The notice in the window was difficult to see because the glass needed washing and there was ivy growing up from a patch of dirt beside the door, but for those who were in need of help, the desperate and the distraught, the placard was perfectly evident. Ian had grown up with magic, not that he’d been happy about it at the time. His mother had always been a practitioner of the Nameless Art, and all the while Ian was growing up he’d wanted nothing to do with the masses of herbs drying in the rafters and the tinctures his mother had concocted in their kitchen or the people in town who seemed to both fear and revere her. Needless to say, none of his schoolmates were allowed to come play at their house, and, anyway, his mum, Margaret Wright, had thought play to be a ridiculous waste of time. They were outcasts, and Margaret couldn’t care less. Ian, on the other hand, spent his early days in a fever of resentment, morphing from an unruly child into an uncontrollable teenager. Their neighbors made the sign of the fox when he lurched past, a gesture meant to protect them from evil and black magic. Go fuck yourself, Ian would shout at them when he was all of eleven years old. He held up two other fingers in response, the ones that would have been chopped off had he been a robber long ago so that he could not use his bow hand. Everyone knew his meaning. I’ve still got mine, whether or not you like it. People continued to tell him to piss off even when he had grown to be as tall as a man. By the age of fifteen he was handsome enough so that his neighbors’ daughters stared at him with longing, all the more interested when their parents threatened to lock them in their rooms if they dared to have anything to do with Ian. Although these girls promised to avoid him, many were quick to break their vows to stay away, their hearts shattered in return for their defiance.
Growing up in Essex, Ian had felt perched at the end of the world, a landscape of marshy fens and forests and fields. He’d longed for a different life. He wanted a father, brothers, the comradery of other men. At the very least, he wanted a kitchen with an electric stove and room of his own, for their cottage was small and he’d slept on the couch. He left home at sixteen, abruptly storming out after an argument with his mother about some trivial matter, some chore he’d neglected, and it had taken years before he got back on track. He was nearly thirty by the time he went to university, and it was a miracle he made it there. As soon as he was on his own, he joined up with petty criminals, becoming a thief early on. Perhaps it would have been better if someone had chopped off two of his fingers; it might have turned him away from larceny. As it was, he was good at crime, almost unnatural in his abilities as a robber. He thought he recalled his grandmother mention they had a distant ancestor, someone in the far-flung past, who’d been an outlaw and a horse thief who had thrown in his lot with a player from the London theater with a bad reputation, so perhaps robbery was in Ian’s blood. Sometimes he’d take the money and return the wallet to a pocket or purse before it had been noticed missing purely for his own amusement. He was cocky and full of himself and he’d enjoyed his risky, wild life until he’d been arrested.
It had happened in his own hometown when he’d come for a visit to see his mum out of guilt. A good deed had changed his life, for better and for worse. An old policeman named Harold Jenner, who’d caught him shoplifting from the market when he was a boy, and had been fool enough to let Ian off with nothing more than a stern talking-to, now nabbed him once more, this time for lifting a wallet.
“I’m doing this for your own good,” the officer had told him when he apprehended Ian.
He’d wound up doing eighteen months in prison. Much like a crow, he’d stupidly held on to bits and pieces of what he’d stolen, a collector not of books back then, but of incriminating evidence: purses and backpacks, wallets and jewelry, all of it in a messy pile in a rented room on a bad street in London, there for the cops to see when they came to cart him off. Three weeks after he was released, he was back again. He felt like an addict, out of control, unable to stop himself from taking what he imagined he was entitled to, not yet understanding that no one is entitled to anything other than his freedom and the choices he makes.
It was in prison that he found his way to magic. For one thing, his mother visited, bringing books for him to read, and what had previously seemed like far-fetched nonsense now was quite fascinating. The first time Ian’s mother had come to see him he’d glared at her defiantly when she handed him the first book of magic. She’d meant for her gift to both console him and educate him. That first text she brought him was de Laurence’s Oracle Mystery of Life and Destiny. Lauron William de Laurence, who’d lived between 1868 and 1936, was a book pirate and a plagiarist, a rogue and a thief, but also a magician. It was beginning reading, but Margaret thought her son would appreciate the author’s character. Ian had snorted a laugh as he looked through the chapters. “Hidden Treasures.” “Recovering Stolen Goods.” “Lucky Numbers.”