“We are fortunate indeed, my lord.”
“Call me Marius,” I said.
Two hours later, I stood before the manor beneath a leaden sky, watching as Rebecca and Byron climbed into the waiting coach. The luggage was already strapped atop, and the driver was ready.
“We shall await your return, Master Marius,” Pietro said. A chill wind howled from the north, and the old servant shook.
I rested a palm against his withered cheek. “Dear Pietro,” I said, then climbed into the coach.
The driver cracked the reins, and the coach lurched into motion. I turned in the seat and watched until the manor was lost from view. It would be many long years before I would return to Madstone Hall, and I never saw Pietro again.
“This is all terribly exciting, Marius,” Byron said. The two Seekers sat on the bench opposite me. “You won’t regret joining us. There’s so much for you to discover.”
“Yes,” I said, noticing Rebecca’s eyes were on me. “Yes, there is.”
I am afraid I must now leap ahead in my tale, for it has taken me much longer to set down this account of my first two decades than I had imagined. However, I believe it was vital for you to see how I was made in my early years—for otherwise, when at last you reach the end, you might not understand why I chose as I did. Why I chose differently than Master Albrecht. And while I have had more time to pen this journal than at first I dared hope—it seems even eyes of gold do not always see clearly— the hour now grows late. Thus I will fly over those next years of my life, to a gray autumn day in London when once again my world was changed forever.
The year was now 1679, and at five-and-twenty years of age I was a man grown into his full power, yet still filled with vigor and optimism that the harshness of the world had not yet had time to wear away. As an order, the Seekers were much the same. Founded in A.D. 1615, the Seekers—like myself at the time—were just coming into their own.
The fractious early years, in which the order was little more than a motley collection of wild-eyed alchemists scrabbling for the secret of making gold in filthy, smoke-hazed dungeons, had been left behind, and already the organization would have been recognizable to a modern-day Seeker. The Age of Discovery and the Renaissance were giving way to an Age of Reason, and thus we chose a scientific approach.
The ideas of transmutation and the Philosopher’s Stone—a mystical catalyst that could bring about the instantaneous achievement of perfection in anything it touched—were thrown in the dustbin along with the ashes of myth and superstition. The Seekers had undergone their own Reformation, and while the order was founded on a belief in the existence of magic—a core conviction we had not rescinded—it was agreed we would approach the subject not with flights of fancy, but rather with logic and cold rationalism. Evidence that pointed to an otherworldly origin of magical forces on Earth was already mounting, and by the time I entered the Seekers the order’s focus was steadily being directed toward a single goal: the discovery of worlds other than this Earth.
It was an intoxicating notion, and at the time not so outlandish as it might seem today. Before the discovery of the Americas, people had believed a ship that sailed too far west would fall off the edge of the world. However, Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan had proven otherwise. So who was to say there were not other New Worlds waiting to be discovered? Except to find them, one would indeed have to sail over the edge of the Earth. And we thought we were the ones to do it.
Master Albrecht had warned me not to trust the ones who would come after he died, and while I did not entirely forget his words, I kept them at the fringes of thought. Surely his concern was with the Philosophers—the result of some old argument or misunderstanding with his peers—and while they were purportedly the leaders of the Seekers, it quickly became clear they were a distant authority at best. Rebecca and Byron had never seen the Philosophers themselves; in fact, I soon realized that none of the Seekers had. The Philosophers communicated with them only through letters sealed by wax and imprinted with their sigil—a hand holding three flames—and never appeared in person.
I considered telling Rebecca and Byron of the time the three with golden eyes had come to Madstone Hall, but decided against it. The last thing I wished was for something that would mark me as different. I had never had a family. My mother, the Gilroys in their silent mausoleum, Master Albrecht and Pietro—all had offered comfort in some way. However, none had been able to provide that all-encompassing sense of inclusion I now felt. The Seekers were my first true family, and I embraced them with all my might.
Those first months were filled with constant wonder and delight. The Seekers worked to discover new worlds, but I felt as if I already had, as if Rebecca and Byron had pulled aside a curtain woven in the dull grays and greens of Scotland and shown me the gilded door to a fantastical land I had never dreamed existed. London was grand and glorious, so full of life and beauty and grand squalor that it made Edinburgh look like one of the backward villages huddled around Madstone Hall.
Once my initial astonishment at my new life was complete, I threw myself into my work as a journeyman Seeker. Rebecca had not lied; my talents were indeed perfectly suited to the organization. I had a zeal for both ancient and modern knowledge, and a keen curiosity; but then, so did many of the Seekers. What caused me to excel was my ability to combine these skills with the instincts I had acquired on the streets of Edinburgh. Just as I had been able to sense which passages beneath the old city led upward to light and which plunged into darkness, I was often able to discern the avenues of investigation that would bear fruit from those that were dead ends before concrete evidence favored one over the other.
“You rise more quickly in the order than even I believed you would,” Rebecca said one evening as we lay entwined together on her bed.
We had become lovers not long after our arrival in London. It was not a serious affair. Both of us were far too interested in our work to devote our hearts to another. All the same, our match was a good one. I was tall and handsome, and she had made it clear during the long journey to London that she favored my look. In turn, I found her mature flavor of beauty alluring.
For all my work as a youth in Edinburgh, I had never lain with a woman, but that suited Rebecca well enough. We spent many hours in her chamber, on the upper floor of a small but comfortable house near Covent Garden, in which she taught me the art of making love. And when our bodies were pleasantly spent, we would engage our minds instead, drinking wine as we sat half-naked on the bed, speaking long into the night about modern science, and philosophy, and the nature of our vocation as Seekers.
I learned much from Rebecca, and perhaps more than she knew—though I suppose she might have said the same of me, for it is hard not to become at least a little vulnerable in the arms of a lover. Still, I think each of us guarded our inner hearts from the other.
I thought little about the life I had left behind in Scotland. Letters came from Madstone Hall—many at first, but fewer as time went on. I paid them little heed, and so I did not notice when they stopped coming altogether. I had no time for such cares. I threw myself into my work by day, while at night, if I was not in Rebecca’s bed, I could be found in one of London’s more raucous pubs with Byron—whose jovial company I had come to greatly enjoy—along with a band of the Seekers’ best and brightest young men.
Once I made the mistake of letting Byron take me to the Cup and Leaf on a night that Rebecca was expecting me. When I tried to beg my leave, the boys grabbed my coat and hauled me back down to the bench.
“Where did you think you’re going, Marius?” Richard Mayburn said. “You’ve had but a single ale.” Richard was a short, stout, red-haired young man who won every drinking bout he entered.
“I have somewhere to go,” I said, glancing at the window in hopes of a glimpse of the moon, knowing I was already late.
Byron gave me a sharp look. “By Zeus, you’ve got a woman waiting for you, don’t you, Marius? You sly cur.”
My blush was all the answer he needed and elicited whoops of laughter all around.
“So who is this tasty little trollop?” Richard said with an exaggerated leer. “And better yet, are you going to share her?”
“Not with the likes of you, Richard Mayburn,” said a cool voice.
We turned as one to see Rebecca stride across the pub. All eyes were on her, for she was out of place, but wonderfully so, like a dove in the midst of a flock of grackles. The smoky light softened the lines of her face, and her wine-colored gown accentuated the curves of her body.
“What on Earth are you doing here, Rebecca?” Byron hissed. “This is no place for a lady.”
“I’ve only come to fetch what’s mine,” she said, laying a hand on my shoulder.
Byron’s eyes bulged, and Richard let out a loud guffaw.
“Good show, Marius,” the red-haired man said, grinning. “Every man in the Seekers has tried to woo Rebecca and failed miserably, and now you’ve succeeded. What’s next? I suppose you’ll be telling us you’ve seen the Philosophers themselves.”
In the humor of the moment, caution fled me. “I won’t keep it a secret from you any longer, gentlemen. The man I dwelled with in Scotland—”
“Was purported to have seen the Philosophers once,” Rebecca smoothly cut me off. Her grip on my shoulder tightened, her fingers digging in. “Yes, so we learned before we came to see you, Marius. Though it’s just a tale, that’s all.”
I looked up. Rebecca’s brown eyes glinted in the lamplight. Did she know that Master Albrecht had once been one of them? Byron and the others clearly did not, for their eyes went wide at her words, and they plied me with many questions about my former master. However, I kept my answers short, for I could feel Rebecca’s gaze upon me, and told them only that he had been an enigmatic gentleman who had taken me in as an orphan and about whom I learned little before he died. It was true enough.
Not long after that night, my affair with Rebecca cooled. I went to her house with diminishing frequency, and we seldom shared her bed when I did. All the same, our partnership within the Seekers seemed stronger than ever, and we often worked together in our investigations. So often, in fact, that I fear Byron grew a bit jealous.
Byron was a good lad, but he was woefully unskilled with women. Somehow, when he tried to speak with them, he always ended up with ale in his face. While the Seekers have had female members from the start, in that time Rebecca was something of a rarity, for I had met no other lady Seekers. Thus it was only natural that Byron should be somewhat fixated upon her; she was the one woman he could speak with and not end up all wet. I feared he would grow angry upon learning of my affair with Rebecca. However, such was his good nature that he said nothing of it, and he remained as jovial a companion as always at pub.
I continued to rise in my career as a Seeker, and in only my fourth year as a journeyman I achieved a significant breakthrough. It was chance, really, that I came upon it at all, but my instincts alerted me that something was not as it seemed, and further investigation proved my hunch.
Near the house where I rented a room, little more than a stone’s throw from the Tower of London, was a bookshop I often haunted for its unusual and varied collection of volumes, especially relating to history. I often engaged in cordial conversation with the proprietor of the shop, a fine, white-bearded gentleman who went by the name of Sarsin. When he learned of my love for Virgil’s
Aeneid
, he clucked his tongue.
“The Roman poets were little more than thieves of the Greeks,” he said, then rummaged through his shelves and came up with many classic works of ancient Greece. After that, much of the wage the Seekers paid me went directly into Sarsin’s coffers, and I spent many hours sitting by the Thames, poring over the poetry of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
It was when I moved on to the works of Shakespeare that I began to grow suspicious. Sarsin claimed that his uncle, who had owned the shop before him, had known the Bard, for he had often come into the shop. I did not doubt that. However, more than once, when recounting these stories, Sarsin spoke as if he were the one who had met Shakespeare, rather than his uncle.
The shop owner was likely daft, I told myself. Yet I didn’t quite believe that, and my investigations soon proved I was right. Sarsin claimed that, like Shakespeare, his uncle had been something of a poet, and I convinced him to show me some of his uncle’s work, and to even lend me a yellowed piece of parchment with one particular song.
That night, I compared the handwriting of the song to that on the receipts Sarsin had written for me when I purchased books. There was no doubting it; both documents had been written by the same hand. Certain I was onto something, I began to question the oldest folk I could find on the lanes around the bookshop, and I soon found an old woman, quite blind now but still sharp of wit, who recalled the former proprietor of the shop. She described him as a handsome, elderly man with a white beard, thinning hair, and bright blue eyes.
It was Sarsin, of course. Not the fantastical uncle, but the one and only. Research into the city’s legal records confirmed what by then I already knew. Every fifty years or so, the owner of the Queen’s Shelf “died” and left the shop to his heir. However, though the names changed, the handwriting of the signatures on the deeds was always the same. There was only one answer: The man Sarsin had owned this shop for over a century and a half, and in that time he had not aged a day.
Excited, I reported my findings to Rebecca and Quincy Farris, our superior in the order, and that was when I entered into my first argument with the Seekers, for Farris foolishly decided to approach Sarsin. This was strictly against the First Desideratum, of course; the Nine Desiderata were set down in the Book by the Philosophers, and every Seeker, upon joining the order, swore a Vow to uphold them. However, Farris was an ambitious man—overly so—and no doubt he thought by winning over Sarsin he could seize this finding from me and claim it for his own, thus furthering his rise in the Seekers.