“You’re thinking your visitor was Ward, then?” Stephen asked. He’d have followed the trail anyhow since it was the only one he had, but he wanted to be sure before he got hopeful. “Another might have asked for the same information.”
“He looked like you describe. The hair was darker—not blond or gray—but such things are easy enough to manage. I wouldn’t have said he was particularly thin, either. But the eyes were the same, and he was tall.”
Age could add a few inches to any man’s waistline. The description was close enough.
“I’m very much obliged to you,” said Stephen, getting to his feet. “Good day, Mrs. O’Keefe.”
“Good luck, Lord MacAlasdair,” she said.
Earlier that evening, Mina had set aside the last of Professor Carter’s correspondence and made a decision. If she was going to stay in MacAlasdair’s house for some unknown length of time, she was by God going to stay in the house and not skulk around in the attics. MacAlasdair and his servants could like it or not as it pleased them.
So, after a glance in the mirror to replace a hairpin or two and make sure she didn’t have ink spots on her nose, Mina had descended all three flights of stairs with her head high and made her way toward the library.
The servants were back by then—the stars had been out for quite a while—and Baldwin had intercepted her on the way. His expression managed to be both polite and forbidding. “Laird MacAlasdair’s out for the evening,” he said. “If it’s him you were looking for, Miss Seymour.”
“Actually,” Mina had said, even as she briefly wondered where MacAlasdair had gone and why, “I was just going to find a book.” She didn’t explain that MacAlasdair had given her permission to look around the house. That would have been admitting that she needed permission. “There’s quite a library here.”
“It’s verra large, yes,” said Baldwin. “A bit disorganized, though. Will you be wanting anything in particular?”
“I thought I’d see what I could find,” said Mina. She’d risked a smile. In return, she’d gotten a slight softening of Baldwin’s heavily whiskered face. It was something, at least. “Could someone make a fire in the drawing room and bring me a cup of tea?”
Training had kept Baldwin from looking surprised at her request. He’d hesitated only an instant before saying, “Of course. I’ll see it done.”
Flush with minor triumph, Mina had proceeded into the library, managed to find a small subset of Dickens in the shelves’ jumbled contents, and was curled up on the couch with The Pickwick Papers when the door opened again and MacAlasdair, dressed in spotless evening clothes, walked into the room.
“Owens said you’d come in here for the evening,” he said, looking from Mina to the fire and back. “I hope I’m not intruding.”
It’s your house was the first response that came to Mina’s mind. What she said, as she hastily straightened up, was “No, not at all.”
It was true. The extent to which it was true was no more surprising than the thrill that had run up her spine when MacAlasdair walked in. Both were unnerving.
He did look good in evening clothes. That might have had something to do with it. The close-fitting coat and trousers showed off both his broad shoulders and the firm lines of his waist and thighs, while the white shirt made his hair look almost garnet-colored and his eyes even brighter. Somehow, unlike most men Mina had seen, he looked more powerful in evening dress.
She resisted the urge to shift in her seat or to moisten her lips, although they’d suddenly gone dry. Thank goodness for tea.
“You’ve been out,” she said, in a truly amazing feat of stating the obvious. “Er, Baldwin said you were. But not where.” She kicked herself mentally for sounding like a prying wife, and then kicked herself twice for caring. “Somewhere fancy, I’d guess.”
“You could say as much,” said MacAlasdair, his mouth curling sardonically around the words. “There are a number of…clubs…around London that take an interest in mysticism. I thought some of them might be able to put me onto Ward’s track.”
“Ah,” said Mina. “And did they?”
“Perhaps. There are a few hints I might pursue. The Emerald Star, for instance—” MacAlasdair stopped. “But telling you all of it could take some time.”
“Time I’ve got,” said Mina. “And I want to know.”
“Very well, then,” said MacAlasdair. He settled into a seat near the fire, leaned back, and began.
Eleven
The next evening, as she stood by the drawing room window and watched night fall over London, Mina was still thinking over what she’d heard from MacAlasdair.
She’d heard about clubs like the Emerald Star, of course. Florrie brought home stories every so often, and other girls in Mina’s boardinghouse gossiped about spiritualists and fortune-tellers. A few gauze-draped mystics had even called on Professor Carter from time to time, after which he’d usually had to have a lie-down and a glass of whiskey. Mina had just thought they were all frauds.
Hearing otherwise had brought on very mixed emotions. On the one hand, the presence of other magicians in London meant other people who could maybe deal with Ward if MacAlasdair really fumbled the matter. On the other hand, in Mina’s experience, you could count on other people to foul things up more than you could count on them to be helpful, and now there was a whole other world of potential accidents—or not accidents.
The sound of shattering glass broke through her reflections.
Mina darted back away from the window and was halfway across the floor before she realized that it hadn’t broken. The noise hadn’t come from the drawing room. It had come from the fireplace, but nothing around that was broken, either.
The noise had come down the chimney.
Closing her eyes, Mina pictured the floor above her. The stairs led up from the hall, and the drawing room was on the right side of the lower floor. Retracing her previous exploration, she thought that the noise had come from one of the bedrooms she hadn’t entered.
A bird or a bat had probably flown into the window. Granted, the second floor was a bit low for that and too high for children throwing stones, but stranger things happened.
In London, burglary wasn’t really strange. In the house of a wealthy man who lived alone—who was known to keep few servants and to send those away at regular hours—it wouldn’t be at all unusual.
And while Stephen had said the manes weren’t coming back for a while, Ward could have conjured up other things.
Mina swore under her breath and found that her mouth had gone completely dry.
MacAlasdair was locked away being a dragon for a little while longer. Running to get the police would give the burglars or demons or whatever time to do their work and get away. If they were working for Ward and managed to see Stephen in dragon form, that would be awful. If they weren’t human and caught either Stephen or the rest of the servants by surprise, that would be even worse.
She took the poker from the fireplace. It hadn’t helped much last time, but she wouldn’t be facing a dragon now—at least, not with any luck.