The Order of the Lantern

The Order of the Lantern kept its London house in the ruins of an old Carmelite priory behind Blackfriars, and the people of the parish, who did not like to name it, called it Lanternhold.

Garrick reached it at nine that night on foot, without a hat, with his coat buttoned wrong and his sword still in his hand.

He did not remember the walk. He remembered only the fog, which had thickened to a wet gray wall, and the cold, which had got into his bones, and the sound of his own shoes on the cobbles. Somewhere on Ludgate Hill a clock had struck eight. Somewhere on Fleet Street a woman had screamed with laughter. He had passed through all of it like a man walking under water, and had come at last to a high black wall with a door of iron-bound oak, and had struck on it with the pommel until a slit opened.

"State your business."

"I am Garrick Wynmore, Viscount Wynmore. I wish to speak with Magister Crale."

The slit closed. A bolt shot. And for the space of a quarter of an hour he stood on the step in the drizzle, shaking, while the iron lantern above the door hissed and sputtered in the wet.

…

He was not taken to a cell.

That was the first surprise. He had expected one. He had pictured, in the half-mad lucidity of the walk, a vault with a rack and a brazier, all the paraphernalia of the old terror. Instead a young priest with a soft pale face led him through a cloister garden, bare and clipped and damp, and up a flight of stone steps to a room that might have been a don's study at Oxford.

It was small and warm. A fire burned in the grate. The walls were lined with books in calf bindings, and there was a table with a green cloth, and two chairs, and a lamp. On the table stood a decanter of sherry and a plate of plain biscuits. On the wall hung a single crucifix of black wood, and beneath it, quite alone, a small framed engraving of a woman in a veil.

Magister Crale rose from behind the table.

"Lord Wynmore. You are wet. Sit by the fire. Brother Anselm, take his lordship's coat." The voice was mild and courteous and a little weary. "And his sword, if he will permit. We do not allow weapons in the library. A foolish rule, but old."

"I will keep the sword."

"As you please." Crale lowered himself into his chair. "You have come about the lady."

"I have come to demand her release."

"Yes. I thought you might." The deep-set eyes studied him with an expression of what seemed to be sincere regret. "Will you not sit? I would rather not say what I must say to a man who is standing in my doorway dripping on the carpet."

Garrick sat. He laid the sword across his knees.

"Your writ is irregular," he said. "Your arrest was made without a constable. The Justice who countersigned it is a creature of the Society, and the Society has an interest in the matter. I shall petition the Lord Chancellor in the morning. I shall have the Attorney General's opinion by Friday. I have friends in the House of Lords, Magister, and I assure you I know how to use them."

"I do not doubt it."

"Then you know this is folly."

"I know that you are a man of great intelligence and no experience of the Church," said Crale. "You think we are a department of the state. A thing to be sued, or petitioned, or outwitted with a precedent. It is a natural error." He poured two glasses of sherry and pushed one across. "We are older than the Lord Chancellor. We are older than the Parliament. We were old when the Plantagenets were young, and we have survived because we do one thing, very well: we wait. We do not hurry. We do not shout. We collect, as a sea collects, one grain at a time, until the beach is ours."

"You have forty-seven witnesses to a trick of light."

"I have forty-seven witnesses to a miracle." The mild face did not change. "That is the difficulty, you see. I should be glad of a trick. A trick can be exposed. A trick, Lord Wynmore, would be a mercy. But I was in that hall. I saw the glass break. I saw the stone light, and I saw her. I have been seven-and-thirty years in the service of the Lantern and I have examined, I should say, two hundred and eleven persons accused of the unlawful arts. Of those, perhaps nine were what they claimed to be. And not one of the nine had ever glowed."

Garrick's hand tightened on the hilt.

"It was an electrical effect," he said. "I will demonstrate it. The Society's own instruments—"

"Were destroyed. I know. And you will demonstrate nothing, because you do not believe it yourself."

There was a silence. The fire cracked.

"You have been in her bed since July," said Crale quietly.

Garrick felt the blood leave his face.

"Do not look so startled. It is the second thing that every servant in your household knew, and the first thing that every servant in the Duke's household told me. You are a man of thirty-three. She is a young woman of striking appearance. It would be remarkable if you had not. I mention it only because it bears on a question of mercy." He sipped his sherry. "I find it very hard to blame a man for being seduced. Even by the Devil."

"She is not the Devil."

"No. I rather think she is not." The Magister set down his glass. "I think she is a good deal more dangerous. A witch who works for the Devil can be reasoned with. She wants something. She can be bought, or frightened, or tricked. But a woman who works for no one — who is touched, as we say, by something that has no name and no master — that is a rarer creature. Such a woman believes she is doing right."

"Then how can she be a heretic?"

"By being right in the wrong way." A thin smile. "That is the oldest heresy there is."

…

They argued for an hour.

It was the most terrible hour of Garrick's life. He argued from precedent and from statute. He argued from the Act of Toleration, and from Habeas Corpus, and from the Royal Society's charter. He argued from natural philosophy; he argued from mercy; at the last, hearing his own voice crack, he argued from the plain, stupid, savage necessity of a man who sees the thing he loves most in the world dragged out of reach. And Crale heard him with perfect courtesy, nodding now and then, offering biscuits, answering every point in a low voice with a quiet and horrible reasonableness, until Garrick understood with sick clarity that he was not a litigant but an exhibit. The Magister was not listening to the argument. He was listening to him. He was taking the measure of the man, the way a farrier takes the measure of a hoof.

"You must understand," said Crale at last. "I do not wish to hurt her."

"You wish to burn her."

"I wish to save her." The deep-set eyes were quite steady. "It is the same thing, in the end. There is a fire in her. It will consume her one way or another. The Church's fire is only the cleaner."

Garrick stood up. The sword fell with a clatter. He did not pick it up.

"I will pay," he said. "Whatever you ask. The Wynmore estates, my ships, the whole of my fortune. I'll sign it over tonight."

"I have no use for your fortune."

"Then name your price!"

"I have named it." Crale folded his hands. "A deposition. A frank statement that you were deceived. You will name the woman, describe her arts, and testify to the Tribunal that you were led by sorcery into a course of error. You will be received back into the Church's mercy. The matter will be closed." A pause. "And you will have, as I say, a very great deal of time for your sister."

"You are asking me to condemn her."

"I am asking you to say what is, in some degree, true."

"I will not."

"Then I am afraid that I have nothing further to offer."

The fire popped. A coal fell into the ash. Somewhere in the priory, very faintly, a bell began to toll.

Garrick turned to go.

"One thing more," said Crale, behind him.

It was said so softly that it might have been an afterthought. Garrick stopped, with his hand on the latch.

"The midwife who examined her this evening has made her report. The Order requires it as a matter of form." There was a small dry rustle of paper. "I thought you would wish to know. In a spirit of candor."

He did not turn his head.

"She is with child," said the Magister. "Three months, or a little more. A boy, the woman thinks, though she would not swear to it."

The world stopped.

It did not go dark, or spin, or roar. It simply stopped, as a clock stops, with a faint click at the end of a swing. Garrick stood quite motionless in the lamplit doorway with his hand on the cold iron latch and the sound of the bell going on and on, and the arithmetic arranged itself in his head.

July.

October.

Three months.

The night of the masquerade. The thin moon in the window.

"I see you did not know," said Crale. His voice held, for the first time, something that might have been pity. "I am sorry. I had thought, perhaps — well. One cannot be certain of anything with a woman of that sort."

Garrick opened the door.

He went out into the cloister. The rain was coming down. He crossed the wet garden and the black gate and stood in the street with his face lifted, letting it fall on his eyes, and discovered that the sound he was hearing, over the hiss of the fog and the tolling of the bell and the roar in his ears, was himself, laughing, or sobbing, or both.

A child.

Hers. Mine.

And she did not tell me.

…

He did not go home that night.

He walked. He walked the length of the Embankment and back, three times, and sat on the steps of Blackfriars Stairs for an hour with his head in his hands. He tried to think. He had no thoughts. He had only images: her face in the porter's room, wet with tears, whispering in a language he did not know. Her hand on his chest, on the steps. That is why I love you. Her eyes in the fog. Do not save me.

She knew.

She knew it all, and she kissed me anyway.

By the time he reached Hartwell Square, the sky had begun to pale. The lamps were burning low. And on the steps, before the green door, stood two men in gray cassocks with silver pins.

They did not stop him. They stood aside, bowing their heads, as he mounted the stairs. He understood, with a dull lack of surprise, that he was not a guest in his own house any longer.

…

Crale called at nine.

He came in a plain black coach with a physician, a small bright-eyed Scotsman named Dr. Mackintosh, whom he introduced with the air of one presenting a particularly useful clock. He bowed to Garrick in the hall. He bowed to Mrs. Hatch. He inquired with grave concern after Miss Wynmore's health.

"My sister is resting."

"I should be sorry to disturb her. But Dr. Mackintosh has a great reputation for the lungs, and I thought, in a spirit of friendship—"

"She is resting."

"Garrick?"

The voice came from the top of the stairs. It was very small. He turned, and his heart dropped through the floor.

She stood on the landing in a white wrapper, one hand on the banister, the other pressed to her chest. Her hair hung in a thin plait over her shoulder. She was paler than he had ever seen her, her skin like paper held against a lamp, and there were shadows under her eyes like thumbprints. She was swaying slightly.

"Odette, go back to bed."

"Who is it?"

"Nobody. A caller."

"It's the man," she said. "The man who took Calla. I saw him from the window." She came down a step. Her chin was up. "I want to know where she is."

"Odette—"

"I want to know, Garrick, I'm not a child, I'm—"

The cough took her.

It began as a tickle and became a wrench, and then a deep, tearing, dreadful spasm that bent her double on the stair. She clung to the banister. Her whole thin body convulsed with it. He was across the hall in two bounds, and had her in his arms, and Mrs. Hatch was there, and Tobias, and he was saying her name again and again in a voice he didn't recognize, and when at last it passed, and she lay limp against his chest with a spot of crimson on her lips, there was perfect silence in the hall.

Over her head, he met Crale's eyes.

The Magister was looking at his sister.

It was not a cruel look. It was far worse. It was a look of tender, grave, attentive sorrow, the look of a doctor at a bedside, and under it, so faint that Garrick might have imagined it, there was something else. Something calm. Something that had found the lock and understood the key.

"How very sad," said Crale gently. "How very brief."

Garrick felt his arm tighten.

"You will leave my house."

"In a moment." The Magister turned to the Scotsman. "Doctor. Your opinion."

Mackintosh had set down his bag. He knelt, not asking, and put his ear to Odette's back, and his fingers to her wrist, and listened for a long minute with his eyes closed. When he looked up, his face was grave.

"A cavity in the left lobe," he said quietly. "Possibly two. I would not give her the winter."

Mrs. Hatch made a sound like a hurt animal.

"Thank you, Doctor." Crale inclined his head. "Lord Wynmore, I will say this plainly, because I think you are a man who prefers it. The Order maintains an infirmary at the priory. It is quiet, it is dry, and it has attached to it a body of brothers who have studied such cases for three hundred years. If you will accept my hospitality for Miss Wynmore, I will see that she is cared for. I will see that she wants for nothing."

"You would take her as a hostage."

"I would take her as a patient. The distinction depends entirely upon yourself." A pause. "I leave two brothers on the door. They will see that nobody is troubled. Your household may come and go. But I should counsel you not to leave the house yourself, and not to send letters, until the question of the deposition is settled. It is a matter of the Order's peace of mind."

He bowed.

"I shall call again on Monday. I hope to find you in a more reflective frame."

…

The door closed. The carriage rolled away. In the silence of the hall, Odette lay in her brother's arms and wept without a sound, and Mrs. Hatch, shaking, knelt and wiped the blood from her mouth with a corner of her apron, and Tobias stood with his face turned to the wall.

Garrick carried her upstairs.

He put her to bed and drew the covers over her. He stayed until she slept. Then he went to the library, shut the door, and sat on the floor with his back against the shelves and the child, his child, a boy, a girl, he did not know, pressing in his mind like a burning coal.

He did not hear Pike come in.

"Hatch told me," said Hollis, quietly.

Garrick did not look up.

"She told me last night. She'd been carrying it for a month. I think it was killing her." Pike lowered himself to the floor beside him, stiffly, with a grunt, and sat with his knees drawn up like a schoolboy. For a long time he said nothing. The fog pressed at the windows. In the grate, the fire was dead.

"I have been a fool," said Garrick.

"Yes."

"You told me. You said she was hiding something. I said I'd be content to be defrauded."

"You did."

"And I am." His voice cracked. "God help me, Hollis, I am. I am sitting on a floor, with every door in the house watched, my sister dying upstairs, the woman I love in a cell with my child in her, and the only thing I can think is that I would do it all again."

Pike turned his head. He looked at his friend's face for a long moment. Then he took a flask from his pocket, uncorked it, and set it on the carpet between them.

"I'll tell you what I see," he said. "I see two roads."

"Go on."

"The first is the one that the Magister has laid out. You sign the paper. You go to the Tribunal, and you say you were bewitched, and the Lantern takes the lady, and your sister goes to the priory, and you are forgiven. You have a house. You have a name. You have the rest of your life to live with it." He took a pull from the flask. "It is the sensible road. Most men would take it. I would not blame you."

"And the second?"

Pike looked at the dead hearth. His mouth twisted, a crooked, rueful, un-physician-like smile.

"There's an old saying among sailors," he said. "When you can't win the game and you won't lose it, and the man across the board has got you by the throat. You have only two moves. Obey, or overturn the table."