He looked back at Gabriel, and his eyes were bright. “A demon, you say?” And he actually laughed. “An archaic goddess, perhaps!”
Gabriel shook his head unhappily. “You don’t know anything about it, Algy.”
“Good God!” came a voice from the hallway door, sounding flat with no resonance from the missing window. Gabriel looked up to see his young assistant, Henry Dunn, gaping at the wide new gap in the windowpanes. “What happened?”
“I leaned on the glass,” said Swinburne.
Dunn stared expressionlessly at Swinburne for a moment, his mouth open, then said to Gabriel, “Your sister is here. Christina.”
And in fact Christina now hurried into the room right behind Dunn. She glanced from Gabriel to Swinburne through narrowed eyes, not even looking at the window.
“Algy,” she said, breathing hard as if she had run up the stairs, if not all the way from Euston Square, “I need to talk to my brother privately, if you would excuse us.”
Swinburne nodded and bobbed to the door. “It was a goddess!” he called before disappearing down the hall.
Dunn crossed to the remains of the window and pulled the curtains closed; they rippled, but they were heavy enough to keep out the river-scented breeze and the indistinct roar of the city. Then he nodded too and stepped back out of the room and closed the door.
“I saw two clouds of smoke,” Christina said, “—distinct, not dissipating in the air, like — splashes of ink in oil! — they burst out through your window and churned away over the river! Darker than the night! Our uncle John—”
“Is awake again; I know,” said Gabriel, pulling two chairs out from the table and slumping into one of them. “My visitors told me. My inky visitors. God.”
“It wasn’t him, himself, then,” said Christina. “Thank God for that.” She sat down in the other chair and took his hand. “Who were they?”
“One was a boy, like a starved corpse galvanized. The other—” He had run out of air, and had to take a deep breath to go on. “The other was — Lizzie. Or your Celtic queen, the one who died in A.D. 60, animating my Lizzie.”
“Lizzie? But she was blocked with mirrors too! Did they all dissolve?”
Gabriel rocked his head back and stared at the rings of gaslight on the high ceiling. “Corrode, tarnish, I don’t know.” He put a hand over his eyes, but his voice was still steady when he said, “My poor Lizzie! This thing said that what’s left of my wife has two true parents, meaning our uncle and this Boadicea creature.”
“And … the other one, the boy?”
“God knows who the boy is, or was. They said I need to renew my lapsed vows.” He gave his sister a bleak smile. “They said Uncle John is wounded — by your mirrors apparently, while they still worked.” He leaned forward to see the clock over the mantel, then glanced moodily at the waving curtains. “William is due soon for dinner. I suppose we’ll eat in the breakfast room, rather than in here.”
“That room has several mirrors,” Christina agreed. “And I left a note for Maria, saying to join me here.”
“All four suits together, Diamonds, to play this hand.”
Christina shook her head and pursed her lips. “I can’t imagine what William will think of all this. But we’ve got to try to warn him.”
“He’s big on science. We’ll tell him that it’s all to do with magnetism.”
WILLIAM STOPPED AT THE Euston Street house to refill his tobacco pouch — Gabriel’s guests always smoked up the tobacco he left in a box on the mantelpiece at Tudor House — and so he and Maria arrived there together in the cab William had hired.
William only spent a night or two a week in his room at Tudor House, because, unlike Gabriel, he generally had to arise at eight in the morning to be at his office at the Board of Inland Revenue in Somerset House by ten. He was forty years old and had worked there since the age of fifteen, and he was now the assistant secretary in the Excise Section.
His real allegiance was to art and poetry, but he had no particular skills in them himself — he had written a translation of Dante’s Inferno, but Macmillan had rejected it twelve years ago and reconsidered eight years later only because William’s mother contributed fifty pounds toward the expense of its publication — and he tried to be content with being a financial and emotional support to his sister and brother as they pursued their areas of genius. He was currently devoting a lot of his free time to editing a collection of Shelley’s poetry, a project that had brought him into contact with Shelley’s oldest-surviving and most controversial friend, an old pirate named Trelawny.
Neither he nor Maria noticed the broken first-floor window as they stepped from the cab through the streetlamp radiance to Gabriel’s iron gate, but Christina met them on the walkway and hurried them inside, glancing nervously at the dark sky.
She led them upstairs to the studio, where they found Gabriel staring at his painting Beata Beatrix, a portrait of his dead wife, Lizzie, as Dante’s Beatrice. The painting, still unfinished seven years after it was begun, portrayed Lizzie in three-quarter profile with her eyes shut, as a dove dropped a poppy into her limp hands; behind her stood the indistinct figures of a man in black and a woman in red, who Gabriel said were intended to represent Dante and Love.
William had always thought it was a morbid picture — the Dante and Love figures looked sinister in their shadowy blurriness, and he thought it was in doubtful taste to show a poppy being given to a woman who had died of an overdose of laudanum, which was a potent mix of opium and grain alcohol.
William stepped carefully around the many half-finished paintings that lay on the floor to the fireplace, but the tobacco box was once again empty. Grumbling, he fished his old briar pipe and tobacco pouch from his coat pocket.
Christina had pulled Maria down beside her onto the sofa. Behind them was a small window blocked with the dead leaves of one of the trees in the back garden.
Gabriel was tugging at his goatee and scowling as he paced the floor between the pictures, and when William had finally drawn up one of the easy chairs, and raised his eyebrows quizzically as he struck a match to his pipe, Gabriel said, “Lizzie was just here. Lizzie. Christina saw … saw her exit, right through one of the drawing room windows. She then apparently flew away.”
“Oh no,” moaned Maria, clasping Christina’s hand. “The mirrors…?”
“Mirrors?” asked William, keeping his voice merely level.
“It’s magnetism!” blurted Christina, and then blushed.
Gabriel curtly explained to William that the three of them had surreptitiously lined the bottom of Lizzie’s coffin with downward-facing mirrors stained with Christina’s blood; the ghost of their suicide uncle was apparently in the coffin directly below Lizzie’s, in their father’s coffin — and Gabriel claimed that the “corporeal kernel” of their uncle’s ghost, or possibly vampiric devil, was a tiny statue lodged in their father’s throat.
William cleared his own throat and shifted in his chair. “Did — did you say,” he asked, “in Papa’s throat?”
“Yes,” said Gabriel levelly.
“I see.”
For a moment no one spoke, and William just puffed on his pipe, and the tarry smell of latakia tobacco drove away the big room’s usual scent of linseed oil. He considered asking how they believed they knew this, but the thought of the occult explanation that would surely follow wearied him in advance.