Lessons in Enchantment Read online

  The wind seemed chillier than usual. Phoebe wrapped her arms around herself, grateful for the old coat she wore over her fraying gown. She had a little money, but living here, there was no point in flaunting the fact or wasting her meager savings. She had resisted applying at the veterinary college—called Dick’s Vet School by the locals—for fear her mother might need more funds if her consumption worsened.

  After Phoebe’s father had died, her mother had created their nest egg by selling the entire tenement building to a consortium that could manage the tenants better than she could. Malcolms had lived in the once grandiose edifice for centuries—behind the ornate facade that was currently collapsed in the street. Part of the sales agreement had given them a life estate in that flat. What would she do without it? Phoebe started to shake.

  Concentrate. Follow Piney through the dust and debris—hear a child’s whimper. Evie was alive!

  Not daring to raise anyone’s hopes, Phoebe slipped over to old Michael and gestured at his shovel. The cemetery worker frowned but signaled his younger assistant. As the crowd gathered in the street, wailing, arguing, or just gawking, Phoebe led the diggers to the farthest end of the rubble, where she sensed Piney nosing what could be the child’s skirts. She started pulling at the crumbling stones with her gloved hands, showing the men where to dig.

  These people had known her from birth. They knew her family. She didn’t have to explain herself. Men instantly followed her actions, gently pushing her aside so they could paw at the gravel and debris with their bigger, rougher hands, helping the grave diggers.

  She hadn’t realized she was crying until a wet spot dripped onto her dusty sleeve. She rubbed her eyes and cried more.

  Piney slithered out of the debris, and she gathered him up, hugging the tiny animal as the men shouted and a mat of filthy hair appeared. Hearing Evie’s whimpers, Phoebe shuddered in relief. She was no physician. She could do no more but pray.

  If she’d learned nothing else in her hard world, it was that she had to act swiftly and think later. Her life, all that she owned, was in ruins at her feet. She couldn’t stop to grieve.

  While the hysterical mother gathered up her child, Phoebe slipped Piney back into her pocket. Everything she loved and treasured—except her mother—was in that building. And her mother might die of heartbreak if she should learn they’d lost even the family portraits.

  Shivering so hard that she could barely move her feet, Phoebe crawled over the crumbled mortar and stone blocking the lane. She didn’t dare attempt to enter the tenement through the gaping front, but the rear staircase in the outside tower should still be solid, if she could reach the alley further down.

  Around her, people wept and cursed and bewailed their wretched fates. She wanted to weep with them, but she had no one to rely on but herself. Crying would not protect her books and the artwork. She’d save hysteria for later, when the impact of homelessness fully hit her. She’d sit down and have a good howl then, when there was nothing left to be done.

  She had no idea how she would cart a few centuries of belongings down three flights of crumbling stone stairs.

  She did, however, know what she had to do after she’d accomplished the impossible. She simply hated sacrificing her independence to do it.

  That produced a fresh spate of useless tears.

  Two

  Wiping the sweaty grime from her forehead, Phoebe closed the lid on a trunk holding her meager wardrobe. She’d squeezed in the cloth rabbit her father had given her as a child and the ink sketch of her mother and as many small items as she could manage, but she couldn’t afford to be too sentimental.

  She was relieved that her mother had the cottage in the south of France so she needn’t see this. Phoebe wanted her mother to get well and come home—but not just yet, please.

  She looked around through a blur of tears. The mahogany inlaid vanity was covered in dust and debris. The Chippendale chairs she’d always hoped to have re-upholstered were buried in rubble. Portraits of noble ancestors. . . she’d saved the best. Grief gnawed at her middle more than hunger.

  And the worst was yet to come. She mentally berated herself for thinking like that. At least she had a place to turn, hat in hand. Most of her neighbors did not.

  As the laborers gathered to haul the last of her boxes down, she gestured at several lifetimes of family belongings and told the men to help themselves in payment for their work. The place would be scavenged by daybreak in any case. Her boxes of books, artwork, the family silver, and her mother’s wedding china were in the cart already.

  Back in the street, she paid the carter and his ancient mule with a beautiful pewter oil lamp.

  Using an almost-clean handkerchief to smudge the dust from her face, Phoebe took one last glance at her home. Raven circled overhead, hunting for new territory. She stroked Piney in her pocket, blinked back a threatened waterfall of tears, and walking beside the mule, gulped and nodded at the carter to proceed.

  She led the way from Margaret’s Wynd, down Canongate, and through a maze of backstreets to the small close near the palace where her aunts lived. Like Phoebe’s mother, her aunts had each inherited an entire building inside the medieval walls of the old town. The family had built in Edinburgh centuries ago, when the town had first started growing. Unlike her mother, who had married a handsome, courageous, and penniless earl, her aunts had married well enough to retain their neighboring townhouses.

  Over the years after their husbands passed on and Cousin Max disappeared, Lady Agnes and Lady Gertrude had remained in their gothic horrors. They’d knocked out walls and combined their two homes to form a School for Malcolms. They might as well have called it a School for Witches. Everyone who knew their family understood Malcolms weren’t normal.

  The school’s street level floor had been turned into a giant repository of books and artifacts few thieves would wish to steal. Praying there was room for her belongings, Phoebe entered the stairwell in between what had once been shops. She climbed to a brightly-painted blue door and rapped the ornate brass knocker.

  A young girl answered, bobbed a curtsey, and gestured her inside. “You’re expected, Lady Phoebe. The ladies are in the parlor.”

  She could hear the laughter of young girls in a schoolroom overhead. Still in her filth—she couldn’t exactly have changed in a building without a wall—Phoebe curtseyed to her aunts. Sitting around a parlor table with their flowered tea set and plates of crumpets, her mother’s older sisters beamed welcomingly but wisely didn’t stand to hug her.

  “Phoebe, there you are! Come sit down, child. Let the staff carry your belongings inside. We’ve cleaned a space in the library for your books while we were waiting. There’ll be room below for your boxes, but I’m afraid if you want many of your things in your room, you may not be able to turn around. We’ll leave that to you. We’re so glad you finally came to us! That building has always been a disaster waiting to happen. The mortar should have been maintained. You should have rented out that flat. You were never meant to live there!”

  This recitation bounced back and forth between her prescient aunts. They had a habit of speaking as one. Phoebe had often wondered if they read each other’s minds as well as everyone else’s. She waited patiently until they wound down before she answered.

  “You are all that is kind, my dear aunts. I shall try not to impose upon you for long. I’ve decided I must find a solicitor to demand reparations. A lifetime lease cannot be absolved simply because the owner did not maintain the structure. I need to wash before I can sit down with you. I apologize.”

  She’d learned at an early age to push past her aunts’ chatter to what she wanted or she’d go quietly mad. She was quite convinced that was why her beloved Cousin Max had taken off for darkest Africa and never returned. She loved her mother’s sisters, but they were. . . overwhelming. She curtsied again and followed a student—she was pretty sure the school didn’t have maids—to her assigned room, leaving her aunts still protesting and explaini
ng and weaving a world of their own.

  The tall, narrow townhouses were a warren of tiny rooms cut up even more as the family grew and the school expanded. The address had once been prestigious. Like much of old Edinburgh, the neighborhood had been deteriorating since the English came into power and the palace fell into disuse. At best, these days most of the area inside the city walls could be called a slum, but everyone knew her family. Phoebe had never felt threatened.

  Her aunts might not be wealthy, but they maintained their house well. The threadbare tapestries on the walls kept out the damp and cold. The thick old glass in her bedroom window was covered by heavy velvet draperies. The poster bed was laden with downy covers so only a minimum of coal would be needed in the grate on a chilly night. All in pretty shades of blue and adorned with forget-me-not prints, the bedchamber had obviously been chosen for Phoebe.

  She couldn’t stay here. She’d suffocate. She’d spent the last five years on her own, with an entire flat at her command and all of the old city as her dooryard. Under her aunts’ roof, she’d have to obey their expectations and pretend she was a proper lady, wearing corsets, crinolines, and bonnets and never going out unattended. She would fail, of course. One could not tend ailing animals in crinolines. And she’d have no place where she could tend to them. She might as well be locked inside a cage with her creatures.

  She needed a windfall to set her free, preferably one that would allow her to attend Dick’s Veterinary School. Maybe if she sued the consortium she could obtain a lump sum to pay the tuition. Then she need only find a closet somewhere to sleep.

  An elderly housekeeper and her young son carried up her clothes trunk. One of the students brought hot water. Wearily, Phoebe realized the entire day had gone by without time to eat. She hugged Piney and settled him into a dresser drawer with his box of pine branches and a dinner of berries she’d saved for him. Night was his most active time, but she didn’t know if the students would appreciate him stealing into their rooms in search of bugs and rodents.

  Changing into a gown and petticoat from her adolescence that fit a little too tightly across the bosom, she traipsed back to the parlor, where her aunts had arranged dinner.

  “I will help tutor, of course,” Phoebe announced as she spread her skirts on the faded stripes of a Regency chair. “I will gladly help with correspondence or in any other way to return your kindness in taking me in on such sudden notice.”

  Short, rotund, with her graying hair piled in loops and ribbons to better show off her enormous earrings, Aunt Agnes waved away Phoebe’s prepared speech. “I’m sure you will be an asset to our little school. But we have been talking while you dressed.”

  Aunt Gertrude nodded, her dyed black tresses bobbing precariously. Taller than her sister, she was more stout than round, and the pince-nez she wore on a chain gave her an air of authority. “We have received a request for a nanny. It’s most unusual, admittedly. In the past, we haven’t actively recruited students, but it seems our gifted family has achieved some claim to fame.”

  “Terrible, of course,” Aunt Agnes said. “Ladies should never be noticed or talked about.”

  “But we’re Malcolms,” Gertrude continued. “And people are becoming more interested in the spiritual.”

  To prevent her head from bouncing like a ball, Phoebe interrupted. “Spiritual, as in the fake clairvoyants and mediums who rob people of their money and their faith, you mean? That’s preposterous. We’re not carnival shows. We do not sell our gifts.”

  “Of course, we do, dear.” Aunt Agnes patted Phoebe’s hand. “We simply do it in a more genteel manner. Our family is our foundation, so we needn’t actually sell our gifts for money. But we do use them in various ways that enhance our fortune. You deliberately give away your gift rather than expose it to the world, but the knowledge you obtain from animals earns you the respect of your neighbors.”

  “And perhaps a little fear,” Aunt Gertrude acknowledged. “The lesser sorts do not harm you because they believe you’re a witch. Word is already spreading that you saved that little girl’s life, even though they have no inkling of how you did it. Anyone attempting to harm you would be thrashed within an inch of their lives. People are not stupid.”

  Phoebe squirmed and concentrated on her food. She was starved, after all.

  She had never wasted much time wondering how people thought of her. Her life was simply too busy taking care of her animals and her neighbors and her mother and. . .

  “But this letter offers us an opportunity to branch out,” Agatha continued.

  “It offers Phoebe an opportunity to branch out,” Gertrude corrected. “She is young. She needs to see more of the world than these crumbling walls and a past that will never be resurrected.”

  “Queen Victoria is extensively renovating Holyrood,” Phoebe argued, not wishing to be talked around. “The kirk is being rebuilt on High Street, and they’re razing entire blocks to modernize the streets. We are more than crumbling walls.”

  “We are not blind to what has become of our home. The old town is an overpopulated slum,” Gertrude said bluntly. “Poverty and disease are rampant. There are scientific reports declaring the death rates are beyond control. You have no idea what life is like outside these walls, and you need to learn.”

  Yes, she did. The new part of town had veterinary schools. Phoebe had bicycled there, studying the neat buildings with longing. She’d never seen a woman near them, and she’d lost her courage to go up and make inquiries among so many men, knowing she hadn’t the funds to pay tuition.

  But the direction of this conversation had taken an alarming turn that she must cut off at once. “My friends and family live inside these crumbling walls,” she protested. “Why would I have any interest in fancy terrace houses and parks where I don’t belong or in shops I can’t afford?”

  Or a college she couldn’t get into. . .

  Aunt Agatha produced a letter from her pocket. “Because we wish to broaden our horizons, dear. Our little school has no room to house more students. This offers us an opportunity to teach the gifted outside our limited space.”

  Phoebe scanned the small, neat lettering. The writer did not include a single flourish. Each letter was as precise as a printed book. Tedious. She frowned as she read it a second time. “He wants a nanny for his cousin’s children? And he writes to you, why?”

  “Because he recognizes our family, of course,” Gertrude said with satisfaction, raising her pince-nez and taking the document to re-read. “We have verified his credentials, naturally. Until you came along, we’ve been uncertain how to proceed.”

  “Mr. Blair is an engineer, a very wealthy one,” Agnes said. “His family is from Glasgow, but he attended the university here and has made quite a name for himself. It is a credit to his character that he took in his cousin’s children after they lost their mother.”

  “But why us?” Phoebe asked in genuine bewilderment. “There are other perfectly respectable agencies who hire out servants.”

  “His wards are gifted, dear.” Aunt Gertrude folded up the letter and regarded her with severity. “Their mother was a Malcolm descendant, although the relation to us is far in the past. Her family has recommended that the children be sent here, but they are much too young for classes.”

  Terror yawned wide as Phoebe recognized the direction of this conversation. “I am not a nanny!”

  “Of course, you’re not, dear.” Gertrude patted her hand again.

  “You’re a gifted teacher,” Agatha said complacently. “But instead of tutoring the poor in the streets, you will be teaching gifted children. Present yourself as a governess. You may tell Mr. Blair that once his wards are prepared for school, we will welcome them. Until then, they are no more than young heathens and simply not acceptable.”

  Appalled, Phoebe realized her aunts were serious. They meant to send her into the new city to mix with the elegantly garbed ladies and gentlemen of business who lived there. She wouldn’t know a single soul. Her f
reedom would vanish, and she’d be trapped like an animal in a zoo.

  That thought almost caused her to brighten. She was an animal to those staid citizens. They’d recognize that the moment she darkened their doorsteps.

  And they’d shoo her away as if she were no more than a mutt of little consequence.

  She actually smiled as she envisioned how she’d assure that outcome.

  And then she would knock on the door of Dick’s Vet School and ask if they took scholarship students.

  Three

  “You mistake me,” a plummy feminine voice declared in icy hauteur from Drew’s foyer.

  On his way up the stairs to wash before attending yet another business meeting, he hesitated. The tone was more refined than his meddling neighbor’s. Mrs. Dalrymple and her niece hadn’t returned since the hysterical screaming incident he’d blamed on a nanny afraid of mice.

  The rounded vowels continued, “I am Lady Phoebe Malcolm Duncan. I will not use the servants’ entrance.”

  Lady? Aristocrats did not darken his doorway, especially ones with the condescending speech of royalty. He had the urge to duck and run.

  The lady’s cool tones conveyed imperiousness without once raising her voice. “If this is how I am greeted, then you may tell your master that he may find someone else to educate his children.”

  Oh no, he wasn’t losing another nanny before she was even hired! He’d had to throw out the last one when he’d found her drunk in the kitchen after the episode with Clare and the ghost. He hadn’t found another since. He didn’t even know where the damned children were at the moment.

  He hastened down the stairs despite the fact that he was missing jacket and cravat and his shirt was coated in oil and his worst nightmare was at the door.