Excerpt: Bane of Toads

Bane of Toads
Book Two of the Lady of the Labyrinth Series
"Someone doesn't want sorcerers to fly."

Table of Contents

Chapter One: In Which Hopes Are Crushed and Visitors Enflamed
Chapter Two: How Two Centuries of Change Are Nothing to Magic and Magicians
Chapter Three: Pots and Pans and Pipes
Chapter Four: In the Eye of the Beholder
Chapter Five: Magic Being Entirely in the Mind
Chapter Six: In Which Merlin is Discovered in Princes' Street
Chapter Seven: Another Ancient Alchemical Secret Brought to Light
* * * * *
Chapter X-One: How a Lady and Gentleman May Deal with a Heated Situation
Chapter X-Two: How Friends Will Get You Through Times of No Ammunition Better than Ammunition Will Get You Through Times of No Friends
Chapter X-Three: A Paralysis of Seven Men and a Woman
Chapter X-Four: The Secrets of French Economy and Bow Street
Chapter X-Five: Facing the Worst and the Best
Chapter X-Six: In Which Two Alarms Are Enough
Chapter X-Seven: When Time Proves the Crime
Chapter X-Eight: How Doing the Impossible May Be Quite Routine
* * * * *
Chapter Y-One: An Escape and a Rocket
Chapter Y-Two: Why a Sorcerer Does Not Wish to Stop Flying
Chapter Y-Three: In Which the World Leaves Her Shoulders
Chapter Y-Four: In Which She Might Be Abandoned
Chapter the Last: In Which Mrs. Quarterpath Finds a Bad Perfumer
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Chapter One
In which Hopes Are Crushed and Visitors Enflamed

"I can not like this," Lady Margaret sighed, "but I suppose you are obligated. Was he really so much help to us?"
Emma Quarterpath nodded. "I asked him for information and he gave me what he could. So I do have to help get this balloon off the ground. What he does with it is his concern, including whether or not he has the showmanshp to make it a crowd-pleaser. Though I think ascents are still enough of a novelty to pull a crowd in any case."
Lady Margaret rose from her elegant lounge on the Roman couch. "I do hate to give him any countenance, but I ought to go--"
"Oh, ;lease don't if you dislike it!"
"--for the sake of your reputation, to ascertain that he at least acts sufficiently the gentleman."
Emma laughed. "Francis Barrett? From his writing, on a good day he's a neuter, ranging out to woman-hater."
"It doesn't matter if all he likes are boys, only that as the older lady you are staying with I have made, as it were, a tour of inspection."
With a frown, Emma shook her head. "My apologies. It's just very hard for me to think in terms of 'reputation.' People don't care about one's private life, except perhaps as entertainment as gossip. I thought as a widow I got greater freedom of action."
"You are not grey-haired and grandmotherly! As a young widow, and you look a very young one, it means you will not have to bring a chaperone every visit you make. Your maid should be sufficient companion then--only do not send her off on errands. Her purpose is to be with you."
"Thank you. I might have forgotten."
"The twenty-second century would be so strange a place for me. You did not quite cover some matters of change in our earliest conversations."
"I wasn't going to be here long."
"I so regret having separated you from your family and your life."
"Lemonade." In their six months together, Emma had already taught her friend and patroness the adage about being handed lemons. "Do you know, this may be over sooner than you fear? He may get fed up--"
"Weary of, disgusted with."
"Right." Acquire period upper-class speech habits, lose the twentieth-century idiom. "He may grow so weary of being corrected by anyone, least of all a mere woman, that he bids me thanks and goodbye forever after only a few meetings."
"Why do you think it will be so bad?"
"Fascination with his work is what got me studying alchemy in my teens. But alchemy's only good where it's magic or where it is science manqué. He's not at all a good chemist, so his attempts to generate lift gas fail. Three tries, no flights."
"What will it change, I wonder, if he does get airborne?"
This was their running game, since Emma didn't see why the Prime Directive had to apply to time-travelers, since time was obviously not monolineal in terms of the quantum plenum. "Possibly nothing changes. I don't think every butterfly sneeze starts a tornado. But let's see--he spends more time on chemistry and actually makes some advances. He spends more time on balloons and doesn't write his opus on scrying--which didn't see print anyway until the twenty-first century, but who know who saw the manuscript and learned from it?"
"How does--did he die? Perhaps that changes and he lives longer to learn and write more."
"We had neither birth date nor death date for him. The joke among occultists is, 'Well, maybe he *didn't* die!' Or that Francis Barrett is just the latest identity for some immortal alchemist like St. Germaine."
"Oh, you should ask Count Rémy about him. I believe St. Germaine was a dinner guest in his family."
Emma got a tickly shiver up the back of her neck at the thought of the count. "I must! Ihad no idea--but then I've had little time to investigate occult history with so much to learn." Her turn to sigh. "Am I ever going to be fit for grown-up company?"
"Yes, I think you will be. Except for a near-blindness on the matter of what apparently innocent acts may mar a reputation, you are doing well. You no longer look appalled at the number of dishes at table, you converse well and vivaciously--I think your time at émigré houses helps there--and your dancing is light and graceful."
"There are so many to remember, but I think that very idea has finally sunk in, that dancing is much more varied and challenging here."
"I have noticed your memory of them improving."
"It's just like remembering what words go with the tune."
The drive down to London from Lady Margaret's home outside Hounslow took two hours. Emma still found it amusing that the time of day between country and town were marked so differently. They left at a time the mornorning would be considered well-aired out in Hunslow, when anyone in Society in Town would be sound asleep. If Emma's inspection of the proposed balloon didn't take all day, they might pay some morning calls on the few people who knew Emma's actual condition and history. At present, it was considered better for her not to make too many acquaintances before she had a better hang of being nineteenth century.
Her mourning dress now was perfectly legitimate. Her entire family, if not dead, were unborn, off living in the tech and medical heaven of the twenty-first century. [insert how Emma wound up here.] So much for the life she had tidily planned out since her early teens. Every time she thought she was sliding into it, something went wrong--in this case, epicly. In the months since her solution of the murder a Higher Power might have purposed her for, she had shown no greater tendency to teleport back to her proper time. Some bizarre conjunction of forces had made her arrival possible. Perhaps even the yearning of Mr. Woon's ghost--who inconsiderately did not yearn her back home, the ingrate.
It appeared London at the dawn of the nineteenth century was her bowl of lemons. It might have been worse--would have been worse for someone not a Diplomatic corps brat. It might have been better. Middle-class wizardesses might be stuffier in some ways but less worried about her eccentricities in others. Knowing no one well enough to live with--and frankly batten off--who didn't have a title or a close relative with one demanded a level of social gaming that intimidated Emma. Add that what she did, how she was taken, would reflect on Lady Margaret, and she studied her poetry and dancing as hard as she had for her BA in Magic at UCLA.
She let her mind drift back to the Modern halls of the Physics Building, laser labs, four floors of elctronic gear to delight the geekish heart, right off the mock-Tudor original buildings of the original campus. She could remember the control panels, which gauges where, where the dials were--but what went on behind, she had not studied. Oh, well, no place to buy chips, or even tubes if she wanted a pocket-calculator level of power from something that filled a room and no VEPCO to plug it into, anyway.
They reached town [describe]. Though the sun was high, the April fogs kept the town under such a lid of gloom Emma suspected an LA-style inversion layer and was tempted to introduce the word *smog*: the so-called fog smelled of smoke rather than water, and made eyes more sensitive than hers water so slightly. Not wishing to run around with reddened eyes, Lady Margaret would not be in town full time until the Spring arrived and the fogs lifted, in May. March might be an astrological spring equinox, but as far as the climate went, it was still the snowy, sleet-edged hem of winter.
They paused at the townhouse to freshen up and have a cup of tea, but mainly to switch to the town coach. The travelling coach had less elegant lines and was spattered. It also didn't have the peculiar structure to keep from being shaken to pieces and the passengers with it when they hit cobblestone streets, besides the granite-block pavements. The latter were common here in the West End, properly the town of Westminister, where a lot of streets had been built in the last generation. They were headed through the cobble hell of the City, London proper, to the Eastside Docks area.
A neighborhood made up of warehouses and what tenements could fit between was never posh, until warehouses became lofts, a fashion not due up for a century and a half. These were on the upswing as warehouses, with a few old Baroque houses between, former merchant residences cut into flats, perhaps made into a tavern or gin shop, shuttered at this time of day, not by law but a lack of customers in profitable quantity.
The coachman drew very slowly up a side street to a warehouse, as if reluctant to stop his equipage in such a place. The cobblestones were nearly buried in muck, where they had not been dug up, leaving a hold that jarred the wheel going over it. The footmen got down from their standing perches behind the coach and looked around as if for a barrage of the missing stones. Emma wondered what people did with them. Stone clubs? Fire rings? Weights to sink bodies in the Thames? It almost missed spray paint graffiti to complete its ambience--lacking, she was sure, to no spray cans yet and illiteracy being fairly complete among the lowest class.
Lady Margaret looked more baffled than wary, as if such a place were beyond her imagining. Emma considered it with the cynical eye of a Los Angeles emergency medical technician, and thought she had gotten down in much worse. This was light industrial, not housing for hostiles.
"Very cheap rent," Emma said. "See the gaps in the bricks there? It's worse higher up, maybe esier to see. The two ends are settling at different rates and tearing the long walls apart. In earthquake country, the next shake could bring it down."
"Amazing. You can tell so much from so little."
Renters and Buyers 101, Emma thought.
"But we have few temblors in London. Not, I bleieve, since the Stuarts."
"You had one ever?! I had not the least idea." Time to get very period. To Barrett she was just an alchemist from Virginia.
The footman rapped his buff-gloved knuckles on the door, painted green over older chipped paint. When it opened, the servant announced, "Lady Margaret ostingly and Mrs. Quarterpath for Mr. Barrett."
"'E's out," came a Cockney voice--the 1800 Cockney, which wasn't quite that of a century later, just as the upper class sounded nothing like QEII, but with a soft drawl that survived in Emma's own Tidewater accent. At least something upper class came easy for her.
She and Lady Margaret looked at each other in annoyance. Emma lowered the window in the coach door. "Woodson, have the man come here."
"Mrs. Quarterpath would speak with you, my man."
A hesitation in the inner darkness, then the man stepped into the light. Greying brown hair down over his collar, caught back in an old-fashioned tail, a well-receded hairline balanced by several days of stubble. His clothes style might be ten or fifteen years old--hard to tell on baggy blue-collar clothes. A red scarf with white spots held his coarse greyed shirt collar closed. His buckled heavy shoes looked made by an amateur or apprentice, and fitted more by habit than original intent.
Emma beckoned him closer. He glanced back at the door and sidled over like one of them might attempt to rush in.
"My good man, we have driven all the way from Hounslow because I had an apointment to see Mr. Barrett at this address at this time."
"I told ye, 'e--"
"If," she interrupted him, a superior-to-inferior ploy as good as degree vocabulary in Japanese, "if he has stepped out for a minute, we will wait. If he has forgotten the day, you had better lock up and take a hack to the White Tree and fetch him here. But if he is inside and told you he did not want to be bothered, it did not apply to us. Or you had better take him word that we are waiting. If he refuses then, then the failure of his balloon is his problem. I wash my hands of it, as having been relieved of my obligation. Now, which is it?"
The man glowered suspicion.
Emma said brightly to her companion, "Well, that was done with quickly! do you think Lord Ainsmough is awake yet?"
"More likely Miss Delaney."
"Mr. Barrett don't hold much with females." The scruffy servant actually wavered toward the door.
Slow, Emma thought. "I am not a female. I am an alchemist. And witch enough to make your digestion worse if you do not get a move on upstairs."
A startled blanking of expression, before he turned and clumped back up the stairs, to shut the door behind him.
In French, Lady Margaret murmured, "Was that wise to say in front of our people?"
"As if they did not know what they carry in and out of your workroom, or never smell or hear something from your spellcasting?" Emma switched to English. "His face and manner all spoke of a bad stomach. It is easy to play with people's fears to get them to cease being obstructive."
In two minutes, Francis Barrett himself opened the door and stepped out to greet them. Lady Margaret nodded to the senior footman, who opened the carriage door. The lesser footman let down the folding iron steps, tiny round treads on a skeletal frame of surprising strength.
[description of Barrett]

(See what I mean about getting down to the story and skidding right by the things I can fill in later?)