The Double Life of Incorporate Things (Magic Most Foul)

by Hieber, Leanna

  I tucked my arm in hers and squeezed tight. “I love you,” I murmured. She took my hand and clutched it in both of hers, tucking it toward her heart. I felt a tear splash onto the back of it.

  “And I you. From the moment I first met you, I wanted you as my daughter. I knew it had to be. I...I saw this moment. Right here. Walking through the park, my long-lost daughter and me, on a perfect New York afternoon...” She turned away to dab her eyes with a handkerchief. I thought my heart would burst.

  “I am the luckiest girl in the whole of this great city,” I murmured. I looked up at the beautiful blue sky and thanked all the forces of light that had gotten me this far by stubborn faith and more blessings than I knew what to do with.

  We took the longer route back, arm in arm, me and my mentor and second mother, a bond that had saved my life. I’d like to think I’d saved hers too. At least her heart.

  Lavinia came over for tea, sweeping into the Northe parlor in something just as black and dramatic as usual. Something about our earlier bout of gossip and talk of love and lovers made me bold, and so I asked:

  “When is Nathaniel going to stop running from the obvious and marry you?”

  Lavinia shrugged wistfully. “I’ve no idea. I can’t force him. He is his own beast. A wild creature that will only stop pacing when he wishes. I know he loves me. But I’m not sure what that means to him.”

  “With your parents still having cut you off...what will you do?”

  “I’ve found work for her,” Mrs. Northe said with a smile.

  “Via Senator Bishop,” Lavinia continued excitedly. “He’s associated with an office that quietly looks into paranormal goings-on in the city. They’re selective and very secretive. Evidently they had only men as doorkeepers at their office for quite some time. But they all kept falling for the woman in charge, the senator’s ward—”

  “Miss Templeton? I just met her.”

  “Indeed,” Mrs. Northe added. “It would seem the senator finally got tired of intimidating all the gentlemen doorkeepers, so Lavinia will be a great addition to their little cadre.”

  “Especially considering the experiences we’ve had,” Lavinia added. “If you’d like work, I’m sure he’d like to talk to you, although the idea of ‘Lady Denbury’ taking a job doesn’t sound quite right,” she said with a wink and a smile.

  “Miss Templeton did seem quite interested in talking to me,” I replied. “But I’d prefer not to work in any field we barely survived... After all we’ve been through, I’m surprised you’d want anything to do with anything paranormal.”

  She smiled. “Has your time with our club, Her Majesty’s Association of Melancholy Bastards, taught you nothing? We court this sort of intrigue!” She laughed. “No, truly, think about it, my friend. My name is Lavinia. A Shakespearean character who, in Titus Andronicus, was raped, her tongue cut out, and her hands cut off. No matter that it was a “family name,” I made it my mission in my life that I would not let my name damn me. That I would live loudly and fully. That I would live as dramatically as I please, with no men making decisions for me that I would not make on my own as best I could. To take a job, a position, for a secret office? Something empowering and fascinating? Why, it takes that Shakespearean tragedy and makes it something glorious.”

  “Well played, Miss Kent.” Mrs. Northe applauded.

  “Indeed, I think it’s lovely, Lavinia. While I go off to be a titled lady,” I said with a grin, “we’ll all have the best of adventures together. Safely away from any demons, haunted paintings, or reanimate corpses.”

  “Huzzah to that, my lady. No more of that indeed,” came a familiar British accent lilting off lips I longed to kiss. Jonathon swept into the room with a bouquet of red roses for me. “Come, come, Lady Denbury, shall we house hunt? It’s my favorite kind of quarry, lavish lodgings that can’t run away from my title. Fit for a very pretty girl who can’t run from it, either.”

  “As if she’d ever want to,” I murmured, lifting my face so that he’d bend over the settee to kiss me. He did. I jumped to my feet, sliding my arm in his, holding the roses very princess-like in the crook of my other arm. “If you’ll excuse us, ladies...”

  Lavinia and Evelyn grinned, shooing us to the door.

  As Jonathon and I descended onto Fifth Avenue, the bustle and swarm of New York before us, I had never felt so vibrant. So full of all the possibilities I could make manifest. The life and family I would lead and create. Mother’s causes I would soon take up. All the art I would buy for Father’s beloved Metropolitan Museum. The clinics I would help Jonathon open.

  For all that the “Majesties” had wanted to take from society, we would do all the more to lift it up and serve the world with love. With the second chances we’d been given. With the lives we were lucky enough to still live.

  I stared out at my beloved city and promised I would live to the fullest all that our infinite blessings dictated. For all that my beloved Jonathon and I had seen of tragedy, of darkness, of the double life of solid and shade, we were all the better equipped to shine, throughout this life and unto the paths that angels would tread.

  Epilogue

  From the Desk of Miss Clara Templeton

  Internal Director, Eterna Commission, established 1865

  Notes:

  Senator Bishop gave me the case of Lord Denbury and Miss Natalie Stewart and the various issues that befell them for consideration.

  Though I am not sure what it may have to do with issues of immortality that the Eterna Commission has been charged with examining, I find everything about the Master’s Society to be fascinating. Harrowing, but fascinating. I do not envy all those two young lovers underwent.

  I spent quite some time in the sergeant’s office, examining the deeds in the sequence as the inimitable Evelyn suggested. Her clairvoyance never ceases to impress me, and I confess I am envious of the gift.

  I believe my office could benefit from similar experiences of the teamwork displayed by the friends drawn into the Society’s sinister web. Though I doubt Miss Stewart or her lord would wish what they lived through upon anyone.

  The police, when it comes to many spiritual or inexplicable matters, seem more than happy to let women handle them. While the paranormal does not favor a gender, I do find that more women of this gilded age of ours remain open-minded about the inexplicable, and perhaps in some ways that may make us more vulnerable. We are, after all, the founders and purveyors of Spiritualism.

  It was all very personal, in the end, this Mister Moriel’s targeting of the Denbury family. To reanimate the corpse of the woman who rejected him? How tasteless. But wars are waged over trivial matters.

  People live and die over personal matters, not global ones.

  And that’s perhaps why Miss Stewart and Lord Denbury won, in the end. They too made it personal. Faith is personal. Resilience is personal. And the pasts, the energies, the ghosts and the angels we carry with us. Those are very personal indeed.

  I have asked to interview Miss Stewart—once she’s Lady Denbury—and glean from her a specialized wisdom this sort of trauma creates. I’ve been considered gifted for so long, I need to be challenged, else I’ll become a bore to myself.

  I need to make everything personal. That’s the only way forward in all that I seek.

  I have enclosed a letter from Lady Denbury responding to my request for a further interview, along with a package that I am humbled to have received. And I’m certainly up for this challenge.

  Dear Miss Templeton,

  I received your request for an interview along with the gift of the silver platter Senator Bishop sent as a wedding present. It’s lovely and very generous of you both.

  I have just returned from honeymooning in Paris, which was transcendently romantic. If you’ve never been, I insist everyone should go there with someone they love.

  I’d rather not, at the moment, talk about what I’ve been through. Jonathon and I are determined to live our lives out from those dread shadow
s. We were so relieved to hear, just as we began moving into our Greenwich Village townhouse, that the wretch Moriel has been sentenced to death. The Society operatives have been rounded up and may face the same. Their radical madness is ended at last.

  I wish we had received confirmation from Mr. Brinkman that his son has been returned to him. However, as he is a government operative, I am sure the man’s details will forever be withheld from us. I must content myself with the surety that they are reunited. However, I would encourage persons in such an office as yours to keep vigilant.

  Since I have refused an interview, I will grant you something more comprehensive, in the interest of making sure no one ever has to go through the sorts of things we have gone through. I have enclosed my diary for your perusal. These pages detail my first encounters with Societal magic and what we did to save my husband’s soul.

  However, as you are a lady, I ask you, please skip past all the kissing bits. And please return it to me as soon as you’re finished. I never intended for the diary to become a novel for others to read, but it would seem it has become one. Let it be a lesson to keep faith and believe in love above all else.

  Sincerely,

  Natalie Stewart Whitby, Lady Denbury

  The End

  OF THE MAGIC MOST FOUL SAGA

  More of Clara Templeton, Senator Bishop,

  Mister Brinkman, and British Counterparts,

  featuring appearances from Magic Most Foul

  and Strangely Beautiful characters, in:

  THE ETERNA FILES

  Summer 2014 from Tor / Macmillan

  &

  The award-winning, nationally bestselling, acclaimed

  STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL SAGA:

  New, revised editions, coming 2014 from Tor / Macmillan

  Read more:

  leannareneehieber.com

  twitter.com/leannarenee

  facebook.com/lrhieber

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Marcos and to the Hieber family for unconditional support of me and my work. Thanks to the readers who donated to the serialization of this project along the way, I cannot thank you enough for helping to sustain the venture. Thank you Perseus and Draco LePage for sharing my work so constantly and generously, that’s only one of the ways in which you are Angels, Treasures and Family. Thank you to my fabulous editor Haleigh Rucinski for coming on board with this whole madness and being such a help and a dear along the way, I couldn’t have done this without you. Thank you to my critique partner Cassandra Johnstone for fielding some of this half-cooked madness. With wine. Thank you Stephen Segal for the amazing cover and your services, you are a hero. Thank you to Melissa Singer, my upcoming Tor editor, for encouraging me to serialize this novel, it’s been an amazing and fulfilling experiment and I cannot wait for our next adventures.

  To my readers, you are why I do this. To God and the Angels, I promise to do my best in your honour.