And of the mirror purportedly created by Ciro Valeriani with the aid of an Italian sorcerer … a mirror that could summon a demon up from the depths of Hell? If Matthew had vowed to help find Valeriani’s son in the search for that mirror, what kind of accomplice to the act of demon-raising would that make him? Such a thing if true would mark a soul forever.

Of course it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. Could it?

Well, by Matthew’s reckoning they had quite a way to go yet. It had taken thirty-eight hours from Bristol, but that had been in much better weather and the horses able to be driven harder and faster. Matthew recalled that the condition of the roads—the cart tracks, would be a better description—was not ideal for fast travel up into Wales, and particularly around Y Beautiful Bedd. So say forty-eight hours plus another twelve? That, he thought, would likely be a conservative estimate, particularly as the wind was picking up and shrilling past himself and the coach. Seventy-two hours from London to Fell’s village, say? And that was with hardly stopping at any of the coaching inns along the way except for resting the horses and the necessities, just as they’d done on the trip from Bristol.

There was nothing to do but to flick the reins every so often, to try to convince the team that a driver was in charge, to count off the miles and keep this polar bear coat wrapped around him, and God bless the taste in clothing of dead Count Pellegar, whose corpse and that of Baron Brux had surely by now been found at the Mayfair and would cause a profitable spike in the business of Lord Puffery’s Pin when Lady Puffery got hold of the story.

The miles rolled on. The snow fell. The coach passed through several small villages in the early dark. There was little activity, here and there horses standing in pastures watching their brethren pass and a few villagers out doing whatever labor was essential, which didn’t seem to amount to much. Then the forest closed in on both sides of the road once more. They had come this way from Bristol, it being the central pike northwest and southeast as far as Matthew knew, and this was also the route he’d been taken by Mother Deare to Fell’s village in the first place. But it was far from being familiar, and the covering of white made everything even less so.