Evermore (Emily Chambers Spirit Medium Trilogy #3)(70)
It turned out to be white, not grey, and quite a pretty little thing. It wore a slender leather collar studded with black jet surrounded by rings of gold. A lovely piece that must have been worth a small fortune.
"Let me have a closer look," Tilda said, removing the collar. "It might have a name or..." Her sentence trailed away as a sliver of tingles crept from her hand along her arm. Her fingers grew warm, as if the collar threw off heat. Impossible.
And yet she knew it wasn't. This strange phenomenon had happened several times over her twenty-four years. Whenever she touched an object separated from its owner, her skin heated, as if the source of the heat was the object itself. And then a clarity came to her, like a vision of a path to follow.
Her mother had explained what it meant when Tilda had first asked her about it. She'd been barely eight years old. The object was like a talisman and it was using her to find its way back to the owner. Tilda's mother had possessed the skill too, but had warned Tilda to keep it a secret. At the time, Tilda didn't know why but later she did.
Divination was a dangerous skill to possess in a time when machines ruled and the men who controlled them were treated like Gods with wealth and privilege thrown at them. Anyone possessing paranormal abilities—a power not based on mechanics but on the unexplained—was treated with suspicion and fear. The most powerful, the hellhags, were blamed for all the ills to befall a community. An epidemic of disease was said to be caused by the hellhags, the unexplained death of a child or the occurrence of any strange phenomena was laid at the feet of women with even the most tenuous skill.
It only took one accusation, one pointed finger, and an entire community would jump at the chance to punish the person responsible for their tribulations. According to the law, hellhags were to be put on trial and hung until dead. It was a long English tradition, one deeply entrenched in the hearts of even the good. No one would deny the simple folk a target for their fears, least of all the inventors. A cynical person would claim the inventors didn't want rivals more powerful than themselves, didn't want anyone to take their place at the helm of the government and the forefront of progress. And since their class held the ear of the law-makers, the law stated that anyone possessing strong non-mechanical abilities must be put to death.
Tilda, like her mother before her, may only possess a weak and rather useless talent for finding people but it was not a talent she wanted to advertise to the world. She didn't want to be branded a hellhag by mistake. Letitia too had shown signs of some skill at divination but hers was even weaker than Tilda's.
The heat from the collar grew more intense so Tilda placed it on the table and plopped down on one of the chairs. She and Mary exchanged glances. Letitia was too busy cuddling the dog to notice.
"You all right, miss?" Mary asked, eyeing Tilda closely.
"Did it have any writing on it?" Letitia said, nodding at the collar. She scratched the dog under the chin and made coo-coo noises at it.
"Er, yes. An address. I'll take the dog back." Tilda scooped it up.
Letitia pouted. "Now?"
"I'm sure the poor thing would like to see its owner again."
"I suppose." Letitia sighed. "Some little boy or girl must be missing him."
"Be careful, miss," Mary said, fixing the collar around the dog's neck.
"Why?" Letitia asked, frowning at one and then the other.
"There's a lot of construction work going on in the city," Tilda said quickly, scooping the dog into her arms. Its fuzzy little face nestled against her chest. "Of course I'll be careful."
Tilda set off immediately with the dog tucked under her arm. It would be lovely to see it back where it belonged. As Letitia said, perhaps the owner was a child. How happy they'd be to see their beloved pet again! It seemed to enjoy the company of people and didn't mind the loud grinding of digging machines, the whir of cranes and the shouts of workers that had taken over London of late.
She followed the path laid out for her by the divination, a somewhat tenuous thread that pulled her along. Whenever it weakened, she touched the dog's collar and the way was made clear to her once more. The process took a great deal of concentration, and so keen was she to reunite the dog with its owner, she walked right up to the palace gates before realizing where her divination had taken her. Straight to the queen.
It wasn't that the sovereign was so terrible. Tilda actually admired her. It mustn't be easy for a woman to rule over a rapidly changing country dominated for so many centuries by men. It's just that the queen was the one who'd reinstated the law to terminate all the hellhags after a deranged one had tried to assainate her early in her reign. The country had gone nearly three hundred years without incident and hellhags had become normal members of society in that time, neither feared nor loathed until the horror of thirty-seven.
Not that Tilda was a hellhag. A little skill at divination didn't put her into that category. Nevertheless, it was best to keep even her small amount of power from the authorities. They tended to get over-zealous.
With her heartbeat skipping more erratically than it usually did after divining, she walked up to one of the red-coated guards standing to attention at the gate and told him about the dog. She gave him a story about having seen the queen's servant out walking it once and so was able to identify it as belonging to Her Majesty when she found it. The guard gave her an unreadable stare. He opened his mouth to speak when a man approached. He was tall with a pointed black goatee and moustache and bright striped vest of green and gold. Set against his cream colored coat and breeches he looked different to the dreary figures who usually walked the city streets.