Such a curious and clever woman.
“They wish. No, this is an Elvanfoot invention. A gift. Though I’ve no doubt they’ll try and get their hands on the ingenious devices one of these days.”
Ian felt Edwina’s mind whir at the mention of Sir Elvanfoot. Naturally, she knew who he was. Every witch in the isles knew who the great wizard of the north was. Not everyone had known the man had a son, however. Sadly, the son’s talents with magic had proved mediocre at best, relegating him to an unremarkable life in his father’s shadow. Until later, when he’d run off to the city to become a stage magician in a music hall variety show. Oh, he’d inherited a decent amount of talent for the craft. Enough to impress an audience of dozy mortals willing to pay good money to watch a string of average tricks, but in the north, he would never have been able to fulfill the expectations one held for the son of Sir Elvanfoot. And now, of course, the unfortunate fellow was missing.
Ian checked again to see if anyone was eavesdropping and noticed the young woman in plaid had tilted her ear ever so slightly in their direction. Her eyes no longer concentrated on her stitches but rather stared down at the floor without moving. He lowered his voice and leaned in close enough to Edwina’s ear to make a blush rise in her cheeks.
“He gives lectures on magic in the summer,” he explained. “Sir Elvanfoot, that is. That’s how I met him. He’s an acquaintance of my father’s, so he came to me when he suspected his son had gone missing. That and I’m the only private detective investigating the supernatural outside of the Constabulary in the whole of the isles who could locate George without alerting the authorities and making a mess of it in the papers.”
“My father spoke of meeting Sir Elvanfoot once before as well.” She peered ahead as if watching for something outside the window, despite the darkness of the tunnel. “I dare say we may have more in common than we might have first imagined.” The train slowed and she gripped the back of the seat in front of her. “This is where we get off.”
Out of habit, he opened his pocket watch for a quick sweep of the end of the tunnel. Forewarned was forearmed. He stood to let Edwina out of the seat they’d shared so she might disembark before him. Once she was out the door, his spectrometer spun toward the young embroiderer in plaid. She looked at him and moaned, revealing a face with sunken eyes and shriveled skin. The young woman gagged and retched on the seat beside her before dissipating from the car.
“Damn cholera,” he whispered and shut the timepiece again, satisfied the decades-old ghost was the only other supernatural entity lurking in the train tunnel with them.
Back at street level, Edwina led him through the crowd of passengers coming and going in ten different directions. Nothing about their surroundings struck him as familiar until they exited the station. Outside, the bustle of the East End echoed in his ear, as recognizable as it was loud. The sound of heavy-footed horses hauling wagons collided with the clamor of men going to and from work, some shouldering ladders, some carrying buckets, and others walking with parcels tucked under their arms. Newspaper hawkers competed for customers, while women and children sold posies for a penny in the street. As they walked, the call of goods for sale proved as common as a tip of the hat and a “pardon me” when passing a stranger.
At the corner of the intersection in front of the station, Edwina took a moment to get her bearings, while Ian noted the grit in the air was thick enough to taste with each inhale. Her eyes scanned the skyline—the clock tower, the gilded eaves of the Rose & Crown pub across the street, and the row of striped awnings where the smell of slaughtered animals at the butcher’s shop rode on a wave from a block away.
“There,” she said at last, pointing straight down the street in front of them, where a man and two boys walked by with faces caked in coal dust. “Five minutes in that direction is the Wilshire Music Hall.” She then directed his attention to the right. “That way there are boardinghouses and hotels on each side of the street. No matter if you took the underground train here after your journey south or you rode an omnibus, you would have stood at this intersection four days ago. So where would your instincts tell you to go next in search of lodging?”
He’d already deduced what she was about. By having him stand in the same place he would have made his decision four days ago, they might track down where he’d stayed. Without a doubt he would have remained close to the one main clue he had about the man’s last known whereabouts. “This way,” he said as recognition slipped over his body like an overcoat. Memory in the form of déjà vu guided him, letting him feel out the lay of the street rather than truly remembering. He kept his eyes on the doorways of each business they passed—a hotel and tavern, a wine and spirit emporium, a sewing machine shop, another hotel that carried the whiff of a brothel—measuring each against his body’s reaction. He rejected them one by one until they came to a door flanked by weather-beaten pillars. The name above the entrance read THE THREE HARES INN.