Ash glanced over at her, his pale blue eyes giving no sign that the question was anything more than casual.
“He touches things,” Lily replied evenly, trying not to think of the electric brush of his fingers on her skin.
“What do those powers have in common? Something that your ability does not share.”
Lily felt her patience thin.
“You might as well just tell me. I’ve never been any good at tests.”
“I doubt that.”
“You may inquire for my records at Mrs. Finch’s Academy for Young Ladies, if you think I’m lying.”
“The assessments you received there weren’t tests. They were hoops you were instructed to jump through.”
Lily felt a smirk tug at the corner of her mouth, despite herself. It was a cuttingly accurate statement.
“What do Sam and Lord Strangford and Miss Deneuve all have in common that makes them different from you?”
Lily suppressed a sigh and blurted the first answer that came to mind.
“They’re always on.”
“On?”
“Their . . . gifts. Sam seems to be able to communicate with all manner of creatures anytime he likes. If the dead are around, Estelle can receive messages from them. And Lord Strangford . . .” She hated the brief tightness in her throat when she said his name. She forced herself to speak past it. “Lord Strangford’s ability manifests itself anytime he touches something.”
“And you?”
“I never know when I’m going to see something. The visions come, or not, as they like. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.”
“You do not control when your visions occur. What, then, do you presume does?”
“I don’t presume anything. I’ve never thought about it.”
Ash stopped. They had reached the end of the lane.
“You have had this power all your life and you have never once stopped to ask yourself what it is that determines whether you have a vision, or do not?”
“I was generally too busy trying to stop people from getting hurt or dying to worry about philosophy.”
“Or you were wishing it would stop.”
Ash’s words, delivered with bald simplicity, cut like a blade. Lily stepped back as though he had in fact struck her, her chest tight.
“How would you know that?”
“Who could live in the grip of a power like yours and not, at some point in time, wish it was gone?” He reached out, his hand lightly touching her arm. “I have called it a gift, Miss Albright. And it is a gift. But that does not mean it must always be a welcome one.”
He moved his hand away and motioned forward, the gesture practiced and gentlemanly. They stepped from the lane out into the current of men and horses and engines that flowed up and down Tottenham Court Road.
It was one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, a chaotic and ever-moving river of life. The flow of bodies reshaped itself around them like water passing around stone. It was an unnatural feeling for Lily, who as a born Londoner had always plunged into such flows, melding herself into it as smoothly as possible. To deliberately neglect to do so—to become, instead, an obstacle that the moving bodies were forced to avoid—was an uncanny sensation.
Ash seemed unperturbed.
“You may not have asked the question of the cause of your visions in the past, but I have put it to you now. How would you answer it?”
It was a line of inquiry she had no desire to pursue. Something in her rebelled against it, pushed her to abandon this conversation and lose herself in the anonymous safety of the crowd that continued to move around them.
She forced herself to stay. She would play along for a while longer. There was no time for her to find another source for the knowledge she needed.
“I would say it was like a reflex. A cough or a sneeze,” she replied, unable to keep all of the impatience from her tone.
“Reflex implies an initial cause. You cough to expel matter from your lungs. A sneeze is triggered by dust in the air or a feather to the nose. What’s the feather for your vision?”
“I don’t know. It could be anything.”
“Come, now. Surely you’ve looked for patterns in the past. It would have been the sensible way to try to rid yourself of the thing—determine what triggered it and avoid such stimuli in the future. And you are a sensible woman.”
Lily felt that quick, defensive anger return again. He was trying to walk her into a box, like a child tugging another through the family hedge maze. She didn’t have time for this.
“Why don’t you just tell me whatever it is you’re trying to get at?”
He showed no sign of being offended or taken aback by her directness.
“I believe I know what your feather is, Miss Albright.”
“And?”
“I don’t believe it will be an easy concept for you to grasp. Simpler minds adopt it readily, but your mind is anything but simple.”
“Try me.”
“God.”
An omnibus clattered by. An oyster girl brushed past, calling her wares, her path crossing with that of a pair of dandies bent over with laughter at some unheard joke.
“God,” Lily echoed numbly.
“Or dharma. Logos. The Egyptians called it ma’at. In China, I encountered it as the tao. In nearly every system of belief across this world, there is a principle of acausal causality—a connection between events that has no basis in the commonly understood laws of physics, but is no less real. An organizing principle of the universe as fundamental as gravity, but based on meaning. On heart. Call it fate, if you like. The Parliament of Stars.”
A gull cried overhead. A carriage jolted to a halt nearby, releasing a line of finely-dressed ladies who wove their way to a milliners. Somewhere nearby, a motorcar honked, adding another note to the symphony of noise and movement that surrounded them.
“You’re saying you believe my visions are triggered by . . . fate.”
“Miss Albright, we are speaking about the realm of miracles. Your visions. Sam’s chatter with the birds. Lord Strangford’s touch. These are impossibilities by every physical law we know. Yet here you are. Here men and women like you have always been, since the beginning of human history. We have always had miracles, and miracle-workers. If you are not bound by the linear nature of time, the regular rules of space, then what principle does move you? It must be some greater force, and the tao is as great as they come.”
Her head was spinning. Was it because of this wildly unexpected turn of the conversation, or simply the disorientation of being the only still point in a sea of moving bodies, carriages and apple carts?
“I just want to know how to make it work.”
Ash smiled. There was patience in it and a hint of sadness.
“Miss Albright. If fate is your feather, then your visions are already working. They are not sneezes. They are emanations from the source of all meaning in this universe, and as such, they are infused with purpose.”
The quick, old anger returned again, hotter than ever.
“If they have a purpose, I’m either a terrible failure, or your fate has a twisted sense of humor.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because every time I try to change something I foresee, it happens anyway. Every time. So what am I supposed to conclude? That I’m inept? Or that this is all just some rotten joke?”
She couldn’t keep the sneer from her tone. This side of her was uglier than anything she usually let out, but something in Ash’s calm as he tore open the fabric of her reality made it impossible to care about social niceties.
“What if changing it was never the point?” he replied.
The ground beneath her feet seemed to shift. Lily’s anger shivered away.
The shoppers and clerks and loafers and dog-walkers continued to weave around her, but for the first time since they had started this conversation, Lily felt the world go still.
“What exactly does that mean?”
; Ash laughed.
“Oh, my dear girl . . . I suppose there are few better places for tackling the problem of suffering than the middle of Tottenham Court Road, but I fear I’ve thrown far more at you already than you asked for, or expected. There will be ample time to discuss all of this—with, I hope, more leisure, and more space for the necessary contemplation—when you are ready. As I told you before, the door has always been open. You may walk through it any time you choose.”
“Why?” Lily demanded. “Why would you offer that to me? You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know enough.”
“You mean that painting, don’t you? The one you told me about before. It isn’t me. Your wife couldn’t possibly have painted me. She died before I was born.”
“Says the young lady who sees the future.”
There was a brightness in his eyes that made Lily rather certain he was laughing at her. It infuriated her.
She needed more than this. She needed an answer, now, not months or years down the road when Deveral had been hung and Estelle murdered.
“You said there was more than one way to bring a vision about. Something faster than study and practice.”
“Yes. There are ways. You could try scrying. And there is the Wine of Jurema, which for other charismatics has acted as a shortcut to a greater sense of their potential power. But there are often . . . unintended consequences. You must know, however, that none of these techniques will allow you to see only what you choose. Fate is your feather, Miss Albright. No matter how a vision comes about, whether it simply happens or you drive it by your own will, something quite outside of you will determine what you see. As for what you are meant to do with that knowledge . . . perhaps you are the herald who warns people of what is to come, granting them time to set their affairs in order. Perhaps the struggle itself is the rub of it—the very effort to change things, even though it appears to fail, could have an impact on the world you couldn’t possibly discern. Or perhaps, now and again, you may be meant to succeed.”
Could that really be true? Had the point of her visions never been to try to stop the events she foresaw from coming to pass? Were they meant to serve some other purpose? The notion was revolutionary. It also begged a vital question.
“How would I know the difference?” she demanded.
Ash smiled.
“You won’t.”
His answer left her speechless.
“I’m afraid I must hurry to another engagement,” Ash apologized. “May we continue this conversation another time?”
“Right. Another time,” Lily replied automatically, as her mind spun with unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions.
He bowed.
“Good afternoon, Miss Albright. I do hope you will call again soon.”
He stepped into the crowd and was gone, swallowed into the rolling mass of people as though he had simply blinked out of existence.
EIGHTEEN
LILY KNEW ONE PLACE where she would certainly be able to learn more about scrying and the Wine of Jurema, the two methods of provoking a vision that Robert Ash had mentioned during their talk.
The enormous library at The Refuge.
She would not go.
She knew what Ash wanted of her. Though he had not pushed the issue, Lily had no doubt that his goal was to lure her to join Strangford and Sam and who-knew-what others under his tutelage, where she would be guided along a years-long path of discipline and study that would eventually see her reaching some mystical state of perfect acceptance of who and what she was.
That wasn’t going to happen.
Lily would never be at peace with what she could do. How could she? What sort of person could make peace with a power that showed them the worst the future had in store without granting them the ability to change it?
Perhaps it did have another purpose, as Ash had suggested. But if whatever higher power was pulling the strings didn’t stoop to share the plan with Lily, she felt under no obligation to play along.
No, she wouldn’t be going back to The Refuge, not if it could possibly be avoided. She was certain there was somewhere else in London she could come by the knowledge she needed.
After Ash had deserted her on Tottenham Court Road, she headed directly to Guildhall Library, a space she was certain had been designed to intimidate the less-than-scholarly. The massive collection was housed in a building modeled after a cathedral, complete with soaring, buttressed ceiling and naves lined with shelves instead of saints.
The catalog had no entry for the Wine of Jurema, nor did it offer a lead on scrying. She had better luck when she pressed a flustered librarian directly.
“If we had anything on that, it would be filed under folklore,” he said. “But we don’t. Perhaps if you made an application to one of the learned societies . . . presuming, of course, that your project is of sufficient scholarly value,” he added, with a skeptical look at her fashionable walking dress.
Lily was quite certain no learned society would find her current project sufficiently scholarly. Thankfully, she knew of a folklore archive that did not require a letter of introduction for her to access.
She need only knock on the door.
A crisp, clear evening had fallen over the city as Lily climbed the steps of her building on March Place. The bite in the air tasted far more of winter than spring.
The chill cutting through the fabric of her gown lent a greater urgency to her task.
She quickly climbed to the first landing and rapped at the door.
“Who’s there?”
Estelle’s tone was uncharacteristically sharp.
“It’s me,” Lily called in reply.
The door flew open. Estelle was wrapped in her dressing gown. Her ubiquitous turban was missing, revealing a cap of thin brown hair cut as short as a boy’s, streaked with gray. She had applied a bit of cosmetics to one of her eyes but not the other.
“In, quickly.”
Lily darted through the door, which Estelle slammed shut behind her. Lily envisioned Mrs. Bramble glaring up at them through the floor.
“Sorry, darling. I thought you were one of them,” Estelle explained, striding across the drawing room to the hall, leaving Lily to follow in her wake.
“One of who?”
“The guests! They’re not supposed to be here for at least another hour, but it wouldn’t be the first time one took it in his head to pop in early. I’m usually dressed by now, but that bother with the billows this morning put me behind.”
Of course—the séance. Lily had nearly forgotten that Estelle was hosting one of her events that evening.
“So you see, darling, I’d love nothing more than to visit over a little vermouth, but I’m afraid I’m in rather a rush at the moment.”
“Actually, I came to call on Miss Bard. But if it’s a bad time . . .”
“Gwendolyn? Oh, no—she’s just holed up in the study, playing with those gruesome little dolls of hers. I don’t know how I could find a place for them out here that won’t have house guests shrieking and dropping their glasses.”
“They are meant for study, not decor. As I have told you several times before.” Miss Bard’s voice rang out cheerfully from the room at the far end of the hall.
“You could at least study something less macabre,” Estelle retorted.
“Says the woman who speaks to the dead for a living.”
“The dead aren’t macabre. They’re mostly just confused, the poor dears.”
Miss Bard appeared in the doorway.
“Do come in, Miss Albright. Let us leave Miss Deneuve to prepare for her performance.”
The folklorist’s study was a tiny space, little bigger than a dressing room. The dimensions were made more narrow by the bookshelves which lined every wall from floor to ceiling. A single window let in the last of the evening light, but the gaslights mounted on the walls banished the rest of the gloom.
The shelves were heavy with volumes packed toget
her with stacks of journals, bound papers, and sturdy cardboard boxes. Several such boxes were scattered about the table that served as Miss Bard’s desk. Tucked inside, resting in nests of tissue paper, were the “gruesome little dolls” Estelle had mentioned.
“Isn’t that Punch?” Lily asked, surprised, recognizing the puppet’s characteristic hooked red nose and peaked cap.
“It is indeed. A complete set of the characters. I had it off an estate sale in Buckinghamshire—the gentleman’s father was a Professor who performed the show as far off as Glasgow. The figures must date to the late 18th century. They are in remarkably good shape, except for our friend Jack Ketch. He’s nearly lost his arm. Can’t have a one-armed hangman, can we?”
“Are you starting a puppet theatre?”
“Oh, no!” Miss Bard chuckled.
“Then what will you do with them?”
“Not set them out in the drawing room, apparently. Though I certainly never intended to. None of my collections are intended for display, though Miss Deneuve does insist on reviewing them in case she finds something to liven up the mantle. I’m relieved she decided these weren’t to her taste. They really ought to be kept out of direct sunlight as much as possible.”
“So you are studying Punch and Judy?”
“Indeed I am.”
“But what do Punch and Judy have to do with folklore?”
“Goodness!” Miss Bard exclaimed, smiling. She put another stitch into the black-cloaked hangman, tugging the thread tight. “The narrative is simply packed with Old Britain. I mean, there are still clear connections to the Italian source material, but that couldn’t have remained intact for very long. Now it’s all trickster archetypes and ritual sacrifice. Anyone who doesn’t peg Crocodile for the dragon of the medieval mystery plays clearly hasn’t read their York Cycle. Never mind all that death and resurrection . . . they might as well just make the figures out of corn and call them the harvest gods.”
“I see,” Lily replied, her own lack of familiarity with mystery plays and harvest gods leaving her unqualified to make any further comment on the matter.
Miss Bard didn’t seem to mind. She snipped her thread, then set Jack Ketch down in his box, popping the lid on over his masked face.
The Fire in the Glass Page 26
