A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  “How did you guess?”

  “I saw your face when you got that letter.” He heard her yawn and snuggle down deeper under the covers. “Why don’t you go over to Putney tomorrow anyway? They won’t turn you away, surely.”

  “I might. I can’t decide. Do you think I should?”

  “I think you should. He’ll want you to.”

  “I might try it, then.” He kissed the top of her forehead gently. “Thank you. I’ll sleep now.”

  “Please do,” she said. “You need it.”

  She was asleep again almost immediately: he could hear the shift in her breathing as she slipped away from him. His own eyelids were growing heavy also, and after a few minutes he let them close.

  He was standing in a garden, on a clear, perfect summer’s day. He knew it was summer because of the flowers that were out, and because the overarching sky held a sun that was blissfully warm and unobscured by clouds. A breeze tickled his face, carrying with it the scent of freshly cut grass and, just for an instant, the salt tang of the sea.

  “Wilberforce?” a familiar voice said.

  Wilberforce turned around. As he’d expected, Pitt was standing behind him—not as he’d last seen him, but the way he remembered him, tall and strong and brilliant. Wilberforce couldn’t work out if he looked young again, but he looked himself.

  “Oh, good evening,” he said, although of course it wasn’t evening, not here. It looked to be midafternoon, or perhaps midmorning. It didn’t matter. He was so pleased to see him. “Am I dreaming?”

  “I don’t think so,” Pitt said thoughtfully. “I could be wrong, but I think I’m nightwalking. Strange. I’ve never been able to manage it on my own before.”

  “Really?” Wilberforce looked around with interest. “So this is your mind?”

  “I’m not sure. It could be your mind. Or perhaps it’s one of the places where our minds meet. It looks like the grounds at your old house when we first met, only that’s the Wilberforce oak, and I’m pretty sure that’s my pond from Holwood. I wasn’t able to have it finished before I left, though.”

  “It’s finished now. It looks beautiful. So do the gardens.”

  “Yes,” Pitt agreed. There was a trace of amusement in his voice. “Whichever of us is responsible for the landscape did an admirable job.” He looked at Wilberforce. “I hope you don’t mind this intrusion. I didn’t exactly intend it, but I’m very glad it’s happened.”

  “So am I,” Wilberforce said fervently, then felt himself smile. “And I’m very glad that you came to me, and not some poor unsuspecting soul who had no idea you weren’t pure Commoner through and through.”

  Pitt laughed. It was his old delighted, infectious laugh; Wilberforce hadn’t realized how used he’d become to it ending in a cough. “Next time I’ll pay Fox a visit. It would frighten him to death.”

  “Don’t you dare!” Wilberforce warned playfully. “We need Fox for the abolition bill.”

  “What a Machiavellian politician you are. Very well, who don’t we need?”

  “Um…” Wilberforce cast his mind around for the most committed anti-abolitionist he could find. “Tarleton.”

  Pitt made a face. “Good God, Wilberforce, I can’t visit Tarleton. I do have some standards.”

  “How do you know? You’ve never done this before.”

  “I’ve just decided I have them. I didn’t say I’d decided what they were.”

  “Work them out later,” Wilberforce suggested. The idea had suddenly come into his mind that this was something special, something not unlike a miracle, and it was far too important to waste on trivialities like political rivals. “Race you to the Wilberforce oak?”

  Pitt looked startled for a moment; then a smile spread slowly across his face. “Absolutely.”

  Wilberforce didn’t think he’d ever run faster than he did then, through the swish of the grass and the crispness of the breeze and the wild, joyous irrationality of the world around them both. The tree might have been a mile away, or more, or no distance at all. Although he supposed really they had no physical bodies, he was aware of his lungs breathing in great swaths of air and his feet hitting the soft ground and his muscles stretching pleasurably; yet he didn’t seem to tire. He wondered if he had become young again too, if indeed Pitt had. In any case, as he broke through from the sunlight into the shade of the branches, he saw Pitt’s hand touch the bark at the exact second that his did likewise.

  “Well, that settles it,” Wilberforce said, collapsing to the ground. He didn’t need to—he wasn’t the least out of breath—but the grass was soft and inviting. “This must be your mind. I’d beat you otherwise.”

  “Unless your mind is committed to realism,” Pitt countered, throwing himself down beside him. Wilberforce still wasn’t sure if they were younger—that didn’t seem to matter either—but for a second he caught a memory of chestnut hair escaping from a queue to frame Pitt’s face. “Though I have to admit I’ve seen little evidence of that.”

  Wilberforce laughed, falling back against the grass, and after a second they both were, not because anything was really funny but just for the sheer joy of it. However witty they had attempted to be when they were younger, all their best laughter had really been for that reason.

  They sat there together in the shade of the tree as they subsided into giggles, and the wind in the branches and the droning of a solitary bumblebee seemed to fill all the world.

  “I wrote and asked if I could pay you a short visit,” Wilberforce said eventually. “You know, an everyday corporeal visit. But they told me you needed to rest. Do you want me to come tomorrow anyway?”

  “I think you’ll be too late tomorrow,” Pitt said, with neither regret nor reproach. There was a touch of wistfulness, though. “And if you’d come today, I wouldn’t have been very good company. I’m still myself most of the time, but it’s a great deal of effort to get that to the surface, and lately even my thoughts have been tiring out. This is better.”

  “You’ll get well again,” Wilberforce said, as firmly as he could. “You can’t die while the country is still at war and the slave trade is still going strong.”

  “Tactful as ever,” Pitt said with a brief smile. “But I can, it would seem. It’s not so very difficult, not after what we’ve done. It doesn’t even hurt very much anymore. It’s only that sometimes I’m rather scared.”

  “I know,” Wilberforce said. He’d always known. “But you have no need to be. I told you about the nature of the universe, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, my dear Wilberforce, but you didn’t convince me that you were right.”

  “I was right about you, wasn’t I?”

  “Yes,” Pitt conceded. “Yes, you were.”

  He was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again the wistfulness had cleared. “About the country at war and the slave trade still thriving: I think you’ll find things shifting now that we’ve lifted the shadow from Europe. The war will go on, of course, now it’s been started. But there’s hope now for a resolution, which I couldn’t otherwise see after Austerlitz. Probably the public distrust of Commoner magicians will start to shift, given the changing situation in France, and the fact that there’s no enemy to stir them anymore. It might take a while for the equality that you want, but it will happen eventually. Magic is loose in the world now. It won’t go away again. And the slave trade… I think you’ll come through very soon. I truly do.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “Whether I am or not, it is now in your hands. I’m sorry I couldn’t manage things better for you in the last few years. The enemy was right about that, at least. Now I’m here, a lot of the things I delayed or procrastinated or feared seem ludicrous.”

  “Your mind was on other things,” Wilberforce said. “You did the best you could.”

  Pitt smiled. “Well, that’s not a bad summation of a political career, I suppose. The best I could. I hope I did.”

  “You did,” Wilberforce said firmly. “And the b
est of you was extraordinary. I don’t think the House of Commoners will forget it for a very long time.”

  “Just wait until you finally stand up in Parliament and tell them the slave trade is no more,” Pitt said. “I think it will see something rather extraordinary then.”

  “I don’t care about the world,” Wilberforce said, rather illogically. “I just… I wish you could see it.”

  “I already have,” Pitt said.

  There were a great many things Wilberforce wanted to say then. He didn’t say any of them. They didn’t need to be said, and anyway the garden enveloped in the summer day was saying it for them both.

  “It’s strange,” Wilberforce said after a very comfortable silence. “Usually in dreams you don’t feel the world around you. But the sun feels warm, and the breeze feels cool, and the grass tickles.”

  “This isn’t a dream,” Pitt reminded him.

  “But it’s not real grass. Is it?”

  “I don’t know.” He stretched lazily. “The memory of real grass, perhaps. I’m not very concerned about it.”

  “I’m not concerned either. But it’s interesting, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Pitt said. “And I should certainly be more interested. I don’t know if it’s possible to be sleepy in your own head, but I think I am.”

  “Well, I’m asleep, so I can’t judge,” said Wilberforce. “But I feel as wide-awake as I’ve ever been in my life.”

  “That as well,” Pitt agreed. He leaned back against the memory of real grass. “I think I’m going to have to leave soon.”

  “Why?” Wilberforce asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Pitt said vaguely. For a moment his gaze was far away, and there was something in it that had never been there before. Then he blinked and focused once more on Wilberforce. His mouth quirked in a rueful smile, the way it always did when he had been caught lost in dreams. “In any case, we have a while. May we talk?”

  “I’d love to,” Wilberforce said. His heart felt very full. “What about?”

  “Anything. Politics, people, words, ideas. The nature of the universe. Anything. Everything.”

  “Let’s,” Wilberforce agreed. “Before you have to leave.”

  Wilberforce woke slowly to darkness. In the corridor, he heard the clock striking half past four. He closed his eyes again, but he knew as he did so that there was no one there anymore.

  He came down late to breakfast the next morning, not because he slept late but because he knew what would eventually be waiting for him when he did. He said good morning to his children, admired the stone William had found out in the garden the day before and the picture Lizzy had drawn of a bird, and had some tea and toast even though he wasn’t hungry.

  When the children had run outside to play, shouting and giggling, Barbara sat down beside him. Her eyes were very grave.

  “Wilber,” she said hesitantly. “A rider came half an hour ago from Putney Heath. Lady Hester wanted you to know as soon as possible.”

  Wilberforce nodded. His throat felt tight, but his eyes were dry. “I know.”

  “He died in the early hours of this morning,” Barbara said. “It was very peaceful. The message says he just… departed, like a candle burning out.”

  Wilberforce nodded again, and when he felt his wife’s hand slip over his own, he took it and managed a very small smile for her. “Thank you for telling me.”

  He was very quiet for the rest of the day, and there was an ache in his chest as though something very important had happened to his heart. No tears came to his eyes, though, then or in the long days and weeks afterward. It was not until one month later, as he watched the coffin containing his friend’s body being borne through tens of thousands of mourners to the doors of Westminster Abbey, that he suddenly thought of what in the world Pitt would say if he could see it, and of the quick, self-conscious smile that would dart across his face as he did so. Then he cried as if his heart would break.

  That evening, Fina sat down at the desk in her room at Montagu Square. She took up her quill, set it to paper, and began to write.

  They came the summer I was six, she wrote. My brother and I were alone in the house when strangers broke in, armed with muskets and knives. I never knew what happened to my parents.

  England

  23 February 1807

  The last time Fina had been in the House of Commoners, the enemy had been there with her. England had been new and strange and hostile, and so had its people. They would always be strange, possibly, and many would always be hostile. But she had been in London now for many months, and had come to know many of them. She had worked with them, as an abolitionist and as a magician. If there were enemies aplenty, they at least looked at her from behind their own eyes, and she had no difficulty looking back at them from behind her own.

  Now, as then, she sat behind a screen that muffled the voices that came from the public gallery. She had looked into the gallery through Wilberforce’s vision a few times, just to see the crowds, but on the whole she was content to listen, the walls vibrating at her back and her stomach a low flutter of excitement. It was time.

  Many of the women sitting beside her were fellow abolitionists—Hannah More and Marianne Thornton among them. Hester was not beside her this time, although Fina had a letter from her folded in her reticule. The king had granted Pitt’s dying request to bestow upon Hester an allowance that would grant financial independence. She had lived in Montagu Square for a time, and Fina had boarded with her, but recently she had left for Wales and would soon be leaving the country altogether. Her youngest brother had been wounded in battle, and she was planning to take him to Italy to recuperate. Fina suspected, though, it would not be the farthest she would travel. She had not spoken of the dragon—not then, when speaking of her plans, nor scarcely at all in the long year since she had stood on the rigging and set it free. But sometimes Fina had seen her staring into the distance, and there had been something in her blue eyes that she had not seen before. A fire, or a light where a fire should be. And her plans were slowly, inevitably, beginning to draw her toward Egypt.

  “Are you going to find the dragon?” Fina had asked bluntly as they said goodbye. It had been a gray, drizzled day, with a cold wind from the north.

  “I don’t know,” Hester had answered—unsurprised, as though the question had been natural and obvious. She gave Fina a smile that glinted with mischief. “But I suspect so. And if I don’t, I suspect I’ll find something else.”

  Fina gave her a tight hug and didn’t even notice that the younger, taller woman hugged her back so fiercely that it drove the stays of her new London dress into her ribs. “Be careful,” she said.

  “Never,” Hester returned cheerfully. “But you be safe. And let me know if you need me.”

  For a while after the enemy’s defeat Fina hadn’t known if she would stay in the country herself. She was free, and the world was open to her. There were rebellions to fight in Jamaica, after all, and she had promised to return for her friends. In her heart, she was still a revolutionary and not a reformer. And yet in the end she decided to stay, at least for now.

  “I’ve seen what can be done with blood and war and magic,” she said to Wilberforce. “I’m not afraid of it. But I want to see what can be done with words first.”

  “Thank you,” Wilberforce said, and she knew without having to enter his head that he meant it. Wilberforce’s head and heart were always on display for all to see. “I don’t just mean for trying to find a peaceful way to freedom. We need your words more than anybody’s.”

  “One year,” she warned. “If I feel that words are useless after one year, I’ll return to Jamaica on my own.”

  Her book had come out within three months. She told the country about the transatlantic voyage, the loss of her childhood to spellbinding and slavery, the war of magic in Saint-Domingue. The stranger was not mentioned, of course, but he wasn’t important anymore. What mattered was the feel of the elixir turning her bones to lead, the
cut of the whip, the songs and whispers of her friends in the dark before dawn. What mattered was that the slaves of Saint-Domingue had burned down their oppressors, and Toussaint Louverture had risen out of the flames and taught them to rebuild, and Dessalines had torn a flag in half and founded a nation. What mattered was that she was free, and so many weren’t.

  The country listened, as they had listened to Olaudah Equiano’s memoirs earlier, and to every pamphlet Clarkson had ever given them. Not everyone, and not to everything, but perhaps it was enough. At the very least, nobody could pretend anymore that they hadn’t heard.

  One year. The world had turned in that year. The war continued, and it was still a war of magic, but without the dragon and the kraken and the dead, the magic was less dark, less terrible. The shadows had settled, though it was no longer fashionable to bind them, and with so many new shadowmancers on the battlefield it was no longer even necessary. There was a sense that Europe had pulled itself back from the brink of something unknowable and frightening. They had found themselves in an age of magic, and they were learning it even as it grew about them.

  And on that night, a cold gray night after a long, cold day, they were here to vote on the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

  Wilberforce sat beside Thornton on the benches of the House of Commoners, as he had sat for so many nights over so many long years. This one felt longest of all. Everybody present knew the real reason they were here, and both floor and gallery were packed with people eager to take their place in history. But before history could be made, more-ordinary business demanded attention, and as the night wore on and the light from the setting sun had been replaced by the glow of candles, it had seemed for a while as though history was going to be put off in favor of the everyday running of a country.

  Wilberforce listened with dutiful attention to all of it, even a very dry bit about the alteration of a general election result in Chippenham. His mind, however, had already been hours ahead, waiting at the end of the session for whatever it might bring. In some ways, it was no different from every other year when the same bill had been raised. But it felt different this time. The climate had changed—the bill had already passed in the House of Aristocrats. Stephen’s flag bill had cut the legs from the slave trade virtually overnight. The shadow that had lain behind its opposition had been removed. This time, everybody dared to hope, would be the last time.