The Mirror of Granby Blackstone - a Widdershins Story
Ms Barber and Mr Malik uncover a tale of madness and obsession
This story occurs soon after 'Vanishing Act' and contains mild spoilers.
The life of the Hunter of Magical Artefacts is often full of action, excitement and adventure; searching for hidden treasure through inaccessible jungles, pursuing (or being pursued by) dangerous lunatics across desolate moorlands; scaling inaccessible mountaintops in search of arcane knowledge; investigating dark and haunted mansions. Then there are the days when Christmas has come and gone but the warm weather and long evenings of spring are still a distant dream; when the sky vanishes and becomes a white blank canvas; when Nature cannot be bothered to summon a decent winter storm or the bright cold frost; when it is neither warm enough to leave your coat at home nor cold enough to enjoy its warmth; when there is no colour left in the world and the very air seems imbued with lethargy. On such days, both the criminals and the clients that provide the Hunter with work stay at home in front of their fires waiting for the spring and there is nothing for the Hunter but to do likewise.
In her Widdershins office Harriet Barber sat in her fireside chair, smoking her new French pipe and watching her apprentice Sidney Malik sitting at his desk and practising the same magic trick for the twentieth time. Harriet was getting increasingly frustrated. Partly, this was because she was a woman of action who found it difficult to sit still and wait, but mostly it was because no matter how many times she watched Sid place a bent playing card in the middle of the pack and then make it move to the top, she still didn't have a clue how he did it. She had meant to spend the time reading up on old case notes, but try as she might, she couldn't stop herself watching her apprentice perform the trick again. And again. She knew it was only through continued practise that he was able to perfect his art, but very soon she was either going to start screaming or hitting him with the poker; possibly both. Anyway, as a trainee Hunter, Sid should really have been learning more about the trade, not playing with his toys. She was struck by a sudden idea that perhaps there was a way she could break the monotony for both of them.
She got up and crossed the room to a large cupboard where she kept various souvenirs of her adventures. Of course, most of her income came from trading in all the important artefacts for the bounty, but she liked to keep mementos that were either non-magical or too trivial to be of interest to the Royal Society. Unlocking the cupboard door, she took out an object the size and shape of a thin book, carefully wrapped in oilskin tied with string, and took it over to her apprentice as he successfully completed the card trick for the twenty first time.
“Put away the cards Sid,” she said “and tell me what you make of this.” Sid cleared away the clutter on his desk to make room for the parcel. Harriet was pleased to see that first he remembered to examine the cloth and the string for traps. He said a few words in Latin, twiddled his hands in the air just so and then paused as if listening. In fact he was performing a read to detect the presence of any magic.
“At least the cloth and the string are not imbued.” he told her, and then slowly undid the knots and unwrapped the parcel to reveal a small hand mirror set in a frame of dark wood inlaid with silver. The metal was tarnished, the glass was cracked in the bottom right hand corner and the entire thing had been stained by water. Sid examined his reflection in the mirror, surreptitiously admiring the tiny beard that clung to the point of his chin. He performed the read again, but this time when he listened, he seemed to hear a response.
“So far as I can see, this is exactly what it appears to be.” he told Harriet. “A hand mirror wrapped in oilskin. The glass has been imbued with obstinacy, so it will not allow light to pass through, making it into a mirror. Quite a common, simple spell. Half the households in Widdershins will have something similar. Nowadays of course they just use a silvered backing. Much cheaper and easier to mass produce, but somehow lacking in romance don't you think? There is a little of something else there too. A certain amount of...” he cocked his head to one side to listen to the read again “...well-being imbued into the frame perhaps? Some of the more expensive mirrors included it so that vain people would feel good about their appearance. Made sometime around the turn of the century I'd say.” He looked apologetic. “Sorry, is there something special about it?”
Harriet puffed on her pipe. “How much would you say that it was worth, exactly?”
“Worth? Let's see. The mirror is nothing out of the ordinary, especially with this damage in the corner. The frame looks to be rather good craftsmanship and with the additional imbuing it might have cost, say, twenty guineas when it was new. But of course it's been rather ruined by water - sea-water if I'm not mistaken, so the sale value would be much reduced.”
“What if I told you that a man wasted his entire life and fortune trying to find it?”
“Then I would say that I have obviously missed something.” Sid looked unhappy. He was always eager to please Harriet and it pained him to have failed the test. Harriet shrugged in response.
“Hrm. If there is anything to miss, then I've missed it too. I recovered that artefact several years ago and I still haven't been able to solve the mystery. Wizards at the Society and the University have looked at it and they've found nothing. I've even had a watchmaker look over the frame for hidden mechanisms.”
“Your old ...er... associate Ms Cunningham was very good with mechanical devices. Have you asked her?” Sid asked. Harriet blew tobacco smoke out though her nostrils and glared at him in stony silence. “Ah no, I suppose you haven’t.” her apprentice continued quickly. “Perhaps if you were to tell me the story?”
Harriet drew up a chair as she refilled her pipe and made herself comfortable. “The story? Well it all started with a minor wizard called Granby Blackstone, over thirty years ago. At the time you wouldn’t have believed he would ever do anything out of the ordinary. You know the type. Married his childhood sweetheart, second class honours from the University, steady job with a firm of merchants in Liverpool, diligent worker. Actually, if there were more like him the world would be a better place - and we’d probably be out of a job. Anyway, his wife died of typhoid fever a couple of years after his marriage and somehow it seemed to shake him out of his rut. He sold up everything he had and went into the merchant trade in his own right. To start with he was in partnership with other merchants, but to everyone’s surprise he was wildly successful and soon he was chartering his own ships and then buying a ship of his own named the Lovely Lisa after his late wife. He sailed it around the world to strike new deals and open up new trade routes in person. One of the reasons he was so successful was that he was completely fearless. They still talk about the trade deal he negotiated with the Malay pirates. He took risks no-one else was prepared to take, but somehow all his gambles paid off.”
“Now this is where things start to get interesting from our point of view. Of course, with the risks he was taking Blackstone often got into some pretty dangerous scrapes, but somehow he always managed to come out on top. Stories started to circulate among this crew, and they rapidly spread through all the ports where ship called, that this wasn't merely good luck or skill. How, when things looked at their most hopeless, when all seemed lost, Blackstone would retire to his cabin for five minutes and then emerge strengthened and invigorated, ready to meet the challenge, his mind full of plans to get the ship and the crew through to survive another day. The stories say that the source of his strength was a small ornate mirror he kept in his cabin.”
“This mirror?” Sid asked.
“I believe so.” Harriet replied. “What no-one can agree on was how it worked, for he was careful never to use it in the presence of anyone else. No-one was allowed to even touch it. Some say he used it to talk to a magical genie that would grant his every wish. Some said it gave him powers beyond those of normal men, boosting his reflexes, will and fortitude to superhuman levels. Others say it was a viewing portal into the future that enabled him to see the consequences of his future actions.”
Sid laughed. “Seriously? How could anyone believe such stories in this modern age? That is not how magic works at all.”
“Well, sailors are a superstitious and credulous lot.”
“Please Harry, next you will be telling me that it was giving him advice by casting his horoscope!”
Harriet smiled. “No, I don’t think even sailors would believe that. But don’t be too hard on them. When you are thousands of miles from home, with only a six inch plank between you and the bottom of the ocean, completely reliant on the fickle breeze to get you to land and with no hope of rescue if things go wrong, you tend to believe in anything that might possibly increase your chances of getting back alive. Anyway, Blackstone’s mirror became something of a legend among the seafaring community and it certainly seemed to work, because the risks kept paying off and soon Granby Blackstone was a very, very rich man, although he never showed any sign of retiring and enjoying his wealth. It was as though there was always something driving him on. Something riding his back that meant he could never settle, never be happy.”
“Of course, eventually his luck ran out. Coming back to Liverpool from the Americas in the middle of winter, his ship lost its masts in a raging storm somewhere off the west coast of Scotland and Blackstone himself was badly injured by a falling spar. They lost all control of the ship and then suddenly a rocky coast loomed out of the darkness. Some of the crew just managed to get him into a boat before the ship was dashed to pieces on the rocks. They got away out to the relative safety of the open sea but the night was pitch black and by the time the storm abated the next morning they had no idea of their position. The Captain and all the charts went down with the ship. They headed east on the grounds they would eventually hit land and eventually came ashore on a sandy beach on the island of Taransay in the Outer Hebrides.”
“Now this is where the story gets weird. In the last emergency on the ship, no-one collected Blackstone’s mysterious mirror; it was lost with the ship. With the charts gone, no-one could be sure where exactly the ship had foundered, especially as they'd been blown around in the storm and hadn't been able to get a fix for several days. It had to be somewhere on the Western coast of Scotland but there’s an awful lot of shoreline there. As I said, Blackstone was a very wealthy man. He had no need to go back to sea or indeed ever to work again, but rather than retire he devoted the rest of his life to trying to find the wreck of the Lovely Lisa. It couldn’t be for the cargo - it was valuable high quality tobacco sent over from Virginia,” Harriet paused and sighed at the thought of such a tragic waste “but it was insured and would be ruined in the wreck. The ship itself was a fine vessel, but again as a ship wreck it would have no intrinsic value. Everyone knew what Blackstone was looking for, - his magic mirror. He spent the remaining ten years of his life and his entire fortune searching - and he never found it!”
“There had been several wrecks along the coast in that terrible storm and he investigated them all, sending teams of salvage experts to examine each one. It turned out none of them were his ship. He employed survey teams to explore every inch of the coast line, looking for rocks where the ship might have foundered and not been discovered, having the depths plumbed to find wrecks that had sunk. As you can imagine there were plenty to investigate and each cost him more than the original ship had been worth, but none of them were the wreck he was looking for. In the end, even his vast wealth began to fail, and with it his health, ruined by the constant searching in all weathers and the stress of his quest. I’ve heard that he was often half crazy in his single-minded desperation to find the Lovely Lisa. In the end he died a penniless and broken man, still trying to raise money to fund another survey of the coast.”
“Did he ever think to try to find the mirror by other means?” Sid asked. “I was thinking perhaps…”
“You mean employ a Hunter? Yes that would seem to be the obvious way to go about things wouldn’t it? The answer is no he did not. In fact, Grandfather did offer to act on his behalf on more than one occasion, but he was always turned down. He could never understand why. He did go up to the Hebrides to look on his own, but he never found anything, well nothing to do with Blackstone’s mirror anyway. Remind me to tell you about what he unearthed at Na Fir Bhreige one day when you haven’t had a large breakfast. Anyway, if that mirror on your desk is indeed what Blackstone was looking for, then it isn’t something that a Hunter would be able to find easily. It’s just another minor imbued item.”
“But you found it Harry. You found it when your Grandfather couldn’t.” Sid was not the most ingenuous person in the world, but he had learnt that Harriet, for all her outward strength, was not immune to a little flattery, especially where her hunting abilities were concerned. He knew that it still galled her that whenever she pulled off another triumph, the newspapers still referred to her as 'Granddaughter of Famous Bounty Hunter'.
Harriet allowed herself a little grin of satisfaction as she refilled and lit her pipe. “Yes, I found it. Not by wading through some God-forsaken midge-infested bog but by good planning and forethought down in London. One reliable source of information on rogue magical items is Bedlam. There is nothing like magic for rotting the brain - no offence - especially if it’s being used by someone who isn’t a wizard who starts playing with an artefact they’ve found with no idea of how it really works or what the long term consequences will be. I find it useful to pay a contact in Bedlam a small retainer in exchange for inside information on any inmates whose condition might be linked to rogue magic.”
“You pay for information from a public institution? Is that allowed?” Sid was shocked.
“Hrmph, it’s not a crime.” Harriet said defensively. She caught the look in Sid’s eye. “Well, yes it’s a crime technically. But really if the authorities are so interested in patient confidentiality they should consider paying their orderlies a bit more. If I hadn’t had my inside source of information, I’d have never got the lead on the mirror.”
Sid put the mirror down on his desk as though it had burned him.
“Are you saying that this mirror sent someone insane?” He pushed his chair back from his desk.
“No, as a matter of fact in this case the insanity had been called by smoking an unpleasant narcotic called hashish. It’s quite popular in the Middle East and the Indies apparently. It produces feelings of euphoria but using it for any length of time weakens the brain and produces insomnia, mental impairment, delusions of paranoia and eventually sends you completely bonkers. Why anyone would want to smoke stuff like that when you can get perfectly good, honest, mind-strengthening and completely harmless tobacco on every street corner escapes me, but apparently it is quite popular among sailors who’ve picked up the habit on their travels, usually when they can't get the proper stuff. You can get it in most sea ports around the world.”
“The lunatic was a sailor called Harrison and he was raving about a valuable and powerful artefact that he’d hidden and wanted to retrieve. Of course I got the nod straight away and down I went to see him. He was in a pitiful state. His brain was completely scrambled and he had a great deal of difficulty in focussing and telling a coherent story, not to mention the sudden paranoid rages when he accused me of trying to steal his treasure, which I suppose I was, in a way.”
“To cut a very long and rambling story short, Harrison was a member of the crew of the Lovely Lisa on her last fatal voyage. They didn't all abandon ship when she was about to go onto the rocks. Some of them stayed with the Captain in a hopeless attempt to save the ship. From what I could piece together, Harrison knew that the precious mirror was still on board and was hoping to get his hands on it. Whether he thought it would save him or whether he was hoping to steal it I was never quite sure. He somehow got the mirror out of its lead-lined waterproof chest in Blackstone's cabin while everyone else was busy on deck, wrapped it in oilskin and dived over the side as the ship hit. Unlike most sailors he was a strong swimmer so he was the only one that made it ashore, more dead than alive. All he could do was huddle on the cliff face to wait out the storm. Now we get to the interesting part. When the storm cleared he wasn’t on a cliff face at all. He was on a great spire of rock - a stack - out in the middle of the ocean. No wonder Blackstone could never find the wreck of the Lovely Lisa. It never reached the Outer Hebrides at all.”
“Where was it then?” Sid asked.
“From the description there was only one place that it could be. The stacks off the island of St Kilda.”
“Where? Isn't that in the Indies?” asked Sid.
“No, you’re thinking of St Kitts. St Kilda is a couple of tiny remote islands, about 50 miles west of Lewis, out in the Atlantic Ocean. As remote a place as you could ever hope to find. Home to about 200 islanders who live mostly off the thousands upon thousands of sea birds that nest there. They keep a few sheep too. Anyway, Harrison was stuck on this stack, just an enormous lump of rock sticking up out of the ocean, with no provisions and no water, other than what collected in crevices on the rock. The main island was within sight, but swimming across to it was completely out of the question in those seas. The Lovely Lisa was a total wreck and had sunk in the deep water surrounding the stack. Little more than a few timbers remained. Things were looking bad for him, but then a ship turned up.”
“Oh that was lucky. So he was rescued then.”
“Yes and no. You see the ship that turned up was the Royal Navy frigate HMS Surprise. Of course any seaman setting foot on a Royal Navy ship is immediately pressed into the crew, which was rather unfortunate for Harrison. Naturally he did not want to go on board with his treasure, so he carefully hid it amid the rocks and climbed down to meet the ship. It was pretty difficult to get him off, but the ship's crew were good seaman and they managed it in the end. He gave them some cock and bull story about the ship he was from, he says so they wouldn’t find out about the treasure but I suspect the paranoia was starting to bite even then.”
“The bad news was that the Surprise was on her way out to the Far East for an extended cruise. From what I could gather their adventures pursuing American pirates through the South Pacific would make a much more exciting tale than the one that I am telling you, but it will need a better story teller than me to do it justice. At some point he decided Royal Navy discipline was a bit too much for him, so he jumped ship in the Antipodes. After that he had a lot of difficulty getting back to Britain, what with having to avoid the Navy as a deserter and the fact that the hashish was really starting to eat his brain. By the time he eventually made it back again he was to all intents and purposes completely insane, so was transferred directly to Bedlam, still unable to reclaim the treasure. After several conversations, and a look at a few maps, I was able to work out that there are two stacks off St Kilda and he must have been on the larger one, Stac Lee. It was agreed that I would go and recover the treasure and bring it back to him, in return for a suitable Hunter’s reward.”
Harriet paused to refill her pipe. This was turning into a three-pipe story.
“This was before the new railway was complete and anyway, Florrie only helps fund the business when… when it suits her, so it was a long and hard journey up to St Kilda. The journey by road up to Mallaig is bad enough, but then there’s a the sea trip across to Skye, travel all the way up to Uig at the North end of Skye, then a long crossing over to Tarbert on Harris, then another long journey over terrible roads to the North West of Lewis and then you can finally start haggling with fishermen who might, if you are very lucky and the weather is right, take you out to St Kilda.”
“There’s no regular ferry?”
“No, it’s really difficult for boats to get into St Kilda's harbour. Don’t ask me why. You can only do it if the tide and wind and whatever is just right. Really, the only regular visitor is the factor who goes out to the islands to collect the rent of sea bird feathers and the cloth the islander’s spin from the sheep’s wool. I tried to get the Lewis fishermen to take me to the stacks, but they weren’t having it. They wouldn’t go near them - too dangerous they said. It didn’t help that the fisherman could only speak Gaelic, so I had to get the local vicar to translate and his accent was so bad that a translator would have been useful for him!”
“Finally, I got a boat over to St Kilda. There’s only one settlement. They live in houses that are just low stone walls with a turf roof. Open doorways, no windows, furniture or chimney and they share the houses with their animals. There's lots of little odd stone structures like bee hives where they keep the dried sea bird skins. It's like something out of the middle ages. Fortunately there were a couple of people on the island who spoke a bit of English and I was able to persuade them to take me over to the stack, although they didn’t advise it because they said there was bad weather brewing. They go across regularly in the summer and harvest the birds that nest there. Landing was difficult and they told me to hurry. I had only a vague idea where the treasure was hidden and in the summer the entire place is packed with gannets, and I mean packed. When I first saw the stack I thought that it was covered in snow. The distance between each nest is twice the distance that a gannet sitting on it can peck - and they do. It didn’t make the search any easier, not to mention the fact that I was clinging to a steep rocky slope that was almost, but not quite, a cliff face. It must have been an hour before I found the mirror wrapped in oilskin, more or less as you see it there. Climbing back down is always more difficult because you can’t see where to put your feet, even when you’re not using one hand to carry treasure. Then, when I got back down to the water’s edge, I found that the boat had gone.”
“They’d abandoned you?” Sid was shocked.
“Oh, they were very apologetic about it. They were only a little way out to sea. They explained that the swell had got up, so they had to put off, or their boat would have been broken up. They’ve only got two and there are no trees on the islands to build more. Since they rely on them completely for fishing and harvesting the stacks you can imagine how valuable they are. They promised they’d come back for me the next day.”
“Did they?”
“Oh yes. And the next day and the day after that. A gale set in from the Atlantic and with it heavy rain. Every day the islanders came back and every day they shook their heads and said sorry and went away again. I had to sit there on that lump of rock in the tiny shelter the islanders have built there, trying to keep out of the wind and driving rain for a week, until the sea had calmed enough for them to pick me up.”
“That sounds terrible! Did you have anything to eat and drink?”
“There was plenty of rain water, tasting strongly of gannet doings I might add. And there were plenty of raw gannet eggs. Haven’t eaten another egg since.”
“How absolutely awful!”
“You haven’t heard the worst of it. After the second day I ran out of tobacco.”
“Oh my! Oh dear!” Sid really didn’t know what to say. Harriet never showed her feelings to anyone, especially not him, but he could see the look of pure horror on her face as she relived the nightmare.
“That was the worst week of my life; soaked to the skin, hungry, thirsty and sucking on an empty pipe trying to get a little smell from it.” She shuddered. “My only consolation was the treasure of Granby Blackstone. I didn’t dare open the package in case it got wet or in case there was dangerous magic involved, although I was seriously considering smoking the oilskin. After that I’d have started on the bloody gannets.”
“Finally the weather cleared enough for the islanders to get me off. They even gave me a little tobacco, which in retrospect was really kind of them, as it was in pretty short supply for them too, although it never occurred to me at the time. They got me back to the main island - the fishing boat had long gone of course - but with the good weather they came back for me. Once I was back on Lewis I smoked an improbable amount of the vile ship’s tobacco which was all they had available and at the time was the best thing I’d ever tasted. Then I opened the package and what I found is lying on your desk and bloody disappointed I was too I can tell you. After that it was a case of retracing my steps all the way back to Widdershins. It took ten days and most of my available funds.”
Harriet puffed on her pipe with more than her usual energy at the awful memory, savouring the wonderful smoke.
“So there you have it, Sid. A man wasted his life and fortune trying to find that mirror. I spent a week in Hell to recover it. As far as anyone can tell it’s just a perfectly ordinary imbued mirror. The Royal Society aren’t interested. The University have drawn a blank. What do you think?”
“Did you take it back to Bedlam?” Sid asked uncertainly.
“You needn’t worry about me keeping it when it belonged to Harrison.” Harriet told him. “Yes, I did take it back only to learn that he’d hanged himself the week before. Nobody had turned up to claim his body or belongings. I donated some money to bury him and kept the mirror.”
Sid was still puzzled. “So what makes you think I can help?”
“Watching you just now set me thinking. Maybe this isn't a normal imbued item at all. Maybe it's some kind of Magicians trick. Maybe that's why no-one can unlock its secret, because they've been looking at things in the wrong way.”
Sid was suddenly interested. “Why yes, that would make sense! If there was a secret catch or some misdirection... If I was designing a trick, where would I hide it?” He rummaged in the organisational disaster of his desk and in a surprisingly short space of time produced a set of watchmaker's tools and set to work.
After a couple of minutes of tinkering, Sid gave a cry of triumph. “Of course! The mechanism is hidden in plain sight all along. See where the mirror looks to be damaged with this crack in the corner? In fact it was a very clever way of concealing a small switch. The small piece of glass moves to make something happen, although I can't say what. Once you know it's there you can operate it with your finger nail.”
Sid and Harriet looked at each other in trepidation. Sid reached for the glass switch, but Harriet stopped him. “I'll do that I think. You take a couple of paces back and get ready to either run like Hell or save me, not necessarily in that order, if things go wrong.”
Very gently at arm’s length, Harriet reached out and used Sid's smallest blade to move the glass lever. The mirror shimmered and the reflective surface cleared to reveal the head and shoulders of a strikingly pretty young woman, dressed in the style of the late eighteenth century. She looked like an oil painting.
“Gosh” said Sid, peering over Harriet's shoulder. “Now that's clever! Glass imbued with obstinacy so it reflects light and becomes a mirror but the frame is imbued with a feeling of well-being. Moving that second piece of glass allows the frame to talk to the glass and the sense of well-being overcomes the obstinacy, allowing the light to pass so the glass becomes transparent. It appears to be an ordinary imbued mirror until the glass is moved to reveal what is hidden beneath.”
Harriet was more interested in the young woman's picture. “Hello?” she asked it uncertainly. “Hello? Can you hear me in there?”
The woman did not react. There was no sign of life or movement. It just looked like an oil painting. Harriet moved in closer. There was still no reaction. She looked at the mirror's frame, looked at the mirror at an angle, at the back. She tried moving the glass lever back and forth. The glass obediently showed a mirror or the oil painting of a young woman. She examined the face, the background and the details of the brush strokes, then sat back in disgust.
“Hrmph! We've solved one mystery and all we have is another. The thing is just a mirror with a clever bit of magic to conceal a painting behind it. It's not even that good a painting. No inscriptions, just the name 'Lisa' in tiny letters at the bottom. What is the bloody thing actually for?! Sid!? Sid are you listening to me!?”
Sid was staring at the picture with a strange half-sad smile. He looked as if he was about to burst into tears. Harriet was suddenly alarmed that some subtle emotional magical effect might be at work. “Sid? Sidney!? What’s wrong?” Sid pulled himself together and grinned at her. He knew that she couldn't stand soppy.
“But Harry, don't you see? No wonder looking at the picture always gave Granby Blackstone strength and inspiration and no wonder he was so desperate to get it back no matter what the cost. Such a tragic, romantic tale. It's a picture of his wife, who died so young. It must have been the only one he had.”
--------------------------*
Ms Harriet Barber, Mr Sidney Malik, Mrs Florence de Montfort and Ms Verity Cunningham copyright Kate Ashwin.
The adventures of HMS Surprise and her crew were indeed told by a better story teller and you can read them in the books by Patrick O'Brien.
This story occurs soon after 'Vanishing Act' and contains mild spoilers.
The life of the Hunter of Magical Artefacts is often full of action, excitement and adventure; searching for hidden treasure through inaccessible jungles, pursuing (or being pursued by) dangerous lunatics across desolate moorlands; scaling inaccessible mountaintops in search of arcane knowledge; investigating dark and haunted mansions. Then there are the days when Christmas has come and gone but the warm weather and long evenings of spring are still a distant dream; when the sky vanishes and becomes a white blank canvas; when Nature cannot be bothered to summon a decent winter storm or the bright cold frost; when it is neither warm enough to leave your coat at home nor cold enough to enjoy its warmth; when there is no colour left in the world and the very air seems imbued with lethargy. On such days, both the criminals and the clients that provide the Hunter with work stay at home in front of their fires waiting for the spring and there is nothing for the Hunter but to do likewise.
In her Widdershins office Harriet Barber sat in her fireside chair, smoking her new French pipe and watching her apprentice Sidney Malik sitting at his desk and practising the same magic trick for the twentieth time. Harriet was getting increasingly frustrated. Partly, this was because she was a woman of action who found it difficult to sit still and wait, but mostly it was because no matter how many times she watched Sid place a bent playing card in the middle of the pack and then make it move to the top, she still didn't have a clue how he did it. She had meant to spend the time reading up on old case notes, but try as she might, she couldn't stop herself watching her apprentice perform the trick again. And again. She knew it was only through continued practise that he was able to perfect his art, but very soon she was either going to start screaming or hitting him with the poker; possibly both. Anyway, as a trainee Hunter, Sid should really have been learning more about the trade, not playing with his toys. She was struck by a sudden idea that perhaps there was a way she could break the monotony for both of them.
She got up and crossed the room to a large cupboard where she kept various souvenirs of her adventures. Of course, most of her income came from trading in all the important artefacts for the bounty, but she liked to keep mementos that were either non-magical or too trivial to be of interest to the Royal Society. Unlocking the cupboard door, she took out an object the size and shape of a thin book, carefully wrapped in oilskin tied with string, and took it over to her apprentice as he successfully completed the card trick for the twenty first time.
“Put away the cards Sid,” she said “and tell me what you make of this.” Sid cleared away the clutter on his desk to make room for the parcel. Harriet was pleased to see that first he remembered to examine the cloth and the string for traps. He said a few words in Latin, twiddled his hands in the air just so and then paused as if listening. In fact he was performing a read to detect the presence of any magic.
“At least the cloth and the string are not imbued.” he told her, and then slowly undid the knots and unwrapped the parcel to reveal a small hand mirror set in a frame of dark wood inlaid with silver. The metal was tarnished, the glass was cracked in the bottom right hand corner and the entire thing had been stained by water. Sid examined his reflection in the mirror, surreptitiously admiring the tiny beard that clung to the point of his chin. He performed the read again, but this time when he listened, he seemed to hear a response.
“So far as I can see, this is exactly what it appears to be.” he told Harriet. “A hand mirror wrapped in oilskin. The glass has been imbued with obstinacy, so it will not allow light to pass through, making it into a mirror. Quite a common, simple spell. Half the households in Widdershins will have something similar. Nowadays of course they just use a silvered backing. Much cheaper and easier to mass produce, but somehow lacking in romance don't you think? There is a little of something else there too. A certain amount of...” he cocked his head to one side to listen to the read again “...well-being imbued into the frame perhaps? Some of the more expensive mirrors included it so that vain people would feel good about their appearance. Made sometime around the turn of the century I'd say.” He looked apologetic. “Sorry, is there something special about it?”
Harriet puffed on her pipe. “How much would you say that it was worth, exactly?”
“Worth? Let's see. The mirror is nothing out of the ordinary, especially with this damage in the corner. The frame looks to be rather good craftsmanship and with the additional imbuing it might have cost, say, twenty guineas when it was new. But of course it's been rather ruined by water - sea-water if I'm not mistaken, so the sale value would be much reduced.”
“What if I told you that a man wasted his entire life and fortune trying to find it?”
“Then I would say that I have obviously missed something.” Sid looked unhappy. He was always eager to please Harriet and it pained him to have failed the test. Harriet shrugged in response.
“Hrm. If there is anything to miss, then I've missed it too. I recovered that artefact several years ago and I still haven't been able to solve the mystery. Wizards at the Society and the University have looked at it and they've found nothing. I've even had a watchmaker look over the frame for hidden mechanisms.”
“Your old ...er... associate Ms Cunningham was very good with mechanical devices. Have you asked her?” Sid asked. Harriet blew tobacco smoke out though her nostrils and glared at him in stony silence. “Ah no, I suppose you haven’t.” her apprentice continued quickly. “Perhaps if you were to tell me the story?”
Harriet drew up a chair as she refilled her pipe and made herself comfortable. “The story? Well it all started with a minor wizard called Granby Blackstone, over thirty years ago. At the time you wouldn’t have believed he would ever do anything out of the ordinary. You know the type. Married his childhood sweetheart, second class honours from the University, steady job with a firm of merchants in Liverpool, diligent worker. Actually, if there were more like him the world would be a better place - and we’d probably be out of a job. Anyway, his wife died of typhoid fever a couple of years after his marriage and somehow it seemed to shake him out of his rut. He sold up everything he had and went into the merchant trade in his own right. To start with he was in partnership with other merchants, but to everyone’s surprise he was wildly successful and soon he was chartering his own ships and then buying a ship of his own named the Lovely Lisa after his late wife. He sailed it around the world to strike new deals and open up new trade routes in person. One of the reasons he was so successful was that he was completely fearless. They still talk about the trade deal he negotiated with the Malay pirates. He took risks no-one else was prepared to take, but somehow all his gambles paid off.”
“Now this is where things start to get interesting from our point of view. Of course, with the risks he was taking Blackstone often got into some pretty dangerous scrapes, but somehow he always managed to come out on top. Stories started to circulate among this crew, and they rapidly spread through all the ports where ship called, that this wasn't merely good luck or skill. How, when things looked at their most hopeless, when all seemed lost, Blackstone would retire to his cabin for five minutes and then emerge strengthened and invigorated, ready to meet the challenge, his mind full of plans to get the ship and the crew through to survive another day. The stories say that the source of his strength was a small ornate mirror he kept in his cabin.”
“This mirror?” Sid asked.
“I believe so.” Harriet replied. “What no-one can agree on was how it worked, for he was careful never to use it in the presence of anyone else. No-one was allowed to even touch it. Some say he used it to talk to a magical genie that would grant his every wish. Some said it gave him powers beyond those of normal men, boosting his reflexes, will and fortitude to superhuman levels. Others say it was a viewing portal into the future that enabled him to see the consequences of his future actions.”
Sid laughed. “Seriously? How could anyone believe such stories in this modern age? That is not how magic works at all.”
“Well, sailors are a superstitious and credulous lot.”
“Please Harry, next you will be telling me that it was giving him advice by casting his horoscope!”
Harriet smiled. “No, I don’t think even sailors would believe that. But don’t be too hard on them. When you are thousands of miles from home, with only a six inch plank between you and the bottom of the ocean, completely reliant on the fickle breeze to get you to land and with no hope of rescue if things go wrong, you tend to believe in anything that might possibly increase your chances of getting back alive. Anyway, Blackstone’s mirror became something of a legend among the seafaring community and it certainly seemed to work, because the risks kept paying off and soon Granby Blackstone was a very, very rich man, although he never showed any sign of retiring and enjoying his wealth. It was as though there was always something driving him on. Something riding his back that meant he could never settle, never be happy.”
“Of course, eventually his luck ran out. Coming back to Liverpool from the Americas in the middle of winter, his ship lost its masts in a raging storm somewhere off the west coast of Scotland and Blackstone himself was badly injured by a falling spar. They lost all control of the ship and then suddenly a rocky coast loomed out of the darkness. Some of the crew just managed to get him into a boat before the ship was dashed to pieces on the rocks. They got away out to the relative safety of the open sea but the night was pitch black and by the time the storm abated the next morning they had no idea of their position. The Captain and all the charts went down with the ship. They headed east on the grounds they would eventually hit land and eventually came ashore on a sandy beach on the island of Taransay in the Outer Hebrides.”
“Now this is where the story gets weird. In the last emergency on the ship, no-one collected Blackstone’s mysterious mirror; it was lost with the ship. With the charts gone, no-one could be sure where exactly the ship had foundered, especially as they'd been blown around in the storm and hadn't been able to get a fix for several days. It had to be somewhere on the Western coast of Scotland but there’s an awful lot of shoreline there. As I said, Blackstone was a very wealthy man. He had no need to go back to sea or indeed ever to work again, but rather than retire he devoted the rest of his life to trying to find the wreck of the Lovely Lisa. It couldn’t be for the cargo - it was valuable high quality tobacco sent over from Virginia,” Harriet paused and sighed at the thought of such a tragic waste “but it was insured and would be ruined in the wreck. The ship itself was a fine vessel, but again as a ship wreck it would have no intrinsic value. Everyone knew what Blackstone was looking for, - his magic mirror. He spent the remaining ten years of his life and his entire fortune searching - and he never found it!”
“There had been several wrecks along the coast in that terrible storm and he investigated them all, sending teams of salvage experts to examine each one. It turned out none of them were his ship. He employed survey teams to explore every inch of the coast line, looking for rocks where the ship might have foundered and not been discovered, having the depths plumbed to find wrecks that had sunk. As you can imagine there were plenty to investigate and each cost him more than the original ship had been worth, but none of them were the wreck he was looking for. In the end, even his vast wealth began to fail, and with it his health, ruined by the constant searching in all weathers and the stress of his quest. I’ve heard that he was often half crazy in his single-minded desperation to find the Lovely Lisa. In the end he died a penniless and broken man, still trying to raise money to fund another survey of the coast.”
“Did he ever think to try to find the mirror by other means?” Sid asked. “I was thinking perhaps…”
“You mean employ a Hunter? Yes that would seem to be the obvious way to go about things wouldn’t it? The answer is no he did not. In fact, Grandfather did offer to act on his behalf on more than one occasion, but he was always turned down. He could never understand why. He did go up to the Hebrides to look on his own, but he never found anything, well nothing to do with Blackstone’s mirror anyway. Remind me to tell you about what he unearthed at Na Fir Bhreige one day when you haven’t had a large breakfast. Anyway, if that mirror on your desk is indeed what Blackstone was looking for, then it isn’t something that a Hunter would be able to find easily. It’s just another minor imbued item.”
“But you found it Harry. You found it when your Grandfather couldn’t.” Sid was not the most ingenuous person in the world, but he had learnt that Harriet, for all her outward strength, was not immune to a little flattery, especially where her hunting abilities were concerned. He knew that it still galled her that whenever she pulled off another triumph, the newspapers still referred to her as 'Granddaughter of Famous Bounty Hunter'.
Harriet allowed herself a little grin of satisfaction as she refilled and lit her pipe. “Yes, I found it. Not by wading through some God-forsaken midge-infested bog but by good planning and forethought down in London. One reliable source of information on rogue magical items is Bedlam. There is nothing like magic for rotting the brain - no offence - especially if it’s being used by someone who isn’t a wizard who starts playing with an artefact they’ve found with no idea of how it really works or what the long term consequences will be. I find it useful to pay a contact in Bedlam a small retainer in exchange for inside information on any inmates whose condition might be linked to rogue magic.”
“You pay for information from a public institution? Is that allowed?” Sid was shocked.
“Hrmph, it’s not a crime.” Harriet said defensively. She caught the look in Sid’s eye. “Well, yes it’s a crime technically. But really if the authorities are so interested in patient confidentiality they should consider paying their orderlies a bit more. If I hadn’t had my inside source of information, I’d have never got the lead on the mirror.”
Sid put the mirror down on his desk as though it had burned him.
“Are you saying that this mirror sent someone insane?” He pushed his chair back from his desk.
“No, as a matter of fact in this case the insanity had been called by smoking an unpleasant narcotic called hashish. It’s quite popular in the Middle East and the Indies apparently. It produces feelings of euphoria but using it for any length of time weakens the brain and produces insomnia, mental impairment, delusions of paranoia and eventually sends you completely bonkers. Why anyone would want to smoke stuff like that when you can get perfectly good, honest, mind-strengthening and completely harmless tobacco on every street corner escapes me, but apparently it is quite popular among sailors who’ve picked up the habit on their travels, usually when they can't get the proper stuff. You can get it in most sea ports around the world.”
“The lunatic was a sailor called Harrison and he was raving about a valuable and powerful artefact that he’d hidden and wanted to retrieve. Of course I got the nod straight away and down I went to see him. He was in a pitiful state. His brain was completely scrambled and he had a great deal of difficulty in focussing and telling a coherent story, not to mention the sudden paranoid rages when he accused me of trying to steal his treasure, which I suppose I was, in a way.”
“To cut a very long and rambling story short, Harrison was a member of the crew of the Lovely Lisa on her last fatal voyage. They didn't all abandon ship when she was about to go onto the rocks. Some of them stayed with the Captain in a hopeless attempt to save the ship. From what I could piece together, Harrison knew that the precious mirror was still on board and was hoping to get his hands on it. Whether he thought it would save him or whether he was hoping to steal it I was never quite sure. He somehow got the mirror out of its lead-lined waterproof chest in Blackstone's cabin while everyone else was busy on deck, wrapped it in oilskin and dived over the side as the ship hit. Unlike most sailors he was a strong swimmer so he was the only one that made it ashore, more dead than alive. All he could do was huddle on the cliff face to wait out the storm. Now we get to the interesting part. When the storm cleared he wasn’t on a cliff face at all. He was on a great spire of rock - a stack - out in the middle of the ocean. No wonder Blackstone could never find the wreck of the Lovely Lisa. It never reached the Outer Hebrides at all.”
“Where was it then?” Sid asked.
“From the description there was only one place that it could be. The stacks off the island of St Kilda.”
“Where? Isn't that in the Indies?” asked Sid.
“No, you’re thinking of St Kitts. St Kilda is a couple of tiny remote islands, about 50 miles west of Lewis, out in the Atlantic Ocean. As remote a place as you could ever hope to find. Home to about 200 islanders who live mostly off the thousands upon thousands of sea birds that nest there. They keep a few sheep too. Anyway, Harrison was stuck on this stack, just an enormous lump of rock sticking up out of the ocean, with no provisions and no water, other than what collected in crevices on the rock. The main island was within sight, but swimming across to it was completely out of the question in those seas. The Lovely Lisa was a total wreck and had sunk in the deep water surrounding the stack. Little more than a few timbers remained. Things were looking bad for him, but then a ship turned up.”
“Oh that was lucky. So he was rescued then.”
“Yes and no. You see the ship that turned up was the Royal Navy frigate HMS Surprise. Of course any seaman setting foot on a Royal Navy ship is immediately pressed into the crew, which was rather unfortunate for Harrison. Naturally he did not want to go on board with his treasure, so he carefully hid it amid the rocks and climbed down to meet the ship. It was pretty difficult to get him off, but the ship's crew were good seaman and they managed it in the end. He gave them some cock and bull story about the ship he was from, he says so they wouldn’t find out about the treasure but I suspect the paranoia was starting to bite even then.”
“The bad news was that the Surprise was on her way out to the Far East for an extended cruise. From what I could gather their adventures pursuing American pirates through the South Pacific would make a much more exciting tale than the one that I am telling you, but it will need a better story teller than me to do it justice. At some point he decided Royal Navy discipline was a bit too much for him, so he jumped ship in the Antipodes. After that he had a lot of difficulty getting back to Britain, what with having to avoid the Navy as a deserter and the fact that the hashish was really starting to eat his brain. By the time he eventually made it back again he was to all intents and purposes completely insane, so was transferred directly to Bedlam, still unable to reclaim the treasure. After several conversations, and a look at a few maps, I was able to work out that there are two stacks off St Kilda and he must have been on the larger one, Stac Lee. It was agreed that I would go and recover the treasure and bring it back to him, in return for a suitable Hunter’s reward.”
Harriet paused to refill her pipe. This was turning into a three-pipe story.
“This was before the new railway was complete and anyway, Florrie only helps fund the business when… when it suits her, so it was a long and hard journey up to St Kilda. The journey by road up to Mallaig is bad enough, but then there’s a the sea trip across to Skye, travel all the way up to Uig at the North end of Skye, then a long crossing over to Tarbert on Harris, then another long journey over terrible roads to the North West of Lewis and then you can finally start haggling with fishermen who might, if you are very lucky and the weather is right, take you out to St Kilda.”
“There’s no regular ferry?”
“No, it’s really difficult for boats to get into St Kilda's harbour. Don’t ask me why. You can only do it if the tide and wind and whatever is just right. Really, the only regular visitor is the factor who goes out to the islands to collect the rent of sea bird feathers and the cloth the islander’s spin from the sheep’s wool. I tried to get the Lewis fishermen to take me to the stacks, but they weren’t having it. They wouldn’t go near them - too dangerous they said. It didn’t help that the fisherman could only speak Gaelic, so I had to get the local vicar to translate and his accent was so bad that a translator would have been useful for him!”
“Finally, I got a boat over to St Kilda. There’s only one settlement. They live in houses that are just low stone walls with a turf roof. Open doorways, no windows, furniture or chimney and they share the houses with their animals. There's lots of little odd stone structures like bee hives where they keep the dried sea bird skins. It's like something out of the middle ages. Fortunately there were a couple of people on the island who spoke a bit of English and I was able to persuade them to take me over to the stack, although they didn’t advise it because they said there was bad weather brewing. They go across regularly in the summer and harvest the birds that nest there. Landing was difficult and they told me to hurry. I had only a vague idea where the treasure was hidden and in the summer the entire place is packed with gannets, and I mean packed. When I first saw the stack I thought that it was covered in snow. The distance between each nest is twice the distance that a gannet sitting on it can peck - and they do. It didn’t make the search any easier, not to mention the fact that I was clinging to a steep rocky slope that was almost, but not quite, a cliff face. It must have been an hour before I found the mirror wrapped in oilskin, more or less as you see it there. Climbing back down is always more difficult because you can’t see where to put your feet, even when you’re not using one hand to carry treasure. Then, when I got back down to the water’s edge, I found that the boat had gone.”
“They’d abandoned you?” Sid was shocked.
“Oh, they were very apologetic about it. They were only a little way out to sea. They explained that the swell had got up, so they had to put off, or their boat would have been broken up. They’ve only got two and there are no trees on the islands to build more. Since they rely on them completely for fishing and harvesting the stacks you can imagine how valuable they are. They promised they’d come back for me the next day.”
“Did they?”
“Oh yes. And the next day and the day after that. A gale set in from the Atlantic and with it heavy rain. Every day the islanders came back and every day they shook their heads and said sorry and went away again. I had to sit there on that lump of rock in the tiny shelter the islanders have built there, trying to keep out of the wind and driving rain for a week, until the sea had calmed enough for them to pick me up.”
“That sounds terrible! Did you have anything to eat and drink?”
“There was plenty of rain water, tasting strongly of gannet doings I might add. And there were plenty of raw gannet eggs. Haven’t eaten another egg since.”
“How absolutely awful!”
“You haven’t heard the worst of it. After the second day I ran out of tobacco.”
“Oh my! Oh dear!” Sid really didn’t know what to say. Harriet never showed her feelings to anyone, especially not him, but he could see the look of pure horror on her face as she relived the nightmare.
“That was the worst week of my life; soaked to the skin, hungry, thirsty and sucking on an empty pipe trying to get a little smell from it.” She shuddered. “My only consolation was the treasure of Granby Blackstone. I didn’t dare open the package in case it got wet or in case there was dangerous magic involved, although I was seriously considering smoking the oilskin. After that I’d have started on the bloody gannets.”
“Finally the weather cleared enough for the islanders to get me off. They even gave me a little tobacco, which in retrospect was really kind of them, as it was in pretty short supply for them too, although it never occurred to me at the time. They got me back to the main island - the fishing boat had long gone of course - but with the good weather they came back for me. Once I was back on Lewis I smoked an improbable amount of the vile ship’s tobacco which was all they had available and at the time was the best thing I’d ever tasted. Then I opened the package and what I found is lying on your desk and bloody disappointed I was too I can tell you. After that it was a case of retracing my steps all the way back to Widdershins. It took ten days and most of my available funds.”
Harriet puffed on her pipe with more than her usual energy at the awful memory, savouring the wonderful smoke.
“So there you have it, Sid. A man wasted his life and fortune trying to find that mirror. I spent a week in Hell to recover it. As far as anyone can tell it’s just a perfectly ordinary imbued mirror. The Royal Society aren’t interested. The University have drawn a blank. What do you think?”
“Did you take it back to Bedlam?” Sid asked uncertainly.
“You needn’t worry about me keeping it when it belonged to Harrison.” Harriet told him. “Yes, I did take it back only to learn that he’d hanged himself the week before. Nobody had turned up to claim his body or belongings. I donated some money to bury him and kept the mirror.”
Sid was still puzzled. “So what makes you think I can help?”
“Watching you just now set me thinking. Maybe this isn't a normal imbued item at all. Maybe it's some kind of Magicians trick. Maybe that's why no-one can unlock its secret, because they've been looking at things in the wrong way.”
Sid was suddenly interested. “Why yes, that would make sense! If there was a secret catch or some misdirection... If I was designing a trick, where would I hide it?” He rummaged in the organisational disaster of his desk and in a surprisingly short space of time produced a set of watchmaker's tools and set to work.
After a couple of minutes of tinkering, Sid gave a cry of triumph. “Of course! The mechanism is hidden in plain sight all along. See where the mirror looks to be damaged with this crack in the corner? In fact it was a very clever way of concealing a small switch. The small piece of glass moves to make something happen, although I can't say what. Once you know it's there you can operate it with your finger nail.”
Sid and Harriet looked at each other in trepidation. Sid reached for the glass switch, but Harriet stopped him. “I'll do that I think. You take a couple of paces back and get ready to either run like Hell or save me, not necessarily in that order, if things go wrong.”
Very gently at arm’s length, Harriet reached out and used Sid's smallest blade to move the glass lever. The mirror shimmered and the reflective surface cleared to reveal the head and shoulders of a strikingly pretty young woman, dressed in the style of the late eighteenth century. She looked like an oil painting.
“Gosh” said Sid, peering over Harriet's shoulder. “Now that's clever! Glass imbued with obstinacy so it reflects light and becomes a mirror but the frame is imbued with a feeling of well-being. Moving that second piece of glass allows the frame to talk to the glass and the sense of well-being overcomes the obstinacy, allowing the light to pass so the glass becomes transparent. It appears to be an ordinary imbued mirror until the glass is moved to reveal what is hidden beneath.”
Harriet was more interested in the young woman's picture. “Hello?” she asked it uncertainly. “Hello? Can you hear me in there?”
The woman did not react. There was no sign of life or movement. It just looked like an oil painting. Harriet moved in closer. There was still no reaction. She looked at the mirror's frame, looked at the mirror at an angle, at the back. She tried moving the glass lever back and forth. The glass obediently showed a mirror or the oil painting of a young woman. She examined the face, the background and the details of the brush strokes, then sat back in disgust.
“Hrmph! We've solved one mystery and all we have is another. The thing is just a mirror with a clever bit of magic to conceal a painting behind it. It's not even that good a painting. No inscriptions, just the name 'Lisa' in tiny letters at the bottom. What is the bloody thing actually for?! Sid!? Sid are you listening to me!?”
Sid was staring at the picture with a strange half-sad smile. He looked as if he was about to burst into tears. Harriet was suddenly alarmed that some subtle emotional magical effect might be at work. “Sid? Sidney!? What’s wrong?” Sid pulled himself together and grinned at her. He knew that she couldn't stand soppy.
“But Harry, don't you see? No wonder looking at the picture always gave Granby Blackstone strength and inspiration and no wonder he was so desperate to get it back no matter what the cost. Such a tragic, romantic tale. It's a picture of his wife, who died so young. It must have been the only one he had.”
--------------------------*
Ms Harriet Barber, Mr Sidney Malik, Mrs Florence de Montfort and Ms Verity Cunningham copyright Kate Ashwin.
The adventures of HMS Surprise and her crew were indeed told by a better story teller and you can read them in the books by Patrick O'Brien.