Chapter Thirteen
THIRTEEN
“I think we have a second suspect in Francis Gladwell’s murder.”
Across the small table, Maximilian grimaced before taking a long sip of his caffe latte.
They were seated at Guillermo’s, tucked away in a corner that allowed Vesper to watch the coffeehouse’s breakfast crowd give way to the usual midday rush.
They’d come to the coffeehouse after the polo match had ended, looking for lunch, but Vesper wanted answers too.
“Who?” asked Maximilian. He looked considerably better now. The color had returned to his face, and he seemed much more alert.
“Bess Duxley,” said Vesper. “During the polo match, I learned that she and Francis had some sort of affair, so she had the means to lure him away from the party. I saw her leaving the maze on the night of the exhibition, which gave her opportunity, and if it’s true that her affair with him cost Bess her reputation, that could be a motive to want him dead. ”
“I’d heard rumors that the two of them were … involved,” Maximilian acknowledged, “but Francis was involved with a lot of women. If every young lady who’d had a fling with him was a suspect, we’d be investigating women for weeks.”
“Yes, but Bess was the only one we know of whose reputation suffered for it,” Vesper pointed out.
“True, but if Bess wanted Francis dead, why kill him the night of the exhibition?” he asked. “Personally, I still think the Gladwell Machine is involved in this somehow.”
Vesper bit her lip. She’d had the same thought.
“If you ask me, I also still think Charles Belver’s the more likely culprit,” said Maximilian. “We just have to find a way to prove it.”
Vesper sat back in her seat. “Why do you dislike Charles Belver so much?”
“What do you mean?”
“You seem to have real animosity toward him, even outside of the current situation. You said you once did business with him,” Vesper pressed. “What happened?”
Maximilian massaged the bridge of his nose, sighed, then leaned forward. “Do you know how old I was when I assumed leadership of the Basalton Coal Company and its foundation?”
“No,” Vesper admitted.
“I was fourteen.”
“What?” Vesper frowned. “How’s that possible?”
“It goes back to the founder of my family’s empire,” said Maximilian. “My great-grandfather, Ignatius Kite.”
Ignatius, Vesper thought. So that’s where you got your middle name.
“When he drafted the company’s bylaws, Ignatius added a special clause,” Maximilian went on. “It mandated that leadership of the Basalton Coal Company must always be held by a direct male issue of the Kite family, no exceptions.”
“But at fourteen, you were still only a child,” Vesper pointed out. “It couldn’t possibly have been legal for you to run a multimillion gild company.”
“It wasn’t,” said Maximilian. “So, to make do, a board of trustees was established to essentially run the company until I was of age. The board was made up of men personally preselected by my father. You might guess who one of them was.”
“Charles Belver,” said Vesper.
Maximilian nodded. “For the first couple of years, I was happy with the arrangement. After all, I was only a boy who didn’t know any better.
But the closer I got to seventeen, the more obvious it became that Charles had no desire to relinquish the power that had been temporarily afforded to him.
One day, I caught him trying to steal money, and immediately fired him from the board. ”
“So that’s why you don’t like him,” said Vesper.
“To put it lightly,” said Maximilian. His smile was humorless. “And that’s also why I now want you to shift the focus of your investigation to him exclusively.”
“What?”
“Means. Opportunity. Motive.” Maximilian held up three fingers. “Belver was at the exhibition on the night Francis died, and had the ability to use sorcery to kill him. We know he also had a clear motive to want him dead. That’s enough for me.”
“Your personal bias is clouding your judgment.” Vesper pinched off a piece of banana bread from her plate.
“You’re trying to make a case for Belver being the culprit instead of letting the facts lead you to it organically.
Certainly he was at the exhibition, but neither of us ever actually saw him in the maze.
Whoever killed Mr. Gladwell would have needed pretty good knowledge of the grounds to get in and out of the maze quickly.
How would Charles Belver have even known Francis was going to be in there?
And if he’s as wealthy as you say, why wouldn’t he have just offered Francis more money for his machine?
” She shook her head. “Something about it isn’t right. ”
Maximilian frowned. “Then we go back to the drawing board and look at every captain of industry who was at the exhibition,” he said. “One of them is guilty, I know it.”
“How can you be so sure that a captain of industry did this? They’re not the only ones in Basalton with power and motive, you know.”
“Fine.” Maximilian cocked his head. “Who would you rather focus on, then?”
Vesper’s gaze panned the coffeehouse. “I think we keep Bess Duxley on our list, and I think we keep asking questions about Francis Gladwell. Until we know who he really was and what secrets he might have been hiding, we’re missing a major piece of the puzzle.”
“And how do you plan to find that elusive piece?”
I don’t know. Vesper didn’t want to say the words aloud. She’d always hated uncertainty, it was one of her least favorite feelings, but that seemed to be the only thing she’d been feeling as of late. She picked up her apple cider to sip it, then immediately drew back, grimacing.
“What’s wrong?” Maximilian asked.
“It’s my cider.” Vesper set her mug down, disappointed. “I was waiting for it to cool a bit, but now it’s gone cold.”
“Here, allow me.” Maximilian picked the mug up by its handle, then placed his other hand underneath it.
He murmured something under his breath as a furrow appeared in his brow.
He closed his eyes and continued to speak, and Vesper remembered that he’d done the exact same thing during Francis Gladwell’s exhibition.
In that moment, there was a real reverence in the sorcerer’s face, a gentleness as he spoke the Thaumaric incantation.
Just as quickly as he’d begun, he stopped speaking and opened his eyes.
Then he slid the mug back across the table. “Try it now.”
Vesper eyed the mug, dubious.
“Good grief, Evans.” The sorcerer rolled his eyes. “It’s not poisoned.”
Vesper lifted the mug to her lips. The cider was now the perfect temperature, not too scalding to drink, but still hot enough to send pleasant warmth through her body as she swallowed. She stared down at the steaming mug a moment, then looked back at Maximilian. “What did you just say?”
“Pardon?”
“To rewarm my mug.” Vesper gestured toward it. “You did that back at the modiste’s too, when we were having tea. So how do you do it? How do these Thaumaric incantations actually work?”
Maximilian gestured to the mug. “I used the Thaumaric word for heat, then focused on the molecules of the cider itself to make them vibrate rapidly, which in turn created thermal energy and heat.”
Vesper stared. “That’s just basic molecular science.”
Maximilian nodded. “I took an entire course in molecular chemistry in my first year of university.”
“It’s really that simple, then,” said Vesper.
She looked at the steaming mug with new appreciation.
“With the right words, and a bit of scientific understanding, anyone could use a Thaumaric incantation, just like Mr. Gladwell indicated.” She looked up in time to see that the sorcerer’s expression had changed.
“It’s not as simple as that,” he murmured. “It’s complicated.”
“Oh?” Vesper raised a brow. “It certainly doesn’t sound complicated.”
The sorcerer clasped his hands and stared at them a moment as though in deep thought, then:
“When you’re learning a new language, you begin by learning basic vocabulary and grammar, right?”
Vesper nodded.
“From there, you learn how to conjugate verbs, how to string words together to form increasingly sophisticated sentences,” he continued.
“But one of the last things you learn, one of the hardest things, are the nuances of a given language. When we say, ‘it’s raining cats and dogs,’ we don’t literally mean that animals are falling from the sky, but that’s what it would sound like to a non-Victerran speaker trying to directly translate the words, because they lack the context needed to understand that the translation isn’t meant to be literal. ”
“All right,” said Vesper. “So what’s your point?”
“Thaumaric is the same way,” said Maximilian.
“It’s a language, full of nuances and quirks.
Learning the vocabulary is easy enough with the right resources, but it still takes years of study to learn and understand its idiosyncrasies, of which there are many.
To perform sorcery safely and correctly, it’s imperative that a person understands those idiosyncrasies before attempting an incantation.
Otherwise, the consequences can be catastrophic.
It’s not enough to memorize the words; you have to understand what putting them together in a certain order means, what laws of science you’re manipulating or, in some cases, outright violating.
It’s an extraordinary power to dabble in. ”
The word extraordinary shook a memory loose in Vesper’s mind. She remembered the words the sorcerer had said the night they met.
“You said once that you didn’t trust ordinary people with extraordinary power,” she recalled. “But if a machine like Mr. Gladwell’s allowed people to safely produce Thaumaric incantations that might better their lives, I still don’t understand why you’d be against that.”