The Experiment

Garrick Wynmore had designed a great many experiments in his life, and he had never before designed one in which he was also the subject.

He began on the morning after the storm, at precisely seven o'clock, with a table, two chairs, and a stack of sealed envelopes.

The sailroom aft had been cleared and scrubbed. A bunk had been set in it, with a clean blanket from the sickbay, and a lantern in a wire cage, and a bucket, and a small round window that looked out over the stern. Pike had examined its occupant the night before. His report, delivered in a troubled undertone at two in the morning, had been brief. Malnourished, dehydrated, bruised, otherwise healthy. Pulse strong. No sign of disease or fever. Her lungs are scarred, the way you see in men who have worked in smoke. And, Garrick... He had hesitated. She is very much a woman. She is not a spirit. I thought you should know that I thought you might need to be told.

"I do not require to be told," Garrick had said coldly.

"No," Pike had agreed. "Of course not."

Now she sat across the table from him in a borrowed sailor's shirt and a pair of canvas trousers rolled at the ankle, with her hair tied back in a rough braid and a plate of oatmeal untouched at her elbow. She looked better. Her skin had begun to recover its depth, a rich, burnished brown, and her eyes, in the clear gray light of the morning, were not simply black but the color of strong tea held up to a flame. She was watching him with an expression he could not classify.

Interest, he thought. Curiosity. Not fear.

It annoyed him profoundly.

"The rules," he said, "are these."

He laid out the envelopes in a row. Ten of them, thick cream paper, each sealed with a blob of red wax and numbered on the back in his hand. Inside each was a card, and on each card, one word or number or short phrase, chosen by him the previous night from a randomized table, sealed in the dark, and set aside without being read again.

"You will not touch them. You will not smoke. You will not close your eyes for longer than a count of ten. You will tell me, in your own words, what is on the card. I will record both the prediction and the result. I will not speak to you except to indicate the number of the envelope."

"And if I am right?"

"Then I will have a data point."

"And if I am wrong?"

"Then I will have another."

Her mouth quirked. "You are very afraid of being surprised."

"I am very fond of being correct. It is not the same."

He tapped the first envelope.

She did not look at it. She looked at him. And then, in a low, even voice: "A number. It is twenty-three."

He broke the seal. The card said 23.

He made a note. He did not let his face change.

"Two," he said.

"A word. A color. Red." She tilted her head. "No. A red thing. Something you have to protect from the sea. A flag, or..." She frowned. "It is an apple."

Apple. He had written apple. He had written it at midnight, and he had thought of the one Odette had pressed into his hand on the dock at Bristol.

He wrote the result in the margin, in a very small hand.

For two hours, they went through the envelopes. He marked each one on the sheet. He interleaved them with his own questions, a deck of cards, a drawn sketch, a balance scale with a hidden weight, a sealed jar with a coin inside. He tried every device that the Royal Society had ever devised to catch a fraud, and a few that he invented on the spot. He sent Pike out to bring in the quartermaster, so she could not be accused of reading expressions alone, and he told Brandt to sit behind her, out of her sight, and think about something. Brandt thought about his dead wife. Ixara said, "She had a green shawl, and you buried her with it," and Brandt went the color of tallow and left without a word.

By noon, she had answered thirty-one questions.

She had been right twenty-nine times.

Garrick set down his pen.

He did not trust himself to look at her. He looked, instead, at the sheet: the neat columns, the tidy tally, the little check marks and crosses in his own small, careful hand, and the two crosses that were all that stood between him and an absolute, appalling certainty.

"The two you missed," he said, rather stiffly. "Fourteen and nineteen."

"Yes."

"Fourteen was a horse. You said a dog."

"I said a dog because it was the shape of a dog." She was sitting very still. "It was a horse that you drew badly. The legs were wrong."

He glanced at the card. It was true. He had always drawn horses badly.

"And nineteen was..."

"A name. I could not see it." She hesitated, and for the first time something unguarded crossed her face: reluctance, and a flash of something that might almost have been pity. "You wrote a name, Captain, and then you tried not to think of it, and when you tried not to think of it you thought of it harder. I only saw the shape. A woman. Tall. Fair hair. Many pearls."

He said nothing.

"It was not Odette."

"No."

"She is..." Ixara stopped. "I will not say. It is not mine to say."

The silence lengthened.

Garrick looked at the card, still sealed, in his hand. He did not need to open it. He knew the name written inside it. Perpetua. A woman in London with a house on Berkeley Square and a laugh like wine poured into crystal, who had once been the nearest thing he had to a confidante, and who he had written on a card at midnight, in a fit of irritated cynicism, as the least likely thing anyone could guess.

He put the card in his pocket, unopened.

Twenty-nine out of thirty-one, he thought. With two failures, both of which are more disturbing than any success.

…

"She is exactly what she claims to be," said Pike that night.

It was close to midnight. They were in the stateroom, with the lamp turned low and the door shut, and Pike was sitting on the edge of the desk with his arms folded and his brandy untouched beside him. His face was set in the grim, patient lines of a man who has made up his mind to say something unpopular.

"I have not said that."

"You have not needed to. I've known you since Oxford, Garrick. I've seen you take apart a mesmerist in front of the Royal Society for the sake of an afternoon's amusement. I watched your face when you came out of the sailroom this afternoon, and you looked like a man who has just seen a ghost take a cup of tea."

"I don't see ghosts."

"Quite." Pike's mouth twitched. "Then what do you see?"

Garrick said nothing. He was standing at the stern window with his hands behind him, looking out at the long white wake that ran from the ship into the dark. He had been standing there for some time.

"I see an unexplained phenomenon," he said at last. "A system I cannot yet characterize. I see a woman with a perceptual capacity that exceeds normal human bounds, operating through an unknown mechanism. I see a possible discovery."

"You see a woman who knows your sister's name."

His hand flexed against his back.

"I propose," said Pike, "that we put in at Bristol, as planned, and hand her over to the Bishop's people. They'll treat her kindly. They'll treat her as a curiosity, and she'll be fed, and she'll be somebody else's problem."

"No."

"Garrick."

"No." He turned. "No, Hollis. I will not give her to the Bishop."

"Why?"

Because she would burn.

The thought came unbidden, whole, and cold as a knife. He saw it as clearly as he had ever seen a chart: the white-robed men with their lanterns, the rope, the stake, the dry-eyed crowd. He saw it, and something in the center of his body clenched like a fist.

"Because," he said evenly, "she is the only lead I have. If there is a mechanism, I intend to find it. I intend to bring it before the Society in London and have it examined by competent men, not by clerics. And if she has any capacity to see the future, then she might also..."

He stopped.

Pike's eyes sharpened. "Might what?"

"Nothing." He turned back to the window. "Go to bed, Hollis."

For a long moment, he felt his friend's gaze on his back.

"Very well," said Pike, quietly. He picked up his brandy, finished it, and set the glass down. "But I would remind you of one thing. A woman who can see the inside of your head does not need a lock on her door."

The door closed.

Might also what, thought Garrick.

He knew what. He had known since the moment she'd said Odette. It had risen in his mind and sat there, small and ferocious and shameful: if she could see the future, then perhaps she could see whether his sister would live. If she could see through lead, then perhaps she could see what the Duke's men had not told him. If she could read the Aurelith as she had read his sister's letter...

A hope. Rational men did not allow themselves hope. Hope was an unfalsifiable hypothesis.

He stood at the window until the lamp burned low.

…

It was past two when he found himself in the corridor.

He did not remember deciding to leave the stateroom. He had been at his desk, with the sheets laid out in front of him, trying to compute the probability of twenty-nine successes out of thirty-one by random guess, and arriving at a figure so small that it seemed to belong to another branch of mathematics. Then he had been standing, and then he had been in the passage, in his shirtsleeves, with the lantern swinging, and the whole ship asleep around him.

The sailroom door was at the end.

He stopped a few feet from it.

There is no reason to be here. He was perfectly aware of that. The prisoner is secure. The lock is sound. A guard is posted at the head of the companionway. He could hear, through the thick oak, nothing at all: no movement, no breath. Only the long, slow creak of the timbers, and the faint tick of water against the stern.

He raised his hand to the door.

He didn't knock. He just put his palm flat against the wood, as she had put hers against the rice sack, and stood there with his head bowed.

It was ridiculous.

He knew it was ridiculous. He, who had measured the speed of falling bodies and the density of seawater, who had read Newton before he could ride a horse, was standing in a dark passage at two o'clock in the morning with his hand on a door like a boy outside a girl's window. He was thirty-three years old. He was a peer of the realm. He had a sister who was dying and a debt that could end a dynasty.

And he could not make himself walk away.

What is it? he thought. What is it about her?

It wasn't her beauty, though she was beautiful, in a way that his London had no words for, a severe, shadowed, unadorned way, like a carving in dark wood. It wasn't the cheap trick of her gift. It wasn't even the extraordinary fact that she had named his sister.

It was the way she had looked at him in the hold.

Not with fear. Not with hatred, though he knew perfectly well that she hated him. She had looked at him as though she knew him. As though, in some other place, some other time, they had already had a long conversation and she had come to the end of it and said: Ah. There you are.

He had never been looked at like that in his life.

He heard a movement on the other side of the door.

A soft sound. Bare feet on boards. A pause, and then, so close that it might have been breathed into the keyhole:

"You are standing very still, Captain."

He nearly dropped the lantern.

"You can't possibly—" He stopped. His own voice was a stranger's, hoarse, low. "You cannot know that."

"I can hear the lamp swing." A small sound that might have been a laugh. "It is a different rhythm when a man is holding it very carefully. As though it were a bird."

Silence.

"I thought you might come," said Ixara, through the door. "I did not know if it would be tonight."

"I came to check the lock."

"Of course."

"I'm going to go now."

"Of course."

He did not move.

He leaned his forehead against the oak, closed his eyes, and listened to the dark. He could hear her breath, light and quick and quite close to his own, a pane of wood between them. He could smell it, even now: burned plum, and iron, and something warmer beneath, like sun on stone. He thought of the lead box, and the pulse that had run up his wrist like a living thing. He thought of Odette's hand on the sheet, tapping one-two-three, one-two-three.

Then, without having meant to, he asked the thing he should never have asked.

"What do you want from me?"

The silence on the other side was so deep that he thought she had gone.

When she spoke, her voice was very low, very clear, and utterly without guile. That was the worst of it. It wasn't a trap. It was only the truth.

"Everything," said Ixara.

He stood there a long moment, with the lamp in his hand and the door cold under his forehead, and understood that she was not mocking him.

Then he turned, and went down the passage, and did not look back.