Worlds Unseen - Rachel Starr Thomson (beach books .txt) 📗

a few minutes, then sat with his long fingers entwined, watching her until he was satisfied that she had eaten as much as she could be expected to.

“Now,” he said, “you didn’t bring me the scroll out of idle curiosity, and you did not bring it because you felt duty-bound to Daniel Seaton. By your own admission you went against Mrs. Cook’s wishes to come here, and you did it because there is something you are looking for-something you want to know. What is it?”

Maggie was quiet for a long time, her brow creased. It was true enough; she had come because she was looking for something. Without realizing it herself, she had believed that this aged professor would hold all the answers, but now, faced with the reality of Jarin Huss’s questioning face, Maggie did not know what to ask him or why she had thought he would know.

“I’m not sure what I want you to tell me,” Maggie said. “I’m not really sure what I’m looking for.”

Jarin Huss leaned back and nodded. ‘Then tell me about yourself,” he said. “Together perhaps we can unearth the questions you want to ask.”

Maggie looked the professor in the eyes, and she slowly let her walls down. She could trust him, she felt. She had to trust him.

“When I was ten,” she said slowly, “Mrs. Cook and her husband bought me from the Orphan House in Londren. I stayed with them a short time, and then I was sent to Cryneth, to live with John and Mary Davies.”

She faltered, but continued, her voice full of emotion. “When I went to the Davies’, I was like a bird that had been caged all its life and didn’t even know there was such a thing as a sky. And they set me free. I can’t even explain how… they loved me. And Mary would sing to me, and play the harp, and my heart would fly.

“One day, when I was thirteen, I was out with the sheep when I saw smoke over the hill. I dropped my staff and ran, and when I got over the hill I saw that the house had burned to the ground. I knew that Mary was dead, and John too. I’m not sure how I knew, but…” Her voice trailed away and she took a deep breath. She was looking down at the wooden table.

“I thought I heard laughter. I thought it was an evil spirit laughing. To tell the truth, I don’t know what I heard. Maybe nothing. I don’t remember anything after that. They tell me I ran to the house and started digging through the ashes, calling for John and Mary.”

She held up her hands, the burn scars visible reminders of that day. “They say the villagers tried to help me, and I ran away. I ran all the way to Londren. I do remember being alone, and in pain, and cold. I remember sleeping on the streets and sneaking rides on wagons, and I think I remember falling down on Mrs. Cook’s doorstep.

“And then one day I woke up, and Mrs. Cook was there, and Pat… another girl they took from the Orphan House, before me. And my hands were burned.”

She looked up suddenly, meeting Huss’s eyes with terrible urgency. “I lost everything the day John and Mary died,” she said. “I lost my heart. Paradise was stolen from me. But I recovered… I survived, because people loved me and I knew how to love them back, because of what Mary had taught me.” Tears stung her eyes and she blinked them away, leaning forward.

“This may sound strange, Professor Huss, but I have always felt that there was something more that I was supposed to learn from Mary. And from John. I feel as though I was on a path when I lived with them, and when I went back to Londren, the path was lost and I never found it again. I know that doesn’t make sense. But maybe I’m here trying to find the path again?”

Huss was listening with an odd glow on his face, but Maggie hardly noticed it.

“And then Old Dan came, and he and Mrs. Cook said that John and Mary’s death wasn’t an accident. They said it was murder; that Evelyn killed them. I want to know why, Professor. I want to know who Evelyn is, and what the Council for Worlds Unseen was, and why the people I loved most had to die.”

A sudden picture came into Maggie’s head, a parable that Mary had once shown her. The mental image was strong, unblurred by the tears in her eyes. “Have you ever seen the underside of a cross-stitch, Professor?”

“I haven’t,” Jarin Huss answered, obviously surprised.

“It looks like a mess,” Maggie told him. “A lot of threads and unconnected bits of this and that, strewn around. But if you turn it over, you can see that all of that mess has made a beautiful picture on the other side. My life so far has been a lot of threads and unconnected bits. I want to see the picture.”

“To bring cosmos out of chaos,” Huss said with a smile. “I understand completely. Though I don’t know how much help I can be to you, I will try to bring at least a little order into the unconnected bits of your life. Unfortunately, you will have to sit and listen to me talk for a good while, and I am sure you will need plenty of patience.”

Maggie smiled. “Mrs. Cook used to say I had more patience than was good for me.”

“Very well, then,” Huss said, but his eyes grew solemn. He stood and paced as he talked. “I am not surprised to know that John and Mary are dead, although I am exceedingly sorry to hear it. Evelyn had threatened Mary… perhaps Mrs. Cook told you?”

Maggie nodded. “She told me a little.”

“I have long pondered the mystery of Evelyn,” said Huss, “and I believe that I know now who she is. She is an important piece of a puzzle I have been studying for forty years. You see, I have been trying to bring my own cosmos out of chaos. In my life I have run down many a false trail, but I do think I have found the truth of the thing at last. I met Evelyn first through the Council for Exploration Into Worlds Unseen, forty years ago.

“I was in the Isle of Bryllan, in Cranburgh of the Highlands, for a conference of scholars. The conference was dry and dull, even for a such a dull young man as I was-all brains, and books. Nothing else mattered to me. Still, I was young-even I hungered for entertainment at times. There was a festival in Cranburgh at the time, and one day I skipped out of the conference and wandered in the streets.

“In the midst of the acrobats and jugglers and freakish human beings, a young Highland gentleman was holding a group of listeners spellbound with some very strange tales-tales he took quite seriously. His name was Lord Robert Sinclair, and he claimed to be the founder of a new branch of study: a study of what he called the ‘other side of reality,’ the Worlds Unseen.

“His theories were a delightful patchwork of history and folk tales and imagination, but they gripped me somehow. I talked with him for hours. In the end he invited me to come to his estate, Angslie, and help him carry on his new science. I went with him, though I have never been sure why. And others did, as well, most of them visitors to Cranburgh just as I was. There were six of us: myself, Lord Robert, Eva Brown, your guardian, Mary Grant and John Davies, who fell in love in those days, Daniel Seaton, and a dashing young fellow called Lucas Barrington.

“We all lived together in Angslie and studied, if you could call it that. We read stories and spun tapestries out of their many threads. Lord Robert had an impressive collection of ancient documents, the kind you can be arrested for owning, and I was able to read them-you see, Maggie, much as the Empire wishes the ancient languages extinct, they are not. There are some who can still read them and understand, and I am such an one. We hunted down other documents; we tracked down stories; and we drowned ourselves in wonder and fear. We pieced together a history of the world much different than what we are taught under the Emperor’s rule… and you understand, my dear, if the history of something is not what we think it is, the future of that thing is also not what we think.”

He stopped a moment, and began again.

“It seems to me as though those days were spent in another time and another world. Sometimes Mary would sing and play her harp. Stories and legends with words like fire, that caught all of our hearts aflame. Her songs were alive, and somehow ancient, and she never claimed to write them-she told me once that she sang what she heard. I can’t quite describe the way they sounded.”

“I know,” Maggie interjected quietly. “She sang to me, too. Sometimes I think her songs are in me, somewhere-if only I could hear them.”

Huss looked at Maggie strangely for a moment before continuing. “And then one day, Evelyn came. She was a young, beautiful woman. The laird had met her while he was in Cranburgh on business. He was fascinated with her, all the more because she seemed to have knowledge of the other world. She spoke sometimes of visions and strange powers, and claimed that miracles had been done at her hands.” He grimaced as he said the word “miracles”; Maggie could see the distaste he felt for it. “It was the laird’s dream come true-that we might find some way to bring the Otherworld into our own.

“Lord Robert wanted her to join the council, but there was something in her that the rest of us could not trust. Mary, especially, was opposed to Evelyn. At first she was quiet about it. She managed to discover where Evelyn came from, and then she left us for a few days. When she came back, she stood up in the council and denounced Evelyn as a witch. Mary claimed that she had gone to Evelyn’s hometown, and found that the people of the village were deathly afraid of her. Rumour said-and Mary believed every word of it-that Evelyn had grown angry with two young men in the village and publicly cursed them. Later that same day, both young men came down with strange and horrible diseases. They were dead in less than three days.”

A vision of Old Dan dying in Mrs. Cook’s guest room assailed Maggie, and she shivered.

“That meeting was the undoing of the council,” Huss continued. “Lord Robert took Evelyn’s part-blind fool that he was. The rest of us were divided. Accusations began to fly between us all, until at last it was hopeless to think of working together anymore. In less than three days the council was no more. Evelyn, in that meeting, swore to kill Mary someday. Even then, Lord Robert could not see what she was.

“And that is all there is to tell of the Council for Worlds Unseen. I came back to Pravik, nearly crippled by the shattering of a dream that had become more to me than I knew. But just as you recovered after the death of your foster parents, so I recovered after the death of my vision. I became a teacher, carrying on the work here in Pravik, keeping true history alive and out of the clutches of the Empire. I teach ancient languages, and legends, and dreams, but