Chapter 5
The urge to execute a U-turn and flee back to Washington was just shy of overwhelming.
No one there knew what he’d done. It wasn’t too late to go back to his Greek Revival townhouse, to a job where everything he needed was provided and a life where he was as important as a scientist could be.
Ellicott Mills, by contrast, would be a daily misery.
He pulled his car into the last parking spot before Main Street gave way to the teeming throng and forced himself to get out.
“There he is!” yelled a little boy at the end of the line. “There’s our wizard!”
The noise of the crowd escalated to a din. Peter, seizing a leaf in a death grip, muttered a spell and cleared his throat. It echoed over the crowd, the sound amplified. Everyone fell silent as if he’d enspelled them, too.
“I understand why you’re here,” he said, skipping to the heart of the matter. “You haven’t had an omnimancer for years. The closest ones are a good forty-five minutes away, and they won’t help anyone outside Baltimore unless they get a lull in requests from residents.”
“Which never happens!” someone bellowed.
Peter hesitated, loath to go on. He clutched another leaf in case he had to make a quick escape from a stampeding mob.
“The trouble is, Washington has not changed its mind about Ellicott Mills’ need for its own omnimancer.
The assignments office didn’t send me here.
I decided to come home, and I won’t have the usual assistance to do the job. ”
He raised his voice over the sounds of surprise—Miss Harper’s shocked intake of breath among them. “I’ll take care of your requests in order of importance. Please be patient with me. A five-year backlog won’t quickly be undone.”
Some of the murmurs turned to mutters.
“I’ve been standing in this line for three hours!” yelled a man near the head of it. “Please, couldn’t this be first come, first served?”
Another called out, “How will you define ‘important’?”
“Try ‘impending structural collapse’ on for size,” said an elderly man a few spots from the line’s end.
“My daughter is ill! That’s more important than your roof!” a woman shouted at him.
“Take ’er to the hospital, then, you ninny,” the old man sniped back.
What on earth could he say to placate everyone?
“Quick,” Miss Harper said, grabbing his arm. “Put that voice spell on me, too.”
He didn’t make a sarcastic remark about how, less than twenty-four hours earlier, she’d told him he was never to cast a spell on her. He just did it and prayed she could be soothing.
“Quiet!” Her voice boomed over the town. “Didn’t you hear what Omnimancer Blackwell said? He doesn’t have to be here. He could leave right now. Isn’t waiting with the promise of eventual help an improvement over nothing, no matter where you are on the list?”
Townspeople looked sheepishly at each other.
“Exactly,” Miss Harper said. “Now, we’ll take down your requests starting at the front of the line, and equally compelling needs will be handled first come, first served.
You can help move things along by harvesting leaves before they all wither, or else our omnimancer will run out long before spring.
And no, Mr. Edderly,” she added to the elderly homeowner with the roof problem, who had just raised his hand, “one’s place on the waiting list will not be determined by whether one volunteers for leaf duty. ”
Great heavens, she’d cleared up two major problems in thirty seconds flat.
“Is that acceptable?” he asked the crowd.
Nobody looked especially overjoyed. But no one said nay.
He was about to remove the amplification spells when a critically important addendum occurred to him, courtesy of Miss Harper and her reminder about his predecessor. “Just to be clear: I don’t want or expect anything in exchange for my services.”
This seemed to cheer everyone up. He should have said that first.
After he canceled the spells on them both, Miss Harper whispered: “Is anyone paying you to be here?”
He shook his head, bracing for the inevitable. She did not disappoint: “Why did you come back?”
He told her the truth, if not the whole of it. “I needed a break.”
“This is a break? No, never mind, tell me later,” she said, glancing at the crowd.
She went down the queue, assigning numbers with two-minute appointments so people who weren’t near the front could go away and return later to state their case.
(“Not a second over two minutes,” he heard her warn, “or we’ll end up with another ridiculously long line.
”) He retreated to the forest with leaf-picking volunteers whose number swelled to fifty within an hour.
Miss Harper’s day revealed itself in bits and pieces as he passed by the receiving room with piles of leaves.
To a stooped man in overalls, she said: “All right, I’ll see if the omnimancer can do something about that gopher.”
To a young woman in an old dress: “Yes, I’m certain wizards cannot determine whether an infant has magical ability. We’ll just have to wait until he turns thirteen, I’m afraid.”
And to the haggard mother who’d wailed about her sick child: “An ear infection absolutely should be looked at. I’m putting your daughter at the top of the list.”
After his helpers left with promises to return and the last batch of leaves sat atop a wonderfully large pile in the cellar, Peter walked down the driveway toward Main Street and the inviting glow of Reed’s Diner.
He hadn’t so much as a can of soup in the house, and he’d eaten the instant meals stuffed in his trunk for emergencies.
No doubt Miss Harper was ravenously hungry, too.
“Omnimancer!”
The man calling out to him from the sidewalk was tall and sharply dressed in a pinstripe suit, a standout among the farmers who constituted most of the county. “Welcome home. You were a few years behind me at school, so you probably don’t remember me—Mitchell Gray.”
He said the name as if it should mean something. Peter searched his memory and came up empty.
“I’m afraid not, but it’s good to meet you again,” he said. “I hope you’ll forgive the inevitable lag to have your requests filled.”
Gray laughed. “Oh, I’m not on your waiting list. The General Assembly has its own omnimancer. Rotten shame, the shortage of wizards. It’s been awfully hard on my constituents. How did you convince Washington to do without your skills?”
“I resigned.”
“Well, that’s one way.” The politician’s grin was conspiratorial and brief. Then he shook his head. “So they’re not giving you any of the usual support and they’re not paying you. How long do you intend to work here for free?”
“Long enough to get all the residents squared away for a while, I hope.”
“I’ll see if I can get you a stipend when the General Assembly reconvenes in January,” Gray said, clapping him on the shoulder.
“Not necessary,” said Peter, who didn’t care to be beholden to the man, “but thank you all the same.”
Gray lowered his voice. “How are you managing to pay an assistant?”
“Savings.”
“It’s remarkably good of you to do this.”
This too was a question: Why? Peter put on the bland smile he’d perfected in Washington and said, “Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble—”
“—there’s no place like home.” Gray sounded sincere. Either an improvement on the D.C. pols, who would take pleasures and palaces any day, or an especially skilled liar.
Peter had no interest in sticking around to try to figure out which. “Are Reed’s sandwiches as good as I remember them?”
“Better. Sorry to keep you—you must be famished. Just one more thing before I forget,” Gray added as Peter took a step toward the diner and its food.
“You do realize Beatrix Harper is part of the anti-wizard movement? I’d hate to think she finagled her way into your employ through false pretenses.
She could be waiting for an opportunity to undermine you. ”
“Actually, she didn’t want to work for me,” Peter said, suppressing a frown. “I heard of her administrative talents and I insisted. But thank you for looking out for my interests. Good evening.”
He walked into Reed’s, momentarily transported back twenty years. The aroma of gravy and hot roast beef, the glossy hardwood floor reflecting his face back at him, the buzz of conversation all around. Then the chatter died as the rest of the diners caught sight of him.
It was so much more awkward to be a wizard here than in D.C., wizarding capital of the free world.
“Am I that frightening, or is everybody holding a grudge about my inability to help them all simultaneously?” he asked the owner, who looked grayer than he remembered but still hale, standing behind the counter rather than sitting.
“I think it’s more along the lines of ‘impressed.’” Edgar Reed grinned, eyes crinkling. “You’re the most important person to ever come out of Ellicott Mills, and suddenly you’re back. Glad you’re home.”
“Mr. Reed,” Peter said, shaking the proffered hand with both of his, “your kindness when I was the least important person in town kept me from starving. I’m glad to see you again.”
“Want your usual?”
Peter couldn’t believe the man remembered after all these years. “Yes, two.” He handed over enough money to cover the bill plus a generous tip. “One for me, one for my assistant.”
“I’ll pack them up for you to take back. Have a seat, Pete. Oh—forgive me, Omnimancer, old habits die hard.”
Peter gave free rein to an honest, non-D.C. smile. “Call me whatever you want.”
He sat by the door, watching Mr. Reed’s son ferry other people’s dinners from the kitchen, and tried to tally up how many sandwiches various members of that family gave him at no charge between first and seventh grades.
It had to be close to fifteen hundred. He doubted they’d actually needed the sweeping up he’d done to repay them.
“Omnimancer Blackwell.” A prim voice. A prim woman, elderly, with white hair like an exclamation point against her black hat and dress. “I am Mrs. Amelia Price. Do you remember me?”
“Yes, I do,” he said neutrally, gripping the table as he stood. Mrs. Price—like Mrs. Harper, the polar opposite of the Reeds. Mrs. Harper, at least, was dead. “How are you?”
She waved his question away like a gnat. “Perfectly well. I want to talk to you about your choice of assistant.”
“I have every confidence in Miss Harper.”
“That is not the point. She is an unmarried lady, Omnimancer. It is inappropriate for her to work for you.”
He bit back an aggravated sigh. “She worked for Mayor Croft.”
“Mayor Croft is married. You, I take it, are not,” she said, casting a pointed look at his unadorned hands.
“All a lady has in this life is her reputation, and I do not think you should hurt Miss Harper’s already diminished chances for matrimony by making people wonder what you are doing with her while you are alone in that big house. ”
Neatly done, that. She’d insulted him, Miss Harper and the good sense of the entire town.
“Mrs. Price, anyone who saw or was part of the crowd queued up today for my services will immediately grasp what we are doing in that house. No one else in town could have handled that mob as deftly as Miss Harper, and I am not going to replace her with someone whose main recommendation is having been born male.”
“I am very disappointed in you.” Her evil eye was as potent at seventy as it had been at fifty. “Propriety is not something to be ignored when it happens to be inconvenient. You of all people should understand that.”
This jab at an old scar struck an open wound instead. He’d made peace with his illegitimacy, but he hadn’t thought he was a bastard in any other sense of the word until recently.
“Sometimes propriety is unjust,” he said, feeling like a hypocrite, and was saved from the need to dig himself further into a hole by Mr. Reed signaling to him that his food was ready. “Goodbye, Mrs. Price.”
He arrived back at the house as a supplicant exited and didn’t have the mental fortitude to do more than nod at the man. He found Miss Harper slumped over the receiving-room desk, head in her hands.
“On the bright side, you’ll never have to go through this sort of day again,” he said. “Was that the last request?”
Her “yes” sounded slightly choked. She sat up, revealing red-rimmed eyes.
Mrs. Price sprang to mind. “Did someone harass you?”
“No.” She chuckled half-heartedly. “Well, yes, but only when I insisted that second requests would have to wait until everyone’s firsts are filled, barring extreme situations, and Mr. Delarose declared me an idiot for not agreeing that his needs supersede everyone else’s.”
“Mr. Delarose might find himself at the bottom of my to-do list.”
She shrugged. “He’s more middle of the pack, in all fairness.”
“I see power has not yet corrupted you.”
“It would be quite quick if it had,” she said, her laugh more genuine this time.
“What happened, then?”
She looked at her hands. “I thought I understood the extent of the problems here, but I didn’t. Not really. Some of the requests made me wonder how I ever had the gall to consider myself poor.”
He thought of saying something cutting, of dredging up the memory of her telling him—at age eight—that poverty afflicted only the lazy and wicked. But this Miss Harper did not seem to be that Miss Harper. He handed her a sandwich and kept his mouth shut.