18. The Letter and the Box
Chapter 18
The Letter and the Box
Perhaps the night had healed me, I supposed to myself as I poured some water from the old ewer on my washstand into its chipped basin—if this should be called healing.
It was now late morning in my chamber, and I was, or soon would be, in a condition more conducive to the day’s forthcoming event. Despite the tribulations of the night, I could think of Victor now—at least for a moment, which was as long as I dared—without hot tears stinging my eyes. That was, I supposed, what I wanted. More practical, at least.
But it felt more like becoming inured to my crossed stars than forgetting the hidden light of their fires.
Goethe’s faeries did a better job of soothing Faust’s heartbreak in the meadow, I thought rather sardonically as I washed my face, than a night in a decent bed had done for me. Still, my image in the mirror did not look terribly unlike the self I knew: my hair was in want of the morning’s comb and brush, and a touch of weariness shadowed my eyes, but my color was otherwise good.
As I reached for my comb, I thought momentarily of my lost pins from the day before—but no matter; I had others—and my wandering thoughts wove from there to the careful coil of my hair bun loosening against Victor’s shoulder, the sensation of his art rushing through me, my swoon and my awakening against the solid strength of his body—I forced myself to turn aside from the memory before its heat rose in me again, and in doing so, my recollection turned to the first face of Absolon.
The first face , I thought to myself as I combed my long tresses, trying not to consider whether any vestige of Victor’s warm scent still lingered in my hair. The true face of the disprite Absolon, as Victor had described it, behind the illusion of the ordinary man.
Then an odd thought took me. I set down my comb for the moment and leaned a little closer to the mirror.
My face was not so far from ordinary, after all: only a bit more haughty than average, as I had heard it described, and perhaps (I may have flattered myself) a touch more well-formed. Brown hair and brown eyes were not uncommon, though my hair in some lights had a cast of deep red; I was by no means tall, but not quite short enough for men to find my height endearing, and my complexion was never so light as the sunless pallor that was presently in fashion. Vanity had never been for me a besetting sin, unless there is a certain vanity in being content enough with one’s own appearance: not once had I harbored a yearning for any part of me to be otherwise than it was.
When Victor looked to me—when Absolon turned his pineal organ towards my form—did he see this generally ordinary shape? Did he see me as I appeared to myself in this mirror?
Capriciously, perhaps, I touched my face, watching my reflection do the same. Nothing felt unusual or discordant, at least—the touch and the image were congruent. But I did not know to what end that may have mattered.
And if I did not have what Victor called the Sight—or had it only intermittently, in some unforeseen manner which even Victor did not yet entirely understand—how did I know that this familiar face in the mirror was my first face , my true face, and that my own visage I had known so well was not a mere mirage that would shift someday into the face of a goblin?
Surely, this was one of my stranger fancies. And did this imagining appall me, I wondered—or did I delight now in all things extraordinary and bizarre?
As if I believed that some uncanny transformation were imminent, I found myself waiting, watching my reflection from the corner of my eye, not yet content to pick up the comb again. Then I bared my teeth for the mirror like fangs, mocking myself for my moment’s consideration of such an abject notion, and though I forced myself to laugh, I did not know whether it was out of mirth or discomfort.
I had read of such things in one of Victor’s books: gazing into a mirror, one might attempt to descry the future or commune with disprites, the reflected face of some other entity replacing one’s own. Not quite the same, I had thought, as discerning a disprite’s true form, but now with the notion in my head, and the mirror before me, I could not help but wonder?—
And then I started at a sudden sound: only a sharp knock at the door, and after the initial shock came a slight relief: perhaps it was better to be broken from this eerie reverie.
“One moment,” I called to the door. I was still in my underclothes, with my hair unbound and no time to make myself decent, but I did not wish to brand myself as unready or ill-prepared, nor to rank the conventions of feminine propriety above the name of action—not for Hargrave, and certainly not for Victor. I did not think I had heard the latter’s firm footsteps, but no matter: I quickly threw on a long cloak, drew up the hood, and held the fabric close enough around myself to disguise my state. If my fellow sorcerers could present themselves thus, so too could I.
An envelope slid under my door as I finished adjusting my cloak, and I hurried then, leaving it lying on the floor in my haste not to miss the identity of its deliverer. Upon reaching the door I loosened its lock swiftly and pushed it open, in time to catch sight of the back of a departing form in the hallway: a broad-shouldered figure in a hooded black cloak, but not nearly tall enough to be Victor, nor with Victor’s power and drive in his gait. His footsteps were relatively quick, but vaguely uneven; as I could not see his arms, I thought that he held his hands before him.
“Absolon?”
The dark figure turned, and what little I could see by the hallway candlelight of the face beneath his hood was entirely unremarkable. He pulled his broad right hand out of somewhere under the left sleeve of his robe, pointing a fleshy finger at the floor beside my feet.
“From Doctor Vittorio D’Arco,” he enunciated, his voice somewhat hoarse around its edge. “The letter and the box.”
Holding my cloak about me, I bent down to pick up both, and found that already the man in the black robes was continuing away down the hall.
“Thank you, Absolon,” I spoke after him, and he turned back to me with a bow. “Please give him my regards.”
He nodded with some haste and turned away again, as if to escape before I could delay him longer. I did not. I said no more, and let him go on his way, watching him as he did. He half-hurried down the hall and disappeared around the corner, looking for all the world like an irritable stranger trying a new shortcut down a suspicious street.
For a disprite possessed of such resentment towards mortal man, he seemed in that moment, paradoxically, to be entirely human.
And if he were not truly human, I thought to myself as I brought the small box and the letter inside, closing and locking the door and divesting myself of my cloak—if Absolon the elf of the earth, Absolon the demon, could seem so familiarly human a man—what other disprites may be in my midst, hiding horns and tusks behind the illusion of a human face?
What of my fellow students: the row of mens’ furtive faces to my left and right at Victor’s great table—the rogues’ gallery , as their professor had called them? Pale Greycliff with his unnamed curse, or brooding Walker with his deep black hood and crooked knife; silent Lloyd, pulling old tales of his Tylwyth Teg through the obscuring mists of time, or Reinhardt the illusionist?—
Reinhardt the illusionist .
I sat down on my bed, as if to prepare myself for the forthcoming revelation.
Reinhardt the stage magician, the Marvelous Manfredini with his wand, whose sorcery could alter the seeming of a thing but not its substance, and whose appearance nonetheless seemed at once somewhat eccentric and oddly ordinary: the outgrown hair with the receding hairline; the flashy waistcoats, their buttons strained by the well-to-do paunch of approaching middle age…
His art was different. No two of Victor’s students seemed entirely alike in their practice, it is true, yet for all their varied approaches and idiosyncrasies, it was Reinhardt who seemed in some ways to stand the farthest apart. Reinhardt, who sat separately and alone in the creaking chair of Victor’s parlor while the others formed a magic circle around the fallen Greycliff.
And if Reinhardt were indeed no mortal man, did Walker know it, or sense it somehow, and was that the true source of his ire?
But I set the notion aside for the time. I meant to investigate, surely—to pay special attention to Reinhardt next time I saw him in the student chair beside mine—yet for now I had greater concerns: greater even than the thought of sitting in class with a demon at my left shoulder.
I ran my thumb across the edge of the small box Absolon had left outside my door, setting it in my lap along with the letter. The box seemed very old. It was made of dense wood, black and somewhat rough-hewn; its lid was inset with a silvery metal disk, upon which was finely engraved some manner of emblem or magical sign I did not recognize. I thought first that it bore some mild resemblance to a compass rose, in its center a sickle moon in its final phase; but then, though the design itself did not change, I saw the burst of sun-rays breaking from behind the moon’s crescent, and the embellishments of something like swirling water, or flames, or twining vines—and most of all the great archer’s bow, armed with an arrow aimed to drive due east, bold and incisive and ready to strike. Though I did not understand its meaning, it felt like Victor somehow, and I thought of him when I saw it.
But how could I not?
How, indeed, could I divert my mind for long enough to think deeply of anything but him?
My considerations of my own face and of Reinhardt had distracted me admirably for the moment, but the moment had passed, and in the wake of Absolon’s presence the greater question now troubled my mind. What if, even after how human Victor had felt to me yesterday: his warmth—the touch of his hand—the rhythm of his heart—the comfort of his arm and his cloak and his shadow around me, his body pressed against my own?—
A light shiver slipped down my spine: not only for the memory, but for the possibility of that which remained unseen. Not for the first time did this uncanny notion strike me, but the countenance of Absolon revived my speculation, renewing its old terror to ring all the more true: what if, as Victor had commanded Absolon to conceal himself before me—on the rare chance, as he had said, that I might possess the Sight to discern his servant’s true form—what if Victor himself wore the mask to hide an inhuman face?
Had I looked to Victor, during the time when the Sight was mine? No, I recalled, tentatively at first, then with certainty after I replayed the memory in my mind. No, I had not. I had gripped his hand, when I saw before me the figure in black, and his hand felt to me as ever it did. But never once, until after the Sight left me, did I see his eyes.
Would they, too, have been that bloody shade of red? Were the black slits of his pupils horizontal like a goat’s, or vertical like a cat’s? Would I have glimpsed the dark scar of a Cartesian eye swelling between his black brows; did his hood hide the broken stumps of bone-white horns?
And what would have changed, had these visions appeared before my eyes? And what would be different were I to see them tonight?
Would it even matter now?
It would not change the memory, I thought to myself, reclining slowly onto my bed with a heavy sigh. Perhaps it would only twist the pang of circumstance deeper into the chasm between my ill-fated stars and the hope of my heart. If he were not, after all, a mortal man…
But whatever lay hidden behind the mask—whatever shadow-ridden road he had walked alone that led him, as I disembarked from a hansom cab in the midnight hour, to the spiritualist shop at the corner of a fog-blackened street—it would not change that he had moved my heart.
And it would not change how I felt, less than a day ago, when I awakened from being overcome by his art into the forbidden comfort of his arms.
Enjoy the memory , I told myself, if you will: whatever he may be, whatever he may have done, it is as close to him as ever you will come.
If you care for him —I felt my hand tighten around the strange seal on the lid of the box, my fingernails catching in the coarse grain of the wood— if you care for him, you cannot love him.
That was the terrible mystery of it, the fatal paradox: the man who exhorted me to restrain my desire, at the peril of his life and my own, was the only man who had ever truly summoned its vital spark.
Perhaps it was already too late, and the disprites of our doom were drawing in unseen from the air and the earth, circling the whisper of a restless heart. I should run to him, I thought, if ever I came to know that the hour for rescue had passed, and all hope were gone. There was a kind of desperate freedom in that, and the ache of its vastness caught my breath. I should run to him, and tear away the steel mask—I wondered if it should be so easy—and behold his face, and touch his hair, and fall with him into a first, last kiss, and then I would not die with my heart in chains.
A last fantasy. I would have cherished it, but now it must fade: evaporate into non-being, like a shadowy mist smoking before the sun.
I shook my head: I could not risk the new tear I felt threaten my eye, lest all my passions of the past night rush in again. I drew a breath to settle myself and split open the envelope with my thumb, and though the letter inside was already gently warped from the heat of my palm, I smiled a little at the familiarity of the handwriting. It was written in the same bold hand I recognized from the note that had fallen from his grimoire by the oak tree, the script at once concise and almost brash, and my initials inked with the same sudden flash of style:
E.B.,
You will meet me at three o’clock at the roadside gate at the foot of the hill path. If you are still in possession of your black veil, I advise you to wear it: the better to avoid the nuisance of public curiosity.
Rest until then. If you cannot sleep, I suggest to read from the book of border ballads I assigned to you. A preparation for the ways of the world you will come to know.
Should you be insufficiently recovered from our previous experiment, or should any alteration to these plans become necessary, slide a sealed letter under the door in Hargrave’s library that leads to the stair, marked with a prominent A in thick candle wax—something Absolon will see.
In the absence of communication, I will expect your punctuality.
Trusting this letter finds you well,
V.
PS. The contents of the box may be of use to you, particularly in the picking of locks.
To my twinned relief and disappointment, his tone was little changed, as if the events of the previous day had altered nothing at all, and were in the end a routine part and parcel of the teaching of sorcery—and nothing more. If anything, I thought he sounded more properly professorial than yesterday. Sterner. More distant.
As I folded his letter back into its envelope, I looked to the corner of his old grimoire where it protruded from beneath my pillow; I looked to the row of books and scrolls he had lent me, arranged with care beside my own volumes on the shelf. Should you be insufficiently recovered from our previous experiment , his handwritten words echoed in my mind, as if spoken in the familiarly firm, morose tones of his deep voice, or should any alteration to these plans become necessary —and then the instructions, in some detail, of how to leave a letter to him for Absolon.
Perhaps his tone was little changed, but nearly half the letter was to provide me an escape, should I have desired such a thing, and the suspicion of this grew upon my mind. I prefer an ally whose will is entirely her own , he had said the day before. Not unusual for he who had spoken always of the power of the will and its primacy in the sorcerous arts, but his emphasis nonetheless gave me pause. Had my will, I wondered, weakened or strengthened with the events of the past day and the passing of the night? This was a quiet test of it, surely—surely, he had wondered the same.
We thought alike, he and I, more often perhaps than not.
And as soon as that notion came to mind, I forced it immediately away, but to little avail: it returned as with the tide, eddied and inverted by the waves but otherwise intact. And supposing we do think alike , I considered to myself, then why, were I in his position, would I have written such things?
As a test of will, I concluded and reaffirmed. Or, perhaps, to ease an embattled conscience.
But what reason had he for the gloomy reticence of guilt?
I walked open-eyed, or so I thought, into the shadows of the world with him; I knew my danger, or imagined that I did. I had heard my fill of the hazards of death and madness. And I was not innocent to our exchange: I was to perform the other half of his tandem spell of banishment. That was why he took me as an apprentice—and why, I presumed, he took as apprentice my predecessors in the role, who had either died or fled his underground in half-blinded terror. My odds had never been auspicious, I smiled grimly to myself. But with my old life erased by Simon Buckingham’s miswritten will, I had little to lose, and all to gain: I was learning true sorcery—the great, hidden secrets of the world—from the most feared, the most grudgingly respected sorcerer of London. And that was what I desired, and it was more than enough. More than an adequate compensation for my jeopardy. So far as I was concerned, the arrangement and the contract were both fair and sound.
Why, then, did I feel with all my awakening senses some secret part of him that wished for me to turn back? Did he lay for me escape routes to test me, to absolve himself of responsibility for any unfortunate outcomes of my choice—or did he do it because he cared if I should perish?
Because some part of his hidden heart could not bear to draw me into danger?
Because he?—
I clenched my eyes shut, turning my head to shake myself free of the notion I could not bring myself to believe, and as I opened them anew I searched my room for something, anything, to distract me from the thrill of the thought.
My gaze settled on his book of northern border ballads. It was newer than the rest, the gilt lettering of its spine still shining brightly enough to catch my eye. This was to be my assignment, he had specified in his letter, if I could not sleep. I had looked at some of it already, because its inclusion in my reading materials intrigued me—it was, seemingly, the volume which had the least clearly to do with sorcery—and I discovered in its table of contents the names of two old songs I had already known:
James Harris the Demon-Lover , about a woman who leaves her husband on the shore to sail away with a lover; he reveals his cloven hooves at sea, and sinks them both to Hell.
Tam-Lin the Elf-Knight , about a once-mortal man, ensnared by the Faerie Queen and living as one of her folk, who is saved from sacrifice to the infernal underworld by the courage and love of a human woman.
I wished to give it no more thought.
After preparing myself for the day and taking a first meal I should rather sleep again, and content myself with anticipating the happy mystery of the evening’s event. I looked forward to testing my Sight, and seeing disprites, and bearing witness to his promise of the haunting of London. Any tremor of trepidation I ought to have felt was overshadowed by a sense of relief: I would not have to sit across from him in the close, warm air of his hall, alone with him and without the other students to diffuse his attention, watching him occupy the throne where once I had lain in his arms. Not yet. That trial would come in time, but for this evening, I needed only bring myself to stand or walk comfortably beside him—with my black veil hiding my face, and partly obscuring the sight of his form. Being with him at all after yesterday would still, I was sure, be a sore test of my own capacity for illusion—the abhorrent strength I must enforce upon myself to stifle the truth of my heart—but disprites, I grinned to myself in a strange, hopeful melancholy, might prove themselves a welcome distraction.
But first, the box: I could defer its opening no longer. As I pulled gently at the lid, I wondered at his postscript—that the contents would avail me in lock-picking—and whether it suggested that we would tonight trespass through some forbidden gate: into some long-abandoned graveyard, I imagined, somewhere just beyond the limits of the city, where the day’s last ravens hunched atop the sinking monuments as the black fog of the night drew in?—
And then I caught my breath, and the vision was forgotten.
The lid was in my left hand, connected by its hinge to the open box in my right, the contents gleaming as my bedside candle flickered.
My hairpins.
I touched them, rolling them in my fingers to test whether they were real, and truly mine that I had lost, wondering whether it was Victor himself or the mole-clawed Absolon at his command who was troubled to search for them and pick them up from the dark stone floor.
To make a gift of them was only an odd joke, I assured myself. It fit Victor’s strange sense of humor.
So I must believe , I told myself, at least for now.
But joke or not, Victor had thought to collect my hairpins, and bothered to see it done. And he had not forgotten my story of teaching myself hieroglyphics against my husband’s knowledge and will, accomplished by using those very hairpins to pick the lock of the metal strongbox where he kept his secret research.
My first venture out away from the shackles of mundanity and into the great unknown.
A new warmth bloomed within my breast, and with all I could spare of my own sorcerous art, I attempted to will myself neither to lose a tear nor to smile.