The Double Life of Incorporate Things (Magic Most Foul)

by Hieber, Leanna

  “Another experiment?” Jonathon posed. “Should we expect for another ‘outbreak’ like what happened with Nathaniel’s Association?” He turned to his countryman. “We believe we need to find their center of operations to terminate the beast at its source. I hope you’ll help us in that quest, Mister Brinkman.”

  “It changes, they’ve several offices. I’ve only pinpointed two, there may be four. They seem to like to commandeer grand spaces.”

  At this, Jonathon’s jaw clenched, and his crystalline eyes darkened. “I don’t suppose you’ve any news of my Greenwich estate.”

  “The situation will have to be...addressed, Lord Denbury. I don’t believe the tenants who overtook your manor are fully in control there; Knowles informed me that he thinks something is a bit off.”

  “Could that be a center of operations?” I asked.

  “In part, perhaps, though their focus seems to zero in on a few cities, London, New York, Chicago. That your estate got swept into this is rather an outlier, my lord,” Brinkman replied. Jonathon’s leather-gloved hand clenched, and I resisted the urge to put my lace-gloved hand over his. There was no avoiding Jonathon’s return to England. This time I wouldn’t let him go without me.

  “I’d like to know those addresses, and also, do elaborate on how you know someone is ‘coming for me’ as your note intimated,” Jonathon said carefully.

  “The former? Intercepted mail. The latter? Let’s say instinct. And I was trying to get your attention.”

  “Idle threats may get attention but not trust,” Jonathon countered.

  “If I knew exactly who or what or when something was coming for you, my lord, I’d have left you an itinerary. But I do believe they’d rather kill you than wait to see if you bested them, especially without word from Doctor Preston directly. So be on the lookout for anything and everything. Where are you staying? I’m sure I could arrange for protection.”

  “I am well protected,” Jonathon assured. I wondered if Mrs. Northe had increased guards around her home. If so, they weren’t visible. The woman was artfully subtle. Brinkman bowed his head. “How can I find you, Mister Brinkman, if I have information to give you or questions to ask?”

  “Here is what I know of possible property in Master’s Society hands,” the spy replied. “And don’t worry where to find me, I’ll find you.” And with that, he was again out of the still-moving carriage, the door slamming behind him.

  “Well,” Jonathon and I said at the same time.

  “He didn’t have any aura of the demon about him, but then again, he didn’t have any light at all. Generally speaking, when people will be of particular help, they’ve a soft white light about them. You, of course, were colored in the exact inverse hues the demon sported; thusly, I knew you could stand in direct opposition to its magic. But this fellow, curiously nothing, and for him to be so involved, I’m not sure what it means.”

  “Could he be a possessed body?” I asked.

  “Generally, the possessed have a flicker of fire about them, that odd sulfuric haze. I saw none of that. What do you think, were the eyes off? Did they have that dog-like reflective quality?” Jonathon replied. I shook my head. He shrugged. “Perhaps it means he’s neutral.”

  “You mean he won’t help but won’t harm?”

  “That’s all I can think of it.”

  “Well, that’s disappointing.” I folded my arms, elbow brushing the knife hilt I’d returned to the unconventional sheath of my corset.

  “And troubling,” Jonathon added, “if his allegiances are easily swayed.” He unfolded the paper.

  “You’re not going alone,” I cautioned. “That you went, with that note, and tried to find—”

  “That I did anything without you truly disturbs you, I realize. But you cannot mother me through everything, Natalie,” he said, an edge to his tone.

  “Mother you? No, I…” I felt sounds die in my throat. Come on, Natalie, words. Words to fight what isn’t fair.

  He sighed. “I’m not ungrateful for anything, Natalie, but I also need to be able to do things for myself and on my own. Not only because I worry for your safety, but also because this is, at heart, my own personal vendetta and the only thing that sets my mind at ease is constantly thinking of the next step to best them. I will try to involve you if it seems plausible. Allow my independence, as you would wish I allow you yours, Miss Natalie,” he said, driving home the point of my femininity, of the world that sought to confine me and offer me no independence whatsoever. He didn’t say it with cruelty, but with a worldliness I could not deny. I had to tread carefully with him. I could lose him at any moment, and while I was not one to beg or plead for anything, I truly wanted him in my life.

  His words were not to be argued. But I did take the paper from his hand to examine the addresses before he could yank it back away from me. One was on the Upper East Side, Park and 66, the other downtown, in an area I was fairly sure was industrial, off 14th Street.

  “Tomorrow?” Jonathon queried. “Shall we scout?”

  “No, tomorrow I’m…busy.”

  “Busy?”

  I considered a moment whether or not I’d tell him, but there was no sense in secrets. It was all for his benefit, to set this madness to rest once and for all. “Mrs. Northe and I have a date with a madman. Crenfall. Mrs. Northe thinks she might glean some sort of clue from him about what to target in the city.”

  Jonathon made a face and was silent. He helped me down from the carriage as it let me out near the red-brick Romanesque façade of the Metropolitan, a grand building quickly outgrowing itself, where I would go check in on Father so that he could feel as though he were checking in on me. It was now more important than ever that I keep my freedom by making Father think I were subject to his constraints as any good unmarried girl should be. Jonathon bowed his head to me before turning away. The gesture seemed too formal. If the forced intimacy of having met soul to soul receded into the cool detachment that supposedly came with “mature” sentiment, I couldn’t bear it. I was passionate, and I wanted to live, and love, passionately. Mutually.

  “Do you want to come tomorrow?” I blurted, not wanting him to go, wishing we could replace our last day in the park with a better one, one where everything was said exactly so and unfolded as any girl might dream.

  “I doubt a madhouse will do me good, Natalie. I will walk by the addresses Brinkman gave—” He put up his hand as I opened my mouth. “I’ll not make any attempts at entry or contact. Merely surveillance. Allow me this while you see what can be gleaned from that wretch who helped imprison me,” he muttered, grinding out words through clenched teeth. “We’ll be more productive if our team splits up.”

  I prayed he didn’t mean that in terms of our relationship as well, and the fear of this had me blurting again. “I love you.”

  His beautiful face, as world-weary as it had been in the painting when he feared all was lost, brightened a bit. He took my hand and kissed it softly. My entire body reacted in a sweeping thrill. And then he turned away, gave Mrs. Northe’s cross streets to the driver, and climbed in, disappearing behind the lace curtain of the carriage window. Perhaps his wounded pride still sought to punish me a bit, and so he did not return my words of love, but I would relive that kiss upon my hand until he could.

  I watched the carriage turn town a side street, waiting for him to look out the window at me. He didn’t. I waved at the carriage anyway, biting my lip. I doubted a madhouse would do me good, either, but I’d rather I suffer it than Jonathon. He was truly alone in the world save for me. The young man who had yet to grieve his murdered parents and all that had been taken from him was doing the very best he could in a land that was not his own, and I had to be the best I could be, for his sake. For our sake. Tomorrow might bring us one step closer to answers and closure.

  Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day till the last syllable of recorded time… My Shakespearean life would yet unfold day by day, in an inexorab
le march toward the undiscovered country.

  Chapter Five

  I watched from the window of my small upstairs room for Mrs. Northe’s fine carriage and magnificent mare. When they came around the corner of my block, I darted out to the door. Bessie asked nothing of my business—Mrs. Northe’s wealth and high social status offered us that privilege—so I hurried down to the street and hopped in as soon as she opened the door from inside. Before the driver could climb down to assist me, I had already clambered up in a swish of skirts far less fine than those opposite me. I threw myself into the seat a bit like Brinkman had the day prior. It was an impressive skill I wanted to practice.

  She opened her mouth as if she were about to reprimand me, likely ready to remind me that wasn’t how Lady Denbury should behave, yet she only chortled.

  “This is the first moment we’ve had in a while to just catch up, you and I,” I began. “I do hope you’ll be less cryptic about Chicago and many other things you’ve been cagy about.”

  She chuckled again and looked out the window as the carriage sped downtown down an oddly clear Second Avenue. I could tell the chuckle masked grief. I could tell she didn’t want me to see the pain in her expression. She kept her voice impressively steady. “My friend was dying, that was no lie. She was a woman of visions. When she bid me come see her onward onto the Undiscovered Country, she told me that she’d seen things I needed to know about. I confess, I wasn’t eager to hear them.”

  There was a pause. The clatter of horse hooves and wheels upon cobblestones was a lulling pattern of sound for several blocks. I patiently waited, but I kept my eyes trained on her so that she knew I was expecting more out of her.

  “Every mentor has to step out of the way, Natalie,” she added finally. “And allow her protégés to fight their own battles.”

  I caught my breath, trying to let that declaration and all it may portend sink in. “That’s why you went to Chicago, when Jonathon and I, with the help of friends, had to deal with Doctor Preston’s reanimated madness on our own? I confess, I didn’t like feeling abandoned.”

  “And I remain torn,” she countered. “What my friend saw predicts dark futures ahead. I was hoping she’d reassure me that I would, as I like to do, play the role of guardian angel effortlessly, flawlessly. I can’t promise that will be the case, Natalie. So look sharp. Stay safe. And don’t look to me as the answer for everything,” she said, her tone terribly sad. She kept her gaze trained out the window.

  This wasn’t something I wanted to hear out of a woman I’d once thought invincible, infallible. But she was human. Just like the rest of us imperfect creatures that fate had bound together against a dark force we still struggled to comprehend. I hope at least fate knew what it was doing even if we didn’t.

  I opened my mouth to ask about Maggie, for last I’d heard a doctor had been tending her at the Hathorne residence, but I doubted life would simply continue on for the misguided girl—a young woman who was my peer in age, though I was not her peer in wealth—without some sort of judgment, punishment, or internment. I wasn’t sure what stopped me this time. But the overwhelming task of what we were up against had me at a loss for words, my occasional difficulty with speech notwithstanding.

  A lack of confidence is what had me often fall back into my old patterns of silence. I decided to focus on the task at hand. One task at a time, this day was for information gathering, else I’d lose my mind with worry and wondering. When we disembarked for the small steam ferry and I saw the dreary round island ahead, positioned amid the East River, a place I’d thankfully never had cause to go, there was nothing to do but wrestle with the pit of dread in my stomach. While boarding the small boat, we had to brace our hats—Mrs. Northe’s feathered piece far more elaborate than my felt and tulle one—against the river winds, feeling the boat struggle against strong currents as if it didn’t want to cross, either...

  Good God, what a miserable place. A long, sprawling castle of dark brick out on Wards Island that picked up the howls of patients upon the East River winds. I glanced at Mrs. Northe as I first spied the long, rounded edifice, curving in like a vast crescent. Any hope of getting honest information paled. I wondered if the man we sought would even be recognizable in this gargantuan estate of insanity.

  Crenfall, the broker who had seen to the transfer of Lord Denbury’s portrait from England to New York—with his soul trapped inside—was an odious man, leering and unseemly. But I couldn’t imagine that even the most deserving of creatures would fare very well in this purgatory, just one step away from hell. I couldn’t imagine that anyone with a shred of sanity would keep it in a place like this; from the cries and screams I heard the moment the scowling ferryman mounted a rickety calash to drive us up the long winding path to the front doors, it seemed no one had.

  “I have to utterly shut down any of my heightened senses, any ability to pick up on another person’s thoughts or emotions. It’s too painful, scattered, and raw,” Mrs. Northe murmured to me as we stepped down from the creaking calash that was all too happy to tear away again, the driver not looking back. I stared up at the towering, formidable building before us as she continued: “I know that Crenfall was an accessory to murder and justice must be served. Still, I feel a pang of pity for those confined here.”

  An attendant in a dreary gray uniform, a solemn-looking man strained around the eyes, opened the door before Mrs. Northe had even lifted the knocker. He stared past us, out into the wide, vacant lawn, as if ready to run. We stepped inside the daunting doors, and the sounds were far worse within than without. I could not blame the man for yearning for that free open space behind us, in such contrast from the overwhelming weight and gloom of the place.

  The warden, a stern, broad man dressed in the same somber gray as everyone that could be seen anywhere in the vast open foyer and halls leading off in either direction, looked up in surprise at our arrival. A large ring of keys clinked at his side as he approached. “Can I...help you...ladies?”

  “I seek an interview with one of your patients,” Mrs. Northe said.

  “An interview?” The man’s eyebrows seemed ready to launch off his skull.

  “Yes. Someone who was recently convicted and placed here in confinement, a Mr. Crenfall.”

  The warden chuckled. “You want information out of him? Because all you’ll get is some babbling murmurs about a Master.”

  I fought back the urge to shudder at that word.

  Mrs. Northe was swift to answer. “I’ll take what I can get,” she replied, her tone not to be trifled with. “It’s to do with an investigation.”

  The man sneered, and I distinctly didn’t like him. “Since when did the police let women do their work?”

  “They don’t,” Mrs. Northe replied crisply. “And yet we do. Sir. Do their work. Every day. It just isn’t our job. But we do, in our way. Now please be so kind as to do yours in turn and show me to the prisoner. An attendant guard would be kindly appreciated.”

  That I wanted to grow up to be just like the woman at my side was hardly lost on me in moments like this. I fought back a haughty look I wanted to give to the man.

  “I’ve got to ask the boss. As this is hardly custom,” he said with an exaggerated bow, flashing jagged teeth first at Mrs. Northe, then at me. I quelled another urge to shudder and had to keep it still at bay when I saw the Alienist in charge approach; he was a towering, sour-faced, balding man in an ill-fitting brown suit, the sort of character who looked more like someone the Master’s Society would choose as a lackey than the kind I’d like to see tending the mentally ill. The warden was speaking to him quietly as they approached us, and then he walked off, leaving us there in the cold, drafty hall with the head of the place.

  “You wish to...interrogate Crenfall?” the man asked with blatant skepticism.

  “I realize his lucidity may be limited,” Mrs. Northe replied, “but if he’s speaking in puzzles, even they, sensible or not, may be of use.”

  “May I ask what you’re
working on, and why you’ve a young...” He turned to me and fumbled for words. “What are you, miss? An...apprentice?”

  That the world seemed so baffled by a woman of agency such as Mrs. Northe was far more irritating to me than a man being baffled by my presence. I typically ought not to be in the situations I’d been finding myself since encountering Jonathon’s haunted portrait, but with every new situation, I felt more and more entitled to my purposes and would stand strong, haughty, even, against the withering stare of the disapproving who wanted me to be seen and not heard, home and not out, soft and not strong.

  “I wish I could explain our positions and duties, but I’m under orders not to say,” Mrs. Northe said with a kindness to her voice that made her less threatening, a good tactic, one that appeared to placate but was unapologetic. “If you’ve any concerns, I’ve government contacts to vouch for me, men who will most certainly appreciate your efforts to both allow us to complete an interview whilst ensuring our safety.”

  I was fairly sure she meant Senator Bishop; he seemed a very useful man to know, and one that was on our paranormal side, a side few seemed brave or open-minded enough to entertain. The doctor shrugged and gestured we follow him into the heart of the gray maze laden with bars and wailing voices.

  Dank halls, dirty linens... the men within the cells seemed creatures, not humans. It was a brick building of long, caged hallways. It was a prison, yet worse; they weren’t merely being held, they were being worked on. Whatever efforts had gone forward since the Civil War to make sanitariums seem more amenable must not have affected this place for the better.

  The doctor seemed to be deploying a host of new advancements, operations, serums, and “therapies” upon his patients that seemed more like abuse from the looks of it as I passed cell after cell of misery. One man was strapped to a chair while attendants dunked him face down into a vast basin of water. I opened my mouth to ask what the point there could possibly be in such treatment when the doctor supplied: