Sherlock and Gregory alighted from the hansom cab at Miss Morgan's Chelsea address. With apologies for the impropriety of it, Gregory brought him in through the kitchen, dropping off an unused hamper of brandy, cigarettes, chocolate and smelling salts he had offered to Sherlock in the aftermath of the incident. The servant explained that people were frequently shaken by their initial contact with his mistress and he kept such stimulants on hand in case they were beneficial.
Each door that they passed through squealed as they were opened and Sherlock enquired about the recurring oddity.
Gregory was dismissive. "Miss Charlotte prefers not to be surprised. She has me treat all the hinges with salt so they can't be moved without alerting someone. It wears on the doors and the nerves, but the repairs are simpler than the alternatives."
Sherlock thought back. Each door he had passed through at the theatre had screeched like a beaten animal, yet the door that had slammed just before the incident began was unheralded. What door had the servant missed?
They made their way to the conservatory at the back of the structure. As with most such rooms, it was large, with panes of glass forming two walls and the vaulted ceiling. The farthest glass wall was hidden by what appeared to be an ocean of billowed black fabric. Red clay tiles formed a herringbone pattern across the floor and the hearth of a small fire grate which warmed the open space. Such rooms were frequently used as greenhouses; this example had a tap and large basin, but no plants were evident. Instead, a large ornate round oak table dominated the area, an assortment of chairs and smaller tables scattered haphazardly around it. Several trunks were piled in a corner, and an imposing cheval glass stood silent sentry in the corner. Books were everywhere, piled in sliding disarray.
Gregory offered Sherlock a seat which was refused before moving to an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys that seemed to crisscross the entire room. As he began to manipulate the mechanism, the black fabric was drawn forth via tracks in the walls and ceiling. It draped like a tent, and as it began to smooth, Sherlock could see the dim ambient city light through its ebony weave. Flickers caught his attention and he realized the fabric had silver threads running through it, creating an effect like a starry night sky. Overall, the effect was quite breath-taking.
Something had been puzzling Sherlock, and he raised the subject as the servant stirred the ashes and fed the coals in the grate. "Where is Tobias? I thought Miss Morgan wanted him to accompany us?"
For the first time, the servant seemed to falter, at an apparent loss for words. "I – I'm sure he will be along, sir. If you'll please excuse me, I need to prepare for Miss Charlotte's arrival." Gregory bowed very slightly, leaving the room before any additional questions could be asked.
Gregory was lying somehow, Sherlock was certain of it, but that would need to be pursued later. Restless, he looked over the spines of her books seeking some form of distraction. A few classic novels, a thin volume of Russian verse, but a majority of them surprised him by being not unlike his own collection. Physical sciences, chemistry, geometry, even a volume on transference of infectious diseases he had been looking for but hadn't been able to acquire. Certainly not the heavy religious tomes or Gothic romances he would have expected.
The sense of being observed refused to be dismissed. Sherlock's eyes kept being drawn to the cheval glass. It was tipped forward, reflecting the herringbone pattern on the floor. The trunks could yield a multitude of secrets, yet he couldn't resist approaching the glass. His hand tremored, reaching to push its reflectivity upright before he was interrupted.
The effectiveness of the lady's preparations made itself clear as Sherlock heard a series of high pitched metallic protests, echoed by two bickering voices. The woman's voice stopped with a strong curse, but the man's was coming closer.
The conservatory door burst open as an already red faced Mr. Baker exploded into the room. He stopped inches away from Sherlock's face, in a move Sherlock was sure would have been threatening if they hadn't been of similar height. The manager was practically frothing in fury. "You gained that card because of a murder, then the first time you are near her, she almost dies! You're going to get her killed!"
Before Sherlock could respond, Gregory returned, closing the door behind him as quietly as possible. He placed a silver tray on a smaller side table, unloading its contents and preparing the apparatus it contained. "Mr. Baker, Miss Charlotte asks your assistance with her wardrobe." It seemed like a rote statement, the real meaning quite different than the words used.
The manager was unmoved, continuing his rant. "I owe that woman more than I can ever repay, but I have no intention of returning her to America in a pine box, do you understand? I'm sure your problem seems very important, even earthshattering, but you can find help for it elsewhere!"
Gregory lit a taper from the grate, using it to ignite the charcoal in the hookah. He added some tobacco from a small pouch beside it on the tray. "Mr. Baker, Miss Charlotte asked me to remind you that you are not her father, husband, employer or guardian."
It seemed to affect the manager like a slap. He moved his attack from Sherlock to the servant, with as little effect. "You saw her turn blue! Don't tell me you don't want to pack her trunks and get her on the next available steamship!"
"Of course I do!" Gregory barked, then seemed to retreat from the faux pas. "We have to trust them." It was as quiet as a whisper. He smoothed his buttoned vest. "Mr. Holmes, Miss Charlotte doesn't wish to shock you, but tobacco is one of the few indulgences she allows herself. She will join you presently." He shot the manager a poisonous glare as he left the room.
Mr. Baker walked slowly along a thigh high wall of books, hands clenched and words hissed. "What do you want to leave right now? How much will fixing your difficulties cost? What do I need to buy to make you go away and leave us alone?"
Sherlock was distracted from any answer by a heavy copy of 'Anatomy: Descriptive and Applied' that rested precariously atop the wall. By itself, it was not unusual, but he had thought its spine had been roughly parallel to the volumes below it. Now the spine hung over open space directly above the manager's foot.
As he watched, the book tipped slowly, eventually falling edge first and landing heavily on the man's instep. The manager displayed a vast knowledge of vitriolic language.
He was stopped mid tirade by a quiet woman's voice. "Douglas."
Miss Morgan had somehow quietly negotiated the door. She stood against it, her arms folded in apparent irritation, hidden by the voluminous sleeves of a formal oriental kimono; white cranes flying majestically across a jade ocean. The peace of the scene was not reflected in her expression; her head raised but her eyes gazing darkly at the floor.
Mr. Baker strode to her, bristling with outrage. "You don't have to help him, Charlotte! Damn him and his tart! We can be aboard ship within the hour; the trunks can follow…"
"Assez!" She hadn't shouted, but the word struck like a gunshot. Her eyes blazed in fury as they rose. "La jeune fille est la famille." She huffed, resigned. "Go home, Douglas. You're of no use to me like this."
In seconds, Mr. Baker visibly deflated under her intense stare. "Your grandfather will have me skinned alive if I return his only granddaughter in a coffin."
Miss Morgan shrugged. "So bury me in your family plot in Cambridge and don't tell him. As long as the stipend is spent, he'll never suspect a thing." A small smile seemed to want to escape.
The manager paled, descending into a symphony of wordless gargles and harrumph noises. Miss Morgan went to him, craning up on her toes to press an affectionate peck to his quivering chin. "I've given my pledge, Douglas. Helping is not negotiable."
The manager was almost out of the room when Miss Morgan interrupted him by loudly clearing her throat. He mumbled some odd form of atonement Sherlock couldn't hear, but it seemed to placate her and she let him go out the conservatory door.
Miss Morgan stooped to replace the fallen volume. "My apologies, Mr. Holmes. Some families are chosen, not born. Unfortunately, you end up with an even more motley collection of oddities than blood allows." She gestured him to a padded chair beside the smaller table.
Again refusing the offered chair, Sherlock stood beside it and folded his arms. "Why the performance, Miss Morgan? Why do you present yourself as a charlatan?" Sherlock noted the steaming tea beside him on the table. He wondered if it was prepared to his unstated preferences.
"Charlotte, please." The lady opened a small wooden box of already rolled cigarettes, leaving them beside Sherlock in invitation before settling herself into the larger padded chair. She took a prolonged draw from the hookah, rose petals spinning in the bubbling water. When she released the smoke into the room like an unfolding cloud, she met his eyes with that same obstinate stare she had used on her manager. "My mother had to withdraw from her last finishing school in order to marry her husband before my arrival six months later. He had not met her previously and disappeared right after my birth, so it's safe to assume he was not my father."
Her bald forthrightness stunned him, but he assumed it was leading to something. He packed his pipe, waiting for her to continue.
"When I was very young, we were living under my grandfather's roof. My mother had a school chum who asked to visit her. My grandfather agreed, but was furious when the young woman arrived with both her own parents and three of her sisters in tow. You see, the reason for the visit wasn't social niceties; they had taken up the temperance movement with religious fervour and she wanted to convert her poor fallen friend." Miss Morgan's face clearly showed her opinion of that motive.
"I assume the effort failed?" Sherlock remembered the heavy scent of brandy in the air when he had dreamt of her being attacked.
"They tried over four days. I think she was sober two of them." Another long draw and spiralling petals. "I started having nightmares as soon as they arrived. Flashing lights, flags I couldn't recognise, screams. The worst was a noise I later knew was rending metal. I went to the girl's father and told him if they continued going to revivals, it would cost them their lives."
A sinking feeling Sherlock was only too familiar with. "Did it?"
She smiled bitterly. "At first, the old man thought I just liked having visitors and wanted them to stay. Unfortunately, I ended up using a few of my grandfather's choicest terms for them and they left in a fury. I had made quite a scene; every servant overheard." She stood, moving to prod at the glowing embers in the grate.
"The following Saturday night, they were coming home from a revival via the Portland Express train from Boston. Their engineer must have fallen asleep or missed a signal. One way or the other, he failed to recognise they were in peril until it was too late. He did attempt to stop, but the brakes failed and they collided with another train."
As she sat back down, he remembered similar accidents closer to home. The carnage left by a steam locomotive wreck was horrific.
"His boiler exploded on impact. Several cars simply flattened. Rescuers had to peel the walls away to try to get to survivors. The entire family was killed and not to be egocentric, but my life changed forever." She took up the hookah pipe again.
Sherlock thought of his own responses to what he had seen and heard. He couldn't imagine enduring something similar as a child. His own memories of difficulties caused by his racing mind and absent censor provided some understanding. "The servants had overheard you."
"As had my mother and grandfather. I think they were more embarrassed than frightened; they've never acknowledged it happened. The servants had more than enough fear to go around; they always knew I was illegitimate, but they saw it as my mother's sin and had treated me well. As soon as we received the news, I became cursed. By weeks end, I was damned. Within the month… Do you know what a cambion is, Mr. Holmes?"
He nodded. "The offspring of a mythical creature and a human. Merlin was supposed to be one."
This time her smile was genuine. "Merlin would make fine company, thank you." She drew another long puff. "My mother and I were packed up and banished as far away as we could go and still be within reach for punishment if we embarrassed him; Louisiana. You see, sir, the only thing worse than people thinking I'm a charlatan is people believing I'm real."
His mind spun. His own abilities caused discomfort, even fear on occasion. Through painful experience, he'd tried to learn when to keep his observations and deductions to himself unless they were requested. He was not as adept at it as he sometimes wished, but at least if asked, he could explain his conclusions. They didn't appear to be some form of sorcery or black arts.
Sherlock sipped at the tea; prepared just as if he'd made it himself. "The Sullivans were asking after their daughter, I presume. You wouldn't help them?"
Charlotte flinched, her fingers tightening on the hookah pipe. "I can't." Her lips were drawn very thin. "It doesn't work that way. I have little control over what I'm shown."
"I don't understand." How had she perceived so much of his own trauma, but be unable to assist the grieving parents?
She sat silent for several moments. "I have to be able to make some connection to a person or event. Usually, they come from either familiarity or intensity. If I had met the girl or perhaps her parents before her death, I may have been receptive enough, but all they could provide me with was a shawl. If her death had been traumatic or painful, it might have been intense enough, but it wasn't." She looked distantly. "Small mercy."
"You're certain she's dead?" Sherlock had suspected as much. The girl had lead a chaste, almost pedantically quiet life. She had been missing far too long without contact for any other likely explanation.
Charlotte's head dipped in what Sherlock thought was pained embarrassment. "The girl was walking through that square with all the columns. She wasn't meeting with anyone; all she's thinking is how upset her mother will be because she's late." She stopped, giving Sherlock a baleful look. "All I can see is what she herself saw. She was killed by a blow to the back of the head, dead before she fell. She never saw her attacker, even the light was in front of her, so she saw no shadows; nothing that could identify her assailant. All I could tell them is that she died, but I can't even prove that! What possible help or comfort could I give them?"
He lit a match from the hookah's glowing coals, watched as the sulphur burned away. "So what exactly is your connection to me?" He recalled her statement to her manager. "Are you claiming a familial relation?"
Her expression slid from surprise to indignation to coldly restrained fury. "You really are the damnedest fool! I said the lady is family, not you! I've sworn to protect her! Meanwhile, you see a crack in the door and approach it with all the subtlety of a drunken politician!" She stood, moving to the basin to splash water on her face.
"What door?" Sherlock blew out the match, pocketed his pipe. "What crack? You said she was in danger; what did…" he reached out, determined to finally get some form of answer.
The bare skin of her arm was beneath his palm. Reality canted violently. He knew he staggered, his grip holding and pulling her from the basin. She seemed to be falling toward him, but his vision darted away.
Images flashing by too quickly for recognition. Sherlock blinked, shaking his head to try to resolve the clamour. Marching across a field caked in blood-stained mud. A dark haired man writing with painfully cramped hands at a candle-lit desk. He couldn't draw enough breath to shout.
A beautiful raven haired woman was coughing final waves of crimson onto a blood-tinged pillow, then the man at the desk sobbed as ink coiled across the page.
"Friend of a friend. His beloved wife died of consumption." he recognised Charlotte's voice in the rising hurricane of sound. "Try to focus on him."
Where was she? Sherlock couldn't find her and the images flooded forth. A set of wooden steps, spattered, leading to Madame La Guillotine. Someone being dragged to an already smouldering pile of tinder. A noose surrounded by a maddened crowd. The reflected image of a copper-haired woman desperately trying to reach the mirrored surface of the water above before her one gasp of breath ran out. The man at the desk was grinding the heels of his aching hands into his tear-filled eyes.
"Dangerous between." Charlotte sounded calm, almost regretful. "Experienced mystics get lost wandering here. You can get trapped even when you know the path."
She was standing in the writing man's shadow and suddenly Sherlock was standing beside her. She favoured him with a sad smile, sliding her hand into his. It seemed to anchor him, mitigate the swirling dizziness.
The silence was deafening, only broken by the man's occasional sobs. Sherlock was afraid to move, break the quiet.
"We aren't really here." Charlotte assured him. "He died before I was born. Grande-dame Cherie, a servant of my mother's, brought me here when she tried to teach me control. You should see what he's written, though." She gestured him forward.
Releasing her hand, Sherlock stepped closer, trying to read around where the man's elbows were inadvertently blotting the ink. Most of the words were obscured, but at the bottom of the page he read 'O God! Can I not save one from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?"
"He died not long after he wrote that." She nodded gravely. "Like you, he accidentally found a chemical path to get between. I don't know if that was what actually killed him, but it must have made it easier." She took Sherlock's hand again.
"We're…" he hesitated. "We're between what? Dreams? Realities? How?"
"In sleep, the mind is protected by disbelief; what is perceived cannot be real, so can be dismissed. Die in a dream, wake up safe in your own bed. If you experience something too horrific, too damaging, the mind ignores it as nonsense with little or no damage. We don't have that protection right now. Dreaming, experiencing with neither flesh nor defence." She watched his expression carefully.
"It's just a different perspective than the one in my conservatory. Our flesh is locked to that point in time by blood. You are seeing from one dream to another; across time and distance; his reality," she gestured to the sobbing man. "Our dream. The crack in the door gave you a glimpse you weren't meant to have; now you're developing an affinity for it. We need to find a safer method for your oneiric impressions." A small smile settled on her face as she dropped his hand, seeming to ease backward into a gathering gloom.
The darkness would have concerned him, but Sherlock felt some odd sense of familiarity. He became aware of a sound from somewhere outside the small garret; quiet but growing louder. At first it seemed some vibration of a great engine, but as it grew, he realized it was animal; feral. The growl of a beast larger than any in his experience. Where was it coming from? He stepped closer to the woman, determined to defend them both.
"It's all right." She smiled in understanding. "The aberration can't see us here." Some measure of the darkness seemed to wrap itself around her midsection and she stroked it with affection. "The silver confuses him; makes us too hard to track, but he'll wait until he can find us again."
The darkness spoke in a voice he recognised from his own dreams of Charlotte. "You are safe in my lady's home, Sherlock, but your lady remains imperilled." A wisp rose from behind Charlotte's shoulder, brushing his cheek.
It lasted only a moment, but the vision caught at his breath. Molly; seen from some distance above. Oddly, the colour was muted, almost non-existent. Her arm was raised as if trying to hail transportation from a blur of fast movement.
Sherlock reached out clumsily, trying to follow in the way he had found Charlotte in the whirl of images.
Reality swam, but it would all be alright if he could just get home quickly. Mum had wanted her to stop for a loaf of bread, but the baker had closed early, and she couldn't find another open to custom. She spared a glance up at the statue of Admiral Nelson. It was just too bad none of the local boys were cut of anything near the same cloth. Only a suitor of… Sharp pain flared across the back of her head as her vision went first to red, then to black as the ground rushed up to meet her.
Sherlock snapped awake with a shout, his feet pushing him away from where Charlotte was heaped on the floor. Heart hammering, he gasped for breath. Perspiration on his skin had gone clammy. He wiped the salt stinging his eyes away.
Pushing up from the floor, he staggered toward the cheval glass. An urge to either laugh or vomit bubbled in him. All his fears of insanity suddenly seemed no more than childhood fictions to force obedience. A single question burned as he stared at the reflected herringbone tiles. "Where is she?"
Charlotte's voice softened. "Molly is in London, Mr. Holmes; just a bit ahead of us."
He closed his eyes tightly against the thought. He had reached that conclusion himself, but had wanted it to be as impossible as it appeared. Teeth so close to her throat and there was nothing to be done. Some weakness seemed to be creeping up his legs, robbing his knees of strength. He reached to the cheval glass to steady himself, tipping it up to reflect Miss Morgan cradled in the arms of the bohemian man that had known his name outside the theatre.
He seemed to be blowing gentle circles from her hairline to her chin. "Are you all right?"
She was looking up at him, her gaze full of the warmth reserved for an intimate. "You seem to be developing quite an affection for this face. Who is he? A victorious warrior? Perhaps an eccentric lord? " Her hand drew itself affectionately through a sea of golden curls.
"A figure who will be beloved by children and adults alike. A bit of a scoundrel; an imp. I can change if you don't approve; just don't ask about the dog in the daytime." He smiled back, vibrant blue eyes shining devotedly.
The dark figure in dream, the bohemian, and the unseen entity who seemed to repeatedly harass Mr, Baker suddenly melded seamlessly.
Meeting Sherlock's eyes in the mirror, Tobias stage-whispered conspiratorially. "Our guest can see me now." He smiled, waved jauntily, and had completely disappeared as Sherlock turned to face him.