Ten Little Wizards: A Lord Darcy Novel (13 page)

“Well, if it works—” Lord Darcy said.

“Aye, my lord,” Master Sean agreed. But he looked doubtful.

Two days passed in which nothing of import happened. Lord Darcy interviewed as many master magicians as he could find at the Castle who had known either Master Sorcerer Raimun DePlessis or Master Sorcerer Paul Elovitz. All agreed that neither man had an enemy in the world. None could think of any reason why either would be killed. Lord Darcy had expected no less.

The body of Master Paul was removed to the Castle’s morgue. The ballroom floor finally having dried, Marquis Sherrinford’s permission was earnestly sought to begin sanding out the bloodstains. His Lordship turned the question over to Lord Darcy. After much thought and consultation with Master Sean, and one more trip to the ballroom, he gave his consent, withholding it only on the two mysterious scratches, which he had covered to preserve them.

The rain moved to the east, but the flood waters, fed by the eastern streams, did not subside, and the Castle was nearly cut off from the outside world. This did not matter, as most of the guests had arrived, and the Castle’s larders would feed many regiments for many months; which, after all, is the function of a castle.

Two trains a day arrived at Cristobel Station, on no fixed schedule: one from the east and one from the west. The water was still not deep enough to endanger the locomotives’ boilers over most of the run, but there was the constant danger of the track washing out, and a tremendous amount of extra fuel was needed to pull the cars through a three-foot lake.

The Dowager Duchess of Cumberland was waiting in the drawing room of Lord Darcy’s suite when he returned in the evening of the third day. His man Ciardi intercepted him in the hall, murmured “Her Grace!” disapprovingly, and pointed to the open door. Then, with a sniff, he retreated back toward the kitchen. A simple man with a complex view of propriety, Ciardi thought it fine that Lord Darcy and Mary of Cumberland had been carrying on an
affaire de coeur
for the past decade. But it was, to his mind, wrong that she, on occasion, came to Lord Darcy. The baron should visit the duchess, and not the duchess the baron. Etiquette was quite firm on this.

Mary of Cumberland stood up when Lord Darcy entered the room. Tall for a woman, she was pleasingly slender, and had startlingly dark blue eyes. Her light brown hair was touched with gray, but if that was a sign of age, it was the only one she showed. Without the gray she would have looked on the young side of thirty, but she was far too vain to dye her hair. “My dear!” she said, stretching out her hands to Lord Darcy. “You see, I’ve come.”

He took her hands silently and pulled her to him. They embraced, and he felt her warm, yielding body press firmly against his. “Yes,” he murmured into her ear, “and after two months, you know how glad I am to see you. But I shall always wonder.”

“Wonder what, my dear?”

“Whether it was me or murder that brought you here?”

She pushed him away. “Really, my lord!” she said sternly. “You think—” Then she broke out laughing. “I did not hear of the murder until yesterday,” she said. “And then I was already in Rouen. I came with Edwin in the Ducal train. Since his wife’s approaching accouchement prevents her from traveling, he was glad of even my company.”

Her stepson Edwin, the present Duke of Cumberland, was a mere six months younger than his stepmother. But in many ways he had been born old, and he never pretended to understand the young and beautiful woman who had come so late into his father’s life. But she had so obviously loved his father, and the age difference had not mattered to them. She had made her husband happy until his favorite mare stumbled and cut short his life in its prime—at the age of sixty-eight.

So the Dowager Duchess of Cumberland, a widow before she was thirty, held court at Carlyle House and was known for her brilliance and the company she kept. And her stepson married well, and took care of the estates, and hunted, and was perversely proud of this stepmother he didn’t understand.

And Mary of Cumberland did good works, and no longer thought about men. For the first year the grief of her loss kept such thoughts from her. And after that, when the passage of time had healed the hurt, she came to realize just what she had lost. For she found that, after her husband, no other man interested her. They were all dull.

Until she met the Chief Investigator of the Duchy of Normandy, the Baron Darcy.

“You are the only man I have known,” she murmured into his ear one night shortly after they met, “since my husband died, who did not bore me.”

“A rare compliment,” he had replied.

And their relationship had been a good one over the years because they respected each other, they cared for each other, and neither of them ever bored the other. And Mary of Cumberland, who had helped Lord Darcy in a couple of his cases when she happened to be present, had discovered within her the thrill of the hunt. She enjoyed the intellectual challenge of chasing murderers, and hoped one day to catch one.

“I thought your stepson was going to remain with his wife,” Lord Darcy said, “until after the child was born.”

“He wanted to,” Her Grace told him, “but she chased him away. He is not a good man to have around when one is giving birth; he takes it all so personally. After all, it’s not as though she doesn’t know how—she has done a perfectly fine job of it three times already. And Edwin keeps fainting. It’s strange—he’s perfectly good with brood mares, I understand. But watching his own wife give birth gets him extremely upset.”

“So he decided to attend his royal cousin’s coronation rather than his wife’s parturition?”

“She insisted,” Mary of Cumberland reiterated. “And, as it gave me a perfectly good excuse for visiting you, I volunteered to go along. After all, the poor man shouldn’t be left alone at a time like this.”

“True,” Lord Darcy admitted. “Husbands are notoriously bad at birthing.”

“And so here I am,”Her Grace said, “and it seems I won’t be able to spend any time with you after all.”

“None at all?” Lord Darcy asked.

“Surely not,” Mary of Cumberland said, mock-seriously. “With you running around solving a murder, you’ll be much too busy to pay any attention to me.”

“If it was just the one murder,” Lord Darcy told her, “I might be able to spare you a moment. But with four so far—”

“Four!” Mary put her hand on her mouth and her eyes narrowed. “You’re joking!” she said, studying his face. “No, you’re not joking. What has been going on here?”

“That is a very good question,” Lord Darcy said. “I’m glad you’re here, Mary. I need a cool, intelligent person to talk to about his.”

Her Grace shook her head so that the tight rings of curls—the latest London fashion—bounced from side to side. “That’s not so, my lord,” she said. “What you need is someone you trust to bounce thoughts and ideas off while you pace back and forth in the bedroom. What you need is a wall. I am honored, my lord, to be that wall, but let’s not build up that function to more than it is.”

Lord Darcy laughed. “You may be right, Mary,” he said. “But it takes a cool, intelligent, perceptive person to see that. And one with a lot of empathy to be able to do it properly.”

“Well,” she said, taking his hand, “let’s go into the bedroom and start bouncing.”

* * * * * * *

The next morning Lord
Darcy woke early, showered, and then went in to breakfast, leaving Mary sleeping comfortably in the bedroom. He read through yesterday’s
Paris Courier
, which had finally made it to the Castle, and sipped his caffe.

As he was starting his second cup, Mary stumbled into the room and dropped into the chair opposite him. “You let me sleep!” she said accusingly.

“It was an act of mercy,” he told her.

“Certainly it was,” she said. She turned to the kitchen door and yelled, “Maggy! Bring me a cup and a crescent roll!”

“Yes, Your Grace,” came the muffled reply of Lord Darcy’s cook through the door.

“I have something for you,” Mary told Lord Darcy. “In the excitement of last night I didn’t get around to it; but if you’d left this morning without seeing it, you never would have forgiven me.”

“It sounds portentous,” Lord Darcy said. “What is it?”

Her Grace of Cumberland shook her head. “If I had forgotten to give it to you, it would have been portentous. As I didn’t, it will merely be interesting.” She handed him an envelope. “Henri Vert—the little man who’s the police prefect for Normandy—gave this to me when our train stopped at the Tournadotte station. He was down there looking for someone reliable to take it on to you. I convinced him I was reliable, although at first he had his doubts.”

Lord Darcy smiled. “You are reliable, my dear,” he told her. “And it’s but one of your minor good qualities.”

“Why thank you,” she said, passing him the envelope.

Lord Darcy ripped it open. There was a brief note and several pages of hand-printed data. “Dear Lord Darcy,” the note said:

I have assembled some of the information you wanted, and am sending it to you while the trains are still running. Here is Sir Pierre Semmelsahn’s report on the tests that Master Sean wanted him to complete, and a list of all the guests of the inn for the time period in question. Sir Pierre has determined that the murders took place on the night of April 15th, which was a Tuesday. He says that Master Sean will agree with the result, since he suggested the method.

The people on the list are those who were at the inn that night. Unfortunately, due to the weather, it is impossible to get any current information about any of them at this time. Where the records indicated their intended destinations, it is on the list.

I hope this is helpful to you. We are interring the corpses temporarily in a crypt in the village church, as burial is impossible at the moment anyway. The spell of preservation is being maintained for the near future.

Your friend,

Chief Henri

“I’d better get busy on this,” Lord Darcy said, rising and finishing his caffe.

“What are you going to do?” Mary of Cumberland asked.

“Check on these names. I imagine a good percentage of them were on their way to Castle Cristobel when they stopped at the
Gryphon d’Or
, and are here now.” He ran his finger down the list. “Some of the names I already recognize. Master Sorcerer Raimun DePlessis was murdered in a bakery Count d’Alberra is curing headaches. The Chevalier Raoul d’Espergnan is a King’s Courier. They’ll all have to be questioned.”

“Is there anything else?” Mary of Cumberland asked.

“I should also give the sorcerer’s report to Master Sean, to see if there’s anything of value in it. All these wizards write in a sort of Latinate shorthand that’s very hard for a layman to interpret.”

“What can I do?” Mary asked.

Lord Darcy considered. “Help me locate whichever of the people on the list are at the Castle. As soon as we have found some of them, the former guests of the inn, you can help question them. Particularly all the women on the list,” he told her. “They will talk more easily with you than with me or anyone else I could send.”

“Very few of the King’s investigators can send duchesses to do their bidding,” she told him.

“Very few duchesses are as talented as Your Grace,” Lord Darcy responded.

“Yes,” she said, “that’s true.”

Marquis Sherrinford opened his eyes and sat up on the leather couch. He felt curiously refreshed. What had they been talking about? It was such a strange experience, discussing one’s own youth. How could it possibly be therapeutic?

“And how is your headache now?” came the solicitous voice of the Count d’Alberra from somewhere behind him.

He shook his head slowly from side to side, testing for that needleprick feeling of sensitivity that usually presaged one of his attacks. There was no result. He felt somehow lightheaded, but there was no trace of pain, or threat of pain impending. “Gone!” he said, sounding faintly surprised.

Marquis Sherrinford had gone to see Count d’Alberra for a scheduled hour of treatment, knowing that one of his headaches was about to begin. It was a sensation, as he described it to the Count, of hollowness in the head combined with pinpricks. Count d’Alberra said that he had been waiting for this moment. “If my treatment is to work, which I cannot guarantee,” he had told Marquis Sherrinford, “it will commence at the start of one of your attacks of head pain. Once we have treated it from that point, subsequent treatments will be of greater ease and more assurance.”

“You want to talk to me while I’m getting a headache?” Marquis Sherrinford had asked incredulously.

“Actually, I want you to do most of the talking, although I shall assuredly do a little,” Count d’Alberra had told him. “And why is this so much stranger than the Laying On of Hands, which you, I feel positive, do have faith in?”

Marquis Sherrinford had thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know—it just is.”

But here it was, one hour after he had entered Count d’Alberra’s little office, and he had no headache, no trace of a headache, or threat of an impending headache. Although one was certainly building when he had come in.

“I think, Count, that you have here a convert,” Marquis Sherrinford said, pushing himself to his feet. He shook his head cautiously, but it was fine. “I will have to admit that whatever you did, it worked.”

“You did it mostly,” Count d’Alberra replied, getting up from the leather easy chair he had been reclining in and moving to the desk. “To be honest with you, I am not altogether clear how it does work, although I am developing a theory based on my case histories. But I am, of course, delighted that you find relief through my quaint techniques. Now you had best be on your way. You must have a busy schedule, with the coronation impending as it is, and I have another patient waiting.”

“Yes, of course, Count. Thank you again. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yes. Usual time. And, my lord, please do not hesitate to come to me at any hour of the day or night should you feel a headache impending. Now that we know the technique works, it is entirely unnecessary for you to suffer any more of those debilitating episodes.”

Count d’Alberra opened the office door and bowed Marquis Sherrinford out. There was a short, passive-looking man sitting on the wooden bench in the hall. He was slumping down on the bench and staring at the opposite wall, totally devoid of motion. It was as though he were turned off and waiting for someone to turn him back on. “Sorry to have kept you waiting, Goodman Bowers,” the Count said, turning to him and smiling. “Please come in.”

Marquis Sherrinford crossed the courtyard from the Stephainite Monastery feeling more cheerful than he had in some time. He had not allowed the headaches to get him down, or interfere with his work—outwardly. But only he had known the inward cost of maintaining a placid disposition and rendering equitable judgments while suffering from what, as he had described it to Count d’Alberra, “felt like a vise was being steadily tightened on the sides of my head, and then periodically struck with a hammer.”

But now, just knowing that there was the possibility of control over the periodic pounding in his head sweetened the whole day and made everything seem possible.

Lord Peter was waiting for him when he entered the throne room. “There is mail, my lord,” he said.

“Good, good,” Marquis Sherrinford said, taking his cloak off and hanging it on a cloak rack behind the throne before he sat down. “I’d better get it cleared up right away. The Ancient and Honorable Society of Guild Halls’ Celebratory Ball is tonight, and I must go, and there is much detail work that remains to be done. The guild masters are much more serious about such things than the nobility. The Castle staff is working like mad to get the ballroom and all ready on time. Harbleury here has charge of the arrangements. The guild masters dote on his every word. Anything new here, Harbleury?”

“The Polish delegation has arrived, my lord,” Harbleury told him. “They were greeted by His Royal Highness of Normandy and His Grace of Paris.”

“That’s good,” Marquis Sherrinford said. “I hope they can dance.”

“They refused to exit from their private car on the train until they were assured they would be properly greeted,” Harbleury told him. “Coronel Lord Waybusch was quite concerned. If we hadn’t been able to round up His Highness and His Grace, they’d be on the train yet.”

“Who came—the son, as promised? Or did they send a substitute at the last minute?”

“It was His Royal Majesty, Stanislaw, King of Courlandt and heir to the throne of Poland, along with thirty of his closest aides and confidants,” Lord Peter told him.

“We make our royal sons princes, so they make theirs kings,” Marquis Sherrinford commented. “It’s a strange sort of regal oneupsmanship. Courlandt was merely a dukedom until 1923, then it suddenly became a kingdom. So Stanislaw is a king. And I doubt whether His Majesty has ever been in his kingdom of Courlandt in his life.”

“We’ll have to arrange for an audience for King Stanislaw here in the throne room tomorrow,” Harbleury commented. “King meets king.”

Marquis Sherrinford looked around the great room, equal in size to the ballroom that sat opposite it across the inner corridor; the pair like the two rectangular wings of an architect’s butterfly. But the ballroom was for gaiety, while the throne room was for ponderous matters of state. It was designed to impress the sixteenth century barons who had come to pay homage here, and little had been changed in the decor since.

The walls were hung with the banners and pennants of battles long since won and the arms and armor of warriors long since dead. The room was dominated by the throne of the Plantagenets, from which John IV leaned down and greeted emissaries and accepted tribute and passed judgment as had his ancestors for these past eight hundred years.

“I’ll inform His Majesty,” Marquis Sherrinford said. “I leave it to you to see that they’re kept happy while they’re here.”

“The suite of rooms we have reserved for them is barely large enough,” Harbleury said. “Although they’ll never notice the overcrowding, if what I’ve heard of their living conditions is accurate.”

“Now, now,” Marquis Sherrinford said. “Let’s not have any anti-Polish sentiment. It’s hard to like them; I think their suspicion of everything rubs off. But we must try. Although if it turns out that they are engaged in a plot to assassinate Our Most Sovereign Majesty...”

Harbleury and Lord Peter stared at Marquis Sherrinford with serious expressions. “My lord,” Lord Peter said, “there is a letter from His Lordship of London.” He held out an envelope. “It contains new detail about the apparent plot, although still not enough to do anything about it. Just more tantalizing detail.”

“What? Let me see that!” Marquis Sherrinford almost snatched the stiff envelope out of Lord Peter’s hand. “Send for Lord Darcy!” he said, pulling the folded letter from the envelope.

“I have taken the liberty of doing so already,” Harbleury told him. “And also Coronel Lord Waybusch.”

Marquis Sherrinford unfolded the letter and put on spectacles. He read:

To His Lordship, the Right Honorable the Marquis Sherrinford.

From His Lordship the Marquis of London.

On Tuesday, the 3rd of May, in the Year of Our Lord 1988.

Greetings Noble Cousin.

I trust this letter will further your efforts to guard and protect His Majesty.

The “ten percenter” of the deceased Goodman Albert Chall was one Goodman (?) Ambrose Zekka of dubious antecedents. He was not to be found at his residence, and apparently disappeared with most of his belongings shortly after the sudden demise of Goodman Chall.

A search of his chambers, and such of his belongings as he did not see fit to take along, came up with an assortment of ephemera which, taken singly, disclose nothing, but looked at together are strongly suggestive of certain possibilities.

To Wit:

One well-worn pair of shoes.

One worn leather strap, seventy-two inches long, with a brass buckle.

Fragments of glass.

A small fragment of three-mouse paper with the words “Cannot” on one line and “His Maj—“ on the line below written in Polish.

A large fragment of what appears to be a house plan, of which I include an exact copy. I do not send the original for fear that this letter will go astray.

Particles of mustache wax.

A large piece of oiled cloth, about four feet square when opened out, which seems to have once had an avoidance spell on it, and still carries the residue. Which explains why the person who had the apartment missed it when he moved. It was not until the third time the apartment was searched that my investigators found it—and then they had Master Sorcerer Lord John Quetzal, the city’s chief forensic sorcerer, along.

Lord John Quetzal performed a series of tests involving the dust in the room, the psychic pictures left behind, and suchlike wizardry, and was able to form sense-pictures of two persons who regularly used the rooms. One was a shortish man with a dark beard—probably pointed—and a “sense of great control.” But probably without the Talent. The other is an enigma. Lord John describes someone who “was there and yet was not there,” and could get nothing else about him—or her.

The leather strap was from a piece of luggage. Since it was probably replaced, look for an old piece of leather luggage with one new strap.

The broken glass was the left lens from a pair of spectacles. On testing the degree of correction of the lens, it was determined that it had none. Therefore either the man who wore the spectacles has one good eye, or the spectacles were part of a costume. I assume the latter.

As to the paper fragment, it is tempting to guess, but unhelpful. But it does support Goodman Chall’s curious contention. Unfortunately.

This information has been developed through the efforts of my chief assistant, Lord Bontriomphe, and several of our most able and most trusted plainclothes armsmen; Goodmen S. Panser, O. Cather, and J. Keems. I shall not attempt to further identify who did what, but all have proven noteworthy and loyal servants of His Majesty.

Strangely enough, as far as we can determine, Goodman Albert Chall did not speak Polish.

I trust this proves useful.

God Save His Majesty.

London

When Marquis Sherrinford looked up from the letter, Lord Darcy and Coronel Lord Waybusch were standing beside him. He silently handed the letter over for Lord Darcy to read and stared at him impatiently as he did so. “What have we got here?” he asked when Lord Darcy had finished.

Lord Darcy passed the letter on to the Coronel. “Very interesting,” he said. “Very interesting indeed.”

“I’m glad you think so,” Marquis Sherrinford said. “I can’t make anything out of it. But it’s not my job, I suppose. If you say it’s interesting—”

“Dammit, Darcy,
what’s
very interesting?” Coronel Lord Waybusch snapped. “I can’t see that that gets us any forrader at all. What in heaven is three-mouse paper?”

“It’s the watermark,” Lord Darcy explained. “Blazon of the d’Enver family, who own the paper mill. Three mice with their tails tied together. It’s a good grade of paper sold by the quire for correspondence. Unfortunately it’s too common to try to trace the sale.”

“I see,” Marquis Sherrinford said. “And the words mean nothing by themselves, although as de London said, they are suggestive.”

“Too damn suggestive,” Coronel Lord Waybusch said, refolding the letter and handing it back to the Marquis, who passed it on to Harbleury. “Polish. The damn Poles have just moved into their rooms, did you know? Three dozen of them. Wouldn’t get off the train until they were greeted proper by His Highness. Damn insulting about it, they were. Now they want their own guards, and their own damn cook for good measure. As if good, solid Norman food isn’t good enough for them.”

“It’s just as well,” Marquis Sherrinford said. “Let them guard His Courlandtish Majesty. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to him, now would we?”

“I just don’t like the idea of thirty of them wandering around the Castle when we’ve got word that some damn Pole is trying to kill His Majesty.”

“The threat to His Majesty may be of Polish origin,” Lord Darcy said, “but it would seem to come here from London. I doubt whether any of the Polish delegation here even know about it.”

“I agree with Lord Darcy,” Lord Peter said. “And between us, I have a way to check that.”

“What sort of way?” Marquis Sherrinford asked. “Have you placed a magical spy-eye in their suite?”

“No,” Lord Peter said. “That would be most unhospitable. And besides, their sorcerer would be sure to spot it right away. What we have is a secret agent—a man of ours—right in the Polish delegation.”

“Really?” Marquis Sherrinford looked surprised. “You mean one of them is really one of us? How, ah, fascinating. Who is it?”

“I’d rather not say,” Lord Peter replied. “His safety depends upon
nobody
knowing his identity. And while I trust the discretion of you four gentlemen implicitly, it isn’t my own life I would be putting at risk. When and if the time comes that he must reveal himself, you will know.”

“Whoever he is, does he know of the threat against His Majesty?” Marquis Sherrinford asked.

“I haven’t been able to get word to him,” Lord Peter said. “So, unless he knows of it from the inside, so to speak, he doesn’t know. And if he had discovered the plot, I must assume he would have gotten word to me.”