The Twelfth Enchantment: A Novel (44 page)

Within a day it became apparent that there was not going to be any revolution in England and no blood flowing through the streets of the capital. This was certainly good news, but the newspaper Mr. Blake brought home contained its share of troubling news. The assassin was revealed as a madman named John Bellingham. It took Lucy a moment to recognize the name, but then she recalled it was the man she had met at Lady Harriett’s house the night she was captured. And Mary had told Lucy that she had taken him away and set him free in London. Mary had, in effect, played a hand in a plot to murder the prime minister.

Lucy could not believe it. Even if her cause was just, how could Mary condone such an act? It was monstrous. On the one side, the Rosicrucians and the revenants and their mills and machines; on the other, the Luddites and the old order—and now murder and treason. There had to be a third way, a better way. If only she could think of it and make Mary see reason. Of course, Lucy did not know if she would ever see Mary again, and now that Mr. Perceval was dead, she did not know that she could have any sway over the Rosicrucians, so even if she could think of a third way, she did not know that there was anything to do with the knowledge.

As for Mr. Bellingham, Lucy believed him to be no more than a madman, manipulated by Mary and her faction. According to what she read, he was angered because of an unjust imprisonment in Russia, for which he believed the British government owed him compensation. Somehow he had been convinced that his best course of action was to kill the prime minister. Justice for Bellingham was swift and terrible, and two days after the murder he was tried at the Old Bailey, where he offered scant explanation for his act but the misery he felt. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang the following Monday.

Mr. Blake, for his part, understood without Lucy telling him that Bellingham had been manipulated by the different invisible factions that now waged their war. Those who are called madmen are much more susceptible to magic, he said, for madness is often nothing more than an openness to the world around them, the world not governed by the cold logic of Bacon and Newton and Locke. These names he spoke with virulent contempt, and it seemed to Lucy that Mr. Blake hated nothing so much as he hated the very idea of reason.

“It is all well and good to apply reason to business plans or a mode of education or a voyage to Italy. One must live in the world after all. But reason, when applied to the universe, to the wonders of nature, to the things hidden from our poor eyes that see not all, but only what the Lord intended that they see—well, that becomes nonsense, doesn’t it? To say there are no ghosts because we cannot see them, cannot measure them, cannot weigh them upon scales nor note their reaction to heat in a flask—I hardly see the point of such a mode of inquiry. The world is full of wonders that cannot be measured. That is why they are wonders.”

For her first three days at Mr. Blake’s house, Lucy was left mostly to herself as she studied the new pages of the
Mutus Liber
, but unlike the earlier pages, these two had no clear content she could divine. She quieted herself and attempted to become lost within the images, and yet she could find nothing of use. While Lucy came away with clear notions of elements—gold, sulfur, and mercury—to what purpose these elements could be put, she had no idea. She presumed it had something to do with the production of the philosopher’s stone, but that was mere guesswork. Even so, she thought it best to have such elements upon her in the event the meaning should become clear or subsequent pages tell her what she needed to know. In one of her few excursions out of the house, she visited an apothecary and acquired vials of sulfur and mercury, and she visited a goldsmith, where she purchased a small quantity of gold dust.

She also spent a great deal of time thinking about Byron. He had said she must come to him, and she wanted to. She longed to. She thought about what it had been like to kiss him. Over and over she relived the
memory in her mind, recalling every detail, sometimes adding to it something she might have done or he might have said until she could not easily recall what had been real and what her imagination.

She wanted to go to him. Each morning she woke and thought that she would, but by the time she had dressed and eaten, she understood that her desire was but a dreamy absurdity. She had no real home, no protection, and she dared not put herself in his power. If he would but make a proposal of marriage all would be well, but he had not done so.

Instead of running to Byron, she contented herself with conversations with the Blakes, particularly on the subject of what she must do next. Lucy needed to find the remaining pages of the
Mutus Liber
if she was to rescue her niece, but she had no notion at all of where to look. With Mr. Morrison having discovered her treachery, no one could tell her. One evening while they talked of this and drank weak tea, Mr. Blake fell into a reflective quiet for some time. Lucy and Mrs. Blake spoke of other matters for half an hour when Mr. Blake appeared to start awake and interrupted them without ceremony.

“Miss Derrick, your father is of the opinion that you must look to your inheritance.”

Lucy felt her entire body tense. She had told the Blakes nothing of that circumstance. She knew she would have to look to it at some point, but now she had more important things with which to concern herself. In any case, Mary had described the matter as hopeless.

Even if, to further her own mysterious ends, Mary had lied, was her inheritance the most important matter at this moment? Why would her father ask her to look to it? Perhaps by proving Mr. Buckles’s forgery Lucy could more quickly disrupt Lady Harriett’s plans. Was she implicated in the forgery as well? Lucy did not think she would be able to attack Lady Harriett with the laws of the land. For now, she had no choice but to wait and hope to learn more.

So taken was Mr. Blake with Lucy that he insisted he show her some of his work, so in the bright light of the next morning, he led her down to his shop and began to put into her hands some of his astonishing
books—
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Milton
. Lucy had never seen a book of poetry like this. It was a swirling, vibrant mixture of image and word. Even the text was engraved, and letter and image interwove until one became the other, and she could hardly say where one began and the other ended. It was seamless and elegant and chaotic and maddening.

Yet, as beautiful and eerie and moving as was his art, this is not what struck Lucy most. When she looked at his engravings, Lucy felt as though some unseen hand slid the final piece of a puzzle in place. She felt elation and fear and an insatiable curiosity. “It is time that I show you something, Mr. Blake,” she said.

Lucy went upstairs and retrieved her pages from the
Mutus Liber
. She brought them down and then spread them before Mr. Blake without any semblance of ceremony. They were simply there for his inspection.

Blake looked them over, running his fingers along the images, carefully noting the details. He shifted one, held another up to the light. A third he sniffed.

“Remarkable,” he said at last.

“They appear very much like your own work,” Lucy said to him.

He nodded. “They do indeed. I would go so far as to say that they are my own work.”

Lucy sat down, uncertain how to understand this new information. She had always believed Mary when she said the images dated from the seventeenth century. There was no reason to lie about such a thing, surely. Besides, Mr. Morrison had told her the same thing, had he not? Certainly it was possible that he had received false information, that they both had. Lucy found it easier to believe that Mary would lie than that she would be mistaken, but there was no reason why she could not simply be wrong about something.

“Do you know anything of alchemy?” Lucy asked Mr. Blake.

He shook his head. “Nothing out of the common way.”

“Have you ever sought the philosopher’s stone, the secret to life immortal?”

He smiled. “I already possess the secret to life immortal, Miss Derrick. It is called Jesus Christ. I need not seek another.”

Lucy closed her eyes. If these pages were not part of some mystic book, but merely the clever engravings of an affable if deranged craftsman, then everything she had done was for nothing. Lucy could not believe that. These pages were real. They radiated power and energy and a magnetic force. Lucy felt that these pages were, in some fundamental way,
magic
, whatever that meant. They were, for want of a better way of expressing it, half wedged in that invisible world of wonders that Mr. Blake claimed to know so well.

She turned to him. “When did you engrave these, sir?”

He was still examining them with minute interest. “I don’t believe I have.”

“But you told me they are yours.”

“Oh, they are certainly mine. I know this technique. I know it well, Miss Derrick. Do you know when I learned it? It was shortly after my brother Bob died, and I fell into the deepest and most terrible grief. Of all my brothers, he is the one I have always loved best, and I feared I should never see him again until I left this mortal realm. I was so distraught I did not even attend his funeral. You must think that unfeeling.”

Lucy recalled the misery of her father’s and sister’s funerals. “I think no such thing.”

“I could not endure that I should be made to grieve as others expected, that my grief must be a scripted and public spectacle, a stage play as much as an experience. I stayed at home. Then, only a few days later, Bob appeared before me. I had been having many difficulties in my work, unable to figure out a technique for combining text and image in the manner I wished. Bob told me how to do it. He invented this technique I now use. I did not know what to do, and then Bob appeared, explained it, and lo, I knew what to do.”

Lucy smiled. “It is the most literal experience of
inspiration
I have ever heard.”

Mr. Blake looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time.

“Mr. Blake,” she said, “I am confused. You say these are your engravings, and yet you say you have not done them.”

“I am confused as well.” He appeared more amused than anything else. “I have never made these engravings, and yet they are unmistakably mine. I have no followers in my mode of engraving, and even if I did, no one could imitate my style so well that I would not detect it.”

“I was told,” she said, attempting to show no emotion, “that these drawings originate from the seventeenth century in La Rochelle.”

Blake examined them again. “I see nothing particularly French in them, but the paper is certainly aged. There is nothing in these to say that they are not from such a time and place.”

“Mr. Blake, I do not think you are near two hundred years old.”

“I thank you.”

“How is it, then, that these pages can be?”

“I cannot answer that. I can only surmise that at some point in my future, either I or my work shall be in seventeenth-century France.”

“That is nonsense,” said Lucy.

“No,” he corrected. “We know where the pages come from and we know they are my work. It is not nonsense. It is evident. You say it is nonsense because reason tells us that I cannot ever go to seventeenth-century France, but once again that is the reason of Locke and Bacon and Newton. That is the reason of Satan and hell. You cannot doubt your own experience of the world because your reason tells you that your own experience must be wrong.”

Lucy rose and looked out the window of the shop. The day was overcast but not gloomy. She had not yet been outside, and she suddenly felt cramped and constrained, as though she needed fresh air. She turned back to Mr. Blake to announce that she wished to take a walk, but saw that he was very much absorbed in one of the engravings.

“Tell me,” he said to her, “who is Mr. Buckles?”