by David Liss
“I could not endure that I should be made to grieve as others expected, that my grief must be a scripted and public spectacle, a stage play as much as an experience. I stayed at home. Then, only a few days later, Bob appeared before me. I had been having many difficulties in my work, unable to figure out a technique for combining text and image in the manner I wished. Bob told me how to do it. He invented this technique I now use. I did not know what to do, and then Bob appeared, explained it, and lo, I knew what to do.”
Lucy smiled. “It is the most literal experience of inspiration I have ever heard.”
Mr. Blake looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time.
“Mr. Blake,” she said, “I am confused. You say these are your engravings, and yet you say you have not done them.”
“I am confused as well.” He appeared more amused than anything else. “I have never made these engravings, and yet they are unmistakably mine. I have no followers in my mode of engraving, and even if I did, no one could imitate my style so well that I would not detect it.”
“I was told,” she said, attempting to show no emotion, “that these drawings originate from the seventeenth century in La Rochelle.”
Blake examined them again. “I see nothing particularly French in them, but the paper is certainly aged. There is nothing in these to say that they are not from such a time and place.”
“Mr. Blake, I do not think you are near two hundred years old.”
“I thank you.”
“How is it, then, that these pages can be?”
“I cannot answer that. I can only surmise that at some point in my future, either I or my work shall be in seventeenth-century France.”
“That is nonsense,” said Lucy.
“No,” he corrected. “We know where the pages come from and we know they are my work. It is not nonsense. It is evident. You say it is nonsense because reason tells us that I cannot ever go to seventeenth-century France, but once again that is the reason of Locke and Bacon and Newton. That is the reason of Satan and hell. You cannot doubt your own experience of the world because your reason tells you that your own experience must be wrong.”
Lucy rose and looked out the window of the shop. The day was overcast but not gloomy. She had not yet been outside, and she suddenly felt cramped and constrained, as though she needed fresh air. She turned back to Mr. Blake to announce that she wished to take a walk, but saw that he was very much absorbed in one of the engravings.
“Tell me,” he said to her, “who is Mr. Buckles?”
For days Lucy had wanted to go to Byron, but she’d dared not. Now, it seemed, she did not have a choice, for she needed his help. Her father had made it clear to Bob that Lucy must journey to Harrington, her childhood home, for there were pages there. And he had made it clear that she must not travel alone. She would need an escort, and Mrs. Emmett would not do. She required a man who had proved himself, which could only mean Byron.
There was no one else to ask, so Lucy traveled to Byron’s house to beg him to take her once more to Kent, this time to the home of Mr. Buckles, where Mr. Blake insisted she might find more pages of the book.
Because her reputation had been damaged, and because she must be vulnerable if she entered his house alone, Mr. Blake agreed to accompany her. They arrived at Byron’s London house to discover a string of young ladies loitering on the walk, hoping to capture the baron’s attention. It was a beautiful spring day, sunny and bright, with enough of a breeze to offer comfort. There could be no better weather to stand outside a man’s home, Lucy supposed, though she could not imagine why they did so. Each of these ladies clutched her copy of an identical volume.
Lucy approached one of the women, a girl with heavy features and sallow skin, but whose eyes shone with bright hope.
“I want to see him,” she said to Lucy. “I want only to see him. His work has so moved me, if I may see him and impose upon him to speak to me, I know he will love me.”
“What has caused all this fuss?” asked Lucy, astonished.
“You do not know?” This lady seemed as confused by Lucy’s surprise as Lucy had been by the lady’s ardor. “You have not read it, then?” She held out her book.
Lucy took the book and examined it and discovered it to be the newly published volume of the poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. “He told me he thought it was remarkable. I see you think so too.”
“He told you,” the young lady repeated. “You know Lord Byron?”
“I know him well,” she answered, implying much if saying little.
“He will see you?” the lady asked.
“I believe so,” Lucy answered.
“Will you bring me inside with you?”
Lucy smiled indulgently. “It is not for me to invite strangers into his house.”
“You are wicked not to share him,” she answered.
“Would you share him?”
“I imagine not.”
Lucy pushed past the girls and rang the bell. In a moment, a fatigued-looking servant answered.
“Please tell Lord Byron that Miss Lucy Derrick desires a word. I am unlike these other ladies in that he knows me.”
The serving man appeared skeptical, but agreed to relay the message. He returned and allowed Lucy and Mr. Blake inside. They had remained in a sitting room for nearly an hour when Lord Byron at last appeared in a dressing gown, his hair looking quite wild. In one hand he held a goblet of wine which he swirled carelessly. He took another step, and Lucy observed his movements were stiff and controlled, like that of a drunkard attempting to disguise his impairment.
“Ah, Miss Derrick. You’ve come to call, and you’ve brought me an old tradesman. How thoughtful.”
Lucy felt shame wash over her. Mr. Blake’s expression did not change, but she could not endure that she had brought him here to be so thoughtlessly insulted. Byron was his own man and lived by his own rules, but he had never before been rude to her without cause.
Lucy took a breath to steady herself. Perhaps it was simply her imagination. Perhaps he was not being so cruel as it appeared or his drunkenness only seemed to her like rudeness. “Mr. Blake has been kind enough to attend me. I must ask something of you, Lord Byron.”
“Must you now?” he asked. He began to pace leisurely about the room. “You know, since we last spoke, the first portion of my poem has been published. It has proved very popular with the ladies.”
“I observed that,” Lucy said. The anger began to build inside her. He had no cause to speak to her this way. No cause, and after all the things he had declared. It was unforgivable.
“Yes, I have two or three of them upstairs just now, and there is an endless stream of new ones at the door. Some prettier than others, so one must be careful to choose wisely.”
Lucy’s cheeks burned with indignation. She might have, from time to time, allowed herself to believe that Byron was a more honorable man than her experience suggested. She may have, on occasion, indulged in the fantasy that he would reform and ask her to marry him. She had known these thoughts were flights of the imagination, and yet they had seemed close enough to reality that they had been worth indulging in. But even if she had not deceived herself, and she had never taken Byron for anything but what he so clearly was, this behavior would have been unforgivable. “I wish to know why you would speak to me in this fashion. Are you under another curse that makes you act so?”
He laughed theatrically, throwing back his head. “A curse? No. It is but literary success that makes me act as I do. I am free now to treat all as I like and as they deserve, and that includes you, though you would believe you are owed something out of the common way.”
“What have I done to deserve this rudeness?”
Byron coughed out something like a laugh. “What have you done? I asked you to come to me. I begged you, and you did not come. Do you think I beg others? You ignored me when I wanted you because it was not convenient for Lucy Derrick—the great Lucy Derrick—to call upon a mere mortal such
as Lord Byron. I saved your life. I took blows for you—blows to the face—but does that impress you? Does that instill in you any sense of obligation? No, you are too busy with your gods and spirits and monsters to trouble yourself with me.”
“You must understand the difficulties of a young lady in my circumstances—”
“The devil take your circumstances!” he cried, and flung his goblet against the wall. The glass shattered, and the wine sprayed out like blood. He went to the mantel above the fireplace and swept away all the pottery in a wild, angry thrust, sending a wave of ragged pieces washing across the floor. “The devil take you. Do you think the ladies who queue up at my house trouble themselves about their reputations? No, but Lucy Derrick will not be moved by love.”
Lucy was too astonished even to speak. Could it be that he really thought this so? Could he really not understand what motivated her? How self-absorbed, how childish he must be to condemn her. It was horribly shameful that this drama must play out before Mr. Blake, and Lucy dared a glance at him, but he only continued to smile blankly.
“I’d thought better of you, Lord Byron,” she said quietly.
“Oho! I’ve disappointed you, have I? Tell me, why did you come here today? Did you wish to see me, to spend time with me, as I begged you to? I think not. Or rather, did you wish to ask me to take you somewhere, accompany you on another of your adventures?”
“That is why I came,” said Lucy, her voice betraying her uncertainty.
“That is why you came,” he echoed. “You wished more from me. After all I have done, what have I received in return? Nothing!”
“Lord Byron—” Lucy began.
He would not let her speak. “Nothing!” he cried again. “I have done and done and done for you, and you have only trifled with my feelings. Those women who come to my house ask for nothing in return. I cannot imagine why I should not enjoy their company rather than enduring yours.”
Lucy’s face was now set hard. “Because you claim to care for me. Because a gentleman ought to aid a lady he cares for without demanding she turn whore in compensation.”
“It is a convenient arrangement for you, I’ll wager.”
Lucy turned to Mr. Blake. “Come sir, let us go.”
Mr. Blake rose and smiled at Byron, but it was a chilling smile.
They left the house, Lucy tense with rage. Could she have been so wrong about Byron? Had she allowed herself to misunderstand his beauty as goodness? She did not know. She only knew that now, other than Mr. Blake, she was utterly without allies in London.
31
MR. BLAKE WAS A REMARKABLE MAN. THERE WAS NO DENYING that. He saw things and knew things that no ordinary man could see or know, but he was old and eccentric and, Lucy believed, somewhat unpredictable. She would hate to ask a man of his age to accompany her on a dangerous adventure, and all the more so when she could not know if she might rely upon him. All of which meant that she now did not know how to proceed. Mr. Blake said Lucy’s father wanted her to seek pages of the Mutus Liber at Harrington, her childhood home, but she could not go alone. She had not the money to travel, and she could not ask Mr. Blake, who was poor, to help her in that regard.
That night, after Lucy had picked at her dinner of roast chicken and parsnips, she sat by the fire with Mr. Blake. Mrs. Blake had gone to bed, and now Lucy sat with the engraver opposite her, also with his side to the fire. Across the room, Mrs. Emmett sat with her head slumped, snoring noisily.
Lucy stared at the flames while Mr. Blake told her about the curious mythology that spread throughout his many books. He told her stories that seemed dreamlike and allegorical and yet, strangely not, filled with curious names and a pantheon that evoked classical sources as well as the Bible. Lucy could not keep the names or the struggles clear, but the stories were infused with the themes that preoccupied Mr. Blake: the fight of the human spirit against the oppression of cruel and unnatural law and custom, and the struggle of divine truth against satanic reason. Even if the details eluded her, Lucy took pleasure in the enthusiasm in Mr. Blake’s voice, and she admired, even envied, his excitement at his own creation.
It was a testament to Mr. Blake’s comforting presence, not a sign of failure as a storyteller, that Lucy found herself drifting toward slumber in the comfortable armchair by the fire. She was not quite asleep, but in a state where Mr. Blake’s words took on strange and unpredictable meanings, and she drifted slightly away from herself.
Then Mr. Blake was silent, and Lucy snapped awake. There was another person in the room, sitting in a chair once empty, directly across from Lucy and Mr. Blake, and farthest from the fire. Lucy blinked twice, unable to credit what she saw, for it was Ludd himself. She had not before seen him so clearly or so directly. The room was well lit, and he did not seem to twinkle in and out of existence as he had the previous times she’d gazed upon him, and yet he did not seem to be entirely there either. He was not transparent or insubstantial, the way one might suppose a ghost to look. It was more that looking at him was like looking into a fire. She could not look long, for it strained and clouded her eyes, and she found it was most comfortable to look at him from the corners of her eyes.
Mr. Blake appeared to have no such difficulty. Lucy could see that he stared at him directly, and he blinked in wide-eyed astonishment.
Mrs. Emmett was awake now, and she too had no trouble gazing upon him. “Look at that,” she said, as though observing a dog doing a remarkable trick. “How unexpected.”
“All depends upon you,” Ludd said to Lucy.
“Can you think I don’t know it?” she answered. The bitterness of her own voice surprised her.
“I hope you do,” Ludd said in his unaccountable, shifting voice. “I hope you comprehend what happens if you fail. I may fail. You may not.”
“We do not stand for the same cause,” said Lucy. “You arranged for Mr. Perceval’s death. You hoped to cause the death of hundreds more in rebellion and unrest.”
“We thought it necessary,” Ludd said. “We failed. Now your role is even more important.”
“What shall happen if Miss Derrick does not stand with you?” asked Mr. Blake.
“Death,” said Ludd. “Blood. Machines. Enslavement. An end to everything you love. An end to all that tempers Lady Harriett and her kind. An end to England as any of us have understood it.”
“There must be another way,” said Lucy. “A way for the machines and the magic to coexist.” She did not know how strongly she believed this until she spoke it. “That is my cause. Peace and compromise. That is the third way.”
“There can be no peace while Lady Harriett lives,” Ludd said. “You must destroy her for there to be peace, and if you compromise, how can you destroy her?”
“Then what do you suggest I do?” asked Lucy.
She asked it to an empty chair.
Lucy was on her feet in an instant, walking about the room as though Ludd might somehow, absurdly, be hiding somewhere.
“Damn them!” Lucy cried, hardly caring how wanton she sounded. Then, after a moment, she said, “Forgive me, Mr. Blake.”
“No forgiveness is required,” he answered with his customary ease.
“I am so frustrated!” Lucy cried out, feeling like a petulant child. It was the unfairness of it all that drove her mad. “Why can they never speak plainly? Why can they never tell me what must be? Why are they always so opaque and vague and maddening?”
Mr. Blake smiled at her. “You must be patient with them, Lucy. Our world is as difficult for them to see as theirs is for us. That creature did not seek to vex you. It struggled mightily to be clear, but you were just as slippery and evasive to it as it was to you.”
This notion startled Lucy, but it also comforted her. It made her feel better to know that at least Ludd was not toying with her.
“I must go to Harrington. I must go to Mr. Buckles’s home and take possession of whatever it is he has.”
“Yes,” Blake said.
“Oh, yes,” Mrs.
Emmett agreed. “Your father does not wish for you to go alone, so why not ask his brother to accompany you?”
Lucy stared at the woman in surprise. “He had no brother. My Uncle Lowell would never do such a thing for me, and in any case, he is no blood relative, but my mother’s sister’s husband.”
“Not that,” she corrected. “Not his brother of blood, but of fellowship. His brother of the Rosy Cross.”
Lucy stared at her in wonder and confusion. She felt as though the very floor upon which she stood bucked and twisted wildly. “What do you say, Mrs. Emmett? My father was a Rosicrucian? He was in the same order as Jonas Morrison?”
“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Emmett. “Can you not hear him say so? They were fond of each other. Your father regarded Mr. Morrison as though he were his son.”
Lucy sat down heavily in her chair. After all that had happened, after all she had seen, this revelation astonished her more than any of the rest. Everything Lucy knew about her own life, it seemed, was a lie.
Mr. Blake agreed to escort Lucy to Mr. Morrison’s house, but he sensed Lucy’s somber mood, and rode over in complete silence, his hands in his lap, a sympathetic smile on his lips. Lucy did not wish for him to be there, and she regretted the necessity of an escort. She did not want anyone to witness the confusion and abasement she would be certain to undergo. But there was no helping it. She could not sacrifice her duty for her pride.
Lucy had never before been to Mr. Morrison’s town house, had never even seen it, but he was a man of means, and it was never difficult to learn where a rich man lives. She and Mr. Blake called at his house at two in the afternoon and could only hope that he would be home. Whatever Lucy must face, it would be less horrible than her treatment at the hands of Byron. To some degree she knew that Byron had been lashing out, feeling nothing more complicated than frustration. If she had learned anything about him it was that he was childlike in his belief both that his desires ought to be satisfied the moment he felt them, and that he was justified expressing himself in any way he chose. Whatever she had imagined to be her feelings for him now seemed empty and foolish. She had been a fool. She knew that now. Perhaps she had known it all along, and she condemned herself for it.
