by David Liss
“What monster?” asked Mary, her eyes suddenly narrowing.
“Byron’s tortoise,” Lucy said. “It was transformed into a raging beast and set upon us.”
Mary’s expression darkened. “Lucy, for the love of God, we must leave at once.”
“What is it?” Mr. Morrison asked.
“If what you say is true, then Lady Harriett is here, upon these grounds.”
In a swift motion, Mary removed one of her shotguns and held it in her hands. It looked absurdly incongruous—she, the pale, ethereal beauty, taking hold of the weapon.
Mr. Morrison watched her for a moment then took one of his own weapons. “They’re here?”
She nodded. “I can feel them. I’ve loaded my gun against their kind, but my little trick won’t work on Lady Harriett, you know. She is too powerful.”
“I know,” he said. “After I killed her late husband, she found a way to indemnify herself against it, but not the others.”
“Have you discovered what will work on her?” asked Mary.
“Not yet,” he said.
Mary turned to Byron. “Why would she choose to come here? Have you made any arrangements with Lady Harriett? Have you leased her any land? Is anything here hers?”
Lucy understood. At Lady Harriett’s estate, Lucy’s charms had been ineffective because there had been wards against them, wards that only the rightful owner of a property could employ. Newstead ought to be neutral, but if Lady Harriett had legally acquired the rights to part of it, that part might be protected.
“Oh, put the shotgun away, Mary,” said Byron. “It is unbecoming. Yes, I leased her some land. She wished to use part of my property to establish a hosiery mill, of all things.”
Mr. Olson’s new mill. It came full circle. “So much for your speech in defense of the Luddites in the House of Lords,” Lucy said.
“Oh, I never really believed most of that. It sounded quite right, of course, but there is politics and there is money, and I know which I value more, so when Lady Harriett made her offer, my lukewarm sympathy for the Luddites cooled entire. In any case, I owed her a debt, and Lady Harriett is not someone to refuse.”
“There must be something in the contract that grants her power here,” Mr. Morrison said to Lucy. “She will first try to make you give her the pages. She will want to take them from you by force, but her first choice will be to own them. Lucy, you cannot let her have them. Better to destroy the book than to let her have it.”
Lucy clutched the pages to her chest. “If we destroy the book, we will have no weapon against her. If I cannot defeat her, I cannot safely return my niece to her mother. We must get away until I’ve had a chance to learn what the book will teach me.”
Mary smiled at Lucy. “I admire your courage, Lucy, and applaud your sentiments. I shall lead the way. In the meantime, I suggest we do something about Byron. He is a menace and unpredictable.”
The latter part of her assessment certainly proved correct, for when they looked around, Byron was nowhere to be found. After a brief discussion it was agreed that he could not easily be discovered if he wished to hide in his own ruined abbey, and that he possessed little that could harm them and nothing they needed. While he might have run off to alert Lady Harriett to their presence, taking the time to search for him would be a self-defeating effort. In short, their first priority was flight. Byron was a problem that would wait for a more opportune moment.
Lucy held out her hand to Mary. “We might be separated. I must have what is mine.”
With no more hesitation than a few rapid blinks, Mary handed the final pages to Lucy. They felt as heavy as iron in her hands, as alive as a beating heart, as vital as a bolt of lightning. She did not even look at them except long enough to see the telltale signs of Mr. Blake’s designs. They felt so powerful, they frightened her, and they seemed to be gathering power, quickening in her grasp, urging her to action. The pages wanted to be looked at, to be understood and deciphered.
She closed her mind to them. New ideas would only confuse and distract. There would be time enough for that when she was alone. Instead she took the pages and placed them with the others. She rolled them up into a tube and placed them into the secret folds of her frock, where she kept her herbs and charms and tokens. The secret pockets were getting heavy with old and discarded tokens of her adventure that she dared not throw away, for she could not know what she would need to survive.
Mary led them out of the hall toward the main entrance. The body of the horrible tortoise lay there, already covered with an impossibly thick halo of flies. More flies crawled upon it, countless flies, an impossible number, so that the body appeared a living, writhing, buzzing mass. It turned Lucy’s stomach, and she hesitated to approach, and in that moment of hesitation she saw movement in the darkness. Four figures, cloaked in shadow, and yet vaguely familiar. In the flickering light of Mrs. Emmett’s lantern, Lucy recognized the revenants she had seen in Lady Harriett’s house, led by the gray-haired Mr. Whitestone.
“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Whitestone, stepping forward. “Lady Harriett says we are to take your book, young lady. Please hand it to me.”
At that instant, Mr. Morrison and Mary raised their shotguns.
Mr. Whitestone managed a nervous smile. The other three revenants looked at them and then at Mr. Whitestone, then at the ground. They seemed dazed and disoriented, and Lucy understood they were so impossibly old that their sense of self had in some manner altered. They had been in the world so long, they were no longer of this world.
“You cannot harm us,” said Mr. Whitestone. “There is no point in resisting.”
“If we cannot harm you,” said Mr. Morrison, “why did Lady Harriett not come herself?”
“We can harm you, and we will,” said Mary.
“No,” answered Mr. Whitestone. “You would not use our own secrets against your own kind. You have never wished to be one of us, but you cannot be so lost as that, Miss Crawford.”
He stepped forward, reaching out as if to take Mary’s weapon away from her. She fired. The heavy scent of rotten eggs filled the air, and Mr. Whitestone staggered backwards, a massive wound open in his chest. Shot had scattered among the other revenants, but their wounds were smaller, less brutal. They bled all the same.
“This feels odd,” said Mr. Whitestone, looking down at his wound. “It does not close.”
They had filled their shotguns with sulfur, mercury, and gold, allowing the shot to penetrate and preventing the wounds from closing. The same understanding crossed Mr. Whitestone’s pale face. He staggered forward and fell to his knees. He looked up at Lucy, as though she were the one who had fired upon him. “All along,” he said, “it was you. And here is the other secret.” But he said no more. He pitched forward, face-first onto the cold stone.
The three remaining revenants looked at one another, then looked down at the body, then looked at Mr. Morrison and Mary, who was in the process of discarding her spent weapon for the fresh one. Perhaps the creatures were so outraged that one of their own had been, impossibly, killed, but Lucy did not think so. Even at that moment she could not help but believe they wanted to die, to end their existence, these creatures who had walked the earth for so many centuries that they could no longer remember who or what they were. They leapt forward and Mary and Mr. Morrison discharged their weapons nearly simultaneously. Mr. Morrison then cast his spent gun aside and took the fresh one, and fired it into the mass moving toward him.
Smoke engulfed Lucy and her party. Neither Mr. Morrison nor Mary made an effort to reload their weapons, and Lucy suspected the process was too complicated to do in the midst of a conflict. She had no idea what they intended to do if the revenants were not all down, but as soon as the smoke began to clear, she saw that they posed no further threat. Two of them were still, and one—a woman with thick white hair—lay on her back, her gown covered with blood, her fingers twitching like a dying beetle. It sickened Lucy to look at it, but in a moment the creature stopped
all motion. It lay still, eyes impossibly wide.
Lucy looked at Mary to see her reaction, to see if killing her own kind had taken a toll, but on her face was only grim satisfaction. “Let us reload and continue,” she said.
“Mary—” began Mr. Morrison.
“You cannot understand, so there is nothing to say,” she said, not unkindly. “This is why I am here. Not to talk, not to negotiate, and not to capitulate. I am here to end them. Now reload.” She tossed one of her weapons to Mrs. Emmett, who caught it easily with one hand. “You know what to do?”
“I’ve always known,” said Mrs. Emmett.
Mary smiled. “In case you needed to protect Lucy from me.”
Mrs. Emmett betrayed neither pleasure nor pride. “I did not think it likely, but I thought it best to be prepared.”
Some ten minutes later, after a lengthy process of mixing shot, gold dust, sulfur, and mercury into their weapons, they were ready to proceed. Lucy was frightened and determined, but she also felt strangely useless. She might have owned the book, but this was Mr. Morrison and Mary’s adventure. She was merely the person who needed protecting. They were a team. She hated the feeling of being left out, and she realized, much to her own surprise, that what she wanted was to impress them—to impress Mary, to be sure, but to impress Mr. Morrison most of all. She wanted to be worthy of him, to be as useful as Mary made herself, but even after all she had learned and done, she was still weak and ignorant and helpless.
“Will there be more?” asked Lucy.
“That depends on how much they want to die,” answered Mary.
They walked out the front door, and Boatswain, the ghost dog, remained there, but it flared its ghostly nostrils in Mary’s direction, let out a hollow bark, then a whimper, and fled.
They took only a few steps before Lucy realized the coach in which they had arrived was no longer there.
“Very well,” said Mr. Morrison. “It does seem rather hopeless, but it’s not. Not entirely. Here is what we are going to do.”
He never had a chance to explain his plan, however, because right then men emerged from the woods. There must have been a dozen of them, their long rifles raised to their eyes as they advanced like soldiers upon a battlefield. These were not revenants, but mortal men.
“They cannot harm me,” Mary said quietly, “but I cannot disarm them all before they fire their weapons. The chance of harm coming to you or Mr. Morrison is too great.”
“What do we do?” asked Lucy.
“You may have to confront Lady Harriett now. Tonight.”
“I am not ready,” Lucy said. She felt light-headed and terrified. She was not ready for this. The confrontation could not come now. “I don’t know what to do. You and Mr. Morrison know what you are doing, but I do not.”
“You will have to be ready,” Mary said. “The book is yours. Be worthy. Take what the book offers. Remember what I told you. Twelve pages and twelve enchantments. Power and luck. Do not depend upon them, but know that the pages want you to succeed.”
“You are ready,” said Mr. Morrison. “You know more than you allow yourself to believe.”
His voice cut through the buzzing in her head, the cold grip of fear. There was something else. A warm feeling she hardly understood until she realized that he held her hand firmly in his own. He smiled at her, and Lucy managed a smile in return. She would be ready. She had to be.
One of the men stepped forward to collect their weapons. They took Mr. Morrison’s guns and bag, and they took Mary’s guns, but they did not search her or Lucy other than to ask them to remove their pelisses to make certain they contained no weapons. Lucy still had the pages of her book and many more things besides hidden in the folds of her frock. She did not know that she would be able to put what she had to use, but it made her feel better to have at least something.
Half the men moved behind them, with two at each side, and two in front. They were then marched along a path around the back of the estate. Lucy huddled close to Mary, and Mr. Morrison walked behind the two of them, trailed by Mrs. Emmett, who hummed softly to herself.
The men led them through a narrow path that bisected a thick wood. Off in the distance they saw glowing lights through the trees, and Lucy perceived that they were coming upon some sort of habitation. In another moment or two she began to hear a repetitive and discordant clicking noise, one she had heard before. It took her a moment to recognize it as the beat of stocking frames. They were hard by the newly built mill. It was low and flat and wooden. Despite the late hour, it was in full operation.
The path took a sharp turn around a thick and ancient copse that had been obscuring their vision, but when they came out into a clearing the mill was revealed, larger than Mr. Olson’s old mill, nearly twice as large. Though it had few windows, the light blasted out of them as though the building were on fire. It was also guarded. Here was a mill that would stand against the Luddites. Armed men stalked the perimeter, and there was even a tower from which one man stood with a long rifle. The guards showed no alarm at their arrival, however. Near the door, a burly man with a few days of beard raised his upper lip in a sneer.
“Got them, did you?”
“Likely so,” said one of the armed men.
“We was told to expect only three women.”
Lucy looked around, not knowing what he meant, but walking alongside was Sophie Hyatt. How long she had been with them, and how had she joined them without the armed men knowing or objecting? Lucy turned to her. “What do you do here, Sophie? It isn’t safe.”
She shrugged. Whatever her reasons, she was unwilling to write it upon her slate.
These men would hardly let Sophie go, but Lucy wished to try something.
She could not simply react to whatever circumstance Lady Harriett presented. She would need to plan ahead, form her strategy, anticipate her enemy’s actions. While the armed men talked among themselves, Lucy took the deaf girl aside. The others watched as the girl wrote a few things on her slate. Lucy nodded, and Sophie wiped away her words with her palm. And though she hated to take the risk, Lucy did what she had to. She put herself at risk, she put Sophie at risk, and worst of all, she put Emily at risk, but to not take that chance would be to condemn them all.
“You will not betray me?” Lucy asked.
Sophie shook her head. Never, she wrote on her slate.
It would have to be good enough. Lucy prayed it would be.
At last the guards opened the door for them, and the armed men gestured for them to go inside. They did not follow. Lucy stepped inside and saw a mill much like Mr. Olson’s previous establishment, though better lit for the nighttime work, and far, far bigger. There was row upon row of women and children and the elderly, working their stocking frames as overseers walked the space between them, cudgels at the ready. It was an almost deafening tumult from the machines as they churned out their hosiery, and the noise was interrupted only by the occasional thwack of a cudgel or the cry of a stricken worker.
Mr. Olson now came up to them, hobbling upon a cane, one leg bulky under his trousers where it was no doubt wrapped in bandages. He was red in the face, and his eyes were sunken and ringed with alarming blackness, and yet there was a look of contentment, almost childlike happiness, on his face. Lucy had never seen him so happy, and she could not help but see his mood as a dark sign.
“Ah, Miss Derrick,” said Mr. Olson, waving his hand in a vestigial hint at a bow. “Reunited at last. And I am told Mr. Buckles is on his way, too.”
Lucy snorted. “You cannot still think to force me to marry you.”
“We are past that, I fear,” he said. “What happens now is all in Lady Harriett’s hands. She wishes for you to meet her in her chamber. Follow me, though we shall not move too quickly, I fear. I’m not so limber as I once was.” This last was said without bitterness. Indeed, he barked a little laugh.
“I think we are all quite comfortable here,” said Mr. Morrison. “Well, perhaps comfortable is overstating it
a bit, but we are as comfortable as we should hope to be. I think if Lady Harriett wishes a word with us, she ought to come out here.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Mr. Olson, leaning heavily upon his cane. “You have been rude to me in the past, and I am grieved to see you would continue this infamous tradition.”
“You may call it rudeness if you like, but I am determined. Now run along and fetch her. We are waiting patiently.”
“It is too loud,” said Mr. Olson. “The noise will distress Lady Harriett’s ears. She has condescended to speak with you, and it is wrong to reject her generosity.”
There was something in his tone that seemed familiar to Lucy. It took her a moment, but then it occurred to her that he was acting and speaking like Mr. Buckles. Could it be that Lady Harriett had worked some sort of enchantment upon him, and she now worked it upon Mr.
Olson?
“No doubt this entire building is well warded,” said Mr. Morrison, “but she will have particular protections in her chamber. I don’t think that suits us. As for the noise, if she doesn’t care for it, send your workers home.”
The expression of good humor dropped from Mr. Olson’s face. “Have you any idea what a night’s labors is worth?”
“No,” said Mr. Morrison. “Nor do I care. But I believe I understand what Lady Harriett’s patronage is worth to you.”
Mr. Olson stared at him, and then turned to limp off to the far end of the mill. In a few moments the overseers removed whistles, and began to let out a series of sharp tones. The workers looked about in surprise, but were soon setting down their hose and exiting the building. It took perhaps a quarter hour for them all to depart, and soon the five of them found themselves standing alone in a cavernous and deserted building. Without the workers and their sounds, the space seemed larger and even more forlorn. The overseers were gone, and strange though it was, Lucy would have felt comforted by their presence. Perhaps they might have acted as a restraint upon Lady Harriett.
