Wondering Sight (The Extraordinaries Book 2)

by Melissa McShane

  Vane looked at her bloody arm, then at her face, and nodded once, slowly. “You should have that tended to, Mrs. Westlake,” he said. “We’ll have him confined in the Catterwell immediately.”

  “That may not be enough,” Sophia said.

  “They’re equipped to keep criminals with talent from escaping justice.”

  “Yes, I know, but I believe someone will attempt to have Mr. King killed to prevent him implicating others in his crimes.”

  “And what crimes are those?”

  A great weariness descended upon her. “Ask him,” she said. “I cannot provide evidentiary proof, so my witness counts for nothing at law.”

  Vane nodded again. “Many thanks,” he said. He took King from Mr. Rutledge’s hands and handcuffed him, then let his companions lead the man away.

  “Come inside,” Mr. Rutledge said, leading Sophia back into the passageway and around a corner into the bright warmth of the servants’ dining hall, interrupting their supper. “We will need warm water and bandages,” he told the room at large when everyone leaped up at their appearance, then steered Sophia to sit at one end of the table, not caring that he was evicting the butler.

  Mr. Rutledge ripped the torn sleeve from her gown and examined the wound. “Shallow, but long,” he said, “nothing serious.” One of the footmen appeared with a bowl of water and a cloth; a maid brought a rolled bandage. “Hold your arm still,” Mr. Rutledge said, which made Sophia begin to shake again. In her mind’s eye, the knife descended—

  A hand gripped hers. “You have survived worse than this,” Mr. Rutledge said. She looked at him, at his expressionless dark eyes, and wondered what he saw in her face. He gently washed the blood from her arm, then swabbed the wound, making it bleed a little, and wrapped it up and tied off the bandage. “You might have someone look at Healing that,” he said.

  “It is not enough to be worth troubling anyone. I will simply wear long sleeves for a while.”

  “If you wish.”

  Sophia became aware the servants were hovering around them, and that their meal was still spread on the table. “I beg your pardon,” she said, rising, and left the room, but once she was in the passage that led up to the ground floor, she realized she did not know what to do next. She certainly could not return to Eleanora’s party in this condition—she touched her hair, realized her turban was hanging down the back of her head and her hair was matted on one side where she had rolled on the ground, and of course her gown was ruined. She removed the turban, which had a smear of dirt along one side, and buried her cold fingers in its folds.

  “Let me take you home,” Mr. Rutledge said. “I will inform Mrs. Barham that you felt ill and did not wish to disturb her.”

  “What of your partner?”

  He smiled. “She had already arranged to meet someone here, someone younger and more prepossessing than I. A pleasant enough young lady, but her conversation leaves much to be desired.”

  “I see,” said Sophia, feeling pleased. So he cared nothing for the attractive brunette. “And I doubt Lord Chumleigh will note my absence, except as it affects his chaperon duties—” She had forgotten, for the moment, why Lord Chumleigh was so solicitous of her, and she did not want to explain it to Mr. Rutledge, who knew why Lord Chumleigh’s belief was completely erroneous. But he did not seem to notice her confusion.

  “Wait here,” he said, leaving her alone in the passageway. She still felt cold and a little sick. He had come to her rescue, albeit accidentally; he seemed genuinely remorseful about having used her; why could they not be friends again? Because you are on the trail of Lord Endicott, and you cannot tell him that without looking obsessive and unstable. That first great obstacle to their friendship, that he did not believe her Dream about Lord Endicott was true, reared up again like a black blot on her memory. Her cold thoughts went round and round her head: tell him, and there will be no chance of anything between you—don’t tell him, and let lies come between you—tell him, and make him see—

  “We’ll go out the side way,” Mr. Rutledge said, startling her. He held out her heavy pelisse and helped her put it on, letting it rest on her left shoulder rather than trying to ease her bandaged arm into its sleeve. “My carriage is waiting. Mrs. Barham is concerned, but I believe I carried my point that you are not seriously ill. I apologize for deceiving her—I hope she will not be too angry with you when she hears the truth.”

  “She will not be angry for long,” Sophia said. “She never is.”

  Mr. Rutledge helped her into the carriage and settled himself opposite her after giving the driver his orders. “Are you in much pain?” he said.

  “Not much.”

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “No, thank you.” Sophia sat on the edge of her seat, unable to relax. “That is two things I owe you for now.”

  “I haven’t been keeping score. I only want to be of service to you.” He looked, if not tense, then not entirely at ease, leaning forward as if he expected she might fall off the seat and he would have to catch her.

  They rode in silence for a while, Sophia unable to think of anything to say. How to tell him she forgave him, when a greater secret lay between them, preventing a return to what they had once been?

  “Why do you refer to Lord Chumleigh as your ‘chaperon’?” Mr. Rutledge said. “Was he not a chance-won partner?”

  The knot formed again in Sophia’s stomach. “It is apparently common knowledge that I am nearly engaged to Lord Endicott,” she said lightly, trying to make it sound like a great joke, “and as Lord Endicott’s friend, Lord Chumleigh considers himself bound to protect his interests.”

  “What a horrible irony,” Mr. Rutledge said.

  Sophia said nothing. Telling him Lord Endicott had spread the rumor to torment her would do nothing but bring up the forbidden subject they had learned so well to dance around. To her horror, tears formed in her eyes. She wanted to tell this man the truth. She wanted him to know how she felt about him. She wanted him to share in her secret misery and give her the same comfort and support Cecy did, and she could not be honest with him.

  “Something is wrong,” Mr. Rutledge said. She shook her head, afraid tears would spill over with her words if she spoke, grateful for the darkness of the carriage that made him nothing more than a dim, bulky outline across from her. He leaned farther forward, enough that the lights from the street lamps illuminated his face at intervals as they passed. “Mrs. Westlake,” he said, “if you can forgive me at all, I wish you would share whatever troubles you with me. I want only to be your friend.”

  With those last words, a barrier broke free within her. He was telling the truth, she was certain of it, but rather than reassuring her, it made her heart break. “A friend would believe better of me than the world does,” she said. She was surprised at how miserable she sounded. His lack of faith in her Dreams—no, in her, in her reliability and honesty—wounded her more than she had realized. “A friend would not treat me with such reserve in order to maintain that friendship. I cannot tell you anything without running up against that one truth. Mr. Rutledge, I would like to be your—your friend, but I believe that is impossible.”

  Mr. Rutledge shifted in the darkness. “Lord Endicott. Mrs. Westlake, you yourself said it to Vane: without evidentiary proof, your Dream can have no power in a court of law.”

  “And of course that means it is impossible that the subject of my Dream might have had, for example, a Seer to tell him how to conceal his crime? You saw the ‘lodging house’ that made my Dream seem false. How can you be so intelligent and yet so blind to the clear fact that someone is trying to make me look unreliable to protect himself?”

  Mr. Rutledge was silent.

  “I have—” The carriage came to a lurching stop. “I have no proof yet,” Sophia continued, “but I will have, and I will see Lord Endicott destroyed for what he has done to me. The reason our investigations came together is that he is the man behind the counterfeiters, Mr. Rutle
dge. I am certain of it, and you may consider me unstable if you like, or a liar, and that will not change the fundamental truth of the matter.”

  She drew a deep breath to calm herself. “I am truly grateful to you for what you have done for me. I owe you my life. But I cannot be the friend of anyone who believes me wrong when I have asserted, time and again, that I am right.”

  She wrenched at the carriage door; it stuck, and she wobbled, and his hand came up to steady her. She jerked her arm away and fled, furious with herself, furious at the weakness that brought tears to her eyes again. It mattered little that he had apologized, that he wanted to return to what they had been, because he did not believe her Dream, and even her love for him could not change that.

  Safely in her room, she let Beeton exclaim over her injury and said only that there had been an accident, and she simply needed to sleep. But sleep was impossible. Her arm ached, her head was beginning to hurt from unshed tears, and she felt a weariness of the soul no amount of rest could cure.

  King was no longer a threat to her. She thought about the possibility that he might be murdered in prison and was a little disturbed that the idea did not horrify her. With him out of the way, Lord Endicott’s operation lay open to her Dreaming, and it would take her very little time to discover a way to link him to the counterfeiting. She hoped. Bow Street would not listen to her, which meant any solution would have to be one within her grasp, and that of Daphne and Cecy. She refused to be daunted by this.

  She reached into the drawer of her bedside table and removed the watch fob, running her bare fingers over it to trace the faint engraving of the rose, or lily, or whatever flower it was, as the Visions swirled around her head. They made her feel ill, but she was disinclined to sit up, and she could endure a little discomfort. She sorted through Visions, watching Lord Endicott’s life unfurl, until she caught a glimpse of one that endured longer than the others. She focused on it, and the nausea rose as it became stationary against a spinning background.

  A game of cards—no idea which one, she was so bad at all of them she never could identify them by sight—and familiar hands, wearing the gold pinky ring incised with the Endicott arms in miniature. The hand chose a card and laid it down. Pity she was not an Extraordinary Speaker, able to send thought into the mind of anyone, Speaker or not, to tell one of Endicott’s opponents what cards he held—but, of course, if she were a Speaker she could not also be an Extraordinary Seer, and her Speaking would be pointless.

  She realized her thoughts were wandering aimlessly and released the Vision, then closed her eyes and willed the nausea away. Now she could watch the world through Lord Endicott’s eyes. It was probably too much to hope he would go personally to the site of one of his crimes, but she would find a way to use this Vision regardless. And I will prove to Mr. Rutledge that I am right, she told herself, and settled in to Dream.

  In which the lioness stalks new prey, and is stalked in turn

  ophia sat next to Cecy and Lewis in their box at the Theatre Royal and listened with half her attention to the actress pacing the stage, lamenting that her hands would never be clean. The lackluster performance of Macbeth was responsible only for part of her distraction; in her heart, she was back at home, preparing to Dream yet again of the black-haired man, Lord Endicott’s crony Baines. He was a handsome man, which only went to show it was impossible to tell a person’s nature by his appearance. He had a face almost as well sculpted as a Shaper’s, with finely arched black eyebrows and lips full enough to be attractive without being womanly, and he moved with a graceful confidence, like—I am not thinking of Mr. Rutledge anymore.

  Sophia’s initial Dreams after King’s attack, the ones intended to show her in which direction success lay, had all indicated Baines was key to Lord Endicott’s downfall. So she had done almost nothing for the last three days but Dream of him. She knew where he lived, or rather, had Seen a number of places where he slept, and knew the parts of London where he was most likely to be found, but every attempt she had made to predict where he might be at a particular time had been foiled by his natural ability to confound Dream. She could not even Dream of the printing press, which Lord Endicott was apparently moving often to confound her Sight, because it was Baines who determined where to move it, and her Dreams attempting to predict its location collapsed as well.

  Not that it mattered. Even if she could discover where it would be at a given date and time, there was no one she could tell who might have the power to apprehend Baines or confiscate the press. It was just possible that Benjamin Vane had conveyed her statement to Sir Arthur, and that Sir Arthur might once again trust her word, but that seemed unlikely. And even if he did trust her, he would send her letters to Mr. Rutledge, and the thought of that was unbearable. She would simply have to find a way to deal with Baines, and what he represented, on her own.

  It was tempting, here in the relative dimness of the box, with Cecy and Lewis’s attention on the stage, to let herself drift off for just a few minutes, but Cecy would be infuriated, and even Sophia realized that behavior bordered on irrational. Besides, she was still unsettled by her most recent Dream, in which, in an attempt to approach the problem from a different direction, she had chosen a door marked with Lord Endicott’s face.

  She had followed him frequently in Vision these past few days, Seeing what he saw, but even when he went into the rougher parts of the city he was never in proximity to anything criminal. It frustrated her, but she kept watching, feeling vaguely guilty at how intimate her Visions were when used this way. In the past, whenever she had Seen through someone else’s eyes, it was with their knowledge and consent; what she was doing now would be wrong if it were not transmuted by some alchemy of necessity into right. But it still made her feel uncomfortable in the rare times she allowed herself to think that way. Even so, Lord Endicott must be destroyed, and a little discomfort was a small price to pay for that destruction.

  So when two days ago, a door of Dream appeared to her bearing his face, when she had done no meditating that might create it, she had entered it out of curiosity. It was a long, featureless hall, its walls and floor and ceiling a uniform red like dried blood, with no doors or windows. The ends of the hall in both directions disappeared into a red-streaked grey mist that moved like a curtain in an unseen wind. Lord Endicott stood next to her, his head tilted in the attitude of someone listening for something very far away. Then he began walking.

  Sophia followed him, her Dreaming self easily matching his long stride. The grey mist did not seem to be drawing nearer, and Sophia had begun to wonder if they were walking in place, when something bright came fluttering toward them. It was a butterfly, gold and green, with a wingspan the size of Sophia’s two outstretched hands. Lord Endicott stopped walking and held out one hand, and the butterfly alit on his finger, slowly fanning its wings even though it was at rest. He looked at it, and Sophia was surprised at how happy he looked, as if the butterfly were the greatest gift anyone had ever bestowed on him.

  Then, with the joyful expression still on his face, he took one of the butterfly’s wings in his free hand and tore it off, and the butterfly screamed with Sophia’s voice.

  Sophia took a step backward, and the Dream shuddered as her real body reacted to her Dreaming self’s shock and horror. No Dream had ever made a sound so soul-chilling before. Lord Endicott’s smile became even more pleasant. He tore the other wing off, and Sophia had screamed as the butterfly did, making a discordant echo, then had thrown herself out of Dream more quickly than she ever had in her life.

  Now she could not stop seeing the look on his face as he tortured that insect. There had been no cruelty, no sadism, only a cheerful, guileless pleasure, and it was far more horrifying than if he had displayed his evil in his expression. She had known he took pleasure in other people’s pain, or at least he took pleasure in hers, but she had not realized he was insane, though he was good at pretending otherwise. She had seen it in his eyes more than once, but had not known to attr
ibute that lack of human feeling to madness. Now she wondered that she could ever have believed otherwise.

  She shifted as if to lean against the front of the box, remembered she was in public, and sat up straighter. That he is not sane might explain why he is still pursuing his counterfeiting operation when the sensible thing to do would be to shut it down, now that he does not have King to protect him, she thought. He wanted to torture her more than he cared about being sensible. The thought made Sophia feel cold, and she rubbed her arms where goose pimples had sprung up despite the warmth of the theatre, crowded with people. Who knew what kind of torment he might devise now that King was no longer available to counter her Dreams?

  The sound of the tide washing on the shore translated itself into the applause of the crowd, and Sophia clapped with them, though she had not even noticed Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane, which was supposed to be very dramatic in this new production. She listened idly to Lewis and Cecy discussing the performance, which had been as much a disappointment to them as to her, and followed them through the crush of playgoers and, finally, past the portico, where they waited for the carriage to be brought round.

  Revived by the crisp winter air, Sophia began planning another foray into Dream that night. Only one Dream, she assured herself, but her frustration at being balked yet again was translating once again into more frequent Dreaming, and she had to remind herself she had promised Cecy not to overextend. Still, she had only Dreamed twice today, and a third would not be excessive. But what Dream? Dreaming of Baines only made her more frustrated, but she knew in her bones there was a way to circumvent his infuriating ability, if only she could approach it properly. She was afraid to Dream of Lord Endicott again, and Dreaming of lesser things, like the location of forged banknotes, only made her impatient.