“Grab hold!” said Violet.
The entire party took grim hold of the banister with their free hands. Jack concentrated on not slipping any farther down what was now something like a fairground slide, and also bracing himself for any of the women behind him to lose their balance and create an unfortunate human landslide. The soles of his bloody house slippers weren’t exactly designed for grip.
“Violet,” he said through his teeth.
“The poor thing’s skittish. Little wonder. Give me a moment.”
Jack risked a glance back over his shoulder. Violet had her free hand on a wood panel of the wall and her forehead on her hand. She might have been singing, or whispering. Jack couldn’t hear above the music, which was starting to feel unpleasantly as though it were emanating from the centre of Jack’s own skull.
Slowly, the floor beneath their feet tilted back into stairs. Jack got them moving and down to the ground floor before Spinet House’s capricious carpentry could interfere further.
The kitchen was at the back of the house. The floor creaked musically as they made their way through the largest dining room, through the butler’s pantry, and down a short service corridor to the top of two flagstone steps. The dark expanse of the kitchen was still warmed by the ashes of the main cooking fire, which was still used despite the large modern stoves that lined one wall of the kitchen. Hints of moonlight sang off the copper of hanging saucepans.
Jack lifted a hand and paused before stepping down through the doorway. Hair prickled along his arms. The external kitchen door appeared to be closed, and the high windows showed nothing but the dark of night. He should have left his guidelight behind. Nothing to announce your entrance and ruin a reconnoitre like a gleam of yellow light.
Was that a hint of movement in the shadows? And—
Jack jerked back into the shelter of the passageway, treading on someone’s foot. A supple line of red light lashed across the room, bright enough to carve aftereffects in his sight and leave him blinking. It snapped to nothing against the doorframe.
“Violet, shield!” he said sharply.
The golden shimmer appeared like a fishing net flung forward over the whole party. A rather ragged net, unfortunately. Violet was at her best with illusion magic; she was still struggling to improve in other areas. Jack had no way to cram his own dusty education wholesale into her head, and most magic was a hell of a lot more complicated to teach and learn than firing a gun. Jack steeled himself to ignore the darting gaps in the spell. Nothing to be done. You worked with the arsenal you had.
He was about to retrieve his own pistol when a gangly figure darted into full view, both hands raised. Jack leapt down the steps and lashed out with his stick, aiming at one of those hands before it could begin a cradle, and landed a glancing blow.
A youthful yelp emerged. Familiar. Jack hesitated, pulling his second blow—which would have smashed a kneecap—even before the figure said, “Wait! My lord!”
“Oliver,” Jack barked. “What are you doing?”
“Oliver?” said Violet, behind him. The shield blinked out.
Maud and Violet and Dorothy came down into the kitchen. The insistent musical note decreased considerably in volume, presumably because Spinet’s mistress had arrived at the site of trouble.
Jack’s valet, now rubbing his wrist, looked shamefaced. “Mrs. Smith said she’d leave me a morsel of something, my lord. For when I got hungry in the night.”
When, not if. Freddy Oliver was seventeen and not done growing, and Violet’s food bill had probably doubled when he and Jack came to stay in Spinet House.
“Where’s your guidelight?”
“Snuffed it, when I heard—”
A rattle came as the kitchen door shook against its hinges. Leftover sparks of magic flared nervously in Oliver’s hands as if someone had blown a glow from dying embers. So this wasn’t a false alarm created by Oliver’s midnight hunger pangs, then.
“Someone’s trying to break in!”
“Thank you, Oliver. A formidable grasp of the obvious.”
“Pack up your temper, Hawthorn, this is hardly the time. The warding’s holding for now,” said Violet. “I can try something if it falls, but…”
“Good. Do that. Maud, Oliver.” Jack jerked his head and pushed his way back into the house. The other two followed him at a run up the servants’ stairs. Apologies tumbled from the boy’s mouth, and Jack shushed him with a wave.
“You’re lucky I didn’t break your fingers. Or shoot you. And you’ll owe Miss Debenham a new guidelight. What in the damned—does this stair go from ground to attic without pause?” The staircase had thankfully remained stairs, but they’d passed two boxed-in landings that should have led out into the house itself. “I want a window overlooking the kitchen entrance.”
“The house must still be skittish,” said Maud. “I suppose we can’t exactly complain that James Taverner was a fiend for security spells, all things considered.”
“These stairs respond best to staff, miss,” said Oliver. He cradled a light spell and let it brighten as he returned to the previous landing, where he rapped his knuckles politely on the wall. After a moment, a panel slid aside, and Oliver beckoned them into a sparsely furnished sitting room.
At Jack’s direction, Oliver cast a curtain-spell that would muffle sound as well as hide them from view, and they cracked open first physical curtains and then the window. Jack peered out and down.
A thinly veiled gibbous moon illuminated the scene below. Two figures, both with their faces obscured by the fog-masks that George’s conspirators seemed to favour. One stood a few feet from the kitchen door, methodically sending bolt after pale bolt of magic against it.
The other man was tucked in against the wall of the house, a spell hovering uncast between his hands. Protection and backup. Neither of them seemed to be making any effort to experiment, or do anything fiddly to unravel the warding, even though they must have realised how sophisticated it was. Blunt power only.
Jack described the scene, mostly to prevent Maud from shoving her own head out.
“Oliver, can you manage a location-fix clause on a fire spell? Or anything that will distract them? Hell, itching would do. You want it to arise in a specific spot, not come in a line from your hands. You’ll need to define the precise distance.”
Oliver gulped. Even at the best of times the boy looked like a cricket stump wobbling in the aftermath of a ball, and his reddish hair had gone hedgelike in the excitement. “Never tried one, my lord.”