The Music of Razors (6 page)

Summoning an intelligence such as Voso’s is no easy matter. It is no tearoom beckoncall. It is an effort of collective will with no margin for error.

Finella decided she would try again, elsewhere, and that meant leaving all she had here in Boston. Margaret Fuller’s ideas were taking root in cities across the country. Somewhere she would find a place to finish her studies to her satisfaction. But first she had a final duty to the group, and she would see it through. She would be with them, prepare with them, and together—one last final, extraordinary act—they would summon Voso.

Henry didn’t know what to say. The news left him hollow, filled with cold air. Finella spent no time with him now, and instead focused rigidly on the task at hand. When Henry couldn’t sleep he found himself tangled in impassioned scenes he would never realize, and soon she would be gone.

Dorian vanished without so much as a word. Jukes rabbited on about it, speculating endlessly. Dysart was unflustered. The nightly meetings continued. Finella stopped coming once she realized Dorian was out of the picture for a while.

Three days later he resurfaced, contacted every one of them, and appeared at the Coat and Arms without any of his usual overflow. He ate no food during his time there that night, and drank no brandy. He provided them all with sheets of clean paper, wrapped in white linen. Hubris had made so many things possible for him in his short life. Overconfidence, he said, had been his greatest virtue. But calling down an ageless, cunning, and merciless piece of the universe was so much more than a trick of supreme confidence.

“When the time comes,” he had said, “it will be an hour before midnight, and the moon will be waxing, not quite at her full power. The weather will be calm, and still, and we will be in a place far removed from any disturbance. Before that time we will prepare. I ask that you pay close attention to me now, that you might understand my full meaning: we must be prepared, or we shall be destroyed.” He let his eyes rove from one member to the next, drawing from their eyes what he needed to know. “Prepared,” he said again. “Impeccably and, above all, sincerely.”

“Sincerely,” Finella repeated. “What form do these preparations take?”

“Destroyed?” Jukes said.

“For the most part it consists of what you would expect: abstinence. Complete and absolute, from anything impious or impure. Engage in nothing that offends body or soul. I shall provide each of you with a prayer, which you shall inscribe once a day upon the paper I have provided you, for three days. I shall provide you with an exact account of how the working will proceed, and you are to spend those three days considering it, meditating upon it as you work, placing yourself at the service of your fellow man.”

Dysart cleared his throat. “I see.”

“For three days you must surrender yourself to others. Seek out those who need you. Do so selflessly. Sacrifice your wants, your desires, your identity, your pride, and your doubts…become selfless. For three days.”

Henry watched Finella, expecting her to laugh, or to point out the inherent insincerity of such a thing. Instead she said, “Very well.”

Dorian looked to Henry. “Do you comprehend the change of mind I am asking you to undertake? To shift your world to a new axis, if only for three days? Are you able to permit such a shift to topple your psychological architecture into a new configuration? Can you both admire and dwell within this new house, completely and utterly, for three days?”

There were many things Henry could have said at that point. Instead he took one look at Finella, sitting straight-backed, hands laced on the table before her, and said, “Of course.”

“Of course,” Jukes said.

“What have you decided upon for the working itself?” Dysart rumbled.

“In the end the form of the service matters little. What is paramount is the purity of our souls, minds, and flesh.”

Dysart sighed luxuriously, thoughtfully, and raised his thick, cloudy eyebrows. “I’ve done worse.”

After shrugging into their coats, Dorian said, “Say good-bye to this room. We won’t be needing it again.”

“Indeed,” rumbled Dysart. “The time feels right for a good last act.”

“But…,” said Jukes.

“If we are successful,” Dorian said, “we progress. It may well be that our paths diverge from that point on. And if we fail…well…”

“Destroyed,” Henry said. “You believe the thing you want to call down could actually kill us.”

“All things are possible.”

Finella listened to the conversation as though it were one of the professor’s lectures: attentive, saying nothing, taking it in. Henry realized he really had remained here for her. Regardless of whatever fascination he had for the group’s explorations, regardless of the fact that these people now constituted the entirety of his social circle in a life now devoid of both family and schooling, he had remained here for her. He hadn’t even asked what the ultimate point of it all was.

“Good night, Henry. I will see you all four evenings hence, at the arranged location.”

“You’re not coming back to Mrs. Brown’s?” Henry said. “She’s been worrying after you.”

“As Master of Ceremonies my duties differ from yours. Remember: pursue your good deeds, memorize your prayer, study the service, give yourself over to a cleansing and selfless transformation—if only for three days—and we will all witness and achieve the most extraordinary thing.” And Dorian left the room, walking stick in hand.

“Saintliness isn’t the aim,” Dysart rumbled, throwing a scarf about his broad neck and adjusting his aged topper. “Only the absolute suspension of our own needs and wants, which are the bedrock of our cumbersome personalities. Become selfless—without self—a conduit for the happiness of others. Embrace the change of mind, the feelings it provides, and come to us on the fourth night with a pure and selfless heart, untroubled and uncluttered by the baser needs of mind and flesh. A conduit for something greater still.”

Finella took his arm. “We want to be doctors, Henry. Selflessness should be in our very natures. Come on, walk me to a cab.”

The street air was bracingly cold, briny and feculent and still. A stray man clutching his tweed coat about himself hurried along, shoulders hunched, breathing into the heat of a cigarette. They stopped before a horse cab, and that was when Finella released his arm and said, “The next time we see each other shall be the last time. I wanted to thank you, Mr. Lockrose, for your company this past year. Though I admit things seemed to be at sevens and eights between us for a time, I am glad to have made your acquaintance and consider you a friend. You shall make a fine doctor, Henry.”

Henry didn’t know what to say. It was now or never.

Instead he said, “Good night, Miss Riley.”

“Good night.”

He held the door open for her as she climbed aboard. The driver nick-nicked, slapped the reins, and amid a crisp clatter of wheels and hooves Finella was gone.

It felt a little like being born, standing there, with nothing left and no real idea as to what came next. Everything was new, somehow. Blank. As beautiful and terrifying as an Arctic landscape. He thought about what was to come. Three days of selflessness.

Blank and empty, then, was a good beginning.

The air was rich and sweet with stink—a stench most people never paid any attention to. The sewers beneath them were barely contained. Overflows were frequent—an especially high tide could do it—and tuberculosis was on the rampage, more so in Boston than almost anywhere else in the country. On first arriving in New York, and then here, it had surprised and saddened Henry the density of filth a city could contain, how a metropolis could float upon it. Somehow he had expected something different.

He closed his eyes for a moment as he walked. To be truly selfless was to be as uninhibited as a libertine. As thoughtless as an idiot child. It was to allow anything passage through you that had the whim.

Henry wanted to see the water.

He spent the best part of a cold hour clipping briskly toward the old State House and the myriad wharves that bristled out onto the Charles River just beyond it.

If someone asked him for money, he gave it.

If someone told him their story, he listened.

He found a disheveled young man clutching himself in a doorway, poor bulwark against a biting wind. Whoever he was, he was in his early twenties and had the drawn features one saw so often on people who remained on the street after nine o’clock on cold nights like this. The woolen glove on his right hand, clutched weakly to his left biceps, lacked a fingertip or two, and there Henry saw how black his nails were, how corrupted the flesh of his fingertips. He gently took the sleeve of that arm and rolled it up a little. Infection had worked its way up from his scrofulous fingers, spreading along the lymphatic vessels of the arm. There was an abscess at the wrist, a fragile dome and amber-filled.

“What happened,” Henry asked. “Was it these cuts on your fingers?”

The young man nodded weakly. “Broken spittoon,” he said. “Me master’s. At the time. Who are you?” His breathing was like a gentle wind over stray leaves. His coughs were blood against stone.

Henry slipped the young man’s arm around his shoulder and helped him to his feet. “It’s all right. I’m a doctor.”

If Voso felt kinship with woodland then woodland Voso would have. Dorian had made a good choice, an area of woodland that was yet to be cleared not too far from where they all lived yet removed enough that they would not likely be disturbed.

Henry stood alone in the small clearing they were to be using. He knew this was the place, because Dorian had laid the space out beforehand. The ground had been swept, in a circular fashion, and Voso’s sigil scratched roughly into the earth. Later it would be prepared correctly, the runnels filled in with chalk. A small supply of candles and a pile of linen robes were stored in a duffel sack nestled into the roots of one of the larger elms, gone leafless with the turn of the season. Henry wondered if Dorian was around, perhaps watching, an idle voyeur. That certainly seemed like something he would find amusing.

He had not slept in three days. He felt apart from the world, rather than part of it. It ordered his thoughts.

What a strange life it had been. To have come from the north and ignorance, and come southerly into God only knew what. If he had taken a different boardinghouse, he wondered, would he have met Dorian anyway? What was it that had delivered him here…why had Dorian delivered him here. Henry wasn’t anything special. What made Dorian think tonight would actually succeed?

Think, nothing. Believe, nothing. Dorian knew. That was the difference.

So many questions.

“Mr. Lockrose?” Finella stepped into the clearing. “Oh, it is you. I was wondering…”

“This is the place.” Henry inclined his head toward the circle. “How are you, Miss Riley?” In truth she seemed changed. No bodice, none of the formal clothing she so often chose. Finella wore a plain dress, with plain shoes, her auburn hair no longer bound up, only tied back from her face. It suited her. It highlighted her natural loveliness. “Been away?”

“Yes. You?”

“No.” Henry looked at the circle. The waxing moon dappled light across it, the straight lines and neat curves of Voso’s sigil discernible as a different kind of shadow amid the soothing, scattered play of light and dark.

“It feels as if we’re meant to be here now. As though everything up to this point in time has occurred for a reason.” Voso’s name lying in wait before him, Henry crossed the clearing toward her.

She didn’t stand on formality. “Henry…”

And he kissed her.

For two seconds he lived in the only point in time that would ever feel like home. And then she pulled away, leaving him with naught but the sound of her feet on leaves.

Time passed. Shadows shifted. Dorian and Dysart arrived, carrying tools. Within an hour all was ready.

“Where’s Jukes,” Henry asked.

“Adam won’t be joining us,” Dorian replied. “In fact, he is not even aware that we are here tonight. He is an unfortunate liability in a situation where such a degree of seriousness and focus is required. It would have been irresponsible of me to include him. Now let’s have no more talk.”

Which left them with four.

They worked in silence, none speaking for fear of destroying the meticulous preparation of the preceding three days. Finella would not look Henry in the face.

Dorian waited in the clearing, at the northern point of the circle. Voso’s mark was a smaller circle within a circle with his name—
VOSO
—inscribed in the between-space, and his symbol in the center. All was marked out in trails of powdered chalk. This would be the space of their working.

“Over there”—Dorian pointed away from the four spotfires that lit the clearing, flames sheltering inside a border of round stones—“you will find a few simple robes, nothing fancy. Remove your clothes—all of you—and bring the robes over here.”

Henry watched as hesitation and horror at the idea of exposing his rotund form flashed across Dysart’s face. Nonetheless they retrieved the garments laid out for them on the dead leaves, and disrobed. It was a chill night, yet Henry felt nothing shedding his clothes. He kept his eyes forward, neither cold nor shamed. He simply was.

Dysart on the other hand wrestled with the first of many layers concealing his form, and Henry felt a pang of sympathy for the man. Finella took the act of disrobing with good grace, and Henry in turn felt obliged to maintain her ease by treating their state as incidental.

This was the first time he had stood naked in the presence of any woman other than his mother. He had kissed Finella and regretted nothing. Being naked before her was like something he had always known. His spirit had touched hers, and now they would part.

This, then, was both death and birth. Henry felt as resigned to it as anyone on his deathbed, as any child at his confirmation.

They crossed the clearing to where Dorian waited on the other side of the circle with a giant steel pitcher of water. He took Henry by one thin shoulder and turned him around, tipping the jug above his head. Henry gasped loudly, convulsively, as chill water crashed over his head, spreading in icy sheets down his entire body.