Thank heavens she hadn’t had access to the bulletproof corset. As uncomfortable as it was, covering me from above breasts to below hip, the crossed layers of spider silk and fine wire mesh—as delicate as a cobweb, but able to resist projectiles—had cost the earth.
His brother touched a fourth jar almost reverently, pausing to murmur a prayer. It contained the essence of death. Their religion was cautious about dealing with the dead in any form after the soul had left the body.
“Then we must be going. The vengeful woman rouses.” I took the jar from the boy, held it over my head, and threw it to the floor. It shattered with a most satisfactory sound, followed by the slurping of leaking liquids.
“You should kill her, Miss Elise,” the middle brother said.
“Her worst crime was loving too well, if not wisely.” The dwarf who might be Shelley or Lord Byron was another issue.
I stepped toward the dwarf, intent on disconnecting him from the soul-preserving jar.
Jimmy grabbed my arm as my fingers clasped around the wires. I yanked all the connections free, then traced them to the proper jar—there were at least a dozen left stored on shelves along one wall. One swift kick sent the pottery clanging to the whitewashed floor. It cracked raggedly along the middle. Fluid leaked out. Whoever was in there died as the chemicals spread across the floor.
I stepped into the thin puddle and ground my heel through it. One of my enemies would trouble us no more.
“We are out of time,” Jimmy said.
“There are still . . .”
“We have to go now, before the dogs sniff us out.”
“Wait. We need the crystal!”
“Dawn approaches, and my sister Reva is missing. We need your help to find her.” He dragged me away with some urgency.
Chapter Sixteen
WE MOVED SILENTLY AND CAUTIOUSLY up the exterior stair to the nicely proportioned kitchen courtyard. Jimmy paused for many long moments listening to the night. Then, satisfied the armed guards and their vicious dogs were not near, he motioned us across the open space to an archway in the brick walls. Rusty but empty hinges on one side and a broken lock on the other told me a gate had once protected the yard, but no longer. Most likely, the wooden planks had fueled someone’s fire. Or if it had been made of intricate wrought iron, it had been sold to cover gambling debts.
I thought about the intact jars in the cellar. As I hesitated, debating about turning back, Jimmy grabbed my arm and dragged me through the ragged opening in the brick-and-hedge wall of the courtyard.
In the near distance a dog yipped, followed by a man’s curse. Then the dog bayed. He’d caught our scent.
We ran.
Once free of the immediate manor grounds, we moved more swiftly toward the encroaching wilds of the heath. When the Rom wish to move unseen, ordinary men cannot find them. No one spoke until we passed into a copse between the manor and the city that crept closer every year. Soon there would be no heath at all.
“When did anyone in the family last see your sister Reva?” I broke the silence the moment Jimmy’s shoulders and arms relaxed into a normal swing and he lengthened his stride beyond carefully placed steps.
“Noon.”
“Which noon?”
“Yesterday.”
“When did you notice she was not there?”
“Supper.” Which meant sundown close to half eight in the evening. A long time for a Romany girl to slip beyond notice or control by a male.
“Why did no one look for her sooner?” A note of anger crept into my voice. The Rom protected their females well. Too well. To the point of allowing them no skills to interact with the outside world. We gorgí tainted them to the point of marimé. Men could overcome the uncleanliness or withstand it. Women could not. I appeared to be the exception, but then I was never Rom, only a friend to them.
“Reva has . . . has been difficult of late,” Jimmy admitted. Without a torch or lantern, I could not see his face to know if he was embarrassed for his sister or for himself. Angry at her? Or at himself?
“Define ‘difficult.’”
“She requested several times an introduction to you so that you might teach her to read.” He stepped further into the copse and kept his back to me. Probably so he would not have to witness my outrage.
“And since you and your father deemed that impossible and just requesting such a forbidden action drew her close to marimé, you ceased to pay attention to her until her mother or aunts cleansed her.”
He chose silence.
I sighed, knowing I’d get no more information from him on the subject.
“There was an incident, about a year ago.”
I listened more closely.
“My youngest brother, little more than a toddler, fell into a pond. The moon-faced boy who sweeps for you pulled him free before he drowned.”
“Toby?”
Jimmy nodded. The faintest lessening of the dark allowed me see his silhouette. Dawn approached. Half four in the morning. I should be at my baking within the hour.
“Why was Toby away from the city?”
Jimmy shrugged. “There were other boys about. Teasing and taunting him.”
“He ran away.”
“Yet he stopped when he saw my brother in trouble, and helped him.”
“Toby didn’t know enough to fear drowning,” I said. “He had . . . has a big heart and it hurts him to see another distressed.”
“The other boys ran from the water. They shouted something about monsters living in the murky depths.”
“What has this to do with your sister, Reva?”
“From the safety of her bardo, she witnessed our father honoring Toby, giving him food and hospitality. She wanted to thank him herself, but speaking to a stranger, and a male stranger, is forbidden. She spoke often of the moon-faced boy who risked sticks and stones from bullies to save her brother. But Toby’s impurity as well as being a man not of our family meant she must not approach him. Ever.”
I had to think a moment while I gained control of my temper. Toby could not help his damaged mind and unusual body. He’d proven he could not hurt anyone, nor willingly taint them.
“Has Reva been going off on her own for longer and longer periods of time since then?” I asked.
“Yes,” responded one of the nameless younger brothers. He must view Reva’s return as more important than her taint.
“But she always returned in time to help prepare meals, as is her duty,” another brother added.
“Who did she meet while off on her own? Could it be a man? Possibly an educated man who fell in love with her exotic beauty and promised to teach her to read in return for . . . favors, or possibly marriage.” The last was my own musing out loud rather than a true question.
Silence.
“If you will not tell me everything, then I can do nothing more for you than to have my urchins question others.” I firmed my shoulders and my steps as I headed back toward the lights of the city as the first streaks of a fiery dawn shot beneath the smoky cloud cover.
“Miss Elise, we came to you because you can ask questions and get answers where we may not,” Jimmy finally said. “We do not know who she met or where she went. Perhaps she headed for your café to meet the moon-faced boy. The Rom have learned well how to keep secrets. She kept hers from us as well as the gorgí.”
“Will you still love her, even if she is marimé?”
“We will still love her, but we may not welcome her back into the tribe. She will be as dead to us.”
“Then I need nothing more from you.” I abandoned my plan to have him help me pick the locks of a certain warehouse with ancient cellars and a disguised exit to the river. The Rom must find another solution for their errant daughter.
Inspector Witherspoon didn’t need a lockpick or secrecy. Even before he returned to t
he café with his report, I heard through my web of contacts about the squad of Bow Street Runners who stormed the warehouse and smashed the locks.
“We found little,” Inspector Witherspoon said as he downed three cups of milky, sweet tea and half a loaf of bread and butter. “As you predicted, the cellars are ancient, but the mortar is still tight. And all had been recently whitewashed, including the passage to the river gate. Cunning disguise on that. We’ve torn down the painted wooden wall. There is now normal access from the river through that gate.”
“What was in the warehouse?” I prodded him as I wrapped my cobwebby knitted lace shawl of fine Highland wool more tightly around me, still chilled from my adventures the previous night in a whitewashed cellar on the opposite end of town.
“Not much. In one room there were some new shelves lining the walls with some pottery jars, some short strands of wire, two thin sheets of copper. And some curious metal tables. Otherwise empty from floor to ceiling.” The inspector sighed and slathered butter on another piece of bread.
“The cellars where I was imprisoned?”
“Cleaned out, in a hurry. We found a tangle of copper wires and glass tubing. Shards of pottery, and foul smelling puddles of liquid. The shelves were old but showed clean rounds in the dust, where pottery might have rested. Scrapes on the floor where something heavy, maybe one of those metal tables, was dragged away.”
“Could the people at the warehouse have somehow heard we were looking for them and moved to the house on the heath?”
“Timing is wrong. The empty laboratory on the heath my men searched had been there a long time. The place had been whitewashed several times and they left some equipment. I think we are dealing with two necromancers.”
“One connected to Lord Byron, the other not,” I mused.
A new thought bothered me. If Percy Shelley had managed to get into the dwarf, why couldn’t Stamata get either him or Lord Byron into me? She’d said that storage in the Leyden jars had a finite duration before the soul diminished. The dwarf was a sloppy and inadequate job, perhaps only accidental success—a weak will due to a damaged body overcome by a stronger personality in desperate straits? Perhaps he’d ended up in the wrong body because Stamata did not fully understand the process, and neither did Byron or Shelley.
I could not dismiss the idea that they would eventually approach an educated and determined necromancer to complete the process properly.
Necromancy had been specifically defined and illegal for four years now. The practice did not conform to practices within the Church of England in any way, shape, or form. Any deaths occurring during the illegal rituals were murder and blasphemy, punishable by hanging by the neck until dead or burning alive. Howley wanted the latter punishment. He’d told me burning and then scattering the ashes in the river was the only way to be certain a necromancer died. Hanging might allow the body to revive as Aldini had tried with executed George Foster in 1803. The House of Lords had not granted Howley the right to burn anyone unless the necromancer profaned a church in their rituals.
I’d read that clause a dozen or more times—every time a different student or cleric asked to read the archbishop’s treatise. He had allowed the entire act to pass, because he needed to take a stand against necromancy. Blackmailers be damned.
Whoever had found out about his wife’s youthful indiscretion had agreed. Ridding the land of necromancers was important enough to allow a few reforms. Those could be changed by legislation later.
I had no idea the hideous cult had enough practitioners to warrant laws aimed specifically at them. They must if the archbishop’s blackmailers gave way for that one issue.
“Inspector Witherspoon, is it possible that Archbishop Howley is the target of the assassination plot and not the queen?”
He sat in silence for many long moments. “I must ask many more questions in different quarters before I answer that. I doubt it, though. Killing him, while heinous, would not bring down the government, not like the loss of our queen to violence.”
But it would give a necromancer revenge, possibly beget enough fear among the clergy to recant on the laws against the hideous cult.
“Did you at least discover who owns the warehouse?”
“Some country lord who never shows his face in London. Forgot his name. Someone said he has to be in his nineties if he still lives. I’ve got a man chasing him down. Local constables haven’t had time to reply to our messages. Leased it to a shipping company that went out of business twenty years ago.”
If he still lives. That phrase sent chills up and down my spine.
“That’s a valuable property to leave empty, seemingly abandoned for so long.”
“Aye. Who knows how and why country lords, or city lords for that matter, do anything.” He left abruptly without excusing himself.
I wished Drew would come home. I needed to talk to him, mine his extensive knowledge of the peerage, hear him support or tear down my arguments. I always thought more keenly when I discussed things with Drew.
Where was he?
He was with Lord Ruthven, recently come to town from an obscure country estate, who exhibited a fascination with death. As did Drew.
I grew hot and cold. A great buzzing in my ears presaged a closing of my peripheral vision. My knees trembled so badly I doubted I could walk across the room.
Drew was in league with Ruthven, and they both practiced necromancy. I knew it deep in my soul and hated the knowledge.
Hated him for hiding his practice beneath a guise of charming indolence.
Hated myself for loving Sir Andrew Fitzandrew.
Chapter Seventeen
“MISSUS,” MICKEY WHISPERED from behind me. He sounded hesitant. “There be a messenger at the kitchen door. Won’t talk to no one but you. I told him you was busy, but he insisted.”
“You do not trust him?” I asked, gathering my senses so that I might stand without pitching forward into the remnants of Inspector Witherspoon’s tea.
“Nay, Missus. Seen him before I ’ave. That night I acted your lady’s maid. He come to the salon.” He paused over the word alien to his uneducated life. But he got the essence if not the proper pronunciation. “Came late with one of the gentlemen he did. Hung back, keeping to the shadow and never truly showing his face.”
“And does he reveal his countenance now?”
Mickey had to think about my words. I watched understanding dawn in his eyes. “Barely, Missus. Won’t come in, stays on the back stoop, half turned away from the light coming down the outside stair.”
I checked the amount of light coming in through the café windows. Still full daylight at a time of year when sunset came very late. Time meant little to the sun. From the scarcity of customers, I suspected the early afternoon when we frequently had a lull in business. The clock that would verify this needed winding, something I would have to do since none of the others were tall enough to reach it. “If you did not see him clearly before, or now, how did you recognize him?”
“I know people and I know how they hide behind changing shoulders and neck, different clothes and hat. It’s him. And I seen ’im afore, dressed as ’e is now.”
“Who did he come with to the salon?”
Mickey shrugged and backed away. “Not one of the toffs I usually watch about town. Not seen him before that night or since.”
“Very well, I will take the message from this person.”
I had to unlatch and open the kitchen door. During business, we left it open for deliveries and taking trash up to the dustbin in the back courtyard. Mickey really did not trust the messenger if he locked the door. On the back stoop, a short, wiry man stood with his back to me. He cradled his right wrist within his left hand as if it hurt. Or had little strength. Considering the paleness of his skin below the wrist and the withered skin, I suspected that even though it hurt, he had little use of the limb
.
Mickey had said once or twice that he’d seen a beggar with a withered hand. That he should recognize him as one of the extra men at my salon made me nervous. I’d seen no one recently with a withered arm. But I had seen a man who never removed his gloves, both at the salon and at the opera, in the company of Lord Ruthven.
“You have a message for me?”
“Man from Oxford said to give it to you. Said you’d thank me for the delivery,” he mumbled. He used his good left hand to fumble inside his ratty greatcoat that had seen better days when the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo. Eventually he found a folded page much besmudged with dirt from his hands . . . and elsewhere. Or did the new filth cover old stains?
I didn’t trust anything anymore.
“Said you’d thank me.” He held the document protectively against his chest.
Quickly I assessed his need against the value of his offering. “A farthing when I know that the note is from the man who claims to have signed it.” I wasn’t about to be fooled again by unlikely messengers delivering notes I half-expected.
For the first time, he lifted his face and his eyes to look at me directly. His mouth opened slightly in surprise, revealing broken and blackened teeth that distorted the shape of his lips.
I knew those eyes. I knew I’d seen him before.
“The farthing will do,” he said, returning his gaze and his countenance to the ground once more.
I snatched the letter before he could hide it again, replaced it with the tiny coin, then slammed the door in his face. The snick of the locks engaging did not reassure me that he’d leave and not return.
Madame,
Please accept my apologies for not thanking you in person for partaking of your excellent hospitality. I find I must return to Oxford forthwith and consult with my colleagues.
Respectfully yours,
Dr. Jeremy Badenough,
Professor of Ancient Studies
Studiously polite and correct, as expected. Despite the neatness and precision of the document, Oxford dons were notorious for their illegible scrawling signatures. This letter matched the norm.
The Transference Engine Page 14