House of Lucy Chapter 1

There is a fey scurrying of something somewhere around in here...
I raised my head to look out at the stars. We were on track all-right. We would reach our destination by mid-day tomorrow. I smiled and produced a small silver compass from my coat, studying it briefly before putting it away.
I am mad. I know that I am mad. My father knew it, my mother knew it, all our servants and my brother and sisters knew it, and I know it. From the moment of my birth, something has stirred inside me. Almost as soon as I could walk and talk, I was stealing kisses from the girls in the town near my family's estate, and swiping pies from the merchant's stores of food in the market square. My mother, bless her heart, never knew what to do with me. By the time I had become a young man, I was, by all accounts, a menace. When I wasn't getting into trouble, I could be found in the Library at Whitcombe. My father would say that I spent so much time in there, I was liable to start growing cobwebs in my ears. I used to spend hours in that room, reading rapturously tales of chivalry, of knights-errant, of kings and queens, of great romances and great tragedies. I found my young mind enraptured from a young age by Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Malory's The Death of Arthur, (though I hated the French,) and Ovid's Metamorphoses, respectively. I was 17 when I discovered Palladio's Four Books, which sparked my love affair with architecture. Each page laid out a logic I had always sensed, but never could name. I began sketching obsessively. I would take long walks around the estate, studying angles of light, the sag of old roofs, the curve of broken arches. I began sketching reimaginings of the Whitcombe estate itself, with long, winding halls that went on and on, basements beneath basements, hidden compartments you would have to know a special code to reach. I showed them to my father once. "You were born a Lucy, not a joiner," he would say.
It was in the Library of Whitcombe where I had discovered a curious piece of writing, called Essay Concerning Human Understanding, written by a man named John Locke.
It hit me like a bolt of lightning. The mind begins empty, it postulated, not fallen, not divine, but unformed. It explained everything. No sacred blood, no noble instinct, only experience, accumulated like bricks. Then what is nobility, if not merely a habit of memory? I became possessed by philosophy. My father, aghast, sent me to live in London, to "have the Latin beaten into me."
I loved London, and spent much of my time at the library there.
It was there where I met the man who would become my best friend, Mr. Nathaniel Darwin. He caught me reading Locke, and asked me whether I believed the mind begins as a blank slate. "I'm not sure," I responded.
"Then you're reading it properly," he said.
We met by candlelight, and spoke of architecture, brotherhood, and the dignity of labor. No lord or peasant among us, simply two men. Upon one of Nathaniel and I's fated meetings in London, he made a curious proposal to me. "Come," he said, "and meet some gentlemen who will not care that your father is a Baron, only whether you can think."
I laughed. I thought he meant a salon or a gambling house. I was wrong.
The building had no sign, only a heavy black door, and a small brass knocker in the shape of a compass. Inside was a room full of men, some noble, some bricklayers, all sworn to a truth higher than blood. As I conversed with them, Nathaniel watched me carefully. When it was over, he handed me a small book, its spine cracked, its margins dense with symbols, and told me to study it, and then decide if I wish to return.
I returned the next night. And the next. And the next after that. I did not yet understand the tools, or the oaths, or the meaning of the light they claimed to seek, only that no one asked me for the name of my father.
I could not have known it then, but but I felt that something was coming. Not just for me, but for the world. At one of these lodge meetings, an old man pulled Nathaniel and I aside, and said, "If you go, go soon. The colonies are growing. What is planted there will change everything, for better and for worse. The symbols are aligning. Do you understand?"
The old man spoke in riddles, as many of them did, but I remember the weight of his voice. As thought the old man could see into something far beyond what any man could know.
That night, my mind was enlivened by thoughts of the colonies. I was restless, and could not sleep. That morning, I wrote a letter to my father, that I had resolved to go to Virginia, that I was to reject my family's inheritance, and build a new life for myself in the colonies. I had already packed my things. I told Nathaniel my plans, he seemed almost proud of me, and urged me to "go now, before I regained my good sense," and I boarded the next ship to Virginia.
I smiled again, and took out my compass, gazing up at the starry sky. Land was approaching.