Sorcery of the Stony Heart Page 3

  “August.”

  Swaine turned. Devon Woods, Clerk of the Pells at the Exchequer, clapped him again on the back. A thick-necked man in finery and a full head shorter than Swaine, his round face was largely hidden behind a beard that reached past the cravat around his neck while a silken tricorn covered his red hair.

  “I never took you for a theatre man,” Woods said.

  The two had shared rooms in the same building twelve years earlier, when Swaine had first moved to London. Though Woods had left after only two years, they’d run into each other from time to time since.

  “Broadening my horizons, Devon,” Swaine said.

  “So I’ve heard. From all sorts of gentlemen.”

  “Ah, the chair.” Swaine cringed.

  Woods’s wide shoulders shook with mirth as they passed through into the ten-foot-wide passageway that led out onto Bridges Street.

  “You say it as though it were an accident,” Woods said. “You don’t commit accidents, August.”

  “I slid the man and his chair all of six inches.”

  Around them, Covent Garden bustled as the afternoon light faded. Swaine wished to be back in his rooms. The incident with the chair had gotten around, as he’d feared. Well, he’d only himself to blame.

  “The man is Conyers Hargrove. Who, as you know as well as I, loves nothing more than argument and controversy.”

  Since Hargrove was the former Principal Librarian at Cambridge and the current Professor of Fossils in the University’s Department of Earth Sciences, Swaine had thought Hargrove might be sympathetic to his bid for access to the Acts collection. The man had so studiously rejected Swaine’s assertions that Swaine had retorted with a crass display of magic.

  “Well, he didn’t have much of an argument left,” Swaine said.

  “And you think that will stop him? No, you’ve poked the bear, August. He’s evidently told everyone who crosses his threshold about your delirium. Even I’ve heard it.”

  “Delirium? What nonsense is this?”

  “He claims you suffer from visions. Hallucinations. A wee touch of madness.” Woods shook his head. “That you’ve delved too far into your studies of the literature of magic and finally bitten the forbidden fruit.”

  “My approach to my studies involves considerably more rigor than anything Hargrove has done in decades, and he bloody well knows it.” Swaine’s shortest fuse lit anew. The disdain with which the allegedly honed minds of the scientific community viewed the unseen arts never failed to rile him. “I ought to have hurled him and the chair he sat his cushioned arse on straight out the window.”

  “Be thankful he didn’t seek charges. His wife’s niece is married to Lionel Sackville. Now there’s a man who’d like to see you jailed. They don’t care for each other—luckily for you.”

  Swaine bristled at the mention of Sackville, a man of considerable influence at court, who went to sleep and woke up with thoughts of how he might further the Lord’s war against Satan by branding nearly every advance of any note as tainted with the sulfurous stench of Hell’s machinations. The Acts forbidding magic in England stood on par with the Gospels themselves in Sackville’s accounting of the world. “Yes, and they’re both wrong. Fools.”

  Woods watched him closely. “So you really did it?”

  “The commission of magic is a crime, forbidden by law.” Swaine smiled. “Of course I did.”

  “I have to hand it to you, August—you’ve stuck by your guns. I used to think it no more than a colorful story to pass on, if the topic ever came up. The most brilliant man I’d ever met, convinced there was something to all those old books. Never wavered.”

  “No, I never did.”

  “And is there more?”

  Swaine crossed his arms, frowning, thinking about the damage to his name caused by the insufferable Conyers Hargrove. “More what?”

  “More—of what you can do?”

  “Well I haven’t spent the past decade studying how to rearrange the furniture, if that’s what you mean.”

  Woods hooked a thumb in his jacket pocket. “Have you ever met Thomas Summerfield? Recently of Bath, now here in London?”

  “Thomas Summerfield? Who is he?”

  “Well, number one—he’s exceedingly wealthy. Number two, he comes—or claims to come—from a line of magicians from before the Acts. Grandfather was someone of note, apparently.”

  That caught Swaine’s full attention. “You don’t mean Alfred Summerfield?”

  Woods nodded, pointing. “That’s the one.”

  “The man was a giant,” Swaine said. “Changed the course of English magic.”

  He’d read—and reread—all of Summerfield’s books over the last decade, convinced that his work in the field of harmonic shadow theory put him in the rarified company of Newton or Bacon. Had the cowards on the throne—and the many ministers slavering for any advantage, and the fops in dark robes throughout the Church of England and the Vatican—not been blinded, still, by the superstitions of illiterate, Iron Age peasants, England might have already shrugged off the chains of grueling labor, fatal infirmity, and debilitating ignorance.

  “So claims Thomas. And I believe that he’s more than eager to put his wealth behind any efforts to bring such work back to respectability,” Woods said.

  “He’d best not let Sackville get wind of his delirium.”

  “I’ll advise him to leave all nearby furniture in place, save by human hand.” Woods took Swaine’s arm and moved him out of the way of a carriage lumbering down the street. “Honestly, I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of you sooner. He believes what you are expert in and has the means to do something about it. And, unless you’ve conjured up a fortune for yourself with your chair relocation endeavor, a friend like that could be awfully useful in countering the arguments of Hargrove and the like. I can arrange a meeting—what do you say?”

  Swaine straightened, buttoning his jacket against the wind. Delirium. Such nonsense. Especially from one sitting so comfortably within an establishment built on the reputation of a handful of true visionaries but populated by the mediocre, who excelled at nothing as much as they did at playing politics, curating influence, and inflating their own import. Shameless ingratiation had never been for Swaine, and he had the frayed clothing and skimpy coal scuttle to prove it.

  If that’s what it took—well, art demands.

  “A fine idea, Devon. A fine idea,” he said.

  5

  As London Slept

  All it took was a scent: the lightest impression left in the air, the lingering hint of the hidden presence. The man with the crooked leg stood before the darkened theatre, sniffing. Yes, there it was. So difficult to find—yet even as he’d crossed miles of empty countryside, forest, and fen, the lonesome roads, mountain passes, rivers and channels, sparse towns, and finally the teeming city, he hadn’t forgotten it. The faintest wisp led him ever nearer. Still, the sorcerer hid himself well. For days now, the man with the crooked leg crisscrossed London, drawn one way, then another, vexed.

  And in his wake, he knew, nightmares spread, a plague of dark urges infecting the thoughts of those who noticed him. He was more than happy to help; he had more than enough dark keys. One for every soul in London. Perhaps once he’d delivered the gift he bore, he’d remain, weaving his dark strands here and there, poorest and richest, youngest and oldest, kind soul and murderer alike. The smile that crawled across his face would’ve wilted the hope carried in the heart of anyone who saw it.

  But the street was empty, a hard rain lashing the cobblestones and brick, gusting up against shutter and window.

  The man with the crooked leg turned slowly, searching. Without warning, he cocked his head toward the doorway of the theatre. A sob. The sound of it enticing, filled so with despair. As the door opened and a figure—head hung, shoulders slumped—stepped into the raw night, the man with the crooked leg knew that his search could wait, if only for a short while.

  The woman closed the door beh
ind her, shawl and cloak quickly drenching, and headed off east, the wind at her back and working to trip her legs with the bottom of her cloak as it snapped like a pennant in a gale. Delicious sadness trailed her in a wake as pungent as any the man with the crooked leg had enjoyed since setting out from the wooded vale in the foothills. How could he refuse to help a heart tormented so? The chilling smile faded from his lips as he set out after the weeping woman.

  As he paced her, half-obscured by the rain as it blew sideways in sheets, he opened his senses—and marveled. Most people’s hearts—their true hearts—normally remained hidden. Locked away, door after door, façade after façade, sometimes even sealed beyond their own reach. But she—well, if there’d ever been a lock, it had long since fallen away. If there’d ever been a door, it’d been torn from its hinges. Perhaps she’d been one of the few cursed with no barriers whatsoever, her heart there for all to see, a target for every dart and wound the world had to offer.

  Given all that, then, it was little surprise that the woman sensed him almost immediately. Why, he could look over his shoulder and still see the front of the theatre. What he didn’t expect was that she would turn on him. Where was her fear—where, even, her common sense? All he felt was sadness.

  “What do you want?” she shouted.

  The man with the crooked leg limped to her. In the darkness, her pale face was drawn. He felt her essence, a scent so delicate, wash over him. He inhaled—and paused. Beneath the heady grief was something else: a sharp, smoky spice. Also, hints of magic. He sniffed again.

  “Wonderful. I’ve had enough lunatics for this evening, thank you sir,” she said, turning. “Leave me be.”

  He reached out and grabbed her arm. When she tried to pull away, he yanked her in close to him. His voice, little used, came out in a whisper, a stone dragged across gravel. “Where is he?”

  The woman fought, but the sadness tapped her strength and she let out a sob. “Just let me go, please—just let me go!”

  “You saw him.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Saw who?”

  He reached out and put his free hand to her face, touching her cheek lightly. There. Magic and dark eyes and a rich voice and a charcoal jacket and more magic. Glyphs and charms, cloaking him in mirrored waves of disruption. Each soul had its own flavor—and the man with the crooked leg didn’t mistake that of the sorcerer.

  “Thank you, darling,” he said, his voice taking on an accent from the Midlands. He smiled once more. The woman stared at his face, recoiling. “I thought you were someone else, forgive me. Best run along and get out of this wretched night. You’ll catch your death.”

  He relaxed his grip, his hand burning from the heat of her flesh, and stepped back. The woman stared at him, her gaze drifting from his mouth to his eyes.

  “Goodnight, sweetheart,” he said.

  She shook her head, her face crumpling into tears. With one uncertain step followed by another, she backed off—then turned and ran, glancing back more than once as she fled into the stormy darkness. The man with the crooked leg stood still, a statue carved in granite, an angel tombstone, a skull with wings watching over the dead, even as a strike of lightning broke the sky over the city, thunder muttering as London slept.

  6

  A Walled-in Garden

  Rain dripped from cornice, lintel, slate, and spire even as the morning sun burned much of it to mist. Swaine shouldered his satchel and crossed into the Great Court of King’s College. Students and professors passed along the paths. Men such as he, focused on study. He wondered just how many of them were willing to dedicate a tenth of the effort he did. Not many, in all likelihood. He strained to imagine such a center of learning dedicated to the unseen arts. A century, two, more. How long would it take before humanity might cede its superstitions and primitive urges? The world preferred the darkness of ignorance, he fully realized—and it would take more than a lone flame illuminating the future to sweep away the night.

  At the library, a whispered, “Fultume eft hie fuhton. Feohtan swa dydon, sige hæfdon. Sendan maran fultum.”

  Had anyone glanced at him in just that moment, he might have appeared to pass through a shadow—of a stray cloud, perhaps, or maybe of a flock of ravens overhead. Those who saw him on the other side would no longer see a gentleman in faded attire, but rather a younger man dressed in a scholar’s gown, in bearing and appearance little different from those students nearby. By the time Swaine entered the library, no one would have recognized him.

  He made his way through the stacks and tables until he reached the desk tucked away by the stairs to the lower level. Phineas Hozier slumped before piles of books, staring at the wall.

  “Ah, the ever-industrious librarian, the very picture of vigor and verve,” Swaine said.

  Hozier startled. “I beg your p-p-pardon?”

  Swaine, seeing no one else nearby, released the spell.

  Hozier’s eyes widened. “Mr. Swaine.”

  “Come to return Hill, as promised.”

  Hozier looked at him as though decoding his words.

  “Is everything quite all right, Mr. Hozier?”

  “Ah, the book. Hill. Yes, of course.” Still, he made no move to stand. “She’s dead, sir.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Catherine. She—well, she hung herself. Hanged. Hanged herself.” The poor man’s face wrinkled up and he put a hand across his eyes.

  Swaine frowned. The actress? So vibrant, exuding life in her portrayal of Cordelia?

  “And I can’t help but think—well, that it was my fault,” Hozier said.

  “Your fault? Why in the world would you think that?”

  “She trusted me, sir. With her secrets. With her dreams.”

  “You seem to have gone from hoping not to make a fool of yourself to guardian of her secrets and dreams rather quickly.”

  “But that’s just it—there was something there. Between us.”

  There’d been a magical enchantment between the two of them, a fact Swaine kindly refrained from pointing out. “You used all of the potion?”

  “Before two days—and nights—had p-p-passed.” Hozier lifted his gaze. The man looked positively haunted. “That was the beauty of it, sir. Even after it’d weakened, she still confided in me. So much. Telling me all about her cruel father. His death—trampled by a four-horse team while in his cups. Her aunt’s household, with her vile cousins. The eyes that watched her. The voices that she found, inside. A trapped bird, she said. A trapped bird who sings of soaring over forests and foothills.”

  Hozier swallowed, the corners of his eyes quivering with tears. “Sang, sir.” His bony shoulders shook with grief and anguish, his sniffles breaking the quiet of the library.

  Swaine frowned. “You had no inkling that she was intent on—taking her own life?”

  “Of course not.” Hozier wiped his nose on the cuff of his sleeve. “Otherwise, I’d have kept her in my sight. While she slept, all throughout the day.”

  “Naturally.” Swaine thought for a moment. “Was there any marked difference in her bearing from when you first approached her—with the magic, to be clear—versus when it weakened? Or after?”

  The chances were quite low, but a certain type of person, one who teetered on the brink of madness, could be susceptible to exposure to various magics. Pushed over the edge, as it were, the flaws in their sanity finally sundering. With such as spell as what he’d incanted for Hozier, he didn’t think such an outcome likely—yet the possibility couldn’t be dismissed.

  Hozier shook his head. “No, none. It was all like a dream. B-b-better than anything I’d imagined. The first night we talked at the theatre for an hour. I escorted her home—where we stood outside her room and talked until nearly dawn. About everything. I nearly floated away as I walked home myself. She wanted to meet after the next afternoon’s performance. That, of course, required a second application. Remembering what you’d said, my nerves had me by th
e scruff, I can fairly say—but it went even better than the night before. I had a knack for making her laugh, one that I’m not willing to say came from your work, begging your pardon.

  “’Twas the third night—the night before last—when I wondered if I’d ever even needed your help at all. Not that I hadn’t needed it to begin with—Lord knows I tripped over my own tongue to the point of indecipherability, leaving me relegated to nothing more than the pity column in her ledgers, no doubt—but when the effect weakened and vanished, she didn’t seem to notice. She told me, sir—she told me that she’d never felt listened to so well. Ever. And isn’t that just the most peculiar notion? An actress, commanding the stage, commanding an audience—and she never felt listened to?”

  “They weren’t her words when she was on stage, were they?”

  “That’s a point, indeed, sir. A right point. Not her own. Well, she filled my ear with hers, that night. And you might think I simply listened so well because I was so terrified of saying something foolish—but that’s not the case. Not entirely, at least. I listened because her heart was right there. Open. What she said was true. I can’t put it any better than that.”

  “I don’t doubt you,” Swaine said.

  “She bore hardships, sir. Yet she turned them all into something beautiful. Poured them all out through her art. She felt it all so deeply. As I listened to her, my own heart ached—as if I shared some of the weight of hers, if you follow. Now, it’s not as you may be thinking—that’s what I wanted all along, getting close to her. Sneaking my way past her defenses, all that. I don’t rightly know what I wanted, going in. All I knew is that I was content to see her eyes looking at mine. To stand near that beauty. But it changed, talking with her so. I saw her as a person. A walking, wounded, unique, beautiful spirit. It changed. I didn’t want to—what’s the way to say it, hunt for something? Take something? Possess some part of her? No, none of that. I only wanted to share something with her—a few moments, a few hours of honesty. Honest talk. Honest feelings. And—and—we did. We both agreed. We’d discovered something, some space between us that neither of us expected, a walled-in garden we didn’t know existed but had room for both of us.”