She found Miss Price fussing over Bob and treating him like the light of the world for having rescued her from the city jail. He was sitting down before a plate containing all the eggs that Miss Price had been cooking when Elizabeth left, and all the toast she had started as well. Most of the bacon had disappeared, but Elizabeth managed to snag the last piece from under the paws of Rififi.
"What happened to you?" Miss Price tore her attention away from Bob for a moment.
"Oh, nothing," Elizabeth said, looking down at herself, barefoot and smeared with sand and coal dust. "I thought I heard a sound in the boiler room and I went to check it out."
"What was it?" asked Bob between bites.
"I don't know. The pile of coal in the boiler room was all spread around on the floor and in the sand room, the floor started to collapse. It gave way under me when I walked in."
Miss Price asked, "What's the sand room?"
Bob explained about the train tunnel collapse and the ground under the house subsiding. "I guess we should call the city or the landlord. Maybe they just need to put more sand in."
Miss Price cracked two more eggs into the frying pan and prodded them gently with her spatula. More to herself than the others, she said, "So the old tunnel runs under this house. How interesting. That might explain the odd resonance in the ley lines, and all that energy."
Elizabeth wanted to ask her what she meant by that, but before she could, Bob said, "Like that ring?"
Miss Price raised her eyebrows and asked him to elaborate. As Bob started to speak, Dirk walked into the kitchen and interrupted him with a cheery greeting. Dirk was still wearing his black clothing from the previous night. He had made some effort to brush himself clean, but was still streaked with dirt and leaves, especially down the back, and his face was smudged.
"Where have you been?" Elizabeth asked him quickly.
"Hiding in the woods with a foxy friend," he said with a grin. "What about you? Did y'all get arrested?"
Miss Price told him, "Alice and I did. I've never been arrested before. It was rather an interesting experience, all told. I found some former students among the inmates, so it was a reunion of sorts."
Dirk found this amusing, but his cheer evaporated when he saw the empty egg carton beside the stove. "Those are my eggs. You're not supposed to take whatever is in the refrigerator if it doesn't belong to you," he said angrily.
Miss Price planted her hands on her hips and faced him squarely. "I would've happily asked permission if there had been anybody awake to ask. I'll get you more eggs as soon as I get my purse back."
"What if I don't want to wait?"
"You don't exactly have a choice," she pointed out, "so you might as well have a better attitude."
Elizabeth slipped behind Miss Price and folded one of the fried eggs into a slice of bread. She scampered up the back stairs without being noticed by Miss Price and Dirk, although Bob gave her a desperate look. If he wanted to escape the arguing he'd have to leave his breakfast. She finished her makeshift sandwich as she reached the first floor landing and licked traces of yolk from her fingers. She walked down the hall to her sister's room to see if Alice was up yet.
Alice was still in bed with the covers pulled up high and a box of tissues within reach, but she was tapping away at her laptop. She gave Elizabeth a perfunctory "Morning."
"What are you doing?" Elizabeth asked.
"E-mailing everyone in the coven to see what happened to them last night. A few other people were arrested, but they got bailed out before we did. And some people managed to escape entirely." She regarded her sister with sour envy. "How did you do it?"
"I hid in the trees and the police didn't see me. I walked over the rocks to the park on the south side and called Bob from a pay phone." Elizabeth wondered whether her sister would be in total denial about the ring like Bob was. Probably not. Elizabeth suspected that once Alice got hold of the ring she would never let it go, so she decided to say nothing.
"Oh really? Well, I went to help Miss Price and I couldn't save her and myself." Alice stopped typing and blew her nose.
Elizabeth was defensive. "I was going over to where you were, but one of those people hit me in the head and knocked me down. Do you know who they were? They called themselves the Sisters of Sycorax."
"Huh." Alice looked directly at her for the first time since she had entered the room. "I didn't recognize any of them. I don't think I've ever heard of them either. They're probably just another coven who wanted to be jerks. That isn't exactly in the spirit of Samhain. I didn't see any of them getting arrested, either. I wonder if they tipped off the police."
"It would be pretty stupid to tell the police where to find some trespassers and then trespass in that exact same spot yourself."
"Yeah, I guess you're right." Alice's computer chimed and she looked at her e-mail. "Ooh, here's one from Kevin, that's Fox," she said as an aside. "It seems he and Dirk helped each other escape."
"Dirk just turned up a couple minutes ago, totally bipolar. He's yelling at Miss Price for cooking his eggs."
"Oh, for goddess' sake. You'd think he'd maybe have made a Samhain resolution to leave that attitude behind. I've got a whole dozen eggs in the fridge, he can eat those. Or at least I did, maybe they disappeared. I'd better go see." Alice clicked the computer shut and set it aside. She took her robe from the foot of the bed and pulled it on over her shoulders before she threw off the covers.
Elizabeth went back to her room and washed off the coal dust and sand, then crawled back into bed. She woke up a few hours later, far too few in her opinion, to find the room bright with sunshine and Penrose seated at the foot of her bed. He was reading another one of her teenage favorites and laughing. At her, as opposed to with her, she thought crossly. He appeared to have suffered no lasting harm from dragging her out of peril and looked as solid as she did.
She sat up and combed her fingers through her hair. "What are you doing here?"
"Reading drivel and waiting for you to wake up. I want you to tell me what happened last night," he said and closed the book.
She did so and he found her description of the Samhain ritual, complete with editorial comments, to be highly amusing, but his face became grave when she told him about the disruption. She told him, "They said they were the Sisters of Sycorax. Who is Sycorax? I haven't had time to look it up."
He pressed his lips into a flat line and thought for a moment. "Sycorax was a witch in The Tempest. She was the blue-eyed hag, Caliban's mother, and it was she who imprisoned Ariel in the cloven pine when he would not do her bidding."
"What a strange reference. If they were going to do Shakespeare, why not the three witches from Macbeth?"
"The witches in Macbeth were unnamed, and so less liable to be played off of. I'm more concerned about how they knew where to find you all, and that they tried to hurt you."
"Did hurt us." Elizabeth gingerly rubbed the knot on her head, then put her arms around her knees. "There are thirteen people in the coven. Any one of them might have mentioned their plans to a friend and then word could have gotten around. After all, Richmond isn't that big a town. The witches in both groups probably have a lot of mutual acquaintances."
"Yes, but it's the malice aforethought that troubles me." Penrose leaned back against the footboard and put his arms around his own knees in unconscious imitation of her posture. His eyes fell upon the ring which sat on the bedside table. "When did you find that?" he asked.
"Last night. It was in the pocket of the coat I had on." She pointed to the object in question which was thrown in a heap on the floor with the rest of the clothing she had worn the night before.
Penrose turned up his nose a bit at the pile of laundry, so reminiscent of her sister's room, but forbore to mention the mess. "I thought that it was lost long ago. I assumed that it had been stolen."
Elizabeth picked up the ring. The gold weighed heavily in her hand. "Where did you get this? I didn't think that something like this could be real. Is it like the one in Lord of the Rings?"
"No, of course not. I made this myself." He reached out and she passed the ring to him. He turned it over in his fingers and squinted at her through the hole. "The only evil it can work on your mind is to bring out any evil that's already there. Are you familiar with Plato's Republic?"
She shook her head.
"Really? What do they teach you these days?" He was only mildly shocked, however, and went on without waiting for an answer. "Never mind. In the second book of the Republic, Plato tells the legend of the ring of Gyges. Gyges is a shepherd who stumbles upon a ring which makes the wearer invisible depending on which way he twists the collet. He subsequently uses this power to seduce his queen, murder his king, and rule in his stead. Plato uses this story to argue that we behave ourselves out of fear of the consequences of bad behavior, and that we could not resist taking whatever we wanted should we become able to do so without consequence, such as by becoming invisible."
"So you decided to run the experiment and prove it for yourself? You're already invisible, at least to most people. Have you set yourself up as the control?"
"I mostly wanted to see if I could make the ring. After being ensorcelled, I developed considerable interest in magic and I've been studying it for the past few centuries."
Elizabeth didn't let him change the subject. "How's your experiment going? Are we all craven monsters, bent on doing whatever nasty things we can get away with? How about you?" She leaned forward, eyes bright.
"Me? Well..." Penrose hemmed and hawed for a bit, but finally admitted that he'd gone through a stage of screwing with people a few hundred years ago. "But that gets boring, and even the most immoral soul may become introspective eventually."
"And the rest of us?"
"Pretty much like Gyges, only less successful." He handed the ring back to her.
"How disappointing." Elizabeth held up the ring and squinted at the engraving on the inside of the band. Thomas and Elizabeth, 1891. She frowned.
Penrose smiled at her discomfiture.
"Bob says it's a trick," she told him.
"I'm not surprised. He's our resident skeptic of all things supernatural. Did you give him a demonstration?"
"Yes, and he just told me to stop."
"Typical scientist. He merely ignores the data that don't fit his preconceived notion of the facts."
The telephone rang.
Penrose said, "Bob's asleep and the others have all left, so you have to get it."
Elizabeth groaned but crawled out from under the toasty warm covers and ran down the hall, her bare feet slapping on the cold floorboards, to her sister's room where she had to fumble for the phone from beneath a pile of discarded blouses. "Hello?"
It was Alice. "Can you come into the shop today? There was a break-in last night and the place is a wreck. We really need you."
"What happened?"
"Somebody broke in the door and trashed the place. There doesn't seem to be anything missing, but it's Sunday and since we tend to do a lot of business on Sundays, this is the worst day for it to happen."
Elizabeth heard raised voices in the background. "I'll be right there. I have to get dressed, so it'll be a few minutes."
Alice thanked her profusely and cut the connection.