20. Twilight, Crystal Palace Park
Chapter 20
Twilight, Crystal Palace Park
It was twilight indeed when I descended from Victor’s carriage. My hand was still in his as he let his walking-stick rest in the crook of his left arm and produced a pocket-watch on a fine silver chain from somewhere beneath his black cloak.
We were almost near enough to each other, I thought, for me to feel the low growl I heard rumble in the back of his throat.
“About to close,” he muttered as he snapped the watch-case shut and dropped it back into an unseen pocket.
Absolon shut the carriage door, his hooded form dwarfed by the great black horses behind him. “Traffic, Doctor D’Arco.”
Victor grunted in reply. “Be assured I do not delight in those teeming streets any more than do you.”
I heard a strange chafing sound, hoarse and yet smooth, nearly like a snake gliding through fallen leaves—after a moment’s confusion, I concluded that Absolon must have been laughing.
“There is time enough,” Victor continued, “though scarcely. Move the carriage somewhere less conspicuous and tend to the horses. Cast a glamor if necessary. Wait, and prepare for my summons.”
“As you wish.” Absolon nodded, turned and climbed into the high driver’s seat, and I wondered for the moment whether the horses knew that he was not a mortal man, and whether it mattered to them very much.
In the gathering twilight, nothing seemed particularly real anymore—not in the way that I thought I once had known. The black-hooded driver made a quiet sound with his mouth, not entirely human; the horses snorted and stepped forward as if broken from a spell, and as the great, grave equipage picked up pace and disappeared around a treed bend in the road, into the rising fog of the coming night, I wondered idly whether those creatures yoked to Victor’s coach were horses after all.
The air was cold. I reached my right hand to pull my shawl closer about me, and only then did it strike me that my other hand was still in his. My fingers tensed on the back of his hand—only slightly, only in instinct—and he took it as a signal to let me go.
I realized then that I did not know how to walk with him—I did not know, in our performance of mundanity for the mortal city of London, in our show of strength in sorcery for the hidden worlds below, how much space was to be left between us.
How deeply I was to remain in the shadow of his emanating darkness.
Surely I was to play the part of a dutiful, bereaved young widow, veiled as I was: concealed, forbidden, secretly alluring. But who was he to me, in the eyes of the world? Some relation of mine to escort me, I supposed. Surely not my professor. How doubtful that any would guess such a thing.
Most likely, our faces both concealed thus—though he had, at least, the excuse of winter’s bite for the scarf over his mouth and nose—prying eyes and minds might figure some villainous tryst: an excursion of lovers into the anonymity and lascivious thrill of a public park, to be at once witnessed and unknown.
I looked up to him as I stood at his side, watching him watch the slow stream of visitors issue from the southern exit of the park, near the silent entry turnstiles and their lone attendant. I could see Victor’s hair—some glimpse of it, at least, from beneath his hat and scarf; more than that single stray lock I had seen before—and I wondered why I did not think to look for it while we were in the carriage. It fascinated me now: a thick, rich black, streaked here and again with strands of silver. Long enough to be tied back, though whatever held it could scarcely contain the ends of a few unruly waves that escaped the back of his scarf.
Feeling my gaze, he looked down to me.
“For what do we wait, sir?” I asked, as if I had awaited his attention all along.
“For the right time,” he mumbled quietly to me, his voice low. “I intend to catch the gateman alone. Distracted, preferably.”
“I imagine you’re seeing to that.”
“Watch.”
I did as he asked, though after I felt a wave of his art ripple through me—a long, slow pulse of his darkness, deep and mildly disorienting—I knew already what I would see. The man standing by the entry gate blinked and wiped his brow, as if struck by a fervid sweat, then leaned heavily against the side of a turnstile to catch himself from falling.
“And now,” Victor’s voice had a wry edge as he began to stride forward, flashing a glance to me to assure himself that I was still at his side, “our time has come.”
As I walked beside him over the cold ground, I realized that the falls of our feet on the earth, my shoes and his great boots, were now (but for the wheels and horse-hooves on the streets behind us) the only sound: the quiet din of human voices in the park ahead had faded. There were yet a few figures before us in the distance, walking amid the winter-bare trees and the few evergreens, but none now approached the exit gate. It was as if some invisible force deterred them—an intangible unease, felt only dimly in the blind depths of the mind, stirring the animal instinct to beware some unseen danger. That was the lightest touch of Victor’s shadow, before even the body felt the thrill of his sorcery begin to quiver in its nerves.
I felt now the beginning of that thrill: a vague shift in the senses. But ever since yesterday, when the surging flood of his art overwhelmed me and I awakened in his arms, it did not feel as once it did. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that the sensation of it was unaltered—the same dark vertigo, the same shiver that threatened to slide down the spine—yet my experience of it had changed. It was more tolerable now, for one thing; indeed, I fancied that, were we to conduct yesterday’s experiment again, my constitution could endure the inexorable undertow of his black tide for at least a little longer.
And if in the end my senses were to drown in his sorcery once more, and I were to sink into his grasp in another swoon—I cannot say that the prospect would deter me. Quite the opposite. I remembered the sensation now with a strange pleasure, so secretly familiar that I wondered if ever I had felt the disquiet of his art without some surreptitious stirring of desire.
But I could not desire him, much less love him. Not now. Not ever.
Not here, on the perilous threshold of the spirit world.
It was all I could do to walk more closely beside him, and feel the uncanny comfort of his shadow warming in my blood, and will with all the force of my own art that that alone would prove enough.
“Two,” Victor pronounced as we arrived at the turnstile, his voice at once stern and indifferent. He produced a pair of tickets from a pocket and extended them toward the gateman in his black-gloved hand, the motion as certain and confident as if the hour of our arrival were entirely unremarkable.
“Very nearly dusk, sir,” the attendant managed, seeming to work at swallowing back something rising in his throat. “I’m afraid we’re closing. If you come back tomorrow, I could?—”
“You look rather green,” Victor interrupted. “Nausea and disorientation, accompanied by darkening vision, distorted sense of time, an unexplained weakness in the legs? Sudden onset, followed by a gradual diminishing of symptoms? I have seen this precise thing before.”
“Yes,” the gateman replied as a mingled look of incredulity and relief passed over his face, “yes, quite right. Are you a doctor, sir?”
“Indeed. I suggest you sit down for a while, if you can. Expedite the subsiding of the sensation. The distortion of time and appearance of dusk may endure for a while, as the darkness slowly clears from your eyes and the coming night catches up.”
“You mean it isn’t really dusk yet? Just a trick of my eyes after this—whatever this is that struck me?”
“Some manner of miasma. You are near the lakes, after all, and all still bodies of water harbor some variety of decaying vegetable matter. As I said, I have seen this before; be assured it passes swiftly. Yet you might consider covering your nose and mouth,” Victor gestured with the scorpion pommel of his cane to his face and mine, “if the symptoms recur.”
“Thank you—thank you, sir.”
Victor inclined his head toward the gateman, whose knuckles looked yet a shade too white on the metal frame of the entryway. “Don’t forget to take our tickets,” he whispered, his muffled voice low and conspiratorial as he stepped toward the turnstile. “I do not mean to rush you, but I promised to show her the prehistoric monsters before the park closes for the evening.”
“Yes, sir, with my apologies,” the attendant replied with a rather stupid smile, taking the pair of tickets from Victor’s hand and tearing them in half. “Enjoy yourselves.”
With a silent nod of thanks to the gateman, I followed Victor through the bars of the turnstile and into the park as the cold winter twilight darkened into dusk.
“How much of that was magic, sir?” I asked him quietly as I followed his lead, walking by his side.
“In the strict sense?”
“I suppose.”
“Only the initial thrust of my art before me: the mild disruption of the gateman’s equilibrium; the vague aversion sensed by the visitors, momentarily disinclining them to approach.”
“I mean no disrespect,” I replied, turning my face upward to see him looking down at me from the corner of his eye, “but?—”
“I have not survived for as long as I have in this world,” he interrupted me, his tone firm but not bitter, “by adhering so strictly to its conventions.”
“It’s not that, sir.” I allowed a pause, but he did not reply. “I meant only to say that, had I your power, I think I should have simply mesmerized him straightaway and saved myself the conversation.”
He chuckled darkly behind his mask and scarf; the sound was apparently disconcerting enough to draw the sidelong glance of a well-dressed couple who passed us by on their way to the gate, and yet I imagined somehow in Victor’s surprise a certain warmth. “Then you have found a failing of mine: there are times now and again, when I adjudge the outcome to be certain either way, that I indulge in foregoing the direct route. An old habit of self-entertainment when one grows too accustomed to routine.”
“How much of it was magic in the broad sense, then?”
“The first, as I said—and the rest besides. My absurd fashioning of myself as a medical doctor, and my inundation of him with inane talk. My will to see us past his gate. Every word that I said. Your presence and your silence. In the broad sense,” he looked down toward me again, then raised his head to survey the path before us, “all that we do is magic.”
The park grew silent as we walked. The visitors grew fewer the further we traveled from the gate, and the darkening day seemed to hold both its breath and its shadows, grey and waiting. This was the coming of the faerie hour. Every rare human form we passed seemed suspicious now, and hidden behind my black veil I looked to each mortal face for some scar to mark a Cartesian eye between the brows, some bestial distortion of the features.
Nothing yet. But every figure emerging from a branched path was a new chance.
I cannot say that I was afraid—not even as we entered the stretch of the Grand Central Walk where the way became a skeletal tunnel, the pale trees on either side of us rising to bend over the path, and beneath the high arch of their passage I felt as if we traversed the nave of some grand cathedral of the nighttime earth. I thought of when once I had stepped into a hidden clearing of green mounds, deep down the trail into the trees behind my husband’s house—that day I had heard the woodland birdsong cease, and terror struck me, and I ran from that place and never returned. But now was a different hour. Now my nerves stirred not from fear but anticipation, possibility, the great forbidden adventure of the unseen secrets of the world.
The trees passed us like living pillars, glowing faintly in the fading light. I was not who I was then. I had now my own sorcery—new and largely untried though it was—and at my side strode a man who seemed himself an elemental force, scarcely restrained by some practiced veneer of humanity, a dark power to shut out the rest of the darkness.
We made a left from the passage, down a narrowing walking-trail. Though the way opened now before us, I thought I discerned ahead a place where the trees gathered closer again, and between them the low shrubs and reeds that are wont to grow beside water.
The lake was close. But more even than the ominous promise of our destination I was aware of the space that closed between us when the trail grew thin, the warmth of his presence, the depth and density of his shadow around me.
I saw a small white snowflake drift down from the steel-grey sky, settling on an errant wave of black hair that escaped from his scarf, melting in his heat.
All that we do is magic , he had said, and I did not doubt that this was true—but tonight that sense of sorcery was stronger. I could tell myself that it was this place, these trees, this moment in time, the hidden presence of the disprites of that other world, but I would be a poorer sorceress for willfully confusing what I knew to be true.
My glance fell to his hand, gloved in black leather and carrying his cane as he walked, his grip just below the silver scorpion pommel. And then, just for a moment, I closed my eyes. I could not tell him how it felt to walk beside him in the world, over the cold ground of the young year, watching the first few flakes of snow fall in the fading twilight.
If all that we do is magic, then at least we were in agreement that magic is what this, too, should be called.
“What do you feel?”
He did not speak—I did not think that I heard the deep rumble of his voice in my ear—but I felt him in the back of my mind as we stopped on the path before the grey lake that stretched toward us, its still waters creeping between the silent reeds and beneath the hanging tendrils of a weeping willow in its winter sleep.
I wondered that he should phrase his question thus, but now was no time to wonder long. Regardless even of what truly he may have meant, what now was I to say?
“The sensation of the?—”
“Speak,” his thought interrupted my own as I ventured to press into his mind, “unless it is truly a matter of absolute secrecy. Expend none of your art except at need.”
“The sensation of the green mounds of earth,” I said quietly, “in the clearing on a trail behind my husband’s house, when once I ventured there. Something like the feeling in your summoning chamber after Balnock. And yet something like…”
“Like me?”
I paused. “Yes, sir. Like you, and yet not.”
“And what do you see before us?”
“The lake, sir. A few of the great beast sculptures looming in the distance, I think, though the trees and the dusk make them hard to discern. I cannot recall precisely their locations from when last I saw them.”
“Describe the lake.”
“It’s very still. The same dim, silvery hue as the sky, and in it are mirrored the trees of its banks, as if they grow at once toward that sky above and down through the water into the earth.”
“That is all?”
“Various trees, shrubs, and water-grasses. Outside of the willow I do not know all of their proper names.”
“Relax your gaze,” I felt him speak quietly in the back of my consciousness. “Allow your eyes to lose some focus as you watch the lake. But do not look away.”
I drew and released a deep breath, and did as he asked me.
“You must see through appearances, Elizabeth—past what is customary, what is likely, and what the fragile tenets of mortal civilization have deemed is possible. Sometimes it is beneficial for the world to seem a stranger , as once you said, to sharpen the eyes and the objective mind from the dull intoxication of convention.” He paused, but he must have sensed the faint shock I felt through my body, like a sudden tremor on the verge of a dream, even if he could not see through my black veil that my eyes grew wide. “What do you see now?”
“There is a mist over the water, sir. I thought that it was only my eyes, but now that they have focused again of their own accord—I see it still.”
“It is only your eyes,” I thought that I felt him almost smile, “but all that you perceive is in some sense true.”
“And what I thought was a sculpture is a living figure crouched by the water’s edge—a woman, I think—I cannot say. Her shape seems to shift in the fog.”
“Focus now,” he replied, “but not on the shape of the figure, nor the willow. Find the negative space: the form of the lake where it escapes the reflections of the trees—the space between two leaves—the shape of the sky. The world in its inverse. When all that you see is unfamiliar, you will naturally?—”
“They’re coming, sir,” I interrupted, forcing my mind into his; this was an emergency, surely, worthy of an exception to his command. “They approach from the narrow trail to the right.”
I felt the brush of his black cloak as it billowed with his sudden turn: his massive form whipped with savage speed toward the place where the footpath disappeared into a copse of trees, and with his right hand ready on his cane he drew himself up to his full height.
And then we waited.
Waited, but nothing came down the trail.
I did not realize, until I watched two tiny snowflakes alight upon his overcape, that our shoulders rose and fell in the same expectant rhythm.
“It’s gone now,” I whispered from behind him and to his left: he had stepped forward, protecting me, a black wall in the fading light. “Whatever it was—whatever they were—they drew away. I don’t understand how I can tell.”
He relaxed, and I heard the end of his cane tap the solid earth as he lowered it back down to his side.
“I don’t understand, sir, how I felt a presence that you did not.”
“Because you felt only that presence,” he replied in my mind, his tone quiet and measured yet not without an ominous tension at its edge, “and therefore it was far more distinct to you. Yet I feel them all. We are surrounded, Elizabeth.”