Whisper of Magic Read online

  WHISPER OF MAGIC

  Unexpected Magic, Book 2

  Patricia Rice

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  May 31, 2016

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-586-1

  Copyright © 2016 Patricia Rice

  Author’s Note

  Those of you familiar with my magical Malcolms and scientific Ives know that I’m playing with possibilities more than I’m using magic. Centuries ago, flying machines would have been magic and a scientific impossibility. Today, we know they aren’t magic at all.

  Of course, since I’m not dealing with fantasy magic but elements of humanity, what my protagonists are really learning is to use what they are given for the betterment of all—a lesson we should all take to heart.

  So in Erran’s book, I’m playing with the possibility of levitation—a psychic gift reported by spiritualists over the centuries and even in the Bible. I’m also flirting with persuasion and Mesmerism—persuasive voices have long been the basis for the success of everyone from snake oil salesmen to politicians. Why else would perfectly sane people do exactly what a particularly eloquent speaker tells them to do, even though they ought to know better?

  So as Hamlet says: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. —Hamlet (1.5.167-8)

  One

  June 1830

  Lord Erran Ives, barrister, glanced back at his client’s shadow of a wife. The babe in her lap sucked at its fist, but even he could tell the child was ill, and the children sitting quietly beside them were undernourished. The family shouldn’t even be here, but they had nowhere else to go. His sense of injustice burned like a flame in his chest as he waited for the other barrister to finish speaking.

  Once it was his turn, incensed by the half asleep judge’s inattention to a poor family’s welfare, Erran drew himself up to his full intimidating height and released his outrage in his closing statement. “To allow the monstrous greed of the defendant to deprive a hardworking man and his family the roof over their heads is an injustice so foul that all Britain must stand and cry for reparations!”

  As if in agreement with this impassioned speech, a gavel rose and banged against the bench—startling the half-asleep judge whose hand wasn’t on it. The judge jerked awake and stared in astonishment as the gavel flew from the bench and slammed to the floor.

  Hiding his puzzlement at this bizarre flight, knowing he’d indulged in unseemly theatrics, Erran tightened his jaw and squared his shoulders for the scolding to come. He’d be lucky he wasn’t thrown out of the courtroom on his first case.

  Behind Erran, the baby howled and the crowd awoke, first with a low grumble, and then with increasingly agitated murmurs of “He’s right!” and “ Hang all landlords!”

  Surreptitiously studying the now inert hammer on the floor while he waited for the judge to establish order, Erran let his mechanic’s mind calculate the possibility of his shouts vibrating the bench enough to bounce off inanimate objects.

  Instead of quieting at the judge and clerk’s commands, the audience started stomping and chanting louder. They’d found a rhythm in a word Erran couldn’t quite discern.

  Wondering what fresh nightmare this was, he refrained from glancing over his shoulder again or he would most likely blow a gasket. Were they chanting at him? Why?

  Prepared to face his punishment, Erran focused on the bench. His head itched beneath his newly-acquired wig. Swallowing a lump in his throat, he squared his shoulders and stiffened his spine. He hadn’t the wherewithal to fix his clients’ problem on his own. The court was their only resource. If Erran lost his plea, the man, his ill wife, and their three very young children would be on the streets.

  He had been their only hope. Now he would be their undoing.

  The judge nodded in what appeared to be approval.

  Disconcerted, Erran lurched back from his self-flagellation. What did that nod mean? Why wasn’t the judge shouting at the bailiffs to haul the noisemakers from his courtroom? Or throwing Erran out for inciting a riot?

  Beside Erran, his normally apathetic clerk embraced their openly weeping client. What the deuce?

  Erran regretted becoming more heated than was suitable for a courtroom, but he certainly hadn’t said anything new or different to make grown men weep. Everyone despised greedy landlords. No one ever did anything about them. They were part of the landscape like sky and trees. Why tears and sympathy for stating a basic fact?

  While waiting for the axe to fall—or another gavel—he finally sorted out what the crowd chanted: Reparations, reparations!

  The half-asleep audience had picked up on his speech? Erran had observed a lot of cases in his years of study. He had never seen or heard anything of this sort. He glanced across the aisle. His client’s criminally abusive landlord and his solicitor were conversing nervously.

  What the devil was going on? His stomach clenched and his throat locked. If the judge didn’t act soon, Erran thought he might collapse in a puddle of sweat. And the mob behind him was likely to take the courtroom apart.

  The audience continued stomping and shouting, while the bailiffs did nothing and one of the new policemen ran in from the street, looking confused at the hubble-bubble.

  The judge was going to throw him in jail and leave him to rot. His brothers probably wouldn’t miss him for a year or two if he ended up in chains.

  He’d told them to cry for reparations—and they’d obeyed. Why?

  With no gavel to restore order, the judge finally shouted, “Let the court record state that Mr. Silas Greene must forfeit the entirety of the building at 16 Foxcroft to Mr. Charles Moore and his family in perpetuity. And if said Mr. Greene should ever face this court again, he shall be fined every cent in his possession. Court adjourned.”

  The crowd roared jubilantly, threatening to bring down the rafters from the vibrations.

  “What does that mean?” Mr. Moore asked anxiously, wiping at his eyes.

  “That the whole damned world has gone insane,” Erran replied, but the noise was too loud for his client to hear, although his clerk sent him a strange look.

  “You’re possessed of the devil,” Silas Greene, the landlord, snarled as he passed their table.

  The devil, what a load of crockery . . .

  Appalled, Erran shuddered as he recalled that term applied to his Cousin Sylvester—the Ives with a silver tongue who’d repeatedly sold fraudulent investments until forced to escape to the Americas. This wasn’t the same at all, he told himself. He had right on his side.

  It was just rare for right to triumph over wrong. And for gavels to fly, but that had to be a coincidence of vibrations and atmosphere. Devils did not exist.

  Uneasy, but refusing to accept evil as an explanation of how an honorable suit over an eviction had become a triumphant melee, Erran stalked out of the chambers, discarding his robe and wig into the hands of his clerk before he escaped from the building.

  “The house is mine?” Following in his wake, timid Mr. Moore stumbled in confusion as they reached the less noisy street. The Moore family huddled together, confused and waiting to be told what to do.

  “The house is yours,” Erran agreed, not believing it either. “The clerks will draw up the papers and deliver them on the morrow. Tell your wife she may move out of your employer’s cellar and back home.”

  Moore was weeping again, this time in apparent relief as he gave his family the verdict even Erran hadn’t expected.

  Granted, the landlord had been a greedy bastard who’d thrown the young family out when offered twice the rent by a neighboring merchant—but that was business as usual for London. Erran had simply taken the case to practice in a real courtroom now that he’d p
assed the bar.

  He’d shouted at a judge, and instead of rightfully being thrown out on his noggin—he’d won the case in spectacular fashion.

  The cloud darkening the previously bright summer day seemed an ominous portent.

  A crowd of his fellows swarmed up to congratulate him, and Erran tried to shake off his apprehension. Jestingly, letting himself be momentarily buoyed by triumph, he climbed up on a mounting block and made a grandiose gesture. “All bow before your new lord and master!”

  His jaw dropped as his fellow students, clerks, and friends removed their tall hats and bent in half before him.

  Worse, everyone on the crowded street—businessmen, urchins, and timid Mr. Moore—all performed awkward gestures of obeisance. And looked extremely confused a moment later after Erran jumped from his pedestal and fled into the nearest tavern.

  September 1830

  Hunting for dry ground for his polished Wellingtons, Erran didn’t see the mud ball until it knocked his black beaver hat into a puddle. Bloody hell. Erran stalked into the mews in pursuit of the miscreants while his ten-year-old nephew Hartley Ives-Weldon ran to rescue the expensive D’Orsay.

  These days, Erran kept his formidable voice to himself, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have fists to shake a few louts into next week. In the narrow mews, he caught sight of the troublemakers taunting a slender woman striding through the rutted mud. Realizing his hat hadn’t been their intended victim didn’t quell his temper. More mud splattered the woman’s long black wool cloak and hood as she marched toward the reprobates without flinching.

  Abandoning his nephew, Erran ran after her, hoping to scare the ruffians off with his greater size. He despised his preposterous delusions about his voice, but he was taking no chances in a public venue. To this day, most of his friends steered clear of him.

  And once he’d returned to his senses, the judge had banned him from his courtroom.

  “You will take your mud balls and run or the wrath of all the gods will rain upon your unworthy heads.” The woman berated her mockers in mellifluous accents that sounded more like song than curses.

  The beauty of her voice almost made up for the damage to his new hat.

  The rain of rocks and mud balls abruptly ceased. Stunned, Erran watched as the lads vanished into doorways and alleys—terrified by a song?

  Apparently unsurprised by their retreat, the woman opened a service gate into the yard of one of the substantial houses lining the left side of the alley. Erran strained to catch a better look at the producer of such a marvelous sound, but she didn’t turn around. Instead, she slipped into the yard beyond the gate and shut the panel firmly.

  Realizing what gate she’d just used—Erran would have flung his hat in a puddle again, if he’d been wearing it.

  Bloody damn hell—he’d been trying to get into that house for a week. No one ever answered the door. He’d thought no one was home.

  “Miss!” he called over solid English oak topped by wrought iron. He had learned to modulate his voice, but making it carry would require shouting if she got too far away. “Miss, if I might speak with you!”

  For a moment, the black cloak hesitated. A head turned, and over the top of the gate, he caught a glimpse of an oval face tinted by the rich hues of a tropical sun, long black lashes, and a frown. Then she hastened her pace and vanished behind a hedge of greenery.

  “Drat.” Erran rubbed at the soiled hat that Hartley handed him, rattled the barred gate, and kicked an errant stone.

  Not tall enough to see over the panel, Hartley tried to peer between the cracks. “Why were they throwing rocks at her?”

  “It’s a puzzlement,” Erran said, scowling at the damage to his boots. “I’ve not seen so much as a ghost in the place all week. At least we now know there are servants in there, even if they don’t answer the door.”

  Even as he said that, Erran wasn’t convinced he hadn’t seen a ghost. She had glided with the elegant grace of a lady, head high, steps delicate, skirts swaying with expensive layers of petticoats. But no lady would have brown skin, wear an ugly black cloak, or use the servants’ entrance. It was all a puzzlement.

  It was his own damned house he was trying to get into.

  His whole accursed life had become a mystery, even to him. He blamed his brother Theo for marrying a witch—although Lady Aster had merely been a thorn in their collective sides at the time the courtroom incident had happened.

  Her family research had simply prompted the notion of inheriting the bad strains of prior generations. Just because Cousin Sylvester had persuaded thousands of pounds out of the hands of wealthy investors didn’t mean Erran had inherited his relation’s deceitful streak. Erran considered himself to be a man of education and science, not a superstitious peasant—or a thief.

  But with judges unwilling to take his cases, he was an unemployed man of education.

  “How will we get the house back for Papa if we can’t move out the tenants?” Hartley inquired anxiously. Hartley was the worrier of Ashford’s illegitimate twins. The catastrophic summer had turned the boy’s usual cheerful smile upside-down as the weeks passed and it became evident his father would never be the same. “We’ll never persuade him into town otherwise.”

  Erran had his doubts that they’d persuade the marquess to town even if they gained the townhouse, but the family home was the only suggestion his newly-blind brother had shown an interest in. It should have been a simple task to find the tenants new accommodations and help them to move out. Unfortunately, the tenants had proved remarkably unavailable for moving.

  Legally and morally, he could do nothing to evict them. The tenants had a proper, paid contract and no obligation to open their doors to him. He had been hoping to persuade them by offering a better house in recompense. He might have more success battering down doors, but that would make him as reprehensible as the landlord he’d taken to court.

  These days, he was working hard to stick to a moral, as well as a legal, high ground, in hopes he would one day be employable again. Being arrested for battering down his own family’s door would set tongues clacking and guarantee disbarment.

  “It’s time to make more inquiries,” Erran concluded, steering his nephew toward the tavern now occupying the former stable.

  In this street just off St. James Square, the once formidable stone and granite mansions built in the prior century were showing signs of deterioration. Many had been subdivided and turned into shops and taverns or bachelor flats. The Ives town house, however, remained a solid square occupying the entire space between the street and the mews.

  “Hunt down those ruffians and find out why they’re throwing stones at our tenants’ servants,” Erran ordered. “I’ll be in the tavern making inquiries. Don’t take too long. We have to return for dinner at Theo’s.”

  Obediently, Hartley ran off to find the neighbor lads. That there were vast differences in their stations didn’t occur to the son of an actress and a marquess. Well, for all Erran knew, the ragged ruffians could have been the bastard sons of dukes. The Crown owned half the property around here.

  He entered the smoke-filled dark room to put his lawyerly skills to work—praying he would have no use for the dangerous Courtroom Voice that had caused him to lose his profession and question his sanity.

  ***

  Celeste Malcolm Rochester removed her muddied cloak with a trembling hand and hung it on a hook by the back door. She’d had enough experience at these misadventures lately that she no longer collapsed beside the door, shaking and crying. She’d learned to take deep breaths and go on.

  But the gentleman—he was a new development, and he’d rattled her badly. His mellow baritone had promised a security she hadn’t known since they arrived in London—which was entirely ridiculous. She hurried up the stairs to find a window overlooking the mews. Rubbing her elbows, trying to calm herself, she peered through a gap in the drapery.

  The formidable gentleman who had followed her wore a fashionable gray
frock coat, the kind with a redingote collar. He’d topped it with a handsome black muffler and held an expensive tall hat. He was no ruffian, although she questioned the origin of the child to whom he was speaking. Were they the instigators of these episodes?

  The boy ran off while the gentleman studied the windows where she stood. Dark curls and slight sideburns framed an arrogantly square jaw and high cheekbones, before he slammed the muddy hat back on his head and retreated to the tavern, out of her sight.

  “Why do they hate us?” she asked, attempting to expel her fear and despair. “We have harmed no one.”

  “People fear what they do not know,” her African nanny said prosaically, glancing up to verify Celeste was unharmed, then returning to pedaling the machine they’d brought with them.

  Nana Delphinia had been with them for as long as Celeste could remember. The older woman had loyally accompanied them to London, leaving behind her own grown children in the process. Therein lay the true tragedy of their lives, and another reason Celeste spent her sleepless nights in tears.

  Their faithful servant’s hair was turning gray, and lines of worry marred her face, but Nana had lost none of her strength of character. “What happened this time?”

  “They’ve escalated to mud flinging. I’ll have to scrape my cloak once it dries. I’m not certain what the gentleman had to do with the attack, if anything.” Celeste dropped the old velvet panel back in place. “If he’s a solicitor, he’s more elegant than the others they’ve sent. I may actually have to talk to him.”

  Celeste’s younger sister hurried to look and frowned at seeing only the empty alley.

  Her younger brother glanced up from his schoolbook with alarm. “Unless we’ve miraculously found the coin to hire a solicitor of our own, talking to him isn’t wise,” Trevor counseled. At seventeen, he was the image of his great-grandfather in the portraits their great-grandmother had painted—tall, dark-haired, brown-skinned, and handsome, now that he was growing into his bones.

  “The lease is ours,” Celeste assured him, trying to convince herself. If they lost the roof over their heads along with everything else, she didn’t know what she would do. “They can’t take away our home. We’ll have a solicitor of our own soon enough. I have a new order for shirts. Sewing in the pleat has proved popular. Young gentlemen lack servants who can wield crimping irons.”