The Raven Spell (Conspiracy of Magic #1)(3)
“The colors are even more vivid than I dreamed.” Mary held the gem under the lamplight, biting her lip the way she did when she had a secret to tell but knew she mustn’t.
“’Tis a beauty,” Edwina said. “Look at the way the line of gold shimmers against the blue.” She couldn’t imagine what final thoughts might leave such a mark. She hoped for the man’s sake it didn’t hold the memory of a loved one still roaming the world. She’d always maintained there was something ignoble about a person’s last thoughts not being allowed to travel to their final destination with the rest of the soul. But then Mary’s nature was not some abomination either. Their father had explained such talent was a gift, and so it, too, must have a purpose.
Mary let the orb roll across her palm as she admired her newest bauble before snatching it up in her fist. “Now, let’s see what you found,” she said and nudged her chin.
Edwina emptied her pockets. A handful of brass buttons, a pipe with a carved buffalo’s head for the bowl still black with mud, twopence coins, and the gold ring. She placed the gold under the light so that, even without a proper polish, its value shone.
“Must have been exquisite when the gemstone was in it.” Mary picked up the band and turned the ring around to better see the details under the light. “Old, judging by the handiwork.”
“Maybe even Grandfather Merlin old,” Edwina said. She gave the ring a rub with the corner of her discarded shawl, then handed it back to Mary for further inspection.
“A raised bevel held up the stone.”
Edwina nodded. “Garnet would be my guess.”
Mary’s eye glinted with the shine of mischief. “I could replace it,” she said and reached for a scarlet ribbon from the nightstand. “Make the ring whole again.”
She could. Mary’s unique magic made it possible to render such gemstones nearly out of thin air. But then to ask a price for the ring to match the worth would raise suspicion in their little shop. No, ’twas best to pass the ring off as something more akin to pawnbroker gold and get what they could, minus the misgivings.
Her twin understood without her saying a word, though she gave a little sigh of regret before setting aside the ribbon and retrieving the mahogany jewelry box atop the dresser. The box, which they shared, had three compartments inside, each lined with velvet. Edwina kept a few keepsakes inside the first partition—a pressed flower given to her by a promising young man, which she’d saved between sheets of wax paper, a ruby teardrop earring missing its partner, and a silver thimble that had once belonged to their mother—but the other two compartments were taken up with the shiny orbs Mary collected. Edwina had lost track of how many there were now, but her sister removed them for inspection, all in a row, each and every Sunday evening after their tea. Always comparing and evaluating one against another, trying to determine why one might be more attractive to the eye. Some were dull like storm clouds and others as bright as a peacock feather, but whether that was due to the quality of the person’s memories or some other influence, she had yet to figure it out.
Mary gave the shiny new remembrance a final approving glance, then shut it away in the box with the others. “Thirty minutes,” she said, putting the box away.
Edwina didn’t need to glance at the cloisonné clock on the pedestal table by the washbasin to know her sister was right. She’d often wondered how the cogs and gears ticked away in that clockwork brain of her sister’s to be able to announce the precise moment each morning exactly thirty minutes before the shop was to open. But she imagined it was akin to her own ability to understand the rise and fall of the tide in conjunction with the phase of the moon. Another odd tic of their nature.
“Right, we better get on with the day, then,” she said and slipped her feet into the black ankle boots she reserved for shop work.
Mary sat and did the same, doing up the buttons with a small hook. “We’ll have customers today,” she said and tossed her muddy boots in a wicker basket at the foot of her bed. “Wednesdays are always good for selling tin and brass.”
“And hopefully a little gold.” Edwina scooped up the ring and followed her younger sister down the corkscrew staircase that led to a modest kitchen and cozy snug. There, two upholstered chairs faced the stove while two hard-back chairs made of oak sat tucked beneath a crude wooden table. Edwina had draped white lace, a secondhand tablecloth she’d accepted in exchange for a pair of wrought-iron finials a month earlier, over the bare wood. It went against her nature to barter away shop merchandise, but the idea of a real tablecloth with a vase full of roses atop was too tempting to deny. And, too, it distracted from the exposed bedsprings of the folding bed against the wall where their father had slept before he left.
The sisters shared the flat above the shop with their absent father. He wasn’t dead, merely gone walkabout for a time. Before he left three months earlier with a curious tip of his hat, he’d rented the odd three-story corner building that sat at the point where two diagonal streets met at an acute angle in the shabby end of a semirespectable street in the city proper. He’d left money enough to cover one month of living expenses, but the sisters had run the shop on their own ever since with the expectation their gray-headed father would one day walk back through the door. Or perhaps not. When their mother had left in similar fashion with a wave and a hand-blown kiss one year earlier, they’d never seen her again. Not a letter, a telegram, or even a whispered word carried on a trail of smoke.