Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

38. The Heart of a Star

Chapter 38

The Heart of a Star

I knew first that I was comfortable, that I was warm, and that it was very dark.

The dead of night, I supposed. I opened my eyes briefly, but the darkness was nearly as complete as the utter stillness and silence of the room: no sound of Hargrave’s servants on the stairs, no gentle nighttime groans of the wooden walls of the great old house, no whisper of the wind in the trees beyond the window or subtle draft of winter air, brisk with the anticipation of spring.

I turned over in bed with a contented sigh, followed by a long, luxuriating breath: I was surrounded by a familiar dark, warm scent—Victor’s scent—and I breathed it in, drawing it deep into my lungs, letting it mingle with my renewed awareness of his shadow’s touch. The feeling was almost overwhelming as I let it in, as if his pleasurable darkness clung to every inch of my skin. No wonder I had dreamt of him. No doubt, were sleep to take me once more, I should dream of him again.

Reaching for the edge of my mattress, hoping to feel the Talisman safe in its makeshift hiding place before going back to sleep—a new, anxious habit of mine, though hardly unjustified —I found that my hand grasped only more bed, more warm bedclothes.

My eyes opened again with a start. Still there was only silence, only darkness—but for the glowing line of candlelight from the bottom of a door that was too wide, too distant from the bed to be my chamber door in Hargrave’s mansion.

And then, with a deep sigh, I remembered. I understood.

The Talisman was gone.

But this was not my cold, borrowed guest room in Hargrave’s house.

And, therefore, this was not my bed.

My thrill of alarmed terror was fleeting, and I smiled in the darkness at my own instinctive fright as it relented into a rare, warm joy. Allowing myself the indulgence of the moment, I explored the sensations of my new surroundings with curious hands. The mattress was broad—I reached again, and could scarcely find the edge—and the bedclothes comfortingly heavy, their outmost layer a coverlet made of what felt like sewn pelts, the fur side soft and fine to the touch. The still air of the room was warm as if with a recent hearth-fire.

I touched my own body—my arms, my chest, my legs—and found, as I had suspected, that other than my shoes and shawl (the latter likely full of skull-dust, I remembered) I was still fully clothed, my mourning dress and underclothes in place but for the disruption of sleep, and—I shifted in the bed and touched my back to be certain—but for the loosening of my corset.

And I found, to my interest and instinctive disappointment, that I was alone in bed.

Yet this was Victor’s bed, in some private chamber of his underground lair. It must have been, though I had no memory of climbing into it—indeed, I found that I had no certain memory of anything after our kiss on the library floor, amid the wind- torn leaves of old books, in the center of our circle of candles and bone. Nothing after that could I be certain was not a dream.

Our kiss. I relived it in my mind, sighing with a soft, sudden shudder at the thought, my hand curling into the fur coverlet.

Unready to rise yet from the pleasurable comfort of lying in his bedclothes, surrounded by the scent and the sense of him, the question of why he was not in his own bed began nonetheless to weigh upon my mind. He was being a gentleman in letting me alone while I slept, I supposed and hoped: not because I would not have liked to awaken in his arms—indeed, little else would have pleased me so—but because I hoped that the cause of his absence were no more than that, and that he was well, and safe, after all that had come to pass.

“Victor…?”

I whispered his name in the warm darkness, not genuinely expecting a response?—

And I was answered by a mild pulse of his art through my body as a single candle flared to life by the side of the bed.

“I am here, Elizabeth,” Victor’s low voice rumbled. The very sound made my gathering tension relax into relief. “Good evening.”

“Good evening, sir,” I breathed, and I felt a small, fond smile creep across my lips as my eyes searched for and quickly found him.

He was seated near the bedside in a heavy wooden chair—not entirely dissimilar to the throne in his great hall, though its back was lower, and its carvings were less fine—a dark and looming presence, as always, wearing his accustomed black cloak and black robes. His clothes were new, I thought, or else the old had been mended, though it was difficult to say in the dim light; I noted more certainly that he wore his robes more loosely than usual, partway open over his chest, revealing a glimpse of white cloth bandages beneath.

Despite the shadows of his deep hood, I could see that he did not wear his mask. That piece of armor flickered instead from the nightstand not far from him, where its steel hulk lay waiting beside the lone candle.

I wondered whether the mask was of no use to him now—damaged somehow in the fight, perhaps—or whether he had let down his guard with me, forsaking whatever advantage it offered him for the intimacy of our being face to face.

And I wondered what we were to each other now, and what I ought to feel, and how I ought to be with him?—

No. No more. I stopped myself with a sigh; I dashed it all away. He had done me wrong and withheld the truth from me, it is true, and out of principle I had done him wrong in turn, against my own heart, and kept my own dire secrets. And then he saved my life. And I saved his: not for principle, but for the stirring of my soul.

Because I loved him, despite it all.

If that were strange, if that were mad, then let it be so. Cold reason would ever be a stranger here, never a guide in this wilderness—here where the lines of all morality’s esteemed and mannered maps tangled and crossed, at the pole of the world where all compasses fail. There was no right and rational road, no matter how I willed it to be so.

And a poor expenditure of the will would it be, after all: that claustrophobic prison of what ought to be , and how I ought to feel , had nearly killed us both.

No more.

The locks and chains that held me, I told myself, were burst with the breaking of the Talisman, no matter how accustomed I had grown to their encumbering weight.

I felt as if I were a bird perched atop a broken cage, wings folded for a few moments more, unused to the unobstructed blue of the barless sky.

But I knew that now my heart was free.

“Are you all right, sir? And have I been asleep long? Other than dreams,” I felt my voice lower to nearly a whisper, “I can’t remember anything after we kissed.”

“Of what did you dream?” he asked in his usual gruff tone, and I wondered that, of all that he might have asked or answered, it would be this.

I paused before I replied, at first for no reason other than my outworn instinct of secrecy and restraint, and as I did so I allowed a brief consideration of Victor’s chamber. It was not so entirely stark as his summoning parlor, but suitably sturdy and functional. Parts of the rough-hewn stone walls shimmered faintly in the dim light: not water, I thought, but natural lodes of some manner of dark metal ore, partially exposed by the excavation of the room—and because he had chosen this cavern for his bedchamber and hung nothing to cover the mineral-streaked walls, I wondered if something about them privately delighted him, or eased for a while his brooding mind.

I wondered if he found them beautiful.

“Elizabeth?”

His voice drew me back from my abstraction, and I wished not to let another moment pass.

“Of you,” I breathed. “I dreamt of you, again.”

My heart quickened, seized by the anticipation of watching him, awaiting whatever would become the first sign to reveal the nature of his response?—

I needed not wait long.

He grunted softly, and I thought that something shifted in the dark flicker of his eyes by candlelight, beneath the shadows of his black hood, as he slowly rose from his heavy chair and stepped closer.

Despite the mild stiffness of his movements, the half-hidden sight of his bandaged chest, and the absence of his mask, as he towered over me while I lay in bed he was no less ominous a figure, and I thought of my shivering thrill of trepidation when last I gazed up to behold that dark, massive form. The Talisman had been hastily hidden in the side of my mattress then, only my nightdress and my guilty conscience to cool the space between my warming skin and the fire of his eyes.

But that terror belonged now to the past. I had nothing more to hide—nothing more to mistrust. He had given his life for me. He had kissed me as I thought that lovers kiss, so fervently and yet so gently, as if all that mattered to him in all the world was for me to know his heart.

I leaned my head back comfortably into his pillow as I watched him sit down on the side of the bed, feeling the weight of his strong body sink into the mattress; he reached a hand down toward me, pressing two fingers in against the softest part of my throat.

With a quiet sigh, I closed my eyes and relaxed into his touch.

“How do you feel,” I heard him breathe, “Elizabeth?”

“Comfortable, sir. A little tired yet. I think that’s all.”

Fleetingly I wondered about my vow to him of strictest celibacy—but I would learn from him sometime soon, I imagined, what was to become of it: he had broken his, as much as I had broken mine. I wondered about the Talisman, and what would become of my room and board at Hargrave’s house once it was discovered that the payment for my new life was now destroyed—but that, too, could wait. There was nothing I could do now, and nothing to regret.

I laid my hand atop Victor’s, my fingers lightly stroking the ridges of his scars. This time, I did not pull back.

The pressure of his fingers relented after some moments, as always it did. But this time he let his hand linger, his touch warm and intimate against the sensitive skin, and it was a long while until he slowly drew away.

It was some new beginning of what we had always meant to do, he and I—the revival of all those surreptitious touches dismissed as accident or happenstance, freed now from reticence or shame. It was so simple a gesture, and it so easily warmed my heart.

“You are quite well, Elizabeth, considering the recent exertion of your art.” His deep voice sounded somewhat different without the mask: clearer without its vague, muffling echo; less distant, more human. “Your strength returns, not with the demure prudence of gradual growth, but in intermittent surges and starts. As always,” his voice sank lower, “you impress me.”

“Thank you, sir.” I was not entirely certain how to reply, nor (I did not even consider it until now) how to address him—he was my professor, after all, and for the way he spoke I could not forget it. It was not so much the tone of voice as it was the choice of words: that incisive assessment of skill and potential I had come to know so well, that seemed as much to uplift my talents as to cut bitterly into all that he deemed fell beneath them. I felt my lips press into a small smile at the thought. “And you?”

“Well enough, for all of that. In considerably better condition than that horse-face,” he chuckled darkly, “but not without a few marks—healing swiftly, thanks to the Talisman’s last power. More importantly, the spell was a success. I live yet. And I owe it to you.

“You have slept for days,” he continued, “if Absolon’s reckoning is to be trusted. After he was confident that Gremio had left—many hours later, I suspect, knowing his sense of time—Absolon found us in the library, and awakened me. By then I had the strength to carry you here.”

I sighed again. Foolishly, perhaps selfishly, I could think only of how it must have felt to be carried in his powerful arms once more—to be lain down in his warm, soft bed—to feel those rough hands that had grappled with the monstrous Duke of Tartarus pull the fur coverlet over me while I slept.

“And did you—” I paused. It felt so small and silly a thing beside all else that had come to pass, a capricious footnote unsuited to the grand drama of life and death—and yet I wished nonetheless to know. “Did you loosen my corset, sir?”

“Yes,” he grunted quietly, and I thought that I heard a kind of fondness at the edge of that grim voice. “In the library, soon after you fell asleep. I wanted for you to be comfortable. I did nothing more.”

“I didn’t think that you had,” I whispered. It was true. But more than that, I wished to offer him my trust. “And what did you do during the—days, I suppose,” it seemed difficult to believe that so much time had passed, despite the far more fantastical things with which my life had become entwined, “that I slept here in your bed?”

“I watched you.”

My breath caught.

Victor drew back his hood, the thin streaks of silver in his black hair gleaming like veins of fire in the dim candlelight. He took my hand from atop the fur coverlet and held it in his lap, stroking my palm with his thumb, and I watched him as if I were still in a dream; my eyes traced the fierce, proud lineaments of a face I had only so recently come to know, lingering for a moment on those lips that had so sensually kissed mine.

“I sat in that chair,” he continued, “and I watched you every waking hour. I kept a fire in the hearth when the room grew cold—I salved and bound my wounds—I cast spells for your rest, and particularly for your recovery. At my instruction, Absolon hung a black shroud over the entrance to the parlor, which will serve well enough until the door is repaired with hammer and nails. I would not have you disrupted by the sound.”

“I—I don’t know what to say, sir.”

“Then say nothing,” he intoned, “and walk with me.”

He let me hold his hand as I rose from his bed, my stockinged toes sinking comfortably into the fur of the bedside rug as he helped me stand. I knew that my clothes and my long tresses were disheveled, and lamented for a moment that all of my hair things were still in my own small chamber as I looked to his nightstand in vain?—

And then my hand instinctively squeezed his, and I smiled as I willed the warmth of tears back from the corners of my eyes: on the nightstand, beside the candle and his steel mask, were a woman’s brush and comb—not mine, but a finely-made pair that looked to have been purchased anew—and a small stone bowl with my hairpins inside.

“Victor…”

“I will await you outside while you ready yourself.”

“No,” I whispered as he began to step away, my hand not yet releasing his. “Stay.”

He looked down at me with dark, unfathomable eyes.

“Stay with me, sir. Please.”

Surely it was improper, untoward, but I did not wish to be apart from him yet.

With no pause for question, he sat down in his heavy wooden chair again. I turned away from him only for the re-tightening of my corset and the adjustment of my dress. And then, finding a small mirror atop his chest of drawers, I combed my hair while he watched me from across the room, his dark form waiting with the rest of the silent shadows.

I found that it pleased me.

So accustomed had I become to the feeling of being possessed by him—the unquiet fire of his art within me, the uncanny darkness of his shadow’s embrace—that the thought of being apart from him now stirred a hollow ache within my breast, a longing sense of absence that had touched me before, when first I confessed to myself that I was falling in love with him, and yet threatened to return now redoubled in strength.

He had said that he would await me outside , I thought to myself, stealing a glance away from the mirror to watch him from the corner of my gaze as I laid down the beautiful comb and picked up the equally fine brush. I had imagined him above ground, grim and alone before the night’s cold stars.

Looking back slowly to the mirror, watching my dim reflection as I stroked the stiff boar-bristles through my hair, I saw the mild chagrin in my eyes as the realization struck me: outside the door to this chamber, surely. He meant to await me in the hallway, or to wherever that door led. Why had I imagined him, then, in the world above? Why had I assumed the meaning, less-likely though it was, that I liked the least?

Did I think the worst of him still? After learning of that secret he had held from me, did some part of my heart mistrust him yet?

No. I watched myself slowly brush my hair, considering. No, not mistrust. Mistrust felt too limiting. Too small. There was something wild and expansive in this feeling, something terrifying in its boundlessness, and I wondered if this was how obsession felt.

I steadied my breathing as I felt it change.

He was silent still. He was still watching, I knew; the weight of his gaze haunted me.

And I desired nothing more than to be haunted by him.

Setting the brush down on his washstand, I twisted my long hair into its accustomed bun, secured it with the twice-recovered pins, and drew a breath.

“Ready, sir.”

I sensed the change in the room as he rose from his chair. There was a vague suggestion of him favoring one leg, I thought, in the slow rhythm of his Hessian boots on the floor, their strikes softened by the bedroom rugs; once again, I needed not hear his footfalls at all to anticipate his approach, so unmistakably did I feel his spreading shadow deepen around me.

Having closed the distance, he held out his hand to me as he stood by my side, and I saw that he carried the candle from the nightstand in the other. How I longed to look up into that remarkable face, to meet his gaze as our hands prepared to touch again, but something held me back. I felt at last too naked, perhaps, beneath those eyes that had watched me so long—I thought him too naked before my own glance, bereft of his mask and his hood—I do not know. All now was new, so full of possibility and of strange comfort, unsettling and reassuring at once.

I watched instead my own small hand as I laid it in his, and I felt a kind of satisfaction as I let his firm, warm grip so slowly, so securely entrap me, as I sighed in silence at the sustaining darkness of his shadow’s embrace.

We walked together, my hand in his: he led me out from the door of his bedchamber, into a lighted hallway I had never before seen, through another corridor and toward a sculpture of a monstrous beast-man that crouched over a fork in the path like a sinister sentinel. Here we turned left, the tunnel rising at a gentle grade as I thought the still, close air grew colder. For as many times as I had descended into his dominion below the surface of the earth, I wondered now how much more of it there might have been that I had never seen nor dreamed, and how vast it truly was. I wondered who had excavated these far tunnels, and whether they had done so at Victor’s command—or whether these passages were once part of some abandoned engineering work below the London streets, or a thieves’ lair, or (I shivered faintly) the winding sepulcher in the hollow heart of a forgotten faerie hill.

I could not shake the thought of that last consideration.

There was some manner of presence nearby—somewhere in the darkness ahead—though for the moment, for several steps more, the reach of Victor’s candlelight touched only further darkness.

And then I thought nearly that I dreamt again; perhaps, I thought, I lay yet in Victor’s bed, his penetrating shadow filling my mind with uncanny dreams: I could not tell whether we walked down the ribbed nave of a bewitched cathedral, its grand concourse shrunken to little more than Victor’s height, or whether we trod beneath the spine of some skeletal, serpentine beast, and these ridges on the walls were the bones of its monumental corpse; I thought of the Grand Central Walk in the twilight at Crystal Palace Park, the pale boles of that aisle of trees rising into a Gothic arch high over our heads—but here the tunnel walls were close at our shoulders, the intimacy of the narrow passageway pressing me closer against Victor’s warmth. As much to understand the nature of the corridor as to ascertain whether it was all a fevered fantasy, I reached out a curious hand, my fingers brushing the ribs of the wall as we walked slowly by.

Roots. Why had I not thought at once of roots? I felt the life in them, their strength rippling faintly beneath my touch.

And then a strange chamber opened before us: more roots, roots like I had never seen before; a cavern of sinuous tentacles delving down through the earth, overreaching and entwining against one another in a centuries-slow race for the silent rills of water that slipped shivering down the stone crags of the walls. They were so alive that with my Sight I thought I nearly could discern the throb and pulse of them; time alone held them back from utter conquest, and were the thread of that spell to break, I imagined the grand terror of watching them swell and writhe down deeper through the waiting earth, until the very cavern in which we stood shuddered with their force.

But Victor led me closer inside, and as he ducked under the lowest of the great, waiting roots and guided me around an immense natural pillar of stone, the flash of something on the far wall caught his candlelight. Not water, I thought—the reflection of the flame was different—and as we drew nearer, I thought that he pulled my hand in a little closer in anticipation.

The veins of ore in the walls of Victor’s chamber, marvelous as they were, had little prepared me for what I now beheld. Here, impossibly, in a lonesome cavern below the teeming London streets—I thought that I heard the distant growl and clatter of carriages on a cobbled road, above us and some ways to our left—was an open rift in the cave wall, a great vertical fissure in the stone of the earth, nearly large enough for me to walk inside. He held his candle out before us, and I felt a quiver of his art course through my body as he made the flame flare brighter, and I watched its glow reflected back at us in a constellation of a thousand facets like shattered glass.

The gap was lined entirely in spears of pale, translucent crystal, and I felt as if I gazed into the heart of a star.

Surely it was only a small thing, in all the vastness of the world, but it took my breath. Inside me welled a sense of possibility and wonder, as if the mere sight warmed and renewed a part of my heart that not until that moment did I remember had grown willfully cold. My grip on his hand tightened—our fingers wove together in silence—and I thought of the splendor of the twilight lake, walking the faerie-haunted paths with him before the night turned to horror; this felt almost the same, somehow, and yet if it were lesser in grandeur, it was also closer, quieter, more intimate.

Here, but for the crystals and the roots, we were alone.

He moved the candle slowly, allowing the geometric facets to flash in its light, and then set it down in its holder on a natural stone shelf.

I felt myself shift closer in against him.

“Why, sir?” I whispered, still looking only ahead, as if to speak any louder or to meet his dark eyes would unfreeze the twisting roots, hide the starfire of the thousand crystalline spears.

I sensed his head bow down over mine; I felt the touch of a lock of his long, wavy hair as its ends brushed the nape of my neck.

“To show you something beautiful,” he said—I heard his low voice nearly in my ear; I felt it rumble in his chest—“after all you have endured.”

After all you have endured at my hands , I thought—somehow, I knew—he meant, but I said nothing. Those same hands that had killed my husband now drew me in closer: I did not slacken my grip on his hand that I held; his other hand pulled his black cloak around me, enwrapping me in the darkness of his great midnight mantle to keep out the chill of the shallow cavern’s air.

I was close enough to feel the sheathed dagger (a replacement for the broken one, I imagined) that always hung at his thigh, and it occurred to me to wonder what manner of murderer’s life I had saved. Since he had killed my husband, had he killed before? Would he kill again? I thought of that spatter of red on his shirt when he came back to me in the night, streaked with mud from the fury and desperation of his ride for goldenscythe—for my life—with his spurs still on his heels, his sword and pistol still at his side.

I released his hand then, and he did not detain me.

Nor did he protest as I wrapped both of my arms around his waist and rested my head against his shoulder. Soon I felt the weight and warm pressure of his powerful arms encircle me, one of his strong hands stroking my shoulders through the fabric of his cloak.

He killed my husband , I told myself again in silence, testing how it made me feel.

My husband who had mistrusted me, and for my being a woman had forbidden me from joining him in his occult pursuits—until it suited him to send me away with the Talisman for his own convenience, imperiling me in attempt to save himself.

My husband, whose miswritten will had left me with nearly nothing.

My husband, who in our years of marriage had never held me so.

I closed my eyes, breathing Victor’s shadow deeply into me, feeling its sensation spread through my blood. It was a long while until I spoke again.

“What a strange world it is, sir.”

Victor chuckled quietly: that grim, sinister sound I had come to know so well.

It could not frighten me now.

“Yes,” he whispered. “So it is.”

“I mean to do the same for you. Show you something beautiful, after all the…” My voice trailed away. I no longer knew what to say. “After all.”

His bandaged chest swelled against me. I felt him release the breath in a long, slow sigh. “You already have.”