The Medici Mirror

by Melissa Bailey

  ‘And then I knew, without needing to hear it from him, just how he felt about me. I smiled at him then and in the sudden gesture something opened up. The restraint which had been sitting there, marking the distance between us, evaporated. James stopped speaking and looked at me for a second. Then he handed me a large box. As I took it from him, my fingers brushed against his and I blushed deeply. I felt the heat of the blood in my face and for a second I paused, perhaps aware that if I went any further, this mix of emotions, guilt, embarrassment, excitement, desire would stain and mark me for ever after. I paused, only for a second, and then I made my choice. I ripped the lid off the box and looked inside.’ She paused and smiled at me. ‘But you already know what was in there, don’t you, Johnny?’

  I smiled back and then nodded slowly.

  ‘The most beautiful pair of green shoes. You may not know this but they were very fashionable at the time. Henry Maybury made them. He was employed by James at the factory and his designs were quite something. The pointed toes echoed the sculpted heel, the leather was soft and luscious and the embroidery intricate, complementing the colour of the uppers but also interspersed with lighter threads. James said that the shoes were inspired by the bewildering beauty of my eyes, their vast array of depth and colour. His words, not mine.’

  Amelia stopped and flushed lightly once more. ‘I remember that I was unable to speak at first, unable to really absorb his words, his gesture.’ She paused and smiled. ‘I remember holding the shoes in my hands, staring at them. James took them from me, put them on the floor beside him and unlaced my work boots. His fingers moved deftly, with certainty. Then he slid the boots off my feet slowly, one by one, and replaced them with the shoes. I don’t know how he knew but somehow they were a perfect fit.

  ‘I think in that moment I felt, overwhelmingly, all that he had done for me. He had helped me so much after the death of my mother – slowly, over time, he had put me back together piece by small piece, through the repetitive, small gestures of every day. And this knowledge circled down and around me in those moments in the assembling room.’ Pause. ‘Perhaps it was in that moment that I was lost. But I resisted for a long time after that. He was unhappy with his wife, I knew that. They were companions who didn’t much like each other’s companionship any longer. They lived separate lives and yet they didn’t separate. James loved his son, and wanted to keep him near. But it was difficult for him, I know that, to remain with Elizabeth.’ She breathed out slowly. ‘Quite how much I didn’t realise until the very end.’

  I coughed and reached for my necktie again, running my fingers around the collar. ‘So, that’s how it all began?’

  Amelia nodded. ‘The shoes. Exquisite, expensive beyond most women’s wildest hopes. But of course I couldn’t really wear them anywhere. If I had they would only have attracted suspicion. And if my father had seen them, he would have had a fit.’ She laughed. ‘He’d have thought I had spent a whole year and a half’s wages. And some of his, too. So they had to remain in the factory. I don’t think James gave it a second’s thought before he had them made; that I really wouldn’t be able to wear them. He had only been thinking of the best gift he could give to me. Something that he knew I would love and treasure. And so, tragically, they became something to hide. In fact, they became an embodiment of everything that was between us: symbols of love and friendship. But ultimately hidden, shrouded in darkness.’

  I thought instinctively of the underground room and the first time that Tara and I had gone down there, when we had seen the green shoes hanging suspended from the velvet ribbon over the side of the mirror. Then it had seemed strange to find them there, unfathomable that such beautiful things should be trapped, mouldering in the dark. Now it made perfect sense.

  ‘How did you find the underground room?’

  ‘James discovered it. It had originally been a cellar, used very occasionally for storage. But it wasn’t a convenient place. It had a steep, narrow staircase and no proper lighting, so it had rarely been used. Then James’s father had constructed the storage cupboards in the dispatch room, one of which was around its entrance. So while it was never boarded up, people forgot about it. But James remembered it.’

  I nodded. Much of this was as Ophelia and I had thought.

  ‘So, as I said, that was the beginning. What I didn’t realise was that it was also the beginning of the end.’ The candlelight beside Amelia flickered and jumped, a sudden bright splash of light. I looked around the room for the first time in a while, absorbed as I had been by Amelia’s tale, and noticed that it was much brighter than before, light spilling in around the edges. Amelia frowned.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, sitting upright.

  The candle’s flame began to judder violently even though there was no draught. ‘I have to go.’ She stood up abruptly, poised to leave. Her black dress, in sharp contrast to the growing light behind her, made her look like a dark shadow. It reminded me of something I had been meaning to ask her.

  ‘It was the mirror, wasn’t it?’ I felt my voice rise. ‘That ended things, I mean.’ Suddenly the candle flame rose higher, taut and straight, as if it too was straining to hear what, if anything, Amelia would say.

  She nodded. ‘But it’s not all as you think. I’m sorry, Johnny. I cannot tell you what you do not know. Keep looking.’ Then she smiled at me. ‘I will help you when the time comes.’ Then she turned and disappeared into the light.

  As the brightness continued to grow, the room seemed to fill with a rush of noise and air. I felt a heaviness in my head, which permeated down through my body. My eyelids fluttered and closed, then fluttered open again. As I felt my body move in and out of unconsciousness, my last thoughts were about the mirror.

  34

  THE SUNLIGHT STREAMING through the French windows stirred me.

  I lifted my head off the wooden table and winced. My neck was strained and stiff and my head pounded. In front of me stood a half-empty bottle of red wine, a stained wine glass, and the photograph of Amelia and James from the factory wall surrounded by the letters it had concealed. I surveyed the scene momentarily before leaning back in my chair and rubbing my eyes. I remembered reading the letters again late last night at the dining table but I didn’t remember falling asleep.

  Through the windows, the garden looked sad and ravaged. A stunted tree stood at its far end and the grass, touched by winter’s lifeless fingers, was browning in clumps. But the sun peeped tentatively over the boundary wall, flooding the patio with bright white light and giving heat to the pots in front of the glass. The hyacinths and daffodils, already sprouting greenery, looked well on the way to flowering. Perhaps spring was coming after all.

  I yawned and stood up, the Batters print above the table catching my eye as I moved: the beautiful black and white symmetry, the stockinged feet, one above the other, the tantalising, dangling stiletto shoes. I smiled and closed my eyes. But instead of that image another formed in my mind. Green shoes suspended over the edge of the mirror. With that came the recollection of the dream I had had and then Amelia’s parting words to me. You need to keep looking.

  I frowned as I headed into the kitchen. As I thought about it all, the banging in the back of my head intensified. I opened the fridge and took out coffee, spooning it absent-mindedly into the espresso maker. I filled it with water and put it on the hob. I poured milk into a pan and began to heat it. I would look over Tara’s file again. Maybe something I hadn’t noticed so far would jump out at me. I thought again about James and Amelia, and their love affair. I thought of the first time they had met, of their connection. I thought of his intensity, his gift, their complicity, their love. What had happened to them? What exactly had happened to undo it all? I knew that it was somehow connected to the mirror. I felt it with certainty. Catherine had done something to it. Perhaps she’d touched it, as the Italian woman had suggested, with the darkness she seemed so familiar with. Perhaps she’d given it some kind of arcane power. I thought of it in the basement of th
e factory, waiting in the darkness.

  Perhaps waiting for me, as it had waited for James.

  By evening, I had trawled through Tara’s file twice more and uncovered nothing new. My eyes flitted lazily over the text, now familiar to me, but kept drifting back to the photographs contained within an article about James – the death portrait, which was always fascinating to me, but also to the one of him standing upright and alone, dressed in his customary three-piece suit. It was not the first time that I had stuttered and faltered over these images. There was something familiar about the dark, brooding eyes, something which I had previously put down to the fact that I had seen this man before in my dreams. The earlier shock of that discovery had eclipsed everything else, including the feeling that I was now experiencing, that I had, in addition to the dream, recognised this man, this photograph, from somewhere else.

  I got up from the table and grabbed my coat and keys. I had to get back to the factory as soon as possible. I looked at my watch. Ten to seven. It was unlikely that anyone would be there at this time on a Sunday evening. But I would be cautious, nonetheless. With that I pulled on a pair of trainers and left, slamming the front door shut behind me.

  When I arrived at the factory it was in darkness. If anyone had been there during the day, they had now departed. The square was deserted, but still I opened the outer doors cautiously, checking over my shoulder a couple of times. But all was quiet and still. Turning on just a few lights, I made my way to the stairs at the opposite end of the floor, climbing the stairwell until I was standing in front of the bank of photographs. My gaze moved over the prints: a group of machinists, smiling, a small gathering of bearded, sombre men, a man in a flat cap, smoking a pipe outside the front of the premises. Scouring the rows, I eventually came to the one I was looking for and felt a tremor of excitement in my stomach. It was entitled ‘Director’ and dated 24 May 1896. It showed a solitary man with dark eyes that glowered at the camera. I placed the image from the article in the paper next to the one on the factory wall. No doubt about it, it was the same photograph. And the man in both pictures was James Brimley.

  I reached forward and unhooked the image from the wall, leaving a pale empty square in its place, outlined by dust trails. It didn’t look as though the photograph had been removed since it had been hung there. I turned it over in my hands, my fingers trembling with anticipation, and unhooked the clasps that held the photograph in its frame – just as I had done with the one of Amelia and the factory workers. Slowly, deliberately, holding my breath, I removed its back and looked inside.

  I was instantly disappointed. There was nothing there except the photograph and the sheet of glass in front of it. I sighed. I had been so sure that I was on the right track. That, just as with the photograph of Amelia, there would be letters behind it. Replacing the picture frame, I hung the image back on the wall. James Brimley stared down at me once more, his shoes shining brightly, his black hair slicked back away from his unsmiling face. I took in the three-piece suit. The suit that I had seen many times before, in photographs, in my dream of James and more recently on myself, during my conversations with Amelia. I looked at James’s eyes again: the heavy lids, the irises dark beneath, and the merest wisp of an idea began to form in my brain that perhaps I did, after all, know where to look. I stared at the photograph, at the deep-set eyes. I had seen their brooding darkness, before, and not only in my dreams. I had seen them when I looked into the mirror. They were the same eyes that stared back at me, as if they were my own.

  I turned and made my way down the stairs and across the ground floor. My head was suddenly filled with the idea that the mirror could tell me something. I paused for a moment in the storage cupboard, taking two candles and a box of matches from the ones that Tara had found there. Then I pulled open the door to the underground room and, before I could change my mind, began to walk down the stairs. The darkness was intense and I struck a match and lit a candle as I walked, trying not to break the rhythm of my strides. Seconds later, I reached the bottom of the stairs.

  I stood stationary for a moment, the darkness of the corridor pushed back by the small pool of yellow candlelight around me. I struck another match and lit the second candle. The flame leaped high and the darkness seemed to recede even further. I turned momentarily, looking back up the stairs to the dull rectangle of light formed by the doorway at the top. As always, it looked very far away. I swallowed, the thick smell of dampness catching pungently in my throat, and not for the first time in this place I fought the urge to retch. I opened my mouth and took a shallow breath. I repeated the action a couple of times. Then, turning slowly, I made my way into the underground room. My steps were hesitant, the light blooming ahead of me and giving me a vague sense of comfort. The mirror loomed large against the wall to my left-hand side.

  I placed the candles on the floor, one level with each end of the mirror, moving slowly and purposefully. I told myself that if my actions were conscious, deliberate, nothing could happen to me. There was nothing to be afraid of. I breathed in deeply, looked up and stared at the surface of the mirror, at its deep grey mottling, its ink blooms of darkness, its initials, markers of lives gone by. I tried to put everything that I knew, or thought I knew, out of my mind, resolving only to focus on myself and my reflection. I looked over the murky surface, searching for my eyes, and eventually found them.

  As usual, the glass corrupted my image. The blue of my eyes was leached of colour, dyed black. I took a step forward and looked at the rest of my reflection, holding my breath. I smiled and I could just about discern a dark smile coming back at me. I continued to look at my eyes, my face, waiting for something to happen. The seconds ticked past and once or twice I heard the soft click-clack of my watch, its hands turning in circles, marking time in the darkness. But beyond that there was nothing. I was in a noiseless room, looking for a spark of something I had seen before that would perhaps lead me somewhere. I concentrated and watched my own black eyes. The more I watched, the more I studied myself in the mirror, the less I felt any connection to the face I saw there.

  I sighed. This was not the way I had felt the last time I was here with Ophelia. Then I had felt an almost overwhelming mixture of emotions. Now I felt strangely disconnected. I smiled again and the dark face in the mirror smiled back. I looked at the face, intrigued and repulsed. But it was just my face darkened and twisted by the mottled surface. A rush of frustration flooded through me. I wasn’t feeling anything. So what was I doing? It was pathetic, ridiculous. With a sudden rush of irritation, I punched the mirror’s surface hard with my fist. Its whole frame juddered and rocked back and forth, creaking on the ancient metal chain suspending it from the wall. The release felt good and I struck it again. The same judder and creak, the same moaning sound as the mirror rocked precariously against the wall.

  And then a different sound, almost the fluttering of butterfly wings. I thought of Amelia and, a second later, of James. Then the sound was gone and with it the fleeting thought. I took a step back from the mirror and looked around me. Had I heard something fall to the ground? I stooped to grab one of the candles from the floor and, as I did so, my hand grazed a piece of paper beside it. I picked it up, certain that it had not been there when I had arrived in the room. It must have fallen to the floor when I hit the mirror. The paper felt warm to the touch. I opened it up, raised it closer to my face and saw that it was a letter, written in green ink.

  35

  London

  August, 1898

  My darling,

  I am sitting at my desk in the drawing room in Bloomsbury Square, pen and paper in hand, and my son Thomas is playing nearby in front of the fire. Elizabeth is visiting friends from church, and so we men are quite alone in the house. I hope you know that I would never say these things to hurt you, that I would never seek to remind you unnecessarily of my domestic circumstances. But the darkness of my thoughts is almost overwhelming and you are the only one with whom I can share them.

  F
or the last half an hour, perhaps, I have been staring at my son, my beloved son, playing with his thaumatrope. I am sure, my darling, that you must have come across such an object when you were a child. It is, you will remember, a disc with an image drawn on each side, held on opposite ends of its circumference by pieces of string. The disc is rotated to wind up the strings and then released. As the strings unravel the disc spins quickly and the two pictures on its sides appear to combine into one. It is a simple type of optical illusion. The pictures are interchangeable and so Thomas has been amusing himself with an assortment. The first had a bare tree on one side, its leaves on the other. When the pictures are spun, a tree complete with leaves appears. Or seems to. The next picture had a bird on one side and a cage on the other. As you can now imagine, when the pictures are spun the bird appears to be in the cage. Similarly, we have had flowers and a vase, producing flowers in a vase.

  As I watch my son now, the picture he is spinning has a man on one side of it. This man looks neat and innocuous. His hair is short and straight and he is clean-shaven. Bland, one might even call this man. On the other side of the picture is wild hair, dark eyes and large eyebrows. Bizarre, I’m sure you’d agree, when looked at in isolation. But when the picture is spun, the innocuous man is transformed into a creature resembling a devil (no doubt inspired by Mr Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). At first I found it rather bewitching to watch. However, as I continued to do so, time and again witnessing the transformation of the man into a monster, the more peculiar yet pertinent this image seemed to me. And I have become possessed, truly possessed by fear.