by David Liss
“I had no wish to see him, and hope I never set eyes upon him again,” Lucy said, stepping close again, “but you fear him. Why?”
“You are mistaken,” said Mrs. Quince as she smoothed her apron.
“Then go tell my uncle,” said Lucy, wishing to test Mrs. Quince, perhaps wishing to hurt her. “Tell Mr. Buckles. Tell them all with whom I danced. Go on. Tell them.”
Mrs. Quince did not move.
Lucy pushed past her, entered her room, and closed the door.
Her triumph over Mrs. Quince, glorious though it may have been, left Lucy more confused than happy. What was Mr. Morrison to her that she should be so frightened? And what did it mean that Lady Harriett had been seeking someone to identify the Mutus Liber in the past few years? Was there some link between that and Mrs. Quince’s failed efforts to teach Lucy to read the cards? And now came this will that Mary has asked her to sign. She did not suspect Mary of trying to cheat her, but she did believe her friend knew more than she was saying, and that made Lucy uneasy.
Lucy slept badly and was awakened by the baby, whom she could hear fussing through the walls. Martha was not at the table when Lucy went downstairs for breakfast. There was only Mr. Buckles and Uncle Lowell, who appeared very angry indeed. Lucy glanced at Mr. Buckles, but he offered only a foolish smile before turning away. Was it hard for him to look at her, she wondered, to see the young lady whose life he had stolen? Lucy doubted his thoughts were ever troubled by such things. She did not believe him even conscious that he had done wrong. He had done it, and now it was over, so he thought no more of it.
After a brief period of silence, and then the baby began its shrill wail again. Mr. Lowell slammed down his fork. “I cannot see what your baby is doing, crying so violently.”
“It is usually very placid,” said Mr. Buckles. “Even Lady Harriett has condescended to observe how very … how, ah, very placid it is.”
“It weren’t placid last night,” said Uncle Lowell.
Lucy set aside her breakfast and went up to see Martha, who was still in bed, but quite awake. The bags under her eyes testified to the difficulties of her night, but she brightened considerably when she saw Lucy.
“I shall go quite mad,” said Martha. “Poor little Emily is really not herself. She’s never been like this, and I fear she may be ill.”
Lucy brushed some unruly hair from Martha’s face. “Does she nurse?”
“Like nothing I’ve seen.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I am quite bruised. Emily is ravenous, and has taken to biting me with the little teeth she has. Why, it seems she has grown more teeth overnight, which may explain her sadness. In truth, if she does not cease hurting me, I will have to hire a wet nurse after all.”
Just then the door opened, and the nurse came in with little Emily wrapped in a blanket.
“How is she?” asked Martha.
“She won’t settle, mum,” said the woman. “I reckon she wants her milk.”
“It cannot be,” said Martha. “She has done nothing but eat.”
“She’s been trying to nurse off me, mum.”
Martha reached out and the woman handed her her baby, and as she did so, some of the blanket fell away. It was all Lucy could do not to scream, for instead of little Emily, there was a monster, a foul thing of skin so white that its bulging, pulsating blue veins showed through. It had pink eyes, little tufts of black hair curling from its head, sharp and narrow eyes, pointed ears, and a predator’s sharp teeth. It looked at Lucy and grinned.
Lucy looked to the nurse and then to Martha, but neither of them noticed anything unusual about the child. Neither observed that it was not Emily at all.
Lucy saw what was invisible to the others—that baby Emily had been replaced by some foul thing, by a changeling. But how had it happened, and where was the real Emily?
“My sweet, you must not hurt your mama so,” said Martha to the thing as it suckled greedily upon her breast.
Lucy swallowed hard, and tried to speak. She failed and made the effort again. “Martha,” she said a ragged voice, “when did the baby begin to fuss?”
“Now that I think on it, it was right after we went to visit your friend, Miss Crawford.”
Lucy took another step backwards. “You saw Mary? When did you see her?”
“After we returned from Newstead and you retired to your room—to nap, I presume. Your friend sent her coach around, inquiring after me. She said she had no wish to disturb you, but she longed to meet her friend’s sister and niece. I cannot believe I neglected to tell you, but it is almost as though I forgot about it until this moment. How odd.”
A secret meeting between her sister and Mary—a meeting her sister happened to forget! And Mary had said nothing to her when she had seen her after this meeting had taken place. Now Emily was gone, replaced by a changeling. And all of this after Mary had insisted Lucy leave the still-undiscovered pages of the Mutus Liber to her in a hastily composed will. Could Mary have been deceiving her all along? Lucy found herself trembling with the realization that the one person in the world she trusted, other than Martha, had betrayed her.
She excused herself, not caring how she surprised Martha with her abruptness, and ran downstairs and out of the house. She ran down the street, pushing past and over and around whoever or whatever came across her path. She cared not how women stared or tradesmen shouted. It was nothing to her. She ran as fast as she could across the square to High Pavement.
When she arrived at Mary’s house, she knocked heavily upon the door, but received no reply. She knocked again and again, and finally she peered into the window.
What she found made her heart thunder in her chest. The house was all but cleared out. There was nothing upon the walls, no furniture upon the floors. The rugs were gone, and the curtains too. All was closed up and removed. Lucy saw but one thing, a single crate with a piece of paper attached to it, and upon the paper was written “Miss Lucy Derrick.”
Trying the door, Lucy found it unlocked. She rushed inside and unfolded the paper, but it contained no information. It merely denoted that the crate and its contents were hers. Lucy looked inside and saw it was a large collection of books upon the practice of magic.
Lucy remained frozen. Martha’s baby, dear little Emily, was gone, replaced with some goblin monster, and Martha did not know it. Mary was gone, and it seemed that she had played some terrible role in all this.
Lucy staggered backwards and felt tears coming on, but she fought them back. No, she thought. No more crying. Mr. Buckles and Mary Crawford and Uncle Lowell and Mr. Olson and even General Ludd—Lucy would discover who was set against her, and she would give them cause to regret it. She would take back what was hers, what had been robbed of her father—and she would find Martha’s baby. For so long she had been powerless, but not now. She would save her niece. She did not know how she would do it, but she would find a way. By force or by stealth, she would challenge those who had made themselves her enemies, and she would have victory over them, because Lucy understood that at the center of all these events was the Mutus Liber, a book whose authenticity she, and perhaps only she, could determine. They wanted it, and Lucy would have it, and once she did, she would be in a position to dictate terms, terms they would not like at all.
21
IT IS ONE THING TO BE DETERMINED TO ACT, AND QUITE ANOTHER to know precisely what needs doing, and so Lucy spent a long and sleepless night as she weighed her options and considered her alternatives. In several trips, so as to avoid the notice of anyone in her household, Lucy removed the books from Mary’s house to her own room. If Mary were her enemy, why would she give Lucy these books? And yet all evidence suggested that Mary had played some part in Emily’s being replaced by a monster. There was nothing to do now but study, learn what there was to be learned, what paths there were to explore. It all had to be done soon—very soon—for Lucy could not endure that Martha must live another day with that vile, grinning monster suckling at her.
She could find in Mary’s books nothing of use about changelings—only myth and folklore, stories that rang of falseness and ignorance. What Lucy needed was to learn how to banish a changeling and how to retrieve the stolen child. If there was little to be discovered about changelings, however, there was much written on other sorts of beings. In Lucy’s new library she read of the dark things that stalked the world, the spirits of Agrippa’s Fourth Book or the demons of the Lemegeton. Lucy had learned nothing of spirit summoning, and Mary had warned to stay away from such magic, but books teaching the methods of such summoning were among the books Mary had left her, and now those warnings fell flat. Mary had abandoned her, possibly betrayed her. Martha and Emily were in trouble, in terrible danger, and only Lucy knew that this was so. It fell upon her shoulders to do something.
With no one to guide her, with no hints to help her follow the right course, Lucy had no choice but to find her own way. She spent the day closeted away with her books, looking for what she ought not to look, and found what appeared to her promising. It was in a volume that Mary had given her, marking off certain sections as the only ones worthy of her attention, but there were other sections as well, including one dedicated to the Enochian magic closely associated with John Dee and Edward Kelley. This author had gone back to the source text, the Heptameron, and proposed a simplified method of calling down spirits, demons, and angels.
It felt dangerous to Lucy, but it also felt real, like something she could do, and yet the creatures in the book terrified her—foul, twisted, distorted things, drawn in broad, renaissance strokes, like the monsters who inhabit the lost islands of unknown seas. Attempting habitually to master beings of this sort would be foolish, but surely she could do so once. She needed only to call a creature of knowledge, command it to tell her how to banish a changeling and restore her niece, and then she would send it off. She would do it quickly and cleanly, and the danger would pass so swiftly it could hardly be accounted danger at all.
The book explained that the creature would attempt to deceive her, to punish her for the insult of summoning it to her realm. It would attempt to trick Lucy into setting it free, and it would then destroy her in one of a thousand painful ways that would appear to the outside world a natural death. Lucy was certain she was too clever for that, too focused. Men summoned these beings out of ambition and power, and these desires were their undoing. A woman who summoned a spirit for benevolent purposes would be more cautious.
Lucy would have thought she must roll up her rug and fashion a magic circle in chalk upon the floorboards, but that turned out not to be the case. The book said that it was best to limit the size of the manifestation of an otherworldly being, and that circles were best drawn on pieces of paper in ink—the smaller the better, but never so small as to compromise accuracy. Errors in the circle would allow the summoned creature to break free, and that was always fatal.
When she began the work, Lucy felt much as she did when copying out a talisman, not that she was drawing something, but more that she was reassembling an object that had been taken apart. The lines and circles and runes seemed to fit together like boards perfectly cut by a carpenter’s skilled hand. Or they did not feel that way, and so she twice destroyed her work because the circle simply felt badly constructed even if she could not find the error. When she was at last finished, she knew what she had done was perfect. She examined it over and over again in the rushlight, for it was now late at night, but her eyes only told her what she already knew—that her work could not be improved upon.
Lucy had put a great deal of effort into choosing a creature that might be most easily summoned and best controlled, and settled upon an angel whose name she could not pronounce (it was written out in Enochian runes, which looked like a strange combination of Hebrew and Latin letters), and whose particular virtues were said to be power, knowledge, and vengeance. Lucy wanted only one of those, and hoped the other two would not get in her way.
The summoning was simple. She would need to quiet herself, banish the world from her thoughts, and recite the simple sentence written in the Enochian tongue (helpfully transliterated by the author), while drawing forth a drop of her own blood. Very direct, very easy. With the circle written on so small a piece of paper, it made the whole affair curiously portable. She could bring her angel of destruction with her wherever she went, Lucy thought with the kind of crazed humor of the exhausted. It would make a pretty diversion at a ball.
Suppressing her giggles, bringing herself into the right frame of mind, Lucy—having memorized the incantation—stood before the circle, a knife ready to draw across her finger. And that was when everything went mad.
The door to her room burst open, and a dark form was on her at once, knocking her down and ripping the knife out of her hand. Lucy fell backwards, snapping her head forward in time to avoid knocking it upon the floor. Instead, she slammed her forehead into that of her assailant. Lucy grunted in pain and surprise, but the person on top of her made no sound.
She was held down by a large figure, round and soft, and who smelled strangely pleasant, like a warm wool blanket on a cold winter day.
“Are you hurt, Miss Lucy? Tell me you are not hurt.”
Lucy scrambled out from under the bulky form. “Mrs. Emmett?”
Hurrying to close the door, Lucy turned to see the plump woman getting to her feet, straightening out her bonnet, which she wore in her customary low fashion so it pressed her hair flat against her forehead.
“Lord, how I had to run to make my way here in time! Did not Miss Mary teach you any better than to fool with such things as summoning? One mistake in that circle of yours, and it would seek out the most arrogant living thing in the room, for these creatures hate arrogance above all weaknesses, and they can smell it the way a dog smells a rabbit. You may be certain that if you are alone, the most arrogant person in the room is you.”
“What are you doing here?” Lucy demanded, attempting to keep her voice low. “How did you get in here? How did you know I was summoning a spirit? And where is Miss Crawford?”
“So many questions,” said Mrs. Emmett with a good-natured laugh.
Checking the clock upon one of the side tables, Lucy saw it was near three in the morning. The house, however, remained silent. Mrs. Emmett’s arrival apparently had awoken no one.
“Then let us take one question at a time,” said Lucy. “Where is Miss Crawford?”
“Oh, I am certain I don’t know that. It’s got nothing to do with me.”
“Nothing to do with you?” asked Lucy. “Is she not your mistress?”
“You are my mistress now.”
“What can you mean? I cannot pay you.”
Mrs. Emmett smiled. “I need no money.”
“But what will Uncle Lowell say?”
“He’ll say nothing,” said Mrs. Emmett. “I’ll not stay here. You don’t need me, Miss Lucy. Not yet. When you do, I’ll come to you. It is no hard thing.”
Lucy shook her head at the nonsense. She was too tired to understand. “When did you last see Miss Crawford?”
“To that, I cannot say. My memory isn’t good for such things.”
Lucy circled around Mrs. Emmett. If this examination disturbed the good woman, she did not show it. She only turned her neck like an eager puppy to follow Lucy’s movements. “How did you know I meant to summon a creature?” Lucy asked.
“How could I not know it?” Mrs. Emmett asked.
Lucy let out a long sigh. “Take no insult, Mrs. Emmett, but what are you?”
“I am Mrs. Emmett,” she said with much cheer.
“And you now serve me?”
“Yes, Miss Lucy.”
“You serve me and not Miss Crawford?”
“Yes, Miss Lucy.”
It did not yet make sense, but Lucy suspected she was moving closer to some kind of clarity. “When we first met, you knew you were to serve me? Is that why you embraced me?”
“Oh, yes, Miss Lucy. I know everything that will happen
to me. I even know when I shall be no more.”
“You know when you are going to die?” Lucy asked.
“I know everything that is going to happen to me.”
“Then can you not alter things to make your life easier?”
“It is not my life, it is yours.”
This exchange was making Lucy uncomfortable. “What shall I do with you?”
“You need not worry for that. I have saved you from being destroyed this night, as you must have been—for there is an error in your circle. Your talent is great, but it is not flawless. You have come far by trusting your instincts, and you have come to see that your instincts do not lie, but it does not follow that you know all.”
“Miss Crawford warned me not to summon, but I cannot know that she is my friend—that she ever was. My niece is gone—replaced with something vile—and as much as I wish I did not think so, I fear Miss Crawford had a hand in this.”
Mrs. Emmett took her hand. “You must not doubt that she is your friend. You have none better. You cannot know what she has done and what she is yet prepared to do. She does not wish you to know, but you may depend upon her friendship.”
“And what of my niece? What of Emily?” Lucy demanded. “She has been replaced by a changeling. What do you know of it?”
Mrs. Emmett shook her head. “I know nothing of how it was done or who did it.”
“Do you know anything of changelings, of how I may banish it and retrieve my niece?”
“Only what is commonly known,” said Mrs. Emmett.
“Nothing is commonly known,” snapped Lucy. “Tell me what you can.”
“I know that when a child is exchanged, it is hidden away, placed out of time as we understand it, so that months may pass for us, but only seconds for the child. If one were to banish the changeling, the original child would take its place, and to someone who knew not how to pay mind to such things, it would appear only that the child’s disposition had changed.”
“And how is this to be effected?” Lucy demanded. “Can you tell me how?”