Monstrous Heart

by Claire McKenna

  Dowager Justinian’s lips vanished inside the disapproving line of her mouth. ‘Sadly true. One of the shorefolk worked here as a domestic. They are frivolous with their affections. A child, fourteen years old when she declared herself. In the end we had to supply our own doctor to assist in the delivery.’ She shuddered at the memory, twisted her wedding ring. ‘The Baron was delighted. The old Baron, I mean. My late husband’s grandfather, Alexander Justinian, not my son. Such things reflect badly on the House.’

  ‘Shouldn’t the Eugenics Society have been called to report the birth?’ Arden asked. ‘They get fussy over an extra finger …’ She waved at the jar, not altogether concealed by the napkin. ‘This would make the Society have hysterics.’

  ‘Baron Alexander Justinian had friends high up in the Society during his life,’ the Dowager sighed. ‘You are right, if it were up to a reasonable person the creature and the wench both would have been investigated. But they didn’t seem much to care, and the Baron did like his curios.’

  ‘What happened to the girl? Her family?’

  The older woman fiddled with her earring. The marcasite chips caught the lantern glow. ‘Oh, I think they’re all gone now. Nomadic folk, islanders. They come and go, and the fish are bad, lately. What are you working on?’

  She showed the Dowager her map. ‘Finding my way. Learning the geography of Vigil.’

  According to Arden’s maps, which in the last few weeks she had spent most of her time studying in lieu of actually going out to sea, the shore where the Rivens’ old factory buildings clung was not particularly accessible by watercraft. The wash and tempest on the rocks made it difficult to bring a small boat close, and the remains of a pier, broken at the root, showed just how dangerous the waves could be.

  However on the other side of the promontory, on a circlet helpfully named Dead Man’s Bay, a divot in the cliffs provided a few natural shelters and a small pebbled beach that was spared the tumult of the ocean waves. There were more ruins here, old fortifications of a Neolithic tribal folk, made before their more enlightened current era. The map illustrated them with helpful asterisks and the word ruins in the key.

  To access the Riven factory, she could make her way on foot through the ruins.

  Dowager Justinian raised the wick on the lamp. ‘It’s so dim in here, Lightmistress. How on earth are you seeing?’

  ‘Beacons are good with little light and long distances,’ Arden said. ‘Blood aside, they’re part of our small endowments, the mark of our family.’

  ‘The Eugenics Society must think highly of such a trait.’

  ‘There’s always someone who will. It’s not just lamps and signals. There’s many shipping companies who pay handsomely for the distance-skill alone.’

  The Dowager squinted in the lamplight, composed a sentence carefully in her thoughts before speaking. ‘My son tells me you are in your twenty-seventh year. Unless you have made a vow to God or the Sapphic orders, I’m surprised someone of your genetic value is not yet married.’

  Arden pointed at the risen lamp. ‘It becomes complicated when one comes from old ledgered families. The Eugenics Society must approve any union I make. For now, I am forbidden anyone until my full degree.’ She closed her eyes briefly, remembering the Guildsman clerk in her father’s offices. His sly winking expression. With a full degree you could certainly choose who you would like to marry, for one thing.

  How pathetic, that Richard Castile feared discovery by Lions, when they had known about the relationship all along.

  ‘You are of a good age,’ the Dowager continued, and Arden realized at once what the Madam of the house was leading in to.

  She put her fountain pen down. ‘Dowager, you never told me your son was going to marry Bellis Riven.’

  ‘Didn’t I?’ The Dowager’s fingers dappled upon a cameo brooch at her throat. ‘I could never quite keep up with Vernon’s dalliances when he was a young man.’

  ‘A proposed marriage is hardly a dalliance.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Her eyes became hard in the lamplight, knowing that Arden had foiled an ill-considered matchmaking. ‘One could never be certain if he’d only suffered a youthful fantasy. Without meaning to, Bellis could be quite the coquette.’

  ‘My concern is,’ Arden continued, ‘although I have an assistant, there will be times when I’ll be on the promontory alone with Miss Harrow’s suspected killer nearby. I cannot have unresolved issues between him and your son making my job difficult. Mr Riven is my closest neighbour, and regardless of what he has done, or whatever rumours swirl, I may come to depend on him for assistance out there.’

  A little part of her laughed at the thought of seeking assistance from someone who had tried to run her down as casually as a cur in the middle of the road. But she had committed herself to signal-keeper business, and that meant business with the other person who shared her territory.

  ‘Miss Bellis Harrow and Vernon – I mean my son, Mr Justinian – may have made plain their intention to marry, but my son never wasted his youth on adult responsibilities.’ The Dowager adjusted the wick on one lamp, for the brightness illuminated an alarming patch of swelling damp on one wall. ‘By my count ten girls in all Fiction have considered themselves the next Madame Justinian. I dare not think about Lyonne. But she was the best of them, Bellis. A good, sweet-natured girl. Always had a kind word for me. They were friends from their first year. My son courted her when he still had baby-cheeks, before the city called him away.’

  ‘So they must have been of similar age, then.’

  ‘Yes, yes they were. Quite a few children in town were. They formed quite a cadre. Vernon and Bellis exchanged rings in promise before he left. Being a hopeful mother, I’d hoped that meant they would one day marry. But you see, friendships from the cradle rarely survive the storms of adulthood.’

  She fiddled with the wick up on a third lamp, this one to chase away the spirits of the gathering night. The only effect was to make the shadows darker, and harshen those lights already in the room.

  ‘Strange,’ Arden said. ‘With all those tales of a forced marriage to Mr Riven, it led me to believe Miss Harrow a literal child. If she shared Vernon’s age she must have been in her late twenties at least. My age, then. An independent adult.’

  ‘Age is relative, you see. Her father, Mr Harrow, is a firm man. Very firm. Owns the general store in Vigil, and is Postmaster into the bargain. Does duties as Magistrate when we have cause to hold a criminal court. So he rather preserved his child in a state of innocence longer than most.’

  ‘I take it he approved of the union between Mr Justinian and Bellis?’

  ‘Of course. Not a better match could a Vigil girl make, not even the daughter of a Magistrate Postmaster. Perhaps this made Mr Harrow blind to his daughter’s beauty and friendly nature, how such a thing is a flame in the night-time, and attractive to night-flying things. Bellis loved my son. What a terrible, tragic surprise that she should marry Mr Riven so very suddenly.’

  ‘Something must have happened to have spoiled this gilded cage that Mr Harrow kept her in. People don’t flee comfort lightly.’

  ‘No they do not,’ Dowager Justinian said. ‘She did not flee. Mr Riven desired that he should have her. An unseemly lust overcame him upon seeing Bellis in the town one day. He is blood-bound to the wild things of the sea, you understand. No doubt his urges are similarly wild.’ Her hand went to her throat, appalled at what such an indecorous affinity meant.

  Arden shook her head. ‘Any magistrate could have granted divorce immediately had there been any true element of non-consent or violence.’

  ‘The economy of Vigil needs kraken—’

  ‘Goodness, morals go beyond that!’

  ‘Well, people tried! Once Vernon attempted to visit Bellis out on the promontory and inquire about her welfare. Mr Riven fired at him with a Middle Country musket. And then a month later the girl was dead.’ Dowager Justinian heaved a breath, fiddled nervously with a lace handkerchief wedged up her
dark sleeve, then went to close the curtains for the night as if the act, more suited to servant-staff, assuaged a deeper trouble of which she had yet to speak.

  ‘Hers is a wretched tragedy, I agree,’ Arden said. ‘But it’s more tragic that I hear everyone’s voice on the matter excepting Bellis Harrow-Riven’s. What was her truth? What was her reason?’

  ‘It doesn’t need a truth or reason. She is dead. I have cried enough tears.’

  With her duties done, Dowager Justinian went from the study with a rustle of skirts, and left Arden in the gloom with her maps.

  A storm had come upon the shoreline, whistling mournfully across the barren black cliffs of Vigil’s bay. When the oil lamps burned low, Arden put away her ocean-current almanacs and headed to her bed. The embers from the fire cast orange highlights across the room, made them move with an uneven flicker. The krakenskin’s thousand eye-rings watched her with abyssal coldness, wiser than any holy stone. The black ship forever bore down upon Arden in her memory.

  A dead woman had worn this coat. A dead woman stolen away, as in the fairy stories, where the King of the Sea would take a fair maiden from the beach and ravish her upon his oyster-pearl bed for a thousand nights.

  An innocent tale, yet Bellis Harrow’s life was just that story, whisked off by a lord of the sea and ravished in a crude bed in a decaying factory-shack. For her the reality had been a story of violence and despair.

  The coat, though. The puzzle piece that did not fit.

  Months, it would have taken to craft such a garment, to cut and cure and fit and sew. The tremulous leather-work at the sleeves had increased in confidence at the collar and yoke. A teacher had been patient, and their student enthusiastic. The patterns were exultant and joyful. A woman in pain could not have made this garment.

  Arden’s Portside stubbornness returned. During her duties as lantern mistress she had seen illegal ships enter the harbour through the Parrot Wharf turning bowl, filled with the spoils of piracy and illegal gains. Her job concerned the safe passage of boats through the locks and wharves. If she had no evidence of wrongdoing, it was not for her to judge the misbegotten contents they held. That task she would leave for the sheriffs and the inspectors

  She had a lighthouse to manage, and a future far from here.

  Whatever the locals got up to in the meantime, that was their business alone.

  7

  The Vernon Justinian who went to Garfish Point

  The Vernon Justinian who went to Garfish Point the day before, and the one who woke up the next morning could hardly be considered the same person. He moaned piteously through the breakfast table and collapsed on the daybed afterwards with a damp napkin over his eyes. The sound of morning rain on the windows made him whimper. The house staff were obliged to tiptoe around, for the shuffle of their feet on the worn parquetry made him yell in a manner most unbecoming to a man of his station.

  Everyone from the butler to the pretty girl of the scullery found themselves bludgeoned with his wrathful tongue. The girl’s darting, angry eyes found Arden, and blamed her silently for Mr Justinian’s foul condition.

  Only Dowager Justinian received permission to come close, to bring the opium tea laced with cannabis oil which only served to make him delirious. Within minutes of his dashing the bitter drink to the carpet, Mr Justinian fell into a daze from which he could not be roused.

  Arden could not find it in herself to be very upset at the Coastmaster’s complaint. It meant she would get easy escape from the grey confines of the Manse, and an unhurried excursion through the lands she would temporarily call home. Mr Quill, the old, tweedy fellow who did double duty as groundskeeper and Justinian driver, agreed to take Arden to the lighthouse by the long-route. He too feared his employer’s temper, and relievedly accepted the excuse of a road trip.

  The car rattled and coughed its way along the inland lanes that led past the racelakes and the ethanol-spirit farms that brought Fiction’s economy a little coin by feeding the hungry country to the north. The coastal scrub was dominated by an aromatic bush, and the air through the open window smelled of menthol as well as salt.

  Through most of the morning Arden hid her gloves under her bag politely until Mr Quill told her that he was not at all troubled by her presence.

  ‘My second cousin twice-removed went to Lyonne after he was tested, near on fifty years ago,’ he said. ‘I saw the coins in his hands.’

  ‘Oh? Would I know him?’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘A Fiction blood-worker quite stands out these days. They’re so rare.’

  Mr Quill shook his head and his mouth fell into long, sad lines. ‘Lass, you were not alive when he died. Fool didn’t last a week. Got roaring drunk one night. Struck his head on a low beam, fell into a Clay Portside canal.’

  ‘Oh, that is a shame,’ Arden said, and felt her hands prickle awfully. ‘The city can be quite disorienting to newcomers.’

  He gave a phlegmy, dismissive cough. ‘Disorienting! We aren’t that lumpen, or grain-pickled. I know my cousin never touched alcohol. No, it was the Eugenics Society that had him killed.’

  It was such a shockingly open pronouncement that Arden wound the window down a little more and silently turned to the menthol gust and the clattering engine rather than reply. Such conversations were never had in Lyonne, where a Lion might be lurking about every corner. ‘The Eugenics Society wouldn’t just murder people. They’re a little more subtle than that.’

  The skin under his eyes had a little nervous tic.

  By now the vehicle had crested an uplift in the land and they came upon a great forest of silver and rubber piping, of vessels as large as airship bladders, and tall chambers as high as her lighthouse. If Arden wanted to talk to Mr Quill more about the economies of Lyonne and blood, her thoughts were gone in an instant.

  ‘Goodness,’ Arden exclaimed. ‘These are automatic rockblood refineries, are they not?’

  ‘Yes, Sainted Isle crude rockblood, straight from the wound.’

  ‘I’ve never seen one so large before.’

  ‘You don’t use petralactose in that big Clay city?’

  ‘All the time. We get petroleum distillates transported to Lyonne, but never in the crude form.’

  A giant copper distillation tank towered above the scrub, bristling with walkways and transoms. From their distance, the refinery had the appearance of a malign castle built by madmen, except no man had made this terrible feat of automatic engineering. Arden spotted a puddle of iridescent petralactose pooling at the bottom of one tank, the old edifice leaking through aged valves no living being had the knowledge to fix. It was there that she caught her first view of human figures, oily workers scuttling about the old refinery with patches and seals, trying to keep it alive the way ants might attend at the swollen belly of their great, gravid queen.

  ‘One of them damn grey ships is at dock,’ Mr Quill said, pointing. ‘Can you see the godforsaken thing? Have you not in your life witnessed such a travesty of nature?’

  The ship was more barge than anything, a grey vessel without windows, berthed on the far shore of the peninsula. Arden knew little about the logistical workings of the Sainted Isles, only that the grey ship was a watch-worked craft with a single purpose, obligated to ferry itself to the Islands and return with a bellyful of raw petrolactose. Compelled by old bloodworked commands, it cruised back and forth between the Island wells and the mainland refineries as thoughtless as the gears in her lantern house.

  ‘Is that a lich-ship? I saw one beached at the Clay Mouth when I was a girl.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t think the lich-ships went that far north.’

  She shook her head. ‘Usually they don’t. A storm forced one off course. The internal mechanisms were confused and it ran aground in Lyonne. The Clay Mouth swampfolk weren’t impressed by their clockwork visitor.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘Burned it. They thought it was evil.’

  ‘Perhaps they were not wrong. What
manner of sanguinity could make such a machine?’

  ‘Ones lost to us now, thank goodness. Ferrum perpetua, mandari, orientis … the old talents. Though one would need the entire compliment to control something like that.’ She tilted her chin towards the grey ship and its empty dock.

  Mr Quill drove on, relieved to be away from the unholy automata. The copper forests faded along with the relentlessly aromatic fermented-pine smell of petroleum fractions. Some of the acrid scent clung to Arden’s skin, a dreadfully bitter perfume. It made her recall the petroleum dens of Clay, where debauched scions might inhale distillations of rockblood from crystal decanters. The euphoria was brief and terrible, and long-term partakers often lost control of their faculties, became confused, and died.

  Perpetua, procuro, orientis. Her intonation of the old talents to Mr Quill had made her uneasy, a feeling that carried even after the refinery was out of view. There were some sanguineous symmetries that were not inheritable, even by a Society who knew more about coaxing heritable traits out of a bloodline than any scholarly system in existence. She knew only of the old talents as one knew all general trivia, something learned to pass an Academy mid-term exam and then forgotten forever.

  Out on the ocean, more boats dotted the grey slate water. More desperate, hopeful souls heading to the source of the refinery’s awful contents. A land torn open and dying, like a wound. Imagine breathing that kind of air all the time, she thought with a shudder. Imagine such a place.

  They stopped at a sugar-beet farm for midday refreshments, and the family were pleased to offer Arden provisions in exchange for Lyonne coin. She needed a little smear of her blood to restore antique bloodlight lanterns extinguished for over a century. They had last been lit only in those days when blood was strong in Fiction.

  ‘These instruments are of a good design,’ Arden said to her hosts, pleased at the steady glow. ‘They’ll not need feeding for two years, maybe three.’

  And I’ll be far away from here.

  The children gawped at the strange, cold blue flame behind glass that had always resisted a normal fire. Their parents, as expected, were a little less enthusiastic.