The Twelfth Enchantment

30

THERE WERE MORE QUESTIONS THAN SHE HAD TIME TO ASK, LET alone to hear answered. For now, Lucy’s chief concern was to vacate Mr. Gilley’s house. Though the news that this odd man was in communication with her father came as a surprise, it did not occur to her to doubt it. What struck Lucy above all things was that her father, though three years dead, still looked after her, still cared enough to attempt to help her, though the effort, according to Mr. Blake, of breaking through to our world was a great one.

Mr. Blake, however, conveyed information with an easy familiarity, and while he seemed to understand that most people did not regularly hold congress with the dead, he gave every impression of having grown complacently comfortable with such communication. He explained her father’s words not with the deep intoning of a charlatan, but rather with the dull patience of a parent expressing the intentions of a child too shy to speak.

In the Gilleys’ parlor, as Mr. Blake told Lucy of his conversations with her father, it became apparent that Mr. Blake considered a third person involved in their conversation. After some minutes, Lucy deduced this presence was the spirit of his brother, of whom Blake was clearly very fond. “Yes, Bob,” he snapped. “I won’t forget to tell her, but you must wait.”

After hearing that her father wished her to accompany the old engraver to his home, Lucy concocted a plausible tale and went out of the room to find Mr. Gilley, who was conveniently nearby, posed as a man who had not been attempting to listen through the door.

“Mr. Blake is my late father’s half brother,” lied Lucy. “He has offered to provide shelter for me, as doing so for you either is too uncomfortable or comes for me at too high a cost. I would be most grateful if you could have my trunk sent to his address.”

“You would be so bold as to walk out of my house?” asked Mr. Gilley.

“You have demanded I leave,” answered Lucy.

To this Mr. Gilley had no easy answer, and it was while he stammered in want of a reply that Lucy slipped a talisman into his coat, one meant to make him susceptible to things he most feared. Lucy decided it was high time for Mr. Gilley to catch cold.

Mr. Blake lived on South Molton Street in a less fashionable part of town than where Mr. Gilley resided. The streets there were filthy with rubbish and animal waste, and crowded with workingmen and haggard women, but these were not the desperate streets of the worst parts of the city. These were the laboring poor, people with enough bread, if only just, and so while all was crowded and noisy and dirty, there was also a vibrancy in the air, as though everyone at every time had just been delivered from the terrible fate of being worse off than they were.

Blake’s house was above his printing and engraving shop, which appeared a respectable if not entirely profitable enterprise. Lucy had arranged with Mrs. Emmett to arrive later with her things, and so she traveled to the house alone with the old man, a decision she wondered about during the whole of the journey. It ought to have seemed more dangerous and radical than she felt it to be, but the only trepidation and doubt she knew came from her head, not her heart.

When they arrived at his house, Lucy began at once to feel uneasy for Mr. Blake’s peace. She had accepted the engraver’s offer because she believed he meant her no harm and because he appeared, in all truth, to have been in communication with her father. Only as they arrived at the little house did it occur to her that she would be imposing upon a family.

“Are you married, Mr. Blake? Have you children?”

“My Catherine and I have not been blessed with children,” he answered.

“Will your wife not object to your bringing home a stranger to live with you?”

“Should she?”

“No, only I mean, it is an unusual thing, is it not, to bring home a woman because a spirit asked you to do so?”

“Catherine and I have been together for almost thirty years. I hope she is accustomed to me by now.”

Lucy need not have worried. Mrs. Blake had not been warned that there would be a houseguest, but nevertheless welcomed Lucy warmly. She was a sweet, plump woman, not at all tall, perhaps once pretty, but now well ravaged by age and the demands of a middling life in London. It took only a minute for Lucy to discern that she was absolutely devoted to her husband, and it would not occur to her to deny him anything. A strange young woman was no burden if it was Mr. Blake who asked that she take a place in their home.

Lucy’s accommodations were not nearly what they had been at Mr. Gilley’s house. She had but a garret with a broadly sloping roof—clean, but small and narrow, and inclined to be drafty. Yet, she loved it, and when she sat upon her low, rather lumpy mattress, Lucy let out a breath of relief. The Blakes were not affluent—they appeared almost poor—but here, at last, she was in the company of people with whom she did not have to pretend. She could say anything to them, for nothing would sound so strange as what they said to her.

Within two hours, Mrs. Emmett arrived with her luggage. When Lucy introduced her to Mr. Blake, the engraver examined her with a peculiar expression. “I’ve never seen one such as you,” he said.

“Nor I one such as you,” answered Mrs. Emmett.

“We shall have to talk, I think,” he said.

“We shall mean to do so,” said Mrs. Emmett, “and yet never will.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Blake. “That is true, isn’t it?”

And with that, the two peculiar people seemed at ease with each other.

Once Lucy was settled, Mr. Blake invited her for tea alone in his sitting room. She sipped nervously, and took none of the macaroons he offered her, though she was usually very fond of macaroons.

“You must have many questions,” said Mr. Blake.

“Tell me about my father,” she said.

He nodded, and then nodded to someone invisible. “He is not himself with us. It is only Bob, who has been a helpful intermediary in this matter. The dead are difficult to hear, Miss Derrick, though they hear one another better than we hear them. Your father has tried to speak to you, but he cannot reach you. It is much easier for him to speak to Bob, even though Bob inhabits our realm, not theirs.”

Lucy felt the tears build in her eyes. Her father had tried to reach her and she could not hear. She felt as though her heart must break.

“There is no deficiency in you,” said Mr. Blake, who appeared to understand her grief. “Do not think so. It is not a matter of will or love or openness. To hear the dead, even those who dwell near us, you must be… different. I have always been as I am. When I was a boy, my mother had to keep my father from beating me as a liar after I spoke of seeing angels in the trees. I soon learned to keep such observations to myself, for I understood, even at that age, that the things I saw could not be seen by others.”

Lucy nodded. “What does my father tell you?”

“He has almost as much difficulty seeing our world as we have seeing his. There is something you must do, but he cannot yet see what. He wishes you to stay here with me until he can see it. He will then tell me when he can. He also says things of people in your circle. He says one you must trust entirely, another not at all.”

“He does not say which is which?”

Mr. Blake shook his head and smiled knowingly. “The dead, even when they mean well, can be rather a pain in the arse.”

Within a day it became apparent that there was not going to be any revolution in England and no blood flowing through the streets of the capital. This was certainly good news, but the newspaper Mr. Blake brought home contained its share of troubling news. The assassin was revealed as a madman named John Bellingham. It took Lucy a moment to recognize the name, but then she recalled it was the man she had met at Lady Harriett’s house the night she was captured. And Mary had told Lucy that she had taken him away and set him free in London. Mary had, in effect, played a hand in a plot to murder the prime minister.

Lucy could not believe it. Even if her cause was just, how could Mary condone such an act? It was monstrous. On the one side, the Rosicrucians and the revenants and their mills and machines; on the other, the Luddites and the old order—and now murder and treason. There had to be a third way, a better way. If only she could think of it and make Mary see reason. Of course, Lucy did not know if she would ever see Mary again, and now that Mr. Perceval was dead, she did not know that she could have any sway over the Rosicrucians, so even if she could think of a third way, she did not know that there was anything to do with the knowledge.

As for Mr. Bellingham, Lucy believed him to be no more than a madman, manipulated by Mary and her faction. According to what she read, he was angered because of an unjust imprisonment in Russia, for which he believed the British government owed him compensation. Somehow he had been convinced that his best course of action was to kill the prime minister. Justice for Bellingham was swift and terrible, and two days after the murder he was tried at the Old Bailey, where he offered scant explanation for his act but the misery he felt. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang the following Monday.

Mr. Blake, for his part, understood without Lucy telling him that Bellingham had been manipulated by the different invisible factions that now waged their war. Those who are called madmen are much more susceptible to magic, he said, for madness is often nothing more than an openness to the world around them, the world not governed by the cold logic of Bacon and Newton and Locke. These names he spoke with virulent contempt, and it seemed to Lucy that Mr. Blake hated nothing so much as he hated the very idea of reason.

“It is all well and good to apply reason to business plans or a mode of education or a voyage to Italy. One must live in the world after all. But reason, when applied to the universe, to the wonders of nature, to the things hidden from our poor eyes that see not all, but only what the Lord intended that they see—well, that becomes nonsense, doesn’t it? To say there are no ghosts because we cannot see them, cannot measure them, cannot weigh them upon scales nor note their reaction to heat in a flask—I hardly see the point of such a mode of inquiry. The world is full of wonders that cannot be measured. That is why they are wonders.”

For her first three days at Mr. Blake’s house, Lucy was left mostly to herself as she studied the new pages of the Mutus Liber, but unlike the earlier pages, these two had no clear content she could divine. She quieted herself and attempted to become lost within the images, and yet she could find nothing of use. While Lucy came away with clear notions of elements—gold, sulfur, and mercury—to what purpose these elements could be put, she had no idea. She presumed it had something to do with the production of the philosopher’s stone, but that was mere guesswork. Even so, she thought it best to have such elements upon her in the event the meaning should become clear or subsequent pages tell her what she needed to know. In one of her few excursions out of the house, she visited an apothecary and acquired vials of sulfur and mercury, and she visited a goldsmith, where she purchased a small quantity of gold dust.

She also spent a great deal of time thinking about Byron. He had said she must come to him, and she wanted to. She longed to. She thought about what it had been like to kiss him. Over and over she relived the memory in her mind, recalling every detail, sometimes adding to it something she might have done or he might have said until she could not easily recall what had been real and what her imagination.

She wanted to go to him. Each morning she woke and thought that she would, but by the time she had dressed and eaten, she understood that her desire was but a dreamy absurdity. She had no real home, no protection, and she dared not put herself in his power. If he would but make a proposal of marriage all would be well, but he had not done so.

Instead of running to Byron, she contented herself with conversations with the Blakes, particularly on the subject of what she must do next. Lucy needed to find the remaining pages of the Mutus Liber if she was to rescue her niece, but she had no notion at all of where to look. With Mr. Morrison having discovered her treachery, no one could tell her. One evening while they talked of this and drank weak tea, Mr. Blake fell into a reflective quiet for some time. Lucy and Mrs. Blake spoke of other matters for half an hour when Mr. Blake appeared to start awake and interrupted them without ceremony.

“Miss Derrick, your father is of the opinion that you must look to your inheritance.”

Lucy felt her entire body tense. She had told the Blakes nothing of that circumstance. She knew she would have to look to it at some point, but now she had more important things with which to concern herself. In any case, Mary had described the matter as hopeless.

Even if, to further her own mysterious ends, Mary had lied, was her inheritance the most important matter at this moment? Why would her father ask her to look to it? Perhaps by proving Mr. Buckles’s forgery Lucy could more quickly disrupt Lady Harriett’s plans. Was she implicated in the forgery as well? Lucy did not think she would be able to attack Lady Harriett with the laws of the land. For now, she had no choice but to wait and hope to learn more.

So taken was Mr. Blake with Lucy that he insisted he show her some of his work, so in the bright light of the next morning, he led her down to his shop and began to put into her hands some of his astonishing books—Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Milton. Lucy had never seen a book of poetry like this. It was a swirling, vibrant mixture of image and word. Even the text was engraved, and letter and image interwove until one became the other, and she could hardly say where one began and the other ended. It was seamless and elegant and chaotic and maddening.

Yet, as beautiful and eerie and moving as was his art, this is not what struck Lucy most. When she looked at his engravings, Lucy felt as though some unseen hand slid the final piece of a puzzle in place. She felt elation and fear and an insatiable curiosity. “It is time that I show you something, Mr. Blake,” she said.

Lucy went upstairs and retrieved her pages from the Mutus Liber. She brought them down and then spread them before Mr. Blake without any semblance of ceremony. They were simply there for his inspection.

Blake looked them over, running his fingers along the images, carefully noting the details. He shifted one, held another up to the light. A third he sniffed.

“Remarkable,” he said at last.

“They appear very much like your own work,” Lucy said to him.

He nodded. “They do indeed. I would go so far as to say that they are my own work.”

Lucy sat down, uncertain how to understand this new information. She had always believed Mary when she said the images dated from the seventeenth century. There was no reason to lie about such a thing, surely. Besides, Mr. Morrison had told her the same thing, had he not? Certainly it was possible that he had received false information, that they both had. Lucy found it easier to believe that Mary would lie than that she would be mistaken, but there was no reason why she could not simply be wrong about something.

“Do you know anything of alchemy?” Lucy asked Mr. Blake.

He shook his head. “Nothing out of the common way.”

“Have you ever sought the philosopher’s stone, the secret to life immortal?”

He smiled. “I already possess the secret to life immortal, Miss Derrick. It is called Jesus Christ. I need not seek another.”

Lucy closed her eyes. If these pages were not part of some mystic book, but merely the clever engravings of an affable if deranged craftsman, then everything she had done was for nothing. Lucy could not believe that. These pages were real. They radiated power and energy and a magnetic force. Lucy felt that these pages were, in some fundamental way, magic, whatever that meant. They were, for want of a better way of expressing it, half wedged in that invisible world of wonders that Mr. Blake claimed to know so well.

She turned to him. “When did you engrave these, sir?”

He was still examining them with minute interest. “I don’t believe I have.”

“But you told me they are yours.”

“Oh, they are certainly mine. I know this technique. I know it well, Miss Derrick. Do you know when I learned it? It was shortly after my brother Bob died, and I fell into the deepest and most terrible grief. Of all my brothers, he is the one I have always loved best, and I feared I should never see him again until I left this mortal realm. I was so distraught I did not even attend his funeral. You must think that unfeeling.”

Lucy recalled the misery of her father’s and sister’s funerals. “I think no such thing.”

“I could not endure that I should be made to grieve as others expected, that my grief must be a scripted and public spectacle, a stage play as much as an experience. I stayed at home. Then, only a few days later, Bob appeared before me. I had been having many difficulties in my work, unable to figure out a technique for combining text and image in the manner I wished. Bob told me how to do it. He invented this technique I now use. I did not know what to do, and then Bob appeared, explained it, and lo, I knew what to do.”

Lucy smiled. “It is the most literal experience of inspiration I have ever heard.”

Mr. Blake looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time.

“Mr. Blake,” she said, “I am confused. You say these are your engravings, and yet you say you have not done them.”

“I am confused as well.” He appeared more amused than anything else. “I have never made these engravings, and yet they are unmistakably mine. I have no followers in my mode of engraving, and even if I did, no one could imitate my style so well that I would not detect it.”

“I was told,” she said, attempting to show no emotion, “that these drawings originate from the seventeenth century in La Rochelle.”

Blake examined them again. “I see nothing particularly French in them, but the paper is certainly aged. There is nothing in these to say that they are not from such a time and place.”

“Mr. Blake, I do not think you are near two hundred years old.”

“I thank you.”

“How is it, then, that these pages can be?”

“I cannot answer that. I can only surmise that at some point in my future, either I or my work shall be in seventeenth-century France.”

“That is nonsense,” said Lucy.

“No,” he corrected. “We know where the pages come from and we know they are my work. It is not nonsense. It is evident. You say it is nonsense because reason tells us that I cannot ever go to seventeenth-century France, but once again that is the reason of Locke and Bacon and Newton. That is the reason of Satan and hell. You cannot doubt your own experience of the world because your reason tells you that your own experience must be wrong.”

Lucy rose and looked out the window of the shop. The day was overcast but not gloomy. She had not yet been outside, and she suddenly felt cramped and constrained, as though she needed fresh air. She turned back to Mr. Blake to announce that she wished to take a walk, but saw that he was very much absorbed in one of the engravings.

“Tell me,” he said to her, “who is Mr. Buckles?”

For days Lucy had wanted to go to Byron, but she’d dared not. Now, it seemed, she did not have a choice, for she needed his help. Her father had made it clear to Bob that Lucy must journey to Harrington, her childhood home, for there were pages there. And he had made it clear that she must not travel alone. She would need an escort, and Mrs. Emmett would not do. She required a man who had proved himself, which could only mean Byron.

There was no one else to ask, so Lucy traveled to Byron’s house to beg him to take her once more to Kent, this time to the home of Mr. Buckles, where Mr. Blake insisted she might find more pages of the book.

Because her reputation had been damaged, and because she must be vulnerable if she entered his house alone, Mr. Blake agreed to accompany her. They arrived at Byron’s London house to discover a string of young ladies loitering on the walk, hoping to capture the baron’s attention. It was a beautiful spring day, sunny and bright, with enough of a breeze to offer comfort. There could be no better weather to stand outside a man’s home, Lucy supposed, though she could not imagine why they did so. Each of these ladies clutched her copy of an identical volume.

Lucy approached one of the women, a girl with heavy features and sallow skin, but whose eyes shone with bright hope.

“I want to see him,” she said to Lucy. “I want only to see him. His work has so moved me, if I may see him and impose upon him to speak to me, I know he will love me.”

“What has caused all this fuss?” asked Lucy, astonished.

“You do not know?” This lady seemed as confused by Lucy’s surprise as Lucy had been by the lady’s ardor. “You have not read it, then?” She held out her book.

Lucy took the book and examined it and discovered it to be the newly published volume of the poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. “He told me he thought it was remarkable. I see you think so too.”

“He told you,” the young lady repeated. “You know Lord Byron?”

“I know him well,” she answered, implying much if saying little.

“He will see you?” the lady asked.

“I believe so,” Lucy answered.

“Will you bring me inside with you?”

Lucy smiled indulgently. “It is not for me to invite strangers into his house.”

“You are wicked not to share him,” she answered.

“Would you share him?”

“I imagine not.”

Lucy pushed past the girls and rang the bell. In a moment, a fatigued-looking servant answered.

“Please tell Lord Byron that Miss Lucy Derrick desires a word. I am unlike these other ladies in that he knows me.”

The serving man appeared skeptical, but agreed to relay the message. He returned and allowed Lucy and Mr. Blake inside. They had remained in a sitting room for nearly an hour when Lord Byron at last appeared in a dressing gown, his hair looking quite wild. In one hand he held a goblet of wine which he swirled carelessly. He took another step, and Lucy observed his movements were stiff and controlled, like that of a drunkard attempting to disguise his impairment.

“Ah, Miss Derrick. You’ve come to call, and you’ve brought me an old tradesman. How thoughtful.”

Lucy felt shame wash over her. Mr. Blake’s expression did not change, but she could not endure that she had brought him here to be so thoughtlessly insulted. Byron was his own man and lived by his own rules, but he had never before been rude to her without cause.

Lucy took a breath to steady herself. Perhaps it was simply her imagination. Perhaps he was not being so cruel as it appeared or his drunkenness only seemed to her like rudeness. “Mr. Blake has been kind enough to attend me. I must ask something of you, Lord Byron.”

“Must you now?” he asked. He began to pace leisurely about the room. “You know, since we last spoke, the first portion of my poem has been published. It has proved very popular with the ladies.”

“I observed that,” Lucy said. The anger began to build inside her. He had no cause to speak to her this way. No cause, and after all the things he had declared. It was unforgivable.

“Yes, I have two or three of them upstairs just now, and there is an endless stream of new ones at the door. Some prettier than others, so one must be careful to choose wisely.”

Lucy’s cheeks burned with indignation. She might have, from time to time, allowed herself to believe that Byron was a more honorable man than her experience suggested. She may have, on occasion, indulged in the fantasy that he would reform and ask her to marry him. She had known these thoughts were flights of the imagination, and yet they had seemed close enough to reality that they had been worth indulging in. But even if she had not deceived herself, and she had never taken Byron for anything but what he so clearly was, this behavior would have been unforgivable. “I wish to know why you would speak to me in this fashion. Are you under another curse that makes you act so?”

He laughed theatrically, throwing back his head. “A curse? No. It is but literary success that makes me act as I do. I am free now to treat all as I like and as they deserve, and that includes you, though you would believe you are owed something out of the common way.”

“What have I done to deserve this rudeness?”

Byron coughed out something like a laugh. “What have you done? I asked you to come to me. I begged you, and you did not come. Do you think I beg others? You ignored me when I wanted you because it was not convenient for Lucy Derrick—the great Lucy Derrick—to call upon a mere mortal such as Lord Byron. I saved your life. I took blows for you—blows to the face—but does that impress you? Does that instill in you any sense of obligation? No, you are too busy with your gods and spirits and monsters to trouble yourself with me.”

“You must understand the difficulties of a young lady in my circumstances—”

“The devil take your circumstances!” he cried, and flung his goblet against the wall. The glass shattered, and the wine sprayed out like blood. He went to the mantel above the fireplace and swept away all the pottery in a wild, angry thrust, sending a wave of ragged pieces washing across the floor. “The devil take you. Do you think the ladies who queue up at my house trouble themselves about their reputations? No, but Lucy Derrick will not be moved by love.”

Lucy was too astonished even to speak. Could it be that he really thought this so? Could he really not understand what motivated her? How self-absorbed, how childish he must be to condemn her. It was horribly shameful that this drama must play out before Mr. Blake, and Lucy dared a glance at him, but he only continued to smile blankly.

“I’d thought better of you, Lord Byron,” she said quietly.

“Oho! I’ve disappointed you, have I? Tell me, why did you come here today? Did you wish to see me, to spend time with me, as I begged you to? I think not. Or rather, did you wish to ask me to take you somewhere, accompany you on another of your adventures?”

“That is why I came,” said Lucy, her voice betraying her uncertainty.

“That is why you came,” he echoed. “You wished more from me. After all I have done, what have I received in return? Nothing!”

“Lord Byron—” Lucy began.

He would not let her speak. “Nothing!” he cried again. “I have done and done and done for you, and you have only trifled with my feelings. Those women who come to my house ask for nothing in return. I cannot imagine why I should not enjoy their company rather than enduring yours.”

Lucy’s face was now set hard. “Because you claim to care for me. Because a gentleman ought to aid a lady he cares for without demanding she turn whore in compensation.”

“It is a convenient arrangement for you, I’ll wager.”

Lucy turned to Mr. Blake. “Come sir, let us go.”

Mr. Blake rose and smiled at Byron, but it was a chilling smile.

They left the house, Lucy tense with rage. Could she have been so wrong about Byron? Had she allowed herself to misunderstand his beauty as goodness? She did not know. She only knew that now, other than Mr. Blake, she was utterly without allies in London.