Spellbreaker

“Passbook, passbook,” she whispered, looking over his sparse furniture. He kept all their savings passbooks in here, often added to them himself, out of generosity. Elsie hadn’t needed to use hers for quite a while. Where is it?

She moved to his desk and opened the top right drawer, searching through the pens and papers within. Several had large scribbles on them, connecting random dots. Something about the drawings seemed almost familiar, but she couldn’t think of why. They lacked Ogden’s usual artistic eye.

The drawer beneath it held various bottles of blue aspector ink, and the third was filled nearly to the brim with old ledgers. In the left drawers, she found receipts—had he given those to her to document yet?—framing tools, and old letters.

Bother. She retrieved his key from beneath his bedside table and went to the cupboard where he kept his drops, opening the door and sorting through the contents of the locked cabinet. No passbook. Where on earth could it be? She needed to get to London before the last train left, or she’d waste an entire day—

Locking up the cupboard, she returned to the desk and checked its drawers once more. She rifled through receipts, lifted ledgers. Pulled open the drawer of inks and pushed them forward and back. Nothing.

She closed the drawer hard and heard a chink

! Fearing she’d broken a bottle, she opened it again, ready to find a blue mess staining the wood. But the bottles were fine.

She shut the drawer again, the chink! sounding again, but a little softer this time. She paused. It didn’t sound like glass hitting glass . . . so what was it? Not her passbook, certainly, but curiosity had her opening the drawer again. Nothing but ink bottles, one nearly empty, three full, one half-full. She shifted the drawer back and forth, hearing the high-pitched chink! even though the bottles were not hitting one another.

She shifted each vial, one at a time, until she found one in the back that was empty. It looked half-full, but upon closer inspection, the glass had been tinted blue halfway up the bottle. She shook it, hearing something rattle beneath the glass. What on earth?

Uncorking the thing, she turned it over, and a long, metal-tipped stamp fell into her palm. What purpose would Ogden have for hiding a seal—

She stopped breathing when she saw the image at its end. A bird foot over a crescent moon.

The symbol of the Cowls.

Her jaw dropped. Then, as though the thing were a live ember, she shoved it back into the bottle, corked it, and replaced it in the drawer. She slammed the drawer shut and retreated two steps.

The Cowls . . . Ogden was one of them?

But it made so much sense. How their letters had always found their way into her most personal spaces, without a trace. Like their deliverer knew precisely where she’d find them. Besides which, he’d always been so generous with her time, as if he knew she was putting it to good use.

Had Ogden always been one of them, or had he converted to their cause after hiring her? Had he discovered something she had not, and been inducted into their fold?

He undoubtedly knew one thing . . . He knew she was a spellbreaker.

Gooseflesh prickled her arms and legs. All the questions she’d wrestled with since the night of the workhouse fire flooded back. Why had he kept it a secret? For Emmeline?

It struck her that Mr. Parker probably wasn’t involved at all. Ogden had said, The squire has his hands in all sorts of nefarious affairs. Was that what his steward had been hiding? Not his penmanship, but a letter trying to sort out one of Squire Hughes’s misdeeds?

But of course it was Ogden! He was an artist. It wouldn’t be hard for him to disguise his handwriting . . .

She needed to think on all of this, to decide the best path forward, and yet it felt as if she’d opened a new book with too many pages. She had to get to Juniper Down now.

But the Cowls . . .

“Elsie?”

She jumped at Emmeline’s voice. Smoothed the sides of her hair. “Emmeline. Do you . . . know where Ogden keeps our savings passbooks?”

She considered for a moment. “Did you check under the bed?”

“I . . . no.”

Jittery, she crouched by the bed and pulled out a wooden box of documents. Sure enough, all three of their passbooks were stored near the top. Elsie grabbed hers and held it to her chest. She didn’t know how much money she’d need, so she would withdraw all of it. There were still bandits about—

Juniper Down. The Cowls. Her family. Ogden.

Her head was going to explode.

Hurrying to her bedroom, Elsie stuck the passbook into her chatelaine bag and closed her valise, noting a second cloth package of food tucked within it.

“Thank you, Emmeline.” She hauled the valise into the hallway. She dragged it down the stairs and set it on the table, then worried her hands as she waited for Ogden to return. He came through the door less than a quarter hour later.