Chapter Twenty-Five
Twenty-Five
“Nice ride,” he remarked as the chauffeur started up and eased them down the rise. “I’m guessing it’s not yours.”
“It is an asset of the Order,” said Ewart primly. “Ownership is an illusion of the fleshly realm, a temporary state, a distraction.”
“If you say so.”
They went left at the bottom of the hill. Duncan lounged in his seat, breathed in the scent of leather, worked at not showing his vigilance over the route they took.
“So you were going to be a warlock?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“It pleased Mistress Spence to believe so, yes. But I could not accept the terms.”
They turned right off Heath Street, heading southeast, as near as Duncan could tell. “The terms?”
“The feminine principle. The female. In witchery, it is always ascendant.”
“And that was too much for you?”
“Only insofar as it is a clear structural mistake.” Young Ewart, turning earnestly toward him on the seat, hands framing his argument.
“Please understand, I am no brute. I cherish women. But the eternal principles cannot be denied. Female is…passive, fecund. A power, yes, but an embedded one. An earthen bedrock strength upon which the world is layered. It cannot be given the ascendant fire and thrust of the male.”
Duncan thought about his one delirious night’s fucking with Wolfbane Sally, four years past and still oddly luminous in his memory. Passive was not one of the words that came to mind.
“So you chose the Sword and Orb instead.”
“Yes. The Order recognizes both principles, and accords them each an honored place. Men and women, both have their part to play. But for dynamic achievements, dynamic change, we must work with the male. We must direct these new energies, with vigor and certain aim.”
“Sort of thing a sword’s useful for, eh?” Left turn, out onto the broad thoroughfare of York Road. Heading east. “Or a penis.”
Ewart flushed to the roots of his hair. “Well, uh, the symbology, of course, uhm, is—”
“How far out of town are we going?”
“Oh—really, just the outskirts.” Visibly relieved not to be pursuing this line of discussion. “We will be there, uhm, quite soon, in fact.”
“Good.”
Duncan turned away from the flustered young face, back to the window.
It was dawning on him just what a poor fit Jerry would have been for apprenticeship with a witch.
He didn’t know Nimble Shanks Annie, but with that name, he doubted she’d be any less coarse in her woodswoman’s ways than Sal.
Ewart would have likely melted into a little puddle of lust and bother at her feet in a matter of months.
No wonder he’d withdrawn, sought the firmer ground of Sword and Orb.
The buildings started to thin as they reached the eastern fringes of the town. Terraced frontage gave way to detached Victorian houses, open space around them. The weather was clouding up; rain specked the glass. Duncan shifted in his seat.
“This is it,” Ewart blurted, as if he thought Duncan might be about to yank open the door and throw himself bodily out.
The car went sharp left off the York Road, and abruptly they were on a climbing gravel track.
Slender young birch trees stood around, screening the view ahead.
By the look of their distribution and size, they’d been planted with intent, and not that long ago.
A little higher up the slope, track and trees sorted themselves out into a modest avenue, the gravel driveway leveled off and grew straight, the birches assembling in aspirational half-grown lines along each side.
At the end stood an equally understated detached house—something of the Victorian vicarage about it, but with the clean, uncomplicated lines of this century rather than the last. There seemed to be more established woodland at its back.
The chauffeur parked the Crossley out front, jumped from the car like some kind of lateral jack-in-the-box, and opened the rear door for them.
Duncan stepped down, tilted his head back to take in the architecture.
The place had nowhere near the size or grandeur of some other mansions he’d seen—Viscount Savin’s family seat, for example, would have been nearly ten times the size; even Stac Dubh was larger and, in keeping with its age, more ornate—but the architecture made its statement nonetheless.
There was a businesslike, fresh-scrubbed Edwardian feel to the way the house presented itself, a modern, forward-looking promise, made before the war and the Forest came and smashed it all apart.
“Welcome, Mr. Silver! Welcome to Adept House.” It was a voice to match the stonework, brisk and brushed and purposeful. “I’m so glad you could come.”
Duncan dropped his gaze, found the imposing front door of the mansion now cracked ajar.
Like some piece of cheap stage magic, a tall, slim man in a morning coat stood under the portico, silver-headed cane balanced lightly in one hand.
Something familiar about the pose, or maybe the face.
For one ludicrous moment, he looked almost like a music hall star about to burst into song.
“Happy to be here,” said Duncan slowly. “And you are?”
The man came down the three steps to the gravel, spry and poised, held out his hand. An amber pentangle ring winked on the little finger. “Malcolm Bainbridge, at your service.”
A little taken aback, Duncan shook the hand.
It was firm and dry, the clasp not trying to prove anything.
He supposed Bainbridge didn’t have to. He hadn’t really thought about which senior acolytes of the Order he might be meeting today.
He certainly hadn’t reckoned on it being the founder and archmage himself.
“I thought,” groping for something halfway intelligent to say, “you’d be in London.”
“Well.” Bainbridge gave him what seemed like a genuine enough smile. “If I’m honest, we had similar information about you.”
In the laugh lines around the other man’s eyes, Duncan saw suddenly how old he was.
Associate of Blavatsky, Olcott, William F.
Barrett, and others in the burgeoning vogue for scientific spiritualism at the turn of the century, founder of his own loosely tributary order in London in the prewar years, scandalous bugbear of British polite society ever since, Bainbridge had to be well into his fifties by now.
But you only really spotted it if you were paying attention.
Touch of gray at the temples, the creases around eyes and mouth, the faintest of wattling in the flesh of his throat—aside from these things, he looked as trim and athletic as a man half his age.
Duncan remembered reading somewhere once that Bainbridge had sold his soul to the devil. Easy to see why it might be believed.
“Perhaps you’d like to come inside.” An elegant gesture with the cane toward the open door. “We are still in the process of setting up, but I’m sure I can rustle up some refreshments. Sandwiches and cordial, at the very least.”
What Duncan had eaten of the witch’s pie sat leaden in the pit of his stomach, memory of the eye-watering amount of horseradish still fresh. Something light and bland couldn’t hurt.
“Aye,” he said. “That’d be nice.”
—
Bainbridge wasn’t being self-deprecating about the early stages of whatever he was doing here.
Adept House, for all its fresh stonework, felt like a mausoleum.
They went down a cold, dusty hall, grit crunching underfoot, past rooms stocked with the ghost loom of sheet-covered furniture.
Only in a rear drawing room—with broad French window views onto a ragged, unkempt lawn and thick woodland beyond—did there seem to be any sign of habitation.
A handsome polished-wood table and chairs stood to one side, files and papers and open leather-bound books strewn across its surface.
More books, shelved along a wall to the right.
There was no carpet to offset the chilly feel, but to the left, a healthy fire burned in the grate of a green-tiled Art Deco fireplace.
Set around the fire, two deep armchairs and a low table, to which Bainbridge now applied his trademark elegant gesture with the cane.
“Will you sit?” he asked. “I’ll see that food is brought.”
Duncan needed no encouragement. The hangover chill was still on his bones; the witch pie dragged at his innards.
He sank into one of the chairs, stretched his legs out toward the warmth of the flames.
Over the fire, someone had found the time to hang a somber study in oils of Tam o’ Shanter reaching the Brig o’ Doon astride his mare Meg, with the witch horde in full cry at his back.
Duncan grinned sourly at it.
A sober-looking butler appeared in the doorway, as if summoned by Bainbridge’s words.
The archmage murmured to the man for a moment, saw him out, then joined Duncan at the fire.
He leaned his cane against the fireplace tiles—the heavy silver cap, Duncan noticed, was a leonine head fronded with wings, some representation of a sphinx, he supposed—and folded himself neatly into the chair.
He looked benignly at Duncan like something he’d just acquired, not cheaply, at auction.
“Well,” he beamed. “You have stirred up quite the hornet’s nest, Mr. Silver. I imagine you’ve realized that by now.”
“Who told you I was in London?”
“It was general information I had. Staying well informed is something of an ingrained habit for me, and I feed it with whatever means are to hand.”
“You’re talking about magic?” Duncan reviewed what little he recalled about the claims of the Sword and Orbsters—clairvoyance and invocation, the third eye’s gaze. Sex magic and unity with the numinous, or so it was, somewhat salaciously, claimed. “Scrying?”