By flickering torchlight, Sir Henry journeyed deeper into the catacombs’ twisting intestines. Veins of sea-green malachite and foam-colored quartz caught the light like phosphorescent algae. Long ago, before Christianity had been dreamed of, these tunnels were hollowed out by Stone Age miners who used the crystals in the strange rites they performed in honor of their sea gods, and later by men hungry for copper ore. Sir Henry paused near an ancient stone altar scattered with votive offerings of bone. Not even those Bronze Age innovators—mining for copper and trading for tin—could forget about the Old Ones of the sea. Clutching the skull more tightly, Sir Henry hurried on, suddenly eager for company.
Compared to the narrow, twisting tunnels used to reach it, the abbot’s cell was palatial. A natural cavern, it had been painstakingly carved into fan arches, though instead of columns, the walls were adorned with glistening stalagmites and stalactites that made Sir Henry think of cascades of glittering seafoam.
After lighting the cell’s seven torches, Sir Henry set his own torch in an eighth ornate sconce. The light flickered eerily across wall frescoes depicting the abbot’s martyrdom. Images of the man being hanged, drawn, quartered, and burned shimmered in the torchlight. His scorched bones now lay in an oak chest bound with gold, which rested in a niche cut into the granite wall.
Sir Henry placed the skull on the stone slab that served as a table and then sat on a nearby boulder. “I’ve brought company,” he said as he poured cognac into three waiting glasses.
A shadow unfolded itself from the oaken box and drifted toward the table. It had the rough dimensions of a man. Sir Henry knew from experience that the longer he stayed and the more he drank, the more manlike the shadow would become. Whether that was due to the abbot’s memory returning or merely to the effect of the alcohol, he had no idea. But he supposed that, either way, the abbot’s lack of distinct form was hardly surprising. He doubted he’d remember his own face after five hundred years of dust.
“To Beauty,” Sir Henry cried as he stood and raised his glass to Lady Godiva’s pale, bony visage. The Shadow raised the shadow of its glass in an equally enthusiastic toast, and the two—man and shadow—drank. Sir Henry swished the cognac around his mouth and felt the dull heat course through his body. It helped to disperse the chill of these ancient sea caves. He took a deep breath, since he wasn’t certain how to phrase his next question. In the end, he decided that bluntness was best.
“My dear Abbot,” he said finally, “may I borrow your treatise on the transmutation of base clay into flesh?” He could feel his companion’s surprise. After all, that treatise had sealed the abbot’s unhappy fate. “You see,” Sir Henry continued, “it’s my forty-ninth birthday soon. Seven times seven, on Midsummer Night.”
Sir Henry thought he saw the shadow give a quick nod of understanding, and perhaps of sympathy. Slowly, it rose and drifted to a far corner of the room, directly below the section of the fresco that depicted his hanged body being pulled in four directions by galloping horses. Only in this image, the horses were sea horses, like mad kelpies charging through seafoam.
The abbot pointed to a foundation stone which, at some point in the past, had been loosened. Sir Henry’s knees cracked as he knelt down and dragged the heavy stone out of the wall. Just as he’d thought: a hiding place. Slowly and carefully, he inserted his hand and then his forearm. Sifting through dirt and dust, he combed his fingers through every inch of the enclosed space. He soon realized that the hole was much deeper than he’d expected and had to thrust the rest of his upper arm into the hollow before his fingers brushed against what felt like a roll of parchment. Grunting, he pressed his shoulder against the wall and reached in as deep as he could. With a husky cry of triumph, he grasped the manuscript and withdrew it from its centuries-old hiding place.
Knees complaining, Sir Henry stood up with another grunt. Ignoring the dirt on his clothes, he broke the seal and unrolled the furled vellum. Just as he’d hoped: the last surviving copy of the abbot’s blasphemous treatise. Brushing dust from his jacket-sleeve, Sir Henry decided to leave Lady Godiva for the night, despite the fact that she was one of his favorites. He only hoped that one day, when he was no more than a shadow, someone would be as kind to him.
The next morning dawned gray and stormy. Sea rain clattered against the windowpane as the wind swirled and howled. Sir Henry awoke with an aching head. His only solace was that the abbot probably didn’t feel any better despite—or perhaps because of—a night spent discussing the miracle of transmutation.
At breakfast, his housekeeper informed him that DeMains had sent a message boy. The project was ready to view. Swallowing some peppermint water, Sir Henry wiped his lips and set out for the west wing, his heart beating in his chest.
At the doorway to DeMains’s inner sanctum, Sir Henry paused. In an unusual moment of self-reflection, he wondered about the wisdom of the path he was about to tread. Why go through the trouble of winning a girl back from the dead only to then sacrifice her to the demons of the sea?
DeMains was right, times had changed, and sacrificing a living girl would be too dangerous. Yet the thought of abandoning such beauty to the demons of this place troubled and angered him. When it came to magic, he was competent enough, but he knew he could never best that vast power that crashed against stone and beach and cliff face, eating away at the land with its omnivorous hunger. Had it not consumed his father when he’d defied it? It was like time itself—eternal, intractable, beyond the power of any mortal to control.
“But occasionally it can be shaped to one’s will,” Sir Henry whispered to himself. “That, a mere mortal can do.” He opened the door.
The first thing Henry saw when he entered was a sculptor’s stand and on top of it, his newest darling veiled in sea-green velvet. DeMains came out of the back room, assiduously wiping his hands on a towel. He was smiling.
“I worked all night,” he said. “She’s far from finished, but I think you’ll like what you see.”
Sir Henry unveiled his prize. The pins were still visible and DeMains had only roughed in the fundamental musculature, but her eyes were in place, green as malachite.
“She has a soul, now,” Sir Henry said.
“Or will soon,” DeMains replied. “Have you thought of a name for her yet?”
“Lady Galatea,” Sir Henry replied.
DeMains nodded his approval. “After Pygmalion’s ivory lady?”
“In part,” Sir Henry said. “But also after the pale nereid. She who is milk-white, the name means in Greek. The most beautiful of all.”
In his mind’s eye, Sir Henry saw the tenuous, invisible thread that still connected this skull to the spirit of a beautiful murderess, sent to the underworld well before her time. Closing his lids, he imagined that thread thickening, and then visualized himself—like the fishermen on that vast stretch of coastline over which he had dominion—hauling her back to the world of the living. It would not be easy. But then again, nothing worth doing ever was.
For three weeks, Sir Henry pored over the abbot’s manuscript, puzzling out arcane symbols, referencing and re-referencing dusty books in his vast library. Sometimes he went out and stared at the sea, cursing it. The sea laughed at him. And then DeMains called him. She was ready.