David Liss - The Twelfth Enchantment - A Novel

She wanted to go to him. Each morning she woke and thought that she would, but by the time she had dressed and eaten, she understood that her desire was but a dreamy absurdity. She had no real home, no protection, and she dared not put herself in his power. If he would but make a proposal of marriage all would be well, but he had not done so.

Instead of running to Byron, she contented herself with conversations with the Blakes, particularly on the subject of what she must do next. Lucy needed to find the remaining pages of the Mutus Liber if she was to rescue her niece, but she had no notion at all of where to look. With Mr. Morrison having discovered her treachery, no one could tell her. One evening while they talked of this and drank weak tea, Mr. Blake fell into a reflective quiet for some time. Lucy and Mrs. Blake spoke of other matters for half an hour when Mr. Blake appeared to start awake and interrupted them without ceremony.

“Miss Derrick, your father is of the opinion that you must look to your inheritance.”

Lucy felt her entire body tense. She had told the Blakes nothing of that circumstance. She knew she would have to look to it at some point, but now she had more important things with which to concern herself. In any case, Mary had described the matter as hopeless.

Even if, to further her own mysterious ends, Mary had lied, was her inheritance the most important matter at this moment? Why would her father ask her to look to it? Perhaps by proving Mr. Buckles’s forgery Lucy could more quickly disrupt Lady Harriett’s plans. Was she implicated in the forgery as well? Lucy did not think she would be able to attack Lady Harriett with the laws of the land. For now, she had no choice but to wait and hope to learn more.

So taken was Mr. Blake with Lucy that he insisted he show her some of his work, so in the bright light of the next morning, he led her down to his shop and began to put into her hands some of his astonishing books— Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Milton . Lucy had never seen a book of poetry like this. It was a swirling, vibrant mixture of image and word. Even the text was engraved, and letter and image interwove until one became the other, and she could hardly say where one began and the other ended. It was seamless and elegant and chaotic and maddening.

Yet, as beautiful and eerie and moving as was his art, this is not what struck Lucy most. When she looked at his engravings, Lucy felt as though some unseen hand slid the final piece of a puzzle in place. She felt elation and fear and an insatiable curiosity. “It is time that I show you something, Mr. Blake,” she said.

Lucy went upstairs and retrieved her pages from the Mutus Liber . She brought them down and then spread them before Mr. Blake without any semblance of ceremony. They were simply there for his inspection.

Blake looked them over, running his fingers along the images, carefully noting the details. He shifted one, held another up to the light. A third he sniffed.

“Remarkable,” he said at last.

“They appear very much like your own work,” Lucy said to him.

He nodded. “They do indeed. I would go so far as to say that they are my own work.”

Lucy sat down, uncertain how to understand this new information. She had always believed Mary when she said the images dated from the seventeenth century. There was no reason to lie about such a thing, surely. Besides, Mr. Morrison had told her the same thing, had he not? Certainly it was possible that he had received false information, that they both had. Lucy found it easier to believe that Mary would lie than that she would be mistaken, but there was no reason why she could not simply be wrong about something.

“Do you know anything of alchemy?” Lucy asked Mr. Blake.

He shook his head. “Nothing out of the common way.”

“Have you ever sought the philosopher’s stone, the secret to life immortal?”

He smiled. “I already possess the secret to life immortal, Miss Derrick. It is called Jesus Christ. I need not seek another.”

Lucy closed her eyes. If these pages were not part of some mystic book, but merely the clever engravings of an affable if deranged craftsman, then everything she had done was for nothing. Lucy could not believe that. These pages were real. They radiated power and energy and a magnetic force. Lucy felt that these pages were, in some fundamental way, magic , whatever that meant. They were, for want of a better way of expressing it, half wedged in that invisible world of wonders that Mr. Blake claimed to know so well.

She turned to him. “When did you engrave these, sir?”

He was still examining them with minute interest. “I don’t believe I have.”

“But you told me they are yours.”

“Oh, they are certainly mine. I know this technique. I know it well, Miss Derrick. Do you know when I learned it? It was shortly after my brother Bob died, and I fell into the deepest and most terrible grief. Of all my brothers, he is the one I have always loved best, and I feared I should never see him again until I left this mortal realm. I was so distraught I did not even attend his funeral. You must think that unfeeling.”

Lucy recalled the misery of her father’s and sister’s funerals. “I think no such thing.”

“I could not endure that I should be made to grieve as others expected, that my grief must be a scripted and public spectacle, a stage play as much as an experience. I stayed at home. Then, only a few days later, Bob appeared before me. I had been having many difficulties in my work, unable to figure out a technique for combining text and image in the manner I wished. Bob told me how to do it. He invented this technique I now use. I did not know what to do, and then Bob appeared, explained it, and lo, I knew what to do.”

Lucy smiled. “It is the most literal experience of inspiration I have ever heard.”

Mr. Blake looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time.

“Mr. Blake,” she said, “I am confused. You say these are your engravings, and yet you say you have not done them.”

“I am confused as well.” He appeared more amused than anything else. “I have never made these engravings, and yet they are unmistakably mine. I have no followers in my mode of engraving, and even if I did, no one could imitate my style so well that I would not detect it.”

“I was told,” she said, attempting to show no emotion, “that these drawings originate from the seventeenth century in La Rochelle.”

Blake examined them again. “I see nothing particularly French in them, but the paper is certainly aged. There is nothing in these to say that they are not from such a time and place.”

“Mr. Blake, I do not think you are near two hundred years old.”

“I thank you.”

“How is it, then, that these pages can be?”

“I cannot answer that. I can only surmise that at some point in my future, either I or my work shall be in seventeenth-century France.”

“That is nonsense,” said Lucy.

“No,” he corrected. “We know where the pages come from and we know they are my work. It is not nonsense. It is evident. You say it is nonsense because reason tells us that I cannot ever go to seventeenth-century France, but once again that is the reason of Locke and Bacon and Newton. That is the reason of Satan and hell. You cannot doubt your own experience of the world because your reason tells you that your own experience must be wrong.”

Lucy rose and looked out the window of the shop. The day was overcast but not gloomy. She had not yet been outside, and she suddenly felt cramped and constrained, as though she needed fresh air. She turned back to Mr. Blake to announce that she wished to take a walk, but saw that he was very much absorbed in one of the engravings.