Death by Silver Read online

  Instead there was no reaction at all. The most common curses were laid down using some version of the word for “bring” in connection with some specified form of ill-luck. Adding “light” should have made at least a momentary flicker of light play across the surface of the platter. The next most common ones used “remove,” or “darken;” he carried lucifer matches in his case, but there was a convenient sunbeam slanting across the table, and he tilted the tray into the sun while sketching “light” once more.

  The light thrown off by the tray didn’t falter. The next of the standard tests switched tactics, testing for a limiting factor. A malediction was most usually limited to a particular set of objects, to things residing under a particular roof, or by family blood. “Silver,” in this case, which wasn’t particularly useful, or “house,” or “blood.”

  He glanced at Nevett, who could at least be a source of useful information if he insisted on hovering. “Did your wife bring any silver into the house when you married? Anything not bought as a wedding present, but perhaps part of a dowry, or a gift to her as a child?”

  “I expect so,” Nevett said. “I didn’t pay much attention.”

  Ned doubted that – the collection of silver in front of him hardly looked like one assembled by a man who didn’t know or cared what he owned – but there was no sense in arguing about it. “No reason to, I’m sure,” he said easily. “And what was her maiden name?”

  “Her people are Winchesters,” Nevett said. He frowned, looking genuinely troubled for the first time. “What are you implying?”

  “If there is a curse on the silver, it’s possible it came through a piece that was in Mrs Nevett’s family. It probably wouldn’t be anything she was aware of, perhaps not even something that was a problem while the silver was in its original home. Some things take badly to being moved.”

  “But it’s not that she’s done something to the silver herself.”

  “Certainly not,” Ned said. The last thing he needed was for Nevett to decide that he was insulting his wife.

  Nevett made a non-committal noise, but seemed mollified, and Ned returned to looking through the pieces for something with a lid. Thankfully, not many of the pieces seemed to have been enchanted at their manufacture, which would have confused the issue considerably. He found a salt cellar with a lid, set it deliberately ajar, and then sketched the fish-hook sigil for “close” without adding a specifier. If the enchantment had been build around “in this house” or “under this roof,” the combination would have formed close all under this roof, which tended to show its effects even through a variety of cluttering prior sigils.

  The silver lid didn’t twitch. He added the sigil for “roof” himself, and watched the lid snap shut, feeling the light flutter of effort deep in his vitals, not strong enough to make him catch his breath, but definitely a perceptible expenditure of energy. That was all his own doing, not prompted by any residual energy in the salt cellar.

  The blood of the family might have been specified instead. The easiest test for that would have required piercing Nevett’s thumb, and Ned didn’t feel he’d ingratiate himself that way. There were some of his clients who were pleased by the hoariest traditional methods, the bloodier and more gruesome the better, but he doubted Nevett was one of them.

  Instead he ran through a number of sigils that should have reacted with “blood,” with no result. He tipped the platter up so that its reflected light played across the wall, and tried “yourself”; in combination with any enchantment relying on “name,” it should have reflected back the sigil “name” in response, at least as a momentary flicker of light.

  Say your name, he remembered the prefects demanding in school, to which the answer was properly name, sir, not actually saying your name, unless you were asked “What are you called?” Julian had pointed out in scathing tones at one point that that particular piece of the Canon had clearly once been “Name yourself,” and that generations of Toms’ students apparently hadn’t been clever enough to repair someone’s long-ago slip of the tongue.

  As Ned recalled, he’d pointed it out in the presence of one of the school prefects, and been sorry for it afterwards, as much as Julian was ever sorry for such things. Ned had pointed out that generations of Toms’ students probably hadn’t felt it worth being beaten to contradict Senior Men about school tradition, but Julian hadn’t seemed satisfied with that answer.

  He brought himself back to the present with an effort, startled and annoyed by how easily distracted he was at the moment by memories of school days. He’d put away boyhood feuds long ago, or at least so he would have said, and it irritated him that having dealings with Victor Nevett even second-hand seemed to be putting his every nerve on edge.

  He ran through the rest of the standard tests for curses proper, and then set himself to the more tedious task of testing to see if any of the individual pieces were enchanted in any troublesome way. For that he did bring out pencil and paper, neatly and quickly constructing Agrippa’s squares through the square of the Moon, which was nine by nine and required careful penmanship to fit in its place on the page.

  It was a couple of hours of tedious work, and Nevett eventually grew bored enough to leave him to it, which was welcome. He reached the end of the tests for enchantments constructed by the Moon without a single speck of evidence that there was anything wrong with the silver in front of him at all. He’d found nothing more sinister than a couple of pieces glamored not to tarnish, a springless silver clock that relied on magic to tell the time, and one shoddy jam pot with a lid that snapped itself shut hard enough to pinch unwary fingers when the spoon was withdrawn.

  “There’s no sign of a curse as such,” he said the next time he looked up to see Nevett hovering in the doorway. As he suspected, the man looked a bit disappointed. A family curse on the silver was the sort of affliction suffered by the best families, and might have gone some distance to discourage burglars as well. “However, to be entirely certain that there aren’t any lingering malevolent influences, I think it’s best to perform a cleansing on the silver.”

  “Very well,” Nevett said, looking a little brighter. “None of that nonsense about burying it in the garden, though, with someone having to guard it night and day.”

  “No, that’s entirely unnecessary nowadays,” Ned said. It hadn’t been strictly necessary in his predecessor’s time either, but clients then had liked considerably more theater, and it had been a way of getting them to let their things alone while slow-working cleansings took effect. He took advantage of his pencil sketches to construct the cleansing that he intended to use on the square of the Moon, better and more effective for the purpose if more complex.

  He traced the sigils once he’d worked them out, a cleansing extending to all pieces of silver under the roof or owned by anyone who lived there, to remove metaphysical words – he’d botched that one as to remove words by metaphysics once at Oxford, scrambling the grammar and feeding it far too much nervous energy into the bargain, and had scoured the engraving from his tutor’s pocket watch. He’d felt wretched about it at the time, although in retrospect he felt that anyone letting undergraduate metaphysicists practice on his prized possessions deserved to get them back in multiple smoking pieces.

  All he was likely doing was removing the sigils he’d left through his own experimental work, lightly enough applied that they would fade soon enough anyway, but it was worth cleaning up the mess he’d made. He made a more theatrical production of it for Nevett’s sake, tracing the sigils with sweeping gestures and adding “light” in the proper grammatical place to make the final lines blaze briefly like trails of flame through the air before they faded away.

  “That should do it,” he said. “No cursework, enchantments, or malevolent energies will have survived that.” He’d also put a good shine on the pieces that needed polishing, which he hoped would lighten the spirits of the domestic staff entrusted with their care enough for them to declare that they felt a perceptible differ
ence. “If you have any further trouble, don’t hesitate to call me in.”

  “I’ll do that,” Nevett said. “About your bill, now…”

  “I’ll have it sent round,” Ned said. He hoped he wouldn’t have to badger Nevett to pay it. There were too many of his clients who seemed to feel that a young man just starting out in the profession ought to be grateful for the experience, and it wouldn’t make him look any better to point out to them that he’d borrowed heavily to buy the practice and that the expenses of establishing it weren’t light.

  “I’ll let you know if I have any more trouble of this sort,” Nevett said.

  “I hope you will,” Ned said, because a client was a client, even one who wanted a metaphysician because consulting one was in fashion. He repacked his bag and reclaimed his hat in the hall from the scrubbed little parlormaid who’d let him in. He smiled thanks and escaped out into the street without asking them to call him a cab; despite every effort to banish his unsettled mood, he hadn’t felt like lingering.

  What he ought to do was go back to his consulting-room at the Commons, see if any other clients had presented themselves, and get Miss Frost to promptly send out a bill. What he wanted to do was go round to Julian’s for a late tea, or if Julian didn’t see the point in tea at this hour, for a drink and the chance to complain a bit about impossible clients.

  He whistled for a cab, using the patent cab-whistle he usually didn’t bother with, enchanted to make a tremendous amount of noise for its size; by the time one extricated itself from traffic and came rattling to a stop at the curb, he’d wrestled with temptation and decided to give into it. He gave the cabman the address and climbed into the cab.

  “The detective, or the dentist?” the cabman asked. Ned supposed that most people wanting to be taken to the boarding house where Julian lodged in the middle of the afternoon wanted one or the other, as Julian Lynes and an elderly dentist were the only lodgers who used their parlors as consulting-rooms.

  “The detective,” Ned said, and settled back as the cabman urged his horse back into traffic without another word.

  Julian Lynes propped his feet unpardonably on his landlady’s recently polished fender, and reached for the last tea sandwich. Mrs Digby was saving with the butter, but the cheese was thickly sliced, and he felt he probably shouldn’t complain, considering how erratic his hours had been for the last week or so. He’d almost finished the tea as well, but at least he could make another pot if he wanted to go to the trouble. It was hot enough today, however, that he thought he might send young Digby to the local for a pitcher of beer instead.

  He stuffed the last of the sandwich into his mouth and folded back the pages of his afternoon paper to the agony column, scanning the advertisements for any items of interest. Booth and Burch were once again offering a selection of devices, metaphysical and electrical, guaranteed to improve virility and impede baldness; there was a second, smaller advertisement from the same firm offering relief from awkward congestion and other women’s troubles. Julian grinned in spite of himself, but it was highly unlikely that any of Burch’s products would result in business for himself. Though if it did – he shook the thought away. If it did, it would probably be blackmail rather than anything amusing.

  He skimmed down the rest of the page, noting the usual offers for Sibley’s Patent Squares, guaranteed to resolve most common metaphysical problems without the expense of consultation, and Johns’s Powders – which were going to bring him business one of these days, if old Mr Johns didn’t pay more attention to what young Mr Johns was doing to save money. Multiple appeals to strayed spouses, wives as usual outnumbering husbands; a mother in search of a missing son; the usual elderly gentlemen in need of gentle companions; and, more promisingly, four inserts that were little more than strings of numbers and letters. He poured himself the last of the tea, thick and stewed and tepid, and settled to work them out.

  They were all simple substitution ciphers, two from star-crossed lovers, one probably from a fence, and the fourth merely spelling out Corinth followed by the number 5. He stared at that one, frowning slightly. The only thing that occurred to him was a biblical reference, but it didn’t seem worth the effort to look it up, at least not without more context. Instead, he refolded the paper and set it carefully on top of the other papers piled on the side table, and swallowed the rest of the bitter, lukewarm tea. He wondered if it was too late to tell Mrs Digby he’d be dining in his rooms

  Before he had decided, there was a knock at the door, and he glanced at the clock on the narrow mantel. It was a bit late for a client, surely – but he certainly wasn’t going to turn anyone away on those grounds. “Yes?”

  “Telegram, Mr Lynes.” That was young Digby’s familiar treble. “And the boy’s waiting.”

  Julian swung his feet off the fender. A telegram might actually mean employment, which was always a good thing. “Bring it in.”

  The door swung open, and young Digby stood aside to let an older boy in a messenger’s uniform into the parlor. Julian slit the envelope, excitement fading to resignation as he read the message.

  Confirm appointment for Friday next. Problem continues. Will explain on arrival. Wynchcombe.

  It really shouldn’t need much more explanation, Julian thought. Albert Wynchcombe had already sent a long letter laying out his worries about the possible theft of the design for his father-in-law’s latest automaton. Unless there was something Albert hadn’t wanted to put in writing, which seemed to be true of most of Julian’s clients, even when they were old friends from school.

  He pushed himself up out of his chair, and went across to his desk, pushing aside the usual litter to clear a space for the reply form. He unstoppered the inkwell, wrote “Appointment confirmed” in the space provided, and handed it back to the hovering messenger. The boy glanced quickly at the slip, and tucked it into his pocket. Julian reached into his own pocket, came up with sixpence and a couple of pennies for the tip and handed them over. The messenger pocketed them as well, touched his cap, and turned away. Young Digby started to follow, and Julian said, “Harry.”

  “Mr Lynes?” The younger boy turned in the doorway. One side of his face was definitely swollen, a knob protruding from his cheek as though he’d tucked a sweet there.

  “Mr Bailey is just upstairs,” Julian said. “Why don’t you have that tooth drawn?”

  Harry shifted from foot to foot. “Mother doesn’t want me to.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Couldn’t you do something, Mr Lynes?” The boy touched his face and winced. “I mean, some hocus or something, so it wouldn’t hurt?”

  “It wouldn’t be any better than laudanum,” Julian answered. “ Have it pulled.”

  “Have you ever had a tooth pulled?”

  “Yes.” That had been at school, sent into the village under the escort of a bored prefect, who’d threatened him with a beating if he cried. The dentist had been old and neither he not his parlor had been very clean, but he’d sent him home with a vial of laudanum and that, at least, had saved him the beating.

  “Did it hurt?” Harry’s face crumpled in embarrassment and pain, and Julian sighed. He supposed he ought to lie, tell the boy that Bailey was a painless dentist or some such, but it didn’t seem right.

  “Fiercely. But it hurts you now and once the tooth was gone…”

  Harry didn’t look convinced.

  “See Mr Bailey,” Julian said again.

  Young Digby made a non-committal noise and let himself out.

  Julian swore under his breath. He’d forgotten to ask about supper, and it was almost certainly too late now. And that meant either an indifferent meal at the local or walking to Blanding’s by the Commons. It was a long walk, especially in this heat, but there was at least a decent chance he’d see Ned at the end of it. He probably oughtn’t allow that to brighten his day as much as it did, but there was no real help for it.

  He glanced around the familiar clutter, trying to decide it if was too early an
d, if so, what he should work on next. He really had no cases in hand at the moment, though his last had been lucrative enough that he didn’t need to worry about fees. Perhaps he should try to finish the most recent issue of The Metaphysicist, though the only thing in it of actual interest was an on-going debate about whether the use of irrational numbers in magic squares was non-conforming magic.

  The bell jangled at the front door, and he went to his window, peering out just as a cab pulled away from the curb. A client, then, either for him or Bailey, and he swept the most recent Newgate Calendar off the chair he kept for clients. There wasn’t time to start more tea, but it was a little late for that anyway. He heard footsteps on the stair, and then young Digby knocked at his door.

  “Mr Lynes, it’s Mr Mathey.”

  “Come in,” Julian called, and the door swung open, Ned looking at him with a faintly sheepish expression as he swept off his top hat.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  “Not at all,” Julian said. He gestured vaguely to the various chairs. “Make yourself at home. Oh, Harry.” He reached into his pocket. “Run down to the General and bring us back a pitcher of ale.”

  “That’s the best offer I’ve had all day,” Ned said, and set his hat cautiously on top of the pile of newspapers.

  Julian pushed the front window further open, bringing in the smell of the street, dust and horse droppings and half a dozen kitchen stoves, as well as a breeze that promised a cooler night. He opened his bedroom door as well, hoping for a cross-draught, and turned back to Ned.