Of Swords and Parasols

Set ten years after The Grand Tour, Kate and Cecy (and their husbands, of course, though I sometimes wonder if Thomas and James feel like third wheels when Kate and Cecy get together) have settled into respectable married lives. Or what passes as normal in an early 19th century where magic is common place. Things are not to remain peaceful, however (though I find it difficult to believe there were no adventures for ten years, given that they couldn’t escape them even on their shared honeymoon) and James is asked to investigate strange happenings on the leylines. Cecy, naturally, goes with him, and so Kate and Thomas are asked to look after their children while they’re away. Things aren’t calm there, however, as Kate’s flighty sister has come to stay with them, and strange men are seen lurking about.

I liked this more than The Grand Tour (which is not to say that I didn’t like that one), but not as much as Sorcery and Cecelia. Much of it, I think, is the return to letter format, but I also like seeing what they were up to years later even more than what they were up to a few months later. It was also interesting to have James and Thomas’s letters to each other (something that was made absolutely necessary for a bit by one plot point) as I think it can be easy to forget that they were also friends before they married the cousins, though I don’t think their relationship carried over as well as Kate and Cecy’s did in either book. I think, though, that that might be because the success of The Mislaid Magician depends on Sorcery and Cecelia, and their letters seem to be a way to maintain the format but add something extra. I have no idea if what I’m trying to say here makes sense.

On the one hand, I kind of like the reversal in adventure types between the two books-in Sorcery and Cecelia, Kate and Thomas have the flashy adventure, while Cecy and James have the more “domestic” one, and it’s reversed here-but it’s rather odd to see Kate and Thomas at home. Partly because they just seem more likely to go on adventures to me, but also because they seemed more reactive than proactive for the most part. Though I did enjoy how the letters-especially Thomas’s-indicated that they were both going completely stir-crazy. I think it’s also worth noting that I was entertained by people talking about their children! Ok, so it was their children having magic and being abducted by gypsies and finding stalkery people in the bushes, but still!

Set about two years after Mairelon the Magician, The Magician’s Ward has Kim’s training as a magician well underway. Her training, however, becomes a secondary consideration when it comes time to introduce Kim to society as Mairelon’s ward. Brought in for that task is Mairelon’s very very proper aunt, Mrs. Lowe. Not about to be upstaged, however, Mairelon’s mother, Lady Wendall comes to town to try to take over. This set up (the two society ladies battling over the proper way to introduce the recalcitrant young miss) can often be irritating, but is loads of fun here.

But we can’t have a plot from just that (ok, you can, but then you just have a typical traditional Regency Romance) so suddenly, we have magic house thieves! Conspiracy to rob magicians of their powers! Foreign princes! I was told that this book is fun, but not quite as fun as MtM, and that’s about right. Both books are Regency capers with magic, but different kinds. MtM is a manor house mystery, and MW is city streets and high society adventure. I admit to being more fond of manor house mysteries.

( spoilers )

Having grown up together in Essex, cousins Cecelia and Kate decide to write to each other regularly when Kate and her sister Georgina go to London for the season with their Aunt Charlotte. Aunt Charlotte would have left Kate behind, but you can’t bring the younger sister out before the older, and so she decided to bring them both out at once, and just keep the less stunning Kate hidden in a corner.

Not, of course, that this works out well, as a white haired woman mistakes Kate for the Marquis of Schofield and attempts to give her chocolate that, when accidentally spilled, burns through her dress. How Kate could possibly be mistaken as the Marquis is a complete mystery to her (and, for a lot of the book, the reader) as they don’t remotely look alike, even before the whole gender thing is taken into account. Soon, however, Kate meets the Marquis and finds herself drawn into his private battle with the woman, and masquerading as his fiancee.

Meanwhile, back in Essex, Cecelia has befriended an attractive but scatterbrained young woman named Dorothea, who all the men in the area are inexplicably besotted with, even the ones who were already in love with someone else. On top of this, a strange man named James Tarleton is not-so-discretely spying on one of the girls, and strange (and possibly sinister) things are going on with a local gentleman with quite the library on magical subjects. Not only that, but Cecelia is discovering that she has quite the knack for magic charm bags. 

Kim is a teenaged street urchin in a Regency era London different from our own only (apparently) in that magic-and magicians-are real. When Kim is hired to steal a silver bowl from a stage magician named Mairelon, she’s caught in a magic trap and captured by the magician. Mairelon, immediately recognizing her as a girl and not the boy she disguises herself as, decides to take her own and train her as an apprentice, not only for the stage, but also for her less-than-scrupulous skills she’s acquired on the streets. Soon, she learns he’s a real magician, not a simple stage one, and that the silver bowl is part of a set he was accused of stealing five years ago, and that he’s trying to recover, and off they go on an adventure to find the rest of the set.

It is, of course, all for the greater good of England.

The book is very fun, and more caper-adventure than anything else, with half of England also after the Saltash Set, resulting in multiple attempted burglaries with the entire cast engaging in antics on scene, all sorts of people randomly appearing at the scene of the climax, and a lot of fun supporting (and lead) characters. The ending seems to be setting the book up for a sequel, but Amazon doesn’t tell me that there’s one currently in print.