C. Harris - What Darkness Brings

“Had he heard of it before?”

She shook her head. “No. But he found an inscription inside the frontpiece that indicates it was copied in Amsterdam. He says it’s written in Sephardic cursive script.” She came to watch as he leafed through the strange text. “I have a friend named Abigail McBean who is something of an expert on these old magic texts. She told me once that they’re called ‘grimoires’ and-” She broke off, her eyes narrowing as he looked up at her and smiled. “What’s so funny?”

At that, he laughed out loud. She was friends with a motley collection of brilliant, fascinating, and decidedly unfashionable people, from scholars and poets to reformers and artists. She knew geologists and architects, antiquaries and engineers; he should have expected that she’d be acquainted with at least someone whose specialty was ancient magic texts.

The amusement faded as it occurred to him that there was something decidedly off about a man accepting his wife’s help in his attempts to prove the innocence of his former mistress’s new husband. He said, “You don’t need to be doing this.”

She reached over to tweak the manuscript from his grasp. “Yes, I do.”

She started to turn away from the window, the book in her hands, then paused, her gaze on the darkening scene outside.

The rain had settled into a steady downpour, the clouds hanging dark and low to steal whatever light had been left in the sky. Women with shawls pulled over their heads hurried through the gathering gloom, their pattens clicking, the murky glow from the oil lamps reflecting in a dull gleam off rain-washed paving stones. A landau emblazoned with a coronet and drawn by a matched team of dapple grays dashed past, its spinning red wheels throwing up a fan of water from the gutter to spray over the footpath. It wet the trouser legs of a man standing near the area steps of the house across the street, his slouch hat pulled low over his face. He neither flinched nor moved but simply stood, his gaze fixed on their house.

“What is it?” Sebastian asked, watching Hero’s expression change.

“That man. He’s been standing there staring at the house for nearly an hour. I noticed him when I was showing Mr. Bloomsfield the manuscript. We brought it here to the window so that he could catch the last of the daylight and-”

But Sebastian was already pushing away from the window to stride rapidly toward the door.

Sebastian walked out of the house into a wild wind that threw rain in his face and flapped the tails of his coat. A whip cracked, a shaggy team of shire horses filling the road in front of him so that he had to pull up sharply at the edge of the footpath, swearing impatiently as he ducked around the laden coal wagon. He half expected the slouch-hatted watcher to have disappeared into the mist by the time he reached the far side of the street. But the man was still there, his rain-darkened coat huge on his skeletally thin frame, his mouth pulled wide into a madman’s grin as he waited for Sebastian to walk up to him.

“Who the bloody hell are you and why are you watching my house?” Sebastian demanded, coming to a halt in front of him.

“It’s funny you should be asking that, you see,” said the man, “because I was wanting to pose the same question to you.”

His hair was a greasy dark tangle heavily threaded with gray that hung too long around a face with hollowed cheeks and sunken, watery black eyes. At sometime in the distant past, his nose had been badly broken, and a puckered red scar distorted one side of his face. In age he could have been anywhere between thirty-five and fifty, exposure to the elements and ill-health having roughened his skin and dug deep grooves beside his mouth. For a moment, Sebastian thought he looked vaguely familiar; then the haggard face twitched and the impression vanished.

Sebastian frowned. “What question?”

“Who are you?”

“You’re telling me that’s why you’re standing here in the rain? Because you want to know who I am?”

“It is, yes.”

The rain poured around them, dimpling the puddle in the gutter at their feet, pinging on the iron railing of the steps that led down to the kitchen, and running in rivulets down the smiling man’s face.

The man’s grin widened. “She’s a fine-looking woman, your wife. Very fine-looking.”

A powerful surge of fear-fueled rage coursed through Sebastian. He slammed the man back against the brick wall of the house behind him, one forearm pressed up tight against his skinny throat. “What the devil is that supposed to mean?”

The man shook his head, his grin still eerily in place. “Didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“Why the bloody hell do you want to know who I am?”

The man’s eyes squeezed shut as he gave a strange, half-strangled laugh. “I saw you. Saw you coming out of his house.”

“Whose house?”

The man flattened his hands against the brick wall behind him, his stringy muscles tense, his fingers splayed. Then he opened his eyes, and they were like the eyes of a child or of the very old, when the mind begins to lose its ability to comprehend and simply stares out at the world in helpless confusion and need. “Oh, I can’t tell you that.”

Sebastian took a step back and let the man go. “You stay away from my wife. Is that understood? You stay away from my house, and you stay away from my wife. I see you hanging around here again, I’ll have you taken up by the watch.”

He realized the man was no longer looking at him but at something beyond him. Turning, Sebastian saw Hero calmly crossing the street toward him, the hem of her delicate white muslin gown lifted above the mud- and manure-strewn paving.

When Sebastian looked back, the man was gone.

“So, who is he?” Hero asked, her gaze following the skinny man’s retreating figure as she stepped up onto the flagway beside him. A gust of wind blew the rain in stinging, swirling sheets around them.

“Someone who belongs in Bedlam.”

She brought her gaze back to Sebastian. “Oh? You mean like a man who charges out into the rain with neither hat nor cloak?”

He swiped the water out of his eyes and looked at his wife. Rain dripped from her wet hair, ran down her cheeks, soaked the wet muslin of her elegant gown so that it clung to every swell and hollow of her magnificent body. He said, “You mean like you?”

Her face lit up with surprised delight and she let out a peal of laughter that tilted her head up to the sky.

The rain eased up later that evening, only to sweep back in just after midnight.

Lying awake in his wife’s bed, Sebastian could see streaks of strange green lightning illuminating the churning clouds that pressed low over the fetid alleyways and rain-lashed docks to the east. There came a moment’s breath-stealing pause; then the rumble of the thunder began, building louder and louder into a window-rattling crescendo that bled seamlessly into memories he would rather have forgotten.

He sensed a subtle shift beside him, heard a whisper of movement. A soft, warm hand crept across the bare flesh of his chest. Hero said, “You’re not sleeping.”

He smiled into the darkness. “And you are?”

She rolled over to press her long body against his side as he brought his arms down to gather her to him.

She said, “You’re worried about that man, the one who was watching the house.”

He stroked his hand down her back and over the swell of her hip. “I keep thinking I’ve seen him before, only I can’t place where.”

“A beggar on a street corner, perhaps? A face glimpsed in the desperate crowds outside St. Martin’s poorhouse?”

Sebastian shook his head. “I don’t think he’s a beggar.”