March gave way to green April. In rare, lucid moments it occurred to me that I should pay a visit to Lord and Lady Faraday, only I would take a drink first to steel my nerves, then another, then I would wake on the floor, my head feeling as if someone had taken a hammer to my temples. I considered returning to Scotland as well. Letters had begun to arrive again from Madstone Hall, piling up on my table. I determined to read them, but always the drink required to clear my mind led to many more that fogged it, and the letters remained unopened. Richard Mayburn came to speak to me, and Rebecca again, and though I did not turn them away I had nothing to say to them. Finally they ceased coming altogether.
I believe, left to myself, I would have drunk myself to death; it was what I wished for. Only there was something that kept me from surrendering altogether–something I had to do. Then, on the first day of May, I happened to pick up a crumpled broadsheet lying in the gutter as I stumbled out in search of more grog. My eyes fell upon a small printed notice, and I knew at last what I had been waiting for: to say good‑bye.
I reached Westminster Abbey at midday. The sun was bright, and its rays pierced my skull, stabbing at my brain. A drink would have succored me, but I had not stopped on the way to buy any whiskey, and I had not had a drink since the night before, which was longer than I had gone in many weeks. However, as I entered the cathedral, the quiet and dimness were like a balm to my mind. The pain grew more bearable, if not diminished.
It took me an hour to find her tomb. The little article in the broadsheet had not said in which part of the abbey she had been laid, only that she had been buried there as an act of kindness to Lord Faraday, who had served the kingdom so well in Parliament. I wandered through the nave and sanctuary, and the two transepts, peering in every corner, looking for a stone that was newer than those around it.
At last I found it, in the place where I should have looked first: on the edge of the Cloisters, not far from Sir Talbot and Lady Ackroyd. The stone was small and plain, with only her name and the dates of her birth and passing upon it. I knelt, but I had no paper and charcoal to make a rubbing with, and so I pressed my hands against the stone, as if to etch the words into my flesh instead.
“Hello, my love,” I murmured, and I wondered if by some strange workings, like those in the Whispering Gallery, she might hear my words. “It’s your Marius. Please, dearest–you must not forgive me for what I have done. Only bid me good‑bye. For surely you and I will never meet, as I belong in no heaven that might house the likes of you.”
I meant to go then. My head, though in pain, was clear of the haze of whiskey for the first time in weeks, and at last I apprehended in full the knowledge I had been masking with drink all this time.
It was my fault Alis had died.
“Is that so?” spoke a soft voice behind me. “Is it truly your fault?”
Had I spoken my anguish aloud? I turned and saw a woman standing above me. She was clad in the flowing black gown of a mourner. Though her lithe figure lent her an air of youth, she leaned upon a cane, and a veil concealed her face.
“Did you know her?” I said, though it was hard to speak.
“Not as you knew her, Marius.”
She lifted her veil. Her face was as pale and luminous as it had been that night at the tavern, though the shadows that gathered in her cheeks were darker than before.
“Why do you blame yourself, Marius?” the fairy‑woman said.
I turned away. “I did not tell her.” Grief tore the words out of me in hoarse sobs. “I did not tell her who she really was. My mission was to watch her, to see if she learned of her true nature on her own. Only she didn’t, and now she’s gone.”
A rustling of cloth behind me. “We all must pass in time, Marius. Her kind, our kind. You could not have changed that.”
“But it did not need to be so soon! I might have taken her to the tavern. You could have helped her. She could have endured for many years.”
The woman sighed. “Perhaps she could have endured. Endured in suffering, and in sorrow. For she had thought herself a child of Lord and Lady Faraday, not something other–a changeling, a thing of legend. Perhaps knowing what she truly was would have given her woe rather than comfort. And even if not, why do you place all this blame upon yourself. Did not those you serve know of her true nature before you did?”
A sliver of ice seemed to pierce my heart. Yes, they had known all along what she was, but they had only wanted to watch her as she failed, not to help her. The Philosophers. And how was it they had known Alis was a changeling in the first place?
But there were . . . others, from outside, who convinced them to try. . . .
I hardly saw as something soft was pressed into my hands. “Dry your tears, Marius.” The woman’s voice was hard and clear as glass now. “It will do Alis no honor to cast away your life. If you would serve her now, then do not forget the gift we gave you. . . .”
Her gown fluttered. Like a passing shadow she was gone, and I knew that I would never see her again. I looked down. In my hands was the silver cloth I had taken from my mother, and which I had given to Alis at St. Paul’s. As always, it was unmarked with stain or rent. With it, I brushed the dust from her tomb. Then I stood and ran through the cathedral.
I reached my house an hour later, breathless, and it took me some time to find it amid the chaos and squalor, for the servants had abandoned me weeks ago for want of their wages. At last I found it beneath a table: a small book, bound in frayed leather. In my grief I had forgotten it. I took it now and sat at the table. My hands trembled, and a strong temptation for a drink came upon me–it would have steadied me–but I dismissed it and opened the book.
It was a journal.
The author’s name was one Thomas Atwater, according to the title page, and the journal was begun in the year 1619.
I begin this record even as I begin a new life, the author wrote. For on this day I have joined a newly established order of men and women who call themselves Seekers. Clever, they are, and curious and bold. They were alchemists once, but have since put such frivolous pursuits behind them, and instead search out the source of deeper and truer magicks. I am of great cheer as I write this, for at last I have found a hope of helping myself and those who are like me. . . .
A thrill came over me as I read these words, for the slanted hand in which they were written was entirely familiar to me. There could be no doubt: The author of this journal was one and the same with the writer of the letters I had found in the vaults beneath the Charterhouse. Thomas Atwater had been one of the tavern folk.
And he had been a Seeker as well.
I read on, page after page, eschewing drink or food, only stopping to light several candles as night stole over the city outside. The journal seemed to contain more pages than possible given its size, recording the events of several years, and it was only as the light of dawn touched the windows that I finally reached the end. I set down the book, staring out the window at the new day beginning, and I knew that, once again in my life, I was just beginning as well. For what I had read in the journal had changed me completely and forever.
Atwater’s writings had contained many revelations, but one above all others burned in my brain. And it was simply this: Everything which the Seekers stood for was a lie.