Chantress (12 page)

The man nodded. “How can I help you?”

“A dram of Tragacanthum, if you please,” Penebrygg said, “and some white saxifrage seeds. Oh, and have you any syrup of Sanguis Draconis?” He leaned forward and intoned another phrase, quick and soft as a single breath.

Master Harbottle frowned. “As to the last, I’m not certain. It will take me some time to make a fresh mixture—at least an hour or more. But you may rest in the treatment room while you wait. If you care to follow me?”

He led us through a small doorway into a long room with a table and chairs. At the back stood shelves and crates and wooden racks where herbs hung drying. After Master Harbottle carefully closed the door to the shop, Nat rolled back the red Turkey carpet and pressed on two floorboards. They pivoted smoothly, revealing stairs that led straight down.

“Lanterns and matches on the left, as usual,” murmured the apothecary. “Good luck.”

Nat was already descending the stairs. Penebrygg motioned to me to go next.

“But where—,” I began.

“Not now, my dear,” Penebrygg whispered.

Seeing the urgency in his face, I hastened down the stairs. A match flared below: Nat, lighting a lantern. He did not wait for me but kept moving steadily downward. Not wanting to be left behind in the dark, I followed him. Penebrygg brought up the rear, pulling the floorboards back in place behind him.

At the foot of the stairs, Nat unlocked a door, and we passed through into a tunnel. Though it was solidly built, with timber
beams that braced the walls and ceiling, it was low enough that I had to bend my head and narrow enough that we were forced to walk single file. The smell of smoky candles and damp earth pressed in on us, and I wished I had my own candle to hold back the darkness.

On we went, Nat’s lantern flickering in front, until at last the passage widened in front of another locked door, twin to the one beneath the apothecary shop.

As Nat unlocked it, I whispered, “Where are we?”

“Beneath Gadding House,” Penebrygg told me. “In one of the secret tunnels that lead into its cellars.”

“There are others?”

“Three others in addition to this one, each well guarded by friends.”

“Master Harbottle is a friend?”

“More than that,” said Penebrygg. “He is a member of our College. His wife will take his place at the shop so that he can attend the meeting.”

Nat had the door unlocked. Behind it, a short passageway led to another door, larger and more ornate. A guard stood before it, armed with sword and pistol.

Penebrygg said something complicated to the guard in a language that I did not know. The guard replied in kind, and let us through into a room with a single door. Penebrygg twisted the handle this way and that.

“I don’t seem to have the knack of it,” he said to Nat. “Perhaps you could try?”

“Certainly.” Skirting around me, Nat leaned into the handle.

“They change the setting each time,” Penebrygg said to me. “I often have trouble with it, but Nat’s a wonder with locks.”

A delicate click: Nat’s work was done. We followed him into a vestibule, where his lantern revealed a small marble fireplace with a golden clock on the mantel. The filigree hands stood at ten minutes past one.

“A little late, but no matter,” said Penebrygg softly as we approached a door built into the arch of the wall. He turned to me. “Not an easy audience, my dear, but do your best. A great deal hangs on it.”

As I braced myself, he raised his hand and rapped on the door.

“A Chantress?”

“That’s what I thought I heard Penebrygg say.”

“Are you sure?”

“See how young she is.”

“Too young.”

I stood before the assembled scholars in the small, windowless library, trying not to show how much their comments unnerved me. I had never before been the object of so much attention. Indeed, it had been many years since I even had seen so many people gathered in one place. Not the easiest audience, Penebrygg had said. He had understated the case.

Everyone seemed to regard me with suspicion.

Well, perhaps that wasn’t quite fair. One jovial young man with fleshy hands had brightened when I walked into the room, and a man I recognized as Isaac Oldville regarded me with a
restless curiosity. But most of the thirty-odd faces in the room bore expressions of dismay and disbelief.

“My esteemed colleagues.” A few paces away from me, Sir Barnaby held up an elegant hand. He looked exactly like the picture I’d seen in Penebrygg’s head: an immaculately dressed, rotund gentleman, who had a sprightly air despite his ivory cane and bad foot. “I present to you Miss Lucy Marlowe, whom Dr. Penebrygg assures me is a true Chantress.”

The room stirred with comment. An anxious voice said, “What if she is a fraud?”

“Or worse yet, a spy?” someone else added.

Until then, I had been too afraid myself to see the fear in the faces before me. But I saw it now.

Sir Barnaby held up his hand. “Silence, please. The Council would not have invited her unless we were convinced it was safe. And Dr. Penebrygg is prepared to submit proof of his claim before you.”

The men quieted, though I could still feel their fear and uncertainty.

Sir Barnaby waved his hand at me. “Miss Marlowe? If you will please show us your arm?”

All eyes fixed on me. My hand shook as I rolled back my sleeve and exposed my Chantress mark for them to see.

“Look!”

“The spiral!”

“By Jove . . .”

“It might only be a scar—”

Mistrustful, they rose from their seats and crowded close for a better view. Not one of them touched me, but their scrutiny—avid and minute and utterly dispassionate—made me feel as if I were a butterfly or a beetle, trapped for observation.

Rattled, I turned my head, looking for a familiar face. Penebrygg and Sir Barnaby had been swallowed up by the throng, but I spotted Nat through a gap in the crowd. He stood by a bookcase at the side of the room, his dark eyebrows drawn in a frown. Although he seemed to be keeping to himself, I wondered if he had somehow poisoned the audience against me.

“Perhaps you would be so good as to return to your seats now?” Sir Barnaby called out. “There is more to come.”

Chairs and voices rumbled as the men took their seats. “Can she read the manuscript?” someone called out.

“She failed on the first attempt, I understand,” Sir Barnaby said.

I saw many eyes narrow.

“If she can’t read it, what good is her mark to us?” a man said.

“If it
is
a genuine mark,” another added. “What kind of tests has she been subjected to?”

“Be patient, my friends,” Sir Barnaby said. “All will become clear. Dr. Penebrygg, will you demonstrate?”

“With Miss Marlowe’s consent, yes.”

At the sound of Penebrygg’s courteous voice, my confidence began to return. Here, at least, was someone who believed in me and wished me well. “I am ready, sir,” I said, and he explained to the audience what they were about to see.

At the mention of mind-reading, the men murmured—not exactly with displeasure this time, but with a blend of alarm and anticipation. When I revealed the ruby and pulled it over my head, they quieted again.

To me, however, the room was anything but silent. As I set the ruby down on a small table beside me, notes eddied around me, elusive and maddening. Though I tried not to listen to them, they distracted me, and I found it difficult to recall the moonbriar song. Fortunately, Sir Barnaby had given me a new vial of the seeds on my arrival. I opened it now.

“The demonstration, of necessity, requires two people. Which of you cares to participate?” Penebrygg asked.

Half the men raised their hands. Penebrygg singled out the jovial dandy at the back of the room. “Mr. Deeps, would you be so good as to come forward? The rest of you shall have your chance later.”

Deeps shook out his lace cuffs and swaggered forward. “So you wish to read my mind, missy, eh?”

He paused as if expecting a reply, but I was too busy drinking in the moonbriar song to offer any.

“Not got much to say for herself, has she?” Deeps said in a stage whisper to one of the men sitting across from him. “But then she’s only a chit of a girl. Not exactly what we were hoping for, what? Even if she is a Chantress.”

Let it go,
I told myself, as Penebrygg explained to Deeps what was required. But the dismissal ate away at me, making it hard to steady myself for the singing.

Let it go,
I told myself again.
Let it go.

But it was only when I started to sing that I truly released the weight of his disdain. I gave myself over to the music, and when the notes were there singing inside me, I took Deeps’s hand and walked into his mind.

It required more effort to read him than Nat or Penebrygg. Was that because I’d only met him a few minutes ago—or because Deeps’s mind was so fragmented? His skepticism warred with his pleasure at being an object of attention, and the rest of him was splintered among a dozen different private thoughts.

Remembering Nat’s outrage, I decided to be very careful about what I shared. If I exposed this man’s secrets, I’d likely earn his enmity forever. Instead, I described in detail the picture he held out to me at the forefront of his mind: an instrument for making music with black-and-white keys—a spinet, his mind called it.

When I finished, I opened my eyes.

“Was she correct?” Penebrygg asked Deeps.

“More or less.” Deeps fluffed his lace sleeves fretfully. “But who’s to say it wasn’t a lucky guess? Everyone here knows I bought that spinet a fortnight ago. Perhaps Penebrygg mentioned it to her—”

“I did not.”

“—or someone else did. But in any case, it does not signify. For even if this young miss did pluck the thought from my mind, it strikes me as a rather labored exercise. I doubt if our enemies
will be kind enough to sit still and meditate on a single object for minutes at a time, so that she might more easily read their minds.”

I regretted that I had held back from voicing his private thoughts. “The spinet was not all that was on your mind, Mr. Deeps.” I spoke clear as a bell across the space between us. “Let me tell you what else I saw: You keep a diary. It is written in code, and in it you record the details of—”

“Hey, ho! How did you know that?” Deeps interrupted. The room buzzed with curiosity.

“You are also annoyed with a certain dancing master because—”

“Enough!”

I had expected Deeps to be angry, but strangely enough, he seemed thrilled. “Did you hear that?” he said to his colleagues. “She read my mind. She truly read my mind!”

“You shall have to watch your step now, Deeps,” one of the men quipped. “No more light-o’-loves for you.”

“Ah, but I have met the lady who puts all others in the shade.” Deeps bowed low before me. “Your humble servant, Chantress.”

After that, there was a rush to the front of the room. Half the men wanted me to read their minds; the other half wished to converse with me. Delighted to have made such a favorable impression, I did my best to make tactful use of what I learned of their private musings. But my most daring comments were the ones that delighted them most.

“You are thinking of a building that does not exist—or rather, that exists only in your mind,” I told a dignified, straw-haired man named Christopher Linnet. “A cathedral with a vast dome
that towers over London. Clustered around it are churches, mansions, arcades, and arches, each one of your own devising. Indeed, you almost wish that the city might be razed to the ground, so that you might have a chance to rebuild it.”

“That’s our man!” a friend called out.

Master Linnet blushed. “I must admit I’d rebuild it rather differently, if I had the chance . . . .”

“A good fire, that’s what you need,” someone else said.

The rest of the company laughed, save one: Nat. He sat stiffly, back to the wall, every inch of him conveying disapproval.

Well, he might not like what I was doing, but I had won them over, hadn’t I? And that never would have happened if I had refused to give voice to their secrets.

I looked down at the brilliant ruby in my lap. The problem with Nat, I decided, was that he was too touchy. Even Penebrygg had called him prickly. And that was putting it kindly.

Doing my best to ignore him, I turned to the next man who wanted his mind read: Isaac Oldville. I closed my eyes and took his hand. “Red—everything I see is red. Red liquids, red light, red carpets. Even, if I am not mistaken, red hangings in your bedchamber. Why, so great is your love for the color red that I do believe . . . yes, you covet my own red ruby.”

Hearing them laugh, I was emboldened to probe further. For a long moment, all was darkness, and I thought perhaps I had lost my connection to Oldville. But no, light was dawning . . . and now I had the uncanny sensation that I was actually seeing the ruby through Oldville’s eyes. “You cannot take your eyes off it. It lies
there on the table between us, not a foot away from you, dazzling in its beauty and its power. The attraction is so strong that you do not care that the others are laughing.”

They laughed harder at this.

The picture was not entirely clear—there was a haze there, and sometimes it darkened unexpectedly—but nevertheless, I felt elated. “But you are determined to prove me wrong,” I went on. “You
can
look at something besides the ruby. There, you’ve done it: You are gazing at your friends and colleagues now. You notice that Deeps’s lace is askew, and that Linnet is still chuckling. In the back of your mind, however, you are wondering what the ruby is made of. You want to subject it to experiments—”

“So I should.”

I opened my eyes. Oldville did not seem in the least flustered. “And so would the rest of you, if you had your wits about you,” he said to his colleagues. “Never before have we encountered such a phenomenon, and there is much yet that we do not understand. Tell me, Chantress, can you read minds like that at a distance?”

I stopped to consider the question. “I don’t know. I tried once at the start, and it didn’t work. But I’ve had more practice since then.”