Spellmaker

They chatted for another quarter hour, blessedly not about spellbreaking, before Miss Prescott took her leave. The moment she did, Elsie went upstairs—careful not to disturb Emmeline’s hanging laundry—and slipped into the sitting room, where she’d left the copies of the newspaper articles penned under her name. Sitting on the sofa, she spread them out before her, reading each of them in turn. The newspapers from the spirit line still hadn’t come in. She nearly had these ones memorized. The only thing of interest she could find were two lines: The inquirer would gladly pay a high price for the black birds, from the Manchester Guardian. It sounded like a bribe, or it did to Elsie’s mind, which arguably had been made fanciful from novel readers. Then there was the line that stood out in the more recent article, which was a sight less cheery: A shame if things were to take a Turner and end entirely. That sounded like a threat.

Emmeline had set the day’s newspaper on the side table. With a sigh, Elsie opened it, eager to read something sensical.

What she found made her blood run cold.

“Again?” she whispered, setting the pages on her lap. The main headline read, Master Rational Aspector Missing Three Days, Believed to Be Victim of Opus Thief.

Her thoughts jumped to Ogden, but she’d seen him last night. Not that she’d ever report him as a master aspector were he to get lost.

She read the article, which detailed a Mr. Kyle Landon Murray, who was forty-eight years old, a popular aspector in Oxford.

“He has a very strict schedule,” his daughter said. “He’s meticulous. He wouldn’t have just run off.”

Police are still investigating.

“Merton.” Elsie said her name like a curse. Was she so bold as to continue her scheme while in hiding, or was this simply an unrelated disappearance?

No, the coincidence was too great. But this meant Elsie, Ogden, and Bacchus really needed to find some clues or else more people would get hurt, and Merton . . . Merton would do whatever it was she was planning to do.

Merton. Merton.

Elsie’s chest tightened.

Sitting at the edge of her seat, Elsie looked over the last article again. A shame if things were to take a Turner and end entirely. It wasn’t just a misspelling; the word Turner was capitalized.

One of the murders had happened at a Mr. Turner’s home in London.

Elsie held her breath. It couldn’t be happenstance. That line had been intended as a threat. Whomever the articles were intended for . . . Merton had been informing them of what she would do if they didn’t cooperate. Had she gotten impatient, moving from coercion to threats, and then to outright murder? But what did she want?

Elsie pulled up the News Letter article and pored over it, searching for something similar. The vapid writing went on and on about traveling via ships and trains—

And then she finally saw something that stood out. Not a name or a threat, but something else. Letting herself breathe, she read again.

It is difficult to maneuver ships when a neighbor seeks a conversation back home. We must analyze the situation and come together.

Elsie pressed her finger beneath the last sentence and glanced over the rest of the article. Yes, this was different.

For whatever reason, the author had switched to American spelling for those two sentences. Maneuver instead of manoeuvre, neighbor instead of neighbour, and analyze instead of analyse. The words themselves didn’t seem to fit, rendering the writing subpar and clunky. As though Merton really wanted that line to stand out.

Elsie took a pencil and underlined the passage, then returned to the article from the Manchester Guardian, carefully reading that one as well. To her delight, she found a similar passage.

The owner has traveled away, though he is wanted in London. “There is no pretense,” a neighbor said. “We merely want to open a dialogue about the spell.”

Traveled, pretense, and neighbor were all in American English. What spell this neighbor referred to was not detailed. Elsie underlined it and moved on to the Daily Telegraph, finding this line: This behavior is unnecessary; let us labor together for a better end.

Behavior and labor were both American English, while the rest of the article was British.