Chapter 1
Summer 1893
“Lady Coyle’s son looks remarkably like her coachman.”
I always thought I’d begin my memoir with a profound statement, one that made readers wonder at my insightfulness and marvel at my wit. But, given how the rest of this chronicle turned out, it seemed more appropriate to start with that line of dialog, spoken by my friend and fellow book collector, Oscar Barratt.
“Did you hear me, Gavin?” he asked. “Or are you declining to respond because your professorial temperament places you above gossip?”
I shushed him with a finger to my lips then pointed at the closed door. “She may be just on the other side.”
“I doubt it, but if she is, she won’t hear a thing. That door is solid as rock.”
Oscar stood with hands on hips as he scanned the book spines on one of the library shelves in Lady Coyle’s Belgravia townhouse. It was a small room with space for only one armchair, a well-worn brown leather wingback angled toward the clean fireplace. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined two of the walls and a painting of a bucolic country scene hung above the mantelpiece. It was warm and inviting, and not at all like the library’s former owner, the late Lord Coyle. His widow, Hope, Lady Coyle, was equally cold.
Oscar’s reassurance that we couldn’t be overheard gave me the confidence to press him further about his scandalous declaration. “You don’t think Coyle fathered the boy before his death?”
Oscar looked at me like I was a naive fool. Sometimes I felt like one, particularly with him. I may be a professor of history and a few years older, but Oscar possessed a worldliness that made him much wiser than me in many respects. “I believe in magic, not miracles. The child was born ten months after the death of Lord Coyle. As if that wasn’t enough, he has red hair like the coachman.”
“Coyle could have had red hair once.” The earl had been aged in his sixties when he died over a year ago. What little hair had clung to his head had been white at the time.
Oscar smirked, lending him a rakish air. He cut a striking figure with a short goatee beard and dark brown hair that could do with a trim as it curled around his ears. His eyes were equally dark, and often reflected his mood. I used to feel self-conscious in his company. My thinning hair, slim frame and spectacles marked me as the mediocre one against his heroic good looks, but I never felt jealous of him. Oscar was simply too good-natured to invoke envy.
That friendliness coupled with his handsome looks meant the women brazenly flirted with him. Not that he seemed to notice. Or perhaps he just didn’t care. For much of the three years I’d known him, Oscar had been bitter after his relationship with Lady Louisa Hollingbroke ended, and that seemed to have colored his interactions with the fairer sex. Lately, however, since we’d made up our minds to undertake our first journey, his sense of humor had returned. He smiled more and seemed positive about the future. Considering we were about to embark on an adventure together, it was a relief. I hadn’t relished spending every day with a melancholic companion.
I stood alongside him and studied the book spines, too. Where to begin? The collection of the late Lord Coyle wasn’t vast, but his widow had given us free rein to take whichever titles appealed to us; for a price, of course. Closer inspection proved not many were on the subject that interested us. Magic. That was surprising, considering Lord Coyle was an avid collector of magical objects. It seemed his interest didn’t extend to books about magic.
We began plucking tomes off the shelves and reading a few pages to gauge their relevance. Lord Coyle’s collection would hopefully provide a solid base on which to build a library about magic on behalf of Matt and India Glass—now Lord and Lady Rycroft—who were partly funding it. After we acquired as many books as we could from Lady Coyle, Oscar and I planned to travel the world in search of others. The problem was, we didn’t know where to begin. The world was rather large.
Oscar’s sharp intake of breath, followed by the sound of wood scraping on the floorboards, had me looking up from the book I was studying. A panel of the bookshelves had opened like a door to reveal a secret room beyond.
Oscar and I exchanged wide-eyed glances. Then he grinned like a naughty schoolboy before squeezing into the room. It was no larger than a cupboard and packed with odds and ends. There were quite a few sculptures and paintings, a brass candelabra, pieces of porcelain, boxes of various shapes, a dining chair, cloths, jewelry, and even stuffed animals. It was an eclectic collection, with no theme tying it all together. Or so it seemed to me.
Oscar picked up a white plate with a decorative blue border then put it down again without taking a closer look. Next, he picked up a stuffed hawk with its wings spread, then returned it to the pedestal. He touched the marble stand itself, running his fingers down the column as if reading its veins like braille.
“Magic,” he declared. “All of it.”
So, this was Lord Coyle’s elusive collection of magical objects. I’d heard India mention it, but had never seen it. As a magician himself, Oscar could feel magic that had been placed into an object, even if it wasn’t his discipline of ink. For ink that did contain magic, the power called to him in a way an attractive woman draws the gaze of men. As an artless, I felt no such compulsion toward anything in particular in the storeroom, although the space itself intrigued me.
“I do love a hidden room in a library,” I murmured.
Oscar wasn’t listening. His face was a picture of rapture as he traced the title of a book with his fingertip, as if he could feel the strokes of the pen that had formed it. It was handwritten, the spine damaged, and it required careful handling or it would fall apart. Oscar was gentle, putting my mind at ease.
“Monsters and Myths of the Central American Tribes,” I read. “It sounds intriguing, but it doesn’t fit our criteria.” The library we were creating would house the world’s greatest collection of books, essays, letters et cetera about magic, past and present. “Books about fantastical creatures are just that—fantasy,” I told him.
He spoke some words in another language. They had a poetic rhythm to them, the syllables undulating as they rolled off his tongue, like gentle waves lapping at the shoreline.
The words on the title page rose in the air, leaving behind a blank page. Like autumn leaves in a breeze, they slowly floated around the room, drifting so close to my face I could smell the ink. With a few more words, Oscar picked up the pace and jumbled the letters up before gently placing them back on the page in their correct order.
He smiled at me. “Ink magic.” Not only could he sense ink magic, he could also manipulate ink in a pretty fashion. If he manufactured it, he could make sure it didn’t fade for a very long time, but he’d left the family manufacturing business when he moved to London to pursue a career in journalism.
“Oscar,” I gently chided. “The library is for books about magic, not books that contain it.” I plucked it from his hands, intending to put it back.
Two sheets of paper slipped out from between the pages and fluttered to the floor. He picked them up and read. “Well, well. How intriguing. These are letters. Coyle must have placed them in that monster book for safekeeping, as they seem to have nothing to do with it. One is from a Scotsman named Kinloch. He seems to know Coyle, but there’s no love lost between them. He states that he won’t sell his book to Coyle, ‘not now, not ever’. The whole tone is terse.” He handed the letter to me. “Note the title of the book mentioned.”
“A Treatise on the Laws of Witchcraft and Maleficium in Scotland by His Majesty’s Lord Advocate George Mackenzie.”
My pulse quickened. I’d heard of the book in my scholarly endeavors, but never seen a copy. Indeed, there were few known copies in existence. Such a rare tome would be a worthy addition to our library.
