Ian took another gander at the photos. “I’ve lost track of him,” he said with a small shake of the head. “But if this witchwork does turn out to be his,” he continued, pointing to the marks on the side of the head, “he’s a better sorcerer than I gave him credit for.”
“How’s that?”
“You ever seen a mark like that from a spell anywhere else?”
The sergeant mopped foam from his mustache with a swipe from the back of his hand. “I seen it on some old standing stones once. Pagan nonsense. Up north.”
The implied pejorative of “up north” struck home. An insinuation about the way witches cleaved hard to the old magic in the north as practiced by men like his father and even Henry Elvanfoot. The sergeant was a fool if he thought his kin up north were backward cunning folk leaping over bonfires and peddling sleeping potions to ailing mortal tourists for profit. Respect for the deep roots where their magic was born had kept the tender sprig of isle enchantment alive, not only in the people but in the land as well. But he took the man’s point: a northerner was missing, and a northern symbol was the common supernatural link between the murders.
“Aye,” Ian said amiably. “We’re fond of our ancestors in the northern vales.”
The two men clasped their hands around their mugs and sipped in silence for a moment, while the clatter of laughter and the creak of the timbers above suggested the place was filling up. Soon punters would be spilling into the basement as well.
“Right, well, I’d best be off,” said the sergeant. “The missus’ll be steaming like a kettle if I don’t get home soon.” The man winked before downing the last three inches in his mug. He swept up the two photos and tucked them away in his jacket alongside his tin of cigarettes and left.
With the bulk of his lodgings money gone, Ian was left with little option for the evening. Luckily, the good sergeant had given him the location of a nearby boardinghouse. One that might offer a valuable clue.
Chapter Nineteen
The steady clop of horses pulling carriages over the bridge from one tower to the next played like a drumbeat in the distance. Dark and silent, the moving water below made smears of the streetlight reflections illuminated on its surface. The sisters, clothed in their lace-trimmed nightgowns and black shawls, stood behind the upper parapet of the white castle, where the air, heavy with mist and the scent of coal smoke, rippled through Edwina’s hair. Grateful for her sister’s insistence they go out, she leaned her head against Mary’s shoulder.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Edwina said.
“You would live in a whitewashed house on Cricket Lane with two children running in the courtyard most like, if not for me.”
She didn’t like it when Mary made herself the martyr. Though their life was unconventional, there were times their unprecedented independence made up for every slight affixed to the wing of an arrow aimed their way. Gazing at stars in the middle of the night atop an eight-hundred-year-old castle, as the river below flowed out to sea, was a worthy-enough trade-off for a life that would likely only ever exist in a daydream.
Edwina moved to sit atop a stone crenellation, letting her bare feet dangle over the side. Mary joined her, leaning against the edge to view the tower green below.
“They died right there,” Mary said, pointing. “The pretty ladies who lost their heads.” Her eyes flitted from spot to spot, tracing the shadows of the women’s spirits as if they were fireflies. Too long dead for Edwina’s eyes, the ladies remained invisible to her, but she knew they were there, glowing like dull candlelight for her sister.
While Mary watched the dancing ladies, Edwina reached into her pocket. She couldn’t see corpse lights like her sister, but she could spot the glint of metal in the grass brighter than Venus at its zenith. She’d found a brass button, three coins, and a young lady’s locket after only one pass over the grounds. Only a night like this one, of following her nature’s true course, could have eased her heart of the bruise it had suffered from the day’s earlier disappointment.
Such lunacy to hold on to so much aching and want, only to have it answered with repulsion and rejection. Being in Ian’s company, she’d felt as if she were under a spell. Love, she’d once been warned, worked in much the same circuitous way as magic, with its enigmatic energy concentrating in the eyes of some but not others. Love was a potion as potent as hemlock or wolfsbane in the right proportion. But was it love she felt? How could it be, when she’d known the man for only two days? Rationally, the encounter was more inclined to be a matter of chemistry, the humors of one body attracted to another through some invisible mist breathed between them. A sort of temporary madness manifesting from nearness.