A Dangerous Magic

by Frances Lynch, D.G. Compton

Genres: Gothic

Synopsis

A new life - but will it bring happiness?

Wonderfully compelling historical romance - perfect for fans of BRIDGERTON

Bridie Tantallon is setting out on a new life - one that she hopes will bring opportunities and, if she is lucky, happiness. It is the turn of the century, and she is setting out from London to Edinburgh to help her great aunt complete her memoirs.

An orphan, Bridie's life has not been easy, but could this be just what she needs? So she is not deterred by her aunt's pretended dipsomania, the various half-hearted attempts made on her life, or even her growing love for Lady Otranta's long-suffering heir, Andrew. Otranta's memoirs, detailing her rise from a music hall magician's assistant to a confidante of Queen Victoria, are interwoven with the more recent tale of Bridie's adventures.

Release date: June 22, 2023

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 208

Sample

It’s no use at all, sitting down to write one’s memoirs, and then trying to fudge them. One must be prepared to be utterly truthful. Of course, the truth is often painful—both to oneself and to those others, possibly near and dear to one, whom it may affect. But truthfulness is still absolutely essential. Otherwise the whole enterprise becomes a singular waste of everybody’s time.

Especially when, as in my own case, one has reached the age of fifty-seven—if one’s mirror is to be believed, seventy-seven at least—and has decided it’s high time the record be set straight on any number of important particulars. Not, you understand, simply in order that one’s soul may be purged but rather so that justice, no matter how long-delayed, may finally be done.

The lie I have lived has gone on long enough. The purpose of these memoirs is that it should be ended, once and for all.

I was twenty-nine when I consented in church to become the wife of Sir James Aubrey Tantallon. Up to that time my life had been rackety and some would say ill-spent. Certainly it had been the despair of my poor parents, while they lived. And equally certainly, for Sir James to give his name and high social position to a young woman only recently come from twice nightly performances on the stage of Edinburgh’s Empire Theatre was both brave and extraordinarily generous. Even today, in these enlightened Edwardian times, I fear that the variety theatre is still hardly considered a respectable calling.

That I subsequently showed myself worthy of his generosity and courage is neither here nor there. I shall be grateful for it, and for the twenty-five long and happy years that he gave me, for the rest of my life.

Mind you, I wouldn’t want it thought that I’m at all ashamed of my former occupation. My fame had been worked for honestly and well. Thanks to my dear friend and mentor, the great illusionist, Professor Henri Salvador, I was already at the top of my profession. The Incredible Madame Otranta had performed, as the saying goes, before all the crowned heads of Europe. But this was, needless to say, scarcely a recommendation when I was later striving for social acceptance as the wife of a member of Queen Victoria’s most intimate circle.

My efforts were not helped, naturally enough, by the various improbable stories then going about as to my origins and early childhood. I was not, as the newssheets would severally have me, a mysterious orphan, raised by the kindly holy men of Tibet. Neither did I come of gypsy stock, fleeing from an Andorran blood-feud. Nor yet was I the unacknowledged offspring of the Russian Ambassador to the Court of Spain, nor even the seventh daughter of a romantically dispossessed Polish nobleman.

Not that any of these exotic beginnings, devised in fact either by Professor Salvador or our more imaginative theatrical entrepreneurs for purely commercial reasons, were openly referred to. But they lurked in the background nevertheless, and took a great deal of living down.

The Queen herself, of course, God rest her, had her own problems. Not the least of these being. … But I run ahead of myself. The agreeable gentleman who has consented to publish these memoirs would, I feel sure, much prefer me to keep any revelations concerning the poor late Queen until their proper place in my narrative. …

The letter from her great-aunt’s publisher arrived one morning in late August, a letter that was to prove momentous, concerning as it did the vexed question of the old lady’s memoirs. All the same, young Bridie Tantallon came running down the stairs and across the dingy oilcloth of Mrs. Bartlett’s hall in such a hurry that she might easily have missed it propped up between the chipped Jubilee mug and the pink pot-dog present from Brighton on the middle shelf of Mrs. Bartlett’s coat-and-umbrella stand.

She’d given up expecting letters. Indeed, in the months following her father’s death and her subsequent move from their pleasant rooms in Maida Vale, near Lord’s Cricket Ground, she had given up expecting very much of anything at all—except the doubtful, twentieth-century pleasures of being an independent young woman, with the poverty and loneliness that this seemed to involve. She would, therefore, very probably not have seen the letter at all, had she not paused anxiously to reassure herself in the umbrella-stand’s lozenge-shaped mirror that her hair had at least survived the four flights down from her tiny parlour-bedroom without escaping entirely from its multitude of pins and tortoiseshell fastenings.

Her haste was on account of being on her way to yet another interview—this time with the Black Diamond Shipping Company in Horseferry Lane—and, although she had little hope that it would come to anything (there were, by all accounts, already a full seven thousand girls in London quite as expert on the typewriter as she, and nobody seemed remotely inclined to increase that number to seven thousand and one) she was nevertheless determined to be punctual. And to create at least a passable first impression.

Having satisfied herself that her heavy coils of auburn hair were still more or less where they ought to be, and jammed her brisk straw boater firmly down on top, she was about to turn quickly away when the letter caught her eye. She picked it up. The envelope was clearly addressed to her, and typewritten—which suggested a business communication. A spontaneous offer of employment? Sad experience caused her very much to doubt it. A bill then, perhaps. She hesitated a moment, then stuffed the letter into her handbag and hurried out through the shabby front door, thankfully leaving behind her the unappealing odour of boiled cabbage and mothballs that permeated every corner of Mrs. Bartlett’s seedy establishment.

She contained her curiosity about the letter until she had boarded the omnibus taking her down to the City, climbed the precipitous stairs and installed herself safely upon one of the wooden seats of its upper deck. Then she took out the letter and opened it.

It was, she saw at once, from Mr. Pugh-Hennessy, the man who had been her father’s publisher, the owner of a small but prosperous publishing house situated in a narrow terraced house on Floral Street. His letter was short, and to the point. “I would be very grateful,” Mr. Pugh-Hennessy wrote, “if you could visit me at your earliest convenience here in my offices in Covent Garden. The matter will, I believe, be to our mutual advantage. It concerns the memoirs of your great-aunt, Lady Otranta Tantallon. If you could see your way to sparing me an hour or so of your valuable time, I would esteem it a great favour.”

Her valuable time. … Bridie smiled a little sadly to herself. Since her father’s death her time had not been in the least valuable. And anyway, if Mr. Pugh-Hennessy wanted a little of it, who was she to grudge him? He was, after all, the nearest she had to a friend—they had known each other almost for as long as she could remember, ever since he had first consented to publish her father’s books. These were, as she now knew, musical biographies and critical works of a virtually unsaleable kind. Mr. Pugh-Hennessy’s loyalty and faith in Professor Tantallon had seen Bridie and her father through many lean months, and it was he who had sorted out the Professor’s affairs after his sudden death.

She did not make friends easily, had no close relatives, and the special circumstances of her life had hardly encouraged her to maintain a wide social circle. Her mother had died when she was twelve, of influenza, leaving her the sole companion and helpmeet of her dear father, who himself had suffered, poor soul, from a progressive affliction of the eyes that had cruelly brought him total blindness for the last several years of his life. She regretted not a single one of the days spent by his side—his courage and unfailing good spirits had been a source of constant inspiration to her—but the sad fact was that they had left her now, at nineteen, quite without friends of her own age and far too shy to be able to go out quickly and make some.

She read the letter again, holding it as still as she could against the wind and the omnibus’s thunderous jolting. Lady Otranta’s memoirs? What on earth could Mr. Pugh-Hennessy possibly expect her to know about Lady Otranta? In all her life, she and her great-aunt had never even corresponded, let alone met. In fact, the two sides of the family, hers and Lady Otranta’s, had positively not been on speaking terms these thirty-odd years.

All the same, if Mr. Pugh-Hennessy wanted to see her, she’d go. He had, after all, suggested that the visit might be to their mutual advantage. And she could certainly do with a nice bit of mutual advantage. The only question that remained, therefore, was exactly when she should visit him—now, at once, or later, after her morning’s interview?

She stared again at the letter in her hand. Interviews terrified her. It was silly, she knew, but they absolutely terrified her. Warty men with cigars and bursting waistcoats, who stared at her as if she was something the cat had brought in. And besides, dear, kind old Mr. Pugh-Hennessy, who wasn’t in the least warty, had asked her to come at her ‘earliest convenience’. So surely it wouldn’t be civil to keep him waiting?

Somehow the summons from the Black Diamond Shipping Company found its way overboard, to drift down onto the crowded pavements of the Tottenham Court Road. She herself left the omnibus rather more decorously, at a stop in the Strand, and made her way briskly towards Covent Garden.

A simple enough decision, she had thought. An understandable decision, even a reasonable decision. However, less than a week later she found herself regretting it with almost hysterical intensity. For, as a direct result, she was by then irrevocably committed to the Flying Scotsman and well on her way up to Castle Tantallon. That was, of course, her great-aunt’s home near Kincardine, on the shores of the Firth of Forth, across the water from Leith and the ancient, black-stoned city of Edinburgh.

She still didn’t quite know how it had happened. Distractedly she peered out of her first-class carriage window. How fast the train was going—no wonder it was called the Flying Scotsman! When she’d left Euston at ten that morning it had seemed that she would never really arrive, that the journey would safely go on for ever. Yet now, with the next stop York, it was already almost half over.

If only, oh, if only she’d done the sensible thing. If only she’d gone off first to the nice shipping company, and got herself a nice position, and been able afterwards to say to Mr. Pugh-Hennessy, firmly and in all honesty, that she really couldn’t do what he wanted of her because she had a prior commitment—with the nice warty man at the Black Diamond Shipping Company.

She’d protested, of course. Much as she would in ordinary circumstances have welcomed the chance of a break, any break, from her lonely and penurious existence under Mrs Bartlett’s roof, the prospect he offered was simply too alarming. But, without that prior commitment, she just hadn’t had a leg to stand on.

“Lady Otranta won’t eat you, my dear. After all, you are a member of the family. And she has written to say she’ll have you. So you truly don’t have a thing to worry about.”

No doubt he’d meant well enough. From his point of view there probably wasn’t anything very much to be afraid of.

Bridie shivered slightly. By nightfall she’d be at the castle. By nightfall she’d be face-to-face with the fearsome Lady Otranta.

She’d tried to explain things to him. She tried to tell him how bad she was at dealing with people she didn’t know, how even the simplest conversation with strangers threw her into a ridiculous panic. But Mr. Pugh-Hennessy had scarcely listened. His mind was quite made up—it must be she and none other who went up to Castle Tantallon. He’d commissioned memoirs from Lady Tantallon, and now the old lady was apparently unwilling to go through with them. Bridie was just the person to go up and help her. Reason with her. Persuade her.

Again, as she sat dismally watching the golden harvest fields of the Midlands hurry by, Bridie shivered. Help her? Help an old lady with memoirs she probably had some very good reason for not writing after all? Reason with her? Persuade her to begin them? The idea was preposterous. Horrifying, even. Why her? Of all people, why her?

It wasn’t as if she’d given in easily.

“We’ve never been exactly close,” she told Mr. Pugh-Hennessy. “My father’s side of the family and hers. Why, my grandfather was to be her brother-in-law, and he refused even to go to the wedding.”

“But that’s an ancient quarrel, an ancient quarrel. …” Mr. Pugh-Hennessy paused to insert a little finger in one ear and rattle it vigorously. Clearly he considered the matter already settled. “I tell you, my dear, this is the twentieth century. Family differences are a thing of the past, entirely. Don’t you think?”

“It’s not what I think, Mr. Pugh-Hennessy. It’s what Lady Otranta may—”

“Over and done with. Quite over and done with.” He hoisted himself with some effort to his feet and moved away to the open window. He was a fusty person, tall and thin, with steeply-sloped eyebrows, a profusion of dark, greying hair, and the very latest in lugubrious false teeth. “Believe me, child, in polite society today the question of Lady Tantallon’s—ah—unorthodox beginnings is long forgotten. She has redeemed them entirely. She is undoubtedly a most remarkable woman. Don’t you think? And she has some … er … remarkable things to tell. … Otherwise you may be sure that I would never have commissioned the book in the first place.”

He flashed her his rather over-furnished smile. “I have no doubt at all that the two of you will get on together excellently.”

Suddenly the view from Bridie’s compartment window was obscured as the train entered a cutting and thick white smoke funnelled down beside the carriage. She turned from the window and closed her eyes. So polite society had quite forgotten the matter of her great-aunt’s beginnings, had it? Was the family quarrel also forgotten? Certainly not by her father, while he had lived. For him everything about the good lady had been faintly ridiculous, if not downright disgraceful. Why, even her name was an outrage: The Incredible Madame Otranta, indeed! A complete fabrication, of course—she could hear his voice even now—just the sort of thing some little conjuror’s assistant might come up with, a wretched young woman who actually earned her living telling fortunes and being sawn in half twice-nightly. She’d been born in a slum—he had it on good authority—and her name was almost certainly Mavis or Aggie or some such. Calling herself the celebrated mentalist, Madame Otranta, indeed!

In the circumstances, Bridie thought, it was hardly surprising that her side of the family had opposed Sir James’s remarriage so bitterly, and the first Lady Tantallon scarcely ten months departed this life. Twentieth century or not, she wondered, could such a quarrel really be so quickly forgotten?

Not that Bridie herself cared a fig for the Lady Otranta’s origins. Times were undoubtedly changing, and she knew that even families as old as the Tantallons must change with them. And besides, on her marriage the second Lady Tantallon had clearly risen to the occasion. Within a very few years she had become accepted in the strait-laced circles of Scottish society and even in that of the old Queen. And her elder son, from what Mr. Pugh-Hennessy had said, was now a worthy successor to his father’s title and estates.

On the other hand, the old lady’s nature, her evident eccentricity and fearsomeness, concerned Bridie very much indeed. The prospect of being faced with that, on top of a houseful—nay, a castleful—of total strangers, with two sons, a stepdaughter, and heaven knows what else, terrified her quite out of her wits.

And in any case, the forgetting of family quarrels was not a one-sided activity. However broad-minded Bridie herself might feel, and however cordial her great-aunt’s invitation might have been, it was perfectly possible that the rest of the family would view the matter less than agreeably.

The note of the train’s wheels changed as it rattled out of the cutting. Bridie opened her eyes, saw distant mill chimneys across a wooded valley. If only Mr. Pugh-Hennessy had been willing to listen to her.

“But won’t Lady Tantallon think it strange,” she’d insisted, “that I should visit her now, simply upon a matter of business, when in all my life I have never before gone anywhere near her?”

“Strange? Why strange?” In moments of agitation Mr. Pugh-Hennessy’s teeth whistled like a broken-winded cab horse. “I cannot see what’s strange about it. You had your father to look after. A blind man—you could hardly be expected to leave him to his own devices. Don’t you think? Not to mention the invaluable assistance you gave him in his work. The research, the hours of painstaking dictation … he’d have been lost without you.” And to this last she could say nothing, for in fact it was true.

Assuming the matter now closed, Mr. Pugh-Hennessy turned away and fixed his attention upon the busy roadway below. But still Bridie lingered in his gloomy book-lined office, urgently racking her brains for an argument that might make him change his mind.

It wasn’t, she supposed, worth pointing out that her father’s blindness had only come upon him in the last few years of his life. And the rift in the Tantallon family dated from long before she had been born, a good thirty years, to the time of her grandfather, Sir James’s younger brother.

Mr. Pugh-Hennessy’s office overlooked Floral Street, from where the sounds and smells of nearby Covent Garden market rose powerfully in the heavy summer air: iron-shod cart wheels and horses’ hooves clattering on the cobbles, the incomprehensible cries of the costermongers, the occasional sharp backfire of a passing motor car, the sickly aroma of well-strawed manure and vegetables rotting in the gutter. Bridie had visited it often, in the company of her father. It was a rough place, but vivid and warm-hearted. She liked it.

She waited a moment longer, anxiously watching Mr. Pugh-Hennessy’s dusty brown barathea back, her thoughts whirling, her fingers picking tensely at the seams of her skirt. Then, bravely she cleared her throat.

Mr. Pugh-Hennessy turned back into the room. Seeing her still there, he frowned irritably and flapped his long bony hands at her. “Run along now, child. Run along. … Mr. Thwaite will see to all your travel arrangements.”

“But—”

“What is it? Is it your wages? See Mr. Thwaite about those also. He knows my mind—I’m sure you won’t find the firm ungenerous. …”

“Of course not, Mr. Pugh-Hennessy.” She took a deep breath. “But … but I still believe you would be better advised to send someone with a little more—” she hesitated, for the word that came to her mind was courage—“someone with a little more experience. By your account, sir, Lady Otranta is a somewhat difficult person, and I—”

“Difficult? Of course she’s difficult. Most old people are difficult. I’m difficult meself.” He patted at his velvet coat lapels in vague self-deprecation. “Though I grant you that at least if I were handsomely commissioned to write my memoirs I’d try a bit harder to get the job over and done with.”

He returned to his desk and began to rummage among the papers on its littered surface. Several thick folders slid unheeded to the floor spilling their contents across the carpet. “An outline she sent us. Promising the most astounding revelations. And her life was remarkable enough in all conscience. An excellent outline—I have it here somewhere. …” His telephone lurched on its stand and would have fallen if Bridie had not darted forward and caught it. The old man sighed, and gave up the search.

“An excellent outline, you understand, and then nothing. Not a word.” He drummed with his fingers. “And that was four months ago. Since then, nothing but excuses. Interminable letters full of ridiculous excuses. Ask Mr. Thwaite—he’ll show them to you. First that outline, and then not another word. Of course she’s difficult.”

Suddenly he was still, his head still bent, eyes peering up at her through the tangled hedges of his sloping brows. “That is precisely why I’m sending you, my child, and not one of the fellows upstairs.” He watched her earnestly for a moment longer, then relaxed. “It’s not as if you were simply one of these brassy new typist creatures. Your work with your father has given you literary skills as well. Don’t you think? And besides, with the Lady Tantallons of this world it’s breeding that counts. Breeding. And you have it.”

He came round the end of his desk, took her by the arm and led her firmly to the door. “You see—I have faith in you. I’m sure you won’t fail me. So run along now to Mr. Thwaite, there’s a good child.” He opened the door and thrust her through. “You’ll do a good job, Bridie. I know you will.”

It was pleasant that he thought so well of her. The nice golden haze occasioned by his flattery lasted her perhaps four paces away down the narrow corridor outside his office. Then it faded, to be replaced by the hard, cold reality of her situation. If Lady Tantallon was refusing to complete her memoirs she presumably had some very good reasons for doing so. And who was she, Bridie, to make the old lady change her mind?

Panic-stricken, Bridie turned. But Mr. Pugh-Hennessy’s office door was closed now, its chipped brown panels blank and forbidding. She dared not question their awful finality.

The train lurched, and began to slacken speed. Brought back to the present, Bridie saw that the countryside had been left behind and she was looking down upon a jumble of smoky grey rooftops, with the tall tower of a cathedral rising massively in its midst. York Minster. A moment later the train entered the station and stopped with a juddering of brakes.

Steam billowed up past her carriage window. Through it she watched absently as people hurried to and fro on the platform, women in light summer clothes, little boys in sailor suits, men jaunty beneath tilted straw boaters, porters struggling with laden barrows. Briefly her attention was caught by a bearded figure in a kilt. His hair was wild, and of a fiery ginger. For a moment it seemed that he was gazing intently in her direction. Their eyes met for an instant, then the steam thickened, obscuring her view. And when next it drifted away the man in the kilt was nowhere to be seen.

It was his kilt, of course, that had attracted her notice. Perhaps she had stared impolitely. And perhaps the man had noticed. In a sudden agony of embarrassment Bridie let the fringed velvet curtain fall across the window and turned towards the compartment’s interior. She should not have stared so! If she was going to stay in a Scottish castle the sooner she got used to seeing men in kilts the better.

Outside in the corridor people sidled past. Each time one of them stopped to peer in at her she held her breath. For most of the journey she had had the compartment to herself, for which she was profoundly grateful. Now, alas, the door was suddenly opened and an elderly manufacturing gentleman with an over-large rose in his buttonhole leaned in.

“Will these seats be taken?” he asked, with a lilting Scottish burr.

Speechless with shyness, she shook her head.

He entered, followed by a motherly person in blue bombazine, clearly his wife. They talked together softly, settled themselves at the far end of the compartment, then turned and regarded her with frank and friendly curiosity. She lowered her gaze.

“It’s a grand day, is it not?” the gentleman’s wife suggested.

“Yes,” Bridie agreed, still looking at the floor and blushing deeply.

“I see from the label on your box you’re for Edinburgh. It’s a fair flower of a city. D’ye know it?”

“No,” Bridie admitted, earnestly studying the lower edge of the empty seat opposite her.

“Do ye no? Och, you’re in for a fine treat, I’m thinking. Is she no, Angus?”

“Aye, she is that, my dear.” The manufacturing gentleman r. . .