The Wizard of London

Without his father, David had had no one to properly train him. There was no truly strong male Fire Master in that part of the country. But Lady Cordelia was one of those rare creatures that though she was a Master of Air also had just enough of Fire to do as a teacher, and she volunteered to train David the day he turned eighteen. David’s father must have consented to the plan, for Lady Cordelia was soon a long-term guest at Harwinton House, the Alderscroft ancestral home—when she wasn’t living in her own town house in Cambridge.

None of this, however, filtered down to the girls at Isabelle’s school, nor even to Isabelle. All she had known at the time was that David had just begun his university education. David was attending Cambridge, most of the girls’ brothers were either going into the military as officers, too young or too old for university, or going to Oxford. David himself never wrote to Isabelle—after all, it would hardly have been proper, and any letters from a young man not one’s brother would have been confiscated by the headmistress. There should have been no reason for anyone to inform Isabelle about anything having to do with David Alderscroft.

Isabelle brooded out the carriage window, staring at nothing. That, of course, was the official version. The unofficial version was that she and David had come to what was known as an “understanding.” Or at least, she had thought so. He had said, and more than once, that he was going to speak to her father when she came of age. If he had meant the comment in jest, she thought she would have sensed that. She’d had every reason to think he regarded her with deep affection, even love, and she had certainly felt the same. She had dreamed, not of what life would be like as Lady David, but of what life would be like as an occultist Warrior of the Light and a Master, working together.

I honestly don’t recall ever thinking much about the prestige, or the money, or the title. She sighed, and closed her eyes, leaning back against the seat cushions. The carriage was stalled in traffic, and had this been a cab it would have been a great deal less pleasant. It would have been even worse in a ‘bus. This made a good place to think about the past, truth to tell. Surrounded as she was by the noise of traffic, she was conversely as isolated as if she had been on top of a mountain, or sitting in splendid silence in a deserted temple in the jungle.

No, it wasn’t that the money and the title meant nothing, it was that she didn’t regard anything above and beyond what constituted a “comfortable” life as being terribly important. Pleasant, yes, but not vital. So far as her ambitions, well, they had always been centered on the realms of the Esoteric rather than the mundane, and she really, truly, did not think she had thought covetously about what being married to one of the wealthiest peers in the county would have meant.

If her memories were correct, the largest part of the equation had been that she felt very strongly about David—and if it was, perhaps, “only” first love, it was still the most powerful emotion she had ever experienced at the time. True, they had done nothing except walk and talk together for hours at a time. But that was far more than many of their contemporaries ever did. The “understanding” that they had was something she had clung to, dreamed about, and cherished. She had been so certain that the bond between them was such that she didn’t need letters to know how he felt, nor to confirm the depth of his feelings toward her.

Ah, but understanding or not, that all changed the moment Lady Cordelia came into his life.

The next time she saw him, at a shooting party, he was literally a different person. When he greeted her, although it was polite enough, there was no mistaking his tone of detachment. He treated her exactly as he treated all the other girls insofar as affection went—but insofar as the level of courtesy—

To her utter shock he had added to his demeanor with her a touch of arrogance that clearly said, “You are tolerated here because you are polite and well-mannered, but you do not, and never will, belong.”

And that was that.

His attitude clearly surprised and puzzled the other girls, but they said nothing. Perhaps they assumed he and Isabelle had had some sort of lovers’ quarrel. At any rate, it was one of those situations where nothing was said, but everything was understood.

And the moment when Isabelle first saw Lady Cordelia, she had known deep in her heart who was to blame.

You could not have said that David danced attendance on Her Ladyship, because he did not. And there was nothing remotely loverlike about the way he treated her. If anything, his attitude was of deference, as of the disciple to the great teacher, as if she were conveying some great favor to him by giving him her attention. It was the sort of attitude one would expect if she had been a great and wise philosopher of the sort that Isabelle eventually found in India…

But the pupils of those great and wise teachers grew more humble in their attitudes toward others, not more arrogant.

The abrupt change in David’s attitude was, perhaps, the worst and most painful experience of Isabelle’s short life. Perhaps it was just as well that the encounter had occurred at teatime; she had been able to plead a headache and retreat to her room, not to emerge even for dinner. The headache had been real; she had cried for hours, until her eyes were swollen and her head pounding. And, fortunately, the friend that had invited her in the first place quickly took pity on her and arranged for her to return to the school the next morning so that there were no more such encounters.

She never accepted another invitation again; instead, she concentrated on her studies, both academic and occult, and set her eyes on the goal of leaving the country altogether and somehow getting to India. Since that had also been a longtime ambition of her benefactress, they had arranged for a trip for the two of them, with Isabelle as the lady’s companion. Her father had been bewildered, but accepted it. Her friend, the London bookshop owner, gave her people to contact.

And when she had met Frederick—everything changed for the better.

“Well,” she said aloud. “Now I know that my memory of things matches Bea’s.”

That, too, had emerged from their morning of “catching up.” She had not been mistaken, everyone around her had assumed that she and David Alderscroft were going to make a couple as soon as she came of the proper age to do so. She was not the only one who had been shocked by his change of attitude.

But perhaps most importantly, there had been one fundamental mistake that she had made. Her immediate circle of friends did not condone David’s behavior toward her, much less share it. Now, there probably were some girls at the school, and there were certainly some young ladies in the exclusive social circle in which David resided, who applauded what he had done and felt that Isabelle had been pushing herself in where she did not belong. But her real friends, though she had been blind to it at the time, were incensed by his treatment of her. Their doors were still open to her, just as Bea’s had been.

And that was of vital importance, for she was going to have to try to find some way of discovering who had set the trap for Sarah and Nan without the aid of the tacit leader of the Elemental Masters hereabouts.

She laughed aloud, remembering what Frederick had once said to her. When you want something done, you ask a man. When you want it done quietly and without any fuss, you ask a woman.

Perhaps a circle of old friends wasn’t a bad place to start.

6

DAVID Alderscroft looked out over the tree-shaded boulevard in front of his town house and frowned. Too many people, too many untidy people, clattering back and forth along the pavement. A nurse pushing a pram, some wretched boy running an errand, two carriages, and a tradesman’s van—too many people. How much better it would have been had there been no one out there, the pavement spotless, the street silent—

Better still had it been winter. Everything lightly coated in snow, all the imperfections invisible beneath the frozen blanket. That would be ideal—

It would be so tidy if winter remained year round. No mess, people properly remaining inside their own four walls, tradesmen keeping to their proper place in the alleys. He entertained himself with a vision of the frozen city for a moment, everything as pure and white and clean as new marble, with nothing to mar the shining perfection of it.

He shook his head slightly. He shouldn’t be obsessing over such trifles. He had some serious campaigning to do, if he was going to penetrate the circle surrounding Her Majesty, Queen Victoria.

It wasn’t a circle he would normally have entree to. The Queen was very particular about those she allowed