Haunt Me Still

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  It was Worse than his Worst Imaginings.

  I was not surprised about the Boy. I had warned my Father against him. Neither Virgin nor even Chaste, he was a Ganymede who corrupted the house, but my Father was besotted with his powers, with his clarity of Sight.

  The Poet, however, was another and more dangerous matter. For hee was ever a sly watcher in corners—

  Shakespeare? Was he the poet? A sly watcher in corners? What had he seen in Dee’s household?

  —and it was not just the Mirror that he borrowed, but a Rite that out Medea’d Medea, stolen in parte from my Father’s translation of the Witch’s Manuscript. Father warned the Poet against such folly. Mr. Shakespeare, tho’, would not listen until the Boy was dead.

  So Aubrey’s sources on that tale were solid, at least as far as the boy’s death. And surely Arthur Dee was at least implying that the death was not accidental.

  You will knowe the Mirror by its black surface, and by a Posie around its edge:

  Nothing is but what is.

  Eircheard started.

  “You recognize the saying?” asked Joanna.

  “Young Dee got it wrong,” said Eircheard. “Left off a word. ‘Nothing is but what is not.’”

  “It’s a round,” I said quietly. “Carved around the perimeter of a circle. The first three letters of the first word and the last word overlap.”

  “An infinite circle linking being with not-being, life with death,” said Joanna, a smile of satisfaction slipping across her face. “Powerful magic.”

  “It’s from Macbeth,” I said. Whatever else this mirror was, it wasn’t the one stolen from Lady Nairn, which was silvered glass. It might be spotted with age, but it had never been black. Rising, Joanna switched off the light, leaving the room in candlelight. From a drawer in her desk she pulled out a hard circular case; inside lay a black velvet bag. From this, she withdrew a disc of glimmering darkness, laying it on the table.

  “Polished obsidian,” she said.

  I bent over it. Within its surface swam a world of shadows.

  Is this it?” I asked. “Dee’s mirror?”

  “God, no,” she said with a laugh. “But it’s a fine copy.”

  And the original?” asked Eircheard. “Are you going to tell us it’s under cement out in Mortlake?”

  “No,” said Joanna. “As I said, I can’t tell you about the manuscripts, or the rite that’s in them, either. More’s the pity, believe me. They’d fetch an astronomical price at auction. But I can take you to the mirror.” She looked at her watch.

  I put both hands on the table and rose. “Where?”

  “Just up the road,” she said with a mischievous smile. “At the British Museum. Open late tonight. If we hurry, we can just get there before closing.” She ran a finger lightly across the surface of her mirror. “I’ve been trying to get the curator to open the bloody case and let me examine that mirror in person for three years. I think you may just have delivered the key.” Deftly, she slipped her own mirror back into its bag and then into the case. “But I’d have to call and tell him at least part of what you’ve found.”

  “Call,” I said hoarsely.

  As she made her call, I sat staring at the mirror case, my mind spinning. The manuscripts were out of my reach. But whoever had taken Lily also wanted the mirror: Blade, mirror, cauldron…On the score of the mirror, as of the knife, they were surely resting quietly.

  Lady Nairn’s mirror had supposedly belonged to the King’s Men. But this one, if Arthur Dee were right, had not only passed through the hands of Dee, Lady Arran, and Shakespeare, it had been the original mirror in Macbeth. If so, it was this mirror, not Lady Nairn’s, that Carrie and her friends would want—no, need—for their ritual. Which made it the key to more than just a case in a museum, I hoped tightly. It might be the key to Lily’s release.

  If I could not take the manuscript to ransom Lily, I would take the mirror.

  Across the room, Joanna had reached the curator. She had her back to us, staring out the window at the shops along the street below as she spoke to him in quick, clipped tones. Before I could think about it, I opened the case, slipped out the velvet bag with the mirror, and dropped it into my bag.

  Eircheard stared at me in openmouthed astonishment. “I mean to play bait-and-switch. I’ll need your help.”

  “At the British fucking Museum?” he hissed. “Are you mad?”

  “Just gallus, I hope,” I shot back. “Don’t you think a piece of black stone is worth Lily’s life?”

  He shut his mouth in a tight line, his fist closing around the smooth bit of iron he’d been toying with all day. “Do you trust her, about the manuscripts?” he whispered. “Or do you think she’s having us on, meaning to go after them herself later?”

  “She’s a respected antiquities dealer. Not a position you can reach or keep if you scoop finds from your clients or their friends. In any case, do we have a choice?” I pointed at the bit of iron in his fist. “Hand that over.”

  He let it slide from his hand to mine, and I set it inside the case. At least it wouldn’t feel entirely empty. I shot Eircheard a bleak smile. “Besides, at the moment, I’m the one who’s not trustworthy.”

  “Tonight,” Joanna said firmly into the phone. “Yes, that’s brilliant, thanks.” Ending the call, she came back with a smile. I felt a momentary pang: She was going out of her way to help us, and I was stealing her mirror. A stone for a life, I told myself. It had to be done.

  In five minutes, we’d put on our coats and were hurrying north up St. Martin’s Lane, toward Bloomsbury. The rain had stopped, but the air was still damp and the streets slick and gleaming.

  33

  “YOU THINK HE’LL really let us see it?” I asked as we wound through Seven Dials, ringed with restaurants and pubs, jazz spilling through a briefly opened door and bouncing along the wet pavement at our feet. “Why?”

  “Because up to now, there’s been no proof that it’s actually Dee’s mirror. Though the museum so far has gone out of its way not to say so in public, seeing as it’s touted among the cognoscenti as one of its great British objects.”

  “But it might not be?”

  “Walpole said it was Dee’s.”

  Castle of Otranto Walpole?” I squeaked. “The inventor of Gothic fiction?”

  “Good old Horace,” she replied with a smile. “He of the creaking doors in the night, the distant scream, the bats fluttering about the moonlit tower. All the great clichés of ghost stories and horror films. Yes, that Horace. He gave us Dee’s magic mirror, too. Unfortunately, there’s suspicion in some quarters that his tale about the mirror’s history might be as fantastic as his fiction. Not quite fair, really. He was a true collector, a connoisseur of esoteric art and occult objects. And the provenance he gave the mirror winds plausibly back through eccentric aristocrats to a man who patronized both Dee and his son.”

  “Arthur?” I asked. In the bag on my shoulder, the weight of the stolen mirror seemed to grow heavier.

  .

  “Arthur. Physician to the czar of russia. Son of an English wizard. And most important, at least tonight, correspondent of Sir robert Cotton—maybe the most significant collector of ancient books and manuscripts in Britain’s history.” for a ways we walked in silence, our footsteps ringing on the pavement.

  “right now, the mirror has pride of place in the Enlightenment Gallery, under the aegis of Owen Knight, head of European collections. A curator who’s half-Welsh and wholly fascinated by Dee. Steeped in British history. But there’s a struggle brewing behind the scenes between Owen and his counterpart in charge of the Americas. Because the mirror may or may not be Dee’s, but it is most certainly Aztec.”

  “Aztec?” I exclaimed.

  An attribute of the god Tezcatlipoca. Dark twin and eternal rival of the better-known Quetzalcoatl. The mirror is supposed to have been fixed to his leg after a sea monster bit off his foot in a titanic battle at the dawn of creation. The Aztecs believed the mirror worke
d two ways. Priests could see in it visions of whatever the god cared to show them—things near or far, past or present, or yet to come. But the god also used it as a window through which to gaze out on the world he had helped to create, watching the people he sometimes chose, on a whim, to destroy. Lord of the Smoking Mirror, his name means. God of poetry and jokes, he was. Sounds bright and beautiful, doesn’t it?” Her eyes twinkled with mischief. “But he was also the god of night and mockery, of disease and sorcery and death. The Enemy, he was called by those who worshipped him. The Trickster. The Spanish missionaries had another name for him: the Aztec Lucifer.”

  “How did such a thing fall into Dee’s hands?” asked Eircheard, rolling along on the other side of Joanna.

  She shrugged. “Nobody knows. It’s not like it’s the only one. Tezcatlipoca was a major god, and most of his statues had these mirrors attached to them. The conquistadors hacked up the statues as evil idols, but trinkets like these mirrors tended to be slipped out of the carnage by the foot soldiers when the priests weren’t looking. A number of them were floating about Europe in the sixteenth century. Dee made several extended visits to the Continent, where he had rock-star status as an intellectual, though he was shamefully ignored at home. It’s not implausible that at some point he picked one up from a Spaniard in the Low Countries. He was in Antwerp, for instance, in 1563, in search of rare manuscripts.

  “We know he had one. The question has always been, is it this one? Your letter—assuming it’s genuine—offers proof. And since Owen’s locked in a territorial battle over the thing, he’ll probably kiss your feet, never mind letting you hold the damned mirror. You’d think it was one of his own balls, the way he protects it.”

  We turned a corner and the museum soared into sight, its colonnade and grand sculptured pediment glowing gold in the darkness. Behind its high wrought-iron fence it looked like an immense beast, a hoarder of knowledge. Late on a rainy autumn night, its grand stairway was eerily deserted. We followed Joanna up the steps, our footfalls echoing in the night.

  We ran up the steps and in through the dim echoing entry hall, into the blinding white space of the Great Court, mostly empty. It was dizzying, like walking through a hard, cold, echoing egg turned inside out. In the center was a circular tower, the old reading room of the British Library before it had moved to its new digs farther north a decade earlier.

  Joanna marched us toward a grand pedimented doorway leading off the court to the right. Inside was a long, narrow gallery, dark after the brightness of the court. I stood blinking in the entryway for a few moments until my eyes adjusted to the dimness, aware only of the room stretching far into the distance on both left and right.

  “Enlightenment Hall,” said Joanna. “A tribute to the seekers of knowledge. Displayed in their fashion.” Which meant lots of classical statuary, apparently, and display cases packed chockablock like curio cabinets with objects gathered by abstract ideas—justice, geography, religion, magic—rather than by the time or place of their making.

  We turned left, past a lion-headed Egyptian goddess in black stone—Sekhmet, goddess of chaos and destruction, noted Joanna—and stopped at a case that held magical objects of all kinds. The antithesis, I thought, of the Enlightenment and its proud rationality. In one corner was a small black disc of polished stone, about a quarter-inch thick. It had a handle with a hole drilled through it.

  “Tezcatlipoca’s foot,” said Joanna.

  “That’s it?” asked Eircheard, clearly unimpressed.

  Nothing was visible around its rim.

  Joanna pulled out her phone to call the curator, and casting a baleful glance at me, Eircheard limped off for the men’s room. But I stood entranced by the dark mirror. A blank bit of darkness. It seemed preposterously small to hang a human life upon.

  Its reflections were dim shadows. It was like the night sky, except that the more I stared into it, the more light seemed to recede from the surface, almost as if I were pouring into it. Clouds skidded across it, growing and dissolving. Barely discernible, without stars in the distance.

  And then I saw a shadowy reflection. The face of a man over my shoulder. With dark hair and pale, wolfish eyes. The Winter King. And then I saw the gleam of a knife.

  I whirled, my heart knocking against my ribs. But I was alone in the gallery, save for one shadowy figure at the far end, too far off to have cast the reflection.

  “Kate?” It was Joanna. “Are you all right?”

  Dumbly, I nodded.

  Owen’s waiting for us at the restaurant.”

  34

  WE CROSSED BACK through the court to the stairs at the base of the reading room. Wide steps spiraled up around it to the museum’s upper level, where a chic postmodern restaurant was tucked in behind the reading room, prickling with the muted clink of cutlery. The few patrons left looked to be an even mix of obvious tourists and well-heeled Britons. It was an airy space, the steel netting overhead now dark.

  A man with a shock of dark gold hair and a finely cut suit rose as we approached, and Joanna introduced Owen Knight, curator of European collections. He gave Joanna a cool kiss on the cheek, his smile faintly lascivious. “I took the liberty of ordering already, as the kitchen was closing. I hope you like calamari.”

  There was a mound of them on a plate in the center of the table. I realized I was ravenous.

  “How are things with Gloria?” Joanna asked.

  He leaned back in his chair, grimacing. “Greedy Gloria.” He had a soft “r” that sounded more like a “w.”

  “Gloria Moreno,” explained Joanna. “Curator of the Americas. She has an interest in Dee’s mirror.”

  “If she’d put it like that, I’d be ecstatic,” he grumbled. “But she won’t admit it’s Dee’s. Says it belongs in her rooms as indisputably Aztec.”

  As they talked, Eircheard and I ate, content to listen to their sparring.

  “No one knows, actually, if it’s Dee’s mirror at all,” said Joanna.

  Owen colored a little. “It’s Dee’s.”

  But you can’t prove it.” Joanna leaned forward. “Yet.”

  He went still. “What have you got?”

  “A letter from Arthur Dee,” she said. “You will knowe the mirror by—” She stopped with a sweet smile.

  “By what?” Sweat had sprung up on his upper lip.

  Joanna leaned back. “Hard to tell from the display. It will have to come out of its case.”

  He sat back. “Impossible. You know that.”

  Joanna set her drink down on the table. “Pity. As Ms. Stanley’s adviser, I’ve told her that the best price will come via select auction among occult collectors. As I’ve said, this might mean it could disappear from view for centuries. Such a secretive set.” She rose.

  “Wait.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Come back to my office.”

  She unfurled a wide smile. “With pleasure.”

  I took one more piece of calamari for the road, and then we clattered down the stairs and back into the Enlightenment Gallery, this time turning right, away from the mirror. At the lower end of the gallery, we passed into another, smaller room, turned left into a long hallway of offices and study rooms, and then right.

  The office had high ceilings and two windows that looked out over a narrow side yard cluttered with a few cars. Beyond that, a black iron railing fenced off the tree-lined street that ran along the eastern side of the museum. A large desk and a long table cluttered with papers and bits of statuary faced each other across the room. Every available surface seemed to be filled with body parts in cold, beautiful stone. Most of them female. A lioness head torn from another statue of Sekhmet, goddess of chaos, pestilence, and bloodlust. A white marble foot. A single, impossibly perfect breast. Did Owen fancy himself Pygmalion? Or Dr. Frankenstein?

  He sat on the edge of the table, arms crossed. “What have you got?”

  Joanna put both hands on the table and displayed her prodigious memory, quoting a sentence she’d seen only once
before. “You will knowe the Mirror by its black surface, and by a Posie around its edge.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that,” said Owen, retrieving a piece of paper from his desk and laying it on the table. “Second inquiry in as many weeks, as it happens, about lettering around the perimeter.”

  The page was a Xerox of a daguerreotype. A man with Victorian sideburns in a kilt and an immense tam-o’-shanter with a cockade and a tall pheasant plume. He stood holding a dark circular mirror like a trophy. At the bottom was scrawled a date: May 10, 1849.

  I started and then stopped myself, hoping Owen hadn’t seen it. He was staring at the photo. “Nothing for years, and then two inquiries in two weeks. Odd, don’t you think?” He looked up. “unfortunately, unhelpful. It was ground down at some point. Nothing legible left.”

  “No marks at all?” asked Eircheard.

  “Nothing useful unless you know what it says.”

  “But we do,” said Joanna.

  Owen’s fists clenched involuntarily, his voice tightening. “What?”

  “It comes out of the case first.”

  We had to wait, he said, none too graciously, until the museum emptied of patrons for the night.

  “I’ll need some help,” said Owen, looking pointedly at me.

  Beyond him, Joanna gave a slight shake of her head. No.

  I’ll do it,” said Eircheard.

  We hung our jackets in his closet, and I set my bag with Dee’s book on the floor. And then we all sat on the floor in the dark, out of sight from the windows, watching the moonlight slip over the walls.

  I thought of the black velvet bag inside my bag. I had no idea how I’d manage the switch. But Eircheard was a clown. No doubt he’d improvise some distraction when the time came.

  Half an hour ticked slowly away before Owen rose and beckoned to Eircheard, and the two of them disappeared into the hall, the door closing quietly behind them.

  Through the windows, the lights of London bounced off the clouds, giving the sky a strange pinkish glow. The wind rattled against the panes in gusts that sent leaves whirling about.