A Scandal in Battersea (Elemental Masters #12)(12)

I need a better source of power.

The idea seemed to come into his head from out of nowhere, although now that he’d had the thought, it seemed so blindingly obvious he was amazed he hadn’t thought of it before.

He knew all about using himself as a source of power, that was the first thing the book had taught him. The second thing it taught him was how to siphon power away from others. But the kind of people he could get drunk enough that they did not notice him performing incantations over them were not the sort that offered him a great deal of power, so mostly he had been limited to himself.

But what if there was a better way? He had not been paying a great deal of attention to the content of the pages he had been sorting through—just enough, really, to make sure he was getting them in order—but now that he thought about it, the obtaining of vast quantities of magical power had been a theme running through them.

For a moment he was galvanized by the thought. But his bed was warm and the sitting room was undoubtedly cold by now, and he could not quite muster the energy to go and look through it properly, peering at the crabbed writing in lamplight. It could wait until tomorrow. It wasn’t as if the book would be gone in the morning.

But what if he had been drawn to this book, as he had been drawn to the first book that started him down the road to occult power? It made sense. He had always had the feeling that there was some greater destiny in store for him than anything his background would allow, and that he had to break free of it in order to achieve that destiny.

For a moment, it also occurred to him that this book, and even the first one, could have been some sort of baited trap—

But what would be the purpose of such a thing? It wasn’t as if the authors were still alive to profit by trapping him.

Don’t get your hopes too high, he reminded himself, as the urge to rise and try to make sense of the book took hold of him again. Not everything old and handwritten is valuable.

That was enough to send him back to his novel, and after a moment, a glass of whiskey he poured from the bottle he kept at his bedside. Eventually the whiskey did its work; he turned down the lamp and went to sleep—to dream of sitting on a throne-like chair with the Elemental Masters of the London White Lodge serving him like slaves.





3





NAN bundled herself into her sable cloak; Sarah was all ready to go. “I’m sorry to drag you out into the snow like this,” John Watson said apologetically, as he held the door of their flat open for them. “But one of my medical colleagues who knows that I am not inclined to dismiss the outré as mere faradiddle sent me a message last night. He has a patient he thinks might be something other than mad, and last night she took a bad turn. He doesn’t know what to make of it.”

“And he thinks we might,” Sarah stated, preceding him down the stairs to the front door. “Well, Mrs. Horace has Suki all day; Suki is going to learn how to make gingerbread and how to set a proper tea tray, serve, and pour, and they’re making Christmas decorations as well. I’ll just pop my head in her door and make sure it’s all right if we leave for a few hours.”

Nan made sure the birds were going to be warm and safe while they were gone; this did not seem to be the sort of situation where they were going to be needed. By the time she came down the stairs, it appeared that Sarah had already confirmed with their landlady that Suki could remain with her until their return. Sarah was waiting at the door, next to John Watson. “I hope you got a conveyance of some sort,” she said to the doctor. “Getting anything big enough for all of us in this weather—”

“Mary is waiting in the growler outside,” John replied reassuringly. “We’ll be going almost all the way to Hampstead Heath. I’ve made sure the cabby will wait for us; I don’t fancy trying to get another way back.”

Sure enough, waiting outside the door was one of the larger cabs, a two-horse “growler” that could seat four in spread-out comfort—or more at a pinch. Nan had no idea how John had managed to get one in the first place; they were usually all pulled up at the railway stations or major hotels to convey passengers and baggage.

Mrs. Horace must have paid a street-sweeper to clean the snow off this morning; the street and sidewalk in front of the building were both clean. At least they could go dry-footed to the cab.

The girls took the rear-facing seats; neither of them had ever had any problem with riding backward. John got in beside his wife and banged on the roof of the cab with his walking stick, and the cab lurched into motion. “Here is what I have,” John said, taking a small sheaf of paper from his pocket and unfolding it. “This patient was consigned to our care by family. I was told, and the patient confirmed, that she had asked for consignment, due to increasing hallucinations. Patient appeared rational, and was intelligent, articulate, calm, and able to reason. Three days after consignment to our care, patient was struck with an apparent fit, during which she remained rigid and unresponsive, although she spoke during this fit, and described a scene of great tragedy in minute detail. I had the presence of mind to take down her words in shorthand. On recovering from this fit, she was in great distress, not only on account of her emotional reaction to the scene she had described, but because of succumbing to the fit itself. I had cause to be grateful I had taken down her words, because not two days later, an acquaintance of mine who happens to work as a London coroner described a pair of bodies brought in to him in a pitiable state that exactly matched the murders my patient had described. Nor could she have known of this from newspapers; the crime must have taken place even as she fell into her fit, at least according to my friend’s judgment of the time of death. Over the succeeding months, this happened again and again; she would fall into one of these fits, describe an horrific crime, and I would later find she had described something that had actually taken place in London or its environs. I began to see a pattern; the victims were all innocent, often lower-class children, and the murders were unsolved and particularly heinous. No one had ever bothered to verify her visions before. I did my best to reassure the poor woman, and it did come as partial relief for her to discover she was not mad, but what could we do? We could not pass on pertinent information to the police for how would we explain where our information came from? At length, with her consent, I began experimenting with drugs to attempt to suppress these visions, since there was nothing we could do with them. I seemed to be having success until two days ago, when she was found in her room in a state of collapse and utter terror. She has not slept since. I then confessed what I had been doing to my friend the coroner, who listened with every evidence of belief, then suggested I contact you, with whom I have a speaking acquaintance. I pray if you can help, please come at once.”