"Ha!" roared Sir Roger. "Said I not I'd have you? The divil set upon me if I don't see you twain dangling from the hempseed caudle!"
"O Gemini, they mean it!" muttered William. "Get ready to vlee!"
"Drop those crossbows!" came the high voice of Charles Stanwyck.
William's bow was still cocked- and loaded. Without thinking, the young man whipped up the weapon and discharged it at Sir Roger. He missed, and the whistle of the bolt was drowned by the roar of the musket. I heard the ball strike Philip, who fell backwards with a piercing scream. William dropped his crossbow and ran for the woods.
Another flash lit up the evening landscape. The report came to William's ears just as a terrific blow struck him in the back ...
And then I was back in Madame Nosi's room, on my feet but staggering back from the wall. About the floor lay the shattered remains of Balsamo's mirror. To my left lay my friend. Madame Nosi was not to be seen, but I had a dim memory of terrible shrieks and crashes just before my "awakening."
I dashed to the head of the stair. At the foot, in an unlovely sprawl, lay Madame Nosi.
After a second's hesitation, I went back to the room. My friend was sitting up on the floor, mumbling: "Wha—what hath happened? I thought I was shot ..."
"Come, help me!" I said. We descended to Madame Nosi.
"Pull her up," said my friend. "It's not decent for her to be lying upside down like that."
"Don't touch her!" I said. "Shouldn't move an injured person until the doctor comes." I felt for her pulse but found none.
A policeman appeared, followed by a couple of neighbors. The cop asked: "What goes on? What's the screaming and crashing—oh!" He sighted Fatima Nosi.
In due course, the ambulance came and took Madame Nosi. For the next few days, my friend and I spent hours answering questions by the coroner and other officials.
As nearly as we could reconstruct the events, my friend and I had leaped out of our chairs at the moment when, in our eighteenth-century lives, we were shot by the Stanwycks. I had blundered into the wall and broken the mirror. Whether in sudden panic at the success of her spell, or for some other reason, Madame Nosi had run out of the room. She had died, not from the effects of the fall, as we at first supposed, but from heart failure before she fell. Her physician testified that she had suffered from heart disease.
The officials, although puzzled and suspicious, let us go.
They swept up the fragments of Balsamo's mirror for "evidence," but I could never find out what became of the pieces. I had some vague idea of putting them together but let it go in the rush of cramming for spring finals. I suppose the pieces were thrown out with the trash.
When it was over, my friend sighed and said: "I fear me that the eighteenth century, which I have idealized all these years, never really existed. The real one was far dirtier, more narrow-minded, brutal, orthodox, and superstitious than I could have ever conceived without seeing it. Gawd, to be cooped up in the body of a bewhiskered amateur theologian and not be able to say a word to controvert his fallacies! The eighteenth century I visualized was a mere artifact—a product of my imagination, compounded of pictures in books which I saw as a child, things I had read, and bits of Colonial architecture I've seen."
"Then," I asked, "you'll settle down and be reconciled to your own twentieth century?"
"Good heavens, no! Our experience—assuming it to be genuine and not a mere hallucination—only serves to convince me that the real world, anywhere or in any age, is no place for a gentleman of sensitivity. So I shall spend more time in the world of dreams. If you like, Willy, I shall be glad to meet you there. There's a palace of lapis lazuli I must, show you, atop a mountain of glass ..."
The Lamp
I stopped at Bill Bugby's Garage in Gahato and got young Bugby to drive me to the landing above the dam. There I found Mike Devlin waiting for me, in an aluminum row-canoe with an outboard motor. I said: "Hello, Mike! I'm Wilson Newbury. Remember me?"
I dropped my gear into the boat, lowering the suitcase carefully lest I damage the box I was carrying in it.
"Hello, Mr. Newbury!" said Mike. "To be sure, I remember you." He looked much the same as before, save that the wrinkles on his brown face were a little deeper and his curly hair a little grayer. In old-fashioned lumberjack style, he wore a heavy flannel shirt, a sweater, an old jacket, and a hat, although the day was warm. "Have you got that thing with you?"
I sent the car back to Bugby's to keep until I needed it again and got into the boat. "The thing Mr. Ten Eyck wanted me to bring?" I said.
"I do mean that, sir." Mike started the motor, so that we had to shout.
"It's in the big bag," I said, "so don't run us on a stump. After fetching that thing all the way from Europe, and having nightmares the whole time, I don't want it to end up at the bottom of Lower Lake."
"I'll be careful, Mr. Newbury," said Mike, steering the boat up the winding course of the Channel. "What is that thing, anyhow?"
"It's an antique lamp. He got me to pick it up in Paris from some character he'd been writing to."
"Ah, well, Mr. Ten Eyck is always buying funny things. After his troubles, that's about all he's interested in."
"What's this about Al's having been married?" I asked.
"Sure, and didn't you know?" Although born and reared in Canada, Mike still sounded more Irish than most native-born Irishmen. I suppose his little home town in Nova Scotia had been solidly Irish-Canadian. "He married the Camaret girl—the daughter of that big lumberjack." Mike chuckled, his faded blue eyes searching the channel ahead for snags. "You remember, when she was a little girl, and the teacher in Gahato asked all the children what they wanted to be when they grew up, she said: 'I want to be a whore!' It broke up the class for fair, it did."
"Well, what happened? Whatever possessed Al—"
"I guess he wanted a husky, hard-working cook and housekeeper, and he figured she'd be so pleased to marry a gentleman that she'd do what he wanted. Trouble was, Mélusine Camaret is a pretty hot piece—always has been. When she found Mr. Ten Eyck couldn't put it to her night and morning regular, she up and ran off with young Larochelle. You know, Pringle's foreman's son."
A big blue heron, disturbed by the racket of the outboard, flapped away up the Channel. Mike asked: "How was the Army, Mr. Newbury?"
I shrugged. "Just manning a desk. Nobody bothered to shoot at me. I sometimes feel I was lucky the war ended when it did, before they found what a nincompoop they'd put into an officer's uniform."
"Ah, sure, you was always the modest one."
The Channel opened out into Lower Lake. The lake was surrounded by the granite ridges of the Adirondacks, thickly clad in hardwoods and evergreens—mostly maple and pine. Here and there, a gray hogback or scar showed through the forest. Most of the marketable timber had been cut out early in the century and its place taken by second growth. The post-war shortages, however, had made it profitable to cut stands that theretofore had stood too far back from transportation to be profitable. While much of the land thereabouts had gone into the Adirondack State Park and so was no longer cuttable, enough remained in private hands to keep the lumber trucks rolling and the saws of Dan Pringle's mill in Gahato screaming.
We cut across Lower Lake to Ten Eyck Island, which separated Lower Lake from Upper Lake. On the map, the two lakes made an hour-glass shape, with the island partly plugging the neck between them.
Alfred Ten Eyck, in khaki shirt and pants, came to the dock with a yell of "Willy!" He had a quick, nervous handshake, with a stronger grip than I expected.