“Little miss,” he said cautiously. “You know that—”
“Neville is an uncommonly large rook,” the child said instantly, and turned to the bird, which ruffled his feathers and stared up at him, as if daring him to deny what the child had claimed.
It quorked derisively at him, proving it was no rook. The girl put her hand up to scratch the nape of its neck. He had once seen what one of those beaks could do to a bare hand, when a Raven-keeper at the Tower was a little too slow in feeding one of his charges. The bird had nearly added the finger to the menu for its dinner that day.
The girl looked at him as if she could read his thoughts, and her expression hinted at her amusement with him. He felt himself getting angry, and warned himself not to do anything nor say anything. These were only silly children. He gathered cold calm about himself, and looked down on them.
The other child had a Grey Parrot on her shoulder; the bird looked at him measuringly, then, without warning, barked a laugh so full of contempt it could have come from a human throat.
It stung, so much so that his next words were a challenge. “Who are you,” he asked icily, “and what are you doing on this property?”
“We’re guests, which is more’n you can say,” the first girl snapped at him. “Don’t you fret, we got permission to be here! Hev you?”
“Nan!” the second girl hissed warningly. The first turned to her, and the two went into a whispered colloquy. The ruder of the two kept looking suspiciously at him as if she expected him to mount his horse and ride them down.
He had never encountered children quite like these two—well, truth be told, he had never encountered a child quite like the one that kept glaring at him. The other seemed tractable enough, but this one! He was accustomed to street children who, at worst, offered to sweep a crossing for him, and if glared at, skittered away. This one challenged him outright, and acted as if he was the one who was the intruder here. Part of him noted that she looked like a little London sparrow, too, with her brown hair and brown frock.
Finally, the whispers ceased, and the rude one planted a fist on either hip and looked him up and down. “Sarah sez I hev to call you ‘sir,’ even though you come through from the other side of thet door, an’ I ain’t niver seed you ‘ere. So, sir,” she somehow made the word a title of contempt. “We got permission’t‘ be ’ere. We’re a-stayin’ at th’ Big ‘ouse. You got permission’t’ come ridin’ through thet door onto this land?”
“Actually, little girl,” he said, carefully coating his words in ice, “I have. By mutual agreement between the gentleman with whom I am staying, and the master of these lands, the guests of my host may ride here whenever they choose.”
Not that it is any business of yours, his tone said, though his words did not.
The little girl snorted. “Awright, then,” she replied ungraciously. “You kin go.”
She and her little friend cleared off to one side; he mounted, but was no longer in any mood to ride. Instead, he made a show of a brief canter in the meadow beyond the door in the hedge, cleared the brook a time or two, then trotted his horse back through the door, shouting as he did so, “Shut the door behind me!” and giving it the force of an order.
The little girl slammed the gate so hard the hinges rattled.
And it was only at that point that he reined the horse in and realized that those had been no ordinary children. Ordinary children did not have ravens and parrots perching on their shoulders and acting like playmates.
They’d had no hint of Magic about them, but in that flash of understanding, he had no doubt that they had some sort of psychical gift.
The second girl hadn’t spoken loud enough for him to hear her voice, but the first girl had been a plain street-sparrow Cockney. And how did that come about?
David’s host had said that the master of Highleigh was “an odd duck,” though he had given no details. Now David wondered if that was a simple description of eccentricity, or if the man was part of one or more esoteric circles. He could think of no other reason why a Cockney child of dubious ancestry and obvious psychical gifts should be on that property…
There was one way to find out, certainly.
He rode back to the house, to ask his valet to make inquiries.
An hour later he was possessed of interesting—and disturbing—intelligence. Interesting, because it seemed that the master of Highleigh was also the owner of that dangerous property in Berkeley Square that his own Master’s Circle had been forced to cleanse.
Disturbing, because the gentleman in question had turned over his home and land to the pupils and teachers of a school for the children of British expatriates for the summer.
Now, David knew of only one school likely to harbor psychically gifted children in London. He knew of only one reason—guilt—why a well-to-do London gentleman would have allowed the masters and children of that school to make free of his property for the summer. And he also knew that two children—two little girls—in that school were the keepers of pet birds.
The conclusion was inescapable. Isabelle Harton was living just on the other side of that hedge, along with her pupils.
All other considerations, all other concerns vanished in the apprehension of that knowledge.
She was here. She was, if not alone, without the oversight of her husband. He could go and speak to her if he liked.
He could. And in so doing, he could make an utter and complete fool of himself.
Or he might rid himself of the memories that continued to intrude on him, no matter what he did.
A dozen times he made up his mind to go back down to the stable and ride over and be done with it. A dozen times he reconsidered. And in the end, the silver chime of the first dinner bell, warning guests that it was time to dress, rendered it all moot. He had been able to escape his obligations for the afternoon, but he dared not shirk them further, and to abandon his place at dinner with no good excuse would be a faux pas he would be months in living down.
He permitted his valet to enter and dress him for dinner, in the stiff evening shirt, formal black suit, and tie that was considered necessary here, even in the midst of summer. The ladies of the party glittered in their jewel-tone gowns of satin and lace, ornamented (since none of them could even be remotely considered ingénues anymore) with small fortunes in gems. And as he made polite conversation and worked his way through the extensive menu, memories kept reintruding, of those times that seemed a world and a lifetime removed now. Times when the dinner menu was restricted to simpler fare than caviar and quail’s eggs on toast, roast pheasant and baked salmon, and a dozen more courses before the end of it all. Times when no one dressed for dinner, or if they did, the young men wore light-colored linen suits, loose and casual, and the young ladies in their muslins and flowers looked far happier than these prosperous dames in satins and rubies. Times when the after-dinner entertainment would be to gather around the piano or read aloud to each other, or for engaged couples, to stroll hand-in-hand in the garden—not for the men to split off in one direction to smoke cigars, drink brandy, and talk into the night while the women went off (again) to their own parlor to do whatever it was they did while their husbands conversed about “important business.”
Suddenly, a feeling of intense dissatisfaction washed over him. But oddly enough, it was not a vision of Isabelle that accompanied that emotion, but the contemptuous eyes of the little street urchin he had seen this afternoon.