Free The Revolutions by Felix Gilman

oil, or with a mirrored lantern.
    The light was both a rather vulgar display—not the sort of thing one would expect from a person of Mrs Bloom’s sophistication—and rather splendidly eerie. The odd thing was that no one else appeared to have noticed it. The room was quiet; the journalist from the Morning Chronicle stared idly at the ceiling.
    Bloom lowered pen to paper, and began to scratch.
    Josephine supposed that she might have had an accomplice standing outside the window with a red lamp. But how, then, to explain the shape of the light: a faint and trembling sphere?
    It wasn’t bright. Its faded colour awoke a memory.
    When Josephine’s father died, he had left a collection of specimens, curios, and oddities. He was an amateur antiquarian, and a man of varied and eccentric interests. There were old farmer’s almanacs, and rusty nails that he had marked as Roman circa AD 400? , and a verdigris’d sextant, and a small collection of saints’ fingernails, et cetera. Among the collection were four cases of butterflies, which Josephine had never seen before—and did not see again, because her mother promptly sold them. That was shortly before her mother, who’d always been of a nervous disposition, began to suffer headaches, and night terrors, and then waking visions—hell-fire and warring angels—as if those awful visions had been held in check by her husband’s rather mild and scholarly form of religion and released upon his death.
    There’d been well over a hundred butterflies in the cases, of many different and beautiful colours. Josephine had studied them for days after her father’s death. She remembered one beautiful creature in particular; it had occupied an undistinguished position near the bottom left of its case, with nothing written on the scrap of yellowed paper beneath it except “ AFRICA (?), ” but its wings had been the most extraordinary shade: a deep and dusty damask-rose, edged with azure and indigo; a morbid and passionate and sad and violent colour; the same colour that hovered now over Mrs Sedgley’s table, slowly revolving.
    Josephine couldn’t quite judge its size, because as soon as she started to think too closely about it she felt dizzy, and she had to hold on to the edge of the table. (Miss Shale, watching with one eye open, saw Josephine holding the table and followed suit, so as not to be left out).
    From the far side of the room came the sharp sound of glass cracking.
    Mrs Bloom started at the sound. She dropped her pen and it rolled off the table. Mr Innes got up in a hurry and moved about the room igniting the lamps, and gaslight banished whatever Josephine had seen or thought she’d seen.
    Mrs Bloom sat veiled and very still at the head of the table. The pen had burst and her hand was soaked with ink, but she hadn’t flinched in the least; she had controlled herself utterly. Everyone else pushed back their chairs and inspected behind themselves and underneath the table for something broken, until Mrs Sedgley thought to pull back the curtains, revealing that one of the windows had a crack running down it from top to bottom.
    “ Well ,” Bloom said, in a voice that silenced all whispers. “The spirits have made themselves known to us. But what is their message? Clearly they are agitated. I can see that I may have to prolong my visit to London; this investigation will be a challenging one.”
    *   *   *
     
    Josephine’s hands shook as she packed away her things.
    On the way out she noticed that the mirror in the hallway was gone. In fact, now that she thought about it, the mirror in the drawing-room was gone too, replaced by a painting of some sheep. She asked Mrs Sedgley what had happened to them.
    “Oh, yes. That was Lord Atwood’s idea. He says that mirrors are a way for evil influences to get in.”
    “ Lord Atwood?”
    “Oh, my, yes.”
    “Who is he, Esther?”
    “Ah—that’s a question, isn’t it? He has a very interesting reputation—or so I’ve