The Twelfth Enchantment: A Novel (53 page)

She seemed to glow in the near darkness. Her skin was like ivory, her hair almost white, and her gown as white as her hair, but she was not a figure of loveliness. Like her widower, Mary was prepared for war, and she bore two shotguns upon her back in the precise manner Mr. Morrison did. It occurred to Lucy that she knew almost nothing of their lives together. Had they gone on adventures, faced magic and monsters? What had passed between them had been real and true and lived, not like the silly infatuation she had felt for Mr. Morrison when she was sixteen or the foolish attraction she’d felt for Byron. Theirs had been a true love, forged and built and earned. She could see that in Mr. Morrison’s eyes as he gazed upon her. He swallowed hard, and appeared to look away, but then turned back, determination in his eyes. He would be telling himself that this was not his wife, not his Mary, Lucy thought. She could not imagine the suffering.

She would have imagined Mrs. Emmett would have reacted more strongly to seeing her old mistress, but she only stood, gazing almost stupidly, awaiting the next situation that would require her attention. This one, evidently, did not.

“I’ll not murder him in cold blood,” said Mr. Morrison. “Not like that.”

“He deserves no better,” said Mary.

Mr. Morrison gritted his teeth, and then took a deep intake of breath.
“Perhaps not, but I shall have to live with what I do, and I cannot be so base as he. But you don’t need me. You could do what you like for yourself.”

She shook her head. “I have no fear of consequences. No fear of God or damnation or my immortal soul. I
am
my immortal soul, and if I kill, even once, then why shall I not do so again when it is convenient or when I am angry or looking to amuse myself? I will save this world if I can do so, but I will not take a life except to save another.”

“Perhaps you are more like what you once were than I credit,” Mr. Morrison said in a quiet voice.

“No,” she answered. “If it were you to whom he had done this, my old self would have slit his throat in that chair and never regretted it.”

“You killed Spencer Perceval,” said Lucy. “You have murdered already.”

“I merely put his murderer in Perceval’s way,” she said. “It is not the same.”

“Ahh,” said Byron, who had gone off to a corner to make use of a necessary pot. Lucy tried to ignore the sound of splashing. “That is just the thing. Almost better than deflowering a virgin.”

“And so you thought to deliver to us Byron and the last two pages,” said Lucy.

Mary laughed. “Lucy, you are so sweet. You must understand that those were the only pages I had the means to find, that I ever had the means to find. I did not give the last two pages to you. You have brought the first ten pages to me. Now I must ask you to make them mine, so I can best use them.”

Lucy felt her face burn. She felt dizzy, as though the floor had vanished beneath her and she tumbled through space. She thought about the will she had written, leaving the book to Mary. Had this been her strategy all along? Did she mean to kill Lucy now? Lucy had some notion of how to kill revenants, and she had the means upon her, but Mary was strong and quick and clever, and she did not believe she could defeat her in a fight.

“All along, you lied to me,” Lucy said quietly. “You used me. You are no better than Buckles or my uncle or Lady Harriett.”

“Do not say it, Lucy. I have withheld information I did not think you ready to hear, but it was always with your interests in mind. And in this matter, I have been truthful. It was your destiny to gather the leaves. It was your duty to fight this war by my side. I have always said it, but I will not ask you to do what comes next. I do not wish to trick you, but to fight for you. If you will give me the pages and let me do what needs to be done, I will not take human life, but I will grind Lady Harriett and her kind into the dust. I would fight on behalf of those who labor with their hands, not those who would own that labor and crush those hands. Tell me I am wrong, Lucy, that what I do is in error, and mean it, but if you cannot say it, and have not the will to fight by my side, I do not judge you. I only ask that you step away.”

“You may ask,” said Mrs. Emmett, “but you may not command.”

Mary smiled at the serving woman. “I have instructed you well, I see. You are Lucy’s now, as I wished. But Lucy, you will have to act decisively, and you cannot hesitate. You cannot show compassion for Lady Harriett. You cannot think to spare her or hope she reforms herself. You must have the strength to kill her.”

Lucy understood that Mary was right, but she did not like the implications. There were many revenants after all. “It will not end there, will it? Those others, the strange men and women I saw at her estate, they are like you, are they not? If you destroy them, you destroy them forever.”

“There is no other way,” said Mary. “This is the time of reckoning. Now, Lucy. Tonight. We shall not do things by half measures. We shall not simply destroy Lady Harriett and hope that magic and machines can find some balance. No, Lady Harriett and her kind will fall. Those who have been her toad eaters, like that monster there, with his foolish grin”—she pointed, of course, to Byron—“shall fall with them.”

“With you as the new ruler?” asked Mr. Morrison.

“Do you know nothing of me?” she asked. “I know I am not what I
was, that I cannot feel as I felt, but am I so alien to you that you think I seek only power? I want only to live in a world worth living in. I will fade into obscurity when this work is done.”

“Nevertheless, you’ve indulged your power, haven’t you?” said Byron from across the room. “Someone sent me to warn little Lucy off marrying her intended. Someone made me believe I had feelings for her. That tenderness could not have been mine.”

Lucy turned to her. “Is it true? Did you use me so?”

Mary looked down. “I did not use you. I used Byron, and I shall not repent of it. I put him in your way because you needed your world to change. Though I despise him, I knew Byron’s appearance and his clumsy affections would have that effect. There was never any real risk to your heart, Lucy, and I cast no love magic upon him. That was you, Lucy. It was your charm, your own magic. You brought out in him what was best even in so base a creature.”

Mary’s reasoning was cold and logical. She had toyed with Lucy’s feelings to effect the end she wanted. It frustrated her because, as terrible as Mary’s actions were, they were not so different from what she herself had done to Mr. Morrison.

None of this was about her or her pride, however. She would examine her resentment more closely another time. “And Ludd, whom you have summoned into this world?” she asked. “What does he care for?”

“This island,” answered Mary. “This land. The people in it. Nothing more. He cares not for power, nor for empire, or dominion over nations—which has been the care of your little band of Rosicrucians, has it not, Jonas? We have no care if England is the weakest or the strongest nation in the world so long as its people have bread and their share of happiness.”

“The
Mutus Liber
is strongest in the hands of the person to whom it belongs,” Lucy said. “You want me to gift you the book because you do not think I will do what must be done.”

“I would spare you from doing it,” Mary said.

“Spare me nothing,” said Lucy. “This is my task, and I shall endure
it, I hope with your help. But for now, let us take the book and go while we still can.”

“Hold,” said Mr. Morrison. “If her intentions are no more than she says, then why did she send her monster to attack us?”

“What monster?” asked Mary, her eyes suddenly narrowing.

“Byron’s tortoise,” Lucy said. “It was transformed into a raging beast and set upon us.”

Mary’s expression darkened. “Lucy, for the love of God, we must leave at once.”

“What is it?” Mr. Morrison asked.

“If what you say is true, then Lady Harriett is here, upon these grounds.”

In a swift motion, Mary removed one of her shotguns and held it in her hands. It looked absurdly incongruous—she, the pale, ethereal beauty, taking hold of the weapon.

Mr. Morrison watched her for a moment then took one of his own weapons. “They’re here?”

She nodded. “I can feel them. I’ve loaded my gun against their kind, but my little trick won’t work on Lady Harriett, you know. She is too powerful.”

“I know,” he said. “After I killed her late husband, she found a way to indemnify herself against it, but not the others.”

“Have you discovered what will work on her?” asked Mary.

“Not yet,” he said.

Mary turned to Byron. “Why would she choose to come here? Have you made any arrangements with Lady Harriett? Have you leased her any land? Is anything here
hers
?”

Lucy understood. At Lady Harriett’s estate, Lucy’s charms had been ineffective because there had been wards against them, wards that only the rightful owner of a property could employ. Newstead ought to be neutral, but if Lady Harriett had legally acquired the rights to part of it, that part might be protected.

“Oh, put the shotgun away, Mary,” said Byron. “It is unbecoming. Yes, I leased her some land. She wished to use part of my property to establish a hosiery mill, of all things.”

Mr. Olson’s new mill. It came full circle. “So much for your speech in defense of the Luddites in the House of Lords,” Lucy said.

“Oh, I never really believed most of that. It sounded quite right, of course, but there is politics and there is money, and I know which I value more, so when Lady Harriett made her offer, my lukewarm sympathy for the Luddites cooled entire. In any case, I owed her a debt, and Lady Harriett is not someone to refuse.”

“There must be something in the contract that grants her power here,” Mr. Morrison said to Lucy. “She will first try to make you give her the pages. She will want to take them from you by force, but her first choice will be to own them. Lucy, you cannot let her have them. Better to destroy the book than to let her have it.”

Lucy clutched the pages to her chest. “If we destroy the book, we will have no weapon against her. If I cannot defeat her, I cannot safely return my niece to her mother. We must get away until I’ve had a chance to learn what the book will teach me.”

Mary smiled at Lucy. “I admire your courage, Lucy, and applaud your sentiments. I shall lead the way. In the meantime, I suggest we do something about Byron. He is a menace and unpredictable.”

The latter part of her assessment certainly proved correct, for when they looked around, Byron was nowhere to be found. After a brief discussion it was agreed that he could not easily be discovered if he wished to hide in his own ruined abbey, and that he possessed little that could harm them and nothing they needed. While he might have run off to alert Lady Harriett to their presence, taking the time to search for him would be a self-defeating effort. In short, their first priority was flight. Byron was a problem that would wait for a more opportune moment.

Lucy held out her hand to Mary. “We might be separated. I must have what is mine.”

With no more hesitation than a few rapid blinks, Mary handed the
final pages to Lucy. They felt as heavy as iron in her hands, as alive as a beating heart, as vital as a bolt of lightning. She did not even look at them except long enough to see the telltale signs of Mr. Blake’s designs. They felt so powerful, they frightened her, and they seemed to be gathering power, quickening in her grasp, urging her to action. The pages wanted to be looked at, to be understood and deciphered.

She closed her mind to them. New ideas would only confuse and distract. There would be time enough for that when she was alone. Instead she took the pages and placed them with the others. She rolled them up into a tube and placed them into the secret folds of her frock, where she kept her herbs and charms and tokens. The secret pockets were getting heavy with old and discarded tokens of her adventure that she dared not throw away, for she could not know what she would need to survive.

Mary led them out of the hall toward the main entrance. The body of the horrible tortoise lay there, already covered with an impossibly thick halo of flies. More flies crawled upon it, countless flies, an impossible number, so that the body appeared a living, writhing, buzzing mass. It turned Lucy’s stomach, and she hesitated to approach, and in that moment of hesitation she saw movement in the darkness. Four figures, cloaked in shadow, and yet vaguely familiar. In the flickering light of Mrs. Emmett’s lantern, Lucy recognized the revenants she had seen in Lady Harriett’s house, led by the gray-haired Mr. Whitestone.