Home > The Midnight Bargain

The Midnight Bargain
Author: C. L. Polk

 

CHAPTER I


The carriage drew closer to Booksellers’ Row, and Beatrice Clayborn drew in a hopeful breath before she cast her spell. Head high, spine straight, she hid her hands in her pockets and curled her fingers into mystic signs as the fiacre jostled over green cobblestones. She had been in Bendleton three days, and while its elegant buildings and clean streets were the prettiest trap anyone could step into, Beatrice would have given anything to be somewhere else—anywhere but here, at the beginning of bargaining season.

She breathed out the seeking tendrils of her spell, touching each of the shop fronts. If a miracle rushed over her skin and prickled at her ears—

But there was nothing. Not a glimmer; not even an itch. They passed The Rook’s Tower Books, P. T. Williams and Sons, and the celebrated House of Verdeu, which filled a full third of a block with all its volumes.

Beatrice let out a sigh. No miracle. No freedom. No hope. But when they rounded the corner from Booksellers’ Row to a narrow gray lane with no name, Beatrice’s spell bloomed in response. There. A grimoire! There was no way to know what it contained, but she smiled up at the sky as she pulled on the bell next to her seat.

“Driver, stop.” She slid forward on the fiacre’s padded seat, ready to jump into the street by herself. “Clara, can you complete the fitting for me?”

“Miss Beatrice, you mustn’t.” Clara clutched at Beatrice’s wrist. “It should be you.”

“You’re exactly my size. It won’t matter,” Beatrice said. “Besides, you’re better at the color and trimmings and such. I’ll just be a few minutes, I promise.”

Her maid-companion shook her head. “You mustn’t miss your appointment at the chapterhouse. I cannot stand in for you when you meet Danton Maisonette the way I can at the dressmakers.”

Beatrice was not going to let that book slip out of her grasp. She patted Clara’s hand and wriggled loose. “I’ll be there in time, Clara. I promise I won’t miss it. I just need to buy a book.”

Clara tilted her head. “Why this place?”

“I wrote to them,” Beatrice lied. “Finding it is a stroke of luck. I won’t be ten minutes.”

Clara sighed and loosed her grip on Beatrice’s wrist. “Very well.”

The driver moved to assist, but Beatrice vaulted to the street, tight-laced stays and all, and waved them off. “Thank you. Go!”

She pivoted on one delicate pillar-heeled shoe and regarded the storefront. Harriman’s was precisely the kind of bookstore Beatrice sought every time she was in a new town: the ones run by people who couldn’t bear to throw books away no matter what was inside the covers, so long as they could be stacked and shelved and housed. Beatrice peered through the windows, reveling at the pang within her senses that set her ears alert and tingling, her spell signaling that a grimoire awaited amid the clutter. She hadn’t found a new one in months.

The doorbell jingled as Beatrice crossed into the book-keeper’s domain. Harriman’s! O dust and ink and leather binding, O map-scrolls and star-prints and poetry chapbooks—and the grimoire, somewhere within! She directed hersmile at the clerk in shirtsleeves and weskit waiting at the front counter.

“Just having a browse,” she said, and moved past without inviting further conversation. Beatrice followed her prickling thumbs between stacks of books and laden shelves. She breathed in old paper and the thin rain-on-green-stones scent of magic, looking not for respectable novels or seemly poetry, but for the authors certain young women never even dared whisper to each other in the powder rooms and parlors of society—the writers of the secret grimoires.

It was here! But it wouldn’t do to be too hasty, to follow the pull of her senses toward the stack where the volume rested, its spine bearing an author name like John Estlin Churchman, or J. C. Everworth, or perhaps E. James Curtfield. The authors always bore those initials on all of the books in her modest collection, stored away from curious eyes. The clerk might wonder at how she knew exactly where to find the book she wanted in all this jumble. She browsed through literature, in history, and even in the occult sections where other patrons would eye her with disapproval, because the realm of magic was not suitable territory for a woman of a certain youth.

Just thinking of her exclusion made Beatrice’s scalp heat. For women, magic was the solitary pursuit of widows and crones, not for the woman whose most noble usefulness was still intact. The inner doors of the chapterhouse were barred to her, while a man with the right connections could elevate himself through admittance and education among his fellow magicians. Anyone with the talent could see the aura of sorcery shining from Beatrice’s head, all the better to produce more magicians for the next generation.

Oh, how she hated it! To be reduced to such a common capability, her magic untrained until some year in her twilight, finally allowed to pursue the only path she cared for? She would not! And so, she sought out the works of J. E. C., who was not a man at all, but a sorceress just like her, who had published a multitude of volumes critics dismissed as incomprehensible.

And they were, to anyone who didn’t know the key. But Beatrice had it by heart. When she lifted a dusty edition of Remembrance of the Jyish Coast of Llanandras from the shelf, she opened the cover and whispered the spell that filtered away anything that wasn’t the truth hidden amid the typesetting, and read:

To Summon a Greater Spirit and Propose the Pact of the Great Bargain

 

She snapped the book shut and fought the joyful squeak that threatened to escape her. She stood very still and let her heart soar in silence with the book pressed to her chest, breathing in its ink and magic.

This was the grimoire she had needed, after years of searching and secret study. If she summoned the spirit and made an alliance, she would have done what every male initiate from the chapterhouses of sorcery aspired to do. She would be a fully initiated magician.

This was everything she needed. No man would have a woman with such an alliance. Her father would see the benefit of keeping her secret, to use her greater spirit to aid him in his business speculations. She would be free. A Mage. This was her miracle.

She’d never leave her family home, but that didn’t matter. She could be the son Father never had, while her younger sister Harriet could have the bargaining season Beatrice didn’t want. Harriet would have the husband she daydreamed about, while Beatrice would continue her studies uninterrupted by marriage.

She stepped back and pivoted away from the shelf, and nearly collided with another customer of Harriman’s. They jumped back from each other, exclaiming in surprise, then stared at each other in consternation.

Beatrice beheld a Llanandari woman who stood tall and slim in a saffron satin-woven cotton mantua, the under-gown scattered all over with vibrant tropical flowers, the elbow-length sleeves erupting in delicate, hand-hooked lace. Hooked lace, on a day gown! She was beautiful, surpassing even the famous reputation of the women of Llanandras. She was blessed with wide brown eyes and deep brown skin, a cloud of tight black curls studded with golden beads, matching a fortune in gold piercing the young woman’s ears and even the side of her nose. But what was she doing here? She couldn’t be in this affluent seaside retreat away from the capital to hunt a husband just as Beatrice was supposed to be doing. Could she?

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