The Fire in the Glass

by Jacquelyn Benson

  Rap-rap-rap-rap-rap-rap-rap

  The door flew open. Strangford’s country footman, Roderick, stood there, his livery jacket buttoned askew over his nightshirt. He blinked out at her blearily, holding a lamp in his hand. Then his eyes cleared enough for him to recognize who was standing on the step.

  “Is Lord Strangford in? I promise you that it’s terribly urgent.”

  The boy’s gaze moved quickly from her trousers to the snow dusting her hair, stopping at her face.

  He stepped aside, opening the door wider to invite her in.

  “I’ll wake him,” he said.

  “He’s awake.”

  Strangford’s voice floated down from the top of the stairs, where he stood wrapped in a gray dressing gown. His hair was mussed, looking longer and wilder than usual as a result.

  Lily’s mind flew back to the vision of his hand on her shoulder, his lips moving to her neck, setting fire to her skin.

  By coming here like this, imposing on him in the middle of the night, she was claiming an intimacy she could not take back. It opened the door to a future she had tried desperately to avoid, with all the heartbreak it surely promised.

  It didn’t matter. She was done running from it. The truth of what he was to her was undeniable now.

  “I need you.”

  The words came easier than she had thought they would.

  He didn’t question, answering without taking his dark eyes from the place where she stood.

  “Roderick, show Miss Albright to the study. Put some coal on the fire. I’ll be down in a moment.”

  “This way, miss.” Roderick clung to some semblance of his footman’s habit as he gestured her down the hallway.

  He led her to the study, turning on a pair of electric lamps. They cast a warm, even glow over the room.

  The fire had died to red embers in the hearth. Roderick crouched before it, adding a few scoops of fuel. One lump jumped back, rolling past him across the carpet. He caught it, tossing it back in and then brushing off his hands.

  “Can I get you anything, miss?” he asked as he rose. “Tea or . . . something?”

  “That won’t be necessary. Thank you, Roderick.”

  He gave a quick bow and showed himself out, leaving Lily alone in the quiet sanctuary of Strangford’s study.

  Her pulse continued to race. It had been pounding since she left March Place, every fiber of her screaming for action, movement. She had chosen a path and it brought her here, where for a moment there was nothing to do but wait.

  She had been here before, but then her impression of the space had been limited to quick surprise at the bright and furious panoply of the paintings that adorned the walls, works that would not be at all considered proper for the home of a respectable member of the ton. Any temptation to give them greater attention had been blown away in the immediacy of Strangford’s obvious distress.

  They were universally startling, executed in vivid colors and bold, primitive lines, like the crayon strokes of a joyful child.

  There were forests of white trees, woven through with dancing figures in exotic gowns. The haunted gaze of a beautiful but hollow-cheeked woman, holding a tawny cat in her lap. Elsewhere, a pair of skulls cloaked in brightly patterned robes moved together as though for a kiss. Other canvases exploded with light and color representing no natural view she had ever seen.

  Every piece was unique, united only by an energy and intensity that made them feel more alive than any expert mimicking of the forms and hues of the real world.

  She moved closer, drinking them in.

  “What do you think?”

  Strangford stood in the doorway. He had quickly dressed in his usual plain black suit, but had forgone a tie. His hair remained untamed.

  “They are wonderful.”

  He stepped into the room.

  “I don’t show it very often.”

  “You selected each of them personally?”

  “I chose everything here.”

  “Even the inkwell?” she asked, trying to break the tension she could feel mounting inside of her at the sight of him surrounded by this art, at the whispering notion of what the gallery revealed about the curator—that something wild lived beneath that quiet exterior, something so passionately full of life it might hurt you to look at it.

  He moved to the desk, running a gloved finger along the dent in the pewter.

  “The inkwell belonged to William Blake. It was an excessive indulgence. But his mind is such a remarkable place to share, even in echo.” He dropped his hand, turning serious. “What’s happened?”

  The moment of peace, of letting herself forget why she was there, passed. Lily felt the weight of her intent settle back onto her.

  “What I’ve been trying to stop.”

  “Estelle?”

  “He’s taken her.” Her voice hitched on the words.

  “Who?” Strangford demanded.

  “Hartwell.”

  She felt a moment of fear, part of her waiting for Strangford to push back, to demand evidence or argue that a man like Dr. Joseph Hartwell couldn’t possibly do such a thing.

  Instead, he headed for the door.

  “Let’s go.”

  He believed her, without question. The impact of that shook her.

  “Where?” she demanded.

  “There’s a police kiosk at Paddington Station.”

  “We can’t go to the police,” she cut back quickly. The knowledge that her description could well have been circulated to the stations scattered about the city came home to her again. “Even if we could convince them to act against one of the most prestigious men in Britain on our word, they’d find nothing at his home. She isn’t there.”

  “Then where is she?”

  “That is what I came here to find out.”

  “You have something for me?”

  The assumption came so easily—that she had woken him in the night simply to make use of his hands again. She felt a stab of shame that her treatment of him justified it.

  “No. I have something for myself.”

  His dark eyes were intent, focused on her entirely.

  “You mean to use your gift.”

  “I don’t think you’ll approve of the method.” She met his gaze.

  “And the method is?”

  She took the little blue bottle containing the Wine of Jurema from her pocket and handed it to him.

  He studied the label.

  “Mr. Ash said it would act as a shortcut to unlocking greater potential in my . . . ability.”

  “He gave you this?”

  “No. He did not.”

  She read the disapproval in his look.

  “You should have gone to him, not come here. You know he would help with anything you asked.”

  “I don’t want Ash for this. I need someone I trust.”

  Trust. The word hung in the air between them, heavy with significance.

  Emotion strangled her, stripping her voice raw.

  “I have treated you abominably. And I would understand if you turned me out.”

  “I would never do that,” he replied quietly.

  She felt both the pain and the relief of that wash over her.

  He returned his gaze to the Wine of Jurema.

  “Do you know how it works?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  “Have you any idea how much you can safely take?”

  “I’ll work it out.”

  He was tense. She could read the disapproval in every line of his body. He held the bottle up.

  “This could be poison.”

  “Hartwell will tie her to a table and drain the blood from her body,” she retorted, feeling brittle. “There is no one else—no one—who can get to her in time. I will not stand here and debate. I am doing this. Will you stay with me?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  At the sound of that single syllable—yes—falling into the stillness of the room, some last shred of resistance inside of her
shattered.

  There had never been someone she could depend upon—not her mother, certainly not her father. Yet here stood a man who offered her what she asked of him without question or condition.

  There was no time to contemplate what it meant or to react against the terrifying vulnerability it entailed. She needed to act.

  She scanned the room, her eye stopping on the deep green chairs by the fire.

  “No. Not there,” Strangford cut in, reading her intent.

  He shrugged out of his coat, folding it into a neat bundle and setting it down in the center of the rug.

  “Here.”

  “On the floor?” she asked, surprised.

  “Neither of us has any idea what the contents of that bottle will do to you. And one cannot fall off of the floor.”

  She considered it for a moment, then acknowledged the wisdom of the suggestion. She sat down.

  “There are a few rules I must insist upon before you proceed.”

  “Name them,” she said. It felt odd to speak up at him from the ground.

  “First. I must have your consent to physically restrain you should it prove necessary.”

  The notion was unsettling, a potential implication she had not considered.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Second. If at any point in these proceedings I detect a serious threat to your own well-being, you agree that I may call for assistance. I am to be given complete discretion on that point.”

  She had sidestepped Strangford’s concern about the contents of the bottle, but this concession brought it firmly back. She had no idea what the substance inside it was or what it would do to her. He was right, of course. She should have gone to The Refuge and begged Ash to assist her. But if Ash’s assertion about the powers of the Wine of Jurema was correct, she was about to blast the doors off of a part of herself she had fought desperately for most of her life to shut out.

  She had not been lying when she told Strangford why she came here instead of Bedford Square. She needed him, far more than she needed to know the proper way to go about doing what she was about to do.

  “You have my permission to take whatever action you deem necessary.”

  There was a pause the length of a breath as he stood over her in his shirtsleeves.

  “I don’t like this, Lily.”

  “I am done waiting in the wings while the people I love are taken from me.” The words shook with more grief than she would have cared to admit. “If there’s something inside me that stands even a chance of saving them and this helps me find it, then it is worth it. Whatever the risk.”

  He pulled the stopper from the bottle and offered it to her. It passed from his gloved hand to hers, their fingers brushing.

  The scent of it was woody, honeyed and acrid, both alluring and terrible.

  She contemplated the level of liquid inside. It was filled to the brim.

  How much should she take?

  A few drops, perhaps? Then wait for some effect, carefully assessing whether it were having any ill impact on her body?

  She looked to the clock on Strangford’s desk. It was one thirty.

  There was no time.

  She put the bottle to her lips, tipped back her head, and drained it.

  The taste was terrible, like off wine soaked in sawdust.

  “Damn it, you might have started slow.”

  “In for a penny.”

  She laid back on the ground, resting her head on Strangford’s folded coat. The rug was soft and the fire had flared up in the hearth, wrapping her in warmth. She was far less uncomfortable than she had thought she would be.

  Strangford paced. The clock ticked.

  “Tell me how you’re feeling.”

  “Perfectly, entirely—”

  The next word was to have been “ordinary”. It failed to leave her lips as she was distracted by the realization that the room had become brighter.

  Had Strangford turned up the lamp? No, it was something more than that. The colors themselves had changed, becoming vivid, more saturated. The green upholstery of the chairs glowed, the pale gray wallpaper shimmering like the inside of an oyster shell.

  It was as though the room was turning into one of the paintings it housed.

  The paintings had changed as well. Or rather, they were as they had always been, but Lily saw them more clearly now. She understood how they had never been confined within their frames. The wild colors, the mad lines, spilled out across the wall, enveloping everything they touched. The desk, the bookcase, the darkened windows, all rippled as though moved by the brush of a hyperactive artist.

  Her ears roared. It was merely the crackling of the fire but amplified almost to the point of pain. A rich hum joined it, slow and substantial as the crashing of waves on the strand—the sound of Strangford’s voice.

  She couldn’t make out the words, but she could see his concern. He had come closer, kneeling beside her. She had just arrived at the conclusion that she should reassure him when all the lines in the room fell apart.

  She fell from impression to abstraction, enveloped in a stunning nonsense of shape and color that meant nothing and everything. It was a language she had forgotten, but if she could learn to read it—this painting that was life—she would understand everything. The answer to every question she had ever struggled with.

  Electricity surged through her. Circuits mated that had previously been severed. Connections arced and fired, and abruptly, shatteringly, the lights came on.

  She went somewhere else.

  Sprawled across an enormous four-poster bed, the light of a fire dancing over the sheets. Soft, sensitive hands roam over her body. Skin brushes against skin, setting off sparks of precise and wildly intense connection. She clasps Strangford’s face in her palms, tastes him, feels the silk of his lips against her own. Pleasure rises, crests like a wave . . .

  . . . then breaks with the roar of artillery shells. Crouching in a hole in the ground built of mud and barbed wire, she is wet, bone-drenched, rattling with cold as the earth shakes under the assault. Strangford, his uniform covered in mud, shouts at her, voice hoarse, roaring for her to go go go go. Gloved hands shove her. She tumbles back as the wall explodes, mud and wire and splintering wood blowing past her . . .

  . . . landing on her back in a field, the seed-heads of the greenest grass in the world dancing over her head. A fat bee buzzes from wildflower to wildflower. She sits up, climbs to her feet. The field goes on forever, perfect in its silence, lined with row after endless row of plain white crosses marching in stillness to eternity, a field of a million unmarked dead . . .

  . . . back in London, the rain sleeting down. Sam Wu glaring at her with unspeakable grief in his eyes. The ravens pour down from the sky, surround him like a whirlwind, a maelstrom of black beaks, feathers, alien intelligence gleaming from dark pebble eyes . . .

  . . . shining from the face of a photograph cradled in the big hands of Dr. Gardner, slumped in an iron chair in the ward at St. Bart’s. An empty bed beside him, sheets stained, his heavy shoulders wracked with sobs . . .

  . . . rain streaking down Cairncross’s face as he stands outside The Refuge, a great brass key in his hand. The iron set to his face as he turns it, flipping the tumblers and locking the door . . .

  . . . inside the attic, spinning dust catching the golden light of the late afternoon sun. The curtains gone, the mural shining out at her from every angle, the bright colors an assault. Truth leaps at her from every detail—the boy with the rats worshiping at his feet. The healer with a wounded soul. A warrior crowned with the golden light of a saint, black gauntlets on his hands . . . because they need protecting and because they are dangerous. A thin woman laughs, delighted, in the bony arms of the dancing dead.

  The artist wears a paint-stained apron, jars and brushes scattered at her feet. She sets another key into the robe of the flame-haired woman on the wall, working on a painting she completed thirty years ago.

  “This can’t be right. I�
��m not capable of seeing the past.”

  “You have no idea what you are capable of,” Evangeline Ash replies.

  “This isn’t what I came here for,” Lily protests. “I have to find Estelle.”

  “Then stop fighting and ask for what you want.”

  She moves to the figure in the circle of skeletons, the laughing woman robed in peacock blue.

  Stop fighting. Ask for what you want.

  It is impossible. Even in the midst of this barrage of things-to-come, the fight coils tightly around her. It is what keeps her from falling in to the abyss, from losing herself to despair or something worse. How can she stop? What will be left of her if she does? The pain roars back in with a few notes of an old music hall jingle, with the glitter of jewels in a pool of blood. If she is not in control then how can she possibly protect herself?

  She can’t.

  She stops inside the stillness—the dust floating in the air, the light suspended around her.

  The truth of it settles in. Lily acknowledges it and the coil releases, leaving her defenseless.

  She shapes the words inside herself, carefully and deliberately, then speaks them aloud.

  “Show me where I will find her.”

  . . . and she is there.

  It is the dark space she has seen before. Towering walls made of dark glass, glittering in the flickering flame of a single lantern. This time, she is aware of the smell in the air—rotting wood, Thames mud, mice. A warehouse, set somewhere on the river.

  But where on the river? There are a hundred such places, a hundred possibilities.

  Estelle lies on a table. It has arms, elegant limbs of articulated metal. One embraces Estelle, wrapped across her chest, holding her down. Another extends up from the surface, fingers pressing a wrinkled ball of white fabric against her nose and mouth.

  A man steps into view. He pulls a dropper from a brown vial and measures a dose onto the bunched cloth, then moves away again. She hears the clatter of glass as Waddington shifts bottles aside, pulling up a tray of equipment. There are clamps, fat needles. A rubber tube wriggles like the body of a snake.

  This doesn’t tell her what she needs to know. She must find another perspective.

  Dark glass glints over the lieutenant’s shoulder. It is a window, just visible between the stacks of crates.