The Bones of Ruin

by Sarah Raughley

  Unexplainable occurrences. Like a woman who could come back to life? Like a robber who used exploding electrical currents to scare off his targets so he could steal from them? Iris chose her words carefully. “If I were to find the author…”

  “You wouldn’t,” Adam said simply. “As far as I’ve heard, Winterbottom has been dead for two years.”

  Iris placed her hands on her hips, lifting her head with a challenging glare. “Then will you tell me what I want to know?”

  “About the ‘Fanciful Freaks’?” Adam tilted his head. “Even better. I’ll show you.”

  Iris hated that mysterious smile of his, hated even more how his words enticed her just enough to keep her on his hook. But this bait was too tantalizing to ignore. “The rumors are true, aren’t they? There are people in this city who can do impossible things.”

  “Does it comfort you to know that you’re not alone?”

  Iris had to admit that it did, though the thought terrified her at the same time. But she’d felt so alone for so long. She couldn’t bring herself to believe it until she saw it.

  Adam wasn’t surprised to hear it. “You’ll get your chance tomorrow night,” he said, slipping off his desk. “For now, rest up. Tomorrow will be an interesting day.”

  “Adam,” Iris called as he walked toward the study door. Once he stopped, she hesitated, gathering her thoughts. “I’ve been through hell and back. I need to know… can I trust you?”

  “You’re unable to die. I can’t imagine there’s much you should be worried about.”

  Iris clenched her hands, thinking of her secret being exposed so publicly. The feeling of being violated because of Coolie. The far-reaching consequences she still had yet to see.

  “But if you’re that worried about me…” Adam reached into the back of his pants.

  And pulled out a gun.

  Iris backed into the bookshelf as he approached. But to her surprise, Adam flipped the gun over. Holding it by its barrel, he offered her the golden handle.

  “If at any point you feel threatened by me, you’re more than welcome to kill me.” He said it with the casual tone of someone commenting on the weather.

  He’s mad, Iris thought. He was also serious. Iris inched closer and closer. And then, snatching the gun, she pointed it at him. But Adam only answered with a cordial bow, his right hand to his heart, his arm at his back.

  His head inches away from the barrel.

  Iris looked down the barrel of the gun, roses and thorns stretching across the surface. Her knuckles felt numb as she held on to the weapon tightly.

  “Make no mistake,” she said, lowering the gun. “I won’t hesitate to shoot you if I find the slightest reason to.”

  “My life is in your hands.” He raised his head with an eerie, knowing smile. “Good night then, Iris. You’re free to stay in my study as long as you like. There’s plenty to read here. I recommend my father’s book, but not too highly. He is my father, after all.”

  With a wink, he left.

  9

  THE DRESS ADAM HAD BROUGHT for her sometime during the afternoon was too long. A promenade toilette, the outfit was called. Dark green satin, its bottom trimmed with red-and-beige plaid. Excruciatingly tight. Over her corseted waist, the closely fitted jacket of the same dark green extended over her hips and was cinched in by a black belt. The bustle just below her waist supported the drapery at the back. Terrible to sit in, but the venue Adam was taking her to couldn’t be reached by foot.

  Inside the carriage, she stared at her white gloves and touched with a tentative hand the bonnet atop her head, decorated with silk green ribbons, white feathers, and hints of lace.

  “Is it too uncomfortable?” Adam asked next to her.

  “I look like a pine tree.” Iris gripped her left forearm, her gaze to the ground. Adam chuckled. “At any rate, if Coolie’s looking for me, then he’s looking for a circus girl. Though not much of a disguise, it’s a disguise nonetheless.”

  The ride had not gone as she’d expected. Actually, she wasn’t sure what she’d expected. But tonight, Adam was suddenly interested in telling her about himself as he played with his silly coin. He was twenty-one years old as of last month. He attended Eton as a boy. Now he was a student at that prestigious law school, Lincoln’s Inn over in Camden, though he hadn’t much of a plan after graduation. When he wasn’t studying, he lived in his Yorkshire manor alone but for the company of his servants. Oh, and he was deathly afraid of squirrels. During a visit to the countryside as a child, one had frightened him badly enough that he was now eternally scarred. He chatted with her like a schoolboy speaking to a girl he fancied for the first time, revealing seemingly everything except the one thing she wanted to know: how he knew her.

  “My mother and siblings are gone,” he told her, and though he’d said it simply, there was a moment, fleeting as the wind, when his expression became so hollow that it spooked her. It passed like a shadow. “My uncle was committed,” he continued amicably. “Perhaps it’s for the better: he owned and ran a series of cotton mills that were infamous for their industrial catastrophes thanks to his sickening policies.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “What doesn’t surprise you?” Adam grasped his coin.

  Iris caught herself once she found Adam brightened at the slightest hint of her engagement. Hesitantly, she continued. “It’s just that I’m not a fan of those awful machines and what they’ve done to people.” Quite a few of her colleagues at Coolie’s company had disfigurements due to the conditions they’d been forced to work in. They’d sought out the circus for the same reason she had: as refuge from the cruelty of “civil” society.

  “With each passing day, it seems that this world is heading in the wrong direction.” Adam looked at a group of children huddling over a bonfire in the alleyway. “As modernity leaps forward, human civilization forsakes the natural world. Destroys it.”

  “A Romanticist?” Iris tilted her head.

  “I’m no Wordsworth,” Adam answered with a smile. “But any astute student of human history should be able to recognize that the choices mankind has made on its way to economic progress have not always been kind to people—nor to the natural world I so love.”

  “Except for squirrels, of course.”

  “The hideous things. Still…” Adam fell silent. “We’ve made a mess of the world.”

  Iris had to admit how much she loved the silence of nature. Sitting in a flowery field reading to Granny. Flying up in the air, feeling the breeze and the birds and butterflies fluttering past. But as Adam was watching her carefully, she told him none of this.

  After a moment of silence, Adam asked her about her life in the circus, if she’d been fed well or if she’d made many friends. It was as if he were checking up on an old chum. Iris wasn’t so keen to respond, not when he already knew her greatest and most dangerous secret.

  “Coolie should be hanged for pulling that stunt last night,” he said, and a glint in his eye told Iris he may have meant it. “I’m sorry you had to go through such a thing.”

  “I saw you and your friends up in the royal box,” Iris said. “Coolie had been bragging about his ‘very important connections.’ Interesting that he contacted you.”

  “Coolie didn’t contact me, but some others in my group. Then word spread.”

  “Your group?”

  “My gentleman’s club.” When Adam’s eyes slid toward her, they looked as if they held a particularly wicked secret. “Club Uriel. We meet every so often over on Pall Mall Street.”

  Iris vaguely remembered Coolie rambling about it. “What are people saying about me?”

  “Oh, that you’re a daughter of death, an ancient goddess revived by a primordial force, a reanimated corpse come to kill us all, and so on,” Adam said flippantly.

  Iris bit down into the corner of her lip. “Coolie didn’t want to advertise an act to just anyone. He wanted to advertise me—my power—to those prominent connections of his.�
��

  Adam nodded. “Which means it would be in your best interest to be very careful with who you choose to trust. Of course—”

  “Let me guess: ‘You can trust me,’ right?” Iris said before he could finish. She thought of his gun tucked inside her right stocking, making good use of her hose supporters.

  Stuffing his coin back into his jacket, Adam ran his fingers through his black hair. “You said you wanted the truth. Well, here’s a bit of it: the Fourth Annual South Kensington International Exhibition in 1874. You were there on the second of June when an explosion took place. As was I.”

  The fair. The chaos. The fires. People running. Yes, she knew. But before that?

  Iris’s chest felt suddenly tight as the shadow of that old memory began surfacing. He was right. Every time she reached beyond the veil to access those old recollections, it was mentally and physically torturous. Memories of flesh… of bone. She shook her head just as her heart began to pound. She couldn’t jump into learning the truth too recklessly.

  “I already know I was there,” she whispered defiantly.

  “But do you know what you were doing there?”

  Silence. Iris clenched her teeth.

  “I’ll tell you more, gradually, I promise. But, Iris, there’s something I wish for in return.” Adam drew closer to her, touching her arm ever so lightly. “If you like, you can think of this as an honest, mutual arrangement.”

  Iris slid to the side of the carriage, away from his touch. “What do you want from me?”

  “There are two things I need more than anything, just like you need the truth.” He lifted his finger. “The first: I want you to help me find my father. Though many think he’s dead, he’s very much alive… to the knowledge of a dwindling few.” Adam’s eyes wandered to the brick buildings lining the sidewalk, a tinge of sorrow in them as if processing a very difficult memory. “There are many layers to your mystery, dear Iris,” he said, bringing himself back to the present. “If you want to restore your memories and return to your true self, finding my father is key.”

  Her true self. “Why would you think that I can find your father?”

  “Because you’re good at finding people. Aren’t you?”

  Granny Marlow. Iris remembered the day she joined the company. The way she felt the woman’s essence from afar. When she was calm and still, she could feel Granny coming to her trailer, or find her easily in the city streets, just by sensing her essence alone. Same as she could do for Jinn, and even Coolie.

  But how could Adam know that?

  “I told you, I know many things,” Adam said, interpreting her look and resolving nothing. “Some I’ve gleaned for myself through years of research. Some I’ve seen with my own eyes.” They glinted now in the moonlight. “What’s clear is that you are a very special girl with very special abilities. If you would like to know why and how, you’ll need to find my father.”

  “And the second thing?” Iris asked, afraid of his answer.

  Adam hesitated. “Well, that might take a bit longer to explain,” he said finally. “But I can explain it. If you come with me.”

  The carriage ride ended in the grittier part of town. “We’ll be walking from here on out.” When Adam lifted his hand for her to take, all she could do was stare. The truth was all she ever wanted. But looking at his hand, she felt as if she were about to make a deal with the devil.

  “What you’re going to see tonight might make some things clear, I assure you,” he said as she stepped out of the carriage on her own, denying his touch.

  For one strange moment she thought she heard footsteps behind her. But when she turned, no one was there.

  She shivered. “I have to say, I don’t have a great feeling about this.”

  “Do you still have my gun with you?” Adam asked.

  With a sharp intake of breath, she nodded.

  “Then by all means.” Adam gave a gentlemanly bow, his hand to his heart. “Follow me.”

  10

  AT THE END OF A dark alleyway, the latch to a solid wooden door slid open. A sickly looking woman who covered her stringy blond hair under a simple white bonnet peeked through the resultant peephole. After Adam spoke some kind of password and flashed a yellow ticket, the latch slid shut. Then the door opened with the whining of iron.

  Several narrow staircases surrounded by walls of clay took them deeper into the earth. Iris stepped carefully, holding on to the rickety railing, the sounds of cheering growing louder. Soon, Iris could hear the clamor clearly.

  “Come on, knock him out!”

  “Sixty-five here! Put me down for sixty-five on the Barber!”

  “Sixty-five on the Barber!” Someone took the order. “Write it down, write it down.”

  Iris saw a stocky, white-haired man writing down the numbers on a chalkboard. No, bets. How else could she explain the thick swarm of men smoking cigars and hooting like maniacs as they surrounded a sunken boxing ring?

  The boxers inside had no gloves to pad their bloody knuckles. They wore nothing but trousers and boots. Each punch drew floods of blood. One fighter hit the surrounding wall separating them from their voyeurs, just before returning a punch that shattered the other’s bones against the stone floor. The audience couldn’t get enough of the morbid display.

  Taking her hand, Adam led her through the crowd, and once they reached the very front, Iris grabbed the clay barrier that separated her from the pit of blood.

  “Kill him!” a man next to her cried as a heavyset fighter stood over his unconscious opponent. “Go on, kill him! Give him a good shave!”

  Someone threw a knife into the ring. It clattered at the Barber’s feet. He was considering.

  “No killing!” cried a man from the betting board. “No killing in the Pit. Where d’you ratbags think we’ll get our fighters if they get ripped into a bloody smear, eh?” He signaled to a thin, droopy-eyed man in a black suit next to him, carrying a bell.

  “Winner!” Droopy Eyes rang the brass hand bell. “The Barber of East End!”

  Cheers shook dust from the rafters and the gas lamps along the filthy walls.

  Iris wrapped her arms around her chest, remembering the vicious crowd at Astley’s thirsting for more of her blood. “Just what is this place?”

  Adam thought for a moment. “Let’s call it… an underground establishment. Where gentlemen in good health and physique—”

  “Illegally fight to the death?” Iris shot him a horrified look.

  “Not to the death,” Adam corrected. “You heard the bookie. It isn’t easy to find men of this caliber. Though I suppose the occasional accident does happen.”

  Disgusted, Iris turned to leave, stopping abruptly when she saw a man with sagging jowls tip his purple hat to her from the crowd, his cigarette unlit.

  Adam linked his arm through her elbow and swung her back around. “I wouldn’t wander too far, Iris. This type of establishment tends to draw unseemly characters.”

  “Clearly.” Iris glared at him.

  Elsewhere, the bright voice of a young woman rang out over the din. She was tucked in a corner. Iris first caught sight of her hair—the color of a pumpkin with the precise shape of a downturned bowl cut close to her skull. Her ivory face was dirtied from the smog of the city, her large, mischievous blue eyes and little mouth chatting a mile a minute as she shuffled a deck of cards on an empty crate.

  “Who’s up? Who’s up next? Come on, you meaters, it’s not so hard; just keep your eyes on the card and follow the red queen—and I don’t mean me.” As she winked at the three working-class men whose clothing style she shared down to the suspenders, she looked quite like an adorable chipmunk. But Iris had been around enough grifters to know better. She couldn’t blame the girl. Where better to run the three-card monte scam than a dingy pit where fools were just itching to throw their money away?

  “What are we doing here?” Iris turned back to Adam. “What does any of this have to do with what we were discussing?”

  “Y
ou’ll see soon enough,” Adam whispered. “When he comes.”

  “Why, if it isn’t young Adam!” came a flamboyant shout from deep in the crowd, and soon emerged a man with a long mane of golden locks that could have put a lion to shame.

  Iris could tell by his swagger that he was beyond drunk, and the half-empty wineglass in his hand served as quite the clue as well. She didn’t even know a place like this served wine.

  The red-and-gold silk night robes, which he wore over his red vest, fluttered from the force of every rapturous shout of the crowd. He looked ready for bed, not for a blood-splattering fistfight, but he was clearly enjoying himself nonetheless.

  “Do you mean him?” Iris pointed at the man as he approached them.

  “Not him,” Adam said quickly. “God, not him.” And though Adam tried to steer Iris in the opposite direction, the man caught up to them.

  “My boy, Adam! Why, didn’t you hear me?” He swung his arm around Adam’s neck before he could escape. “I’ve been shouting and shouting for you. My goodness, I thought my voice would… would fizzle out and just die from the pain and agony of it all.”

  It was the first time Iris had seen Adam look so annoyed, and she couldn’t blame him. The man had called him only once. Iris sized him up, his long hair reaching past his shoulder blades, his blue eyes and pin-straight nose. He was shorter than Adam but seemed older, perhaps in his thirties. Italian by the sound of his accent—and his name.

  “Riccardo Benini,” he said, introducing himself to Iris, almost falling over and taking Adam with him as he attempted a cordial bow. “And tell me, Adam, who is this impeccably dressed creature you’ve brought as your consort?”

  Adam grimaced, trying to loosen his grip. “Her name is—”