24. Chemistry
Chapter 24
Chemistry
My little hand nearly fumbled the key to the door of my own makeshift bedchamber in Hargrave’s house; the wet black lace of my glove slipped against cold brass as thunder boomed again, shuddering in the old wooden walls, tilting the faded portraits in the hallway.
I did not know why so routine a task should take so long this time, nor why I could not align the key with the keyhole, nor why I felt such a terrible tension in Victor’s hand as it closed around the back of mine, guiding the key home, unlocking the door with a force I nearly expected to shatter it to splinters.
The stiff hinges groaned until the door slammed into the wall.
A flash of lightning burst from the edges of my curtained window on the far side of the room as the driving rain beat a mad staccato on the pane.
“Change into something dry,” Victor’s deep voice rumbled as he drew me into the room, his hand still fast around mine, the taut urgency in his voice causing me nearly to mistake it for another dim peal of distant thunder. “But leave the bindings in place.”
“Are you going?—”
My sentence broke; the words, too quiet, caught in my throat, and over the sound of the fire erupting to life in the small hearth, the candles on its mantel and my nightstand flaring into flame, I wondered whether he heard me speak at all.
The sensation of his sorcery struck through me belatedly—I should be able to endure it now, I thought; after the waves of it that coursed through my body these past days, I should no longer be so weak before the bone-deep thrill of his art—but now it sank through me, pooling in the rising pain of my legs, and I grasped instinctively at Victor’s muscular arm.
Earlier this evening I stood before Gremio, twice igniting Victor’s magic circle into fire. Now Victor lighted the hearth and candles in my cold guest bedroom with his sorcery, and I could not say for certain that my knees would hold.
No matter: he held me again, walking me to the fine wooden chair at my dressing table, and I listened to the creak of the old floorboards beneath his great black Hessian boots.
It was only when I saw him grab the handle of the ewer from my nearby washstand that I noted its chipped basin was now at eye level, and realized I was sitting down.
Lightning flashed again from the window, its sudden glare flickering from the trail of rainwater that led to the door. Victor’s wet white shirt clung to his broad shoulders and the solid contours of his arms, darkened by the tone of his skin beneath, his black hair dripping down the back of his waistcoat.
The next crack of thunder came too soon for comfort.
“I’m going for water.” Despite the tension in his words he did not turn to leave, but watched me, and I wondered why the rise and fall of his chest was too shallow, too quick.
“I’ll be fine, sir.”
“Do not touch the wrappings,” he replied with renewed animation, as if my words had released him from some unknown bond. “Change into something dry. I will knock, and if I do not hear you bid me wait, I am entering regardless.”
His mask flashed in the firelight as he turned, dry ewer gripped in his hand, hurrying into the hall on his long, deft, certain stride and nearly slamming the door behind him in his haste.
Rain whipped at the window in a lash of cold wind.
Victor’s fire crackled in my small hearth.
For the first time since he drew me up into his dark coach, I was without him, and alone.
As I began to peel my soaked clothes from my skin, it occurred to me that I could scarcely remember our arrival here, the time that had passed between the snow beneath the carriage wheels and the strange change of the wind, the thunder and the driving rain: there were only sensations out of sequence, images for which I could little account. And all of them were distorted by the dreadful unease that stole through all my senses from the piercing pain in my ankles, as if the claws of Gremio’s severed hands still clutched me under the long hem of my dress, driving deeper through my flesh.
I could not bear to tell Victor—not, at least, until such time as he might ask. He would find out soon enough on his own, if he did not already know.
Half-undressed, my head suddenly grew light, and I leaned forward against my dressing table to steady myself.
A few moments, a few deep breaths later, I gathered myself and doggedly pressed on.
There was a disjointedness now to the world—a sense of absence—moments out of time, bereft of the spaces in between.
I could not bear to tell Victor that I was getting worse.
The crash of my door bursting open awakened me with a start.
“Elizabeth!”
I sat up in bed before even I understood where I was, reflexively holding the coverlet to my bosom. I felt my heartbeat, the sheen of sweat on my skin, the panting of my breath as I glanced about the room, seeking something to remember. My dripping dress and my corset were lying over a chair near the fire, and so I had successfully divested myself of them before Victor’s return; the familiar touch of lace at my wrists reminded me that I was now in only my nightgown. I felt the weight of my unbound hair about me, damp from the rain, still in waves from the duration of its confinement in a tight bun: now it lay over my shoulders, cascaded down my back.
And now Victor was here again.
I needed not see his eyes to know that they met mine. Even as he stood in the shadows by the door I sensed that it was so, listening to the quiet growl behind his mask as he allowed himself to exhale. All was not well—not by the vehemence with which he entered, the desperate fury that colored his calling of my name, the tension in his stance that even his deep sigh could scarcely assuage—but just to see him again, after even so brief an absence, was some comfort in itself.
My hand began to relax on the bedclothes I held in place, and I remembered—only just in time—to press the covers back against my breasts.
“I must have fallen asleep, sir.” It required some force to form the words now, but I strove to sound as strong as I could. “I missed your knock.”
“Lie down,” his deep voice rumbled under the crackle of the fire, the sound of the rain.
I heard the door swing shut behind him, the heavy thump of him setting the full ewer beside my bed on the floor, but all I could see as I laid myself back down into the sheets were his eyes when he looked to me, flickering in the firelight. Despite even the pain in my legs I felt my body begin to warm, a secret thrill of anticipation coursing through my blood as his looming black form eclipsed the light of the fire, his long shadow growing across my coverlet: there was nothing between his gaze and my skin but the bedclothes and a thin layer of cotton.
I looked up to the ceiling—I had to—just to look away, to force down the faint trembling of my awakening nerves.
“Relax, if you can.” From the groan of his chair and the changing of the light, he must have sat down at my bedside, near my feet. “Try not to fall asleep again.”
If not for the urgent force of his tone, I should have thought it a terrible joke.
“Any pain?”
“Yes, sir,” I managed after a reticent pause.
“Worsening?”
I paused again, watching the thin shadows of cobwebs sway on the ceiling in the hearth’s rising heat. “Yes.”
He cursed under his breath—I thought it closer to the feral snarl of a cornered beast, some hunted predator turned to prey; but as he threw the damp bedclothes back from my lower legs, drew the hem of my nightdress up to my knees and began to tear off the wrappings that bound me ankle to calf, I soon could scarcely think at all.
The pain was blinding; the touch of air against my uncovered wounds burned as if Victor had shoved my legs into the center of the hearth, and when at last the pain cooled, it resolved into a feeling of enveloping slime, so putrid in its sensation that I nearly longed for the feeling of fire to come again and burn it away.
“How bad is it, sir?” I managed to ask him as he gave me a few seconds’ peace to recover before I felt his grip close around my right shoe.
“Shoes next,” he grunted, “then the stockings. Nothing I cannot heal,” he continued, convincing in his confidence as he removed my little shoe—this was far less painful than the rest, and as he looked to my face, I nodded stoically for him to continue. “Nothing my magia intrinseca alone cannot restore.”
“Then you are some manner of doctor, sir, after all,” I said, thinking of the incident with the gateman at the park, trying to make myself brave for Victor as he took off my other shoe.
“An academic title,” he muttered as he set my shoes on the floor, “of ecclesiastical origin. Your stockings next.”
I nodded again, turning to watch the cobweb shadows shift on the ceiling, waiting for my breath to hitch in my throat. I could not allow myself to watch him. I could not risk his glance meeting mine again, entrapping me in the power and gravity of his gaze, watching me fight back the subtle, unmistakable change that would stir unbidden in my eyes at his touch.
My eyes fell closed as I felt Victor’s strong hand slip into the cloth that gathered about my knees—beneath the thrown-back covers, up under the lace hem of my thin cotton nightdress; there needed be no more sorcery in his touch than the physical touch itself to electrify my nerves every time his warm skin brushed my own. His searching fingers settled on the inside of my lower thigh, just above my right knee; before even I could wonder if I had trembled at the sensation of his skin—if he felt my flesh warming under his hand—my garter was already undone, my naked leg revealed in his hands as he stripped my stocking away.
The pain of the bloodied fabric pulling at the sticky wounds, and the promise of a reprise of the same when he tended to my left leg, was almost easier to bear than the anticipation of his touch again.
I could endure pain, loneliness, discomfort—but I did not know how to endure the bedeviling torment of dispassion: how to feign that I felt nothing as I awaited the sensation I knew would come again—as his rough, scarred hand touched the soft skin above my left knee—as I felt the encircling tension of my garter release and fall away beneath his deft fingers.
I welcomed the shock of pain, the pulse of lightning, the crack of thunder, no matter how near: anything to dispel the warmth that spread through me, this deadly self-cast enchantment of my desire.
It could not have taken him more than a few seconds to remove my stockings, despite how long to me it seemed—but I thought now that he paused for as long, and I could not think that such a thing boded well.
“How bad is it, sir,” I repeated, opening my eyes, looking to him at last, “now that you can see it all?”
“Needs to be cleaned,” he answered, the words still tense and abrupt, and I saw him reach down for a clean rag and dip it in the steaming water of the ewer. The pain was not terrible as he set about wiping away the blood, and the warmth of the water was some comfort. “Then tended and dressed, once Absolon arrives with the necessary herbs.”
“I thought you said your magia intrinseca would suffice in itself?—”
“I thought it would.” I heard him wring the reddened water out into the wash basin on the floor. “And I hold that it would. But I cannot take that chance.”
He continued to clean my wounds in the same manner, now and again casting dark glances to my face, to the door—and then, in a sudden fit of restless, frustrated wrath he threw down the bloodied rag and stalked to the head of my bedside. Lightning flared behind him as he towered above me, and in its sudden flash I missed the movement of his hand—but I felt him lay two warm fingers against the soft flesh of my neck, his touch firm as he pressed into the hollow where my jaw met my throat. He was gentler this time—no slower, no less insistent, yet softer somehow—but no sooner had I begun to relax into this reverie than a peal of thunder jolted through me. Out of sheer reflex I reached for him, and before I could gather myself my small hand had already grasped his strong wrist.
I looked up to what little I could see of his face, finding his eyes beneath the long, thick strands of silver-streaked black hair, still wet and disheveled from the rain, and above the firelight flickering on his steel mask: haunted eyes, dark and wild with some inner storm, as if the tempest that shook the walls of the old house were a mere mirror of the tumult of his soul.
He did not flinch from my touch.
I relaxed my grip, but I could not draw my hand away.
“Your pulse,” I whispered. My thumb was against the underside of his wrist: I felt the shadow of his sorcery through my hand, the throb of his heart against my touch. “It’s faster than mine.”
“Don’t speak,” he breathed, his voice so low and deep I could hardly make out the words above the sound of the driving rain. “Do not spend your?—”
“ Doctor D’Arco! ”
With a crash the door flew open and slammed into the wall of my room, the hearth and candles illuminating an inhuman form, black-robed, with a large pack slung over one shoulder and a small cauldron carried in his fleshy, mole-like claws. The monster hurried inside, threw the door shut behind him and turned to me: I watched the scar-like organ on his forehead swell between his cracked horns as his staring, unseeing eyes glistened blood-red in the firelight.
I did not know why I could See him again in his true form, or whether his grotesque shape was no more than a nightmare of my afflicted mind.
“Absolon. Fill the cauldron from the ewer and put it on the hearth,” Victor said, neither turning from me nor drawing away his hand. “Set the rest of the supplies on the dressing table. You brought me all of it?”
“Most of it,” Absolon’s dry, harsh voice replied as he emptied his pack piece by piece, turning my dressing table into something halfway between an altar and a chemist’s bench. “You were out of one. Empty bottle.”
Victor turned away suddenly, whipping his massive body toward Absolon with such force that I imagined I would have been pulled out of bed had I not let go. “Out of which one?”
He spoke with such terrible anticipation that, though I did not know why, a feeling of dread crept through me as Absolon produced the last item from his pack—an old, dusty jar—and held it up before Victor, his heavy claws tapping on the surface as he turned it, letting the fire flicker through the empty glass. “A bottle you wanted. I opened it.” It struck me then to wonder whether Absolon’s pineal organ could discern the forms inside a glass container. “Nothing inside.”
Victor roared—there is no word more human to describe what was so far from a human sound—a guttural growl from the depths of his heaving chest, erupting into a half-howl of reflexive fury. The force of his unmoored shadow struck my body like a breaking wave, a terrible surge of his art that slipped his command to stagger the very walls, the very equilibrium of the mind, with a power to nearly rival Nature’s thunder.
Absolon shuffled a step back, his small, sharp ears pricking up, his red tongue catching a drip of spittle that had begun to slip from one of his tusks.
The light of the room flickered; the candelabras above the fireplace jumped as Victor’s fist slammed down onto the mantel—and then he grew still, ominously still as I sensed his shadow gathering back to him, amassing the relentless potential of his power, his only movement the rise and fall of his muscular shoulders as the firelight painted him in crimson hues of Hell.
“Above Hargrave’s primary library,” Victor intoned behind the flicker of his steel mask, the penetrating fire of his gaze drifting slowly from the hearth back toward Absolon and me, “the one adjacent to this chamber, is the room Townsend uses for his folk magic class.”
An impish grin stretched across Absolon’s mouth, his thin lips peeling back to reveal a row of pointed teeth. “Break in?”
“Correct. You will break in, you will search his herb cabinet for goldenscythe , and you will bring it to me with all speed. You know it by its form? By scent?”
“Yes, yes, both.”
“Whether you find it or not, return to me promptly . Do not get caught if you can help it, but do what you must; I have neither the time nor the inclination to wait on social graces. You will be rewarded thrice the standard of our contract. Go.”
“The pleasure is my own,” Absolon over-enunciated as he bowed rather theatrically—a well-observed imitation of human movement, exaggerated nearly to a parody of the smug courtesies of man—and then with an acerbic, hissing chuckle he turned and left, hunched forward in his haste.
The door slammed again behind him, and there was nothing more to ease the anguished brooding I saw in Victor’s eyes.
“Victor,” I breathed, nearly unnerved for the moment by the hawkish precision with which he looked up from the bottles on my dressing table, his gaze snapping suddenly to mine. I could not ask him my condition again—not when I had asked him twice already.
Not when, by all that I saw in him, I already knew.
“What will the Order try to do to you, when they find out?”
“All that they have ever tried to do, and all their designs will be as futile against my art and my will as ever they have been.” With his fearsome strength he grabbed my soapstone bedwarmer by its handle and wrenched it from its place at the fireside, entirely unburdened by the brick-sized slab of rock, nearly tearing the bedclothes as he wrapped it in the end of one of my sheets. Only then did he check his wrath as he stood at my side—I heard him exhale a quiet growl, felt the swift violence in his hands slow and assuage as he touched my broken skin, lifting my ankles to thrust the bedwarmer under my legs along with some new strips of clean cloth.
When he returned to the dressing table he took something from a glass jar and began to crush it with a mortar and pestle, so vehement in the force of his movements that I thought the ceramic would be dashed to pieces in his hands. “All of the Order together could not stop me, not if there were twice as many of them, not if each and every one of them were redoubled in his power. I have not come this far to be stopped by a locked door—by social propriety—by the lack of a few leaves of a single damned plant…”
“What is goldenscythe, sir? Perhaps it’s only my state—this strange fog in my mind—but I cannot remember hearing of it in my Novice class, nor reading about it in books.”
Though surely Victor could hear the difference in my voice, he did not try to stop me from speaking again. I wondered whether he allowed it now that he had in his possession most of the herbs he wanted, and therefore some mixture to ameliorate my condition would soon be at hand, or whether he had given up on trying to stop me.
Or whether—I did not like to entertain the morbid thought—he had given up on my survival, resigned me to an early grave, if death were indeed the worst that might come of whatever Gremio had done to me.
But no—no, it could not be; despite even the malaise that afflicted my body and my brain, I could not forget what he told me on the cold ride home, my legs lying in his lap, wrapped for warmth in his torn cloak and held in his hands: I was his last chance. I did not understand his bargain with Gremio, so much of it still unexplained, but I understood that he needed me. That he meant to banish Gremio with a spell, and could not do so without an apprentice to cast with him, and that finding and teaching another apprentice now would be all but impossible. In my survival, therefore, lay his own.
And so he would protect me, as always he had: cure me of all ills, defend me at any cost.
And never would I know how much was for the sake of his own survival, and how much I dared delude myself to believe arose from some secret depth of that dark heart.
“One of the most potent plants that grows in this country,” he intoned as he worked, “and therefore perhaps the most obscure. I flatter Townsend by even suspecting him of understanding its use. The hallowed wife of oak-bound mistletoe, a golden bride in winter’s early snow , as the old poem goes, long forgotten by all but a few. Pliny the Elder documented the use of goldenscythe for the Romans, albeit esoterically, and in time his true meaning was lost. What do you know of mistletoe?”
I felt myself smile a little, though subtly, faintly: he was my professor, after all, as if nothing had changed—as if nothing had gone so terribly wrong, and the door had never opened in the hollow hill—as if I did not lie before him now in bed, scarcely dressed, the pain in my bare legs returning.
Perhaps, I allowed myself to wonder, this was how he meant to comfort me: to teach me again, as if we were in his grand cavernous hall before his Hellmouth hearth, and all were right again in our eldritch world.
“I know you used mistletoe and fennel to cure Greycliff of elf-shot,” I answered him, “along with olive oil, water, and Greycliff’s own hair. I’ve read that mistletoe can be used in banishing disprites—it was sacred to the Druids, who harvested it from oak trees with a sickle-like golden knife shaped in the shape of a crescent moon?—”
I paused, understanding the words I heard myself speak, and he nodded as he dropped the crushed, fragrant contents of the mortar into a chemist’s tall vial. “Continue.”
“A golden sickle, then—not precisely a scythe, but near enough—paired with mistletoe. If that’s the secret herb and its proper formula—not a real blade, but a plant named for one—then this goldenscythe has been hidden for centuries in plain sight, and only because of a mistaken metaphor.”
“Correct.” He turned to my dressing table again, and though his broad back blocked my view of his work, I could hear the clink of glass bottles and flasks. “Sickle-shaped leaves,” he continued, “harvested by a sorcerer’s hand beneath a waning crescent moon—the first or the second waning crescent of winter, when the green leaves turn to gold. Joined to the white sap of mistletoe fruit, administered by a harvester strong enough in sorcery, it becomes a powerful weapon against possession.”
“Possession? Do you mean Gremio could?—”
“Do not imagine it,” he interrupted, his voice suddenly firm. Once half-bent over his chemistry, he raised himself up to his full height—and though he did not turn to me, his rain-damp hair still dripping slowly down the back of his waistcoat, I wondered if he watched me at an angle in my mirror. “Not until the slime of his sorcery is entirely gone. Imagination is nearly half a spell: it lacks only the will to enact and enforce its form upon the world. For now, should the temptation to imagine some unfortunate fate arise, banish it from your mind.” He turned his head slowly toward me, watching me over the wet white fabric of his shirt that clung to his muscled shoulder, and in the firelight I saw the glint of his metal mask, the strange tempestuous light in his dark eyes.
“Banish it from your mind,” he repeated. There was a power in his voice of driving force restrained; a quiet, bone-deep resonance to move the very earth. “And think of me.”
The sound of the words rushed to my head, to my heart, and it was all I could do to release the slow, quavering breath I had held already too long.
I clung white-knuckled to my consciousness, holding fast to whatever state in which I found myself—neither to awaken from this swoon, if swoon it was; nor to fall asleep, if we were together in my room in the waking world—feeling the heat of the hearth, the sensation of his shadow, the hard corner of his old water-stained grimoire beneath my pillow, under my head?—
A mild terror seized me: I had not thought to remove the book, to put it on my shelf where it ought to have been. I could not have known that he would be here with me, no longer as an ephemeral phantom but as a man of flesh and sweat and blood, my sheets in disarray, my bed and my hair and my senses undone.
I wondered if the edge of the grimoire he read to me beneath the winter oak had crept beyond the cover of my pillowcase, and if he had seen it, and how I could hide it now without drawing his attention all the more—and how I should explain, if he asked, that I kept in my bed a memento of him.
As if ever I could forget him.
As if ever the solitude of night could pass without him on my mind.
“Think of you, sir?”
He grunted quietly behind his mask: a low, rough sound nearly lost to the rain. “After my candle practicum in class, you told me that that is how you extinguished the flame on Forsythe’s turn. You imagined that you were me. You said that it made you feel powerful. So,” he turned back to the supplies on my dressing table with a last glance, a lingering glance, or else my mind no longer could contend with time. “Think of me.”
“I will, sir.” I cleared my throat: the disconcerting sense of silence rose in it again, and I wondered how much longer my voice would hold. “I cannot help but think of?—”
I froze: a foolish utterance, about to grow more foolish yet, and I hoped my voice was poor enough for the words to have gone unnoticed.
I heard him unstopper a jar; I smelt the bittersweet herbal tang of fennel. He did not look to me again.
“Continue,” his voice rumbled in the fire-warm air.
“Walpurgisnacht, sir.” It was not the way the sentence would once have gone, but it came to mind—it had never been far from my mind—and I took such opportunity as I could. “The Eve of May. What you told me in the carriage about,” I paused, “about what would happen to you. I still don’t under?—”
The door burst open again, Absolon’s blind red eyes shining in the firelight.
I did not need to see Victor turn immediately to his assistant to feel the sudden change in him and in the room, the anticipation, the gathering tension of his shadow.
Absolon’s left claw drew the door shut behind him, the lock clicking slowly into place as he shook his head. “None, Doctor D’Arco.”