CHAPTER 50

NA-BARNO’S HAND REVEALED

The crowds had melted away, and the showmen had shut up their stalls for the night. Those who had not gone to bed, wearied at the long day they had passed entertaining the public and lightening their pockets and purses, sat around camp-fires passing bottles between them and amusing themselves by telling old stories and new lies to each other.

Na-Barno Eagle did not join any of these fire-lit pools of conviviality. He sat in the cramped quarters of his own cart, warmed by the meagre glow from the small travelling stove in the corner. He was staring out of the door at the Temple of Magic. Georgiana sat on the narrow bed holding the moneybox with the day’s takings on her lap. She watched him turning the bottle in his hand as he stared murderously at the tent which hid the treacherously broken automaton that had so nearly spoiled his show and damaged his reputation.

“Father—” she began.

“No,” he said decisively. “No, my angel, it’s no good. It’s broken. The damned mechanism is broken. I was told it was robust, by God I was, but it is not robust. It is skittish and over-delicate and wholly unsuitable for transportation. I was sold it in the clear understanding that it would exceed the abilities of the damned imposter Anderson’s automaton, but all I have beggared myself to acquire is a frozen piece of useless clockwork which is wilfully unmoving. I have been betrayed yet again.”

“The people enjoyed my mind-reading, Father,” said Georgiana. “And the communication with the spirits went off very prettily…”

“You seek to ease the pain of disappointment in my heart, dear child, but there is only one kind of spirit that can give me solace and that is within this bottle,” he said, holding up the green flask. “And it will only numb me for the night. Tomorrow I shall wake and still be beset by all my enemies and betrayers. And I will still have the prospect of facing the braggart Anderson and being grossly humiliated in public for what will no doubt be the last and fatal time, for who could endure such public ignominy and still perform? And if I do not perform we shall not eat, and if we do not eat, well, it is sure that we will waste away and die…”

He threw himself back in his chair and swigged a great mouthful of tincture, eyes wet with self-pity.

“But, Father,” said Georgiana, smiling brightly. “All is not lost. What need we with an automaton when I can perform our mind-reading? For am I not more pleasing to look at than any old wooden effigy? Do I not have vivid charm and a bright and compelling presence? All is not lost!”

“Our mind-reading?” said Eagle, lip curling bitterly. “Our mind-reading is a trick that happily bedazzles and amazes dull rustic minds who exercise their thinking capacity little more than watching one foot follow the other behind a plough. Anderson spends his days thinking and concocting illusions of his own. His mind is not dull. It is like a scimitar! It is sharper than a Turk’s razor. He is the very devil incarnate, but he is no fool!”

“But you are clever too, Father, as am I!” Georgiana cried. “We can polish and extend my mind-reading…”

His hand snapped out and grabbed her wrist. She gasped at the unexpected fierceness of his grasp.

“Your mind-reading?” he spat. “What makes you think it is yours? It was your mother’s first, and before that…”

He looked away.

“Father?” she said.

“Before that it was someone else’s.”

“Whose?” she said.

He exhaled slowly.

“When I rescued your dear dead mother from her previous life of bondage and abuse, she did not come empty-handed.”

“But whose trick was it?” said Georgiana, her eyes bright.

“It was… some other magician. She was his assistant. Her family travelled the same circuit as he did, and when his wife became dropsical, he arranged for your mother to assist him in her stead for a season.”

“So…” began Georgiana.

“So it is a known routine amongst the fraternity. So imagine if we were to have done the act tonight in front of Anderson, as I shall have to face him in two weeks’ time. When the flats and yokels marvelled so that you knew the clod had lost his scythe, up he would have jumped and with his look of bumptious conceit he would have cried out to the crowd, ‘Stop! Let me show that the only true illusion here is that Eagle and his daughter have any powers, for this is but a cheap and easy trick to pull off! When you were penned in the passage muttering to one another, you were being listened to! And you, sir, did you not perhaps mention a scythe?’ And when the clod concurs, someone still favourably disposed to us might pipe up quickly, ‘But she can still not have known who the talker was!’ and then he will stand even taller, positively about to burst with self-satisfaction and explain our code: ‘Did the imposter Eagle not say, “Great Moor, so can you tell him exactly what he has lost?” ’ he will boom, and they will nod and agree, and then he will say, ‘Observe the first letters in the phrase following “Great Moor”–“so can you tell him exactly”: “so” is S, “can” is C, “you” is Y, “tell” is T, “him” is H, “exactly” is E, spelling what word?’ And then he will have them in the palm of his hands and they will roar the answer ‘SCYTHE’ and we will be exposed and objects of ridicule. Ridicule I say, and I will brook no man laughing at me!”

He threw himself back in his seat with such a velocity of despair that it cracked ominously as he stared at the ceiling of his wagon.

“Nor I, Father,” said Georgiana, sitting down, her face pale. “Nor I.”

He dropped his eyes and found hers, and for a long moment they both stared at each other as if they had noticed something for the first time. Eagle broke the gaze and looked away first.

“So we are to be ruined?” said Georgiana. “You accepted this duel with Anderson thinking you had the better weapon, and now know that to be false.”

He nodded and took another murderous swig from his bottle.

“Well,” she said, shaking the moneybox. “We have tonight’s money so we may eat a while longer. And where there’s life, there’s always hope.”

“And where there’s hope, there’s always a great candle-snuffer hovering over it ready to extinguish it just as it flares brightest,” he sighed.

Georgiana slapped him.

He was so shocked that he froze completely, not even having the wit to resist, and she leant in and took the green flask from his hands. “You struck me,” he said, his lip quivering like a child’s.

“No, Father. You were befuddled,” she said. “I struck the fuddle, not the man. If we are to avoid ruin, we must be clear-headed.”

“I do not wish to be clear-headed,” he sobbed.

“And I will not have you fuddled,” she said, keeping the bottle out of reach. “You do not talk when the bottle is on you, and you do not answer anything.”

“I am answering for everything,” he wept. “I am answering for my life with my life.”

“And mine?” she asked. “Must I answer for your life too?”

“No, child,” he whispered hoarsely. “No, you should be spared that unnatural punishment at least.”

The fire crackled weakly and for a while was the only sound in the narrow space as they both contemplated their joint and separate futures.

“What else have you not told me?” she said.

“About your mother?” he asked. “About Anderson?”

“That’s dead news and the past won’t help us,” she said. “What have you found?”

“What, my child?”

“You have found something you have not told me about. I have heard you talking to it. I have heard you weep and call it our salvation. If it is salvation, I should like to see it,” she said.

He shook his head wildly.

“I cannot tell you. I must not. I cannot—”

“Why?”

“Because… because it is something I do not understand. I found it on the night my beautiful mirror was broken. I found it scuttling blindly across the floor.”

“It,” she said. “It is an animal?”

“No,” he said, his mouth opening and shutting as if he were a frog and the words he could not find were flies he was trying to pluck out of the air.

“What is it?”

Eagle shook his head and stood abruptly. He rubbed his face and grimaced.

“I call myself a magician…” he began.

“A wizard,” she said. “A great wizard.”

He nodded appreciatively.

“But you, my beautiful child, know I am merely a conjurer. An illusionist.”

“Merely the best in the country,” she said.

He smiled weakly and felt his cheek where she had slapped him.

“You are a loyal girl, even when you strike your own flesh and blood.”

“It was necessary,” she said.

He nodded.

“I have travelled the length and breadth of this island for two decades, and I have seen things. More than seen: I have sometimes felt things, sensed them.”

“Things?” she said.

“An edge. A pit. A darkness. A shadow,” he said.

She looked deep into his wet eyes.

“I think you are still befuddled.”

He shook his head again, and then, as if the effort of talking and standing at the same time were suddenly too much for him, he sat back down and looked at his boots.

“What I mean is that though I face the crowd and perform in the bright glimmer of our footlights, I have sometimes felt I was alone and performing with my back to a great void, and that the void contained things that I knew nothing of other than the clear sense that they were watching me and laughing. They were laughing because they controlled the real magic which I was merely counterfeiting.”

He looked up at her.

“I am the clearest-eyed man alive when it comes to spotting the mechanics of an illusion. Even the fastest and most limber-fingered card conjurer cannot elude me. But sometimes I have caught things with the tail of my eye that I cannot explain. What I found in that tent, what I found then…”

“You cannot explain,” she said.

“I think it comes from that darkness. And no, I cannot explain it.” He was racked by another sob. “Unless I am run mad…”

She put her hand on his shoulder and leant forward until barely a foot separated their eyes, his wet, hers dry and unblinking.

“Am I mad, Father?”

“No.”

She stood back.

“Then show me. And I will be the judge.”

He pointed quaveringly at the coal box.

“It is under the coal. In the secret place. In a casket.”

“What is it?” she said, beginning to move the coal out of the way.

“It is a hand,” he said. “I have been trying to see how it works.”

“A hand?” she said.

“A Manus Gloriae. A Hand of Glory. A hand with a mind of its own, that moves as if alive.”

She looked back at him as she moved the coal.

“And would that not be a greater trick than a wooden automaton?” she said. “Anderson does not have a Hand of Glory!”

She revealed the false bottom to the box and removed the casket. She held her hand out for the key without looking back, and he slipped it into her hand.

A moment later they were both hanging over the casket as he opened the top.

“Your hand is shaking, Father,” she said.

“I am… scared,” he said. She reached past him and pulled the top open.

Sara Falk’s hand lay in the bottom of the box, unmoving. They both stared at the black leather of the glove and the two rings that caught the firelight and reflected it back at them. Georgiana looked less than impressed.

“Are the rings gold?” she said.

“I had not wondered,” he replied.

“Well,” she said, “the rings have value. We can sell them. I do not know for the life of me why you did not wonder…”

“I did not wonder because the rings were quite the least remarkable thing about the hand,” he said.

“It is just a cadaver’s hand,” she said with a shrug, clearly believing her father to have imagined anything more than that while in a “fuddle”. “It is gruesome enough, but—”

“You have not seen it move,” he said.

And he leant past her and jabbed the hand. It spasmed and flopped, then tried to scuttle into the corner of the box, where it scrabbled at the walls. Georgiana stared at it, eyes wide.

“Is it some kind of ingenious clockwork?” she breathed.

He grasped the hand and unbuttoned the glove at the wrist, displaying the pale skin beneath.

“Feel it,” he said.

She reached her fingertips forward and touched the skin, tentatively at first, then–when the hand didn’t try and grab at her–more boldly.

“It’s flesh,” she whispered. “Warm flesh…”

He stabbed a pin neatly into it, and held it tight as it convulsed in protest. He pointed at the red bead that appeared at the puncture point.

“… and blood,” he smiled.

Georgiana was breathing slowly, as if trying to control a rising excitement.

“It feels pain,” she said.

“It does.”

Now she looked at him, a slow smile edging across her face.

“Then we can train it,” she said.

He shook his head at her in slow wonderment.

“Child,” he said. “The hand moves independently of any connection to the body it came from. Does it not fill your mind with terror at the unknown world which it evidences?”

“No, Father,” she said. “What terrifies me is penury and ugliness.”

She took the hatpin from his hand, a hungry look coming over her as she leant over the box.

“Let’s see what it does…”

And she jabbed the pin into the hand and watched it flinch.