The Wizard of London

Her face turned grave. “You would be wise not to meddle with him,” she replied. “He is older than you can guess. The country folk call him Robin Goodfellow—”

“Good gad!” he exclaimed, startled. “Surely not!”

“Surely, for I have encountered him, too,” she replied, with warning clear in her tone. “And Shakespeare did not do him any kind of justice. He is to this land what Attic Pan was to Greece and Sylvanus to Rome. You meddle with him at your peril—”

Now, this made him angry, though he held his anger down firmly. “You meddle with him at your peril,” indeed! It was like something out of a poorly-written novel. What nonsense!

He had been so fixated on his conversation that he must not have noticed that the threatening storm had become actuality, for suddenly, Isabelle’s warning was punctuated, as with an exclamation point, by a bolt of lightning striking an ancient oak immediately outside the library windows, with a simultaneously deafening crash of thunder.

They both jumped; Isabelle clutched at the bookshelves, and he dropped the book he had been unconsciously holding, his heart racing.

His first thought—which he immediately dismissed—was that it had been a warning to echo Isabelle’s. It wasn’t. It was purest coincidence. There was no reason, no reason at all, to think anything otherwise.

It took him a moment to recover; another to pick up the book he had dropped. By that time he thought he knew what he was going to say.

But the conversation was interrupted by the intrusion of—of all things—that wretchedly defiant little girl child, easy enough to identify even in the storm gloom by the raven that rode on her shoulder and glared at him with bright, shining eyes.

“Mem’sab, the lightning frighted the babies half to death an’ they won’t stop cryin’ and the ayahs tol’ me to come get you.” He felt the force of truth behind the words, but he also felt the force of something else. The girl really disliked him and was fiercely happy to be the cause of interrupting the conversation he was having with her schoolmistress.

Nor did Isabelle seem at all displeased by the interruption. “You’ll pardon me, I am sure,” she said, with absolute formality. “But my duties to my charges in this case are something I cannot leave to anyone else. I am sure I can extend the hospitality of Highleigh to you for as long as the rain lasts. You may find research into the books on that shelf—” she pointed, “—to be fruitful, especially in light of what you just told me. You’ll forgive me, I am sure, if I do not make a formal farewell and leave you in the hands of the servants.”

And with that, she turned and followed the infuriating little girl out of the room.

Once again, he found himself struggling against anger, and only by invoking the disciplines that Cordelia had taught him was he able to regain his self-control.

That, too, made him angry. Oh, this was the first and last encounter with Isabelle Harton that he was going to have! He should have known better than to come here in the first place. There was a reason, a good one, why he had broken off the nascent relationship with the woman. Cordelia had been right. Anyone who could invoke such strong emotions in him potentially had a hold over him that he did not need nor want. No, what he needed was control, absolute and complete. He had been an idiot to even think about having any connection to a woman that went past mutual regard and a calm and rational assessment of how each could supply what the other required for a reasonably comfortable life. Marriages of convenience—much better, much more logical than marriages of emotion. Emotion sapped control and self-control and no Elemental Master had any business in allowing that loss of control to happen.

He had no choice but to remain while the storm raged—but he did not have to follow her suggestion to do further research into the nature of the creature that had accosted him. He already knew enough, now. His suspicions had been confirmed, and as irritating as it was to be challenged, then beaten by a Nature Spirit, this one had millennia of power behind him, and he knew, intellectually, that to pit himself against Robin Goodfellow was as foolish as going out and howling defiance at the storm outside. And really, why should he? There was no profit in it. No sense in any sort of confrontation.

He did not, however, have to like that revelation. But he needed to keep his emotional reaction to a minimum, or that, too, would cause a loss of control.

Nor did he have to like the fact that Isabelle Harton had also had an encounter or encounters with the spirit, and presumably had not gotten a similar warning.

So, petty as it was, he did the only thing in his power at the moment. Instead of researching among the books Isabelle had indicated, he selected a novel and set himself in a chair at the window to read it. Or at least, pretend to read it.

And the moment the sky cleared, he summoned a servant to fetch his horse, and was gone.

***

With her experiment a success, Cordelia had no further need for the second orphan. She was, in fact, debating what to do with him when fate itself presented the solution in the form of a tap on the door of her study by the housekeeper.

“Beggin’ your pardon, milady, but I’d like to know if you’ve got any plans for the future of that boy,” the woman said, without preamble. No need to ask “what boy,” since there was only one on the premises.

“Well, I had originally thought to make him a page…” She allowed her voice to trail off, leaving it for the housekeeper to determine that Cordelia now had some doubts about the wisdom of that plan.

The housekeeper jumped on the opening, and shook her head. “You’re kindness itself, milady, but that boy— there’s only so much polish you can put on a lump of coal, milady. Might be shiny, but ‘tis still a lump of coal, and that boy is never going to make a good page, and I don’t need another head in the household that does naught but run errands. He’s simple, milady, and that’s a fact. Not so bad to have a simpleton boy about, but a simpleton man, that’s another kettle of herring.”

Cordelia smiled benignly. “Mrs.Talbot, you would not have come up here to speak to me about one little boy if you did not already have a solution in hand. What is it?”

The housekeeper relaxed visibly. “The sweep’s here,” she said—which statement did not precisely follow, but Cordelia waited for elaboration. “Seems he’s not got an apprentice. Boy’s been following him about, does what he’s told, and he’s small and likely to stay so. Sweep asked where the boy was from and wants to know if you’d ‘prentice him out.”

“Ah.” Cordelia nodded. It made perfect sense. Chimney sweeps’ apprentices had shortened life spans; between falls and the unhealthy effects of crawling through tiny, soot-and-tar-laden chimneys, the number of apprentices that actually made it as far as becoming full-fledged chimney sweeps was exceedingly small. Sweeps were always looking for nimble, undersized boys.

The housekeeper had been more than a bit shaken by the death of the first boy, and was also getting a bit tired of having the second underfoot as well as losing the services of a perfectly capable housemaid for as long as the boy required a nanny. She had already registered one or two mild complaints with Cordelia on the subject. Now, if ever, was the opportunity to tidy up.

“I believe you have hit upon the perfect solution, Mrs.Talbot!” she said, earning a smile of relief from her housekeeper.

And that brought the household neatly back to normal. The boy was taken away, his nanny returned to her normal duties, and afternoon quiet settled over the town house.

Now was a good time for Cordelia to retire to her workroom. Perhaps the Ice Wurms would be able to do something about those little girls… in any event, it was time to put her plans for David into motion.

She lit the lamps—magically, of course—shut the door and sealed herself inside. With a word and a breath, she called up the chill, and the water in the air condensed into a mist, and she waited for it to settle into the forms of her Ice Wurms.

But it didn’t.

Instead, it spread itself in a single even layer on the marble top of the worktable and then—

Then there was ice. A thin film of ice that turned the surface of the table into a mirror, which reflected her face for an instant, and then reflected something else entirely.

She stared, mesmerized, into colorless eyes that took up the entire surface of the worktable, and which stared back at her in some amusement.

So, said a voice she had not heard in a very long time in her head. You