household, I will try.”
Miss Crawford closed her eyes and stilled her breathing.
“You quiet yourself.” Lucy had not intended to say anything, and she regretted the words the instant she spoke them. She hated when words escaped against her will. It was a feeling she knew too well. With Mrs. Quince, the consequence for a slip of this kind might be a pinch or a slap or a public scolding, and Lucy winced out of reflex.
Miss Crawford turned to her, the surprise visible upon her face even in the feeble light, but there was nothing dark or angry. “You know more of the cunning woman’s craft than you admit.”
“Only… only a little,” she answered. “I attempted to learn to read the cards once, but I was not very good at it and—and it ended in a quarrel.”
“With whom?” asked Miss Crawford.
Lucy surprised herself by telling the truth, though she had never before spoken of how Mrs. Quince treated her. She hated that the world would know how helpless she was, but now she found she wanted to tell Miss Crawford. “Mrs. Quince. She was kind to me once, long ago, but since that quarrel, she has not been my friend.”
Miss Crawford clucked her tongue. “I don’t believe I much care for your Mrs. Quince, so we may safely forget about her. I would like you to look for the source of this man’s curse.”
Lucy felt cold fear grip her. It was a near-blinding panic. Was it fear of Mrs. Quince or something else? She did not know why, but she did not want anything to do with helping this man. “I can’t,” she sputtered. “I know nothing of these things.”
“You know how to quiet yourself,” said Miss Crawford. “I cannot do it. At least I cannot do it well, for I have not the concentration. You must simply grow quiet and then, with your mind rather than your eyes, have a look about.”
Lucy shook her head like a child. She had not attempted to enter this state of concentration, not since that afternoon, the last time she’d tried to read the cards with Mrs. Quince. She recalled it now in a jumble of images —Mrs. Quince’s freckled complexion turning bright red, cards flying across the table, a crystal pitcher shattering. Mrs. Quince accusing Lucy of plotting against her. A slap across the face, shocking in its force and suddenness. Lucy had been unable to comprehend. She’d only known magic as something silly and trivial, something for street performers, or a kind of parlor trick practiced by wags like Jonas Morrison. She’d never understood why Mrs. Quince had taken the matter so seriously.
The thought of quieting herself filled her with a terrible anxiety, but she knew it was Mrs. Quince who made her feel this way, not the act itself, and certainly not Miss Crawford. As much as Lucy wanted nothing more than to step back and recede into the wallpaper, she was determined not to disappoint this lady. She bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “I shall try.”
Lucy took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and then repeated this action several times, slowing her breathing, trying to slow her heartbeat though it pounded loud and quick. She tried to silence the chatter in her mind. She felt the light of the candle. The proximity of Miss Crawford, and the strange man on the bed who radiated a dangerous warmth.
Then there was something else. Something red and black and angry. It burned, and yet, in her mind it seemed both cold and wet. On some deep level Lucy understood that if she paused to consider the contradictions of what she experienced, the sensation would vanish, like a vivid dream that dissolves into a jumble of images only seconds after waking. She held on to this experience by the thinnest strand of gossamer, and it nearly eluded her entirely. It was a glimpse of something that flickered like a candle and that she could only understand by putting together fragments. She had no knowledge of what it was, but she knew precisely where it was.
Breaking her concentration, Lucy strode forward. She opened the stranger’s coat and, gripping the lining in both hands, she tore it, and there, tucked in the folds of the cloth, was a little package of white linen, no bigger than a crab apple, tied with what appeared for all the world to be human hair.
She began to reach out toward the bag when there was at once something between her and the bundle. It was dark and ill-defined and empty, and yet, for all its shapelessness, it seemed to Lucy to have a face—not composed of features precisely, but points within its blankness that stood in for features. It turned to Lucy and gazed upon her with its indistinct eyes and opened its absent mouth to reveal an even more black and undulating abyss within. There was something sick and wriggling about it, as swift and jittery as a beetle’s legs as it lies upon its back. It was more terrifying than anything Lucy had ever imagined. It was terror itself, given a cold and shimmering nonform. Lucy’s legs grew weak, and though she did not know it at the time, she would later realize she had nearly passed water where she stood.
If the encounter had lasted longer, Lucy would have been unable to resist the urge to flee, but from the moment she first saw the thing until the moment she acted, only a second or two passed. She had almost no time to feel the full brunt of the terror, and so she reached past the shapeless thing and grabbed the cloth sack and yanked it away.
She looked back and saw that the dark presence had gone, and the stranger was awake, staring at her with glassy eyes, but then he sank back to bed, unconscious once more.
Lucy took the little sack, and realizing she was no longer in the quiet state, she held it out to Miss Crawford.
The lady looked at the bag and then at Lucy. Her sea-green eyes were wide and moist. “Miss Derrick,” she said, “that was most impressive.”
Lucy held the package in her shaking hand. “What was that?” she managed, though her voice cracked as she spoke.
Miss Crawford put her own hand over Lucy’s and smiled. “There are dark things in this world, and you have seen one of them, but it is gone now. Now we must get rid of the instrument that attached it to this man,” she said. “A curse of this kind works upon the principle of sympathy. Whatever has linked the stranger to this bundle must still be in effect, so we must be careful how we destroy it. If we were to burn it, for example, it might cause that man to develop a fever or blisters, or possibly even burst into flame himself.”
Miss Crawford took the package, set it down upon the little bed table, and began to untie it. The cloth unfolded as a square, and within in it, made of the same cloth, was a little effigy of a man, so bland and featureless as to be a model of any living person with four limbs and a head. Around its little cloth neck were tied strands of hair.
“Now we may safely destroy it,” Miss Crawford said, clutching it in her hand. “It is inert. I shall toss it in the fire on my way out.”
Lucy could not cease thinking of the shapeless creature she had thought she had seen or almost seen or sensed or whatever it had been. She opened her mouth to ask about it, but then decided it was better not to know. Already she began to doubt she had seen anything at all, to tell herself that her mind had combined shadow and smoke and fear and created a formless chimera. She liked believing this better than believing that the shape she had encountered was real.
To distract herself, she turned toward the man. “Ought he not to awaken?”
“I expect he will soon enough,” said Miss Crawford. “Though free of the curse, he has been through an ordeal, and he will need time to recover.”
They departed the room, and Miss Crawford put her hand on Lucy’s arm in what felt like a gesture of friendship. Lucy looked up at Miss Crawford and saw her beautiful smile, and though she wished to hear more praise, she understood no words could ever capture the same force as that expression of respect and benevolence. Miss Crawford liked her. She approved of how Lucy had conducted herself. For the first time in as long as she could remember, Lucy felt as though there was a person in the world to whom she mattered.
4
ONCE MISS CRAWFORD HAD DEPARTED, THE FATE OF THE STRANGER remained a matter of significant consternation for Uncle Lowell. He sent Mrs. Quince several times to investigate whether or not the stranger had
