by H. G. Parry
“I know,” Eliot sighed when Wilberforce carefully brought up the topic of his daughter. “I’m failing her. I just—I don’t have any feelings left anymore, for anything.”
“You will,” Wilberforce said. He meant it, but he felt the inadequacy of the words keenly. “It will get easier.”
“But what do I do now? You tell me, Wilber: How am I supposed to live now? Oh, I know I have things to live for. My daughter, my friends, helping you abolish the slave trade, helping Pitt run the country… Those are all important things. But how am I supposed to… physically live through them? How am I supposed to bear her absence, every day, with only the promise—or the threat—that I will one day forget her?”
Wilberforce shook his head, hating his own helplessness. “I suppose by holding to the knowledge that Harriot is with God, waiting for you, and that everything, however painful, is part of a much larger plan for us all. And that the God who planned it loves us all very much and would never test us with something we can’t, in the end, endure.”
“Do you actually believe that?” It wasn’t an incredulous question, or a scornful one; he genuinely wanted to know.
“Oh yes,” Wilberforce said. That, at least, he could answer. “I do.”
It was late when Wilberforce came downstairs; he was weary himself by then, and the old knife wound twinged at each step. Pitt was sitting by the fire, where he had left him. His eyes, still directed at the flames, had the misleadingly vague look that indicated serious thought.
“Eliot’s a little better,” Wilberforce said, sitting down opposite. “He’s eaten something. We had a good talk, and he’s going off to sleep now.”
“Excellent,” Pitt said, slightly absently. “Thank you. I don’t think he’s slept all week. What did you talk to him about?”
“Religion.”
“I see. Well, that would put anybody to sleep.” He caught himself at once; his head snapped up. “Dear God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, you did,” Wilberforce said. It might have stung at another time; in the wake of his talk with Eliot, he felt perfectly at peace, and only a little sad. “It’s all right.”
“No, it isn’t. I wasn’t thinking.”
“I know.” It was very rare for Pitt to hurt anyone, outside the pitched battles of the House of Commoners. Wilberforce was the one whose emotions could carry him away. Pitt’s temper and wit were usually perfectly within his own control. “You’re tired, and you’re grieving. It really is all right. And I know you don’t understand.”
“If I don’t understand your beliefs,” Pitt said, “I understand your feelings completely. There are things that matter to me as well. I don’t like people to sneer at them.”
“I know,” Wilberforce repeated. “Honor, duty, country. Balance sheets.” He said the last with a twinkle and, to his satisfaction, was rewarded with a soft laugh.
“Well,” Pitt said, “you can sneer at balance sheets a little. But not exceptionally well-balanced ones. I really do apologize.”
“And I really do forgive you.” He smiled. “We evangelists are very good at forgiveness.”
“Oh, do shut up.”
They sat for a while in silence—companionable silence that felt very restful after the constant stream of communication Wilberforce had maintained with poor Eliot. He suspected, looking at Pitt, that his friend was working something through in his mind, and as usual he was prepared to wait for it. The firelight danced, and he stifled a yawn. He’d had a long journey that day.
“I’m sorry,” Pitt said abruptly, “but I’ve been turning it over, and it makes no sense. Clarkson was not an alchemist when I met him. It was already very unusual for his magic to awaken so late in life. And now the Knights Templar are saying that he has some abilities, but not the extent required; and yet when I spoke to him outside Parliament that night, the extent of them was exactly what I noticed. By your account, it’s as if his magic was awoken, used, and put almost but not entirely back to sleep. That’s more than unusual, it’s impossible. Inheritances don’t work that way.”
Wilberforce took a moment to wrench his thoughts to the problem. “But what does?”
“I don’t know. Some kind of dark magic, I would assume, but if so, it didn’t come from Clarkson. You can’t, with no magic, work a spell to give you magic.”
“Which means,” Wilberforce said, “that it came from somebody else. Somebody, perhaps, whom he met in France, at the time the Bastille fell.”
“It’s very likely. Whatever it was, I think I need to talk to Clarkson again, in private. I’d be very grateful if you’d accompany me.”
“I’d be very happy to,” Wilberforce said, and meant it. He had been wanting to look in on Clarkson, and he was immensely relieved to see Pitt coming back to himself. “When?”
“Now? Would that be convenient?” Pitt was already standing. “I’d like to deal with this as soon as I can—and, I have to admit, I really do need to get out of this house. I realize it’s late.”
“No matter—I don’t have any other appointments tonight. But the Templars already questioned him, you know. He couldn’t lie—not under mesmerism.”
“He couldn’t,” Pitt agreed. “But they may not have been asking the right questions.”
By the time Wilberforce and Pitt got out of the carriage and instructed the driver to wait for them, it was almost ten o’clock, and the Tower of London stood like a pale monolith against the cold night sky. Clarkson had obviously been told that he had visitors, because he was standing in the center of his cell, waiting to receive them, when the Templar unlocked the door and opened it for them. He was dressed, but barely, and he was rumpled and bleary-eyed with sleep. His hair had grown longer and more grizzled and now hung loose about his face.
“There’ll be a guard outside,” the Templar told them. “He won’t be able to hear what you’re saying, but if you knock on the door, he’ll let you out.”
“Really?” Clarkson said. “Is that a promise?”
“Provided the prisoner is standing well back from the door, of course,” the Templar added, without looking at Clarkson. He might have been hiding a smile. It was difficult to tell in the light.
“Thank you,” Pitt said to him, and the Templar inclined his head and left.
Clarkson turned to them as the door closed. “Wilberforce,” he said. There was an understandable note of curiosity in his voice. “Mr. Pitt.”
“Clarkson,” Wilberforce returned, a little apologetically. “How are you?”
“Quite well, considering,” Clarkson said, dryly. “This is an unexpected honor.”
“We have something very important to ask you,” Pitt said.
“Are we disturbing you?” Wilberforce asked. “We could perhaps come back at a more convenient time.”
“Exactly how full a calendar do you think I have?” Clarkson reminded him, with a wry glance at the cell about him. “I suppose if you were confined to the Tower of London, you would have regular dinner parties and guests staying over all the time, but in my case… Not at this time of night, no. I am not otherwise engaged.” He gestured, with some irony, at the wooden table and chairs. “Well. Do sit down.”
Wilberforce had been a regular visitor to Clarkson’s cell during the months of his imprisonment, as had many of the major abolitionists: it had been difficult to gain access at first, but they had persisted, and the Knights Templar had gradually become more lenient. As cells in the Tower of London went, it was fairly comfortable. Unlike poor John Terrell, who had lived in poverty and therefore filth and deprivation, Clarkson had both a little money and a good deal of sympathetic friends to ensure that he was provided with clean bedding, decent food, clothing, furnishings, and perhaps most important in Clarkson’s eyes, books and writing materials. His work for abolition had suffered from his inability to travel, but he had been no less tireless in the pursuit of it. He seemed to have eyes, feet, and voices in most of the major ports in the country, and what they brought
him quickly evolved into passionate diatribes against the trade and pleas for its victims that, equally quickly, found their way into bookstalls all over England. Among many of the abolitionists, Clarkson’s so-called crime had raised him to heroic status; even those who disapproved of him could not deny his commitment. Clarkson was too brilliant a writer and speaker to be confined by mere prison walls.
Still, those same prison walls couldn’t be ignored entirely, especially as the days grew colder and shorter. The cell was chilly and damp in the autumn night, and there was scant light from the one window even by day.
“You may as well have something to drink,” Clarkson said. “As I said, I don’t have a good many visitors to share with. Some kindly soul who admires my pamphlets keeps sending me bottles of Madeira. I’m not sure why—they could only have a detrimental effect on the pamphlets. Perhaps they’re trying to give me the chance to drink myself to death.”
“You know there’s still a chance of your sentence being shortened or overturned,” Wilberforce reminded him, “if we push through the magic reforms we’ve been aiming for.”
“Yes,” Clarkson agreed, with what could almost have been fondness. “If you do that. Well, you’d better hurry. I only have fifty-six and a half years left as it is.”
He gave Pitt a less-than-friendly look as he spoke. In theory, he accepted that Pitt had had no choice but to hand him over to the Knights Templar, given the situation with France; in practice, there was a certain coolness in his attitude toward the prime minister.
“So,” Clarkson said as he sat down and picked up his glass. He didn’t drink, but looked at them cautiously from over the rim. “How can I help you gentlemen? I’m assuming this isn’t a social call?”
“You assume correctly,” Pitt said.
Clarkson nodded, his heavy-lidded eyes veiled. “Then I assume it touches on abolition?”
“It does,” Pitt said. He sat forward. “This is an unsociable hour, I agree, so I’ll come straight to the point despite the reproachful looks Wilberforce is shooting at me. I think we’d both prefer it. Mr. Clarkson, we have reason to believe that you met someone when you were in France—someone, moreover, capable of enhancing your latent magic into something powerful enough to start a revolution. We suspect you made a deal with this person. If you care at all about your cause, please tell us what it was.”
They hadn’t discussed the possibility that Clarkson had made a deal with someone, not openly. But it was, Wilberforce knew, what he himself had been dreading. He should have realized it had occurred to Pitt also.
Clarkson looked at them, his eyes widening, and Wilberforce’s heart sank. There was no comforting bewilderment in that gaze, only fear and surprise. If he had actually said “How did you know?” he could not have said it any plainer.
“Please, Clarkson,” Wilberforce said, adding his gentler voice to Pitt’s. “It could be extremely important.”
“Don’t talk to me as if I were a child, Wilberforce. What makes you think I made any kind of deal?”
“The way you reacted when Pitt said you had,” Wilberforce said honestly.
Anger flickered into Clarkson’s eyes then. “And by what right does Pitt accuse me? He’s already had me committed to this place for the rest of my natural life. I haven’t seen any sign of him concerning himself about the fates of the slaves since I’ve been in here.”
“He does!” Wilberforce protested. “I’ve told you many times.”
“I do,” Pitt agreed, more calmly, “but that doesn’t matter. You care about their fates. And we’re afraid you might have done something to jeopardize them. If it matters to you, you may also have jeopardized the country.”
“I certainly haven’t!” Clarkson denied hotly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Wilberforce agreed, before Pitt could reply. “Neither of us do, and it’s very important that we do. Please.”
Clarkson seemed about to argue back but stopped just in time. “You say it’s important to abolition?”
Wilberforce nodded vigorously.
Clarkson hesitated a little longer, then shrugged elaborately and took a drink from his glass. “I suppose it doesn’t matter really.” He ran a hand through his prematurely graying hair, sweeping it away from his face. “It’s done now. You can’t stop the rebellion in Saint-Domingue. And the Templars can hardly put me in more prison.”
They waited.
“It was the first time I went to Paris,” Clarkson said. “July ’89.”
“When the Revolution broke out?” Wilberforce said.
“Exactly.” He smiled a little. “I wish I could tell you what it was like. The life of it! It was a riot of noise and colors and ideas and liberty—you only had to go out on the streets to feel drunk with it. And there was hope too—the kind we’d just had beaten out of us in the House of Commoners. Real hope that anything was possible and that the world could change for the better. You would have loved it, Wilberforce.”
Wilberforce smiled faintly himself. “I think you overestimate my bravery.”
“That was when he came to me,” Clarkson said. “Right in the middle of all that passion and idealism. I actually thought at the time he might have been one of the illegal magicians released from the Bastille, but I suppose he couldn’t have been. If the Knights Templar had ever found him, they wouldn’t have stopped at locking him up.”
“He came to you?” Wilberforce said. “You mean he approached you, in person?”
“No,” said Clarkson thoughtfully. He frowned. “No, now you mention it, he didn’t exactly do that. And yet I saw him. I was asleep, but it wasn’t a dream. I was standing on the streets of Paris, and he was standing before me. There was a mist over the cobbles, but a wind was blowing, and it brought with it the smell of blood and a sound like a battle a long way off. And then he came.”
“Who?” Wilberforce asked.
“He never told me,” Clarkson said. “But he knew who I was, and he knew of our recent defeat in the House of Commoners. He told me he wanted the slaves liberated as well. He asked for my assistance.”
“What kind of assistance?”
“He wanted my help in sabotaging the factory in Paris. As I said, he knew who I was. He told me there was a latent strain of alchemy in my blood, and he could ignite it. He needed me to alter the alchemical magic in the compound, smuggle it into the factory, and send it out on the way to the Caribbean.”
“And you agreed?”
“Of course I agreed!” Clarkson retorted, with just an edge of defensiveness. “I knew the situation on Saint-Domingue; there isn’t a lot I don’t know about the trade in human souls. Hundreds of thousands of people locked in their own minds as their bodies sickened and wore out. Most of them brought in from Africa don’t survive beyond two years; those who do are regularly beaten, tortured, and humiliated with cruelty shocking even by the usual standards of slavery. Of course I was going to agree. It was an opportunity to free them.”
“That’s what we were doing in Parliament,” Wilberforce pointed out, though without much heart. “We’re still doing it.”
“Without success,” Clarkson said bitterly. “We may never succeed. And even if we do, what good would it be for those already enslaved? We’re only aiming at the slave trade, not the practice of slavery itself. That’s another battle, and I doubt any of us will live to see it. Those individuals were suffering at that very moment, and this was their only hope. But we’ve been through this. You know my feelings on the subject, and I know yours. Whether it was a mistake or not, I did what I did. A good many people are dead because of it, and a good many people are free.”
“I know.” They had, indeed, been through it all before. Sometimes, in his more hopeless moments, he even believed that Clarkson was right.
“It took me over a year to perfect the magic,” Clarkson said, “even though he told me what to do. I knew I had a latent thread of alchemy in my blood—the Templars had noted it at birth, t
hough it had never been awakened. Even when it was, it wasn’t anything special on its own. If I’d been an Aristocrat, I probably could have been schooled to use it to the point where I could transmute fairly basic compounds by formula. Little more than mundane chemistry, really. But the visitor did far more than simply awaken my magic. He reached into my blood and set my magic on fire. When I worked, using the samples of the compound I had, I could feel him in my mind, and at once I could see every atom. With a touch, I could shape it, change it—I could even reverse it, so that it became its own antidote.”
“That compound’s meant to be unchangeable,” Wilberforce said. “They lock it in place.”
“It almost was. As I said, it took over a year of practice, every night, every minute I could snatch from my other work. I was constantly exhausted, and my health started to break down over the last few months, but I kept at it. And then, one night, the compound shifted under my fingers, and it became what I wanted it to become. It took a few more weeks to arrange a visit to the factory in Paris where the alchemy is made. When I did, though, the opportunity was easy to find. The compound was already crated, waiting to be sealed and shipped out. I reached inside one of the crates, and I changed the whole shipment in one burst of magic. The compound became a formula to break the spellbinding.”
“The whole shipment?” Wilberforce’s eyebrows shot up. “That should have killed you.”
“It almost did. But I told you, I had help. It was like a wave rippling from my fingertips. My only worry was that the elements making up the crates would change under it as well.”
He spoke carelessly, but Wilberforce remembered how white and haggard he had been after that visit. He and Thornton had remarked on it sympathetically to each other. How could they not have done anything more? “Are you still in contact with him? I mean—”