Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

28. Beneath the Stage

Chapter 28

Beneath the Stage

I wondered at that shade of trepidation I sensed in Reinhardt’s voice as I climbed carefully down the ladder, Victor’s scorpion cane held under my arm, watching rung by rung as the light through the small trapdoor above me grew more distant. Torn by my trespass, the trailing strand of a dusty cobweb brushed my neck: thus far this place seemed drier than the rest of the underground—warmer—accountable, I thought, to being situated below the gaslights of the stage. When I slowly lowered my bandaged right leg deeper into the darkness to search for the next rung, my little shoe found no step, nor the dank ground of a cavern, but some manner of wooden floor.

“I’ve reached the bottom,” I called quietly up to Reinhardt, scarcely more than a whisper. Until I understood my surroundings, I dared not risk any louder sound. The air was still, though thinner than in Victor’s lair, and it felt vaguely acrid in my throat.

“There should be a lantern hanging from a hook behind the ladder,” he replied. “Have you found it?”

“Yes.”

“Take it. Light it.”

I had only the red-stained glow from the trapdoor above by which to work; the light’s lingering crimson hue, I thought, must have been due to the reflection of the stage curtains, but it suited the memory of the evening’s entertainment, and it suited this descent into the world below. Hanging beside the lantern—an old piece and somewhat ornate, likely a retired stage property from some forgotten performance—was a small bag containing a box of matches, and as I raised and lighted the lantern’s wick my new world was revealed.

Watching Reinhardt’s thick, compact form pause in its downward climb to slide the trapdoor back into place overhead, I found myself enclosed in what I took first for an old cellar—until I realized that I stood upon a stage strangely alike to the one above, and felt as if I had entered into some lost mirror image of the New Osiris Hall. About me was a forest of wooden scaffolding that half-obscured a number of costume racks and long boxes; those nearer to me seemed relatively clean, as if recent use allowed little grime to settle, while at the far margins of the lantern’s light lay what looked for all the world like dusty coffins.

“This is the original stage,” Reinhardt said as he stepped down beside me and took the lantern from my hand. He held it out low before us to reveal a wood-planked path between the vertical beams, its occasional parquet embellishments entirely unsuited to a basement. “They built the new one over it after the fire. Used for storage now, but as you can tell from its condition,” he paused, shining the light toward a charred, blackened corner, cobwebs veiling even the new wood that stood as reinforcement beside the old, “not many come down here anymore. They say they prefer to leave it for the ghosts.”

“Are any down here now?”

“Anyone from the theater? No, I shouldn’t think so.”

“The ghosts.”

He nodded silently as if to affirm he understood, and I watched as he shifted his grip on his wand, drew a breath, and furrowed his brows, something altering the look of his hazel eyes. A moment passed—in the light of the lantern I thought I saw a pale sheen of sweat begin to bead on his brow—and he shivered with a dismissive grunt, as if possessed by the sudden need to shake off the touch of some unseen perturbation.

“I can’t tell,” he muttered, and I thought he looked somewhat pale. “If they’re here, I can’t feel them.”

“What troubles you then,” I asked him quietly, “if I may be so bold?”

Reinhardt shook his head; hefting his wand in his hand. “It’s him ,” he replied. I needed not ask whom he meant. “I cannot say I understand—I can guess, but—” He looked at me with a slow, measuring glance, his bottom lip jutting faintly forward as he shifted his jaw. “All I can feel is him .” He paused as if to regain his senses, or to allow the moment to pass. “No matter. Come with me.”

Passing through the gap between the wooden uprights, I walked behind him, making use of Victor’s cane to test the floor at my side as if I half expected to encounter blackened brittle wood even in the wake of Reinhardt’s easy steps, or to find myself on some narrow catwalk above an unseen abyss. But most of all, as I walked, I wondered: not even so much at the prospect of ghosts—nor the eerie clamber and squeak of a rat somewhere in the darkness—but at Reinhardt’s fear of Doctor D’Arco.

His fear, perhaps, of me .

I did not detest the thought. Some might say, I am sure, that it was Victor’s shadow spreading within me, that same possessing art that restored and fortified my body now rising to overwhelm my mind, for me to feel thus—for me to think thus —for a woman such as I to entertain a satisfaction in being the source of a fellow sorcerer’s dread.

Those who might have said such a thing did not know me.

But I knew myself. Inflamed by the unquiet embers of Victor’s art though I was, I recognized myself yet.

Soon the old stage gave way to a narrow corridor, sloping downward, the footing softer for a moment beneath my shoes: the remains of a blackened carpet, perhaps, its ash rising from the disturbance of our tread to cast a transient veil of grey across the glow of Reinhardt’s lantern. A ghostly sight—and therefore, I thought, one that should little move Reinhardt, who would sooner contend with the spirits of the dead than endure my alteration by Victor’s haunting shadow.

I felt myself slowly smile.

In that charred and dusty darkness, between the death and resurrection of the New Osiris Hall, I learned for the first time what it meant to come into my power. It was there that I first knew how it felt to be feared: the thrill of being not terror’s thrall, but its new master. It was not that I wished Reinhardt harm (indeed, I felt toward him only gratitude), nor that I delighted in his discomfort in itself, but that I knew very well for him to have the advantage over me in mass and strength. He was no Victor, no impossible mountain of hard muscle and heavy bone—on the contrary, he was of average height at best, and more soft than stern of shape—but I remained nonetheless a small woman on bandaged legs, and the tap of my little shoes in the soot of the abandoned hallway was a poor echo to the sturdier, ambling falls of Reinhardt’s low boots with their devil-red spats.

How exquisite to think that those little taps in slow pursuit of him must have haunted him so.

I wondered whether he dreaded more the consequences of leaving me to complete my quest unaided—what implacable force of Victor’s fury would be unleashed upon him, should some peril befall me and be traceable, however obscurely, to his neglect—or whether he was undone by the sensation of Victor’s sorcery indwelling in my body, and dreaded to endure the thought that the dark art of Doctor D’Arco could as soon possess his own flesh.

My thrill was not diminished for the nature of the shadow within me that unsettled him; the strength of my emanating sorcery, half-borrowed though it was, was no less true. Not once did I forget Victor—I could no more cool the fever of him growing on my mind than annihilate my mind itself—and as the stimulation of memory stoked his art to rise again within me, warm and vital and alive, I allowed the familiar feeling of his sorcery to surround and envelop my senses, and I walked in the uncanny comfort of his shadow’s embrace.

Though its cause was shared, the sensation that stirred within me—the private pride and the burgeoning power, the strange exultation of holding terror at my command—was uniquely mine to feel, to savor, to indelibly engrave into imagination and memory. And once I was whole again, once Victor’s touch and his art and his occult herbs restored me to myself, I would will that sensation back into the world by my own sorcery alone.

In the light of Reinhardt’s lantern, I saw that the way ahead of us terminated in a solid wall, before which lay another old rug. Rather obvious, I thought—the rug showed no sign of charring, and looked far newer than all else I had seen since we climbed down the ladder—but then I supposed that few enough would venture down this way, through the acrid air and the rumor of ghosts, and therefore that a passing nod to secrecy would likely suffice.

“Down one more ladder, shorter this time,” Reinhardt said as he set down the lantern, drew aside the rug, and slid open the trapdoor I expected him to find underneath. “Then a walk through the stone corridors. It is no trouble for me,” he continued, and from where he crouched on the floor I thought that he looked to the wrappings that bound my ankles, “yet it may tax your injuries. Are you well enough to proceed?”

“And were I to say no,” I asked for the sake of curiosity alone, “where would you take me then?”

“To the nearest ascent to street level, and hail for us a hansom cab to deliver you where you will. If you do not wish to risk?—”

I shook my head, and realized he hung so closely upon my gestures that it took no more than this to silence him. “A chance I will have to take. I do not mean to turn back.”

He drew a breath. From the subtle flicker of trepidation in his eyes, I wondered if he had seen some dark light of Victor’s in mine.

Nonetheless, Reinhardt nodded and moved aside, and for the sake of propriety let me down the ladder first while he held the lantern through the trap to light my way; soon we both stood on the stone floor of the Order underground, as chill and dank as I remembered it.

Shallow puddles of still water gleamed at the sides of the narrow tunnel, reflecting the lantern’s light like a constellation of misshapen stars. A drop of water fell in the distance, somewhere beyond my sight: as far as my eyes could see, all the stagnant, glowing pools were rippleless.

Another drop fell, no softer and no louder, and I maintained my silence until the slow, steady rhythm of water dripping into water made itself known.

I heard no other sound, and that was to me a comfort.

For a moment we only stared into the darkness as Reinhardt held aloft the lantern—first ahead, then behind, as the ladder seemed to have deposited us into the midst of a corridor rather than at its end—and I thought that I should have still my Sight, given that only this morning I had beheld once more the true face of Absolon. Yet in the absence of a more recent, positive test of my abilities, it was difficult to trust whether the lack of any movement or apparition before my eyes was enough to prove that we were truly alone.

“Nothing out there?” Reinhardt asked, his accented voice quiet in the stillness of the tunnel.

“No,” I replied, uncertain at first, then allowed myself greater confidence in posture as I quit my subtle lean into the darkness before us. “No. I don’t think so.”

“One never truly knows, down here.” There was something of the Marvelous Manfredini’s theatricality in his tone. “But if neither of us senses anything amiss,” he continued with a mild shrug, “that seems enough to go on.”

I nodded, and we walked ahead. By the nature of the light reflecting from the damp walls, the tunnel seemed to grow disconcertingly narrow. Soon I could no longer walk beside Reinhardt, but followed behind again, as I had beneath the stage. This suited me well enough: it allowed me greater privacy to attempt to discern the occasional symbols cut into the rock walls. Some, I realized by the lantern’s light, were merely navigational aids—arrows marking north, names I imagined to be of streets that ran above—but there were sorcerers’ signs as well, most of protection or banishing, some I did not know.

Futile signs, I thought silently to myself, or carved by too weak a will.

They had not stopped Gremio.

With some relief I followed Reinhardt’s roguish, strolling gait through a claustrophobic portal into a broader, more spacious passage: the main gallery, I presumed at once, before even my companion quietly announced it to me as such. Again we paused for some time, listening for some ghostly groan or sound of footsteps, some furtive or ghastly countenance to reveal itself at the limit of the lantern’s light—and again we found ourselves alone, nodded to one another, and walked on.

I had taken perhaps five steps when somewhere far behind me I heard the creak and slam of an old door, at once soft for the distance and sudden for its break in the silence.

“Far enough away,” Reinhardt assured me, though I wonder if his leisurely pace took on a vaguely more urgent air. “And not the way we’re going.”

“The doors are locked, for the most part?”

He nodded. “Such few as are left open are usually locked by this hour.”

“Then whoever it is, I suppose he belongs here, if he has the key for his door.”

“Most likely,” he replied, and I thought the calm in his voice was genuine.

I did not hear the door again, nor any other sound at all, save only our footsteps and the occasional drip of unseen water down some branching corridor as we passed by its lightless arch.

“If you think it safe to speak,” I said to him at length, keeping my voice low, “I should like to know more about our destination. I was there but once, and it remains largely a mystery to me.”

“A mystery to me why you were there,” he replied, the lamplight catching the flash of his sly, rakish smile, “but I do not ask you to tell me, unless you wish to venture it. You will find that we all have our secrets.”

“I shan’t doubt it.”

I let that suffice, and when he understood that I meant as yet to say no more, he began. “One of several sources of income for the Order. That spiritualist establishment, some others like it—my performances as Manfredini, until they decided they would give up even their split of my box office to get rid of me. I decided I would rather invest the extra cash into cigars and some richer food (pleasures I had once forgone for the Order’s sake, like some naive ascetic), indulge myself in smoking part of the Order’s former cut and eating the rest, than support so thankless an institution?—”

“I couldn’t blame you,” I cut in, both in hopes of diverting him back to the question at hand and because I could scarcely suppress a tight smile.

He conceded a sort of self-deprecating click of the tongue in response, an appreciative cock of the head, and continued. “Well. This place—Witch’s Corner, as they call it; a rather uninteresting name—is a front to conceal its entrance to the underground, and a venue to collect money from the public. You must know this much, yes? Good, good. Mostly worked by the Order underclassmen in exchange for tuition; not a bad system in itself. Fortunetelling, cartomancy, palmistry, phrenological readings to determine love matches, and above all spiritualism—mediumship, communication with the dead—some of them can contact the genuine spirits—for the rest it’s generally performance. Table rapping, chairs attached to wires, that sort of thing.”

“Only the underclassmen? Novices and First Degrees, you mean?”

“Generally so. A professor, once in a blue moon, to check that all is going well.”

“Then it would be strange to meet Doctor D’Arco there?”

He was silent for a moment, and I thought that he looked to me as we walked.

“Yes,” Reinhardt answered slowly, as if attempting not to divulge that he was weighing my meaning in his mind. “Yes, that would be strange indeed. If he were there…”

“He was.”

“A rare chance. I must imagine he had some unusual purpose—acting on a premonition, perhaps—either that or he wished for some reason to make his presence felt, haunt the Order a little. Or he was merely in the vicinity, and the prospect of visiting such an establishment amused him. A rare chance regardless: as you have seen, he is of a habitually grim mood, and such concerns do not often find audience in his brooding mind. Yet he is not made entirely of stone—not without the occasional taste for novelty.”

“The Order doesn’t seem to like him very much.”

“No, but they like having him on their side—so much as he can be said to be. He tries them, because he knows he can. Not only does he keep in his class three students cast out from the Order—myself, of course, being one of those—but he forbade Hargrave and the rest from keeping us outlaws entirely out of the tunnels.”

“What would happen to them if they tried to keep you out, and ignored Doctor D’Arco’s warning?”

Reinhardt grinned. “There’s the question. They are sensible enough to be satisfied with the threat: no one looks forward to finding out what he could do, or what he would—not for so ultimately trivial a concession. And so they concede to him,” he continued, “and concede again, grumbling but impotent before him. And his legend grows.”

I sensed his endeavor to brave his fear of Victor’s power, but he said no more, and I allowed him his silence.

Soon we approached an archway, and across it lay a long pool, like a miniature moat with no drawbridge. “Step across,” Reinhardt advised as he overstepped it on stretched legs, transferring his wand to his lantern hand and then reaching the other back to me like a gentleman, “this one is deeper.” With his hand and Victor’s cane for support I managed to keep my skirts and shoes nearly dry, and I almost smiled at the slope of the ground on the other side. My heart skipped: that was the puddle I had trampled and splashed through with Victor, and this—this claustrophobic, rough-hewn stone passage through which we walked, angling upward, the arch of its ceiling enough to accommodate Reinhardt’s height, though it had scarcely accommodated Victor’s—this was the corridor through which I had first descended what seemed like a lifetime ago, the Talisman clutched in my hand, the scarred grip that had become so familiar to me first clenched like iron around my small wrist.

“This is the last tunnel,” I said breathlessly to Reinhardt, my eagerness plain in my voice, “isn’t it.”

“You remember.”

“We’re almost there.”

The final stretch was long, though not so long as I remembered, and soon enough the heavy wood of the old door was before us. Reinhardt produced a key from his pocket and turned it in the lock, then took a half-step back and slowly pulled the door ajar. It seemed to take him some effort to flex the ancient hinges, which groaned with a low, long cry like a mourning ghost—but a few more steps and we were inside, the grim spectral wail of the door creeping shut again behind our backs welcoming my return to Witch’s Corner.

“Fancy having that kind of timing,” an unfamiliar man’s voice whispered as the creaking door to the underground locked behind us.

By the light of Reinhardt’s lantern I thought that I caught a glimpse, near the back of those heavy moon-and-star curtains I remembered so well from my first venture to the spiritualist shop at that dingy street corner, of a dapper man seated on a stool with something like a handle attached to a wire held in his hand. For a moment I thought uncomfortably of a garrote—but from his tone and his posture, I suspected that he meant us no harm. He had a dark, well-formed face, dark eyes and tight curls of black hair, and was smartly dressed in something like Reinhardt’s style, albeit in deep purple where Reinhardt wore red; he followed his initial comment with an emphatic whisper of “Now shut off that light, Luther! Customer!” and as Reinhardt did so, my view of the stranger was plunged into darkness.

“Timing is my specialty, you know,” Reinhardt replied calmly in the dark, his whisper yet more hushed than the other man’s. “I don’t call myself Marvelous for nothing.”

“But this—” the stranger’s hushed voice paused as a scream sounded from the other side of the curtain—“might be your most marvelous yet.”

Oh, how I tried to hold it in, miss , the once-screaming voice, a woman’s voice, continued, the words audible enough despite the muffling of the sequined celestial drapery, how I tried not to cry out! But that sound was horrible, horrible—I should be happy, I know, to hear with my own ears that spirit call to us in answer to your summons—but that groaning, that terrible mourning moaning—that light, breaking over those very curtains behind you, that went so suddenly dark!

“Yes,” Reinhardt whispered as I sensed him struggle not to laugh, “a marvel of timing indeed—I impress even myself. Nearly over,” he continued, and I thought that his voice was meant for me alone. “The response of the spirit is typically in the final part of the show. Once the customer is gone, I’ll see you get to the bookshelves before the next one starts?—”

“ Shh! ” the other man’s voice hissed at our side, stopping Reinhardt short. “I rather enjoy this part; you’ll be marvelously sorry if you make me miss my cue.”

Once more , I heard a different woman’s voice speak on the other side of the curtains, this one younger and accented, as a medium to the spirit world, I beseech you, spirit: make yourself known to us! If it was you who groaned aloud a moment prior, and shined your ectoplasmic light, give us now a sign we cannot mistake.

“My cue,” the stranger whispered again in the darkness, and I heard a shifting of fabric that suggested to me some movement of his arm—perhaps that he pulled the thin metal cord he held in his hand. Had not Reinhardt mentioned something to me about chairs attached to wires ?

It levitates! cried the breathless voice of the first woman. Oh, it levitates! The very chair! Unmistakable! Surely, but surely this is the sign!

And having seen the sign you crave , the second, younger woman intoned with grave authority, have you further doubt of this spirit?

On the other side of the curtain, it sounded as if the chair landed a bit roughly; its well-dressed puppeteer must have been too eager to ease back the wire.

None at all, miss; the matter is settled then. I ought to go, I think—I ought to go—don’t think me ungrateful, but I fear that to witness any more would be a dire blow to my constitution.

Then I bid you a pleasant evening , came the younger woman’s voice again, quavering and vaguely monotone as if to suggest a lingering state of trance, though I foresee we shall meet again.

I heard the door to the street open and close; I could not forget the tuneless clatter of the old bell that hung from its knob.

A moment passed after the strident clanging faded into silence—another moment besides—and then from the other side of the curtains I heard a short series of sharp knocks on a hard surface, which I took for some manner of coded signal.

The dapper gentleman who once had manned the wire of the levitating chair took it for the same: with a hearty “ Brava , Mistress Savoy!” he threw aside the draperies from their center, parting stern-faced moons from half-sequined stars; the light from the candles and small black stove of the little parlor reached us, and I saw a somewhat plump, serious-looking young woman rise from her seat at the reading table, turn to us, and curtsey, a glint of sarcasm in her eyes.

“Our seeress from across the sea,” he continued as we stepped inside and the curtains slumped back to hang behind us, “Boston’s best spirit medium: Amelia Savoy, First Degree Foreteller and Illusionist of the Order of Magisophists!”

“And my eminent accomplice,” she added in her accent of the New World, “Mr. Cyril Chesterton, First Degree Illusionist.”

“Yes, yes,” Reinhardt shrugged, his words somewhat hurried, “Cyril knows me all too well, though it is a pleasure to meet Mistress Savoy, after all he has told me.”

“He’s no slouch himself,” the American woman replied, sitting back down and pushing her legs under the black velvet of the long tablecloth as she set to polishing some fingerprints out of the crystal ball. “We take turns at it, and he’s up next in the front of house, while I juggle the wires backstage.”

“About that,” Reinhardt replied, absently tapping the tip of his wand on the back of her chair. “May I delay you a few minutes from your next show? My friend needs to find a book from the shelves, and we haven’t much time. Mrs. Elizabeth Buckingham,” though he was polite to introduce me, and innocent of knowledge of my history, I could not help but for the title of Mrs. to secretly rankle, “Novice Sorceress.”

Nearly by sleepwalking, or so it felt, I conducted the conventional empty pleasantries of first meetings, but I scarcely attended to such conversation as followed: my eyes had scanned the parlor for bookshelves immediately upon our entry into it, but now they grew keener in the hunt, and I grew restless to seek my prize.

And with that restlessness a heat began to rise within me, kindling my senses to new life.

For all the conviviality of the trio of illusionists who spoke and joked and boasted at my side, the dim parlor of the spiritualist shop was to me a lonely place; even in their presence, I felt so solitary I could nearly have wept, had not the embers of Victor’s possessing fire dried my tears before they troubled my haunted eyes.

The room felt nothing like Victor anymore. Nothing like him at all.

I had not truly thought that it would—even the long-lingering sensation of his shadow must dissipate, I thought, in the passage of so many days since that midnight when first we met—and yet there is no amount of reason that can weight the wings of a closely held hope. In my heart this dear, shabby store was never once without him, and there was some vulgar joke in how all that lingered now between its walls was the cloying trace of a customer’s perfume.

I do not know how much time passed as they conversed—only that it was too much.

“If you will excuse me,” I interrupted whomever was speaking at the time—it little mattered to me which of them it was—and rounded the table, passing the heat of the small stove to the long bookshelf that dominated the wall.

I remembered that shelf. I remembered the skulls of man and beast that watched in silence from amid the rows of mismatched books. I remembered the dust—I remembered rubbing my thumb across the spine to reveal the gilt letters, and I wondered how long it would take for the dust to soften that sight anew?—

And then, on cue, my eye caught the glint of gold.

I did not dare to breathe.

My shaking hand shot forward to claim the prize, as if to spend even the fractional second required to confirm the identity of the volume were to risk its dissolution into smoke; I bit my lip, I set a canine tooth into my tongue, as if to ascertain that I did not dream.

And then I nearly laughed. All of this—all of this!—for so mundane a treasure? I burned, I dared, I ventured, and all for a mere book that might prove to me of no use after all?

Ah, but savor it, I told myself: it is a victory, however strange and small. A desire sparked, fueled, and fulfilled.

My will had prevailed.

I rubbed at the dusty spine with the heel of my hand. A Discovery of Minor Artifacts of the Egyptians . As if it were a spell, I read the title once, twice, and again.

The three illusionists were still in conversation—some discussion, it seemed, of how to produce the effect of ectoplasm during a seance, and whether the length of gauze employed to represent that mysterious substance should be hidden under the table or on one’s person—and so I indulged myself, prior to announcing my success, in opening the book and beginning to read.

At least, I had planned to do so, but my eyes could pass no further than the hated dedication page. Without revisitation I could not remember the words, though neither could I forget the pang of the poisoned dagger they twisted into my side, and on those words my attention festered like stagnant venom.

To those blessed few who deigned to take an interest in my humble work, know that my “secrets” shall never be held secret from you , my husband’s written announcement of his own utter hypocrisy began, and so old and deep a furor rose in me that it was all I could do not to kick open the grate of the stove and dash the book at once into the flames. The key to knowledge is the key to the world , I forced myself to read—“unless you are my wife,” I mentally appended to this sentence, “in which case you will be denied the dignity of your own mind, and forced to pick the lock”— and it is to you I dedicate this volume. With the throb of my pulse thundering in my head I read also the list of his colleagues that followed, each one prefaced pointedly by the title of Mr. , as if to clarify to the reader that the inclusion of a woman in such company would have been beyond the pale of so civilized an endeavor. I was excluded even from meeting most of them—there were few names I knew—and then, as I read the final name, a cold shudder of recognition shot through the heat of my veins.

Mr. Emory.

I read it again—those seven letters transfixed the wild obsession of my gaze—I forced myself to blink, to look away to the wide, incredulous eye sockets of the skulls on the shelf—but every time I looked back to the page, the same accursed name remained.

Mr. Emory.

Unlike those who preceded him in the dedication list, Mr. Emory was given no Christian name, and his solitary surname sealed what I knew now in my marrow. I shut the book, tucked it beneath my arm (how I wish I could have held it further from my heart!), and leaned heavily on Victor’s walking-stick with both hands.

Someone was speaking to me from across the parlor—had I cried out? did my posture now seem strange?—no matter—I should have liked to know this old acquaintance and new acquaintance of Reinhardt’s, I thought to myself, and perhaps one day I would; it was no slight against these two, who might have from that moment become my friends, but they did not understand—they could not—I could not tell them.

Mr. Emory’s omitted first name was Gregory .

I was certain it could be no other.

Gregory Emory. The name by which that pale man with the equine gait had introduced himself to me on the lakeside path at Crystal Palace Park, before his clammy webbed hands caught me by the ankles and his claws sank into my flesh.

I did not know whether my wrath should be banked or stoked higher: S.R. Buckingham had paid, and paid dearly, for that damnable dedication page. Gregory Emory, Duke of Tartarus, collector of curiosities for his infernal museum—his hunt for the Talisman killed my husband, and now that same capricious quest imperiled Victor’s life and mine.

My husband the fool. The fool! Had he thought the corporeal apparition of Mr. Emory a man? Had he known him for a disprite? Did it matter anymore?

Within the very pages of his book, my husband had thanked the demon Gremio.