Eleven years later, in the city of Oxford, he met her again for the first time...
In 1870, Jack Cade is admitted to the new-breed stronghold of Pandemonium, a colony of people just like him: descendants of the vanished demon race, all of them extrao...
Manda woke with a start, untangled herself from the covers, and groped her way over to the table by the window, where there was usually—although, for some reason, never in the same place twice—a candle and a box of matches.
The flagstones were cold under her feet. They jolted her into some semblance of consciousness, even though it was a nervy semblance of consciousness, as frazzled and chaotic as her hair.
She had to remember what she'd been dreaming about. Her dreams were often helpful in Sam's cases, although he could never be persuaded to admit it.
They weren't prophecies, exactly. Madam Seacombe had always referred to them as sympathies. They were always visions of the sufferings of Oxford people—it was just that they weren't limited to a particular time-period. Manda caught the feelings of future inhabitants of Oxford as well as past and current ones. Sometimes, her susceptible heart would catch the pangs of their childhood and the pathos of their deathbed all at once—a combination which had more than once caused her to fall out of bed.
She lit the candle and sagged back onto the covers, leaning her shoulders against the damp stone wall. It wasn't hard to get from bed to table to wall with a single motion—in fact, she could touch all three, if she stretched her legs out, because her cell in the upper rooms of the University Church was only a few feet wide.
Normally, the visions passed through her head like a street procession—banging cymbals and tambourines under her nose, blinding her with sparklers and sequinned costumes. Normally, she was quite happy to lie back and be bewildered until the dawn light put an end to it all.
But, tonight, the same woman had danced past her twice, as though she'd started out at the head of the procession, and then doubled back, changed her costume, and passed Manda again, just to give her an unsettling sense of déjà vu.
But, no, it had been the same dress each time. It was just, at the start of the procession, it had been white, and, by the time she'd waltzed around again, it was a deep, blood-red. And both times she'd been clutching a little bunch of blue flowers. Forget-me-nots, perhaps.
She fumbled for a pen and wrote that down, trying not to think about the way Sam would raise his eyebrows when she tried to maintain that this was important.
It was important. She just didn't know why yet.
Manda lifted the table and groped underneath it, looking for the battered old book she had wedged underneath one of the legs to keep it steady. This was partly a practical measure—because they didn't have much money for repairs—and partly to keep the book out of sight of Madam Seacombe, who disapproved of sensationalist literature, especially tragic stuff like this, which might reduce the girls in her care to off-duty weeping.
Manda had only risked it because Sam had seemed so worried about that Helen of Troy woman coming to Oxford. She had a childish urge to be Sam's Deputy, so she always made sure she read up on everything that worried him just in case she was ever in the happy position of pointing out a solution to his worries.
She leafed through the pages of Helen of Camden until she found what she'd been looking for—a portrait of Ellini Syal, looking as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa, but without a smile.
Still, Manda thought it was a good enough likeness. She'd never seen the original, of course, but the portrait looked exactly like the woman in her dream.
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