted to learn without her ever having to say anything. Gradually the number and variety of pieces of silverware at dinner increased, and the courses appropriate to them appeared—though not until she had mastered the previous lot. Little comments about her deportment, her dress and hair—never unkind ones, mind, but useful ones—were slowly helping her with her appearance, and Mary, when she wasn’t in an artistic trance, was exceptionally useful about fashion.
She
could see a difference already. And if she could, surely Charles would.

Last of all, together, Mary and Paul were invaluable as examples of what to
say
in a social setting. Susanne had been vaguely aware that the gentry did a lot of talking, but she hadn’t quite grasped how you went about making polite conversation. In the kitchen, talk generally revolved around farm matters, food, and village gossip. Mary and Paul spoke about the politics of France and the British Empire, art, books and—village gossip. Except that their village was spread across two countries.

So. Not so different after all.

The more she learned, the more confident she became that yes, when all this was over and she could go home, Charles Kerridge was going to be so surprised by how she had changed that he would not be able to take his eyes off her.

The wheels of justice grind slowly,
Peter thought to himself as he bounded up the stairs of Exeter House.
Let us hope they also grind exceedingly small.

With Susanne safely out of the way, Peter was free to concentrate on her father. He had sent a preliminary report to Alderscroft, then a detailed one, and now at last had come the summons he had been waiting for.

Clive was on duty tonight; Peter nodded to him as he held the door open. The summons was for the War Room, which meant that the Old Lion was about to organize a Hunting Party.

Through the Club rooms to the private stairs—he wouldn’t take the lift, it wasn’t fair to the old codgers who actually
had
to use it—then down the hall to Alderscroft’s private suite, he wondered the whole time if they’d left it too late. Richard Whitestone could have easily fled by now.

The question is, does he know we know he’s the necromancer?
Peter thought, as a club servant standing quiet guard over the door to the War Room nodded and opened it for him.
If he does, he’s long gone. Then the question is—

“—and can we track him to whatever hole on the moor he’s carved out for himself,” Alderscroft was rumbling, as Peter paused to take in the room and its occupants. Normally the War Room was used for actual magical ceremonies; tonight, however, the meeting table had been brought in, and everyone was sitting around it,
sans
their arcane paraphernalia.