It happened in this way.
You will not be surprised to hear that the Cisneros Society was capable of committing multiple outrageous offenses simultaneously. Constable Roy Maxwell had been assigned to investigate one of them. It was a mysterious death by stoning that had taken place in the very center of Gloucester, in broad daylight, and before a crowd. There could be no question that enchantment had driven the stones, which flew through the air by the dozens until their quarry lay senseless. Maxwell had been unable to identify the victim. How could he, when, unbeknownst to him, the victim had been lured several miles from home? The Cisneros Society had left no clues for him to follow. After pursuing many fruitless leads, he began knocking on doors at random in the vicinity of the crime, an approach I knew would lead him exactly nowhere.
The neighborhood he chose, which you may be familiar with, is called “the Lobby” after the lobster fishermen who live there. And while most of its inhabitants are peaceable, a few have claws much sharper than those of their prey. The houses are crammed up against one another on crooked streets, much like lobster traps thrown together on the ocean floor, and the air has a tang of crustacean to it even in the dead of winter. Now it was summer, and in the wilting heat the place smelled of rotting seaweed. Maxwell’s deputy, tall and skinny, with a shock of reddish hair, sagged in the fetid air; he took off his hat and fanned himself to no effect.
Maxwell ignored the heat. Though he was sweating through his shirt, he wore his coat buttoned. He was of average height and average build, with a careful and considered way of walking. He didn’t waste his movements. He carried a thin, pewter truncheon—both the badge and defense instrument of the officers of criminal enchantment. A band of gold on his left forefinger was his only token; it concealed something about his appearance. He seemed to have no vanities apart from this concealment. His skin, heavy eyebrows, and close-trimmed beard gave him a Grecian aspect. Though he looked about twenty-five years of age, his face conveyed a stillness and reserve more typical of older men. With a patient, untroubled air, he repeated the same tiresome steps over and over: he knocked on a door, explained his query, showed the victim’s necklace, asked several minutes’ worth of questions, received a few unhelpful morsels, said his thanks, and walked on to the next door.
It was maddening. While I hadn’t intended to meddle, I found I couldn’t help myself. For Maxwell had come to the door of a white house with peeling paint. The sole window was boarded up with planks of soggy wood, and a crude insult had been scrawled onto the door with charcoal. Maxwell and thedeputy couldn’t know that inside the crooked walls of the dilapidated house, three men were pasting rum labels onto bottles of seawater. They sat around a table, shirtless in the stale air, their hands rough with paste, silently brushing and slapping, brushing and slapping. Four knives and two revolvers rested amidst the bottles. I could imagine what would come next. Maxwell would be insistent in his questioning; the men would be reckless in their self-defense. It would not end well.
With a weary hopelessness, certain that my gesture would prove futile, I urged caution, sending Maxwell a sense of foreboding just as he raised his hand to knock. To my astonishment, he paused.
He put his hand down. He raised it again to knock, and again I sent him a surge of foreboding. “Hm,” Maxwell said quietly. He put his hand down. To his deputy, he said, “Not this one, Ben.”
Ben, mopping his face with his sleeve, nodded without any resistance or curiosity whatsoever. He only wanted to be done with the Lobby as soon as possible. But Iwascurious. Who was this unusual man who heeded the warnings of spirits?
On that first occasion, I’d been too startled by his response to press any other suggestion upon him. But afterward I considered that a man who listened to my subtle pressure could be persuaded to listen again—and more closely. I visited him a few days later in the surprisingly appealing rooms he rented near the Salem Athenaeum: light-filled, sparsely furnished, and dotted with curiosities from around the globe. Every wall featured two or three botanical illustrations, eloquently executed, and I realized from the traveling easel nestled by the front door that these were Maxwell’s own.
He was repairing a window, setting a new rectangle of glass into the mullioned frame. I sent him a slight suggestion of disquiet, a sense that something needed his attention. Almost atonce, he put the glass down and looked up attentively, searching the room. Then he astonished me further. “I’m listening,” he said quietly.
In those early days, I had a limited vocabulary of influence; I hesitated, wondering how to get him out the door. But he was a careful listener, and he was patient. When the impulses I sent him were confused, he paused and waited for clarification. That morning in June, it took me nearly three hours to lead him to a farmhouse in Ipswich surrounded by apple trees that had lost their blooms. Maxwell knocked on the door without knowing why he was there; he’d trusted me every step of the way. An old woman with a white cap opened the door, holding a handful of asparagus. She looked at Maxwell desperately. “Have you found her?” she demanded.
“Excuse me,” Maxwell said politely. “I’m Constable Roy Maxwell. Whom should I have found?”
“Elizabeth Baines. She goes by Beth. She’s in service at the Morton house in Beverly, and they said last week that she’d run away. They came looking for her here, but I haven’t seen her since she came back on her day off in May.”
“Ah…” Maxwell said, nodding thoughtfully. He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and withdrew the necklace that he’d shown to the inhabitants of the Lobby. It was a small, brass locket in the shape of a heart. The faceted crystal held a swirl of brown hair, and a skull was engraved onto the brass back. Maxwell handed it to the old woman, who dropped the asparagus.
“That’s Beth’s!” she exclaimed, seizing the locket. “Where did you find it?”
Maxwell’s face grew grave. “Are you Mrs. Baines?”
“No—her mother’s passed away. That’s her hair here, my daughter’s. Beth has one and I have one.” She fumbled eagerlyat her neck and withdrew another locket identical to the one in her hand, as if desperate to prove the similarity. “I’m Beth’s grandmother.”
Maxwell nodded gently at the locket. “I see. I’m very sorry. I have bad news for you about Beth.”
I watched him convey the news with sober delicacy. Then I watched him spend much longer than necessary sitting with the young woman’s grandmother as she wept, and railed against the Morton family, and described how their son had been hounding Beth for months, and lamented that she hadn’t brought her home before it was too late. I had no reason to hope that Maxwell would understand Morton’s culpability, much less his connection to the Cisneros Society. And yet, he had listened to me, and now he was listening to a mourning grandmother, and that in itself was something. By the time he left, it was almost dark; he had spent the better part of the afternoon with her. It was most unusual conduct for a constable.
But Maxwell, as I would soon learn, was a very unusual constable.
After my assistance in identifying Beth Baines, Maxwell trusted my guidance implicitly. Sometimes I guided him to the answers he sought in mysteries that had nothing to do with mine; sometimes the mysteries I helped him solve were entwined with mine invisibly; and sometimes I left him breadcrumbs to discoveries that seemed to have no evident meaning but would, I hoped, reveal themselves to have significance in the fullness of time. With this last variety he showed a remarkable patience, seeming to accept them for what they were: indecipherable, but somehow still important.
On the first of September the air lightened, as if summer hadsuddenly tired of its bad humor. After a night of cooling rain, the sun shone but did not glower; the streets looked clean and refreshed. Maxwell was waiting for me, as he always did now on Saturday mornings. If the weather was poor, he sat upstairs in his reading chair by the window; if it was fine, he waited on the stoop. Today he was sitting on the stoop with a copy of Ovid’sMetamorphoses. As I nudged him, he put the small book into his jacket pocket with a smile. Poor man—he didn’t know how long the journey would be; there was something Maxwell needed urgently to see. Ovid would have to wait.
I pushed him a few blocks northward to the Common, where coaches with their drivers waited by the perimeter. Lifting his eyebrows a little in surprise, he approached the coach that was first in line and climbed aboard. To the driver’s question regarding the destination, Maxwell hesitated. He looked forward, left, and right until I gave him a nudge of encouragement. “Southward,” he said.
This was more difficult than guiding a man on foot, and after Maxwell requested several short stops in order to “reconsider” the route, I began to worry that the driver would end by chucking him into the road. But once we made our way out of Salem to the long thoroughfare southward, we were on better footing. I flooded Maxwell with reassurance. “This way,” he called to the driver, relieved. “Keep going!”
I was leading Maxwell to the Lynn Woods. Not to the Manse itself, for a lone constable could do nothing, as yet, to confront the Cisneros Society. But he needed to see evidence of the Society’s crimes.
Thursday’s gathering at the Manse had ended, close to dawn the next morning, with predictably abhorrent results. The creation of the moths had tipped the party early toward unbridled excess,and it had only grown worse from there. Possibly the twenty crates of champagne imbibed did not help. Hubert Pye, a shipping magnate who every week moved many tons of sugar from the islands to the cities of the Eastern Seaboard, had expended a small fortune winning the auction for the privilege of donning the Cisneros Steel. Lacking any creativity whatsoever, Pye had copied the moth maneuver and turned all the fish in the Embalmer’s pond into mermaids. This had led to a spectacle both comical and tragic, for the twenty-five mermaids didn’t fit in the pond once they’d been transformed, and the assistance of a hundred aged, inebriated men in formal wear was not sufficient to prevent the poor creatures from flopping helplessly on the flagstones, desperately seeking water. In a rare display of sympathy—or perhaps he merely wished to show off—the Embalmer had transformed them back into fish, but it was too late. All but one expired.
The moths hadn’t fared much better. Some survived the lavish attentions bestowed upon them by the guests and were transformed back into moths by the Embalmer at the end of the evening. Two tried to escape by fluttering up toward the chandeliers, where their wings and hair were terribly burned by the candlelight. And one, a clever little insect with mottled wings, dashed out into the night when the men went outside for the mermaid debacle. She had rushed into the woods beyond the Manse and disappeared into the darkness, finding a tentative, uncertain freedom in her new form.
If the Embalmer noticed her disappearance, he hadn’t troubled himself about it. But I had. After the party ended in a trail of departing carriages, I followed the trail of the little moth into the woods. She’d found shelter in the branches of a great oak tree, and there she shivered with cold, clinging to the branch with pitiful single-mindedness. The moth fairy would not last long.
Now, after a long drive, Maxwell’s coach arrived at the edge of the Lynn Woods. With my guidance, he led the driver to an easterly entrance that avoided the Manse’s boundaries on the northern side. The carriage continued until the dirt road became too rugged, and I impressed upon Maxwell an unmistakable sense of satisfaction. He called to the driver, thanked him for indulging his idiosyncrasies, and asked him to wait. Then he alighted and paused for my instructions.
We had settled much earlier that summer on a simple method for way-finding. I avoided the stronger emotions of excitement, fear, and apprehension; as attuned as he was to subtle suggestions, I could simply guide him with a sense of niggling curiosity. And so, letting this instinct propel him, he stepped off the path and into the woods. Here the pine trees grew thickly, and an occasional fallen tree blocked the way. Maxwell stepped carefully over the rust-colored needles, edging around the taller trees and toward a rocky outcropping. As I urged him toward the moss-covered flank of the rocks, I pressed a note of caution upon him. “Your warning is noted,” he said quietly. Then he came around the corner and found her.
