WILLIAM DAVEY
I had been acquainted with Ann Braid for many years—she had appeared at a meeting of the Committee when Quillinan was still Chairman, usually in the company of Reverend Pyne or Dr. Higginson. She was scarcely a grown woman when she had first joined us; her surname had carried some weight, and there were some among the younger members who had sought to use that fact to gain familiarity with her. It was never successful.
She soon proved herself adept at the Art, despite her father’s strident denials of its efficacy. She also clearly had no interest in respecting authority, though she stopped short of open rebellion—preferring to cause trouble without confronting me.
But in all the time I had known her, she had never met me with a smile.
“I had heard that you were hurt,” I said. I stepped into the room; Margaret closed the door. Richard Daniel walked to the bed and stood beside it, lifting Ann Braid’s wrist to examine her pulse.
“I am recovering.”
“I see that,” I answered. “I assumed it was worse.”
“I’ve had some help. Margaret you have met, I see.” The smile returned, which was disturbing in and of itself. “And my fiancé.” She directed it to Daniel.
“I wasn’t aware that you had agreed to marry. It’s a shame that your father isn’t here to see it.”
The smile vanished. Her attention left Daniel as she pulled her hand free; he turned to look at me as well.
“Your attempt at wit falls on deaf ears, Reverend,” she said icily. “Perhaps we should dispense with all of this pretense.”
“I thought we had left it in the receiving room.”
She glanced at Daniel and then back at me. “I think you should come to the point on why you are here, so we do not waste any more of each other’s time. I—”
Her words were cut off by a fit of coughing. Daniel took her hand again, and leaned closer to place his hand on the back of her head. She lowered her head while holding a cloth over her mouth. Margaret took a step closer but hesitated.
I affected an air of total indifference, looking out of the window across the park at the city of Manchester, clouded by haze in the distance.
“Perhaps you should take your leave,” Daniel said.
“No,” Ann Braid said. She looked up at me again. “No, I’m all right.”
“You are not ‘all right,’ my dear. You—”
“Reverend Davey,” she said quietly, waving Daniel away. “I am recovering from the effects of a slight miscalculation. But I assure you that it is only a temporary setback. You have a tendency to underestimate others’ powers. I suggest to you that you do not underestimate mine.”
“Why is that?”
“Because, sir,” she said, “you do so at your peril. My new allies have given me certain insights into the true capabilities that our Art only barely touches. By your moralistic constraints—yours, those of that creature Jackson, and any number of others—you have neglected possibilities that can make us ten or a hundred times more powerful than we are. If only your flimsy objections didn’t get in the way.”
“I suppose you’ll be demonstrating your powers on me now. As a challenge.”
“Not at this time,” she said. “I am—” For a moment, she looked again as if she was about to collapse into another paroxysm of coughing, but she fiercely clutched the bedclothes and kept her focus on me. “I am not looking to challenge your leadership of the Committee, Reverend Davey. I neither need, nor desire, to replace you in your present position.”
“I am relieved and gratified.”
“You are nothing of the sort,” she snapped back, and again began to cough. Margaret reached over and touched her leg through the bed blanket; the coughing immediately subsided, but Ann Braid’s face took on an unpleasant grimace.
“Reverend Davey,” Daniel said, “I would prefer that you leave.”
I thought about a retort, then shrugged and walked toward the door. Again I heard the sound like a half-silent chorus—and I turned quickly on my heel, my left hand lifted with three fingers up and little finger and thumb curled into my palm, as if I were giving a medieval bishop’s blessing.
Margaret the chthonios’ mouth hung open for a split-second, then snapped shut like an iron door.
“I will wait in the receiving room,” I said, opening the door behind me without looking, and backing through it, never lowering my hand.
You understand very little of them, Richard Daniel had said to me. What I did know I didn’t like, but he was certainly right. He characterized them as impulsive—as I am sure you know, he had added. Had I seen evidence of that impulsiveness on the Oxford Road train platform, or had that been a lesson that the Levantine and his associates—who were everywhere, as he had told me—had prepared specifically for me?
My thoughts chased each other in circles like a pack of hungry dogs. I did my best to compose myself while I waited in the receiving room; I assumed that my direct interaction with Ann Braid had concluded, at least for the day.
Richard Daniel reappeared at last and crossed to where I sat. His professional manner remained, but there was more than a hint of malice in his tone when he addressed me.
“She is resting as comfortably as she can,” he said. “Your interview has upset her, Reverend, as I am sure you can imagine.”
“Murdering her father with the help of—what was it? A dozen nightfall beings?—upsets me. I assure you, Doctor, her emotional state is of no particular concern to me.”
Daniel sat down. He looked angry, resentful—and perhaps more than a little weary. I wondered to myself what his part had been in the death of Dr. Braid.
“She is right, you know. You underestimate her powers.”
“They’re not her powers, Daniel. They come from the creatures who own her soul and who will consume it when she dies. What she can now undertake she does with their sufferance.”
“It’s not like that at all.”
“I beg to differ. It is exactly like that, sir. It is a fundamental mistake to think that it is anything different. I cannot help but ask—what deal have you made with them?”
“I am not the least involved.”
“Once again, I am forced to point out your error, Dr. Daniel. You are involved from the lapels of your coat to the soles of your boots. You’d best make sure the water doesn’t rise and drown you entire.”
“Your metaphors are colourful.”
“Clerical training,” I said, touching my collar. “Denying your involvement wouldn’t even hold up in a court of the Queen’s Bench. Don’t expect it to work among those who know better. The question is, though: what am I to do, and what do you intend?”
“I don’t believe that you need to do anything, Reverend Davey. You can simply let things be.”
“She may not even survive.”
Daniel frowned. “I am doing everything medically possible to make sure she survives,” he hissed at me. “I will restore her to health.”
“Or else,” I said, “they eat her.”
“I will restore her to health,” he repeated, his face stony.
“Fair enough. But she has gone beyond even defying my explicit order to leave James Braid alone. She killed her father, man. She called upon a whole battalion of nightfall creatures to do it. This is the woman you want to save? This is the one you want to marry?”
“You are very judgmental, Reverend Davey.”
I looked up to see Margaret, the chthonios and lady’s maid, standing a dozen feet away.
“You don’t understand us at all, either,” I said, then returned my attention to Daniel—though it made me nervous to take my attention from the nightfall creature nearby. “We are judgmental by nature. And unless she is challenging me, Dr. Daniel, right now, she has defied my authority and spat in the face of the Committee. I am calling her to account for that.
“You asked why I am here, sir. That is why I am here. To demand an explanation—and to determine what, if any, extenuation she might have for the heinous crime that we both know she committed. If she has nothing to offer, then I will ask no more questions on that account.”
“You are passing judgment,” the nightfall creature said.
“I am only gathering evidence,” I said, not taking my eyes off Richard Daniel. “The Committee will pass judgment.”
“And then?” she asked.
“I do not know.”
“Very well,” Daniel said. He looked at Margaret. “Leave us,” he said.
“I do not answer to you.”
Daniel stood up. “Leave us,” he repeated. “The person you do answer to will cause you considerable pain if you do not do as I say.”
She gave him a look of pure hatred, then softened it to mere petulance. She turned on her heel, walked directly into the far wall and vanished.
“Impulsive,” he said. After a moment, he sat down again.
“I see.”
“I will tell you what will happen,” Daniel said. “The Committee can choose any verdict it likes. It may assuage its pride by assessing any punishment. But it will not be levied. There is no one, even you, Reverend, who can coerce Annie.”
“If she survives.”
This time it was Daniel whose expression was full of malice. “If you do anything to her—”
“I do not waste my powers on fools or innocents. She is no innocent, Daniel.” I stood up and placed my hat on my head. “I have not yet determined into which category I place you.”
With nothing further to say, I stood and walked out of the receiving room, down the front hallway and out of the door.
As I walked across the lawn toward Trafford, I felt the icy breeze once more, and turned to see the chthonios Margaret walking toward me.
“Reverend Davey,” she said, stopping a dozen feet away once more—as if keeping her distance.
“I do not have anything to say to you.”
“Then you can simply listen. Soon the Glass Door will be open, and all of your—posturing—will mean nothing. You should make provision for that day.”
“I am not convinced that day will ever come,” I said.
“It will come,” Margaret said. “Of that you can be sure. Only the key is needed. When found and employed, the mild amusements I hoped to share with you will seem like love-taps.”
“I am not prepared to surrender to—whims.”
“I see,” she said, making a little pout. “You should be aware, Reverend: when that day comes—when the Glass Door is opened—we will not waste power on fools or innocents. Regrettably, however, you are neither.”
Without waiting for me to reply, she turned and walked back toward the sanitarium; but before she reached the steps, she apparently tired of the exercise, and simply vanished from sight.