“Yet,” Cecy said, mirroring her. “No one has done it before yet. Just think—you will be responsible for two of the greatest discoveries about Sight ever!”
Sophia laughed, but her heart was growing heavy again. It had taken her weeks to discover the secret of the generalized focus, and might take more than that to learn how to overcome Baines’ resistance. If the law determined her actions against her “unnamed party” constituted a misuse of her Seer’s talent, she would be doing that discovery in prison.
They went to Cecy’s drawing room, Cecy chattering as animatedly as Daphne ever dreamed of being along the way. “Then explain to me how Baines’ movements cannot be predicted,” she said.
Sophia settled into the uncomfortable chair. She had become fond of it, how it kept her from becoming complacent; it was like an eagle’s perch, putting her high above the confounding movement of everyday life where she could See to the ends of the earth, or at least to the outer boroughs of London. “If I knew that—really knew it—then his ability would not interfere with my Sight,” she said. “It is as if he never makes a decision about the future until he is in it, or perhaps he is capable of holding several possibilities in his head at once, never settling on any of them until it is too late for Dream to have any meaning. It is a type of thinking often seen in those whose minds are not whole, but I do not believe him mad.”
“But you can Dream of Lord Endicott, and he is certainly mad.”
“It is not the same. The reality Lord Endicott sees may not be a true one, but it is coherent.”
“I understand. Possibly.”
There was a whoosh of displaced air, and Daphne said, “Did you see—oh, I see you have. I could kill Lord Endicott right now, I swear! Don’t you agree?”
“I am not so murderous as you, but yes,” Sophia said. “Sit down, Daphne. How on earth were you able to Bound here?”
“I told you, it is all a matter of learning the essence of a place, for an Extraordinary Bounder,” Daphne said, throwing herself down onto the chaise longue and stretching her legs out. She was wearing her Bounder uniform and looked as if she had recently been out of doors, with her too-pink cheeks and slightly disordered curls. “And I certainly know this place well enough now, after all the time we have spent in it. I have to work today, but I thought I would come and tell you my plan before I started.”
“I feel as if an unstoppable boulder is racing down a hill toward this house,” Sophia said. “What plan?”
Daphne grinned. “I told mama I’d heard the unnamed party was Lord Endicott.”
“Why did you do that?” Cecy exclaimed.
“Why shouldn’t we? You both know Lord Endicott is the one who sent that story to The Times, or was behind whoever did send it. So if he wanted his name kept out of it, he must have had a reason, and that means we should make sure everyone who reads the story knows the truth. People will want to know why he has paid such devoted, loving attention to Sophia if she tried to have him arrested as an embezzler. That will throw the whole thing into confusion. Today I will tell everyone to whom I make a delivery the same rumor, claiming that of course it’s just a rumor and can’t possibly be true. I believe the news will get around London faster than I can Skip from here to Bath. Did I tell you I missed the record by only four minutes and ten seconds this time?”
“Daphne, that’s too reckless!” Sophia said, then buried her face in her hands.
“No, I believe she’s right,” said Cecy. “At the very least it will make people question the veracity of the story.”
“I think you have both run mad,” Sophia said, raising her head.
“Then we are in good company with Lord Endicott,” Daphne said. She leaped off the chaise longue and stretched. “I will return later this afternoon, certainly before five o’clock, to tell you of my progress. And you, Sophia, will not fall into despair. Lord Endicott must positively be shaking in his shoes to try something like this.”
“That is what I said,” Cecy said.
“You see? And we are both very sensible. Find Baines, Sophia.” With a pop, she was gone.
Sophia massaged her temples. “I cannot now remember what we were talking about.”
“You were telling me about the difference between Baines and Lord Endicott.”
“Well.” Sophia settled herself more firmly. “Lord Endicott is the kind of man who sees the world clearly, but only as he believes it should be. It is not impossible that he genuinely believes he loves me, which is a horrible thought I wish I had not entertained. Baines is—it is as if, in his mind, the world is fractured, and any one reality might be true at any given time. So he keeps switching between them, and Sight does not… I say ‘does not know,’ but of course Sight has no intelligence to ‘know’ anything. But it is as good a metaphor as any. Sight does not know which reality he will act on until he has already acted on it. I can clearly Dream Baines’ past, just not his future.”
“But he must act eventually. Couldn’t you try to Dream of those actions?”
Sophia shook her head. “That only—” She stopped, arrested in mid-sentence by an unexpected thought. “Suppose he… suppose we are trying to find the press,” she said. “Suppose I attempt to Dream of where he will move it. That Dream will fall apart because Baines makes the decision. But the press must end up somewhere. It can’t be in all the possible places at once. If I… no, that wouldn’t work.”
“What wouldn’t?”
“It would still be looking for a Dream of where the press will be. But—Cecy, I need a map of London. A big one that shows even the smaller streets.”
“I will ask Lewis if he has one, and if not, I will send him to purchase one immediately,” Cecy said. She stood, wincing, and Sophia said, “Cecy, you are not well.”
“I am well enough for this. Do not treat me like an invalid, please.” She left the room, and Sophia sat back in her chair and thought. She would have to do a good deal of Dreaming, and Cecy would object, but if she insisted on pushing herself despite her pain, she could hardly criticize Sophia for doing the same. Cecy was right; Sophia should have been using her intellect to track Baines, should have gathered more information before resorting to Dream.
She leaped from her seat and ran to her room for one of her notebooks and a fresh pencil. Why had she not remembered all the pages and pages of notes that had preceded her discovery of Rhys Evans’ secret? If she were lucky, that memory would not be too late to help her now.
“Where did you go?” Cecy said when Sophia returned to the drawing room. Lewis had joined them and was holding a large roll of paper.
“We need to pin this to the wall,” Sophia said, casting about for a suitable place.
“I guessed as much,” Lewis said, waving a little box at her. “If you will remove those paintings, I will try to control my curiosity long enough to put this up.”
Sophia had never realized how many paintings and portraits and miniatures covered the walls of Cecy’s drawing room. They piled more than a dozen of them against the wall beneath the map Lewis pinned up. It was an excellent map, rendered in great detail, though as she looked at it she realized they probably only needed the southern half of it. Then she reminded herself she should not make assumptions where Baines was concerned.
“I will have to have several Dreams, Cecy,” she said, settling herself on the chaise longue, “and I know you will object to that, but we both know how urgent this is.”
Cecy nodded. “What are you looking for?”
“The past,” Sophia said. “I realized I have not been thinking clearly. Even Lord Endicott does not control every piece of property, every warehouse in London. Baines only has so many places he can move the press to. It is unlikely he will have developed a pattern, but I believe knowing where the press has been, and when it has been there, may show us something we can use.”
“That could mean many Dreams,” Lewis said.
“I hope it does not,” Sophia said, and settled herself in to meditate, her hands over her heart
and navel. Find me a starting place, she told her mind, and dropped into Dream.
In which Sophia makes use of her intellect
alf a dozen doors circled her, each bearing the hazy, spidery shape of the press she had grown so familiar with. A door thus marked, she knew from long experimentation, revealed one of the press’s locations, but none of these bore any indication as to which held the first, original, location of the press. Sophia wanted to scream with frustration, batter down all the doors and force them to show her what she wanted to know. Her sleeping self quivered with her Dreaming self’s emotion, and she made herself relax. Anger would not solve her problem.
She walked toward one of the doors and saw the image on its surface sharpen and come into focus. Perhaps she would have more success if she knew what a printing press actually looked like. The idea turned her anger into despondency; she knew of only one person who might be able to provide her access to a press, and he… She made herself relax once more. Thinking of Mr. Rutledge would not solve her problem, either.
She examined the image minutely and discovered a blotch about the size of a penny across its lower left corner. Strange. It should either have resolved itself as the rest of the image did, or disappeared entirely. She bent to look more closely at it and saw, as if through a thick layer of gauze, the number 6. She took a step backward and looked at the door, then turned to look at the one next to it. Another blotch, this one resolving into a very faint 12. Further examination showed each door was numbered, though not sequentially; the lowest number was 3, the highest 13, and those numbers were the doors’ only distinguishing characteristics. It seemed her Dreaming had produced something useful, after all.
She stood and watched them for a few moments. Once she passed through the door, the others would vanish, and she would learn what she could from her Dream and then have to repeat the process over again. She was already weary from exertion, and the idea of having to do this again and again—at least thirteen times!—sapped her will further. There is nothing for it, she thought. She reached out to the door numbered 3 and let herself be drawn through it.
This press had shadowy human figures crawling over it and along its spidery limbs, but she ignored them to exert her will upon the door to the outside. She stepped through, found herself in a street crowded with more shadowy figures, recognized the location, and rose out of Dream in the space of a few breaths. “This will take some time,” she said, rising from the chaise longue and crossing to the map, where she wrote the number 3 in the center of a tangle of small streets, “and I cannot make the extra effort to identify the building in which the press has been stored without exhausting myself. But I believe that can wait for another time. The general pattern is what matters now.”
“And the numbers will show where the press has been, and when?” Cecy said.
“Yes. I will have to repeat this process several times, because the Dreams are not appearing in convenient numerical order.” Her head was already beginning to ache. She chose not to mention this to Cecy. “But at least I now know it is possible.”
She Dreamed seven more times before her Sight became red-rimmed and blurry, and by that time her head was pounding as if something were trying to escape from it. She did not need Cecy’s urging to take to her bed and sleep for a few hours before continuing her experiment. Sleeping helped a little; the headache still troubled her, but her Sight was once again clear. She returned to the drawing room to find Daphne had joined Cecy and Lewis. “By the end of my deliveries, people were repeating the rumor to me,” she said gleefully, and grasped both of Sophia’s hands. “Lord Endicott won’t be able to extricate himself from it.”
“I only hope it will help,” Sophia said. “I cannot stop imagining Benjamin Vane appearing on our doorstep to arrest me.”
“It will not come to that,” Lewis said. “You are still an Extraordinary and they must have evidence you intentionally lied about your Dream.”
“It is possible the War Office will intervene at some point. They might appear complicit in concealing the truth. Which they are, in a sense. They would have to say they believed I was simply mistaken, if they want to protect themselves. Unless they think to remain silent, and uninvolved.”
“I cannot imagine they would abandon you so completely, Sophy.”
“They already have abandoned me once, Cecy. What is another betrayal?” Mr. Rutledge’s face came to mind then, and her throat closed up against unexpected tears. “But I will solve this problem before then,” she went on, and lay once more upon the chaise longue to continue her task.
“That is all,” she said, eight Dreams later, “I have seen nothing higher than 16.” She moved her stiff limbs and discovered she could not rise. It was not the horrible semi-paralysis of the Duchess of Lenshire’s gathering, but her muscles ached as if she had swum the Thames ten times without stopping.
“You have exerted yourself too much,” Cecy exclaimed, and came to help her sit up. “Oh, Sophy, is there no other way?”
“You know there is not,” Sophia said. “I would not do this if there were any alternative.”
Daphne brought her a cup of tea. “At least you have learned things, so it wasn’t a waste,” she said.
Sophia sipped the tea and discovered it was lukewarm, but it refreshed her nonetheless. “I believe I can support myself, Cecy, thank you for your help,” she said. Cecy gave her a skeptical look, but shifted her position so as not to press so closely against her.
Lewis was drawing lines on the map with the pencil to connect the numbered points, indicating directions with arrows. “This is the path Baines has taken,” he said. “He has moved the press sixteen times—seventeen if you count the location he has taken it now that is concealed from us by his ability—but there are only seven locations it has been. I consider it reasonable to say these are the only places to which he has access. And this—” he tapped the number 16—“is where it was last.”
“But he is not following a pattern,” Cecy said. “If he were making a circuit, you could point to the next location on it, but that’s not the case here.”
“He does have part of a pattern, though,” Daphne said, “because he never retreats to the immediately previous location.”
“Nor to the one before that,” Sophia said. She touched number 16. “So the press is no longer here, and it is not in either of these two places. That means there are only four locations it could be. And all I need do is identify exactly which places those are, which buildings, I mean, and then Dream of them as they are at this moment. And one of them will contain the press. Baines’ ability cannot stop such Dreams.”
They all sat for a moment in silence. Then Lewis said, “I am sure you know what I’m thinking—”
“—which is that we can’t act on that knowledge,” Daphne said. “We need someone who can arrest Baines and his men.”
“And arresting Baines still does not link Lord Endicott to the crime,” Cecy said.
“I believe it does,” Sophia said. “The whole point of tracking down Baines was that my Dreams about bringing Lord Endicott to his knees all pointed to Baines as the key to that result. So even if I cannot tell why he is important, I believe Lord Endicott’s fate is tied to him.”
“Then what are we to do?” Daphne said, jumping up and beginning to pace the room. “We could go to the press ourselves and threaten to turn him in.”
“He would not be afraid of that threat, because he must know I have no credibility with the law, and he has all those Movers he would not hesitate to turn against us,” Sophia said.
“And even if you find where the press is now, Baines moves it so frequently it’s likely it would be gone by the time anyone arrived,” Cecy said. “Which means knowing the pattern will not help.”
Silence again, broken only by the sound of Daphne’s footsteps on the carpet. “I believe we should let it rest for the night,” Lewis said. “We may find a solution after a good sleep.”
“Well, I don’t imagine I’
ll sleep at all,” Daphne said, “but I’ll be back in the morning.” She vanished with the usual pop.
“Neither do I,” Cecy said. She tried and failed to stand, grimacing with pain.
“You should have said something, Cecilia,” Lewis said. He helped her to her feet. “I will call for Dr. Garland.”
“No, I simply need to lie down for a while. But I want to eat dinner first. Do you suppose cook will mind if we eat early?”
“I believe cook is so considerate of your needs she would spoon-feed you if that became necessary,” Sophia said, “and I admit to being more than a little hungry myself.”
She ate without tasting her food, drifted through the evening barely contributing to the conversation. Lewis and Cecy seemed similarly remote. She hoped they were thinking of a solution to the problem. She herself saw no way out of it, save trying, once again, to enlist Sir Arthur Rowley’s help. If he would even listen to her. If he would not simply arrest her on sight. That no one from the Bow Street magistrates had yet appeared on the doorstep did not comfort her as much as it might; for all she knew, the Bow Street Runners were in the process of investigating the truth or falsity of Lord Endicott’s allegation, and this was simply fate deferred.
You could send word to Mr. Rutledge, a tiny, idiotic voice in the back of her head told her when she was settled in for the night. She closed her eyes against its suggestion. He would not listen to her any more than Sir Arthur would. You don’t know that, the same foolish voice said. He believes in your Dreams. “All but one,” she said aloud, then blushed. How embarrassing, to be talking to the inside of her own head like that. It was only that she wanted him to believe her that she could even consider humiliating herself like that, going to him begging for his good opinion. She was such a fool.
She slept, and dreamed of Dream, doors opening on doors in endless rows that led nowhere but to other doors. She passed through them, searching for something or someone, but it was as if she had Baines’ dubious gift, and her desires changed moment by moment so that no sooner had she focused on one object it disappeared, leaving her to grope about again.
Wondering Sight (The Extraordinaries Book 2) Page 25