“You! You’ve never been out of Yorkshire in your life . . .”
“Then it’s time I did.” I folded the precious letter. “As for my father’s house, it will not be sold. I intend to live there.”
He gaped. “A single woman! In London!”
“I will be quite able to afford a servant.”
“I utterly forbid it!”
Coolly I pocketed the letter and looked straight at him. “Uncle, you may bluster as you please. I often wondered why you took me in, when it was clear you had no love for me. Now I see that you must have been waiting eagerly for this day all along, thinking to obtain my father’s money. Well, I thank you both for all your . . . care . . . over the years. Rest assured I will repay all the debts you may have incurred on my behalf. But tomorrow, by the first train, I will leave.”
The years of humiliation and timidity and boredom were over!
As I marched to the door and closed it firmly I looked back and saw him mop his bewildered brow with a white handkerchief. “Bless my soul,” he breathed.
Needless to say I lay awake all night in a trembling terror.
But next morning, bag in hand, my heart quaking with fear and excitement, my head held high, I climbed aboard a train for the first time in my life and set off.
For London!
Immense, brilliant, terrifying labyrinthine London!
8
. . . It is told that there was once a man of that district named Oisin Venn. And that late one night of February he rode home from the wars, and wandered from the path, and long was he lured and mired by feylights and willows o’ the wisp in the marshy places of the moor. And he came to a deep wooded Combe and though he sensed somewhat of the danger, he entered that place.
And he became aware of the eyes of dark birds upon him, and of the malice of laughter.
Chronicle of Wintercombe
REBECCA DROVE CAREFULLY up the rutted lane.
Where it met the edge of the copse of firs, she parked and climbed out.
The wind from the sea was cold; she pulled her coat tighter, then hauled out her wellies. Pulling them on, she turned and trudged up the narrow track, the bag of groceries slung on her back.
Why he had to live out here, she had no idea.
There were cottages in the village for rent. Even on the Wintercombe estate. But then, he was working feverishly on this spell-thing, and he needed quiet.
As she came to the top of the track and opened the bleached wooden gate, she thought of Venn, down there in the ancient house, working equally obsessively with the obsidian mirror. The mirror that was Maskelyne’s. Had they gotten it to work? Had Venn already changed time to bring back a dead woman? Had Jake found his father? She hadn’t heard from Jake for weeks. The silence was unnerving.
A lapwing called and flew up, out of the gorse. The bushes were just starting to come into their mustard-yellow flowers, but something had frosted them hard. Term was half over. And she had so much work to do!
Trying to ignore the familiar guilt, she walked up and rapped on the back door. The cottage was a low, lopsided building, a Devon longhouse, once maybe the home of some medieval yeoman and his few animals. In the summer it was a holiday home for artists and romantic couples.
Now Maskelyne was camping out here.
“Come in, Becky.”
She ducked under the lintel.
“Brought you the food. And . . .”
She stopped. “So you’ve finished, then.”
Maskelyne was sitting at the oak table wearing an old overcoat, his chin propped on one hand, staring down at the peculiar pattern of discs before him. As he looked up at her, she caught that abstracted darkness in his eyes that seemed to be there more and more lately, since he had come so close to the mirror again. And the scar that disfigured his left cheek seemed deeper and more raw.
“I didn’t hear you come up,” he said.
She took off her coat and squeezed the rain from her long plait of red hair. “Too wrapped up in the spell.”
“I told you, Becky, it’s not a spell.” He gestured at the discs. “It’s not anything, yet.”
She could tell by his barely hidden despair that it wasn’t working. After a lifetime of watching him flicker like a ghost into her life, she knew the degrees of his anguish. She pulled a chair over. “What else would you call it?”
“A configuration. Have you finished your assignment?”
She shrugged. “Almost. The Wars of the Roses seem a long way off.”
Maskelyne sighed. “If my problems affect your degree, I will never forgive myself.”
She glanced around the room. “That’s my business. I told you, it’s fine.”
The room was almost cozy today. He had drawn the curtains against the rain, and a small bright fire of furzewood crackled and spat in the open grate. From the rafters hung great bunches of grasses and herbs she had no names for; their pungent dusty leaves desiccating into dusty scatters on the floorboards. The room smelled of charred wood and damp.
On the table were the discs. He had spent every hour since Christmas working on them, and now, finally, twenty-four were laid out in a pattern of six by four.
They were a few centimeters across, and each was of a different material. Some were stone—she recognized granite, limestone, basalt brought from the moor, some greenish shale from the river. Others, like the white discs of chalk and the black one of coal he had had to search farther afield for, in Wiltshire and Wales, sometimes staying away for days. A flint disc lay roughly chipped in the center. She touched it lightly. Beside it lay circles of wood, brass, silver, steel and copper, of glass and paper, cork and cotton, various plastics cut from a credit card, labels, a shiny CD. Others that disturbed her more were cut from skin, fur, fleece. Some were materials she couldn’t even identify, but certainly the central disc was of solid gold, resting in the center like a coin. It had cost a lot of money, some of it from her savings. This was the one he touched now, renewing a slow, silent process of moving the pieces, as if in some secret checkers game with himself, played endlessly, day and night.
“What will it do?” she murmured.
“It will bring them.” His husky voice was patient. “It will bring Venn.”
He moved a piece, sliding it with the softest of touches.
She went and put the kettle on, then came back, leaning closer.
Each of the discs was marked with a symbol. Some she recognized—the zodiac signs of Scorpio, Gemini, and so on. Others looked like warped letters.
She reached out to touch one.
“Don’t!” he said quickly.
“What does that one mean?”
“Mercury. The planet of speed and quicksilver. The thieves’ planet. This is Mars. This, Venus.”
She nodded. The disc made of silver had a moon-crescent; the central gold one a rayed circle that must mean the sun. “Astrology? Alchemy?”
He smiled, even as he moved the discs. “Both and neither. A science so ancient only ghosts remember it.”
She frowned. He rarely spoke about his life before he had leaped into the mirror. Jake had told her about Symmes’s diary—how Symmes had stolen the mirror from Maskelyne in some dingy opium den, sometime in the 1840s. But before that, who had he been? How had he come to possess the mirror? She wanted to ask. Instead she said, “You should have something to eat. I’ve brought some stuff.”