Ravensclaw (4 page)

An arrow shot upright falls on the shooter’s head.
(Romanian proverb)

Edinburgh perched perilously atop an extinct volcano. Stacked up like a great haphazard pile of rocks, the medieval Old Town’s dark tenements glowered down at the New Town’s neoclassical terraces and squares. Separating the two areas was a deep, broad bridge-spanned ravine planted with trees and shrubbery, once a lake where accused witches met their deaths, thereby being exonerated from all charges, for only the innocent drowned.

In the heyday of the Old Town, several prominent Elizabethans had chosen to live in the then less congested area of the Canongate, commuting to and from Edinburgh Castle along the Royal Mile. Count Revay-Czobar lived in the Old Town now, not far from the Castle, in a tall, five-story townhouse capped by two pointed gables of unequal size. The round-headed arches of the ground floor frontage were stained from centuries of billowing black smoke, fog, and rain. Curving forestairs jutted out onto the pavement. A lentil stone dated 1622 bore the words, FEARE THE LORD AND DEPART FROM EVILL.

The interior of the townhouse was furnished to suit its owner’s taste, including tiled chimneypieces and fine tempera work. The master bedroom’s beam and board ceilings were brightly painted with flowers and fruit. A deep arcaded frieze surmounted the tall, shuttered windows and adorned the stone wall above the fireplace and the curved wall that marked the turnpike stair.

Upholstered armchairs were scattered around the chamber. A coffer inlaid with holly and bog oak sat against one wall. Ravensclaw lay on another great carved bed — satyrs and satyresses, centaurs and centaurides, assorted gods and fauns and nymphs — his hands folded on  his chest, as still as the mythological beings that guarded his rest. Or perhaps not precisely as still. One eyebrow twitched.

Abruptly, the Count wakened. If it could be called that. He lay motionless for a moment, orienting himself. Slumber now was not slumber as he had once known it, but a descent into a nothingness so absolute it might have been deeply disturbing if one dwelt on the matter, which he seldom did. Valentin Lupescu spent no more time regretting his inclusion in the Dinwiddie Society’s annals of abnormalities than he did lamenting his own past. Truth be told, all in all, he thought himself damned fortunate.

Fortunate, if alone in his bed at the moment. He opened one eye. Isidore was hovering just inside the door. Val said, “Where are Zizi, Bela, Lilian?”

Isidore wrinkled his nose. “They say it isn’t proper for them to be visiting your bedchamber with a young lady in the house.”

Propriety, Val mused. What a novel concept. Especially in connection with Zizi, Bela, and Lilian.

Miss Dinwiddie was complicating his existence. With or without his cooperation, she would have made her way to Edinburgh, a curious lamb blundering into a lair of hungry wolves. He’d had no choice but to escort her. The matter of St. Cuthbert’s knuckle bone aside, he had to destroy that blasted list. 

In the interim, he would help the young woman retrieve her stolen items. If he took few things seriously, including himself, Val took the d’Auvergne athame very seriously indeed.

Isidore cleared his throat. Val threw back the covers.
“What?”

“The chimneys needed sweeping. It turns out that Miss Dinwiddie has strong feelings about chimneysweeps. This particular chimneysweep was caught trying to steal a candlestick. By Drogo.” Isidore’s thin lips twisted. “Scared the
puşti
out of a good year’s growth.”

“What did you do with our young thief?”

“ ‘He that may not do as he would, must do as he may’.” Before Val could either comment or cuff him, the old man shuffled out the door.

Val pulled on fresh breeches. Though he had long been aware of the Dinwiddie Society’s existence, he had
not
known that the d’Auvergne athame had come to rest in the Society’s vaults. He wondered how far Miss Dinwiddie would go in her efforts to protect herself from him, and hoped she wouldn’t drape herself about with bleached bones, or eat grave dirt.

Val was smiling as he tied his cravat. Of all things, he disliked being bored, which was why he kept around him an ancient manservant who spouted proverbs at him, and maidservants who were no better than they should be. Emily Dinwiddie promised to provide more amusement than he had enjoyed in a score of decades.

Contrary to custom, Count Revay-Czobar didn’t let out each story of his townhouse as a separate flat: the ground floor occupied by a tradesman and his workshop; the lower floors provenance of aristocrats and prosperous merchants eager to escape the streets’ dirt and stench and at the same time avoid the steep climb up the common turnpike stair; the highest floors home to servants and poorer workmen who
reaped some benefit in that they were privileged to glimpse sunlight. Though the bottom floor of Val’s house was indeed occupied by a small cloth merchant’s booth, the MacCamishes were in his employ, and insured that during his absences the rest of the dwelling was kept secure and in good repair. The first floor housed his kitchen and dining area, the second his drawing room, the third his bedroom and adjacent study. Guest and servants’ rooms were located above.

Val descended the winding turnpike stair to the drawing room, a cozy chamber with green-paneled walls and a simple fireplace, nail-studded leather furniture, faded rugs on the wood floor. Here, too, books littered every available surface, interspersed with maps of the world, a calculating board, and a perpetual almanac in a frame.

He paused unnoticed in the doorway. His house-guest was standing in a patch of sunlight that glinted off her spectacles, rendered her fair freckled skin almost translucent, and turned her fiery hair every shade from copper to gold. Val experienced a sudden urge to see the current head of the Dinwiddie Society wearing something other than unrelieved black. Or, even better, clad in nothing but clouds of frizzy ringlets and her fair freckled skin.

She was clutching a sooty urchin’s elbow as she lectured him on the penalties for theft, which ranged from branding to transportation to simply being hanged. Drogo had taken up an alert position in front of the fireplace. Machka was engaged in an inspection of her nether bits.

Val strolled into the room. “Isidore informs me that we have a guest.”

Miss Dinwiddie shoved the boy behind her. “I understand, my lord, that the chimneys of these old wooden buildings have to be swept lest the coal dust builds up and results in a house fire. I also understand that children, being small, are best suited to the task. I think
you
may not understand that a sweep’s life expectancy is approximately six months. If he
survives past his twelfth birthday, which is unlikely, his body will have been permanently deformed by the constant pushing of his limbs against the chimneys’ brick walls. My papa was so appalled by this widespread barbarity that he invented a system of elongated hinged poles and a pulley apparatus to be used in our home.” She paused for breath. Her captive muttered something uncomplimentary concerning contermashious sassenachs.

“Poles and pulleys,” Val repeated. “I will be fascinated to learn the details. Your young friend has a somewhat noxious aroma about him.” His houseguest, on the other hand, smelled like pasta tossed with sautéed garlic and olive oil. “Isidore. Take this noisome whelp away.”

“I’m nae bastartin’ whelp! Me name’s Jamie.” protested the sweep.

“Neispravit,”
muttered Isidore, in the strangled tones of someone attempting not to breathe through his nose.

“No!” said Miss Dinwiddie in the same moment, and clutched the boy’s filthy arm. “You shan’t have him for your — er!”

For his breakfast, mayhap? “Isidore will speak with the lad’s master. Zizi, Bela, and Lilian will give the brat a bath.” Emily looked undecided. Jamie suggested that his captors awa’ and bile their heids.

Much as Val disliked to impose his will on others, sometimes he had no choice.
Go with Isidore. Now.

Jamie’s jaw went slack. Isidore grasped the boy’s ear and led him from the room.

Drogo padded after them. Machka rubbed against Miss Dinwiddie’s ankles, for all the world as if she liked their guest. What Machka really liked was to be an annoyance. Val picked up the cat and set her on his shoulder. Machka licked his ear.

Emily removed her spectacles and gave them a brisk polish. “That was most impressive. However, you needn’t try and bamboozle
me
into thinking I don’t want Jamie as my page.”

Val decided Miss Dinwiddie must be unfamiliar with the adage concerning fools and angels and the placement of their feet. “First you invade my castle and demand I bring you to Edinburgh. Now you introduce a thief into my household and insist on having him as your servant, although I doubt he has the faintest notion what a page boy does and will probably make off with all the silver plate. Don’t put your back up; I’m not suggesting you should turn him out into the streets. Mrs. MacCamish could handle a regiment of Hussars. She’ll brook no nonsense from a cheeky little scamp.”

“Mrs. MacCamish?” Emily echoed suspiciously.

“My cook. Don’t look so appalled. Contrary to what you seem to think, I do
not
have a taste for roasted guttersnipes.”

She replaced her spectacles. “You’re angry with me.”

Yes, and wasn’t that interesting? Anger wasn’t an emotion with which Val often bothered. “I made some inquiries last night, after you went to sleep. Michael Ross is a familiar figure in Edinburgh society. Yes, I understand that you yearn to confront him, but matters will proceed more smoothly if his suspicions aren’t aroused. In other words, you can’t just march up to the door of his lodging house and demand he give back your belongings. If Ross
did
steal the things, you will have put him on his guard.”

Emily tucked a rebellious orange ringlet back into her braid. “I’m sure that he stole it. Well, almost.”

And therein lay a tale, thought Val. He wondered if he would enjoy discovering what it was.

“If one wishes to trap a thief, then one must go where the thief will be. Specifically—” One hand steadying the cat perched on his shoulder, he rifled through a stack of invitations. “Lady Cullane’s musicale.”

Emily sank into a chair. “You can’t mean what I think you mean. I don’t have time to attend any wretched musicale.”

Val set aside the invitation. “One must make sacrifices, Miss Dinwiddie. In matters of this nature, a degree of discretion is required. Lady Cullane knows all there is to know about everyone in Edinburgh, and so Lady Cullane it shall be.”

Emily drew in a breath and released it slowly. “You are the
most
annoying man.”

Val didn’t even try to resist temptation. “You no longer believe me a grotesquerie, then?”

“You are an exasperation! What am I to tell Michael when I see him, pray? He thinks I am still in London, mourning my papa. What possible reason could I have for being here?”

Val had asked himself that same question. “You have come to Edinburgh so that your family may provide you solace in your time of need.”

Emily surveyed him over the rim of her spectacles. “I don’t have family in Edinburgh.”

Val stroked Machka. “You do now.”

Plant the crab-tree wherever you may, it will never bear pippins.

(Romanian proverb)

Cleaned up, young Jamie was revealed to be a gap-toothed freckled lad — ‘fernitickles,’ he called them, observing that Miss Dinwiddie had her own goodly share — some ten years of age, with a sandy-colored ‘coo lick’ springing up from the crown of his head. Jamie confessed to having never had such good food, or clean clothes, or so warm a place to sleep as the wall bed near the kitchen hearth. He assured Emily he had no notion of running away; Isidore had warned him that if he was to scarper, that great wolf would track him down and gobble him alive. If Isidore was crabbit (grumpy), Mrs. MacCamish was couthie (kind); and Zizi, Bela, and Lilian were— Och. Words failed him. At least, words he could use in front of a young lady like herself. Jamie had been given strict instructions on how he was to behave.

Isidore hobbled into the kitchen, his expression suggesting a desire to give similar instructions to Emily, if not grill her over the fire on the brandiron. “The master has been waiting for you. As well as Madame Fanchon and Lady Alberta Tait.”

“If he’s waiting for them also,” Emily shot back, “a few more moments will hardly count.”

Isidore’s nose twitched. “No, miss,
they
’
re
all waiting. For you. In the drawing room.”

Emily wrinkled her own nose. Ravensclaw had only to voice a wish to have it granted. It was most annoying in him.

Why must she bother with these women? There were missing things of power to be found.

If Ravensclaw didn’t stop shilly-shallying, she would be about the business herself.

She
should
be about the business. It was due to her ineptitude that the thefts had taken place.

Tail straight up in the air like some sort of furry directional device, Machka led the way across the flagstone floor and up the stair. Emily managed, barely, to avoid tripping over the vexatious feline.

She hesitated in the doorway of the drawing room. Ravensclaw and two females were seated around a mahogany table on which had been set out a fine selection of delicacies, coffee, and tea. In front of the older woman rested a plate bearing the remnants of a smoked salmon omelet served with watercress cream. The younger had limited herself to a cup of tea. Ravensclaw appeared to have enjoyed a bowl of thick and wholesome porridge, which Emily considered queer in him indeed.

The younger woman was eyeing Drogo with trepidation. “Forgive me for asking, Count Revay-Czobar, but is that a
wolf?”

“You have made a common error, Madame Fanchon,” Ravensclaw replied. “Drogo is a rare Carpathian
copoi,
or sleuthhound.”

“ ‘Cabbage twice cooked is death’,” muttered Isidore, as he gave Emily a none-too-gentle shove.