Philosophy in the Dark

Perpetua Strand arrived at Wynmore House at half past four, which was the hour at which a woman calls when she wishes to be thought casual and means to be remembered.

Garrick received her in the small blue parlor, because it was the only room in the house with a door that closed properly. He had not seen her in fourteen months. She had not changed. She came in on a gust of lavender and cold air, in a cloak trimmed with sable, shedding gloves and a muff and a footman's arm, and she kissed the air beside his cheek and said, "Garrick. You look dreadful. Tell me everything, and begin with the part you've been hiding."

"I have been hiding nothing."

"My dear, you have been hiding it so thoroughly that half of Mayfair has taken up the sport of looking for it." She sank onto the settee and arranged her skirts. "Tea. Mrs. Hatch's, not the other sort. And the little almond cakes, if there are any left. I shall be insupportable without cakes."

He rang. He did not sit.

She watched him with those clever hazel eyes. They had been the first thing he had liked about her, nine years ago, at a supper after a lecture on the aurora. A woman of twenty-six, sharp as a pin, who had interrupted a bishop to correct his arithmetic and had then apologized so charmingly that the bishop had proposed to send her a pamphlet. They had loved each other, after a fashion, for two winters. They had parted with great civility and without a single quarrel, which Garrick had always thought the saddest thing about it.

"You have a ward," said Perpetua.

"I have."

"A Miss Merrow. Of Lisbon."

"Yes."

"With an English father and a Portuguese mother, and a singular fondness for her own silence." She smiled up at him. "Do you know, I have met three Portuguese gentlewomen in my life, and not one of them was ever described to me as dark-skinned, remarkably tall, and wearing the expression of a cat in a church."

"Who described her so?"

"Everyone. My dear, it is the one thing on which London is unanimous."

The tea came. Mrs. Hatch put down the tray with a face like a locked gate and withdrew, and Perpetua poured with the unhurried grace of a woman performing a rite. She added three lumps to her cup and stirred, and when she spoke again she did not look at him.

"I took the liberty," she said, "of meeting her this morning."

The cup in his hand did not move. It was a small triumph of will.

"Where?"

"Oh, in the course of my errands. Near the Meridian Hall." She sipped. "She was out walking. She seemed a little lost. I sent her home in a hackney."

"She was—" He stopped. He put the cup down very carefully on the mantel. "She was out."

"For perhaps an hour. Mrs. Hatch was at the butcher's, and you were at the docks, and the household, it seems, was occupied with its own affairs. You must not blame the girl. A creature shut up in a house, with a pulse in the walls." Her eyes came up. "She has very fine eyes, Garrick. I understand now why people are talking."

His blood was loud in his ears. It was, he understood, not anger. He was too practiced in anger to mistake it. It was a colder thing, thinner and higher, the sensation of a floor tilting under the foot.

She went to the Hall. She went straight to the stone. She could have been seen. She could have been taken.

"What did she say?"

"Nothing at all. She was perfectly composed." Perpetua put down her cup. Her voice shifted, lost its glitter, and became low and rapid and entirely serious. "Now listen to me, because I shall say it once and then deny it under oath. Alaric Draymoor is interested in her. Not in the way a man is interested in a pretty ward. In the way a man is interested in a lock he has not yet found the key to. He asked me about her on Thursday. He asked me twice. And Crale was at his elbow."

"Crale."

"Magister Osmund Crale, of the Consistory of the Lantern. He has been in London since October. He sups with the Duke on Fridays." Her mouth thinned. "I do not know what you have brought home, my dear, and I would rather not. But you should know that you are being watched by two men who dislike each other very much and who have, for the moment, found a common object. Keep her in the house. Keep the curtains drawn. And for God's sake, Garrick, keep her away from that building."

He stared at her.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I am fond of you." She smiled, and it was a little crooked. "Because I am a deeply unscrupulous woman and I have, so far, had very little fun this year."

It was not a full answer. He knew it. But there was something in her face he had not seen there before, a brightness around the eyes, a tension in the hands, and it occurred to him, too late and to his considerable surprise, that she was afraid.

"Perpetua."

"Hush. I must go. I'm expected at the Duchess's." She rose in a rustle of satin, gathering muff and gloves, and paused at the door with her hand on the frame. "One thing more. I would not tell her I told you. She asked me to say nothing, and I should hate to have it said I broke a promise to a woman who cried at a drain."

"Cried at a drain?"

"Gratings," said Lady Strand serenely. "It is a long story. She is a most remarkable girl. Good afternoon."

She went out in a sweep of sable and lavender. The front door closed. And Garrick stood alone in the blue parlor with the cooling tea and the sound of his own pulse, and realized with a faint sick lurch that he was not thinking about the Duke at all.

He was thinking of a woman on her knees on a cold stone in an alley, weeping.

…

He found her in the library at nine.

Wynmore House had a library of three thousand volumes, most inherited from a grandfather who had bought books by the yard. It occupied the whole of the east wing's upper floor: a long, tall room lined in dark oak, with a gallery, a rolling ladder, and a pair of globes. There was a fire. There was a single lamp on the reading table, with a green shade. And there, in a great leather chair by the hearth, with her feet tucked under her and a volume open on her knee, sat Miss Calla Merrow, who was reading by candlelight and who did not look up.

"You went to the Hall," said Garrick.

"Yes."

She turned a page. The firelight made a gold edge on her cheekbone.

"You gave me your word."

"I gave you my signature." She looked up at last. "It is not the same. I told you I was not a person who keeps promises to men who have stolen from me. I think you will find it is in the minutes."

"That is a quibble."

"It is a principle." She closed the book on her finger. It was a treatise on optics. He recognized the binding: Newton, in the French. "I will not apologize. I will say that I am sorry to have frightened you."

"I am not frightened."

"Your hand is shaking."

He looked down. It was.

He put it behind his back, and the gesture was so childish that he felt the heat climb his neck. Eight years at the Royal Society. Fourteen at sea. And I am beaten by a woman in a chair.

"Sit down," said Ixara, quietly. "Please. I will tell you what I saw. I think you will want to know."

He did not sit. He took the chair across the hearth, facing her, with the table between them and the small lamp between them, and he put his hands on his knees. After a moment she began.

She described the grating. She described the chamber below, the circular room with the tiled walls, the dome of glass and brass, the wires running to a cabinet of instruments. She described the men with notebooks. She was precise, almost clinical, in the way of a person who has trained herself to describe what she cannot bear. And when she came to the Aurelith itself, to the blue light thrown against the glass, her voice did not change, but her fingers closed on the book until the knuckles went gray.

"It is in pain," she said.

"It is a mineral."

"It is a heart." She said it without heat. "You have listened to it. You held it on your wrist for three months. You know it is not a stone."

"I know," said Garrick carefully, "that it produces measurable anomalies in the instruments. I know it generates a periodic pulse of an unknown energy. I know that it has some influence on animate bodies, though the mechanism—"

"You are doing it again."

"What?"

"Hiding. In the long words." She tilted her head. "I think you are very good at it. I think you built a whole house out of them. I think if someone took away the words you would not know where to put your hands."

He stared.

It was, he reflected, a remarkable thing: a woman of twenty-four, raised on a rock in the middle of an ocean, who had arrived in London a fortnight ago with a pouch of dried flowers and a fish-bone knife, and who was sitting in his library in a borrowed gown, telling him the shape of his own character with the cool exactitude of an anatomist.

"I will not argue," he said, "that language is an imperfect instrument. But it is the only one we have. Without it we have nothing but superstition."

"And what is superstition?"

"Belief without evidence."

"I have given you evidence."

"You have given me data. It is not the same." He leaned forward. He could feel the old, familiar pleasure rising in him, the clean sharp joy of an argument, the one place in his life where he felt entirely alive. "A pattern in the observations. Twenty-nine out of thirty-one. It is remarkable. It demands an explanation. But the explanation need not be a spirit. It might be a perceptual faculty we have not yet characterized. A sensitivity to micro-expressions. A statistical regularity in the structure of the questions—"

"You wrote the questions in the dark. You did not know yourself what was in the envelopes until you broke the seals."

"A gap in my method, then. Which I shall correct."

"And the pony? Biscuit? The winter your father died?"

"You may have read it in a letter."

"Which letter?"

"I will find it."

"You will not." She was smiling now, very slightly. "You know you will not. You looked for the letter on the ship. I saw you at night with the lantern, going through your own drawers. And you found nothing."

His face burned.

"You watched me?"

"I do not need to watch. You think so loudly." Her smile faded. "Garrick. I do not say this to wound you. I say it because I think it is true. You are not afraid that I am lying. You are afraid that I am not."

The fire shifted. A log fell.

"If I am a fraud," said Ixara, "your world is whole. You have been tricked, and you will find the trick, and you will go to your Society and publish a very clever paper. If I am not—" She spread her hands. "Then there are things that cannot be weighed. And that is not a small thing for a man who has built his life on the scales."

"The world is large," said Garrick, rather stiffly. "I have never denied it. I merely hold that what cannot be measured cannot be known."

"And what of the things you know that you did not measure?"

"I know nothing that I did not measure."

"Do you know that your sister loves you?"

He opened his mouth.

He closed it.

"Did you measure that?"

"That is not—" His throat was tight. "It is not the same."

"Why not?"

"Because it is..." He searched for a word, and found, to his horror, only a single one. "Evident."

"To whom?"

"To anyone who—"

"To anyone who feels it. Yes." She leaned forward. The lamplight caught the planes of her face, the strong brow, the full mouth, the long tired lines at the corners of her eyes, and he saw in them neither mockery nor triumph. Only a grave and terrible patience. "You are not a man without faith, Garrick Wynmore. You are only a man who has put it in the wrong places. You have faith in your sister. You have faith in the stars. You have faith, God help you, in the Duke of Draymoor's word. And you will not give a handful of smoke and dreams one inch, because you think that if you do, the whole house of reason will come down."

"Will it not?"

"No." Softly. "It is only a house. It has many rooms."

For a long moment neither spoke.

The lamp hissed. A coal settled in the grate. Somewhere on the lower floors, a clock struck the half hour, and the notes hung in the air like drops of water.

He was aware, as one is aware of a change in the weather, that he had moved. Without deciding to, he had leaned in across the corner of the table, and she had leaned in, too, and the space between their faces had narrowed to something less than a foot. He could smell the plum-and-iron scent of her. He could see the fine grain of her skin in the firelight, the tiny scar at the corner of her lip, the way her lashes shadowed her eyes. Her lips parted slightly, as if she were about to speak.

She reached out.

It was a small gesture. A hesitant one. Her fingertips touched the back of his hand, where it lay on the table's edge, so lightly that he might have imagined it.

It was like being struck by lightning.

Heat ran up his arm in a long bright line. His pulse stumbled and began to race. The room swam, and for an instant, a half second, no more, he saw something: a flash of green, impossibly green, a canopy of leaves in a roaring wind, and a woman standing in the middle of it with her arms spread, laughing, and her face turned up to the rain.

Her. It was her. It was her memory, or her dream, or some other thing, and it passed through him like a wave, and in its wake it left an ache so sharp and so sweet that he nearly made a sound.

He snatched back his hand.

The silence was total.

Ixara had gone very still. Her fingers hung in the air where his had been, and her eyes had gone wide and bright and wet, and a tremor ran through her. She had felt it, too. He understood that. Whatever it had been, it had gone both ways.

"I beg your pardon," said Garrick.

His voice came out cold. Like iron in winter. He heard it, with a distant kind of horror, and could not stop it.

"I should not have allowed this discussion to wander. It is late, and you have had a difficult day. Mrs. Hatch will wish to know where you are." He rose. His legs felt like someone else's. "Miss Merrow, you will oblige me by not going out again without a footman. I will have Tobias attend you. I will also be obliged if you would refrain from... from any further..."

"Touching you?"

"From any further experiments."

"That was not an experiment."

"Then it was a lapse." He picked up the lamp. Its light shook. "I trust it will not be repeated."

She looked at him. It was not an angry look, which he could have borne. It was a quiet, thoughtful, almost tender one. It was the look of a physician at a bedside, or of a woman at the bank of a river, watching someone who has not yet learned that he can swim.

"No," she said. "I do not think it will."

He went to the door. He had his hand on the latch when she spoke again. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to.

"Garrick."

He did not turn.

"You do not fear that I am a liar. You do not fear the Duke, or the Bishop, or the Consistory, or even death." The words were gentle. They went in like a blade. "You fear what you cannot measure."

The latch clicked under his hand.

He went out. He walked down the long corridor, past the portraits of seven Viscounts Wynmore, in their wigs and their velvets and their pale, haughty, certain faces, and he did not stop until he reached his own chamber, where he closed the door and stood in the dark with his back against it and his gloved hand pressed hard to the place on his wrist where, for three months, a living stone had beat against his pulse.

It was warm.

It was only a touch. It was only a moment. It meant nothing, and he would think no more about it.

He stood there a long time, listening for a heartbeat that was not his own.