Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

42. Two Histories

Chapter 42

Two Histories

We returned to Witch’s Corner for Victor to alert Chesterton and Mistress Savoy that he anticipated no further spectral disturbances, and that they were free to close up shop and go home for the night. I said little but to bid the pair a good night as we left again, as much for the kind regard in itself as to draw their attention to me for a moment: Victor had implied, not for the first time, that my shadow was growing, and I measured Mistress Savoy and Chesterton’s response to me for any sign of unease, any hint of dark sensation.

Perhaps , I thought to myself, perhaps : I wondered if there were something vaguely unsettled in their eyes, a mild trepidation not entirely suited to the friendliness of the exchange.

And I did indeed feel friendly toward them, as I did toward Reinhardt as well; I found that, unlike Walker and his purist’s contempt for a showman’s smoke and mirrors, I felt—as I watched Chesterton climb a short ladder to repair the hidden pulley for the levitating chair, Mistress Savoy looking up at him as she tested the wire—a certain fond inclination toward these performers of illusion, whose imitation of sorcery was not so far in practice, after all, from the true sorcerous art of willing one’s imagination upon the world.

Perhaps it was my own living nostalgia for that quaint, shabby spiritualist shop itself—the place where Victor and I first met, strange as the circumstances were—that made anyone within it seem a friend.

Or perhaps, more likely yet, it was simply that I was happy : happy as I had never been in my years with Simon, nor even that I could recall in my years before; happy in a way that made the word itself seem at once inadequate and scintillating and new. Even the impending peril of facing Gremio again, even the horrific brevity of those weeks until the doomsday of the vernal equinox seemed somehow distant and unreal beside the heat of Victor’s strong body next to mine, the touch of his hand, the rich dark scent of him, the heady embrace of his shadow—the memory of his lips and his tongue and his sensual caress—the promise of more to come—the consuming elation of the knowledge that he loved me , and that he knew that I loved him. How could I not allow myself, now that the vow of strictest celibacy had been broken and cast aside, to indulge at last in the needful, euphoric luxury of so enthralling an obsession? I was drunk on it now, gently intoxicated by a warm fullness of heart that made all the world seem kind.

I looked upward to Victor again, hoping to catch his eye one more time before we left that dearly dingy little parlor, watching him turn his regard from the bookshelf to gaze down at me. There was still a gap where I had taken Simon Buckingham’s book (the shelf, I supposed, did not see much use), and I wondered whether Victor had noted it, and when he might mention it if so: there was so much we had yet to learn of one another, so much still to say that mattered, and yet—as Absolon held open the door to the black coach, and Victor helped me inside, the corner spiritualist store now behind us—it seemed at once to be so many outworn details that mattered so little after all.

We sat close together on the black leather upholstery of the bench seat, a widow and a Renaissance outlaw, with the raw and artless honesty of young lovers who could scarcely stand to be apart. My hand rested on his powerful thigh, the warmth of his skin and the appreciative flex of muscle scarcely concealed by his black robes. Soon his hand covered my much smaller one, holding me gently against him, and I thought of the last time he had come to me in my cold guest bedroom in Hargrave’s house, thick with the mud and sweat and blood of the road, my hands clutching reflexively at those thighs, my head resting back on that broad shoulder, as the goldenscythe elixir he concocted to save my life nearly overwhelmed my reeling senses.

No more, I knew, must I deny those sensations that stirred within me every time we touched, and neither for the first time nor the last I thought of every time he had touched me before now, before this—my professor and protector, guiding me in sorcery and attending to my hurts. I thought of how his fingers had (I was not wrong to imagine, even then) been wont to linger on my throat; the surreptitious sensuality of the way his warm hand had smoothed the herbal poultice over the bare skin of my legs?—

A brief sound from the driver, not entirely human in its timbre, and the cobbled street began to rumble beneath our wheels as Victor’s pair of black horses started to step through the fog. I felt the glow of the gas lamps fade from the curtained windows as Absolon drove us back down the lightless streets.

“Though it is of little moment now,” I heard Victor’s low voice at my side, the cool steel of his mask not far from my ear, “I remain drawn to wonder?—”

“Yes, sir?” I interrupted softly. “It’s the book, isn’t it? I thought I saw you looking at its place on the shelf.”

He grunted quietly under his breath, and I smiled.

“It brought a particular mystery back to mind,” he said. “I do not think that what that horse-face said to you in the hallway outside my parlor was the first you had known of my part in the death of Simon Buckingham. And yet, despite your acquisition of that book—I thought of you in your solitary chamber with its cobwebbed corners, poring fervently and furtively over that volume in your lap, your clever little fingers touching its mildewed pages and your penetrating mind stripping it of its secrets—I cannot think of how you deduced my involvement from the book alone. Nor can I forget your entirely singular claim,” he chuckled, darkly and yet with a strange warmth, as if my macabre confession had only endeared me to him all the more, “of beating your fists on his tomb.”

“Then you must yourself have deduced, I shan’t doubt, some connection between the two.”

“Perhaps. Continue.”

The professorial tone of his latter command made my lips press together in a small, tight smile. “I don’t know, sir,” I replied, forcing a sober tone as I teased him with delay. “Even receiving it as a matter of academic curiosity, you might find the tale rather shocking.”

“I would like nothing more,” his deep, deep voice rumbled beside me, little more than a slow tremor in the dark, “than to be shocked by you.”

In my instinctive effort not to shiver, not to sigh, I must have closed my eyes, because I found myself opening them as the backs of the fingers of his other hand gently stroked my temple and my cheek—in time only to see that same hand draw away.

“Continue,” he repeated quietly, the vibration of his voice thrilling me from within, and I could not help but allow a slight shudder before I began.

“As I don’t doubt you might have guessed,” I said, settling a little closer into the creaking leather upholstery—a little closer against him, and deeper into his warmth—as I began my tale, “the story of my quest for the book as I told it to you was true, albeit incomplete. The way through the underground from the New Osiris Hall to Witch’s Corner was without event, yet when Greycliff pursued Reinhardt and me through the tunnels on the journey back, in our desperation to escape his lunatic knife we took shelter in some manner of catacombs. The Sorcerers’ Sepulcher, as Reinhardt said some call it.”

“A dead end ,” Victor grunted, “in more ways than one. But a rare stroke of fortune, if the door were left open or unlocked.”

“I assure you it was neither, sir.”

“You found somewhere the key, then? Or you and Reinhardt made use of Greycliff’s hard head to batter down the door?”

“I picked the lock. With my hairpins, sir—the very ones,” I allowed my voice to soften, my fingers to grip lightly against his thigh, “that you rescued and returned to me.”

I felt him exhale a deep, slow sigh, his hand tightening over mine.

“Reinhardt slammed the door behind us with not a second to spare,” I continued, “Greycliff’s knife lodging in the wood and his fists pounding at the door. We had shelter for a while, but little time: Gremio’s slime was weakening my legs, and I knew that I had perhaps twenty minutes to return to my room and drink your elixir before the strike of the witching hour; were that not enough on its own, there was also the matter of Reinhardt’s lamp burning down its oil. With a mind to open the door and knock Greycliff senseless, Reinhardt searched for a makeshift weapon, and found a metal box in a drawer under the sarcophagus upon which I sat. I recognized it at once as the strongbox in which Simon kept his most secret research, and then to my horror and fury I saw the name of Simon Ronald Buckingham engraved upon the heavy slab. In my abject madness I wished I had the strength to dash that slab aside and spit upon the corpse itself, to rend the dapper clothes and shake the damned decaying bones to dust—anything, no matter how mad, to make myself less futile than I felt—but it was not to be, and as I came to my senses I knew that time was passing.

“The rest, in its summary, is little different than I told you: we opened the door and fought Greycliff, Reinhardt with the box and then his fists, I with my newfound mesmerism and the threat of the blade from your walking-stick; my chief omission to you before was that this was where I took the Talisman from Greycliff, hiding it even from Reinhardt. And so with the book, the box, and the Talisman, I returned to my room.

“From there your portrait of me was entirely true to life, sir, save only the detail that my fervent and furtive poring was predominantly over the contents of the metal box rather than the book. Inside, among others of Simon’s papers and notes on his work—the ones which he forbade me from ever reading, smug in his assumption that his little lock would stop me—I found one which I had never seen, and which must have been written shortly before his death. An account written in hieroglyphics about your and Gremio’s endeavors to collect the Talisman. It did not name you as the murderer, sir—it could not have, of course, given the circumstances—but that is how I knew of your part in it.”

Enough of words, I thought: enough. It was strange, perhaps even ghastly in a sense, to lean in close to Victor then—to rest more of my weight against him, trusting him—but my heart led me so, and I looked slowly into his eyes.

“And yet you speak of it now,” he looked down at me, meeting my gaze, the slow and mild stroke of his fingers along the underside of my chin a gentle trap to hold me from looking away; a loose cobble in the road sent the carriage’s lanterns swinging, pale light shifting across his dark eyes (so fiery and vivid and alive) and the fixed skull-mouth of his steel mask, “with no more perturbation than one might speak of an unexpected rain-shower on an afternoon walk.”

“Because I feel none. That’s what I want you to understand, sir—to understand and to trust: I never mourned for his death itself.”

“You never loved Simon Buckingham?”

“I tried to love him, once. I thought that I did. And then I thought that I could.”

“And then?”

“And then that was all. Such small joys as we had soon withered on the vine. With Simon I was freed from material wants—I had shelter, and food, and good clothes, needful luxuries which I have not always known in my life—but at the price of a languishing, imprisoned heart. If it means that I am cold, or cruel, then so it must be, but I am not sorry he’s gone. I couldn’t…” I let the words fade into a brief silence, closing my eyes for a moment to focus on the reassurance of Victor’s touch: the subtle yet unyielding warmth of his strong, scarred fingers lightly caressing the soft skin under my jaw. “I couldn’t think my heart into feeling.”

“Do not apologize, Elizabeth.”

“No, sir. I don’t mean to. But I couldn’t convince myself to love him, especially not when I came to know that he didn’t love me for myself. The same way, sir,” I felt myself quietly exhale, “that, try as I did, I was never able to convince myself not to love you.”

“You were brave.”

“Brave? I was desperate. That is the highest praise I allow myself for what I nearly did. If you had known, sir, what I strived to force myself to want?—”

“I knew. No, not at first,” Victor continued in response, I was sure, to some alteration in my pulse, perhaps even to some manner of shift in my shadow, “though I sensed from the moment of my return from the road a change for which I could not entirely account. But it required no particular sorcery,” he chuckled darkly, “to understand what was meant by a dagger’s point aimed at my heart. As I said: you were brave.”

“And if I had done—if I had attempted—if I had endeavored to do the unthinkable?—”

“I would not have stopped you.”

“Sir…?”

“Do not mistake me: far rather would I live to love you than die by your hand, and be left to yearn eternally in Hell for how close we came and all that we might have been. And yet,” he exhaled, and I felt the relaxation of his broad chest beneath his black robes, “if that were all of you that were ever to be mine—if your will were truly to kill me—then I would not turn your blade aside. I would have died for you, and died a happy man.”

“I thought you had died for me,” I murmured, touching his shoulder to feel the bandages beneath his cloak and robes. “Even after that, when you saved me from Gremio’s art. Even after you knew what I had tried to mean to do.”

“Because even after you held me at the point of my own blade, I could not alter the course of my heart.”

“Victor,” I said—his name alone—and for a while, I said nothing more. The subtle pressure of his hand below my jaw relented, and for a time I merely enjoyed being close to him as we travelled through the night: the touch of our hands, the dark warmth of him beside and against me, the disorienting sensation of Absolon turning us again and again down bleak city streets until every direction seemed strange.

“And now, sir, having told my tale,” I broke the silence to find and hold Victor’s gaze again, slowly stroking his black-clad thigh with my thumb, “I should like to hear yours.”

“Which one of mine?”

“What happened that afternoon,” I replied, my voice gentle but not uncertain, “between you and Simon Buckingham.”

He moved against the leather upholstery, drawing his hand away from mine, and for a single, terrible moment, I felt my breath catch at the absence—but before even my heart could sink and cool, it warmed again: he had withdrawn his hand only to brace his strong arm across my back, the hand coming to rest now at my hip as he held me closer against him.

I relaxed into his touch, and he began.

“The day came that Simon admitted at last to having the Talisman in his possession,” Victor said, his voice deliberate and very low; I would have thought him speaking solely into my mind if not for the sound of his words not far from my ear, “as Gremio and I had suspected and presumed. While propriety suggests that such an exchange should be conducted at a predetermined time and place, it was our plan—Gremio’s and mine—that should either of us become certain of the presence of the Talisman we would rush in, alone if need be, and seize it at once (taking care, in my case, not to touch it directly) before Simon had time to prepare a defense or arrange some manner of ambush.

“Yet despite such mild interest in caution, I was too late. The trap was already set.

“I walked with him into his house, where he went to retrieve—so he told me—the Talisman from a hidden compartment in an armoire in the parlor. He pulled from that drawer a pistol instead.

“I had as weapon only my iron dagger, my hands, and my art.

“ This nightmare ends now , he said to me, his hand shaking as he aimed at my chest from halfway across the room. We were alone: I heard the frantic footfalls of his domestics retreating. You’ve driven me to extremity, D’Arco, and if you are indeed some manner of mortal man, then today I free myself from this living Hell!

“ And if not? Drop the revolver, Buckingham, or your nightmare has only begun. I stalked slowly toward him as I willed my shadow to deepen and spread, and I summoned through the gaps in the walls the unnatural fog that I knew terrified him so; from the blank look of dread and revulsion in his eyes I knew he had witnessed the spectral death’s-head of my phantom image in the features of my face. It was not my first time at the end of the barrel of a gun, nor my first wielding terror as a weapon, and I did not doubt my victory: a profound enough tremor of horror would, I knew, cause him to drop the gun, and were I near enough to seize it, the entirety of the advantage would become mine.

“More than that might drive him to permanent madness, if it did not kill him outright.

“Black fog leaked in around the closed parlor window, billowing in like a midday night to blot out the sun; he cocked back the hammer of the gun, sweat running down his temples, pale and trembling with visceral terror. I’m w-willing , he stammered, his eyes wild and the pistol shuddering with his hand and his arm, to take that chance. To s-see if you bleed, D’Arco.

“A sharp crack cut through the gathering mist: the first shot ripped through the outer flesh of my shoulder, shattering a clay idol on a shelf behind me; the recoil startled him, almost throwing the weapon from his hand, and as I grunted in pain he fought his convulsions of dread, nearly retching as he choked on shadow and fog with the shuddering gun aimed in blind madness for a second shot?—

“A second shot which never sounded.

“My hand was around his throat as I slammed him against the wall, my dagger through his heart.

“I held him there until it was over, withdrew, and let him fall to the carpet beside his impotent gun.

“And that was all.

“The gunshot drew in Gremio’s men, wild horses in a riderless hunt with foam spraying like flame from their lips and cloven hooves beating at the earth, demons and demonesses streaming in with the black fog, my blood running warm between my fingers where I held my hand to my shoulder.

“As they tore through the house, desperate to find the Talisman, two of them remained with me—great-grandchildren of mine, they claimed, and that I had never met them before does not preclude it from being true—aiding me in the washing and binding of my shoulder, though I had finished most of the work myself; helping me roll Simon in the carpet onto which he fell, soaked and dark with his spreading blood, and take the body away. Through a few of my connections, he was interred underground, where you found his tomb in the Order’s hidden crypt—suffice to say there are enough who dread the name of Doctor D’Arco to hold secrets with relative safety. Suffice to say as well that Gremio was not pleased: the Talisman of Thoth was never found. No Talisman, and no more S.R. Buckingham, because I had murdered —so Gremio called it, as if he held such high esteem for the vagaries of the law— murdered the only man who knew the Talisman’s secrets and location, and?—”

“—But that was no murder , sir,” I interrupted, too hot with sudden frustration to hold myself back. “He would have killed you. He meant to kill you.” I shifted deeper into Victor as the corners of my eyes began to sting, my hand clutching at his cloak with a reflexive desperation: with a terrible, warm hollow in my heart, I thought of how close we had come to never having met: that but for the trembling cowardice of Simon’s pistol-hand, Victor might have walked down so many ages of the earth only for us to miss one another, to pass in the night by one single, immortal year. “You acted only in your own justified defense.”

“Not everyone sees what you do.”

“I don’t give a damn, sir, what everyone sees.”

“No,” he replied, and I felt his low chuckle rolling into that familiar sardonic laughter as he gathered me closer into his powerful arms, “no, clearly you do not. In the originality of your mind is a charm so overpowering it puts even your beauty to shame.”

“Oh, sir…”

“And yet I believe you now that you do not object to being in the arms of a villain: not so much as a fleeting shudder troubles you as I recount my crime.”

“I was in the arms of a villain, once: a man who—just before luring you into an ambush—had given me the Talisman, told me nothing of its import nor my peril in holding it, and sent me away for the afternoon with the same patronizing nonchalance that one might dismiss a pet to the garden before company arrives: sacrificing me without my knowledge to save that infuriating amulet and his own precious skin. This, too, I learned from those last writings in his smug little strongbox. Yes, sir, I was in the arms of a villain—and I can scarcely tell you how dearly I prefer to be in yours instead.”

This pleased him: I heard his quiet, satisfied grunt; I felt his hand flex languidly against my hip; and for a time, in our silence, once more I simply enjoyed the warmth of his strong body, the rise and fall of his chest against me, the growl of the wheels beneath us and the rhythm of the horses’ hooves.

“If I may ask…”

“Anything you wish, sir.”

I felt him draw a breath, though his voice remained low and even. “Where is Simon’s strongbox now?”

“In my guest chamber in Hargrave’s house, under my bed, next to Simon’s book. I suppose you knew, or guessed, that there was something under?—”

At once I stopped, my body tense, my heart beginning to thunder in my ears at the sinking weight of a terrible realization.

“Victor, I didn’t—I hadn’t—I am sorry to say I hadn’t thought of it until now—If the law were to find it, and trace his disappearance to you?—”

“—An unlikely event,” Victor intoned, his voice almost reassuring as he traced his scarred fingers lightly, comfortingly over the soft skin of my neck, “unworthy of this fluttering pulse. Should even that box fall somehow into the hands of the law—which would necessitate first the Order finding it, caring to open it, and discerning the meaning and import of its contents; three increasingly improbable occurrences in themselves—even with all these stars aligning against us, the far greater likelihood is that Simon’s account of spirits troubling him for arcane artifacts would be dismissed as the incredible ravings of a madman. It would, it is true, be in our interest for the box to be secured, but the matter is of no great urgency.”

“Nonetheless,” I replied, “I should like to retrieve it tonight. If you return me to Hargrave’s, I can take it—and Simon’s book, and your old grimoire—and bring them back to you through the underground.”

“If you wish. Do not let it trouble you, regardless: there are more pressing subjects to attend.”

“Such as what, sir?”

“The long-delayed satisfaction of some part of my… curiosity.”

I did not know whether I heard or merely imagined a vague pause between his penultimate word and his last, allowing the tension of the phrase to hang in the air for half a moment before he resolved it to so relatively decorous a conclusion—I did not know if he were so subtle a tease, and I wondered if he caught sight of my half-concealed smile.

“Your curiosity, sir?” I replied, allowing my voice only the barest suggestion of amusement.

“To begin.”

He paused there for effect—I was certain of it now—and nearly as certain that, so close as now we were, he must have sensed the faint thrill that coursed through my nerves.

“You know now some of my history, Elizabeth. Yet it remains that—while I know now more than I did—I still know comparatively little of yours.”

“Through no particular design, sir, I assure you. The tale is yours for the asking, though there isn’t much to tell—set beside your history of sorcery and danger and adventure, I’m afraid you would find mine terribly uninteresting.”

“There is nothing about you that would not interest me. Speak.”

“Very well, then.” I paused, considering the moment and his words, still unaccustomed to the warm satisfaction of being regarded so. But I drew a breath, and then I began. “My mother was a Yorkshirewoman, my father a Scotsman, but too few years did I have to relish the stark beauty of those northern moors before my father’s business brought us to London. We lived here only for some two years before both of my parents died of consumption; I lived with my grandfather (a Londoner already) for a year or so more, but then a similar consumption took him as well. I was fortunate, I know, to not have caught it myself, though it is difficult to suppose oneself fortunate when one is orphaned at ten years of age, friendless and homeless and alone in the world. My only relief was that it was spring, and the chill of winter was thus far away—but it was ever looming on the horizon.

“Before even I began to beg for food, I thought that I should like to have a book—foolish perhaps though that sounds—because books had been always a comfort to me. In my lonesome wanderings I came to a lending library, and I noted at once that, especially after hours, the borrowers were in the habit of depositing their returned books into the slot of the library letter-box, which I thought very trusting, considering that the slot was rather wide to accommodate the larger volumes and that my arm at that age was particularly thin. And so, on those nights in which enough books had been deposited, I would take it upon myself to reach inside and re-borrow the topmost of the pile for myself. Invariably I returned my prize when I had finished it, but not before helping myself to a replacement from the same letter-box.

“It is difficult to say how many unmarked days passed—likely not so very many, because the weather had little changed—when, one evening, a kind passerby gave me an entire small, cooked game-fowl to eat. In retrospect, he was perhaps a poacher on some gentleman’s land disposing of the last of the spoils of his hunt, but the meal’s provenance mattered to me not at all. I ate it with such eagerness that it caused my distraction: quick and wary though I always had been, this time I did not mark the inordinate attention of another passerby before it was too late: The Tragical History of King Richard III , the book of which title lay unhidden on the pavement by my side, seemed, to my dismay, to catch her eye.

“ Is that your book, miss? she asked coldly—a matronly woman who was likely not so very old, but seemed so to me at the time, in contrast to my very young self—and I thought that her beady eyes might bore a hole right through the greasy game-fowl bones between my fingers.

“ I shan’t say so, ma’am , I replied, reaching into my soot-stained dress for the fabric scrap that served me as a handkerchief and using it to wipe my mouth and hands. I was caught, after all, and I thought it best not to tell a lie. Not in the ordinary sense.

“ And what are you doing with it?

“ Reading it, ma’am.

“ And how did you acquire it?

“ From the library.

“ From inside the building?

“ No, ma’am; from inside the letter-box.

“Her beady eyes sparkled in triumph. Have you ever done this before, young lady?

“ Routinely, ma’am.

“She asked after several titles which had gone temporarily missing—most of which, it is true, were due to me—and I admitted to those I had taken, along with two more which she had not noticed were ever gone, because I did not care for them much and returned them, apparently, before she knew to miss them.

“ Then what is your name, miss, and what have you to say for yourself?

“ My name is Elizabeth Douglas, and what I have to say is that I have become an orphan and miss my own books something terrible.

“ Very well , she said, and I thought that something in those hard, keen eyes softened. Take your book and come with me.

“And so the Beady-Eyed Lady—for so I came to think of her, first warily and later fondly, even after I knew her name—took me back with her to the library, and made me so generous an offer that I could scarcely believe it was true: she would allow me to live in the library storage-room, and read all the books I wished (conceding, of course, those requested by customers), so long as in return I would clean the library, and straighten and organize and repair its books, each day after closing—and this arrangement would be allowed to continue until such time as I could find another situation which we both found suitable.

“I don’t doubt that you can see, sir, how the rest is to follow. Years later, my childhood behind me, I began to catch the eye of male patrons, though none of them interested me in return—except for one Simon Ronald Buckingham, whom after a while I came to find less objectionable than the rest. There was an intelligence about him, and what I thought in my inexperience to be certain degree of charm, and moreover he read the most interesting books: anything at all about Egypt or the occult, whether written as history or purely from the imagination; I thought he seemed almost to prefer the latter, as if he suspected the guise of fiction to mask some hidden, arcane truth that history was too demure to reveal.

“He courted me, and in the hesitant thrill that I guessed to be the stirrings of my own first love, I blinded myself to all those minor vexations that chafed my young heart: the way his own announcements about himself predominated our interviews, and yet he managed at the same time to remain frustratingly vague as to the specifics of his line of study; the slight stiffness of his arms when he embraced me; even the style of his writing, which managed somehow to be at once bland and overwrought, and which I disliked from the start. But in my mind I could not help but tally his better qualities, and weigh and assess him to be the definition of a suitable man to marry. My heart would follow, I trusted. Love would come in time.

“It never did.

“I yearned to love him, as he yearned to begin a family with me. I was indifferent to the notion of children, but unopposed, and expected that children would be expected of me; we tried so many times, and as the tale of our unsuccessful attempts grew longer, he blamed me more and more, to which I replied that the deficiency was as likely to have been his own. Something turned in him then. He grew colder, more distant; we gave up trying, and seldom so much as kissed. More and more he withdrew to the company of his colleagues—men, all of them, and all of the opinion that a woman was not fit to understand such things as they flattered themselves to think they understood—and I missed him less and less. Now and again I wondered if there were an affair, not out of any concern or sorrow on my part— Let her have him , I thought to myself, though I am sorry, for her sake, if she is as unfortunate in her judgment of men as was I in mine! —but because I could then take such an opportunity to attempt to find them out, to endeavor to catch them, and in doing so bring some interest to those days that felt so stagnant and dull.

“But I settled, as it were, for the company of my books, and the small, surreptitious thrill of picking his locks when he was away, availing myself of the knowledge he had forbidden me for my female sex. I should like to think, for my own small and private triumph, that all his fears will come true: that my art someday shall exceed his.”

“It already has,” Victor’s deep voice rumbled. “Simon Buckingham was no sorcerer: he had some degree of intermittent Sight, but that is all. An Egyptologist and a scholar of occult history, a member of one of London’s other secret societies—the Order of Magisophists is but one of a few—in the end he was so consumed by the methods and manners of the academy that he forgot entirely how to sense and to feel the world for himself.”

“I imagine it shan’t surprise you, sir,” I whispered, nearly to myself, “to know how very little he sensed and felt: that our marriage was both dispassionate, and—despite all our frustrated endeavors for a child?—”

“Unsatisfying.”

His single word was so deep and low as to be no more than a rolling tremor in the darkness, and I leaned closer into him as I allowed it to fade into churn of the carriage wheels.

“Yes, sir. Most of the time.”

I felt Victor exhale slowly, sinking me deeper against him, a strange kind of tension in his touch: his hand on my hip spread, as if to encompass and claim more of me; his fingers as they pressed slowly lower down my thigh were so gentle, so entirely sensual in their caress, and yet firm somehow with the tenuous restraint of an indignant, possessive wrath.

“The villain ,” he growled under his breath, followed by a string of muttered foreign words that I knew must be curses from their tone. “To leave the warm blooming of your desire cold and forsaken,” his voice returned to its accented English, rough with the heat of rising fury, “and yet to presume still to call you his wife! How fortunate for him that he is already dead?—”

“Sir—you’re—” My voice quavered and caught—I could not help it, he affected me so—his hand was halfway down my thigh, the heat and the pressure of his touch smoothing the black skirts of my mourning dress tight against my skin; his shadow surged through me, released by his wrath; and no less than all of this was that tone in his voice, his vehemence in my defense, his unsounded depth of ire at the mere intimation of my having been treated with indifference. And in the tempest of my thoughts, whipped from calm to sudden storm—the whirl of his history and mine, the Talisman and the gunshot and the pilfered library book—I could not help but draw strange associations; his hand pushed lower down my thigh, and as I drew a sharp breath I bit my lip so as not to foolishly smile.

“It reminds you of what , Elizabeth?”

I ought to have been taken aback, but so deeply had he already drawn me down into the moment that I had not the presence of mind to wonder whether I had spoken some private notion aloud, or pressed unwittingly some phrase into his mind, or whether by now he could discern my thoughts unbidden. “It reminds me of that book, sir—the play Richard III —the very one in my tale—when that brilliant, devious Richard so outrageously courts Anne, and Anne says she ought to take revenge on Richard for his killing of her husband?—”

“ He that bereft thee, lady, of thy husband ,” Victor breathed, reciting in a whisper behind his mask those lines of Richard’s that I remembered so suddenly and so well, “ did it to—help thee to a better husband .”

My bitten lip could not hold back my fond amusement: unthinkable though it may have been, I laughed, my hand catching at and squeezing his wrist, my body pulling away from him only enough for my eyes to seek his again in the darkness of the coach.

“Had I known you, Elizabeth,” Victor’s voice rumbled behind his mask, still taut with the suspense of rage restrained, his hand tightening over my thigh, “had I known you at the time…”

“Would you have done differently?”

I felt him draw a breath. “If I had known you—if I had thought you trapped there—neglected, diminished—all the wild horses of Hell would not have stopped me?—”

As Absolon turned the carriage down another street, a wheel must have hit a terrible hole in the road before climbing out again: there was a hard, sudden jolt, as if one side of the carriage were lifted up and dropped onto solid stone. A wonder that nothing seemed to have been broken but my balance—the rough shock of it jostled me into Victor. With a soft grunt he caught me surely in his arms, but at an awkward angle and nearly in his lap; rather than try to rise from his grasp I did not protest as I felt him lower me the rest of the way, laying my head on the heat of his thighs.

I shifted, pulling up my legs and folding them so I could lie more comfortably on my back across the leather bench seat, and I felt him slowly exhale.

No sooner had I settled in against him than I watched his hand as it drifted over the curve of my clothed bosom, his touch at once possessive and indulgent, reverent and gloating, like the touch of a man who can scarcely believe his fortune for something he finds so rare and precious to have fallen quite literally into his lap. And I watched—my breath held, my skin beginning to warm, my spine beginning to arch—as his hand closed so maddeningly slowly over my right breast, allowing me time to renounce every opportunity to protest or escape, entrapping me willingly in his firm, gentle grip.

“Absolon,” Victor called with a knock on the carriage ceiling, “go around again. The longest and most serpentine route. I wish to be certain we are not followed.”

“Yes, Doctor D’Arco,” came the response from the driver’s seat outside, and I took the moment of their brief exchange to ascertain that the curtains of all the carriage windows were already drawn closed.

“And I wish to be certain,” Victor whispered, turning his regard back to me where I lay in his lap, “that we are not interrupted.”

Secure in our relative privacy, I looked up at him—watching the dim, diffuse light on his mask, searching the shadows of his hood for the flash of his eyes—and then I felt my toes curl helplessly inside my shoes, my head press back against his warm, muscular thighs as my eyes rolled closed: so strange a new sensation thrilled me that I would have swooned into pleasure all at once, had not its intensity swiftly relented again.

“Victor,” I panted softly in the darkness, a subtle shiver slipping down my spine at the thought of how entirely I was in his grasp and at his mercy, “you nearly made me?—”

He interrupted me with a quiet grunt and that low, ominous chuckle I had come to know so well, warmed now by amusement and desire. “Correct.”

I could feel that my breasts were already full and straining at my corset, a melting warmth beginning to gather between my thighs, and as I looked again to where his strong hand held and massaged me, I felt the same eldritch sensation subtly rise again—familiar in its sensual darkness, and yet new somehow in its intensity—and I began to understand: he had focused his art into his hand; it radiated from his palm and his fingers through my right breast, already swollen in his grip and tingling with the dark stimulation of his shadow spreading through me. I felt myself sinking, every tendon beginning at once to tense and to relax as the uncanny sensation of his darkness crept slowly toward my head even while it drifted downward; the muscles of my abdomen contracted at the first tinge of its influence as the feeling filtered down, down, and I thought that I knew already what would come over me were it to finally spread through my thighs.

“Victor…” I heard myself sigh, unable to resist his art as I shifted instinctively in his lap, reaching my left hand up beside my head, closing my eyes as I found and touched his rigid length through the fabric of his black robes, feeling it move against my fingers at my first light, teasing stroke?—

Then his free hand closed around my wrist, and I felt my hand being gently drawn away.

“Soon,” his deep voice rumbled; he let go of my wrist with a lingering brush of his thumb. “Just you, this time, Elizabeth… to make up for some part of your lost time. The pleasures you deserve to have known.”

I meant to reply—something, anything, to express to him how those words filled my heart—but his left hand released my tingling breast with a last, sensual stroke, and it lost none of that sensation of his shadow as his hand closed slowly, inexorably around the other. I felt the rise and fall of my chest quicken in anticipation, the muscles of my thighs clenching in the futile reflex of some kind of defense—in the most erotic dread of his power.

“Could you feel, Elizabeth,” Victor continued, his voice no more now than a tremor in the close darkness of the carriage, vaguely muffled by the steel of his mask, “how desperately I restrained myself every time we touched? How fervently I yearned for every contact and brush and embrace to linger longer; how deeply I desired from you just one sigh, one gesture I could not mistake, to let fall that last rattling fa?ade of my restraint—to loose upon you every forbidden dream?—”

“—And every time,” I interrupted, aware of the plaintive urgency in my own voice as I saw his hand so gradually seize my left breast, and I watched my bosom (clothed in mourning black) tremble in his grip as I shuddered, the dark stimulation of his shadow beginning to sink in slowly through my taut, flushed skin. “Every time—I imagined how it would feel—what it would feel like if you didn’t stop?—”

My voice broke into a quaking sigh, and I felt as if I had fallen into that forbidden dream: his shadow was overtaking me again, surging through my body from my trapped, tingling breast, rising inexorably over me like a black tide. A moment more—I grasped at the fleeting thought as my spine arched against the leather upholstery, and I became suddenly aware of the grinding vibration of the carriage wheels over the road—a moment more, and my mind and my body would be once again so effortlessly and pleasurably overcome?—

But the black tide began to ebb—the creeping darkness faded—and I was left lying in his lap nearly breathless with need, my skin still heated and my nerves still alight, the heaving of my chest scarcely slower as I realized his hand was drifting again: down over my corseted ribs and stomach, as I listened to the soft, deep sounds of indulgence in the back of his throat; down again to my hip, the sinking thrill of his focused shadow arousing every sensitized nerve beneath his touch.

And I waited, my breath caught in a terrible, sweet suspense as his hand trailed lower still—but then too low, frustratingly so, narrowly missing the places I most longed to feel his fingers indulge me in their darkest, most intimate caress.

“How you tease me, sir?—”

“—And if what you say is true,” he whispered, his voice heavy and thick, his powerful hand coming to rest on my bent knee, “about what you imagined every time we touched—then tell me, Elizabeth,” his hand flexed, ready and waiting, “if anything in particular was brought to mind that night in your chamber, when I applied the poultice to your skin.”

“A sense of anticipation,” I replied, “as your hand slid up my leg—I was wearing little but my nightdress, lying before you on my bed, desperate to betray no trace of my thrill as your fingers so deftly released my garter.”

“You quivered.”

At those two words I felt my body tense with an indrawn breath, my eyes closing before even I realized that his hand had slipped up under the hem of my dress.

“That night, sir? Or,” I thought I must have sighed, “now?”

“Both.”

He did not free me from my garter this time: beneath the black silk fabric of the skirt of my dress he seemed only to stroke it, to trace it with his finger as his rising hand passed it by.

“It was so subtle a sensation, Elizabeth, as you lay on your bed in your nightdress, that I wondered if I had slipped into my own fantasy—so mild and natural a shift beneath your soft, warming skin; so fine a tremor of some single thread of your tension falling slack in release beneath my touch.”

“All I could imagine,” I swallowed, beginning to struggle again for self-control—I could think of little more to say than nearly to repeat what I had already said—“that night, and every time you touched so much as the pulse in my throat—was how it would have felt if your hand kept?—”

“Like this?”

Now I quivered, unmistakably: the muscles of my legs flexed and trembled under his touch as his hand beneath my dress trailed slowly up the sensitive flesh of my inner thigh to linger halfway up from the knee, luxuriating in the heat of my anticipation, only the thin cotton of my drawers separating my skin from his own.

And churning through the abstraction of my mind were a thousand fleeting iterations of how my professor’s hand—the hand of the feared Doctor D’Arco—the killer’s hand—was beneath my dress, my mourning dress, transgression upon transgression, making my breath come faster in expectation and desire.

I meant to speak—to find something, anything to say—but a single finger of his other hand traced lightly, languidly up my throat, settling on the most sensitive place beneath the edge of my jaw, and from my parted lips came only a shuddering sigh: I do not know if it was the sensation of his warm shadow seeping from his fingers into my thigh that was affecting me so, eroding my control, or if it was merely the sensual touch of his hands themselves, but I knew that I felt no more than a mild pressure from his lower hand as he effortlessly eased my legs further apart.

“And all I could imagine,” he breathed, his voice rich and coarse with desire, “that night—and in the lonely nights thereafter—was how close we had come; how with one more mere touch of my hand or my art I could have released you so deeply into pleasure—given you a first savor of all that I longed for you to feel.”

His next touch was nearly all it took. Victor’s bold finger slipped in through the gap in my drawers, drifting across the crease of my thigh and through the coarse hair, and I heard myself moan in a strange combination of anticipation and relief: he touched me at last, not to tease but to slowly satisfy, his strong, skilled finger stroking across the wet source of my heat and then drawing gradually, inexorably upward. The firm girth of his fingertip parted me as I quivered, sliding up the center of my swollen folds, so warm and slick with my own desire that when he reached the dull ache of my clitoris—his finger circling me, rubbing me—the wave of pleasure spreading through me made my eyes roll so suddenly beneath their lids that I nearly saw stars. By some poor animal instinct I nearly tried to twist away in his lap, but to my delight it seemed only to secure me in his power: now my cheek was pressed against the warmth of his muscular thigh, and I panted for breath against the fabric of his black robes, my bosom full and heaving beneath the restriction of my corset, every sensation heightened by his eldritch art that still lingered and spread beneath my skin. His fingers were caressing my throat, their light, masterful touch more overpowering than any exercise of force; his touch between my thighs shifted: I felt his finger slide to my entrance again, not only to stroke this time but to slip inside; my breathless gasp at the pleasure of his blunt fingertip pricking in through my soft, waiting heat—the sensation of so readily parting and opening for him at last—melted into a shivering sigh as he pushed in deeper, slowly enough to let me stretch for the satisfying girth of his finger until he was fully inside me, my inner thigh trembling against the side of his broad palm, the pressure of his firm thumb covering my clitoris.

Then the focused darkness of his art began once more to emanate from his hand, filling me with a warm wave of his shadow, overwhelming me completely: I no longer had the strength even to arch my spine as his thumb rubbed me and his finger stroked me from the inside, inundating my senses until all I could feel was the next surge of his shivering darkness swelling through me, and the next, and the next—a slow, warm, rhythmic pulsation of his uncanny shadow pooling and filling me, rippling into me and through me from the ache between my tensing thighs—and in only seconds I was pulsing too, quivering in release under the pressure of his thumb, clenching and clenching helplessly around his thick finger in the same deep rhythm; his other hand curled lightly at my throat, its satisfied caress almost spectral despite his strength; I felt the low rumble of his voice—I thought that I heard my name—but his shadow was still throbbing into me, drawing out my ecstasy, I was too far gone to understand all the words.

“My Elizabeth,” I thought that I heard again as the tremors subsided at last and I lay soft and exhausted in his lap, my lips parted and my eyes closed, dazed and fulfilled and entirely spent. I murmured his name—I ought to have said more—but I was drifting, floating in his shadow as my heartbeat and my breathing began to settle: his scent and his heat and his slow touch, and the steady sounds of horse-hooves and carriage-wheels, soon eased me into a satisfied sleep.