Chapter Two
Maxwell Ashbridge prided himself on being an efficient sort of man.
He knew precisely what time to walk out his front door to catch the Underground that would see him settling down at his desk ninety seconds before his scheduled arrival time.
He’d been employed by His Majesty’s Civil Service for the better part of five years, first in the Passport Office, and more recently in the Forbiddance and Licensing Enforcement Agency, and regularly received glowing performance reviews.
He used all the produce in his kitchen before making another trip to the greengrocer’s.
He returned library books on time. He got things done with a minimum of fuss, which was just the way he liked it.
It was only now, sitting in Raffles’s office and listening to the brief she was cheerfully assigning him, that he wondered if perhaps he hadn’t made himself a bit too reliable.
“I’m sorry,” he said, cutting into his superior’s monologue. “You want me to shut down Holloway’s?”
Raffles broke off, looking annoyed at having been interrupted.
He was never quite certain what to make of Effie Raffles; she was about a decade his senior, slender, and with a silvery blond bob that she kept in perfectly shackled waves.
She came to work every day dressed smartly in a Chanel suit and sensible black pumps; she had tea delivered to her office in an immaculate bone china tea service twice a day; she wrote all of her correspondence on engraved stationery that she brought from home.
She was whip-smart and also very well-connected; her husband was a prominent Tory MP, Michael Raffles, who stopped by the office to collect her each day at five.
Max understood that they were often to be found in the evenings drinking cocktails at the Savoy or dining with some of Raffles’s allies in Parliament.
Michael Raffles was fervently in favor of Forbiddance—he was close friends with Jacob Finlay, a fellow MP who was the original architect of the Forbiddance legislation.
Now, several years into the prohibition of magical substances, the two men and their various allies were fixated on thwarting the efforts of Simon Covington, the leader of the Alliance Party, who was attempting to create a voting bloc of Alliance, Labour, Liberal, and even a few renegade Conservative MPs to repeal the legislation.
Given all this, it was perhaps unsurprising that Raffles’s wife should hold a prominent role at the F.L.E.A.
, where she was tasked with enforcing the laws that Raffles and Finlay had brought into existence.
She certainly seemed passionate about the job—Max had never yet seen her arrive late or take a sick day.
He had never worked beneath a female superior before, despite the success women had had in gaining the vote a few decades earlier, during the reign of Queen Victoria.
He was certain some of the other men in the office made her job more difficult than it needed to be, and so he generally tried to avoid doing so himself—but, considering the assignment she’d just given him, he couldn’t bring himself to be his usual acquiescent self.
“Yes, Holloway’s,” Raffles said curtly. “Am I not speaking in English?”
“We’ve tried to investigate Holloway’s before,” Max reminded her. It had been before his time at the agency, but he’d read the reports. “Agents have been unable to find any hard proof of magical substances being sold.”
Of course, “unable to find” might simply mean “paid handsomely not to notice,” a fact that Max knew Raffles understood as well as he did.
“I am aware,” Raffles said, with a grim twist of her mouth. “But those agents didn’t have the advantage that you do.”
Max stilled; he’d wondered if this had been where this was going. It was nice, he supposed, of Raffles to admit it outright. “Oh?”
“I know that you and the Holloway son—what is his name—” She broke off, rummaging through a stack of papers before her.
“Freddie.”
“Ah, yes. Freddie.” Max was all at once certain that she’d known Freddie’s name perfectly well and had simply wanted him to acknowledge it. “I know you were friends.”
“At university, years ago.”
“He’ll be your ticket to entry, and I trust you to take things from there.”
“He and I haven’t kept in touch,” Max said—a wild understatement—“and he’ll think it decidedly odd if I appear at the doors of his club.” Given the reasons he and Holloway were no longer in touch, “decidedly odd” was putting it mildly.
“Ashbridge. You came to this post highly recommended. I expect your ingenuity will allow you to work something out.” Raffles leaned forward, bracing her elbows on her desk and pressing the tips of her index fingers together.
“There is a general sentiment that it would be beneficial to show the public that no one is above the law, and that Forbiddance is being enforced fairly. And since we’re not fortunate enough, in this department, to employ many people who spent their university years rubbing elbows with the magical elite, you seem like the perfect man for the job. ”
Indeed, Max thought darkly. Because most of the posh boys—men now—who’d been with him at Cambridge were probably eyeballs-deep in potions at any given moment and had no interest in ceasing the practice.
He sighed, then met Raffles’s keen gaze. “Fine. I’ll see what I can uncover.”
“Brilliant. Off you go, then.” Her eyes were already drifting back to the headache-inducing stack of paperwork on her desk as Max rose from his seat. He turned toward the door but paused, hand outstretched toward the handle, when she spoke again.
“Oh, and Ashbridge? Be sure to keep quiet about this around the department.”
Max offered Raffles a nod. “Noted.”
The Holloways were not terribly serious about most things, but the one thing they took very seriously indeed was the weekly family dinner.
The family lived on a quiet, leafy street in Marylebone, near Regent’s Park, where they’d been holding court for the past couple hundred years in considerable splendor.
Marylebone had been developed north of Mayfair hundreds of years earlier by magical families seeking to create their own enclave separate from the mundane aristocrats—those lacking magical abilities.
Today the neighborhood was known both for its concentration of wealthy old magical families and for its preponderance of somewhat clandestine magical businesses.
The Holloways had spent the past couple of centuries cashing in on the family’s prized recipes for potions and spell powders, which were all that remained of Britain’s rich magical heritage.
Magic had once been so woven into everyday life that it would have been impossible to imagine a day without it.
No one entirely understood why it had waned.
One popular theory was that the farther removed Britain was from the days of King Arthur’s court and Merlin and all the rest, the less magic lingered in the land.
Others pointed to the days of the Tudors, and to the bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants, as the moment that religion became more important than magic.
Still others noted the dilution of magical blood in families that intermarried with mundanes, as these intermarriages were proven to slowly diminish magical abilities in a family line over time, or the dwindling variety of magic in the families that continued to marry only among each other.
What wasn’t up for debate was the fact that the fading of spellwork, which had commenced around the time of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, had accelerated since the Industrial Revolution—the last true spells had been cast during the Regency (many an illegal duel had featured a bit of spellwork), and since then, all that had remained was the magical families’ ability to imbue physical substances with temporary magic through the use of their family Words, passed down through the generations.
The families kept their recipes for magical concoctions as closely guarded secrets, and turned a sizable profit from selling the resulting products to the mundane population and other magical families alike.
This took several forms: There were the half dozen or so private members’ clubs that sold potions and spell powders that could be consumed for purposes of revelry; another few pubs, popular with a more working-class clientele, that sold beers and ales that the proprietors brewed with the use of family Words, though their magical effects tended to be a bit more muted than those of the stronger potions; there were also a couple of magical pharmacies, a gardening emporium that sold various elixirs for use on all sorts of plant life, and a select number of cooks—some employed by restaurants, others by wealthy families—who used their family Words to imbue their cuisine with an extra degree of flavor.
The fact that there was a seemingly limitless appetite for these magical substances meant that the fortunes of the magical elite had continued to grow, even as many wealthy mundane families whose prosperity relied on rural agriculture had seen their finances teeter precariously for a few generations now.
The Holloways had no country estate—they were creatures of London and always had been—and had moved into their current mansion at some point in the eighteenth century; they had not seen fit to move since.
Here, Lucian and Amelia Holloway reigned over a household that was rather emptier these days, now that all three of their children lived elsewhere, but they maintained the tradition of Friday night family dinners, and none of their offspring were brave enough to miss the occasion.