The Fire in the Glass

by Jacquelyn Benson

  “I rather doubt you stopped by just to have your ear chewed off about the syncretism of traditional English entertainments. So tell me, how can I help you?”

  Lily crossed her legs, adopting a casual tone.

  “Are you by any chance familiar with the term ‘scrying’?”

  “Of course I’m familiar with it,” Miss Bard exclaimed. “It’s hardly obscure. How could it be? It’s still practiced by nearly every adolescent female in Britain at some point or another.”

  “It is?” Lily didn’t bother to hide her surprise. “But they didn’t have an entry for it at Guildhall.”

  “Oh? A prestigious collection curated by eminent men did not cover a practice that largely belongs to women and young girls? How very surprising.” Miss Bard’s tone was droll. “When you were a girl, were you ever told that if you lit a candle in front of a glass on Halloween night and gazed at your reflection, you’d see the man you were going to marry?”

  Lily hadn’t been told that, but she had overheard similar tales being passed between other girls at Miss Finch’s. Presumably, they hadn’t thought Lily would have any need for it, as she couldn’t possibly marry anyone worth the trouble.

  “That’s scrying. Watered down, of course, and narrowed in scope to the question of marriage—the only thing young women are permitted to find of importance in today’s society. But still very much a survival of the more ancient practice.”

  “Which I assume had to do with more than husband-hunting?”

  “Oh yes. Most certainly. Scrying means, quite literally, to gaze. That’s more or less all it is—gazing. It can be done in any reflective surface. An oiled plate of brass. A crystal ball. A still pond. A mirror. A bowl full of water.”

  “A bowl of water?” she blurted.

  The morning she had seen Estelle’s death . . . Lily had been standing at her washbasin. She had been about to wash her face, but something about the shimmer of the early morning light on the water caught her eye, making her pause for a moment, and then . . .

  Then she had slipped into a vision.

  “Certainly,” Miss Bard replied. “That would have been very common in ancient times. Bowls were likely made specially for that purpose out of precious metals, to make the liquid within even more reflective.”

  Scrying. She had been doing it without even knowing. But she had washed at that basin hundreds of times before. What made it different this time?

  They are not sneezes. They are emanations from the source of all meaning in this universe, and as such, they are infused with purpose.

  Lily pushed Ash’s words from her mind. She couldn’t afford to wait for an emanation.

  “How do you get it started?”

  “There’s not much of a trick to it. Oh, some of the old stories had you climbing backwards up the stairs before you begin, or waving a candle in front of a mirror and chanting ‘Bloody Mary’. But that’s really another thing entirely—a summoning. No . . . for scrying, it’s simply a matter of entering the right state of mind. Sometimes a candle or some other source of light serves as a focal. You watch it, in silence, until some other fire appears in the glass and the truth opens up to you.”

  A fire in the glass . . .

  Lily tried to hide her disappointment. This didn’t sound like a reliable method for achieving her goal. To simply sit in front of a mirror . . . she’d done that a thousand times in her life and almost never had it resulted in an incident of foresight. There was nothing in what Miss Bard was describing that promised more control of what a vision might show her. Too much was still left to . . . what had Ash called it? The Parliament of Stars.

  Lily wasn’t feeling well inclined toward the stars at the moment.

  “So that’s it, then? Just sitting in front of a mirror and . . . looking.”

  “Precisely.” Miss Bard smiled. “You’re not trying to figure out what your future husband will look like, are you?”

  “No,” Lily replied quickly. “I most certainly am not.”

  “Has it anything to do with why you’re worried about Miss Deneuve?”

  Miss Bard’s tone was casual, but Lily’s senses sharpened.

  The older woman smiled. Her smile was always rather pretty, plump and full. Lily could now see how it was also threaded through with tension, worry tugging at the fine lines around her bright brown eyes.

  “You must know that Miss Deneuve is . . .” Her voice hitched for a note. “That she is the most important person in the world to me. You are a fair actress, Miss Albright, but I am particularly sensitive to any indication of a threat to her. I can hear it in your voice when you speak of her. I suppose I must assume that you have good reason to keep the nature of this threat to yourself?”

  Lily swallowed thickly.

  “I’m . . . sorry.”

  “I see.”

  The folklorist cleared her throat. She picked the box with the hangman up from the table and slid it into its place on her shelves.

  “I hope it is understood that if there is any other way in which I might be of assistance, you need only ask.”

  Lily stood.

  There were so many things she wanted to say, promises that ached to pour from her lips, offering some kind of explanation or solace.

  She kept her mouth shut.

  There was only one vow she could make. I will do everything in my power to stop it. But was that true? Would she really do all that she was capable of in order to save Estelle?

  Or would the fear, all the years of guilt and grief, get the better of her?

  “Thank you for your time,” she said, the words flat and rote.

  Miss Bard reached out. She clasped Lily’s hand, squeezing it firmly.

  “Of course,” she replied.

  Lily left.

  She walked down the hall, forcing herself not to dash. She told herself that she was not afraid to run into Estelle, that she would be perfectly capable of concealing the tumult of emotion rioting through her.

  She was halfway there when a knock sounded at the front door.

  “Drat,” Estelle swore, popping her head out of the bedroom. Her turban was back in place, and her eyes symmetrically lined, but she was still shrugging into an elaborate robe. “Darling, could you do me the enormous favor of playing hostess for a moment? Roger is running late.”

  “The paperboy?” Lily asked in surprise, thinking of the plump adolescent who routinely shouted the headlines outside their windows.

  “I know. I had the most marvelously dour young man—looked like a funeral director. But he’s gone and twisted his ankle. Please?”

  “Certainly.”

  Estelle disappeared into the bedroom again. Lily made her way through the parlor.

  There had been no further knocking. She wondered if perhaps the one they’d heard had been a mistake and that she would find herself facing an empty hallway.

  She opened the door.

  A man waited patiently on the threshold. He was not what Lily would have expected at a séance. There was no black armband, no weeping widow at his side. He looked perfectly ordinary and well-groomed, with carefully combed brown hair, a clear complexion and a waxed mustache. Something about him made her feel as though she had seen him before—but then again, he had the sort of face one seemed to see a dozen times a day on any London street.

  “Good evening,” he said. “I hope I am not too early.”

  “I haven’t the foggiest idea,” Lily admitted impatiently, “but do come in.”

  He was contemplating the straw goat head by the coat rack when Roger dashed into the room.

  “I’m late, aren’t I?” he gasped, bending over. “That’s a dashed lot of stairs. Had to go back for a second round of papers tonight. The headline was a real corker. They’re bringing some toff up on a murder charge. They put him up on the box just like our lot. The punters are wild for it.”

  Lily felt the floor sink from under her feet.

  “Do you mean Lord Deveral?”

  “Tha
t’s him. They held his indictment today. They’re moving on with it right sharpish—set his arraignment for less than a fortnight.”

  “What date?” Lily demanded. She glanced over at the mustachioed séance-goer, afraid the sharpness of her tone might have caught his ear, but he continued to look engrossed in the goat head.

  “March 8th,” Roger replied, unperturbed. “I’ll have an extra shilling or two in my pocket over it. There’s a bit of luck!”

  March 8th. Ten days.

  It was just the arraignment, Lily reminded herself. A full trial in the House of Lords would still follow, and perhaps even a round of appeals before her half-brother’s neck met the noose.

  The notion brought little comfort.

  She was running out of time.

  “See to the guests,” Lily snapped in reply. She hurried into the hall, pushing past a pair of gossiping widows and quickly climbing the stairs.

  Lily set her twenty-pound vanity mirror down on the floor, trying not to make too much of a thud.

  The ground seemed a safer place to attempt this than a chair. Her parlor, where she had dragged the mirror, was also further from Estelle’s séance room, which made it less likely Lily would be disturbed by gasps and clatter of the orchestra in the wardrobe.

  She leaned the big looking-glass against the wall.

  The room was dark. Once she had made certain that Cat was not hiding somewhere nearby, she had killed the gas lights and drawn the curtains, leaving only a single candle for illumination. It burned in a holder on the windowsill, casting flickering shadows over the familiar shapes of the room—the bookcase, the umbrella stand. The chair where her father had sat the morning before.

  She collected the candle and set it down on the ground in front of the glass, then knelt behind it.

  Was this really it? It didn’t seem like enough. A more elaborate ritual would have given her greater confidence. A methodology that seemed to rely entirely on Lily’s capacity for sitting quietly and concentrating stood on shaky ground.

  Perhaps she should try chanting “Bloody Mary”.

  She stared at the reflected flame and waited.

  There was a murmur of voices from the hall downstairs. A door closed, the sound muffled by distance.

  In the mirror, Lily’s face looked pale, lost in an enshrouding darkness.

  The candle burned steadily. She felt a cramp start in her foot. She shifted, trying to get more comfortable.

  Nothing continued to happen.

  This was madness. What was she doing? Spending her evening sitting on the floor, staring at her vanity mirror. It was a colossal waste of time—time she didn’t have.

  What was worse—wasting time? Or risking that this endeavor might actually succeed?

  She was asking for a vision—asking for one, after spending most of the years since her mother’s death fighting tooth and nail to push the blasted things away. What if she got what she came for?

  There was no way for her to direct her precognition. She couldn’t ensure that she saw only what she wanted, a clue that would point her to the true identity of the killer. Instead, she might open herself up to a vision of some new disaster, another tragedy she would be powerless to avert—more grief and guilt and helplessness to be heaped on her plate.

  She should forget all of this and walk away right now. Ignite the lights, put on a phonograph and pretend she’d never heard of any of it.

  The cold seeped up through the floor, crawling through the thin carpet and the fabric of her skirts to settle in her knees.

  Before her, the flame danced, the light echoed in the dark glass.

  She closed her eyes.

  Strangford. Abney Park. Lily’s thoughts went back to the sight of him crouching in Sylvia Durst’s grave, his pale hands, so terribly vulnerable, resting on her corpse. He had risked so much on the chance it might reveal some sliver of useful information, some way of determining who was at the center of this.

  Avoiding more guilt was a poor reason to refuse to take a lesser chance herself.

  She would do this. She owed it to him, no matter what it cost her.

  Lily opened her eyes to see that the fire in the glass had moved.

  It was set against the wall behind her and burned more brightly, framed by the glass of a gas fixture. A shadow passed across it, and Lily glanced up, pausing in the act of brushing her hair. Her nightgown was open at the throat, exposing the skin of her collarbone.

  She resumed, the bristles sliding through long waves of unbound auburn.

  Strangford stepped into view.

  He was naked to the waist, all dark hair and lean muscle—beautiful, as she had known he would be, when stripped of even more of his armor.

  His bare fingers brushed her neck. They slid down the column of pale flesh, grazed along her shoulder. His touch was electric, the fire of it tingling across her skin, casting sparks down into her core.

  Lily tilted her head back, letting herself fall against him as his hands roamed down her body, tangling her in a hot embrace. Desire rose in her, fierce and urgent.

  No, she thought, summoning the will to fight against it. This couldn’t happen. It would end in hurt, in heartbreak.

  This wasn’t what she wanted. She was here for another reason. She framed that need into a demand, clutched at it against the tumult of emotion raised by the feeling of Strangford’s hands dancing over her body.

  Show me who will hurt Estelle.

  She felt the chill seeping back into her knees. It tugged her out of the trance and back into herself. She focused her gaze on the flicker of the candle, ignoring the two figures entwined behind it.

  The flame guttered, hissing against some impurity in the wax. It rose up again, illuminating crimson wallpaper and the edge of a gilded frame.

  The city’s finest, in their silks and tails, drifted around the room like debris stirring in some unseen current. Conversation burbled. Waiters carried trays of champagne and the art on the walls favored dull landscapes by dull dead men, with the occasional interspersing of something more daring.

  She had been here before. It was the Carfax Gallery. A vision or a memory? The future or the past?

  You play well, Miss Albright.

  Dr. Joseph Hartwell—eminent physician, eugenicist, and spurned fiancé—stood before her, polished in his coat and tails. He held a crystal glass in his hand.

  The noise of the crowd battered at her, making it hard to think. She reached for an anchor, something that would help her root herself in the midst of the whirling bodies.

  Strangford . . .

  He wasn’t there. He had just walked away, following the curator to his office to sign the paperwork for the purchase of Evangeline Ash’s portrait.

  A feminine laugh sounded behind her—familiar, bell-like in its clarity.

  Her skin crawled.

  Annalise Boyden. She was here—and in a few hours, she would be dead.

  Lily turned, searching the crowd frantically. If she could find her, warn her . . .

  Flashes of a shocking white gown teased her from the corners of her vision, then danced away again.

  The patrons of the gallery shifted, turning. Lily realized their movements weren’t random, but regular, like the clicking progression of gears in an automata. Where faces should have been, there was nothing but paint and plaster, tawdry theatre masks chipping paint onto the plush carpeting.

  They were false, every one of them, from the railroad baron to the caterer with his plate of canapes, all except the man who stood at the far side of the room, as still as stone in the middle of the eddying bodies. His gaze cut through the crowd to find her, carrying enough hostility to take her breath away.

  Her brother.

  It will never happen.

  The words took form in the air, crossing the room to pierce her like daggers.

  She turned away from the blow and there was Evangeline Ash.

  The dead woman looked down at her from her portrait, serene, locked behind oi
l and pigment, but this wasn’t the painting Lily had seen before. Something had changed.

  It was the lilies. The bright blooms that had burst from the vase at the artist’s side before were crushed now, blooms battered as though torn apart by vicious hands. Bruised petals covered the ground, bent stems hanging over the sides of the elegant porcelain.

  Letters had fallen from the banner she held in her hands, the black characters drifting down to the bottom of the frame. Only a handful remained, the message they spelled made that much more stark.

  Danger.

  Hartwell lifted his glass. His face cracked, bits of flesh flaking like old paint.

  You may find our next match more challenging.

  The flute was no longer full of champagne. It brimmed crimson, thick, warm enough to fog the rim. The doctor drank, pouring rich, fresh blood into his mouth . . . drank and drank as the glass refused to go empty. All the painted faces in the room turned to watch, then stepped forward, their flat black eyes fixing on Lily.

  Go. Now.

  The thought was desperate, as clear as Annalise Boyden’s laugh.

  The word in Evangeline Ash’s hands vibrated with intensity. Lily fought for escape as the masked horde pressed closer.

  Get out of here. Now. NOW.

  She was gone.

  The air around her was cold, sharp with a London winter. The acrid scent it carried burned her nose, harsh with smoke.

  She stood on a deserted street under a starless sky, the city sprawled and sleeping around her.

  The building in front of her was long, taking up the full length of the block. It lay silent, windows dark, with the feel of a place closed for more than just the night. The limestone blocks were stained with soot.

  It could have been any of a hundred such buildings in the city. An accounting firm, or an insurer—a place so nondescript, it almost seemed to fade as she looked at it, slipping out of focus.

  Where was she? Why had she come here?

  Something moved.

  Her attention locked on the source, a glow in one of the windows. The glass was cracked and stained but behind it, something flickered, a dancing orange light.

  Flame.

  The building was on fire.

  She could almost feel it, the blast of sudden heat, but the air was still cold, still winter crisp, and there was none of the roar and crackle of flames. No smoke poured from the roof, no onlookers crowding onto the curb to watch the show, as they would with any proper London fire.