The Oversight Read online

  “Things look a little soupy for the Eagles,” said a voice in her ear, and she turned to find that Charlie had done his unsettling thing and turned up at her shoulder without her realising it.

  “Don’t count your chickens,” she retorted. “They’re not done yet. They’ve got something up their sleeve—”

  “Wouldn’t be magicians if they didn’t,” grinned Charlie. “But I don’t know how they can top that last trick. Walking back in here, the ground’s carpeted in them yellow rosettes. Crowd’s an ugly thing when it turns. Poor old Georgie-girl.”

  At that point Georgiana stepped onto the stage, and the crowd simmered to a mutter and then complete silence. It became clear what all that rustling noise had been. Georgiana had taken off the beribboned costume and all the flashy stage jewellery and stood in front of them in a white underdress, the shift that she had worn beneath her finery. More than that, she had scrubbed the make-up off her face so that she looked pale and defenceless, which Lucy saw as a second masterstroke, not just because the stratagem matched Anderson’s determinedly unadorned style, but because removing the finery and the make-up allowed the audience to focus entirely on Georgiana alone, and Georgiana alone and unadorned was infinitely more compelling and–the word popped into Lucy’s head unbidden–genuine.

  The shift dress was both virginal and pure in itself, yet almost indecent in the way it allowed the curves and prominences of Georgiana’s body to reveal themselves without any restraining stays or corsetry–not that she had any need of their gravity-defying aid from what Lucy could see. Georgiana’s body was clearly well developed, thin-waisted and flat-stomached. But the lack of flash in the costume also allowed the girl’s extraordinary face to shine, her eyes glimmering brighter than any of the paste jewels she had discarded. Her demeanour, when she began to address the crowd, was a similarly compelling mix of the demure and the provocative.

  “Ladies and gents,” she said, and Lucy noted that she had subtly altered her accent to appear less lofty than she normally did, adding a cheeky, almost cockney lilt to her voice. “Gents and ladies, my father will be with us in a moment. After such a memorable and impressive illusion as we have just witnessed he was bowled over, as you might imagine! He was so very deeply affected by the skill and grace of Mr Anderson’s achievement that he decided on the very spur of the moment to show you something more than he had at first intended.”

  “I bet he did!” cried a woman from the back. “Anderson ate your lunch, and showed us how you cooked it and all!”

  There was laughter at this, but also some men who shouted that the heckler should keep a lid on it and let the little lady have her say in the name of fair play.

  Georgiana did not bridle at this, instead she laughed gaily and shrugged like the best of sorts.

  “I cannot deny that Mr Anderson has seen our old act and reproduced it perfectly with considerable vim and added spice, so well did he anatomise it…”

  “Anatomise?” shouted the woman from the back. “He pulverised you!”

  Less laughter this time, and more shushing from the men in the crowd who were, for differing reasons, becoming rather entranced by Georgiana and her visible attractions.

  “Yes,” she laughed. “Yes, he did. For those of you who have been lucky enough to see my father’s act, it will be obvious that Anderson has stolen our wind, so that for us to offer you our normal show would prey on your indulgence. It is because of that that we will today perform for the first time ever a feat which stretches the very definition of the impossible far beyond the already extraordinary sleight of hand that we have seen tonight.”

  At this point she turned and led a fresh round of applause for Anderson who was standing in the crowd just in front of the stage on the other side from Lucy. This was clever since she acknowledged the rival and flattered him, which had the result of getting the crowd to like her for the guileless magnanimity of her gesture. Yes, thought Lucy as she watched, entranced: Georgie was something.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, two days ago my father received a letter from Buckingham Palace itself, requesting that what we are about to show you be displayed to a certain crowned personage whom I will not be so indelicate as to name. We were asked to conduct a private performance at Christmas time. But now my father feels that this very night, this very minute, is the right time to show you the quintessential impossibility of impossibilities, the Manus Gloriae itself, the one, the only Hand of Glory!”

  And with that she swept her hand toward the wings where a black-gloved hand emerged into the light. The audience was quiet for a moment, and then the fingers flexed and Na-Barno stepped out, revealing that the moving hand was detached from a body, and carefully held in his own fingers. At this point there was a settling noise in the crowd–not quite an intake of breath, but a shared sense of “now this might be very interesting”.

  “That girl can lie as easy as water flows,” whispered Charlie admiringly. “Letter from the palace, my arse.”

  Na-Barno placed the hand on the table at the centre of the stage. As he explained what he was about to do, Lucy stared at it with growing unease. When he announced that he would choose someone from the audience to come up and verify that it was a real hand, flesh and blood and not clockwork, Anderson shook his head at his boots and mumbled something. Fast as a snake, Georgiana pointed at him and hushed the crowd.

  “Mr Anderson!” she cried. “I detect an objection! If you would be kind enough to share it with the rest of the audience, I am sure we would all be much obliged.”

  Her question led to more head-shaking and then Anderson cleared his throat and, with the encouragement of others in the audience who shouted things like “go on then matey!” and “spit it out, man”, he averred that the method of choosing a seemingly random tester to verify the hand was fatally flawed, as she had called for volunteers but had then herself selected the tester from the hands that had gone up. He was sure, very sure, he was almost entirely sure that the delightful Miss Eagle was beyond reproach, but he merely wanted to point out that a strictly critical viewer might suspect that she had picked a, er, planted confederate out of the crowd.

  “Mr Anderson is RIGHT!” shouted Georgiana, and turned to look at her father. Only Lucy and perhaps Charlie had the angle on them to see that she winked in triumph before turning back to the crowd.

  “If Mr Anderson suspects us of such a cheap and obvious trick, perhaps he could suggest a foolproof method of choosing a tester?”

  The crowd grumbled approval, liking her open-hearted offer.

  “Or…” she continued, waving them to silence, “or indeed, who could be a more critical or qualified tester and examiner than the very person who has most to gain by proving us false in our assertion that this Hand of Glory is a REAL HAND! Who but Mr Anderson himself?”

  The crowd loved it and Anderson found himself manhandled up onto the stage by a posse of sturdy farmers.

  His eyes told Lucy that he knew he had lost the unstoppable momentum he had seemed to possess at the end of his own portion of the show, but was not yet clear how or to what purpose.

  “She done that well,” breathed Charlie. “Played him at his own game, like he used her. And turnabout is fair play. Style in plenty, that girl has.”

  Anderson climbed up on the stage, a slight sickness in his professional smile revealing that he was aware he was being paid back in kind.

  Georgiana passed him the hand. He opened the buttons at the wrist and peeled the black leather to reveal the pink skin beneath. The crowd murmured in approval. He pinched the flesh and looked puzzled.

  “It is warm,” he said despite himself.

  “Of course,” said Na-Barno. “I told you. It is alive.”

  Anderson pinched the skin again. The hand spasmed and he almost dropped it in surprise. The reaction was so real, so genuine that the audience jumped too, and from that moment on were convinced something magical was afoot.

  “That’s just a—” said Anderson, trying to compose
himself. “That’s just a trick.”

  Georgiana reached into the bundle of hair artlessly piled up behind her head, and retrieved a sharp hat-pin. As she did so her hair fell around her shoulders in a shining curtain.

  “Prick it,” she said, holding out the pin. “Did not the immortal Shakespeare describe what it is to be alive when he said, ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?’ ”

  “Perhaps I should tickle it, then?” suggested Anderson, trying hard not to be led by this unexpectedly formidable young girl.

  “It has no mouth to laugh,” she said. “It is just a hand. But it will bleed.”

  The crowd began to chant “Prick it! Prick it!” with such gusto that Anderson had no choice. He held the hand up and jabbed the needle into the thumb.

  Sara Falk woke with a cry and folded in over the stump of her hand. Emmet stood beside her and Cook was sitting by the small fire at the end of her bedroom looking up from the book she had been reading.

  “Sara?” she said.

  Sara did not look at her. Her voice was sluggish and distant.

  “My thumb. They pricked my thumb again.”

  A small bead of red trickled down the thumb of the hand in Anderson’s grip.

  “Blood!” cried a girl at the front of the crowd.

  “Jab it some more!” shouted a nasty voice from the darkness. “Give it what-for! Make it dance again!”

  Anderson turned to Na-Barno and looked at him, his back to the crowd. His face lost the patina of professional bonhomie as he whispered, “This is not something for show, Eagle! It is something you cannot explain or control! You have never understood; you do not know what you are playing at. It is real…”

  “Mr Anderson has told my father that the hand is REAL,” shouted Georgiana. “Is that not so, sir?”

  And so Anderson had to turn back to the crowd and aver, with a sickly smile of forced good grace, that the hand was real.

  A shiver of dark delight went through the crowd at this, a sense that now they were to see something truly forbidden. Lucy, however, felt something entirely different.

  As she watched Na-Barno set up the stage for the next part of his performance, she looked at the hand, a pale crab-like thing with the leather peeled back at the wrist, and she knew what it was. And she knew whose it was, even before Georgiana made a great show of removing the rings from her fingers and placing them on the hand.

  “The Manus Gloriae is a powerful thing, ladies and gentlemen, but to keep it safe we do not allow it to wear the magical rings that truly awaken its dark power until we need to make it work for us,” explained Na-Barno. “The rings are a safety feature. But now the hand is beringed and we will, in a moment, see the spirit awake and the hand be ready to communicate with us!”

  Georgiana held the hand by the wrist as Na-Barno angled a large mirror over the table at forty-five degrees so that the crowd could see the tabletop. He then lit a candle lamp and directed the beam onto the hand which everyone could now see was not just resting on the table, but on a sheet of white paper.

  He held up his own hand and magicked a pencil out of thin air to a mild smatter of applause, and then put it between the fingers and thumb of the hand.

  He walked to the front of the stage and calmly closed the shutters on the footlights until all that remained by way of light was the lamp on the table and the mirror reflecting the hand beneath it out into the audience.

  The tabletop appeared to float in the dark. His face and that of Georgiana hovered on either side, like disembodied heads on the edge of the candlelight. It was an eerie and effective illusion, and the audience grunted in satisfaction.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen, silence please as I wake the hand and ask it my name. I do this by tracing the words ‘WHO AM I?’ on the back of the hand, like so.”

  And he used the hat-pin to write the question carefully on the skin.

  The hand did not move. He smiled.

  “The spirit is willing, but the hand is still weak with sleep,” he said, and jabbed it.

  Sara Falk gasped again and then gritted her teeth.

  “It’s asking me who it is,” she said. “If I do not write ‘THE GREAT WIZARD’ it will hurt me again.”

  “Then do so,” said Cook. “Why give it cause to give you more pain?”

  The hand twitched. And then, to the audience’s great approval, began to write.

  It wrote:

  I. AM. SARA.

  Na-Barno shook the hand and pinched it with a smile at the audience to hide his irritation.

  “It is sometimes hard to make the spirit wake and do our bidding.”

  He wrote the question again.

  The hand replied in bigger letters.

  I. AM. SARA.

  Georgiana cleared her throat and widened her eyes at her father.

  Sara gasped.

  “Sara!” said Cook. “What do you gain by defying it?”

  Sara looked at Cook, her red-rimmed eyes glowing like coals in the pale snow-field of her face.

  “What do I gain by defying a cruel oppressor?” she growled quietly. “Everything. I gain myself.”

  Out of sight of the audience Na-Barno had palmed the hat-pin and jabbed the hand, holding it steady as it twitched and flinched in pain.

  “We will try again! Perhaps an easier question, one which will tax its will a little less,” he said, and he said the words as he wrote on the hand, “What colour is the sky?”

  The hand gripped the pencil and wrote again.

  I. AM. SARA.

  Lucy was getting a sick feeling in the depth of her stomach as her brain played tricks on her and made her remember the smell of baking Eccles cakes and the kind eyes that had looked into hers as Cook had gently sponged the hessian gag from her mouth, the same grey-green as the stone on the disembodied hand.

  Lucy was used to doing bad things. She was used to lying and cheating and stealing and running away. These were all the tools by which she survived. And though she could only remember her past in dribs and drabs, she could not remember this feeling, this sense that she had done something worse than just bad or criminal, that she had done something fundamentally wrong.

  The crowd around her was silently staring at Na-Barno, and she was aware that she had stopped listening for a moment. He was holding the hand, stump down, over the flame of the candle lamp.

  Lucy heard herself gasp “Don’t!” without knowing she’d said it, but the rumble of the crowd drowned her out.

  “Sometimes we must warm her up!” cried Na-Barno.

  Sara cried out and writhed in her bed, clasping at the mirrored end to her arm. She gritted her teeth and tried to keep silent, her jaw clenched shut, her eyes wide, and she tried until Cook was sure that the veins standing out on her temples would burst.

  “Child!” she said, unable to watch any more.

  As she reached out to her, Sara choked out a despairing gasp, tears streaming from her eyes.

  “Hot,” she sobbed. “Burning!”

  “Sara—” said Cook.

  “Enough,” said Sara, falling back on the pillows. “Enough. It has won.”

  The hand flopped in Na-Barno’s grip as he pulled it away from the flame, which had also dulled the mirrored stump with candle soot.

  “Now we shall see!” he cried. “Now the spirit is AWAKE!”

  He propped the hand onto a clean sheet of paper and put a pencil between its fingers.

  “Another question!” he called. “Perhaps a simple mathematical one?”

  A loud voice at the back enquired as to what three times six was. Na-Barno traced the sum on the hand and stepped back. The angled mirror showed the hand scratching out a number 18.

  The crowd applauded.

  “Another!” shouted Na-Barno.

  Someone asked what seven times ten was, and the hand scratched out a large 70.

  The crowd applauded even louder.

  “A more general question, perhaps?” cried Na-Barno, elati
on pinking his cheeks. “Now the spirit seems to be so amenable!”

  “What drink is made from apples?” shouted a woman near Lucy.

  Na-Barno traced the question with his hat-pin. And the hand flexed and wrote “CIDER”.

  Now the crowd was baying its approval.

  “Let us ask again if it knows who I am, shall we?” asked Na-Barno. The crowd roared a thunderous YES.

  He wrote the question with the hat-pin.

  The hand didn’t move.

  He prodded it with the point of the pin. It winced, and then began to write.

  THE ENEMY.

  The crowd gasped.

  He smiled tightly and exchanged a look with Georgiana. She nodded at the pin. He jabbed a little harder.

  The crowd oohed, this time catching the gesture and the bead of blood that dropped onto the paper.

  “It cannot feel pain,” cried Na-Barno quickly. “Not as you or I do. It only needs a little… gingering up!”

  Lucy felt sick.

  “Who—?” began Na-Barno, but the hand spasmed and began to slash letters before he could finish tracing the question.

  I. AM. SAR. FALK.

  The hand missed an A, but something broke inside Lucy, so suddenly and sharply that she felt it like a crack.

  And so, without planning to, she moved.

  As she moved she knew she had two things in her favour: Na-Barno had shuttered the footlights to give the single lamp on the table greater dramatic effect in showing what was being written on the paper. And secondly, the crowd was already confused and mostly drunk.

  She snatched the hat off the man in front of her and skimmed it hard across the front of the stage. The hat hit the candlestick and toppled it. The flame went out, and for a moment the tent was plunged into darkness. Before the crowd could react, before it worked out that this was not some surprising part of the act, Lucy was in motion, going fast, vaulting over the shuttered footlights. She hit Na-Barno in his midriff with her shoulder and felt him grunt in surprise as he toppled backwards. She scrabbled for the hand and for a horrific moment couldn’t find it.