Hackett cleared his throat. ‘Well, I am no showman – not to denigrate your chosen course in life. I am in the fortunate position of having independent wealth. My father died when I was a nipper, but I inherited a decent trust fund on my majority – and then had the wit to invest a chunk of it in railway shares, and the fortune to pick the right stock.’
Luis said nothing, but cringed inwardly. His own father, by comparison, had backed the wrong horses in the mania of railway building that had followed the opening of the famous Liverpool & Manchester line, and had left his family destitute. He regarded Hackett bleakly. Fortune, he thought, follows the already fortunate.
‘As to what I do with my time,’ Hackett went on, ‘I regard myself as a scholar, without affiliation to any particular body, though I have presented papers to the Royal Society and the Royal Institution among others. I have been particularly intrigued by the great treasury of information brought back by the bolder naturalists, from those who voyaged with Cook whom I mentioned, to more recent fellows like Darwin – have you read the volumes of his account of the voyage of the Beagle? Who knows how much, in the decades to come, we might not learn of the operation of the divine life-sustaining machine that is the Earth?
‘And of course that scientific curiosity of mine has been turned on my own strange abilities, and those of my family and the rest of our scattered, furtive community. How has our peculiar faculty come about? What is it we do? Where are these enigmatic forests we visit? What is the meaning of it all? And what must we do with this strange gift? Tell me, Valienté, when did you first become aware of your own talent? Do you recall?’
‘Vividly. I was being chased by a bull – it’s not much of a story, to do with a couple of us scrumping apples where we shouldn’t have been, I was no more than six – when suddenly I found myself, not in a farmer’s field looking at a bull, but in a dense forest staring at something like a wild pig. Screamed the place down, then suddenly found myself back, but the bull had lost me. The whole episode had the quality of nightmare, and such I thought it was. Took me a while to find out how to do the thing purposefully.’ But he had needed to develop his prowess when his stepfather had thrown him out, not many years after that incident of the apples – not that he intended to tell Hackett about that, if he didn’t already know.
Hackett produced a pipe; he filled it, tamped it, lit it before speaking again. ‘Six, eh? I was older – but then I suspect your talent is rather more developed than mine. I found it when I was about sixteen. I was at school, and in the arms of the headmaster’s wife. I need not elaborate, but when it became necessary that I leave rapidly, and I found the window locked – well, I left anyhow, only to find no window and no headmaster, or wife, or school, or rugger field. Nothing but oak and ash trees, and swamp, and my own bewilderment.’ He flicked an empty shell on the table between them. ‘After that, I’m sorry to say, as an impudent young man I thought that the world was my oyster and I took what pearls I could find. Unlike you I was always impeded by the deuced nausea, but there are ways to combat that. As you might expect, no boudoir was secure. To the ladies of my acquaintance I was never less than a gentleman, but a persistent and rather omnipresent one. And of course money was no problem; no strongroom could exclude me.
‘As I grew older I became sated, and I matured – and after one or two close shaves with various forms of authority I learned to become rather more discreet. There was one irate father with an antique of a blunderbuss … Then, of course, I came into money of my own, and as a man of affairs I became respectable. And terribly pompous probably, as most reformed rakes are – you can judge for yourself. But I never forgot my origins, if you like.’
‘How do you find us? I mean those of us who can – um, Waltz.’
‘Generally, just as I found you: hiding in the open. I admire your artistry, sir. Your tricks might just possibly be very clever illusions, they could be done by smoke and mirrors, or a bit of mesmerism, or some other subterfuge. You are smart enough to be extremely good but not impossibly good. Even a very observant and highly sceptical witness can go away from the show believing he has seen through your tricks, and feeling pleasingly self-satisfied as a result, while understanding nothing of the reality of your abilities. But I, who am like you, could see through the flummery.’
‘And to what end do you seek us, sir?’