by Kevan Dale
“Phineas.”
Phineas clamped a hand over his mouth, eyes wide. His heart nearly trampled out through his ribs.
“Open the door.”
The voice sounded as cold as a pair of roof slates grinding against one another.
“Please.”
Phineas nearly wet himself—he knew the voice, as terrible and without warmth as it sounded. Instead of pulling his hand away from his mouth, he kept it there, pressing down even harder—for he suddenly had more than half a mind to answer: Catherine? Is that you?
But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. He’d been to the burial. He’d seen the coffin lowered into the earth, the last sight of it leaving the world with each clump of soil tossed in after it.
“Even death couldn’t keep me from you—don’t you see?”
Hands trembling of their own accord, Phineas reached for the trunk’s handles, doing all he could to convince himself he was in a dream, or at least letting his imagination get away from him. The silence after the words—her words—bore all the weight of the grave. Still. Blunt. Dead.
“I’ll give you all you ever wanted, Phineas,” the voice croaked. “All of me. You’ll see what it’s like. How sweet the darkness is.”
The inside knob on the door remained still. He glanced at the ring on his finger again.
“You—you can’t come inside, can you?” he said, his voice trembling.
“You can let me in. Please. I don’t want to lose you a second time.”
Phineas still remembered the warmth of Catherine’s hand in his own. The forest pool greens and browns of her hazel eyes. The slope of her shoulders, her braid of hair looped across the right one. The shape of her knees as she’d leaned them against him the night they’d talked until dawn.
“Just turn the knob—and you can forget everything else in my arms.”
“Yes—well—p-p-p-perhaps we can talk,” Phineas said. Quietly as he could, he hefted the last trunk, straining but not grunting. “As we did before.”
“Anything, I beg you, my love.”
Phineas squeezed his eyes shut at those final two words. Opening them, he stepped away from the front door, hurrying through the middle room. A tear bobbled on his eyelid and rolled down his cheek. “Just a moment,” he called over his shoulder.
As he neared the back staircase, the candle flame wavered and extinguished. His skin rippled with chills. A sound came from the front room. Without looking back, Phineas bound down the stairs. Still holding the trunk, he struggled with the latch, finally lifting it enough to bang the door open. Fat snowflakes whirled inside. The thin nag shivered in the hitches of the wagon he’d pulled to the front of the alley. Rushing, slipping on the snowy bricks underfoot, Phineas dropped the trunk outside the door. Tossing both satchels over his shoulders, he dragged out the second trunk. With one terrified glance up into the darkness of Swaine’s rooms at the top of the stairs, he turned and grabbed both trunks by their end handles, sliding them through the snow like sleds, straining and struggling to keep his footing against the weight of the books.
Upstairs in the front room, inky shadows seeped in around the hinges of the door. After a moment, the knob turned, and a pale hand pushed the door inward.
15
A Public Spectacle
Hargrove wasn’t happy, not at all, Swaine noted with pleasure. Oh, he tried one tack after another—though none Swaine hadn’t encountered time and again. The unseen arts lacked the precision, the rigor of science. Sham and tomfoolery prevailed. Such practices put the populace in danger. Such extraordinary claims demonstrated intemperate logic. True knowledge had only driven the unseen arts deeper into the shadows for a reason. Yet for each assertion Hargrove lobbed, Swaine countered with the same unperturbable calm with which he’d opened his remarks, not giving an inch, flicking away Hargrove’s straw men with little more than a slightly raised eyebrow, drawing a gentle focus to the flaws underpinning the man’s assertions, using Hargrove’s own arguments against his own position over and over.
Swaine didn’t, however, deceive himself into thinking he’d won much of the audience to his side. They watched, rapt, yes. For all that, he suspected most simply enjoyed the sight of Hargrove hoisted by his own petard—the satisfaction in seeing the arrogant brought low being one of life’s more gratifying pleasures. Others no doubt appreciated the fight Swaine brought to the evening, though in the end, they fully expected the lion to devour the Christian no matter how well the Christian fought, for where logic and rhetoric failed, Hargrove’s position, influence, and connections would eventually prevail.
As he watched Hargrove grasp the edges of the lectern with whitening knuckles, he knew what was coming, now that all his other strikes had been turned.
“And it would appear that my opponent—smug, condescending, believing himself smarter than the rest of us—would also like us to forget about sin.”
Yes, there it was, Swaine saw. Sin. Religion. A final retreat into the unassailable realm where reason finds no purchase and phantoms hold sway, immune to even the most direct hit.
“For in his silver-tongued remarks,” Hargrove continued, “one needn’t search far to detect his scorn for the beating heart of faith that has always sustained England. Guided mankind from the depravities of the past. Kept us in the Lord’s good stead. He won’t tell you so, mind you. He hides it all away. Asks us all to forget what we all know. Insists the way forward is in fact the way back, further from God’s will. Deeper into sin. Well, we shall not be fooled!”
Another round of applause swept the hall, along with the deeper vocalizations of men whose faith had been—allegedly—questioned. No wonder religion would never relinquish its grip on mankind: there was no easier way to stir an otherwise moral man into behaving irrationally—and in doing so, serve the powerful and the impotent in equal measure, Swaine knew.
Still, he stood and stepped again to the lectern. When the noise died down, he met every gaze without blinking.
“Whether or not my opponent believes the unseen arts to be sin is irrelevant,” he said. “He may harbor whatever beliefs he fancies, yet we are here to discuss laws and facts, for those, in the end, are what lie at the heart of English civilization. Created by men, defended by men, evolved by men as enlightened insight pulls us further from ignorance. Laws. Not superstition.”
He watched as Thomas Summerfield slid a flask from his pocket and tippled a mouthful. As long as he has the money, this is all worth it, Swaine thought. As for the rest of the audience, their hackles were up—there would be no getting through to most of them, exactly as Hargrove intended, having failed to hold his ground anywhere else on the field.
A bustle off to the side of the hall caught Swaine’s eye. Several uniformed soldiers moved in a group along the far wall. At the center, a dark-haired gentleman with a trimmed beard on his chin. Swaine recognized him instantly: Lionel Sackville, a man tragically born a century too late to become His Majesty’s Witchfinder General, yet determined to fill the role nonetheless. Swaine looked at Summerfield, who merely smiled at him with flushed cheeks and fop sweat beading up on his forehead.
“That’s quite enough,” Sackville called out. “His Majesty will not suffer such an assault on Christianity by the likes of you.”
Murmurs swept the hall. Heads turned. Swaine glanced behind him. The calm delight on Hargrove’s face told Swaine all he needed to know: the entire evening had been a set-up, a farce, a public spectacle the climax of which was to be his public arrest for blasphemy or some other such ridiculous charge.
“Do go on, August,” Hargrove purred.
Soldiers swept in from the other side of the hall, bursting in from a side door on cue. Summerfield swept his head back and forth, his eyes bulging as the soldiers rushed him as well. Within moments, they had him by the arms, dragging him from his seat. A dozen muskets pointed at Swaine as Sackville leveled a finger at him.
“In His Majesty’s name, you are hereby placed under arrest,” Sackville said. �
�You may consider your words from the Tower, Mr. Swaine.”
Swaine hesitated for perhaps a full second before deciding he was done being cautious. With a whispered incantation, he flung his hands in the direction of Summerfield. An eruption of ravens filled the air before him, wing, feather, beak, and eye of smoky obsidian whirling and squawking. The crowd pushed back with a gasp, knocking over chairs and benches. Soldiers batted away at the birds, only to see them shear apart into thick smoke. In the same instant, Swaine called for his handiest demon to clear a path for him as he leaped from the stage into the crowd. Soldiers flew into the air as the fiend led the way. Swaine grabbed at Summerfield, taking him by the arm and dragging him along the front of the stage. Shouts and cries filled the hall as the shadow ravens swooped to the arched ceiling and down, diving at the gathering, leaving trails of sooty lines behind them.
“This way,” Swaine said to the frightened, lumbering Summerfield. With another incantation, a great wind rose in Swaine’s wake, powerful enough to snuff out the candles on the chandeliers, to send scarf and hat flying amongst the scores of shadow ravens. One soldier after another was tossed aside as Swaine made his way through a door in the side of the hall, pulling the protesting Summerfield with him. Down a narrow hallway, they burst into a kitchen preparing the finishing touches on the banquet planned for after the debate. Cooks cried out as a path of destruction preceded the two fugitives, pots, tankards, and platters knocked asunder by the demon. Glass shattered, wood cracked, even the stone of the flooring shuddered.
Seeing a door to the outside, Swaine slammed it open, sliding on the snowy ground. Cold air shocked after the warmth of the hall and the kitchen behind.
Summerfield gaped. “Bloody brilliant—were those shadow ravens?”
Swaine didn’t slow. “We’re leaving. Where’s your carriage? Tell me you took a carriage.”
Shouts from around the front of the hall broke out. Several soldiers on horseback turned in their direction.
“Of course I did. And I have to slow down. Can’t breathe. This is brilliant, by the way. If my heart doesn’t give in, of course,” Summerfield panted. He tried to stop, but Swaine didn’t relent. The man was heavy as an ox, but at least he had momentum.
“Where?”
Summerfield ground to a halt, swaying and looking around bleary-eyed. He lifted a hamlike arm and pointed. “There it is.”
A two-horse carriage, a luxurious affair no doubt well suited to the standards of Drumbridge Hall, stood on the side of the street. Soldiers hurried from the kitchens behind them.
“And your driver is where?” Swaine said.
“Probably at the tavern. We’re not due to leave for another hour.”
Swaine sprinted with Summerfield to the wagon as shouts erupted behind them. “Then drive.”
“What? Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“I’m drunk.”
“No excuse.”
“I’m a terrible driver.”
A musket fired. The shot sailed wide, banging off a wrought iron gate that bordered the lane.
“Mr. Summerfield,” Swaine said.
“Believe me,” Summerfield continued, “horses hate me. Bloody things never go where I want. And I’ve a touch of vertigo, which makes riding up so high impossible—”
Another shot lifted a tuft of fresh snow from the roof of the carriage. The man was perfectly ridiculous.
“And you have the rest of my fee?” Swaine said, looking around for an alternative escape.
“Of course—in the carriage, locked in a box in the flooring.”
Half a dozen soldiers came after them, plus more from around front of the debate hall. Swaine turned back to the carriage. “Then get inside. Now. Up we go.”
He ripped open the carriage door and practically threw Summerfield inside, heaving at the man’s impressive bulk with his shoulder. Swaine motioned to the driver’s bench and bade his demon to take the reins. The binding connection between his mind and the demon’s tightened—this wouldn’t be easy. Swaine threw himself in after Summerfield, urging the demon onward without pause. Both horses screamed in terror, but the carriage lurched into motion, sending drifts of snow off in plumes as the horses broke into a gallop.
More shouting and musket shots followed. Swaine steadied himself on Summerfield’s prone back, peering through the carriage’s back window. Three riders on horseback followed. More were sure to join them. He kept his concentration on the demon, urging him on, keeping to the broader roads.
As the carriage careened along the snowy streets, Swaine had his hands full. The demon cared little for a steady ride, speeding around corners, whipping past lampposts, sending such foot and horse traffic as there was scattering in the carriage’s wake. Several times the carriage took to just two wheels, leaning precariously to one side or the other, leaving Summerfield bleating in terror. Even with all that, the horsemen closed the gap, hats low against the thick snow, three more riders added to the chase. Swaine instructed the demon to find a route to the river.
“I’m going to be sick,” Summerfield said, bracing himself against the bottom of the seats. “We’ll never get away.”
“Where’s the money?” Swaine said.
“How can you think about the money?” The carriage jolted with a bang over some unseen obstacle. One of the velvet curtains shook loose from its mountings.
“Shall I explain what this evening has done for my reputation?” Swaine said.
“You made him look like a fool, sir. As I hoped.”
“For all the good it does us, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“Fine, fine,” Summerfield said. He crawled across the carriage floor as it jostled and tipped, unlocking a secret compartment and withdrawing a sack of bills. He shoved it at Swaine. “May you find good use of it in jail.”
“Neither one of us is going to jail.”
“We’re going to outride soldiers? I don’t see—” The carriage skidded sideways after colliding with another carriage. Summerfield screamed. The demon, however, kept the horses straight, hooves pounding the snowy road as he drove them onward.
“Listen to me carefully,” Swaine said. “We’ll only have a few moments and if you can’t concentrate, it won’t work.”
“Work? How?”
Swaine was more than half-tempted to leave Summerfield behind in the carriage. Let him blubber his way straight into a cell in the Tower of London. But, no—he’d kept his end of the bargain, fruitless as the entire endeavor had turned out to be. Swaine had walked into the arrangement with open eyes; it wouldn’t be right to abandon the man, fool or no.
“Your grandfather would’ve appreciated what we’re about to do, Summerfield.”
With another look to see how quickly the horsemen were closing in on the racing carriage, Swaine explained his plan. The ruddy color drained from Summerfield’s face as he did. As the carriage neared the Thames, winter winds sent the snow billowing up from its passage like white flames.
16
Driverless
The horses reared, coming up short before the piers, the turn too sharp for them to make. As the carriage rocked on its springs, soldiers on horseback galloped up next to it, shouting orders for Swaine and Summerfield to come out. Soon, more soldiers swarmed up through the narrow cobbled lane. A dozen muskets pointed at the curtained windows.
“Get him out of there, right now!” a captain yelled from his mount, pointing at the carriage with his sword.
Two of the soldiers yanked open the side door, throwing it wide enough for their comrades to edge in with musket end and bayonet. Another soldier opened the door on the other side, his pistol covering the interior.
The driverless carriage stood empty.
A furious search yielded no sign of either fugitive. The soldiers cursed, spreading out their hunt amongst the barrels, crates, and stacks of coiled rope that opened out from the lane. Nothing. The panting of the horses gradually subsided as the water lapped the piers. Snow fell softly, m
elting into the river even as it settled over London, blanketing all.
17
Hearts Brimming with Courage
Wind caught the sails as they dropped one by one. The Dorset’s masts leaned, timber and rigging creaking, sailors calling out to one another as the wharfs and docks of Billingsgate diminished in the mists of dawn. Water crested along the ship’s prow as they passed scores of other ships moored in the Thames and along the quays, their flags and pennants snapping on the cold breeze.
August Swaine watched from the side of the deck, seated on one trunk while the other one—both loaded down with his beloved books—lay by his feet, an obedient hound by his master’s side. He scanned the snow-draped edges of London drifting by. The city fancied itself the peak of civilization—but Swaine saw it differently, as a monument to a peak already passed. Was it reaching for ever-higher truths? Were the men of influence and wealth who ruled it searching for new horizons of creation? Looking to make their mark anywhere near as courageously as those who’d come before?
No, of course not. They wished no more than to take what they could from the existing edifice of achievement, to occupy stations of privilege carved out a century—or more—earlier. To wring all they could from the system for their own benefit—and for the benefit of their heirs. They were appetite, they were impulse, they were passengers on the great engines of civilization, content to be pulled along in currents designed by others.
“Not for me,” Swaine said, his breath swept away, a tatter of curling mist dissipating on the cold air.
Maybe the New World had always been the place for such a man as he. After all, hadn’t that always been what he’d striven for—to push the boundaries of insight, to discover passageways and paths into the darkness, to set eyes upon the previously unseen? What was that if not precisely a longing for a new world? And if his theories were correct, the New World contained one place of such confounding power as to make such dreams take hold, waiting to be dragged into existence by his own hands, his own will.