“What a declaration!” Sophia said with a laugh.
22 December 1812
Sir Arthur,
The man who has been issuing orders to the counterfeiters of whom I have warned you resides at Wharf End Lane, north of Billingsgate, in a lodging house marked with a picture of a sheep’s head and the word Witters. He is tall, with black hair and black eyes, wears fisherman’s boots and a long scarf of undyed wool, as well as the silver ring I have mentioned before. He will be in possession of a few forged notes drawn on several banks throughout London. I include his portrait here. This is the extent of my Sight.
Sincerely,
Sophia Westlake, Extr. Seer
22 December 1812
Mrs. Westlake,
No one of that description is reported as living at that address, which is not a lodging house, but a mercantile office. I believe it might be better that you direct your reports to the Bank of England’s committee, which will be able to use your Dreams better than we can.
Rowley
Sophia lay wakeful in her bed, too tired to Dream and not tired enough to sleep. No, it was not exhaustion that kept her from Dreaming, but fury. How dare that wizened little man imply that her Dreams were unreliable? Except that they are, she reminded herself, and this last one was simply false. I cannot believe I failed so utterly to interpret it!
She had been so exhilarated to finally put a face to the shadowy figure that had hovered at the edge of Dream so many times, she had drawn a copy of his portrait for herself and hidden it in her wardrobe where she could look at it when she needed a reminder of what her goal was. And now, to be told not only that the man was not to be found, but that the place to which she had directed the Bow Street Runners was not a residence… she put her hands over her mouth to muffle her scream of frustration. She had failed at her goal, and worse, she looked like a fool.
She went through her relaxation routine, flexing and relaxing each set of muscles in turn, but found herself still too restless to sleep. She could ring for a glass of hot milk, which was disgusting but might help her fall asleep, but that would require leaving the warm comfort of her bed for the chill air of her bedchamber. She could light her lamp and read for a while, but her current book bored her, and getting another would again mean leaving her cocoon. So she closed her eyes and slipped into Dream once more, fighting her tiredness and her feelings of humiliation when she remembered what had come of her latest Dream.
The idea of entering a Dream about Lord Endicott’s counterfeiting wearied her, but she had done her work too well, and all she saw on every side, above and below, were doors leading to Dreams of counterfeit banknotes used for purchases or paying bills or redeeming debts, sheets of paper and gallons of ink, the shadowy silhouettes of presses (shadowy because she had never yet seen one and had only the vaguest idea of what they looked like) and the shapes of faces she never recognized. She wandered among the doors, feeling another weariness, this of the spirit, descend over her. What was the point of Dreaming if her Dreams could not enact change in the waking world? She chose a door at random and laid her palm flat against it, and was drawn into the Dream as smoothly as silk sliding through a brass ring.
She entered a large shop of some kind, more elegant than most of those she had seen in Dream lately, in which faceless figures moved, handled the merchandise, and spoke to one another in chirps like a flock of canaries—it was rare to hear sounds in Dream, and most of them were symbolic rather than literal, a bell standing for laughter or a dog’s bark representing a fight.
It seemed to be a clothing warehouse, with yards of fabric stretched out like webbing across the wide space which grew wider whenever Sophia’s attention went to the walls instead of the people. Watching them was something to do, so Sophia made her way through the shop, amusing herself by bringing items into focus and altering them, changing muslin into satin and then into netting. Of course her changes went unremarked by the patrons; it was all a construct of Sophia’s Dreaming mind. But it was an emotional release, a feeling that she was at last in control of something.
She approached a woman who was paying for a dress and saw the flickering movement that meant the banknote was fraudulent. On a whim, Sophia made an effort to draw the woman’s face into focus. She had no idea where this warehouse was, but it seemed ungenerous to the Dream not to at least try to make use of what it gave her. The woman had a narrow face, and a narrow nose, and narrow eyes…
…and the Dream was fading all around her. In the space of two breaths, Sophia found herself surrounded by the doors of Dream again. She turned around in a slow circle. The door she had entered had vanished. The Dream was gone.
This was an impossibility. One entered a Dream, then rose from it into the waking world. One did not return to the doors of Dream. One certainly did not exit a Dream without choosing to or being startled out of it.
Sophia reached out to a nearby door, but stopped herself before she could touch it. A stray thought flashed through her mind—am I losing my talent?—but it was a ridiculous, impossible thought, not even worth entertaining. Something else had happened. Something… something improbable, something suggested by the limits of Dream and the boundaries of a Seer’s talent and the place where they intersected. She stopped herself speculating and reached out, instead, for more information, and for the nearest door.
She did not bother examining the details of this Dream closely, but instead cast about for the image at its heart. A man sat counting banknotes on a stool, laying them out in stacks on an invisible table. As she moved around to see the face of the man, the Dream shuddered, faded to mist, and she was once again surrounded by doors.
So. Let us apply reason. Dreams show what may be, if circumstances remain as they are. A Dream may be countered if the right action is taken. So a Dream that vanishes before it can be acted upon is a Dream whose possibilities have been eliminated, even as I become aware of them. No. Because I become aware of them. Eliminated by someone who is in a position to change those events, who knows what I See. Someone—
She gasped, and her Dreaming self did the same, shaking her concentration enough that her last thought before rising out of Dream was: Oh, no. He has his own Seer.
In which Sophia discovers she has a counterpart
ophia sat up in her bed and lit the lamp with unsteady hands. Another Seer. Of course. What a fool she’d been not to realize it sooner—but then, in her time with the War Office, she had always been the one disrupting the Dreams of Napoleon’s Seers. She had never been on the other side of that contest, never known how it felt to the Seer whose Dream she intercepted and changed. Uncertainty, and fear, welled up in her, and it took some effort to convince herself these were irrational feelings. She knew what the unknown Seer was doing, because she had done it many times before. She simply had to work out how to prevent that Seer from interfering in her Dream.
She lay down again and prepared to meditate. The first step in disrupting a Dream was knowing what your enemy might reasonably Dream about. Lord Endicott knew she had set her sights on his counterfeiting operation and would have instructed his Seer to meditate on the Dreams Sophia would have related to this topic. That would create doors revealing what Sophia Saw, and from there it was a matter of telling Lord Endicott to, for example, move a batch of forged notes from one warehouse to another, or to warn one of his men not to pass a fraudulent banknote to a particular person. It was difficult, because there was no way to know which of the many doors of Dream Sophia might enter, and therefore Lord Endicott would be forced to make many alterations to his plans, but if his organization was large enough, as she believed it was, he would have the resources to do such a thing.
But for Dreams to disappear before she could act on them… the enemy Seer seemed to have discovered a way to predict which door Sophia would choose before she entered it, and was able to take action to erase the possibility that the event would happen at all, preventing her Seeing it. She had never heard of such a thing before.
Fear made her lose her concentration briefly, and she focused on her breathing, in through her nostrils, out through her mouth, until her whole body resonated with the sound of her lungs working and her heart beating. This enemy Seer was powerful. She was clearly experienced. But Sophia was a master of her craft too, and the idea of pitting herself against someone who was her peer in ways no one else had ever been was… exhilarating, actually, and exciting. She would take a different approach and let it lead her back to this other Seer. Show me my enemy, she told herself, and dropped into Dream.
She had hoped one door of Dream, at least, would bear the visage of her enemy, but of course she knew too little of the woman for luck to be on her side. The doors of Dream, as usual, displayed images related to counterfeiting. Sophia stood and watched them for a few moments. If the enemy Seer were powerful enough to make those Dreams vanish before Sophia entered them… that was a possibility that didn’t bear lingering on.
But nothing happened. The doors simply surrounded her in all directions, still and unmoving except for the shapes on their surfaces. So either the Seer’s perceptions did not extend this far, or she was toying with Sophia. Sophia chose to believe the former. Let us experiment, then. She chose a door with the hazy image of a press on it—as long as she was experimenting, she might as well try for the high-hanging fruit—and passed through it with ease.
In this Dream, the press was an angular, spidery creature crouched in a nest of wires that connected it to the unseen walls on all sides. Sophia folded her arms across her chest and waited. Nothing happened. She took a step—
—and she was once again surrounded by doors. She took a few steps, trying to keep her balance. That had been far more abrupt than the last time, too abrupt for her to grasp some other aspect of the Dream that would lead to the Seer rather than the press. Quickly she turned and passed through another door at random, found herself in a tavern, saw the flickering motion as a banknote changed hands—
—and the Dream was gone. Her sleeping self responded to her Dreaming body’s increased heart rate, her growing fear. If she could not find something to hang onto, something to follow back to the enemy’s own Dreams… She calmed herself and began entering door after door, trying everything she could think of: paying close attention to the Dream’s central object, paying no attention to the Dream’s central object, focusing on the surroundings, walking toward the walls and letting them tunnel out before her. Nothing worked. Time after time, the Dreams vanished, one after another until she was sick and dizzy. Then there were no more doors.
Sophia crouched and put her head between her knees, breathing deeply, then remembered she had an actual body that was not nearly so exhausted and dizzy as this one, and let herself wake. Her heart was still beating too rapidly, and the lamp’s flame had rings around it that went away only after Sophia blinked rapidly several times.
She lay back and stared up at the ceiling. The enemy Seer was far more experienced than Sophia had expected. She knew how to conceal her presence so Sophia could not follow the Dream back to her. Sophia squeezed her eyes shut. Very well. She would simply have to go at this from an unexpected direction. She might not be able to pursue her prey through Dream, but her Dreams were anchored in the waking world, and there was no reason one of them might not give her more information. Particularly the only one that had been false.
She rose from her bed and dressed. She would have to forgo her stays; it was nearly eleven o’clock, and calling on Beeton to help her dress would raise the kind of questions she wanted to avoid. So she fumbled into a dark, plain gown and sturdy shoes, found a heavy grey cloak with a voluminous hood, and tiptoed downstairs. The narrow door to the ground-floor stairs squeaked as she pushed it open, but there was no one around to hear it, and she descended quietly into the dimly lit hall that led to the offices and the kitchen.
Here, someone would be awake, anticipating Lewis and Cecy’s return from spending the evening with friends. The hall smelled of supper and hot candle wax, the latter of which came from a dozen candles burning behind glass shields in the servants’ dining hall. At the center of the room stood a battered oak slab of a table that at the moment was bare of cloth or table settings. Three men sat at its far end, playing cards, each of them with small stacks of coin in front of him.
Simon glanced up at her entry, then threw his cards down and leaped to his feet. The other two were slower to respond; the butler, Traviss, wiped his hands on his knee breeches, while Peter the coachman gave his pile of coin a little shove, as if hoping to hide it from her notice.
“Mrs. Westlake, ma’am,” Traviss said. “You… is there something I can do for you?” He wiped his hands down his breeches seam again, and Sophia saw beads of sweat spring up along his receding hairline. She had of course never come below stairs before, and had no idea whether gambling was permitted or not, but the three men certainly were behaving as if they were children caught stealing pies from under the cook’s eye. Good.
“I need the carriage, Traviss, and a lantern,” she said. “I have an errand to run.”
“At eleven o’clock, ma’am?” Traviss blurted, then went pale when Sophia raised her eyebrows at him.
“I don’t recall inviting you to question me about my actions,” she said, “and in fact I believe it would be better if you—” she encompassed all three men in her gaze—“did not discuss this evening with anyone. I know I will not.” She left that sentence hanging in the air, and waited.
Traviss cleared his throat. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Peter, bring the coach around. Simon, a lantern for Mrs. Westlake.”
Peter nodded, scraped his coin off the table furtively, and exited the room without looking once at Sophia. Simon, glancing quickly from Traviss to Sophia, left his coin on the table and followed Peter. That left Traviss and Sophia eyeing each other. She had never seen the tall, stoop-shouldered man so discomfited.
“Are you enjoying your evening?” Sophia asked. She couldn’t help herself. He simply looked so guilty it was hard not to needle him. Why Lewis might forbid gambling was beyond her, since he enjoyed a good wager himself, but as long as the three men were afraid she might give them away, she could feel confident of her excursion remaining a secret.
“Indeed, ma’am,” Traviss said. He seemed to be regaining his composure. They fell back into silence until Simon returned holding a lantern and handed it to Sophia.
“I beg your pardon for intruding,” she said. “No, please do not trouble yourselves, I do not need an escort.” She went back up to wait in the entry hall. If Lewis and Cecy returned home early… but no, they would not be back for a few hours, and it was not very far to Billingsgate. Well, it was a few miles, but that was nothing. She could investigate the supposed mercantile office, learn why her Dream had failed, and return before anyone but those three men knew she was gone.
After five minutes, nervous of being discovered, she opened the door and looked for Peter. There were no gas lamps yet in Hanover Square, just ordinary ones that flickered as if they, too, were shivering in the cold. The smell of a coming snowstorm overrode the distinctive smell of London, crisp and wet, promising a white Christmas. It had been a mild winter to date: just enough snow to be pretty without being an inconvenience. She closed the door and resumed her wait.
Finally, the door opened, and Peter peered inside. He too was bundled up against the cold, the striped woolen scarf wound several times around his neck and his heavy coat making him look bulky. “Ma’am, the carriage,” he said.
Sophia accepted his help into the carriage and settled her cloak around her. “Wharf End Lane, north of Billingsgate,” she told Peter, who frowned at her.
“That’s not a place a lady ought be going, this time of night specially,” he said. “You sure about it?”
“Of course I am,” Sophia said, “and as I have you to protect me, I need fear nothing, yes?”
Peter put his hand on his coat pocket, which was deep with a wide mouth, easily large eno
ugh to hold a horse pistol. “Let’s hope it don’t come to that, ma’am.” He shut the door and climbed into his seat, and with a jerk, the carriage moved forward. Sophia settled back into her seat and watched the street slide past, the lanterns casting stripes of light across her hands in their red gloves. She needed a plan.
Well, it was unlikely anyone would be at a mercantile office this late in the evening, and there might be little foot traffic there because so many of the neighboring buildings were businesses—she ought to have known better when she Saw the address so clearly, and it made her furious how easily that enemy Seer had made a fool of her. No matter. She would find a way into the building and discover why her Sight had failed her. Then she would… well, she would determine what her next step would be after investigating the office.
The Barhams’ carriage was well-sprung, and jostled her only a little over the irregular stones of the road. Sophia readied herself for meditation, which was made only slightly more difficult by the movement of the carriage. Show me the future in which I find a way into the office, she told herself, then fell into Dream and looked about her for the right door.
She had worried, for a moment, that there would still be no doors there, but her Dreaming brain had summoned more to replace those the enemy Seer had destroyed. Most of them still dealt with counterfeiting, but a handful bore images that were harder to distinguish, indicating that her meditation had generated a new set of possibilities. She went to look at these, using her instincts to draw her where they would, and found herself in front of a door which bore a single knob in its center, silvery in the non-light of Dream. The doors of Dream never had any fittings to them; this represented the contents of the Dream. Sophia laid her palm on the door and was drawn into it.
Wondering Sight (The Extraordinaries Book 2) Page 11
