by Amanda Quick
“The Arcane Society. They are an obsessive, devious, untrustworthy lot. Some of the members, like Delbridge, will stop at nothing to acquire relics such as the crystal that they believe to have psychical value. And in the case of the aurora stone they seem to think that they have a claim on it based on an old and utterly ridiculous legend connected to the founder of the Society.”
Carolyn frowned. “Do you think your Mr. Ware is a member of the Society?”
My Mr. Ware. Leona paused, savoring that little fantasy for a few seconds. Then she pushed it aside. Thaddeus Ware was not her Mr. Ware, and he never would be.
“No matter where you go I will find you.” She pushed the memory of Thaddeus’s vow from her mind. Personal issues aside, Carolyn’s question was a very good one.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose it’s possible he is affiliated with the Society, but it doesn’t matter because I will never see him again.”
Carolyn’s jaw tightened. “Thank goodness Mr. Pierce suggested that you wear servant’s clothes last night. At least if Mr. Ware does decide to search for you he will not realize that he is looking for a woman.”
“Mmm,” Leona said. Yet another secret. She did not mention that Ware had penetrated her disguise, because she knew that fact would further alarm Carolyn. “I thought you did not approve of Mr. Pierce.”
“I do not. I think it is clear that Pierce has connections to the criminal underworld.”
“Those were the very connections that helped him locate the crystal for me,” Leona pointed out.
Mr. Pierce was received in respectable social circles, but there was no getting around the fact that he lived a very mysterious life. Among other things, he seemed to know a great many secrets—damning secrets—of the rich and powerful.
Pierce had a few secrets of his own, as well, secrets that Leona had never revealed to Carolyn. Like his lover, Adam Harrow, Pierce was, in reality, a woman living life as a man. The pair moved in a strange netherworld inhabited by other females who had chosen a similar masquerade.
“Carolyn, you must not worry about me; I will be fine. Tomorrow you are marrying the man you love and leaving for Egypt. Concentrate on your future.”
“My lifelong dream,” Carolyn whispered. Wonder and happiness lightened her expression. She turned suddenly. “But I will miss you, Leona.”
Leona tried and failed to blink back the tears. She crossed the room to hug Carolyn. “I will miss you, too. Promise you will write to me.”
“Of course.” Carolyn’s voice was choked with sudden emotion. “Are you sure you will be all right here alone?”
“But I’m not alone. I have Mrs. Cleeves and Fog.”
“A housekeeper and a dog are not much in the way of companions.”
“I have my career.” Leona gave her a reassuring smile. “You know how satisfying that is for me. It is my passion, just as your Egyptian antiquities are for you. You must not worry about me.”
“My marriage won’t change our friendship,” Carolyn promised.
“No,” Leona said.
But of course it would.
Think positive.
9
SHE INSISTED THAT the aurora stone belonged to her,” Thaddeus said. He looked at his cousin down the length of the long laboratory workbench. "Leona thinks that she has a legitimate claim to the crystal. After what I witnessed last night, I’m inclined to agree with her.”
“There is no question but that the stone is the property of the Society.” Caleb Jones closed the old, leather-bound volume he had been perusing and rested his hand on the cover. “Furthermore, it is dangerous. It belongs in the Society’s museum at Arcane House, where access to it can be tightly controlled.”
In the glare of the gas lamps that lit his laboratory and the vast library, Caleb’s stern, dour face was rendered even more grim than usual. He was not noted for his charm or sociability. He had little patience with drawing-room conversation and the niceties of polite society. He much preferred the solitude of his laboratory and library. Here, in this place filled with scientific apparatus of every description, shelves crammed with books, ancient and modern, and the journals and records of the founder of the Arcane Society, he was free to indulge his unique abilities.
Caleb possessed a paranormal talent for detecting patterns and meanings where others saw only chaos.
There were those in the Society who whispered that he was nothing more than a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist of the first order and that his talent was actually an indication of mental instability.
Thaddeus did not have any difficulty accepting his cousin’s unusual abilities or the brusque temperament that accompanied them. He understood as few others did. When it came to disturbing talents, none—not even Caleb’s—had quite the same unsettling effect on others as did his own powers of psychical hypnotism.
He was well aware that most who knew of his talent secretly feared him. Who could blame them? Few wanted to take the risk of getting close to a man who was endowed with such a potentially predatory power. For that reason he, like Caleb, had few close friends.
His talent was also the reason he had not yet married, much to his family’s chagrin. No woman of his acquaintance relished the prospect of being wed to a man who wielded his kind of power. For his part, he refused to conceal the truth from a prospective bride.
He and Caleb were cousins of the new Master of the Arcane Society, Gabriel Jones. They were all three descended from the founder of the Society, the alchemist Sylvester Jones. Sylvester had possessed a powerful gift for what in the late seventeenth century was known as alchemy.
Thaddeus sometimes wondered if, had the founder lived in the modern era, he would have been perceived as a brilliant scientist. One thing was certain: There was little doubt but that he would have been considered extremely eccentric in any era. In addition to manifesting a prodigious paranormal talent, he had been paranoid, reclusive and obsessed with his research. That obsession had taken him down a very dangerous path.
Those traits, however, had not stopped him from fathering two sons with two different women, both of whom also possessed psychical talents of their own. It was not lust or love that had prompted Sylvester to produce offspring. His goal, according to his own notes, was to discover whether his talents would be passed down to his children.
Sylvester’s experiments were successful, although not in the way he had envisioned. What he had not anticipated was the variety of abilities that appeared in his descendants. In his hubris, he had expected that they would all develop his own paranormal aptitude for alchemical intuition.
But over the course of two centuries two things became evident: The first was that, while raw power could be and frequently was inherited by one’s offspring, the particular forms the talent took were unpredictable.
The second outcome, which the arrogant alchemist acknowledged in his journal had come as a startling shock, was that the talented women he had chosen as his mates for the experiments had played just as big a role in the results as he had. Sylvester was flabbergasted to discover that the mothers of his children had bequeathed their own paranormal inheritances to future generations of Joneses.
“I do not think that Leona will give up her claim to the crystal easily,” Thaddeus warned.
“Offer her money,” Caleb said. “A lot of it. In my experience that is invariably effective.”
Thaddeus thought about the way Leona’s eyes had glowed with a feminine heat that could only be described as passion when she had channeled power through the aurora stone. Working the crystal had thrilled her in the way another woman might be thrilled by desire. The blood burned in his veins at the memory. Something deep inside him stirred.
“I would not count on money achieving the results you want this time,” he said.
“Then you will have to find another way to get the crystal from her,” Caleb said, flat and unequivocal. “This is the first time it has surfaced in over forty years. Gabe wants it back in the hands of t
he Society as soon as possible. If it disappears again, the way it did last time, it could be decades before we hear of it again.”
“I know,” Thaddeus said patiently. “I’m merely saying that the new owner will probably not want to give it up.”
The aurora stone had a long and intriguing history within the Arcane Society. According to the legend, it had been stolen from Sylvester’s laboratory by a woman he had named Sybil the Virgin Sorceress. The question of her virginity aside, the truth of the matter was that Sybil was a rival alchemist. The founder had not tolerated competition well; a female rival had enraged him. In his journal he had refused to dignify Sybil with the title of alchemist and had labeled her a sorceress instead in order to demean and deride her talents and skills in the laboratory.
The old bastard might have been brilliant, Thaddeus thought, but he was not what anyone would call a modern-thinking man.
“If money won’t work, you’ll have to find another way to take the stone from the woman,” Caleb said. “Given your particular talent, I should not think that would be too difficult. Damn it, you could mesmerize her into handing over the crystal and then cause her to forget that she ever possessed it. I do not see why you are stalling here.”
“She’s immune to my talent.”
That stopped Caleb cold. His eyes gleamed with the detached curiosity of the scientist.
“Huh,” he said. “Interesting.”
Why was he stalling? Thaddeus wondered. He was going to have to take the crystal away from Leona. He already knew that. Nevertheless, he found himself wanting to defend her right to it.
He wandered over to a nearby bench to examine a prism. “Do you really think that the crystal is another dark, dangerous Arcane Society secret like the founder’s formula? I saw no evidence of that last night. Its powers appeared to be of a healing nature, not destructive.”
Caleb folded his arms and gave the question some serious thought. “I will allow that the crystal is not as potentially harmful as the formula could be in the wrong hands. But I believe that is primarily because the talent for working it is extremely rare.”
Thaddeus watched the light passing through the prism shatter and reform into a dazzling rainbow. “Leona worked the crystal quite easily last night. I assume that means she possesses this extremely rare ability?”
Caleb frowned. “Are you certain she worked it? You said yourself you were hallucinating. Perhaps, while you were under the influence of the drug, you imagined her to be channeling power through the stone.”
Thaddeus looked up from the prism. “The power she employed was real. I have never seen any crystal worker do what she did last night.”
Caleb grunted. “Most likely because the vast majority of crystal workers are frauds. London does not lack for charlatans who claim to be able to tap the energy of crystals. They are almost as common on the ground as mediums who promise to contact the spirit world. And some of those frauds, I regret to say, are capable of deceiving even members of the Arcane Society. Remember the infamous Dr. Pipewell and his niece, whom he claimed could work crystal?”
“I am unlikely to ever forget,” Thaddeus said dryly. “It has been two years since Pipewell disappeared with the investors’ money. My uncle still fumes about how much he lost in that fraudulent scheme.”
“I doubt that any of the other wealthy members of the Society who were taken in by Pipewell’s promise of untold riches have forgotten, either.”
“What of the niece?”
Caleb shrugged. “She disappeared at about the same time. I suspect they are both living well in Paris or New York or San Francisco by now. My point is that most who claim to work crystal are frauds.”
“True. But Leona is no charlatan.”
Caleb frowned. “Can you be sure that it wasn’t your will alone that suppressed the hallucinations? Willpower is your stock-in-trade, as it were.”
“I was a man drowning in a well of night,” Thaddeus said quietly. “She threw me the lifeline I needed to climb back out.”
“A colorful metaphor, but there is no need to waste such fanciful flights of the imagination on me. I prefer hard facts.”
“I suppose you had to be there to grasp the full impact of the imagery.”
Caleb exhaled slowly. “Then, yes, we will assume that she has the talent to work the stone.” His jaw hardened. “All the more reason why we must take it away from her as quickly as possible. Who knows what she might do with it?”
“What, precisely, could she do with it?” Thaddeus asked.
Caleb unfolded his arms and opened the leather-bound book again. He drew his finger down a page of close, cramped, coded writing until he found the passage he wanted.
“Here is what Sylvester wrote,” he said. “ ‘The stone is a fearful crystal, unlike any other I have ever studied. The sorceress possesses the strange and awful ability to make it destroy a man’s most vital powers.’ ”
Thaddeus raised his brows. “Don’t tell me Sylvester was afraid that Sybil the Virgin might render him impotent with the aurora stone.”
“He wasn’t talking about his sexual powers. He was referring to the destruction of something he prized even more, his psychical powers.”
“Leona did nothing like that last night. I assure you, my senses are all intact today.”
“I will be the first to admit that our eccentric ancestor had his character flaws, but he was never wrong when he set down a warning. If he wrote that the crystal is dangerous, rest assured that it is. It is a relic of power. All power is potentially dangerous.”
Thaddeus shrugged. “I will not argue the point any longer. As it happens, I agree with you.”
Caleb’s brows shot up. “About time.”
“The crystal is dangerous, but perhaps not in the way you believe. I am convinced that Leona is at risk as long as it is in her possession. Delbridge murdered two men in order to obtain it. He won’t stop at anything to recover it. If he was to find Leona, he would not hesitate to harm her in order to take the stone.”
Caleb looked satisfied. “It is settled then. Now, on to the other matter: the dead woman you discovered in Delbridge’s house. Any possibility that he killed her?”
“I doubt it. He seems to favor murder by poisonous vapor. This killing was decidedly messy. Could just as well have been one of the guests.” Thaddeus rested a hand on a gleaming telescope. “What is bothering me is that she died the same way the victims of the Midnight Monster died. Her throat was sliced open.”
“Huh.” Caleb contemplated that for a moment. “Any other similarities to the Monster’s work?”
“None I found obvious. The woman who died in that gallery was clearly not a poor streetwalker. The very fact that she was at Delbridge’s party indicates that she was a fashionable courtesan who catered to wealthy gentlemen. Until now the Monster has taken his victims from among the lowest class of prostitutes and done his work in disreputable neighborhoods, not fine mansions.”
“Perhaps he is growing more proud and confident,” Caleb mused. “If he is a rogue hunter, as we suspect, he may be seeking to draw more attention to his prowess.”
The hunt for the Midnight Monster had begun two months earlier after two women had died gruesome deaths. Jeremiah Spellar, a detective at Scotland Yard who possessed a paranormal degree of intuition and who was also a member of the Arcane Society, had concluded that the killer might well be a parahunter. Unbeknownst to his superiors, who were unaware of his abilities, he had contacted Gabriel Jones and warned him of the problem.
Gabriel, inundated with his new duties as Master, had assigned the task of investigating the killings to Caleb, who had in turn called upon Thaddeus for assistance.
The investigation, however, had not gone well, because of the lack of clues. Thankfully, no more bodies had been discovered. But rumors of two prostitutes who had mysteriously vanished from the streets in recent weeks were now circulating in London’s underworld. Nevertheless, it was as if the Monster had vanished.
“It is difficult to see any connection between Delbridge and the Midnight Monster,” he said. “Whatever else one can say about his lordship, he is a man of wealth and privilege who takes his status in the social world very seriously. Difficult to envision him associating with a man who murders prostitutes.”
Caleb drummed his fingers on the journal. “Delbridge might not be aware of his associate’s evening hobby.”
“True,” Thaddeus agreed.
“And I would point out at least one obvious connection between the two.”
Thaddeus looked at him. “The fact that both possess some degree of talent?”
“Delbridge is a member of the Arcane Society. According to the records he has the ability to detect the nature of paranormal powers in others. He would recognize a hunter talent the moment he encountered one.”
Thaddeus considered that briefly. “And if his lordship happened to be in need of a hunter to arrange the deaths of two high-ranking gentlemen, he might have found it useful to employ the Midnight Monster.”
“It is not beyond the realm of possibility.”
“No,” Thaddeus agreed. “Assuming the Monster was open to an offer of employment.”
“First things first,” Caleb said. “Your priority at the moment is the recovery of the crystal. Once it is safely under the control of the Society we can concentrate once again on the Monster. And if it turns out that there is a link between Delbridge and the killer, the pursuit of one investigation will bring us closer to solving the other crimes.”
“I agree,” Thaddeus said. He peered into a microscope. The monstrous, faceted eye of an insect stared back, reminding him of the hallucinations. He straightened abruptly and found Caleb studying him as if he were a specimen under the microscope. He raised a brow. “What is it?”
“I was thinking that in order to discover that Delbridge had the crystal, this Leona of yours must have some interesting underworld connections of her own.”