“My Catherine and I have not been blessed with children,” he answered.
“Will your wife not object to your bringing home a stranger to live with you?”
“Should she?”
“No, only I mean, it is an unusual thing, is it not, to bring home a woman because a spirit asked you to do so?”
“Catherine and I have been together for almost thirty years. I hope she is accustomed to me by now.”
Lucy need not have worried. Mrs. Blake had not been warned that there would be a houseguest, but nevertheless welcomed Lucy warmly. She was a sweet, plump woman, not at all tall, perhaps once pretty, but now well ravaged by age and the demands of a middling life in London. It took only a minute for Lucy to discern that she was absolutely devoted to her husband, and it would not occur to her to deny him anything. A strange young woman was no burden if it was Mr. Blake who asked that she take a place in their home.
Lucy’s accommodations were not nearly what they had been at Mr. Gilley’s house. She had but a garret with a broadly sloping roof—clean, but small and narrow, and inclined to be drafty. Yet, she loved it, and when she sat upon her low, rather lumpy mattress, Lucy let out a breath of relief. The Blakes were not affluent—they appeared almost poor—but here, at last, she was in the company of people with whom she did not have to pretend. She could say anything to them, for nothing would sound so strange as what they said to her.
Within two hours, Mrs. Emmett arrived with her luggage. When Lucy introduced her to Mr. Blake, the engraver examined her with a peculiar expression. “I’ve never seen one such as you,” he said.
“Nor I one such as you,” answered Mrs. Emmett.
“We shall have to talk, I think,” he said.
“We shall mean to do so,” said Mrs. Emmett, “and yet never will.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Blake. “That
And with that, the two peculiar people seemed at ease with each other.
Once Lucy was settled, Mr. Blake invited her for tea alone in his sitting room. She sipped nervously, and took none of the macaroons he offered her, though she was usually very fond of macaroons.
“You must have many questions,” said Mr. Blake.
“Tell me about my father,” she said.
He nodded, and then nodded to someone invisible. “He is not himself with us. It is only Bob, who has been a helpful intermediary in this matter. The dead are difficult to hear, Miss Derrick, though they hear one another better than we hear them. Your father has tried to speak to you, but he cannot reach you. It is much easier for him to speak to Bob, even though Bob inhabits our realm, not theirs.”
Lucy felt the tears build in her eyes. Her father had tried to reach her and she could not hear. She felt as though her heart must break.
“There is no deficiency in you,” said Mr. Blake, who appeared to understand her grief. “Do not think so. It is not a matter of will or love or openness. To hear the dead, even those who dwell near us, you must be… different. I have always been as I am. When I was a boy, my mother had to keep my father from beating me as a liar after I spoke of seeing angels in the trees. I soon learned to keep such observations to myself, for I understood, even at that age, that the things I saw could not be seen by others.”
Lucy nodded. “What does my father tell you?”
“He has almost as much difficulty seeing our world as we have seeing his. There is something you must do, but he cannot yet see what. He wishes you to stay here with me until he can see it. He will then tell me when he can. He also says things of people in your circle. He says one you must trust entirely, another not at all.”
“He does not say which is which?”
Mr. Blake shook his head and smiled knowingly. “The dead, even when they mean well, can be rather a pain in the arse.”
Within a day it became apparent that there was not going to be any revolution in England and no blood flowing through the streets of the capital. This was certainly good news, but the newspaper Mr. Blake brought home contained its share of troubling news. The assassin was revealed as a madman named John Bellingham. It took Lucy a moment to recognize the name, but then she recalled it was the man she had met at Lady Harriett’s house the night she was captured. And Mary had told Lucy that she had taken him away and set him free in London. Mary had, in effect, played a hand in a plot to murder the prime minister.
Lucy could not believe it. Even if her cause was just, how could Mary condone such an act? It was monstrous. On the one side, the Rosicrucians and the revenants and their mills and machines; on the other, the Luddites and the old order—and now murder and treason. There had to be a third way, a better way. If only she could think of it and make Mary see reason. Of course, Lucy did not know if she would ever see Mary again, and now that Mr. Perceval was dead, she did not know that she could have any sway over the Rosicrucians, so even if she could think of a third way, she did not know that there was anything to do with the knowledge.
As for Mr. Bellingham, Lucy believed him to be no more than a madman, manipulated by Mary and her faction. According to what she read, he was angered because of an unjust imprisonment in Russia, for which he believed the British government owed him compensation. Somehow he had been convinced that his best course of action was to kill the prime minister. Justice for Bellingham was swift and terrible, and two days after the murder he was tried at the Old Bailey, where he offered scant explanation for his act but the misery he felt. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang the following Monday.
Mr. Blake, for his part, understood without Lucy telling him that Bellingham had been manipulated by the different invisible factions that now waged their war. Those who are called madmen are much more susceptible to magic, he said, for madness is often nothing more than an openness to the world around them, the world not governed by the cold logic of Bacon and Newton and Locke. These names he spoke with virulent contempt, and it seemed to Lucy that Mr. Blake hated nothing so much as he hated the very idea of reason.
“It is all well and good to apply reason to business plans or a mode of education or a voyage to Italy. One must live in the world after all. But reason, when applied to the universe, to the wonders of nature, to the things hidden from our poor eyes that see not all, but only what the Lord intended that they see—well, that becomes nonsense, doesn’t it? To say there are no ghosts because we cannot see them, cannot measure them, cannot weigh them upon scales nor note their reaction to heat in a flask—I hardly see the point of such a mode of inquiry. The world is full of wonders that cannot be measured. That is why they are wonders.”
For her first three days at Mr. Blake’s house, Lucy was left mostly to herself as she studied the new pages of the
She also spent a great deal of time thinking about Byron. He had said she must come to him, and she wanted to. She longed to. She thought about what it had been like to kiss him. Over and over she relived the memory in her mind, recalling every detail, sometimes adding to it something she might have done or he might have said until she could not easily recall what had been real and what her imagination.
She wanted to go to him. Each morning she woke and thought that she would, but by the time she had dressed and eaten, she understood that her desire was but a dreamy absurdity. She had no real home, no protection, and she dared not put herself in his power. If he would but make a proposal of marriage all would be well, but he had not done so.
Instead of running to Byron, she contented herself with conversations with the Blakes, particularly on the subject of what she must do next. Lucy needed to find the remaining pages of the
