The clock struck the hour, so she shut the chest, finished with looking through the past. Feeling the tug of obligation, Edwina let suspicions about her sister fall into the familiar groove of forgive-and-forget and swung her shawl over her shoulders. Taking Mary’s finds with her, she headed downstairs to open the shop. She turned the OPEN sign around in the window and noted the clouds had cracked apart, letting spindly legs of sunlight seep out around their silvered edges. Good weather made for slow business, but the human traffic lumbered by as usual outside, with one notable exception. The boy hadn’t come to take his normal place in front of the glass.
Mary was also still missing, but she was often late when she claimed to be fetching the milk. Edwina had calculated the distance from the shop to the milk cows in Saint Jonathon’s Square weeks ago and knew it to be an hour round trip, but Mary was often gone twice as long. Those were the days she came home smelling of tobacco and sweat, though she always had the pint bottle tucked under her arm as expected. Still, Edwina knew her sister had been wandering off somewhere else, with someone else, but had never questioned her for fear of, what? Breaching her sister’s privacy and upsetting her? Perhaps today she would confront her about the long absences, and hang the consequences.
While she waited for Mary to return, she spread a cloth out on the counter. With only a little spellwork she thought she could smooth the scratches off the flask so it looked near new again. Besides, busywork usually proved the best cure for an unsteady heart.
Edwina had just taken out her rag and polish, forming a metallurgy spell on her tongue, when an elderly gentleman with a white beard and tan bowler hat entered the shop. A private carriage with a golden dragon coat of arms emblazoned on the door waited across the road. He wasn’t the normal sort who usually popped in to browse their secondhand goods. Aside from the carriage, the cut of his plaid suit and the shine on his shoes marked him as a toff. The second that week. Perhaps the shop was finally gaining a reputation for its odd and unique finds, some of which were quite valuable. There were never bigger bargain hunters than those with money.
The gentleman closed the door behind him, then looked at her with eyes so bright and blue they could have been backlit by starshine.
“Oh,” she said before she could stop herself. The gleam in his eyes wasn’t merely a quirk of heredity; it was the force of his aura sparkling through. “Merry meet,” she said with a nod of recognition.
The gentleman said a quick, “Good tidings, miss,” in a broad northern accent and removed his hat.
“Anything I can help you find today?”
“I’m hoping I’ve found it already.” For a moment the gentleman appeared confused as he looked from the door to the counter. “I’ve been up and down this street three times. Your sign reads Mercier and Sons, though if I’m not mistaken the Mercier family left a year ago to open an apothicaire toxique on the continent.” He stopped and took a moment to appreciate the wares on display under glass and those hung on the walls, nodding as if satisfied he was not standing inside an apothecary shop.
“My apologies for the confusion. Father never bothered to change the sign. He didn’t think ‘Blackwood and Daughters’ would bring in as many customers.”
“Ah, Blackwood, you say? Then I have indeed arrived at the correct place.” The man withdrew a pair of reading glasses and a telegram from his jacket pocket. He slipped the glasses on and unfolded the paper, glancing quickly at the contents to verify the message once again. “Curiosity shop run by the Blackwood sisters,” he read. He nodded and made eye contact with Edwina over the top of his eyeglasses. The stunning starlight quality of blue in his eyes did not fail to shock her anew.
“Someone sent you here to my shop?” The notion struck Edwina as unlikely, unless he was a collector of the odd piece of mismatched silverware or perhaps a pair of secondhand opera glasses. “Was there something specific you were looking for?”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, exposing the palms of his hands upward in an unguarded gesture, “I am looking for my son.”
Edwina fumbled the flask so it slipped from her fingers and clanged against the counter. “You’re Sir Elvanfoot,” she exclaimed. She righted the flask, apologizing for her clumsiness, though she remained baffled as to how or why the great witch of the north had come to be standing inside her shop, and deliberately so.
He extended his hand. “I am indeed, miss. And may I presume by your reaction you have an inkling as to why I might have been instructed to seek out your shop? Or where I might find either my son or Ian Cameron, the man I hired to find him? I’m told there is a key in your shop that I am to obtain.”