be a lamp!- Lydia pushed open one of the side doors to admit a rinsed and cindery light. It showed her a key on the hall table, and turning, she closed the front door. For a time she stood undecided, debating whether to lock herself in and observing the deleterious effects of massive amounts of adrenaline on her ability to concentrate...
How would I go about charting degree of panic with inability to make a decision? The workhouse wouldn't really let me put my subjects into life threatening situations.
In the end she turned the key but left it in the lock, and stepped cautiously through the door she had opened, into what had probably been a dining room but was as large as the ballroom of her aunt's house in Mayfair. It was lined floor to ceiling with books: goods boxes had been stacked on top of the original ten-foot bookshelves, and planks stretched over windows and doors so that not one square foot of the original paneling showed and the tops of the highest ranks brushed the coffered ceiling. Yellow backed adventure novels by Conan Doyle and Clifford Ashdown shouldered worn calf saints' lives, antiquated chemistry texts, Carlyle, Gibbon, de Sade, Balzac, cheap modern reprints of Aeschylus and Plato, Galsworthy, Wilde, Shaw. In front of the bone clean fireplace, a massive oak chest, strapped with leather and the only furniture in the room, held a cheap American oil lamp of clear glass and steel, the trimmed wick in about half a reservoir of oil. Lydia produced a match from her pocket, lit the lamp, and by its uncertain light read the titles of the several new volumes, half unwrapped from their parcel paper, which lay beside it. A French mathematics text. A German physics book by a man named Einstein. The Wind in the Willows. How much time left?
With a certain amount of difficulty Lydia produced from beneath her coat a curious device-a simple brass bug sprayer of the pump variety, its nozzle carefully capped with a pinch of sticking plaster-and a shoulder sling manufactured from a couple of scarves in last year's colors. She removed the cap, reslung the sprayer on the outside of her coat and, picking up the lamp, moved off through the house.
The first-floor room contained more books. The rear chamber, book lined also, held furniture as well. A heavy table, strewn with mathematics texts, abaci, astrolabes, armillary spheres, a German Brunsviga tabulation machine, and what Lydia recognized dimly as an old set of ivory calculating bones. At the far end of the room loomed a machine the size of an upright piano, sinister with glass, metal, and ranks of what looked like clock faces, whose use Lydia could not begin to guess. Near it stood a blackwood cabinet desk, German and ruinously old, carved thick with gods and trees, among which peeped the tarnished brass locks to concealed recesses and drawers.
A wing chair of purple velvet, very worn and rubbed, stood before a fireplace whose blue and yellow tiles were smoked almost to obscurity, its arms covered with cat hair, an American newspaper lying on its seat. Movement caught her eye and made her gasp, but it was only her own reflection in a yellowed mirror, the glass nearly covered by a great shawl of eighteenth-century black point lace that hung over its divided pane.
Lydia set the lamp down and lifted the shawl aside. Thin and rather fragile looking, her reflection gazed back at her: flat-chested and schoolgirlish, she thought despairingly, despite her twenty-six years. And despite everything she could do with rice powder, kohl, and the tiny amount of rouge that were all a properly brought up lady could wear, her face was still all nose and spectacles. Four- eyes, they'd called her, all her childhood and adolescence-when it wasn't skinnybones or bookworm-and if her life didn't, quite literally, depend on how quickly she could see danger in this place, she'd never have worn her eyeglasses outside her rented Bloomsbury rooms.
Her life, and James' as well.
She let the lace fall, touched again the silver around her neck and the fat, doubled and trebled links of it that circled her wrists under cuffs and gloves. Why a mirror? Something one wouldn't expect to find here. Did that mean the stories were wrong?
She picked up the lamp again, hoping the information she'd learned on the subject was even partially correct. It was a disgrace, really, that over the years more scientific data had not been collected.