Magician's Fire Read Free

Chicago, is he?” Billie got there first. “Like you expected?”
    â€œFirst thing tomorrow.” Arthur ran a finger along the dots. “He sent this message through from his office yesterday, telling the servants. The machine in the hallway hammered it out, along with the usual stuff about stocks and shares. Servants read it and left it in the wastepaper basket, as usual.”
    â€œI just don’t get it.” Billie put her hand on Arthur’s shoulder. “He just got back from a trip to… Where was it again?”
    â€œWashington,” said Arthur. “He was gone three weeks.”
    â€œI mean, it’s one thing to spend all your time in an office in the city where you actually live—but traveling all over the country?” Billie shook her head.
    â€œHe’s got meetings, hasn’t he? That’s what it’s like if you come to America to set up a brand-new bank.” Arthur frowned. “It’s been this way ever since we moved to New York, and that’s eight months now. Mind you, he totally ignored me in London too. As long as I can remember, he’s been just the same. Work comes first, a nice expensive house comes second, and having a bunch of servants who do exactly what he wants is important too.” He swung back toward the house. “Me, I’m just expected to tag along.”
    His eyes narrowed. Harry swung around too and saw why. As daylight faded, lamps were being lit inside the grand front room of the brilliantly white building. Inside stood Lord Trilby-Roberts, Arthur’s father. Tall, stiff, and wearing an immaculately tailored suit, the rich banker was standing perfectly straight and talking on a new invention called a telephone, while staring out through the window with an expression that, even at this distance, seemed cold and aloof. Around him, various servants busily gathered papers and files, no doubt in preparation for the trip to Chicago.
    â€œSo he’s just going to…leave you again?” Harry turned back. “To hang around in that house?”
    â€œAlong with all his other stuff.” Artie kept staring at the window. “Antique furniture, clocks from Switzerland, that sort of thing.”
    â€œGood thing he installed the ticker-tape machine,” Billie said. “Least that way you get warning of what he’s planning.”
    â€œI know,” said Arthur. “I know.”
    He reached back into his pocket and drew out another ribbon, gripping its end with particular force.
    â€œActually, the machine hammered out another message this morning.” His hand tightened until the knuckles were white. “Something I wasn’t expecting—today of all days.”
    â€œReally?” Peering at the ribbon, Billie looked hopeful.
    â€œFound it crumpled up in the trash, just like the others. Do the servants really think I won’t find them?”
    â€œIt was from your father in his office? To the servants back home?”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œAnd it arrived today? The seventeenth of September?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd it’s about you?”
    â€œCertainly is.”
    â€œSo what is it? What does it say?”
    â€œIt’s instructions to the servants about contacting another boarding school,” said Arthur, and he crumpled the ribbon into a tiny, hard ball. His eyes were curiously bright as his thumb and finger gripped the tiny paper ball. Harry wasn’t sure what to say at all, and neither, from the look of her, was Billie.
    â€œBoarding school?” She managed something, at last. “Sounds grim. Still, at least that’s taking some kind of interest in you…”
    â€œNot really. There are different sorts of boarding schools, for a start. The one Father has in mind is the sort of place you send someone if you specifically intend to take no interest in them whatsoever for as long as you possibly can. Hard for me to be even the