The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(119)
Just then the door swung open, and a distressed Murray, poised to confront any possible horror, burst into the room.
“What the devil’s going on? Are you all right, Emma?” he demanded, pale with worry, eyes darting about the room in search of some enemy to hurl from the window.
Realizing there was no one there, Murray approached the girl, kneeling beside her and gingerly placing his great paw on her shaking back. Emma went on crying, but gradually calmed down, as though lulled by the sound of her own sobbing. Murray sat her up gently, leaning her head on his shoulder, and put a sturdy arm around her. His eyes were drawn to the map spread out before them.
“What is this, Emma?” Murray asked at last with infinite tenderness.
“It’s the Map of the Sky,” she said in a whisper. “A picture of the universe by my great-grandfather Richard Adams Locke. He gave it to my grandmother, who gave it to my mother, who gave it to me. All the women in our family have grown up believing this was what the universe looked like.”
“Is that why you were crying?” Murray asked, then added, “Well, it’s beautiful to dream.”
Emma raised her head and peered into his eyes. Their faces were so close now that Murray could smell her tears.
“Yes, I realize that now. Isn’t it awful, Gilliam? Now . . . ,” the girl said, and Murray caught a whiff of sweet, faintly sour breath, like that of a little girl who has just woken up, a smell unknown to him and that melted his heart. “I wasn’t crying for the days when I dreamed the universe looked like that, or because in the last few hours dreaming has been obliterated from the face of the Earth forever. I was weeping over my own silly irresponsibility. Had I known dreaming would one day become impossible, I would never have stopped doing it. I would have done things differently. And now I don’t know how to recover that lost time. That’s why I was crying. For lost time, and lost dreams. Where do undreamt dreams go, Gilliam? Is there a special place for them in the universe?”
Murray noticed the girl’s eyes were not completely black, as they had looked from farther away. A few honey-colored flecks, and other finer ones, seeped from her pupils like filaments of gold floating in the unfathomable darkness of space.
“They don’t go anywhere. I think they stay inside us,” he replied. Then he gave a sigh and smiled at her gently before adding, “I saw you, Emma. I saw you as a little girl.”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw you. Don’t ask me how, Emma, because I couldn’t tell you. But I did,” he insisted, shrugging his shoulders. “I know it sounds crazy, but the day of our second meeting, in Central Park, just before you walked off in a huff leaving me alone in the middle of that little bridge, there was a moment when I looked into your eyes . . . and I saw you. You must have been about ten or eleven. You were wearing a yellow dress—”
“I don’t think I ever had a yellow dress.”
“And ringlets—”
“My God, Gilliam, my hair was never—”
“And you were clutching this rolled-up map to your chest,” Murray said finally, pointing to Locke’s drawing.
Emma remained silent and looked straight at the millionaire, trying to discover whether he was deceiving her. Yet she knew he was telling the truth. Gilliam had seen her. He had penetrated her eyes, entered her soul, and seen the little girl who dwelt there.
“I saw you, Emma, that was you. Inside you. Clutching your dreams,” Murray said, experiencing the same astonishment that was overwhelming her.
And then, if falling upward were possible, if gravity could stop working for a moment, stop pinning us to the floor like a paperweight, it happened to Emma. She felt she was falling upward, toward the sky. Emma slid toward Murray’s face, and such was the overpowering seriousness, the smoldering intensity of his gaze, that she imagined she was spinning into the sun and would burn up at the first touch of his lips. However, neither of them was able to test their skin’s flammability, because at that moment they heard Wells’s voice echoing down the corridor.
“Miss Harlow, Gilliam! Where the devil are you?”
“We’re in here! At the end of the corridor!” the girl’s voice rang out. She leapt to her feet, drying her tears, while Murray remained kneeling in front of her, as though waiting to be knighted. “Come on, Gilliam, get up,” Emma whispered.
Wells came in, followed by Clayton. The two men remained in the doorway, taken aback by the odd tableau before their eyes: Emma standing, dressed like a boy, her eyes red and puffy, Murray at her feet, genuflecting theatrically.
“But, what . . . did you trip over, Murray?” Clayton asked in astonishment.
“Don’t be absurd, Inspector,” the millionaire muttered, rising to his feet.
“Don’t you realize what’s happening?” Clayton said, exasperated. “Look out of the window. See those flames in the distance? The tripods are rampaging through Lambeth. We must leave at once!”
Murray gazed calmly out of the window, as though none of this concerned him. The inspector sighed.
“Well, let’s go. I’m taking you to a safe place where we can spend the night, and at dawn we shall join Mr. Wells on Primrose Hill,” he informed them sharply.
“Just a moment, Inspector! I have no intention of moving Miss Harlow from here until you tell us where we are going,” Murray protested angrily. “Is anywhere safe in London? You’re not taking us to a church, I hope. You don’t imagine God can protect us, do you?”