Mrs. Quince walked about the room, adjusting a painting and removing a line of dust from atop a sconce. “I shall indeed, for if that man dies, he cannot tell us what you have been about. What is he, Lucy? A merchant’s son? An innkeeper? A dissolute gentleman? I know you have a fondness for those. And what shall happen now? Mr. Olson will never marry a girl so scandalized as you, and your uncle will expel you for your crimes.” She nodded at her own wisdom and strode from the room with her chin up, like an actress upon the boards.
Lucy remained in the parlor, close to the fire, though she could not banish the chill that left her teeth chattering. She hated life in her uncle’s house, hated it beyond anything she had ever known, but to be cast out with no prospects was unthinkable. She was twenty years old, and Uncle Lowell had no legal obligation to care for her. He was also a man singularly immune to reflection and therefore capable of sending Lucy away and giving no thought to what suffering and horrors would become her fate. When Lucy, newly orphaned, had first come to live with her uncle, she would sit for hours dwelling upon the staggering injustice of her life. In those first few months, Mrs. Quince had been her friend and had comforted her and confided in her. Then everything changed, and Mrs. Quince became cold and cruel and hateful, and Lucy imagined herself the most put-upon young lady in the world. Her miseries had been real enough, but she had known them to have finite boundaries. Now she faced a bottomless abyss of suffering, a life in which there truly were no limits to the pain, humiliation, and want she might know. The threat of ruin was real, and it was true, and it could be upon her as soon as tomorrow.
When Mr. Snyder arrived, he went upstairs at once, and Uncle Lowell and Mrs. Quince joined Lucy in the parlor. Uncle Lowell demanded that Lucy vacate the seat nearest the fire so he might be warm while he brooded in reptilian silence. Mrs. Quince sat near him with her needlework, her fingers quick and dexterous. Now and then she would let out a breathy laugh at some unspoken thought. The tall case clock, off in its timekeeping by at least fifteen minutes, ticked as erratically as a dying man’s heart.
After no more than half an hour, the medical man entered the room, bowed, and stood with his hands behind his back, like an officer awaiting orders. Snyder was a serious sort of man, the type many would choose for their physician. He was of about Uncle Lowell’s age, though he wore his years with more dignity, and dressed in black so that he was often mistaken for a man of the church. Not tall, he possessed a thin frame and narrow, humorless eyes the color of mud. Lucy had seen him often in the years she’d lived in her uncle’s house, and had never observed him to smile. He made a habit of presenting his findings with absolute confidence, but today he looked about the room with a great deal of uncertainty. He began speaking three or four times before he could find his words.
“I am afraid, sir, that I can do nothing for your guest,” he said at last.
Lucy heard herself gasp, and though she put a regretful hand to her lips, the damage was done. Mrs. Quince turned to sneer at her.
Uncle Lowell leapt from his chair with the vigor of the genuinely wronged. “You mean he is to die here? I’ll not pay for his burial, I can assure you.”
Mr. Snyder prodded the fraying fringe of the rug with the toe of his shoe. “What I mean, sir, is that if there is anything to be done, I cannot do it. His suffering is not of a medical nature.” He placed his hands behind his back and stood erect, as though preparing to say something momentous. “I believe the man suffers from what is… is commonly called a curse.”
A silence, heavy and vibrating, filled the room. Lucy had seen the man vomit pins, but even so, she could not have been more astonished if the doctor had said he suffered from the ill effects of a voyage to the moon.
Uncle Lowell stomped his foot like an angry child. A cloud of dust rose up in reply. “A curse, Snyder? Are you an old woman to say so? My opinion of you is no longer what it was.”
Mr. Snyder bowed. “You have in the past done me the honor of heeding my advice, and I urge you to do so in this case.”
“I thought you a natural philosopher, not a superstitious fool,” Uncle Lowell barked.
“Natural philosophy, above all things, concerns itself with what can be observed,” said the doctor in the sort of calming voice medical men use to convince others that they know of what they speak. “If I were to presume I possessed the skill to cure that man simply because I have trained as a physician, then I would be guilty of irrational belief in what no evidence has demonstrated. I would, in point of fact, be guilty of clinging to superstition.”
During this exchange, Lucy sat pressing her hands together hard enough to make her knuckles ache. It all seemed so unreal, and yet it concerned her as nearly as anything ever had. She looked over to Mrs. Quince, who was now turned away from Snyder. She might know something of curses if anyone did, but she volunteered nothing.
Lucy ventured to speak her mind. “Sir, we have all heard tales in which the vomiting of pins signifies bewitchment, but perhaps he simply swallowed them?”
“No,” said Snyder. “I—I saw things during my examination. I will not discuss the particulars—I will never speak of what I saw to anyone. Suffice to say I have no doubt in my mind that this gentleman suffers from an affliction medicine cannot remedy.”
“And so you plan to desert me?” asked Uncle Lowell. “You cannot cure him, so you walk away and leave this man in my care?”
“Not quite,” Mr. Snyder said. “In my youth there were several cunning women with excellent reputations in the county, but they have since died. However, I know of a lady recently come to town—not a cunning woman, but a respectable gentlewoman learned in such matters.”
“You tell me to invite a witch into my home?” Uncle Lowell cried incredulously.
“She is no witch, but a lady of means.”
With great reluctance, Uncle Lowell listened to the information about the woman and suffered Mr. Snyder to depart. He then turned to Mrs. Quince and commanded her to go fetch this woman at once. “Tell her I will brook no delay,” he said, apparently forgetting or disregarding Mr. Snyder’s comments about the lady’s status.
“It is dark, and I am quite disordered by these events,” Mrs. Quince said. “I should like to take Miss Derrick with me.”
Lucy never wished to go anywhere with Mrs. Quince, but under these circumstances, she wished it less than any time she could recall. It was extremely uncharacteristic for Mrs. Quince to request Lucy’s presence unless there was some difficult or unpleasant work to be done, but Lucy was not now surprised to be summoned. Given the unusual circumstances, they would now have to speak of private things, of the one secret they shared. There was no helping it. Best to get it out of the way, for though there was nothing but bitterness between them, fate had conspired to place them in a position in which they must protect each other.
3
WITH THE DULL MOTIONS OF A SOMNAMBULIST, LUCY PUT ON HER gloves, a warm bonnet, and a plain muslin pelisse. She stepped out of the house with Mrs. Quince, and they both walked in silence for a brief while. It was cool and crisp, and the Nottingham streets were lightly trafficked. Lucy believed it unlikely the rough men who caused so much trouble in the country would dare molest two such as they, walking upon the fashionable lanes in the shadow of the castle, but in the spring of the year 1812, it was difficult not to be frightened. These once-placid streets were now haunted by luckless men, hulking and impoverished and starving, skulking about with their shovels and hammers and spades. They sought to destroy, to beat back into its proper shape a world that had betrayed them with war and famine and rising prices. Twice before Lucy had seen bands of these Luddites, though only at a distance, and they had shocked her with their sunken eyes and animal desperation.