“Magic?” Ysabeau’s head swung around, and her eyes sparkled.
“I thought you didn’t approve of witches?” My mother-in-law had made her feelings on this matter known from the very beginning of my relationship with Matthew.
“Ysabeau might not like witches, but she’s got nothing except admiration for magic,” Fernando said.
“You draw a mighty fine line, Ysabeau,” Sarah said with a shake of her head.
“What kind of magic?” Gallowglass had returned, unnoticed, and was standing in the hall, his hair and coat dripping with moisture. He rather resembled Lobero after a long run in the emperor’s Stag Moat.
“A candle spell can work when you’re searching for a lost object,” Sarah said thoughtfully. She was something of an expert on candle spells, since Em had been famous for leaving her things all around the house—and Madison.
“I remember a witch who used some earth and a knotted piece of linen,” Ysabeau said. Sarah and I turned to her, mouths open in astonishment. She drew herself straight and regarded us with hauteur. “You need not look so surprised. I have known a great many witches over the years.”
Fernando ignored Ysabeau and spoke to Phoebe instead. “You said one of the addresses for T. J. Weston was in Denmark. What about the others?”
“All from the UK: four in England and one in Northern Ireland,” Phoebe said. “In England the addresses were all in the south—Devon, Cornwall, Essex, Wiltshire.”
“Do you really need to meddle with magic, Auntie?” Gallowglass looked concerned. “Surely there’s a way for Nathaniel to use his computers and find this person. Did you write the addresses down, Phoebe?”
“Of course.” She produced a crumpled Boots receipt covered with handwriting. Gallowglass looked at it dubiously. “I couldn’t very well take a notebook into the file room. It would have been suspicious.”
“Very clever,” Ysabeau assured her. “I will send the addresses on to Nathaniel so he can get to work on them.”
“I still think magic would be faster—so long as I can figure out what spell to use,” I said. “I’ll need something visual. I’m better with visuals than with candles.”
“What about a map?” Gallowglass suggested. “Matthew must have a map or two in his library upstairs. If not, I could go around to Hatchards and see what they’ve got.” He had only just returned, but Gallowglass was clearly eager to be outdoors in the frigid downpour. It was, I supposed, as close to the weather in the middle of the Atlantic as he was likely to find.
“A map might work—if it were big enough,” I said. “We’ll be no better off if the spell is only able to pinpoint that T. J. Weston’s location is in Wiltshire.” I wondered if it would be possible for Leonard to drive me around the county with a box of candles.
“There’s a lovely map shop just by Shoreditch,” Leonard said proudly, as though he were personally responsible for its location. “They make big maps what hang on walls. I’ll give them a ring.”
“What will you need besides the map?” Sarah asked. “A compass?”
“It’s too bad I don’t have the mathematical instrument Emperor Rudolf gave me,” I said. “It was always whirring around as though it were trying to find something.” At first I’d thought its movements indicated that somebody was searching for Matthew and me. Over time I’d wondered if the compendium swung into action whenever someone was searching for the Book of Life.
Phoebe and Ysabeau exchanged a look.
“Excuse me.” Phoebe slipped out of the room.
“That brass gadget that Annie and Jack called a witch’s clock?” Gallowglass chuckled. “I doubt that would be much help, Auntie. It couldn’t even keep proper time, and Master Habermel’s latitude charts were a bit . . . er, fanciful.” Habermel had been utterly defeated by my request to include a reference to the New World and had simply picked a coordinate that for all I knew would have put me in Tierra del Fuego.
“Divination is the way to go,” Sarah said. “We’ll put candles on the four cardinal points of north, east, south, and west, then sit you in the center with a bowl of water and see what develops.”
“If I’m going to divine by water, I’ll need more space than this.” The breakfast room would fill up with witchwater at an alarming speed.
“We could use the garden,” Ysabeau suggested. “Or the ballroom upstairs. I never did think the Trojan War was a suitable subject for the frescoes, so it would be no great loss if they were damaged.”
“We might want to tune up your third eye before you start, too,” Sarah said, looking critically at my forehead as though it were a radio.
Phoebe returned with a small box. She handed it to Ysabeau.
“Perhaps we should see if this can help first.” Ysabeau drew Master Habermel’s compendium from the cardboard container. “Alain packed up some of your things from Sept-Tours. He thought they would make you feel more at home here.”
The compendium was a beautiful instrument, expertly fashioned from brass, gilded and silvered to make it shine, and loaded with everything from a storage slot for paper and pencil to a compass, latitude tables, and a small clock. At the moment the instrument appeared to be going haywire, for the dials on the face of the compendium were spinning around. We could hear the steady whir of the gears.
Sarah peered at the instrument. “Definitely enchanted.”
“It’s going to wear itself out.” Gallowglass extended a thick finger, ready to give the hands on the clock a poke to slow them down.
“No touching,” Sarah said sharply. “You can never anticipate how a bewitched object will respond to unwanted interference.”
“Did you ever put it near the picture of the chemical wedding, Auntie?” Gallowglass asked. “If you’re right, and Master Habermel’s toy acts up when someone is looking for the Book of Life, then maybe seeing the page will quiet it.”
“Good idea. The picture of the chemical wedding is in the Chinese Room along with the picture of the dragons.” I lumbered to my feet. “I left them on the card table.”
Ysabeau was gone before I could straighten up. She was back quickly, holding the two pages as though they were glass and might shatter at any moment. As soon as I laid them on the table, the hand on the compendium dial began to swing slowly from left to right instead of revolving around its central pin. When I picked the pages up, the compendium began to spin again—though slower than it had before.
“I do not think the compendium registers when someone is looking for the Book of Life,” Fernando said. “The instrument itself seems to be searching for the book. Now that it senses some of the pages are nearby, it is narrowing its focus.”