The Raven Spell (Conspiracy of Magic #1)(51)

“Right, well, I’d best be off,” said the sergeant. “The missus’ll be steaming like a kettle if I don’t get home soon.” The man winked before downing the last three inches in his mug. He swept up the two photos and tucked them away in his jacket alongside his tin of cigarettes and left.

With the bulk of his lodgings money gone, Ian was left with little option for the evening. Luckily, the good sergeant had given him the location of a nearby boardinghouse. One that might offer a valuable clue.





Chapter Nineteen


The steady clop of horses pulling carriages over the bridge from one tower to the next played like a drumbeat in the distance. Dark and silent, the moving water below made smears of the streetlight reflections illuminated on its surface. The sisters, clothed in their lace-trimmed nightgowns and black shawls, stood behind the upper parapet of the white castle, where the air, heavy with mist and the scent of coal smoke, rippled through Edwina’s hair. Grateful for her sister’s insistence they go out, she leaned her head against Mary’s shoulder.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Edwina said.

“You would live in a whitewashed house on Cricket Lane with two children running in the courtyard most like, if not for me.”

She didn’t like it when Mary made herself the martyr. Though their life was unconventional, there were times their unprecedented independence made up for every slight affixed to the wing of an arrow aimed their way. Gazing at stars in the middle of the night atop an eight-hundred-year-old castle, as the river below flowed out to sea, was a worthy-enough trade-off for a life that would likely only ever exist in a daydream.

Edwina moved to sit atop a stone crenellation, letting her bare feet dangle over the side. Mary joined her, leaning against the edge to view the tower green below.

“They died right there,” Mary said, pointing. “The pretty ladies who lost their heads.” Her eyes flitted from spot to spot, tracing the shadows of the women’s spirits as if they were fireflies. Too long dead for Edwina’s eyes, the ladies remained invisible to her, but she knew they were there, glowing like dull candlelight for her sister.

While Mary watched the dancing ladies, Edwina reached into her pocket. She couldn’t see corpse lights like her sister, but she could spot the glint of metal in the grass brighter than Venus at its zenith. She’d found a brass button, three coins, and a young lady’s locket after only one pass over the grounds. Only a night like this one, of following her nature’s true course, could have eased her heart of the bruise it had suffered from the day’s earlier disappointment.

Such lunacy to hold on to so much aching and want, only to have it answered with repulsion and rejection. Being in Ian’s company, she’d felt as if she were under a spell. Love, she’d once been warned, worked in much the same circuitous way as magic, with its enigmatic energy concentrating in the eyes of some but not others. Love was a potion as potent as hemlock or wolfsbane in the right proportion. But was it love she felt? How could it be, when she’d known the man for only two days? Rationally, the encounter was more inclined to be a matter of chemistry, the humors of one body attracted to another through some invisible mist breathed between them. A sort of temporary madness manifesting from nearness.

“Does he make your insides quiver low in the belly?” Mary glanced at her out of the side of her eye. “Is that why you can’t stop thinking about him?”

Edwina turned her head away, embarrassed that her thoughts were so plain on her face. She shook the trinkets in her palm, sifting them to test their weight and value, as if she hadn’t been thinking of Ian at all. “None of that matters anymore.” To prove she had more pressing things on her mind, she held up the locket. “I might have the perfect chain for this back at the shop.”

Mary retreated from the edge and caught Edwina’s eye. “Lie to the rest of the world if you like, but not to me.” Not waiting for a rejoinder, Mary climbed on top of the crenellations. Slanted like a roof, the capstones were slick with mist. Anyone else would slip from the stone and fall to the earth below, where the queenly ladies pranced in deathly shadows. Yet Mary skipped along the ancient battlements like a girl playing at hopscotch. “He lopped their heads off as if they were dandelions,” she said, speaking of the old king with the sharp ax. “Out with the old wife, in with the new. Men can be fickle fiends.”

“I need to get back,” Edwina said. “The tide’s receding, and I’d like to skim over the shore once before the shop opens.”

Mary looked over her shoulder at her. “Suit yourself. I’m going to stretch a little more.”

There had been a time they’d done everything in twin-esque syncopation, but ever since the move to the city, the tiniest of fissures had begun fragmenting between them into verifiable cracks. Perhaps it was a matter of course for two young women forced to find their wings in the world. They couldn’t cling to their childhood inclinations forever. Even so, the tiny places where their differences had found space to splinter apart had worried Edwina of late. The freedom they felt in the middle of the night above the rest of the world was one thing, but too much independence in a young woman on the ground could lead to unspeakable trouble. She hoped Mary had enough sense to recognize her limits as she waved and said she would meet Edwina back home.

Two hours later, Edwina stood alone on the foreshore. The river, as ever, slithered by on its stomach in search of more shoreline to consume. The constant flow of water churned up pieces of the past as easily as it swallowed down chunks of the present, burying everything in layers of mud and sludge. Everything eventually fell to the river in the end.