Chapter 30
Chapter
I was still troubled come morning, as Henry and I worked to sort his collection of ammonite and nautilus fossils to determine which I should resurrect first. Henry had furnished three rooms of his London townhouse with glass tanks in varying sizes.
Only one was filled: a tank we’d outfitted with carefully arranged mud and ferns for our Scottish salamanders.
We were waiting on the water for the rest now, but Henry expected it to arrive by tomorrow midday, along with a shipment of small bait fish and mealworms. In the meantime, we sorted, and I worried.
I loved Lucy. She was my dearest friend. And I agreed with her cause. Truly, I did. The system was broken. Or perhaps even worse, the system was operating just as it was designed.
But in all the years Lucy had been involved with the Prometheans, I suppose I’d considered the movement mostly academic: a reformist analogue to the Geomagical Society, essentially.
I realized now that had been simply my own willful misunderstanding.
Lucy had described plenty of the group’s actions to me: protests, and boycotts, and even violent clashes between Prometheans and authorities.
But it had always been so far away from our little world in Lyme Regis; it was easy to dismiss. And I couldn’t dismiss it now.
Because I kept seeing the cold look in the Promethean leader’s eye, at the end of the meeting, and the current of…what was it, exactly? Resignation, perhaps—a general acceptance that things might escalate. Probably would escalate.
And yet, I knew the desperation that drove people to the slicks, and the bone-deep shame that followed.
I knew the sting of handing over your own magic, unspooled from your own soul, and for what?
Mere pennies. The way it made you feel small, and hopeless, and empty.
I’d tasted the poison of the slicks enough times to know that Lucy—and the Prometheans—were right.
If Edgar’s proposed legislation really could get the reliq-rate raised, it would be a huge boon for those who sold in the slicks just to buy their daily bread.
I must have looked troubled, because Henry glanced up from across the table of swirling ammonites. “What is it?”
I waved a hand and scrawled in my notebook, Experiment 54: compare ammonite and nautilus diet. “It’s nothing.”
Henry cocked his head. “Tell me, please. Maybe I can help.”
We were in the upstairs study of his home, which was decorated like the rest, in that fusion of velveted luxury and scientific clutter that the geomagicians seemed to favor.
I chewed my lip. Frankly, I was curious to hear Henry’s thoughts on Edgar’s proposal.
I closed the notebook. “You know, I assume, that Edgar Murray has introduced a bill to raise the national reliq-rates?”
Henry snorted. “I told him it’ll never get out of the Lords.”
“It’s a good idea, though, don’t you think?” I pressed softly. “The rates haven’t been raised…well, certainly not as long as I’ve been alive.”
“It is a fair proposal, yes,” Henry said thoughtfully. “And I’ll certainly agree the reliq-system is long overdue for reform. Even more reason the bill won’t succeed.”
“Why not?”
“Because too many people with power benefit from the system as it now operates—our Society itself, for one. We provide raw materials to the Reliquemical Guild, which in turn become reliqs. If the payout rate was raised, that would impact our own coffers.” He shrugged.
“And the Society is only one such example. Even if it were to somehow make it through the Lords, half the members of the Commons hold investments in my own bitumen mining companies—which, I’m sure you’ve already realized, would be affected by such an enormous ripple in the reliquary economy. ”
“Of course.”
His smile suggested he knew I had realized no such thing, but was kind enough not to say.
“You think it’s pointless, then?”
He started to say something, and then, thinking better of it, pursed his lips and said, “Let me put it this way. Edgar and Lucy can do all the politicking and protesting they’d like.
But they’re still trapped in an old stone wheel, one set rolling down its hill long, long ago.
The most Edgar can manage through his bill is to shift that wheel’s path by a centimeter.
Maybe an inch.” He shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s pointless, I’m saying it’s not enough. ”
I huffed, bristling in defense of my friends. “And when exactly did you get so interested in reform?”
“Since I created the machine to make that wheel obsolete,” he said coolly.
Ah. Right. “The Loom.”
“Imagine”—his gray eyes were eager—“a network of mills, all running my Looms, stretching all across the country, offering fair, high wages for low-skilled labor—far higher than Edgar’s proposal could win for them.”
“And earning you a fortune in the meantime.” I arched a brow.
He chuckled. “Mary, darling, I have a fortune to last a thousand lifetimes. Is it really so impossible to believe I might have other reasons?”
I was so thrown by the darling, I didn’t have a quip ready.
“Anyway, I suspect even Ed knows his Reform Act is bound to fail. Hunt couldn’t manage to get his own bill through the Commons, and that was much less radical, and Hunt a far more inspiring orator than Edgar.” He shrugged. “Ed’s skill has always been in the…subtler aspects of politicking.”
“Then why bring the bill forward at all?”
Henry cocked his head. “Perhaps to prove that such efforts are futile.”
I snorted. “That makes no sense.”
“I’ll say this: I learned a long time ago never to underestimate Ed.” He chuckled. “You’ve played chess with him. You know.”
I smiled fondly. Lucy and I swore off matches with Edgar after being roundly beaten so many times, but Henry persisted. When Henry finally claimed a win, Edgar sent for a stack of books on chess strategy. Henry never managed to repeat his victory.
“Then what is it he wants?” I asked. I could ask Edgar, but I was curious what Henry would say.
Henry rose and walked to the window, looking down at the street with hands clasped behind his back.
“Change,” Henry said softly. He was quiet a long time, staring out the window, before turning back to face me. “Do you remember the mouse?”
I blinked at the shift in topic, but I knew what he meant.
Henry and I once captured a mouse, with plans to run it through a series of cognitive experiments.
Edgar vowed never to speak to us again if we didn’t let it go.
We released the mouse at once, traumatizing Henry’s butler.
It was the only time I’d ever heard Edgar raise his voice.
I nodded.
Henry ran a hand through his dark hair. “When Buckland and I designed the Loom, I must confess we were thinking only of the Society. Of the potential power of the manifold reliqs. It was Ed who recognized the greater potential—what power it might give the powerless.”
Henry didn’t need to say it. I knew we were both thinking of the viscountess.
Edgar and Lucy’s mother. Her sickness, and the servants sent away.
Lord Merlton hiding the reliqs and taunting his wife to use her witchery to save herself if she could.
And the two pale-faced children hiding in the shadows, jumping at their father’s tongue and cowering from his fists.
Henry sighed as he shrugged. “I can’t claim to know all of Ed’s plans—”
“He’d probably say we were too simple to comprehend them anyway,” I quipped, and tried to tell myself it wasn’t to make Henry smile.
But it worked. “He would indeed.” Henry laughed fondly and then gave a small shake of his head, as if to clear the heaviness from the air. “Now. Would you like to see the tank I’ve commissioned for our ichthyosaur attempt?”
I gasped, abandoning all thoughts of reform, and magic-collecting looms, and Prometheans in my wake as I raced to follow him through the doorway.
Henry spread word around that I was assisting him on a comprehensive survey of British Ichthyosauria.
I was well positioned to assist in such an undertaking, having made most of the significant finds, so no one questioned our cover story.
Though, admittedly, the geomagicians of London had far more pressing things about which to speculate than what exactly Henry and I were getting up to together.
By the end of my first full week in town, nearly every geomagician in Britain had descended on Palmanaeus House, drawn by the irresistible lure of a living, breathing pterodactyl specimen.
The Society was full of noise and bluster, arguments and examinations and men in every corner, furiously drafting papers and proposals, all working to put their own mark on Buckland’s grand hibernation theory.
Buckland once joked that if you put three geomagicians in a room, only two will ever agree at any given time.
So I was surprised, and frankly, a bit appalled at how easily the professor’s theory was accepted among the geomagicians.
Granted, there were already a few splintering theories and theomagical debates around the subtler nuances.
For example, one faction swiftly declared that hibernating species were gradually being triggered to wake by a warming in the climate, while others were becoming convinced the wakings were related to patterns of human migration.
The timeline, too, was subject to great debate.
Buckland, in his presentations, posited that small pockets of ancient species must have been waking in random, staggered fashion through all of human history, which would explain tales of dragons and sailor reports of sea monsters in the deep.
Others—Charles Lyell chief among them—posited instead that species woke in repeating cycles, and that we had likely entered one such cycle.