10
And loyal, every one
WILLIAM DAVEY
By tradition, the guests waited until the clock in the outer hall struck three, at which time servants entered discreetly and began moving occasional tables aside and setting up chairs in ordered rows. At the far end of the room, in front of the sideboard and beneath the black-draped portraits of Ross and Combe, they set a somewhat more ornate chair; a portable secretary was placed on a small table on the right, behind which John Jackson settled himself, preparing pens and ink for the meeting to come.
Only a few arrived later than I had done. If there were no weighty matters to discuss I might have taken note of their tardiness, but that day I did not care. When the servants withdrew, a small group of junior members drew lots and the short straw went reluctantly out into the entrance hallway, the doors closing firmly behind him. No one else would be admitted.
I walked to the cleared space near the sideboard and waited for everyone to take their seats.
“Welcome, my friends,” I began. “I am gratified for so many of you to take time to be here this afternoon. We have important matters to discuss and I have information to impart regarding my recent time in Sydenham. Mr. Jackson, if you please.”
I turned to Jackson, who stood and began to read the minutes of the previous meeting, held a few weeks before Christmas. It had been ill-attended—the weather had been even more wretched than it was today. In the room, the light from the chandeliers and sconces seemed to be fighting against the gloom as Jackson spoke.
My recollections of that meeting were quite sharp. We had taken the decision to accept Esdaile’s invitation to Sydenham, and had determined the course of action to deal with him. At the time, I had felt that my clerical collar might have a better chance against the chthonios—the earth-demon—that Esdaile had “married,” which had defeated several of our number in previous encounters; I had therefore volunteered for the task.
None of that had ultimately mattered: neither the Committee’s intentions, nor my consecration, nor my skill as a mesmerist. James Esdaile had decided how the scene would play out—Esdaile, the Scottish doctor whom the society had so admired, and so reviled, and on whose face scarcely anyone in the room had ever laid eyes. He was a stranger: and now he was dead.
Jackson finished his report, which garnered neither objection nor amendment. He resumed his seat.
“Most of you have heard,” I continued, “that our former colleague has died. We had already concluded that it might be necessary; I had gone to Sydenham to carry out the Committee’s will. As some are aware, he took his own life—not to avoid having me do that service for him, but in part to cheat the chthonic being with whom he had bargained.
“It came as a surprise to me—and I expect it would have done to most of you—to learn that this being had simply possessed the woman to whom he was married. His wife was not merely a manifestation, but rather an indwelling. When he died, the creature fled, leaving its host behind—and alive—and, remarkably, sane.”
“How did you survive it, then?” Elliotson piped up. He had chosen a seat in the front row, as he always did, so that there would be no one to block his view.
“The same way Esdaile did—and the same way he was able to resist my own abilities. We were within the Crystal Palace. Esdaile had discovered its disruptive effect on magnetic auras—both for practitioners of the Art and for chthonic beings. Somehow, he learned this and kept it from his wife’s possessor.”
“And from us.”
“Almost all of us,” I answered, “but perhaps not all. Someone”—I pointed up above the heads of the audience—“someone, perhaps someone in this very room, equipped him with that information. This is no sudden epiphany: he moved to Sydenham five years ago, just in time for the re-opening of the Crystal Palace on its present site. He had planned this for a long time and kept it secret.”
“Why now?” Dickens stood up in the rear of the room. “He waited five years to pull you down there so he could commit suicide in front of you? That beggars the imagination, Reverend.”
“I appreciate your acquaintance with matters of plot, Mr. Dickens,” I answered. It made Dickens’s brow lower just a bit, and Elliotson’s as well. He had a point, but I wasn’t going to let him capitalize on it. I continued, “I can only answer that he planned this ending more than five years ago—or that something caused him to move to Sydenham when he did in anticipation of the ending. Why he chose to do it at this time—I have no answer to that question. But”—I held up my hand, forestalling the author’s retort—“please recall, sir, that he invited us.”
“That is completely irrelevant.” Dr. John Forbes—Sir John Forbes, KB—stood, a few rows from the front of the gathering. He was heavy-set, with stout side whiskers and no beard; though elderly, he still possessed a strong voice which gathered the attention of everyone in the room. “It doesn’t matter who did the inviting. You have clearly mishandled this entire affair. I assume that you do not have the statue we desire—and I further assume you let this … demon escape to cause more mayhem, as well.”
“I do not have the statue. As for the demon—I flatter myself that I am skilled in the Art, Dr. Forbes, but I do not think I had any choice but to let it go.”
“It still calls your competence into question, Davey.”
“Sit down, Dr. Forbes.”
“And your leadership,” Forbes added angrily. “And—”
“Sit down,” I said. I raised my left hand slightly, fingers held together, thumb extended and pointing downward.
Sir John Forbes remained on his feet for only a second or two, then dropped back down.
There was silence in the room.
“It is our custom,” Elliotson said mildly, “to refrain from using the Art during our business meetings.”
“Except for challenges.”
“True,” the little doctor answered. “Do you believe that constituted a challenge?”
I let my hand fall to my side. In the quiet room everyone heard Forbes exhale, gasping. No one came to his assistance.
“No. I suppose I do not. Mr. Jackson,” I said without turning. “Please note that I shall pay the customary fine.”
At the back of the room Charles Dickens looked at Forbes, who was bent down with his hands on his knees, then back at me. Then he, too, resumed his seat.
I told them in some detail what had happened at the Crystal Palace—down to the Shakespeare quote, which made Elliotson frown but drew a smirk from Dickens. It was clear to me that because the account was not especially complimentary to my abilities, they took it to be true.
Of greater interest was the summary of my interviews with Eliza, in which I told the Committee what I wanted them to hear. Calumny about James Esdaile was even easier to accept, since they were already predisposed against him. It would be an exaggeration for the reader to believe that most of my fellow Committee members were actually sympathetic to the poor woman’s plight: I think that, of anyone present, I may have had the strongest feeling of compassion toward her.
As for the rest, I expect that some of them intended to intrude personally upon her bereavement to obtain further scraps of knowledge. That would certainly not happen. I had already arranged with Jackson to have her protected from any predatory challenges. She was not to be interfered with and to be left alone. If there was more information to be obtained, I would obtain it in due time.
The only part of the story I withheld—and I believe that it was for the best, at the time—was the relationship between Eliza’s chthonic possessor and the statue itself. It complicated the tale and converted the item from simply a mesmeric amplifier into a sort of channeling device. There was truly no need for anyone else to know.
To my surprise—given Jackson’s and then Elliotson’s warnings—there were no more challenges, not even from Ann Braid. It was not merely the demonstration on Forbes that dissuaded them, though that was a quite satisfactory bit of theater; Forbes was a crank and a fool and, had he possessed an ounce of sense, would have known better. I think it was more a matter of competing interests among those who did not trust each other in the first instance. To challenge me that February afternoon, they would have had to decide who among them would take my seat. None of them wanted to try and fail. None of them wanted the others to take it, either.
Still, I took the step I had suggested to Jackson: I offered D’Orsay the opportunity to recruit talented individuals at Cambridge and—should he find a suitable adjutant to help him—at Oxford as well. My suggestion caught most in the room by surprise, since (as Jackson had observed) I had been previously hesitant to release this responsibility.
But D’Orsay’s response, while positive, should have given me warning. I suspect that I was somewhat distracted and did not notice, but neither did Jackson or anyone else among my allies and rivals.
We all should have known better.
“Mr. Chairman,” D’Orsay said, “While it is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing, I wonder if this effort is not five or ten years too late.”
I leaned back in my seat, hands loosely grasping the arms of the chair. “Please explain.”
“There seems to be more and more rejection of the disciplines and principles of the Art at Cambridge, Reverend. At certain colleges, mesmerism and other new sciences are even subjected to ridicule.”
“We are acquainted with that, sir. We are even accustomed to it.”
“Of course. But it is one thing to have mesmerism dismissed in public debate, so long as those who find it of interest can be identified and cultivated. But rigorous ‘debunking’ is having a deleterious effect. It is not just a matter of ridicule—the perception is forestalling any opportunity to identify likely candidates.”
“This is an old problem,” William Engledue said from the far side of the room. “We understand that very well, D’Orsay. Very well.”
In the middle of the audience, Ann Braid sat stiffly, her face passive but her eyes full of fury. For more than ten years, while she had improved her own skill and built a power base among the Committee, her father had been an ardent and vocal opponent of the Art. James Braid, surgeon and scholar, was well respected in the medical community—he had even coined a word, hypnotism, to describe the mundane method for achieving the trance state which (he asserted) would require no knowledge of or power over personal magnetic fields.
To Dr. Braid, his daughter’s interest in mesmerism was deplorable: he had stated frequently that he felt it to be a hindrance to her marriage prospects—though there had been rumours of an amorous relationship between Ann and Braid’s protégé, Dr. Richard Daniel.
Her father’s derision was a sore point for Ann Braid. It was a stick often used to beat her.
“You should take it as a challenge, D’Orsay,” I said mildly. “We will find new capable people—it just may require some additional effort.”
“I will endeavor to do so,” D’Orsay said.
Engledue stood again. “Mr. Chairman, we need to combat this problem at the source.”
“We have had this discussion before.”
“Then I suggest that we have it again. This was once merely an annoyance; now it is a problem. It needs to be stopped. There is someone who needs to be silenced.”
“He is not readily accessible to our techniques, Engledue,” I said, glancing at Ann Braid, who was looking straight ahead.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Davey. There are other ways.”
“No.” I stood up and took a step forward; as I did so, everyone in the first row straightened and leaned slightly backward. “I know exactly what you mean, Engledue, and I forbid it. James Braid is our opponent, but he is a public figure, a man of stature in the medical community. That is the wrong approach and will only harm the Committee.”
“And we are not being harmed?”
“Of course we are. But we have tools at our disposal to balance things in our favor.”
“But we can’t use them against Braid.”
“There are some who are resistant to the Art, Engledue. Dr. Braid is one of them. And even if he was not, we do not need to do this. And we will not resort to other means.”
“Davey—”
“I forbid it, unless you are prepared to challenge me right now, Engledue. You are at something of a disadvantage: everyone outside our circle believes you are already dead.”
“Davey,” Elliotson said, “there’s no need for—”
I looked directly at Engledue, holding my hand up to Elliotson—who, sensibly, fell silent.
“Choose right now, Engledue.”
“I’m not challenging you.”
“Then sit down.”
“There was a time,” Engledue said, “that debate was a part of our meetings. I see that time is past.”
He sat down. The room was absolutely quiet, except for Forbes’s still ragged breathing.
“If there is nothing further,” I said into the silence, “then this meeting is adjourned.”