Chapter 10
Chapter
I glared at Buckland and jerked my thumb toward Henry. “I wrote to you, didn’t I? So what is he doing here?”
Buckland reluctantly tore his gaze from the pterodactyl. “When I alerted President Davies to your discovery, he thought Mr. Stanton ought to accompany me in his function as treasurer of the Geomagical Society of London.”
Buckland said Mr. Stanton with the appropriate level of disdain, which I appreciated. I relaxed my hackles, just a bit.
Henry idly patted his horse’s neck. “I’m the one authorized to actually spend the money.”
Buckland’s face twitched. The two men had their own rather complicated relationship, separate from each of ours. Henry had once been Buckland’s star pupil. His protégé. And yes, it had rankled; I was honest enough to admit that.
Buckland never knew the details of what happened between Henry and me—only Lucy and Edgar did—but I thought he might suspect. In the time they worked together, Buckland was always careful not to speak of Henry Stanton. That held true until only a few years ago, when they had their own falling-out.
I can’t say I wasn’t delighted when Buckland finally felt the sting of Henry’s betrayal. Henry Stanton would hang his own mother if he thought it would advance his ambitions.
And his current ambition was the society presidency. Same as Buckland’s.
There was no need for introductions. Buckland and Lucy had met many times over the years of his visiting Lyme Regis, and of course Lucy and Henry were well acquainted.
The cold glare she stared at Henry warmed my heart. I could feel the chill just standing beside her.
Buckland was still giddy, hardly breathing through his chatter.
“What a marvel! Look at his claws! The beak is extraordinary; such a cheerful color!”
Buckland circled us; Ajax nervously shifted his weight on my shoulder from foot to foot.
“That orange shade! You said you found a skeleton of the mother? These wings! You wrote that they were leathered, but I struggled to picture it. They are just like a bat’s!
And one can see light through them? How many teeth does he have?
And two types, you said? I assume the mother’s skeleton is in the shop?
The Society is prepared to offer you a handsome sum, of course, to take possession of both. A very handsome sum.”
I raised my eyebrows.
Henry rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Perhaps we ought to sit down, at least, before we discuss the terms of sale.” He stepped forward and reached out a hand. To take my arm? To gesture?
Whatever he meant to do, Ajax didn’t trust it, either. With a sudden squawk, the pterodactyl lunged forward and clamped Henry’s hand in his beak like a brightly colored trap.
Henry yelped, and I burst out laughing.
“So the shell was hard when you first picked it up?” Buckland asked.
We sat around Lucy’s table as I described the egg’s hatching for a third time. She’d poured tea, and I nursed it slowly, glaring across the table at Henry in between answers to the geomagicians’ queries.
“It was definitely hard.”
“Fossil? Or shell?”
“Fossil. Stone.”
“You’re certain?”
Am I? “I—I can’t be certain, no. But it was very hard.”
“Hmm. Very well. And then?”
“And then, all of a sudden, it was soft.”
Ajax sat on his perch with Achilles, waiting patiently for some command. I should give him a snack. He’s being very good.
“Did you do anything before it softened?”
“Not that I can recall.”
Henry cut in sharply. “You didn’t speak? Did you use any magic? Tap your reliq?”
I shook my head. “I only held it in my hands.”
“And the color and texture changed while you were looking at the egg?” Buckland asked.
“I think so.” I frowned. Had it? Or maybe own memory was growing malleable. “I’m fairly certain it changed as I was looking. But it was so gradual, I didn’t notice at first.”
“Aha, see! You didn’t mention that before!” Buckland scribbled a note furiously.
Henry idly ran his fingers over his knuckles and glanced over his shoulder at the pterodactyl.
“Calm down; he didn’t even break the skin,” I muttered.
“Now, when you noticed—”
I threw up my hands. “What’s the point of this?”
Buckland didn’t look up from his notes. “Pardon?”
“I’ve told you all I remember. Why are we going over this again?”
Buckland kept writing, his quill dashing across the parchment. “Obviously I’m trying to see if it can be replicated.”
“Replicated?”
Buckland met my gaze then, his eyes round with surprise. He set his pen down with deliberate care. “The resurrection.”
I swallowed, finally understanding. “You—you think I did something? To make the egg hatch?”
“That’s what I’m trying to determine,” Buckland said, avoiding my eyes.
My throat tightened. “You’re afraid it was some kind of sorcery.” This was precisely what I’d feared.
My thoughts reeled. Daily magic—normal magic—was intention based.
If you burned your hand, you wanted it to stop hurting and to heal. You would touch a reliq and hold that desire, and magic did the rest until the reliq was empty or you released the desire. I want that water to be cold. I want that fire to be lit. I want that tear to be mended.
One of Edgar Murray’s theomagical books had described magic as “the small prayers.” Because magic, as every child learned in the catechism, was rooted in desire. The original sin. The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The punishment for using magic, which Adam and Eve had stolen from God, should rightly be death. Only by Christ’s sacrifice was humanity spared the commensurate punishment for our sin. But under the new covenant, believers could use magic without risking Hell.
Sorcery, though—as best I understood it, which was admittedly little—tapped the very language of creation. It was the breath of life. The Word of God. It was forbidden. Condemned. Anathema. No one burned witches anymore, but sorcerers? We would spit on their ashes and call it grace.
I shook my head. “But—”
“It’s time,” Henry interrupted. “I’m going to do it now.”
Buckland’s mouth tightened, and his eyes held fear as he nodded.
“Time for what?” I asked. “What are you going to do?”
Buckland reached across the table and grabbed my hands. “Mary.”
I was startled by the solemnness of his face. The usual playful light in his eyes was gone.
“As sworn representative of the Geomagical Society of London and the Church of England both, I must ask you nonetheless.”
His grip didn’t slacken. It tightened, pinching the webbing of my fingers.
Under my shirt, my reliq grew warm against my skin, as if I were doing magic. Warm—warmer—then suddenly hot.
“My reliq,” I gasped, and tried to pull my hands free, to move it away from my bare flesh. But Buckland held firm.
“What are you doing to her? Stop that!” Lucy’s chair clattered as she sprang up.
Henry caught her by the shoulders. “It will be much worse for her if you interrupt.”
I squirmed as the reliq singed my skin, and I gritted my teeth to stop from crying out. I refused to give Henry the satisfaction.
“Do you now, or have you ever, worked magic with words of sorcery?” Buckland asked. His eyes bored into mine.
“What?” I gasped. “No. Of course not.”
“Have you now, or have you ever, stolen magic through vampyrism, in service to the Devil?”
“No.” My voice was steadier this time. I understood what this was now.
It was an inquisition. An old, old, old method for rooting out witches and sorcerers—very popular back in the sixteenth century.
After I’d answered the three questions, I would have to show where my reliq hung. So long as the skin was unburnt, I would be declared innocent.
“Have you now, or have you ever, communed with the dead through necromantic magics?”
“No.” I said it firmly, and after a moment, the ammonite on my chest went cold. It was done.
“I’m so sorry,” Buckland said, his hands fluttering. “But of course you understand. We had to be sure.”
“We still need to see,” Henry said, and I glared, cheeks hot as I pulled down the top of my blouse. I wore my reliq over my sternum, and I lifted the ammonite to bare the flesh there, staring defiantly at Henry.
His cheeks heated. “That’s sufficient.”
The skin on my chest was white and unmarred. I’d passed the test.
“Did you two really think she’d done sorcery?” Lucy rolled her eyes. “How would Mary have managed to get hold of a book of spells anyway?”
I glowered. I liked to think that if I wanted to become a villainous sorcerer, I could have found a way. But I thought better of saying so.
“Of course not,” Buckland said, “but President Davies insisted.”
Ah—now that explained why Henry was actually sent along.
Buckland and Henry were known rivals, each the unofficial leader of an unofficial Society faction of like-minded members. Buckland, the Traditionalists, and Stanton the Catastrophists.
If both men returned with the pterodactyl and claimed the same explanation—decidedly not sorcery—it would carry much greater weight than Buckland’s word alone.
Ironic, really, that the two of them had to forge this temporary alliance on my behalf.
I didn’t trust Henry Stanton any farther than I could throw him.
But I did trust that he would put his own ambition first. He wouldn’t have wanted Buckland to have all the glory.
The man who presented a living pterodactyl to the Society would be celebrated for the rest of his life—and it certainly wouldn’t hurt a campaign for president.
I’m sure each of them would have preferred to take the credit alone, but shared glory was better than none.
A sliver of a notion had started to widen in my thoughts, like a seam of light around a doorway. But before I could inspect it further, Buckland leaned back.
“There’s really only one answer left. The simplest explanation.”
Buckland relaxed in his chair, the tension gone out of him.
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“That you didn’t play any part in the pterodactyl’s resurrection. In fact—it wasn’t a resurrection at all.”
I nodded fervently. “Yes, exactly. I really don’t think I had anything to do with it.” I certainly hadn’t done anything magical; my reliq was almost full until I used it to loosen the mother’s skeleton from the mire.
“As you know,” Buckland said, beginning to raise his voice, taking on the tone of the lecturer-preacher he was. I don’t think he could even help himself. Henry rolled his eyes as Buckland gestured.
“I have long theorized that the ancient beasts were distributed to far-flung regions in the wake of the great flood. Scattered to the ends of the earth. But why, some ask—as you, yourself, Mary, have often wondered—if the beasts still walk the earth and swim its waters, then why haven’t they been seen by human eyes?
Why do we have no reports, then, of a mammoth wandering in Tunisia, or a plesiosaur in the Mediterranean?
Perhaps, we have postulated, they simply settled far from civilization, in numbers so small they have slipped through history unnoticed, outside of legend. ”
Buckland leaned forward, and his gaze danced with delight, but his voice was solemn.
“But now, you and your pterodactyl have given me the inklings of a new theory, Mary. A new answer for the riddle. Perhaps, rather than destroy or alter His first creations, as some have claimed…” He glanced, sidelong, at Henry.
“I begin to suspect our Lord God, in His infinite wisdom, simply laid some of His creations to a long and quiet sleep, rather than erase them entirely.”
There was silence around the table. Disapproval—disagreement—radiated from Henry, but not surprise. Buckland must have pitched this theory previously, perhaps as soon as he received word of my discovery.
The theory did make a certain kind of sense, if I squinted hard enough. And it did solve—quite neatly, in fact—that thorny theomagical problem of potential species extinction.
Buckland grinned in triumph as he concluded, “A sort of hibernation, we might even say. A divinely prescribed period of rest. Perhaps following the flood? And you, my dear Mary, have found one that has at last awoken.”
I understood William Buckland better than he knew, I think. I studied the smooth lines of his shoulders, and the looseness in his jaw. He believed it. Buckland really believed this theory.
But he wasn’t a fool, either—he knew, we all knew, that this theory would dearly please the Church, further tying geomagic and faith together in the braid that Buckland was always working to strengthen.
He could believe it to be true and believe it was a good strategy. Not to mention his theory would shield me from any accusations of sorcery.
“Yes,” I said slowly. “I suppose you must be right.”
Buckland nodded happily, but I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking at Henry instead, because he was being awfully, awfully quiet, and I didn’t trust it one bit.