I popped back into the kitchen and picked up a pair of nitrile gloves.
The fox sat back on its haunches and waited expectantly while I pulled on my gloves and opened the envelope. I always open strange packages from the bottom or the side. There’s only so many ways you can booby-trap a letter and in most of them the trigger mechanism relies on you opening the flap. This piece of fox post was a flat white standard envelope of the type used to send birthday cards. Inside was a single sheet of printer-quality paper with a message written across it in familiar handwriting. There were no foreign substances coating the edges, and when I gave it an experimental sniff it smelt only of paper with a hint of fox.
I read the message by the light from the kitchen, then I went back inside and placed it carefully on a clean plate. I opened the fridge and found one of the emergency snack containers, marked with a fox sticker. The fox perked up as I brought the container out with me and crouched down in front of it.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Jigsaw Alpha,’ said the fox. ‘But most people call me Sally.’ It eyed the container in my hands. ‘Cheese puffs?’
‘Was the dead drop under observation?’ I asked.
‘That’s an operational matter,’ said Sally. ‘And need to know only.’
‘Oh,’ I said and went as if to stand up. ‘No matter.’
‘No,’ said Sally quickly. ‘It’s not monitored – it’s only an emergency drop and checked once a day.’
I settled back down with the container displayed to its best advantage.
‘When was the letter found?’
‘Halfway through the first prance,’ said Sally. I knew better than to ask for a clock time, and in any case I had a rough translation primer pinned to the fridge with a magnet. ‘It was there when we made the routine check. No smell or spoor, so definitely not a fox or fae.’
I opened the container and gave Sally a cheese puff, which she ate in a couple of happy bites. I closed the container and she gave me the big eyes, but I’m made of sterner stuff.
‘I want you to stick around. I may have a message for you to take back,’ I told her, and waved the container for emphasis. Sally nodded enthusiastically.
‘Roger that,’ she said, and then after a hesitation, shyly, ‘Can I go see the Bev?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But don’t annoy her.’
Sally scampered past me and into the house. I followed her in, closed the door and hunted out my scene-of-crime kit and a plastic evidence bag. While I did that I speed-dialled Nightingale.
‘We have a problem,’ I said when he picked up. ‘Lesley just sent me a message.’
Friday Ruthless efficiency …
5 Knowledge
A surprisingly large number of London’s most famous institutions started in coffee shops. Unless he was labouring for a living, eighteenth-century Man liked nothing more of an afternoon but to jam on his wig, adjust his garter and hie himself down to the coffee shop of his choice. There he could sit all day inhaling second-hand tobacco smoke, getting a buzz from a cup of truly vile-tasting coffee, reading the latest newspaper and shouting at his fellow patrons. What they shouted about depended on the coffee shop. Politics, philosophy and science in the ‘penny universities’ like Don Saltero’s or the Grecian near St Clements. Or maybe the price of maritime insurance in Lloyd’s of London, or even if some poor inmate might be mad or nay at a Hoxton coffee house inquisition of insanity.
And in one particular coffee house – how to do magic.
Or, at least, during the reign of George II and his slightly brighter wife Caroline of Ansbach. This was the Folly of the Thames, basically a coffee house built on a barge that was moored off Somerset House. The rent was low and, as its clientele were less refined, it became the favoured meeting spot of those who would practise magic.
Sir Isaac Newton, in between dreaming up a workable theory of gravity and reforming the coinage, had gone looking for the principles that underlay the existing hotchpotch of folklore, rituals, cunning knowledge and Renaissance magic, and created what Postmartin calls ‘The Newtonian Synthesis’. Unlike his first Principia, published in vast numbers, bought by the multitude, actually read by like six people, Newton’s second Principia – the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Artes Magicis – was a strictly limited edition. There was no second edition while he lived, and it’s clear that if he’d had his way, he would have suppressed the first.
There is literally a bookshelf of books written about why Newton, so gung-ho about taking credit for calculus and gravity, wanted to keep magic on the down-low. My personal theory is that he never found a satisfactory mathematical underpinning for magic, and that irked him.
So while Newton swanked around as President of the Royal Society and conducted long bitter feuds with Hooke and Leibniz, the students of the second Principia spent their days in a coffee house on the Thames.
But there’s a kind of freedom that comes with official neglect, especially if you’re someone who’s usually the subject of official disdain. So to the Folly came Jews and Nonconformists, foreigners and criminals and, of course, women.
There, driven by the same caffeine-fuelled intensity as everything else in the capital, they took the principles laid down by Newton and by trial and error forged the forms and wisdoms that power magic today. And this was perilous work, because magic is dangerous stuff and plenty of the early pioneers ended up in the ground, mysteriously vanished or, occasionally, floating down the Thames.
But this was the eighteenth century, when life was cheap and ambition unlimited. The secrets of the universe were there for the taking. And if you could separate some wretch from their ill-gotten gains – so much the better. They took their cues from the apothecaries and the physicians, because if they could make money selling arsenic and bleeding the rich, what couldn’t a body who conjures light out of nothing do?
But as their skills grew, so did their notoriety and it was only a matter of time before they attracted the attention of the great and the … well, the rich and powerful anyway. Even a state as lacklustre and disorganised as the British couldn’t allow such power to continue uncontrolled.
Enter Victor Casterbrook, born on the wrong side of the blanket in Mayfair, a butcher’s boy by trade and a young man on the make. His official biography glosses over his introduction to magic, but I reckon he wandered onto the Folly one evening looking for a good time and found a way out instead. I’m not sure he ever learnt a single spell, but our boy Victor was good at organising, and while his peers studied the interplay of formae and inflectentes he studied the business of wizardry. We know he visited the Académie Royale de Philosophie Occulte in Paris and saw what a little bit of royal patronage might buy in the way of wealth and status.
By 1775 Casterbrook had an in at the court via Queen Charlotte, and he must have done some kind of deal with the Duke of Bedford because he moved off the boat on the Thames and into an actual folly on the duke’s estate.
But no such elevation comes without a cost, because when the newly formed Society of the Wise met in their new headquarters it was notably an all-male affair. Amongst themselves they were ‘wizards’, but to the public they were ‘practitioners’, and if that respectability meant jettisoning the women – that was a price Victor Casterbrook was willing to pay.