Epilogue
“Lady D’Arco?”
I looked up from my absent regard of the crystal ball, wiping a fingerprint from its sphere with a relatively unblemished corner of the black velvet tablecloth.
“Even the name suits you, you know,” Mistress Savoy smiled, hefting a few books in her soft arms. “Lady D’Arco. You never seemed much of a Mrs. Buckingham.”
“I never felt much of one either. Thank you.”
“Anyway, he’s coming,” she continued in her Boston accent. “I’ve locked the front door—he’s been oddly particular about that since this past winter or so—and reset all the tricks for you. The table-rapping switch and the cloth for the ectoplasm are underneath, by your left hand. Chesterton’s already gone home for the night, and we’re supposed to be closed, so if a late customer comes for a seance while you’re here all by your lonesome?—”
“I’ll figure something out,” I smiled back to her. “Thank you for all of it, Mistress Savoy.”
We exchanged our good-byes, and I listened to her depart behind me: the rustle of the heavy curtains, the opening creak and closing slam of the door down to the tunnels.
The candles on the fortuneteller’s table at which I sat flickered for the change in the air, and I was alone in that dear, dingy spiritualist shop at Witch’s Corner.
I sighed—a wistful, satisfied sound, I thought to myself—letting the flames of the candles ripple again. I thought of the bleak midnight, seemingly so long ago, when that tuneless old bell on the door knob clanked to warn of my arrival as I stepped from the fog-blackened streets through the unlocked door. So much had changed, and yet again so little: no more progress had been made since then on the interminable legal case of my inheritance, but now it mattered to me not at all. The old sequined draperies with their fading celestial scene had not, I suspected, been dusted in as long; now they had stilled after Mistress Savoy’s departure, and I thought that their stern-faced moons held their breath, waiting for Victor with me: how could I not think of Victor as I waited in that shabby, hallowed place?
I ought to have run, really, that night when first I heard the force of his footsteps behind the sequined curtain—when I froze in my first horror at his shadow’s uncanny touch. It would have been just and sensible to run.
But I stayed.
And now, alone at Witch’s Corner for the first time since that very midnight, I awaited that same touch.
I awaited my husband’s return.
I found myself smoothing my dress as I thought of him: one of the new black dresses he had tailored for me, without ostentation and yet flatteringly contemporary in style, never made nor worn for mourning. The necklace I wore to the ball had been cleaned and repaired, and in our underground home several others joined it in my new and rather uncharacteristic repertoire of finery; my hair I had come to wear long much of the time, in defiance of convention, and if passersby thought me wild or improper for it, then perhaps so much the better— yet I made a point to always carry a few hairpins on my person, should any occasion require the unfastening of locks.
With my fingernail I picked at the flecks of spattered candle wax that had dried to the nap of the velvet tablecloth. Another nervous new hobby, born of my restless waiting—my fond obsession with our own love story: it was such a small, foolish thing, but I wanted to witness once more the sight of Victor arriving from between the curtains, as he had when first we met?—
I felt him before I heard him. Then came the creaking of the door and the firm, solid falls of what I knew unmistakably to be black Hessian boots.
I turned in my chair, watching with an eager heart as that dark, imposing incarnation of the night again threw apart the heavy curtains with his scarred hands, precisely as he had before, the loosening sequins of those draperies’ dusty stars and frowning moons flashing in the candlelight with the steel of his mask.
I wondered if he knew why I smiled.
“Have you been practicing,” his deep voice rumbled in the warm air of the small parlor, “my Elizabeth?”
“Hardly, sir.”
Victor grunted in reply as he passed me by with his commanding stride, his great black cloak rippling; he sat down heavily in the customer chair across from me—his height and the breadth of his massive shoulders eclipsing most of my forward vision—and he unlatched his mask, letting it hang open over his neck and broad chest. Such time as had passed since our wedding had changed him not at all, nor had I expected it would, though he had grown his thick side-whiskers into a short black beard. For my discerning wife’s pleasure , he had said: I did not doubt him, though the more familiar we had become with each other the more wicked he had grown, and that I could scarcely look at his unmasked face without remembering his words was, I think, an entirely purposeful tease.
“And yet,” he watched me pick idly at another dried drip of wax, “you were the one who wished to learn the secrets of theatrical spiritualism, were you not?”
“Quite correct, sir.”
“For what purpose? And why not from Mistress Savoy, one of the greatest true and false spirit mediums of the New World?”
“The very purpose you suspect: a rather transparent excuse to spend time here with you.” The warm weight of his strong, scarred hand covered mine, and I allowed a tight smile as my picking at the tablecloth ceased. “And a beginning to our new ambition of seeking some manner of artifact with properties similar to the Talisman of Thoth. One never knows who may walk through the door of a spiritualist establishment when it is open to the public. To uncover any trace of such an amulet that way is an entirely distant chance, I allow, and yet…”
“And yet?”
“And yet it worked for you, sir.”
His hand tightened around mine, and I let myself laugh with him as his deep, sinister chuckle rolled through the darkened parlor.
“Then,” he intoned as he sobered, “if you do not object to beginning your lesson with a consideration of the crystal ball?—”
“Not at all.”
“—Regard the play of light and shadow on the surface of the crystal orb. When the time seems correct, push your vision in toward the center, and then close your eyes.”
I did as he instructed, allowing my eyes to fall closed—but then I felt some manner of movement from him, a shift in the nature of the darkness.
“And then, sir?”
“And then open them again.”
Some subtle instinct led me to wonder what I would find upon doing so—we were too close to one another now for entire secrets—but as my eyes opened, never did I anticipate what I found before me on the black, wax-flecked velvet of the tablecloth:
A small box of carved wood, the metal piece on its lid finely etched with the familiar emblem of a crescent moon, the rays of the sun, and an arrow at the ready in its great bent bow.
I touched it, my disbelieving fingers almost greedy, desperate to know if it were true; I held it against my heart, shocked into silence, hot tears welling in my eyes. Again I ran my fingers over it, again and again to be certain it was no dream—this simple little thing that had come to mean so much—and to my relief I felt its imperfections, the places it had been repaired, and they made it all the more precious.
“You fixed it—you fixed it—you remembered?—”
“Open it,” Victor whispered, and between my quiet sniffs to contain my tears I both nodded and shook my head.
“I ought to begin wearing hairpins more often.”
“Open it,” he whispered, this time slower, more gently.
And so I rested my hands to one side of the crystal ball on the black velvet of the table between us, carefully tilted the lid of the little hairpin-box back on its hinge, and caught my breath: there resting within its walls was a gold ring, shining in the uncertain light from the candles on the shabby fortuneteller’s table, and neither the time nor the place could have been more beautiful.
“Oh, sir?—”
Picking it up, feeling its cool weight in my hand, I noticed an inscription on the inner rim of its band, and holding it closer to the candle flames I read Ego sum ego solus on one half of its circle, and on the other half, I am what I will .
And on its outside were fine diamonds, clustered like wildflowers.
“Rather belated,” I thought that he said, “but I hope no worse for the wait.”
My hands were shaking—I knew nothing of what to say—he left his chair to kneel at my side, taking the ring and my hand in his, and I felt his scars so closely against my skin as he slipped the ring slowly onto my finger, and I leaned into him for a deep, sobbing kiss, his beard at once soft and rough against my lips and my cheek?—
And then we both started at once. My fingers curled into his black robes as his strong hands gripped me protectively: there was a knock at the door, only a knock, but with such force and urgency that it clattered the old bell on its fraying rope.
We looked to one another. He stood, closing and latching his steel half-mask; I wiped my eyes on my sleeve, touched the gold wedding ring on my finger, and rose to my feet beside him.
The same knock rattled the door again, and I saw a genuine warmth in Victor’s black eyes as I glanced up to him once more.
“It seems fitting,” his deep voice rumbled, “that you should be the one to answer.”
“I mean to,” I replied as I rounded the table. “Who knows, sir, but that it might be the beginning of a new adventure?”
And then I walked to the front of the dim little parlor, stepping over the curling edge of the fringed rug and toward that door I had once passed through at the same foggy witching hour, filled with a sudden sense of all the strange possibility of the night.