“Mr. Barham has his interests in the East India Company and the theater, and Mrs. Barham loves visiting her many friends.”
“That seems a mismatch, to me.”
“Ah, but Mr. and Mrs. Barham are very happy, I assure you.”
“How so, where their interests do not align?”
“I beg your pardon if I am impertinent, Mr. Rutledge, but that question tells me you know little of marriage.”
“You are correct. I am a lifelong bachelor. I fear I would make some woman a terrible husband.”
“And why is that?”
Mr. Rutledge laughed. His gloved hand, touching hers in the steps of the dance, gripped it firmly for half a breath. “Mrs. Westlake, you are dogged in your pursuit of the truth.”
Again her heart felt icy, as if he meant her pursuit of Lord Endicott, which he could not possibly know of. “Have you some dire secret you keep hidden from the world?”
“No, I simply know so little of what makes an excellent marriage, I feel I am doing the world a favor in not entering into that felicitous state myself.”
“Mr. Rutledge, I am surprised at you. I took you for a man who does not allow fear to govern him.”
“Then teach me, and perhaps I will change my mind.”
Sophia clasped his hand briefly and stepped away. “I was married only a few short years, but they were joyful years. Richard—my husband—enjoyed traveling with me, though I never did become accustomed to Bounding. But it was being united with him that gave me joy, not the places we went, or the breathless wonder of Bounding. That is what marriage is, being one in heart if not in mind as well.”
“So shared interests are not essential?”
“Pleasant, yes, but I have found that dissimilarity gives you things to speak of together. I enjoyed sharing my passion for politics with Richard, even though he cared little for Whig or Tory or Parliament.”
“Then I am even more convinced unmarried life is for me. I would have difficulty shackling myself to anyone who could not share my interests.”
“If you consider it ‘shackling,’ “ Sophia said with a smile, “you are probably correct.”
The music came to an end, and Mr. Rutledge offered Sophia his arm, which surprised her; she had been so caught up in the conversation she had not realized two dances had passed. “I should escort you back to your friends, but you seem rather unaccompanied tonight,” Mr. Rutledge said.
“Mrs. Barham is here somewhere, and you need not wait on me to find her.”
“I’m glad to hear she is well enough to enjoy company.”
“I am happy about it, too. I am also grateful that she has so many Speaker friends to entertain her when she is confined to the house.”
Mr. Rutledge nodded. “Then I will leave you now, but… thank you, Mrs. Westlake, for your company, and your conversation.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rutledge, for forgiving me my faux pas,” Sophia said, curtseying to him, then watching as he walked away. Now that she was paying attention, she realized he walked with as much grace as he danced, and she blushed again at her foolishness. He was interesting, and clever, and handsome, and he danced well, and he… well, did it matter whether he thought her wrong, when all the world did as well? Perhaps they might be able to be friends, after all.
She began circling the room, barely noticing the people who stepped out of her way, and found Cecy sitting alone on a bench upholstered in pale gold. “Cecy,” she began, and Cecy lifted her face to Sophia’s and said, “I need to return home.” Her face was set and white, and tears threatened to spill over her cheeks. Sophia forgot the chastisement that was on her lips and helped her friend stand.
They rode home in silence, Sophia unable to think of anything to say that would not come out as I told you so. Cecy held herself so still, as if she were trying not to touch anything that would make her pain worse, that Sophia could not bear to reprimand her. “You should send word to Dr. Garland,” she finally said.
“I Spoke to her assistant and asked if she would come to us at the house, but the doctor was away and Mr. Rally did not know when she would return. Sophia, you were right.”
“That doesn’t matter now. Dr. Garland will help you, and you will sleep and feel better in the morning.” Sophia reached out to take Cecy’s hand, but changed her mind when she remembered how painful even the gentlest touch could be when Cecy was in this condition.
Outside the carriage, snow was falling in fat white clumps of flakes clinging together against their eventual landing. In the morning, the world would be white, and Cecy would be well, and Sophia could once again plan her attack against Lord Endicott. More banknotes, somewhere, she thought, more notes, and the plates that produced them. That is more than enough.
In which Sophia goes on the attack, with unexpected results
n the morning, the snow was still falling, and Cecy was not well. Sophia brought her tea, and bathed her forehead, and prayed for Dr. Garland to come soon. Dark shadows under Cecy’s eyes told Sophia she had not slept at all that night. “It hurts,” she whispered to Sophia when she brought her another cup of tea and helped her sit up to drink it, then fell silent.
Lewis had vanished—Cecy had told them both, long ago, that she could not bear to see the look on his face when he watched her suffer—and Sophia sat alone with her friend, even after she finally fell asleep, unwilling to escape into Dream and be absent if Cecy woke and needed something.
Dr. Garland came just after noon and expelled Sophia from the bedroom. “She’ll be well enough soon,” she said. Sophia stood in front of the closed bedroom door feeling bereft. She had been so preoccupied with Cecy that she had forgotten to eat, and she did not feel hungry now, but she went downstairs and rang for a light meal: cold meat and cheeses and hot tea. She ate, and returned to her room and sat on her bed. Dreaming might take her mind off Cecy; she refused to consider she might have more selfish motives instead. She lay back on her bed, fully clothed, with her palms pressed to heart and navel, and closed her eyes to meditate. Mr. Rutledge’s comment about finding a press near the banknotes resonated with her. The banknotes, then.
Meditation, for a Seer, was a matter of becoming aware of her body, of how the blood flowed through it like an unending river, how air rushed in and out of her lungs like a warm summer wind, then bringing a single idea to mind and letting it sink into that movement until it flowed through her as her blood did. It took Sophia only a few minutes to attune the idea of the banknotes she had Seen to her body, then she dropped easily into Dream and waited for the right door to appear.
She was surrounded by doors crowding close together around her now, an event not uncommon when she was focused on a particular goal. Her Dreaming mind offered her a host of options, all of which would have something to do with Lord Endicott, but she wanted a particular Dream, so she ignored them. Some of them might recur, though with slight differences; no Dream ever repeated itself. She was experienced enough not to fear that she might miss something important, and simply leap through the first door she encountered.
Above, she saw the door she wanted; the gauzy, faded image of a banknote rippled in and out of view. She laid her palm against it and was drawn into the Dream, into a room somewhat more solid than was usual. It looked like a shed, or a room in some run-down lodging house somewhere in the city, windowless and dark even in the regions of Dream where no light was needed to see clearly. It was unfurnished and lacked the marks on the floor or walls that would indicate where furnishings had once stood. Sophia turned around in a tight circle. There was a door, but it was little more than a rough outline against one of the walls and lacked a knob or latch or even hinges. Time enough to deal with it later.
She returned to her original position and saw that a splintery pallet had appeared on the floor. Its light, unfinished wood looked strange against the dark floorboards, out of place, and it wavered in the Dream, reminding Sophia of the transitory nature of Lord Endicott’s plans. Banknotes began appearing on it in tid
y stacks until the pile reached the ceiling and became compressed by it. Stacks of notes slid down its sides and onto the floor, disappearing as they landed. Then the banknotes began to disappear as if time had been reversed, until the pallet was empty. After a few moments, the process began again. Sophia watched it cycle twice more before turning her attention to the empty room. The press had to be here somewhere.
She tugged at the shadows, trying to force them into definition, but they resisted her. Impatiently she turned the pallet and its load translucent and whisked it away, like sweeping up cobwebs, to give herself a better view of the room. It seemed empty. She walked slowly in the direction of the walls, which receded from her approach until she felt she was walking down a dark, circular tunnel. She looked behind her, and the room drew her back as if she were entering one of the doors of Dream. Once again, she stood near its center. The tunnel vanished. She made a circle of the room, careful not to walk toward the walls, but saw nothing. The pallet had reappeared and was beginning its cycle once again. It seemed there really was nothing left to find.
She turned her back on the pallet and looked at the wall where the door hung. Granted, this was Dream, and nothing existed the way it did in the waking world, but doors and windows within Dream were complicated even by the standards of that strange other-world. They represented the concept of two places being linked, rather than an actual door one could open and step through, and using one took great concentration, even for a Seer as experienced as Sophia was. She let her eyes go unfocused and concentrated on the thin lines defining the door, pictured them deepening and broadening to let even more of the non-light of Dream through. It was smooth, she told herself, smooth and lacking the splintery grain of the wall surrounding it, and as she thought this the door shrank further, rotated as if it were on an axis that ran vertically through its center, and disappeared. Sophia took a step toward the open space that shimmered with pale emptiness, and with her second step had left the unfinished, empty room behind and emerged into a place that appeared to be on the banks of the Thames.
The world was once again lit with the non-light emitted by everything around her. The river looked like a child’s drawing, with passing ships sitting on top of the water instead of resting within it. The part of the city across the river was outlined in a few strokes, with no detail to identify the buildings, though London Bridge was a swoop of black ink across the sky about a mile upriver from where she stood. She turned and saw that the building she had exited was an old, grey warehouse that came nearly to the shore of the river, with a roof half caved in and boards missing from its walls. No one with legitimate business would consider using it.
There were other warehouses lying nearby, all of them in better condition. Sophia walked away from the warehouse and stepped onto the solid “water” of the Thames, which to her Dreaming mind felt like soapy old stone. She continued to walk backward across the water until she had a better view of the shoreline and could commit it to memory, counting off buildings and looking for landmarks. Then she stood and looked out at distant London Bridge, which in Dream was strong and sturdy, completely unlike the decrepit monstrosity that blocked river traffic and always looked as if it were a breath away from complete collapse. Plans to rebuild it had never come to anything, and it was likely nothing would be done until it fell apart completely. How easy it was, in Dream, to fix problems that seemed insurmountable in the waking world.
She woke herself and lay still for a moment, staring at her ceiling. It was flat and boring and made her think of a coffin lid, though it was far too high for her to become claustrophobic from that thought. Then she sat up and began sketching a picture of the outside of the warehouse, then on another page drew a diagram of where it sat in relation to the river, the bridge, and the other buildings. She went to the drawing room and scribbled out a note, addressed it to Sir Arthur Rowley, Chief Magistrate at Bow Street, then called for Simon to run the papers there. “Quickly,” she added, though she knew the footman would not need encouragement. Then she put away her writing desk and went to see Cecy.
“She’s asleep,” Dr. Garland said when Sophia knocked and opened the bedroom door. The doctor looked as tired as Cecy had, with the black hood of a female Extraordinary Shaper covering greying hair that made her look older than her forty-six years. “Outside now, Mrs. Westlake.” She took Sophia’s arm in her grasp, her bony hand firm and smoother than her face, and pulled her along, though Sophia had no intent to resist her.
“Thank you so much, doctor,” Sophia said. “Will she be better, when she wakes?”
Dr. Garland looked grim. “I hope so. I have no idea what causes her pain. Her body is reacting as if she’s being stabbed everywhere at once, but there’s no physical cause I can see. The best I can do is soothe her nerves, give them a conflicting message, so to speak, but…”
“Is there anything we can do for her?”
“Make her rest. I’ve left you something that will help her sleep, if the pain returns. When it returns, I should say, and it gripes me that I have to say it. But there’s no way to tell what makes her pain flare up like that, so aside from keeping her from exerting herself when it starts to be severe, there’s nothing I can tell you.”
Sophia nodded, hesitated, then said, “What of… of children? She won’t talk about it, so I thought—”
“I can tell you what I told Mr. Barham. There’s nothing wrong with her female organs, nothing that ought to prevent her having children, and I imagine the reason she hasn’t conceived is that she’s too caught up in worry about it. Sometimes our minds can hamper our bodies like that. Does she desire children?”
Sophia nodded.
“Then I’ll talk to her about it when she’s suffering less. There might be something I can do.”
“Thank you again, doctor.”
“Don’t thank me until she’s cured.” Dr. Garland shouldered her satchel, which she always carried even though she had never used its contents on Cecy, and went off down the stairs.
Sophia went quietly into Cecy’s room and took her seat near the bed. Cecy already looked better; her face had lost its pinched, painful look, and there was color in her cheeks again. Sophia leaned back and let her thoughts drift until she fell asleep, where she dreamed of dancing with men she knew and men whose faces she barely remembered seeing before, and she was the hunter and they the prey. Lord Endicott had the face of a tiger and clawed at her when she tried to escape dancing with him, and Mr. Rutledge was a giant bear that stepped between them so she could not see Lord Endicott at all.
“Sophy,” Cecy said, and Sophia startled out of sleep and sat up, wiping away a tiny bit of saliva leaking from the corner of her mouth. She leaned forward and put her hand on Cecy’s narrow shoulder, pressing her gently back into the pillows to keep her from rising.
“You need to rest,” she said. “Please lie still.”
“I will rest, I am simply hungry and I want to sit up,” Cecy said. “Sophy, please forgive me for not listening to you—it’s just that I get so impatient—” She wiped a tear from her eyes, then scrubbed her damp hand on the counterpane.
“I understand, dearest, and no one’s blaming you for being ill.” Sophia stood and went to the door. “I will tell Lewis to come to you, and I will order food; do you have a preference?”
“Something simple and warm, like soup, if that is not too much trouble. It is late enough they should be serving dinner soon.”
Sophia looked at the clock. How long had she slept? The men from Bow Street might be taking Lord Endicott’s men into custody right now. “I am certain soup will be no hardship. I will return soon.”
She went down the stairs and into Lewis’s study, which was like stepping into the disorderly back room of some museum dedicated to preserving remnants of every culture in the world. Sophia pinched her nose to keep from sneezing at the fragrant dust that filled the air as if it too had been carried here from India or the mysterious islands beyond China. Lewis had traveled far in his
youth, gone entirely around the world twice, and his study bore the evidence of those travels: carved masks from deep within Africa, colorful rugs from marketplaces in Morocco and Cairo, painted and jeweled statues of Hindu gods, silks purchased from merchants off dhows in the China Sea and not from warehouses in London.
Even now, he continued to collect artifacts from around the world until he had a collection any actual museum would envy, if it were not a disorganized mess. Lewis simply “arranged” it by putting things on shelves and walls wherever there was an empty spot. Had he wanted to continue his travels, to show Cecy the wonders of the world? But he had known Cecy’s condition when they married, knew it was likely she would be an invalid all her life, and Sophia had no doubt he did not regret giving up that dream.
Right now he looked as haggard as a Shaper ever could, which meant he was unshaven and his eyes were bleary. A decanter of brandy sat in a clear spot on his desk, with a small glass next to it, but the decanter appeared full, and she suspected Lewis had simply put it there to keep himself company. He stirred a pile of ivory discs that had angular runic shapes burned into them, some kind of fortune-telling apparatus, he had once said. Unfortunate that they were unlikely to reveal the secret of Cecy’s malady. “I am not drunk,” he said without looking at Sophia.
“I know,” she said. “Cecy wishes to see you.”
He pushed back from his desk heavily. “If there were something I could do for her…”
“I know.”
Someone knocked once on the door, and Simon entered. “Mrs. Westlake, you have a caller from Bow Street,” he said.
Sophia’s whole body began to hum with anticipation. “Go to her, Lewis, and you, Simon, tell the cook Mrs. Barham wants soup, that hearty stuff she makes with plenty of chicken. Tell her I don’t care that it’s not sophisticated and neither does Mrs. Barham. I must—Lewis, both of you, just go!”
Wondering Sight (The Extraordinaries Book 2) Page 9