Elsie blushed redder than the carpet.
It was a comely sight, yet Bacchus could not bring himself to smile.
CHAPTER 9
Two days after the somewhat awkward engagement dinner at Seven Oaks, Elsie was still wondering what it would be like to kiss Bacchus Kelsey. She’d chided herself many times and even tried to start her novel reader, but the pleasure of it had faded—she found she couldn’t care about the fictional baron nearly as much as the real-life master spellmaker, and it made her miserable.
For the briefest moment, she had thought Bacchus might try, there in the duke’s hallway. Kiss her, that was. But that had just been bread crumbs on her chin. Thinking of it made her coil in embarrassment, and pining for the man only flared an uneasy depression. She’d only ever kissed Alfred, unless one were to count that boy at the workhouse when she was nine. His name was . . . Matthew, if memory served her right.
At least Bacchus still tolerated her. He hadn’t yet discovered she was disposable. And if she knew him at all, he might be noble enough to keep her around even once he did.
“Miss Camden?”
Elsie jerked to attention. She sat at the dining table in Ogden’s kitchen, barely a sixth of the size of the one at Seven Oaks, Miss Irene Prescott just across the corner from her. Blast, I missed what she said.
“Hmm?” she inquired sweetly.
Miss Prescott smiled patiently, a small iron rod in her hands. “Do you detect the points of this rune?”
Miss Prescott had brought temporally enchanted items today, as the Temporal Atheneum was all the way in Newcastle upon Tyne, and it was easier to have a local aspector enchant items than take the long trip north. The spell was a reverse aging spell, meant to remove rust. The rod in the spellbreaker’s hands looked fresh and new, but it had the telltale smell of mushrooms.
Elsie touched the rod, detecting the points of its knots. “I think so,” she lied. She knew exactly where they were. She could untie them while standing on her head. Assuming she still had that skill. She hadn’t tried since she was a child.
Miss Prescott went on to discuss the rune for the next fifteen minutes, followed by the assurance that even though Elsie couldn’t see the rune, she could still untie it.
Elsie’s cheeks were beginning to hurt from all the forced smiling, and she was so relieved to untie the bloody thing, she didn’t bother making any mistakes.
“Wonderful!” Miss Prescott set the now-rusted rod on the table. “What a quick learner you are, Miss Camden! It took me a month to feel out temporal runes.”
A month? Elsie tried to remember the first temporal rune she’d come across, and found she couldn’t. “Beginner’s luck,” she offered. She’d need to stall her learning next time. The last thing she wanted was Miss Prescott announcing to important people that Elsie was talented, lest the magistrate determine she’d had more practice than Bacchus had let on.
Thoughts of Bacchus had her fiddling with the ring on her finger. She’d need to procure one for him as well. A nice band . . . But what would Bacchus like? Something simple, most likely. She wouldn’t have much time to look until . . . She wasn’t sure. After the wedding, certainly.
The wedding.
They were going to keep it simple, yet Elsie still had two sheets of paper upstairs filled with discussions on it, mostly inquiries from the duchess, though Bacchus always wrote them out himself. Having a duchess as a guest made her almost as nervous as having Bacchus as the groom.
“Rational spells are the trickiest, in my opinion. We’ll get to those last,” Miss Prescott said, and Elsie became aware once more of the opus spell tucked beneath her dress. “I’ll set up an appointment for us at the Spiritual Atheneum so you can get a feel for that type of magic before we start focusing on individual disciplines. It shouldn’t be hard—the atheneums are always in need of spellbreakers. They’ll be happy to have us.”
Elsie perked up at this. Perhaps she could learn something more of Lily Merton at the Spiritual Atheneum? Could she have left any tracks uncovered? So far, Ogden had had no success in tracking her down, but maybe he’d been looking in the wrong places. “I would very much like that.”
They chatted for another quarter hour, blessedly not about spellbreaking, before Miss Prescott took her leave. The moment she did, Elsie went upstairs—careful not to disturb Emmeline’s hanging laundry—and slipped into the sitting room, where she’d left the copies of the newspaper articles penned under her name. Sitting on the sofa, she spread them out before her, reading each of them in turn. The newspapers from the spirit line still hadn’t come in. She nearly had these ones memorized. The only thing of interest she could find were two lines: The inquirer would gladly pay a high price for the black birds, from the Manchester Guardian. It sounded like a bribe, or it did to Elsie’s mind, which arguably had been made fanciful from novel readers. Then there was the line that stood out in the more recent article, which was a sight less cheery: A shame if things were to take a Turner and end entirely. That sounded like a threat.
Emmeline had set the day’s newspaper on the side table. With a sigh, Elsie opened it, eager to read something sensical.
What she found made her blood run cold.
“Again?” she whispered, setting the pages on her lap. The main headline read, Master Rational Aspector Missing Three Days, Believed to Be Victim of Opus Thief.
Her thoughts jumped to Ogden, but she’d seen him last night. Not that she’d ever report him as a master aspector were he to get lost.
She read the article, which detailed a Mr. Kyle Landon Murray, who was forty-eight years old, a popular aspector in Oxford.
“He has a very strict schedule,” his daughter said. “He’s meticulous. He wouldn’t have just run off.”
Police are still investigating.
“Merton.” Elsie said her name like a curse. Was she so bold as to continue her scheme while in hiding, or was this simply an unrelated disappearance?
No, the coincidence was too great. But this meant Elsie, Ogden, and Bacchus really needed to find some clues or else more people would get hurt, and Merton . . . Merton would do whatever it was she was planning to do.
Merton. Merton.
Elsie’s chest tightened.
Sitting at the edge of her seat, Elsie looked over the last article again. A shame if things were to take a Turner and end entirely. It wasn’t just a misspelling; the word Turner was capitalized.
One of the murders had happened at a Mr. Turner’s home in London.
Elsie held her breath. It couldn’t be happenstance. That line had been intended as a threat. Whomever the articles were intended for . . . Merton had been informing them of what she would do if they didn’t cooperate. Had she gotten impatient, moving from coercion to threats, and then to outright murder? But what did she want?
Elsie pulled up the News Letter article and pored over it, searching for something similar. The vapid writing went on and on about traveling via ships and trains—
And then she finally saw something that stood out. Not a name or a threat, but something else. Letting herself breathe, she read again.
It is difficult to maneuver ships when a neighbor seeks a conversation back home. We must analyze the situation and come together.
Elsie pressed her finger beneath the last sentence and glanced over the rest of the article. Yes, this was different.
For whatever reason, the author had switched to American spelling for those two sentences. Maneuver instead of manoeuvre, neighbor instead of neighbour, and analyze instead of analyse. The words themselves didn’t seem to fit, rendering the writing subpar and clunky. As though Merton really wanted that line to stand out.