Yorkshire, but never Langstrade. I wish I might share your hope, but when one reaches my age, the likelihood that everything one does is being done for the last time becomes difficult to dispute.”
“Mastery of animal magnetism does not confer exceptional longevity, then?” Michael observed, a trifle mischievously—then cursed himself immediately for having allowed a little of Escott’s subversive personality to rub off on him during the train journey.
Carp did not take seem to take offense. “Only to a small degree, I fear,” he said, with a faint sigh. “The effects of magnetism have kept me healthy and alert in the meantime, though, and have given me many other privileges denied to the ignorant and the contemptuous.”
Michael assumed that the old man was referring to the conversations he supposedly held with the dead via his somniloquist. He had also been introduced to the woman currently playing that role: a buxom Frenchwoman named Jeanne Evredon, not much older than Carmela Monticarlo, to whose reluctant care the old man had confided his ward before coming to supervise the transfer of his luggage.
Michael’s equipment was unloaded first, and Michael had to leave the old man alone temporarily in order that he might transfer the fragile items to the diligence personally. He took great care to check that the tools of his trade were safely stowed on top of the coach. By the time he was satisfied, Augustus Carp had finished supervising the securing of his own trunks to the postilion’s station, and the two were able to walk to the Inn together.
The low ceiling of the inn’s dining-room was stained yellow between its oaken beams by tobacco-smoke, and the walls were hung with a random admixture of horse-brasses and prints reproducing badly-painted hunting-scenes or steeplechases. There was a strong odor typical of such institutions, which Michael always took care to think of as the odor of oxtail soup, although he knew that it was really the olfactory ambience of human body-odor.
The Minotaur’s refuge would doubtless have emitted a more intense version of the same odor, he thought. But one always gets used to it after ten minutes or so—unless, of course, mine host takes it into his head to serve oxtail soup.
Fortunately, this being Yorkshire, the innkeeper’s wife was busy serving plates loaded with mutton chops, potatoes and Yorkshire pudding to all the diners.
Their companions had secured a trestle-table long enough to accommodate the entire party, but the two seats still vacant were positioned at one corner, between Mademoiselle Evredon and Lady Phythian. Politely standing aside to let the Mesmerist sit next to his protégée—although Carp hesitated before accepting the invitation—Michael sat down between the old man and the dowager.
Revived by the change of scene, Hope and Escott had begun holding forth again, but the size and shape of the table were such that other conversations could be comfortably undertaken in parallel. Lady Phythian did not seem ill-disposed toward Michael any longer, having obviously found his relative quietness and amiability a welcome contrast to Hope and Escott’s warmongering in the railway-carriage, but she did not seem inclined to talk to him either, evidently preferring to cultivate the acquaintance of her other neighbor, Signor Monticarlo. Michael had no alternative but to resume his interrupted conversation with Augustus Carp, but he did not mind that; he was still curious to know more about the vocation of Mesmerism.
“It must be uncommon, Mr. Laurel,” Carp suggested, before Michael could frame a question of his own, “for you to receive a commission to paint a building like Langstrade Keep. Recently-elevated aristocrats often have their brand new stately homes painted, I believe, but not their Follies.”
“Do you consider the Keep to be a Folly, then, Dr. Carp?” Michael asked. “Hope and Escott do, of course, but I thought that you might be more sympathetic to Lord Langstrade’s…eccentricities.”
“I have long since learned to keep an open mind,” Carp replied, with another sigh, “and I would not be so impolite as to say so to Lord Langstrade, but yes, I do consider the Keep to be a Folly, and I fear that the likelihood of my satisfying his lordship’s expectations is far less than the likelihood of you completing the commission that he has imposed on you. If Jeanne were actually able to contact the spirit of Harold Longstride, I would be utterly amazed.”
“But Lady Phythian is convinced that there really are ghosts haunting Langstrade,” Michael told him. “She was telling us during the journey that she has seen them several times over, albeit in the grounds rather than in the Hall itself.”
“There are ghosts everywhere,” Carp said, morosely, “but they rarely turn out to be the shades we expect and desire them to be. Revenants have their own reasons for visiting the mundane world, and our ability to fathom those reasons is far more limited than we might wish. Thanks to the great Anton Mesmer, we have recently opened up channels of communication with the dead, but the inhabitants of the afterlife have, alas, proved no more reliable as helpers and informants than the present inhabitants of the mundane world.”
“Well,” said Michael, feeling obliged to attempt a compensatory cheerfulness, “for what it may be worth, I think that you have more chance of achieving some effect, even if your success seems less than total to Lord Langstrade, than Gregory Marlstone has of breaching the boundaries of time and allowing us to see into the past—not that we’ll be able to see very much, since we’ll be enclosed by tall hawthorn hedges.”
“That is exactly the point, as I understand it,” Carp suggested. “Because the hedges are recently-grown, and the Keep recently-built, he hopes that we might be able to see them shrink and expand, perhaps even to vanish and let us watch the Hall in the process of construction. I haven’t discussed the matter with Marlstone personally, mind—but that’s the inference I draw.”
“You’re probably right,” Michael conceded, readily enough. “In that respect too, the Keep and its environs might be reckoned a particularly suitable location for his third full-scale trial. Will it be suitable, do you think, for your own endeavors?”
“Marlstone and I have the same objective, even if our instruments are very different,” Carp observed, reflectively. “We both aspire to cross commonplace boundaries, and rumor has it that he also expects to make contact with phantoms if he should ever succeed in getting his apparatus to work. I too am dependent on an instrument whose unreliability can be frustrating—but if there are phantoms at Langstrade, as I’m assured that there are, I certainly hope that I might be able to make contact with them, and perhaps elicit some explanation of their presence.” He glanced sideways as he spoke at Mademoiselle Evredon, who blushed slightly at the reference to her unreliability, but pretended not to have heard it because she was concentrating on whatever Hope was saying. Michael winced on her behalf, and dropped his fork, which clattered embarrassingly on the table-top.
“Personally,” Carp continued, “I wish Mr. Marlstone every success. If his machine really can permit people in the present to catch glimpses of people in the past or the future, if only as silent phantoms, that would be a wonder to outshine all the others that we have recently seen. It might change the world far more profoundly than the steam engine.”
“If we were to receive news from the future rather than the past, it surely would,” Michael reflected. “If we were able to discover today what we would otherwise not discover for a hundred years…well, that way lies paradox.”
“Only logic fears paradoxes,” Carp said, in a rather mechanical fashion, as if quoting a saw. “We should be braver, if we are not to be prisoners of our own intellectual inventions.”
“That’s a nice thought,” Michael said. “Even so, if Marlstone ever does get his time machine to work, there might be hazards involved, just as there must be in your work. If you or he can obtain accurate
