The Seeking Glass

A Receipt, and a Question

In October 1897, Cecil Hawthorne ordered something privately from R.S. Napier of Edinburgh. The receipt survives. The reason does not.

The clerk's hand was deliberate copperplate. The article was set down not in Napier's usual catalogue language but simply as "gazing glass and case, as specified". Two guineas, which is well above the catalogue rate. The correspondence in which the particulars were agreed does not survive on either side, and, for reasons never given, the sale was not entered in the shop ledger that quarter.

Two years and two months later, following Hawthorne's death, his lifelong companion Jonathan Blackwood came upon the case in the north wall cabinet. The leaflet of instructions sat folded inside the lid, apparently unread. He entered the article in his inventory as Item 37 and, having no other words for it, wrote the line "Purpose uncertain." For the rest of his life he called it, for want of a better name, the Seeking Glass.

Cecil could speak to the dead, read the histories of objects, channel automatic writing, and capture spirits on photographic plates. He could not, so far as Blackwood ever discovered, do this one thing. Whether Hawthorne ever uncovered the glass in the two years and two months between its arrival at Russell Square and his death is not on record. If he did, he did so privately and told no one.

The glass is offered now, in faithful reproduction, with the papers of its first sale folded once more inside the lid.

A Strictly Limited Edition

Seeking Glass is a strictly limited edition of forty-eight pieces. No more will exist.

This is the first release of sixteen.

Included within this edition

• The Gazing Glass. A clear sphere of glass, three inches in diameter, free of obvious bubbles or seeds and polished to an even figure. Selected, in Napier's own words, "for clarity of material and soundness of figure." Supplied resting in its case.
• The Fitted Case. A cube of pine, four and three-quarter inches on every side, covered in embossed pebble-grain paper in the Victorian bookbinder's manner. The interior is a black velvet recess shaped to the sphere; the lid bears the R.S. Napier seal struck into the paper. Offered in two finishes, tan-brown or dark bottle-green; and carefully hand-aged.
• The Instruction Leaflet. A reproduction and subtly aged folded leaflet titled "THE ART OF SCRYING," issued under the guidance of the Society for Spectral Enquiry. Sober directions, five numbered rules, and a Notice to Purchasers in Napier's commercial voice. The leaflet has its own quiet trick: not every word it carries is intended for the living eye.
• The Receipt. Napier's pre-printed billhead, made out by hand to the buyer of the glass, with a Penny Lilac revenue stamp cancelled across its face under the Stamp Act 1891. Hand-aged and hand written in period dip-pen and ink.
• A Page from The Medium and Daybreak. A reproduction leaf torn from the spiritualist weekly of 5 June 1885, carrying a letter on the art of scrying signed "J.A.M., Glasgow," and, in the adjacent column, an R.S. Napier classified advertisement.
• The R.S. Napier House History (Digital Download). A full history of the firm and its Edinburgh shop, from its opening in 1884 to its closing in 1916.
• Cecil Hawthorne, an Illustrated Biography (Digital Download). The updated edition of Cecil's biography, revised to take account of the glass and the question it raises.
• The Performance Guide (Digital Download). A guide for the custodian: the 1897 transaction, the unresolved mystery, and the presentation of the artefact and its ephemera by candle-light before a small circle.
• Certificate of Authenticity. Verifying your piece as part of the Cecil Hawthorne Collection.

Note that all items are carefully hand-aged, and so will vary subtly from the product photographs.

In Performance

The glass does not answer. It asks.

Seeking Glass is not a performance piece of shock and flourish. It is an artefact of unresolved enquiry, intended for the table at candle-light, in the company of a small circle who would prefer the question to the answer.

The glass is the centre of the room and the source of whatever is shown. The custodian is not the seer; the glass is. Whatever happens in the evening appears to be its doing, surfacing slowly through the glass while the room watches and waits. The custodian is merely the voice through which what it shows is described.

Used thoughtfully, the artefact becomes a witness to the evening. Pass it from hand to hand and the room reports temperatures and weights it cannot quite name. Hold it before a candle and the leaflet reveals a hand that did not write the rest of it. Set it before a sitter and the sphere returns their face, inverted, surrounded by the bent room. None of this needs explaining. The glass invites; the sitter fills the silence.

Cecil left a gap. Blackwood could not close it. The custodian inherits the question, not the answer.

Companion Artefacts

For those building a fuller continuity within the Cecil Hawthorne Collection, the Emerald Oracle (Cecil's pendulum, returned from a Buddhist temple in 1864) and the Whispering Token (his karmic psychometry pieces) sit within the same shared world. The same rooms recur. The same names. A keeper who holds several will, in time, find them speaking to one another.

Cecil Hawthorne, his stories, and his artefacts are a work of fiction under copyright by Laudanum House Limited. Any resemblance to actual events or persons living, dead, or undead are entirely coincidental. Note that all reproduction artefacts are a mixture of genuine Victoriana and highly crafted props. Cecil Hawthorne is fictitious and so are his magical artefacts and the history behind them.