by Viola Carr
Eliza tucked a struggling Hippocrates into her bag, and she and Captain Lafayette walked east towards New Bond Street, beneath a row of trees. Clammy fog-fingers curled under her skirts. “So gallant, sir,” she teased. “I’m practically a-faint. Brigham will fall over himself to earn another smile from you. Would you really employ him?”
“I might.” Lafayette didn’t offer his arm. Nothing so presumptuous. Just strolled at her side, hands tucked behind him. His scarlet-and-gold uniform glared like a bloodstain in the coarse light. “I feel sorry for the lad. I’m reminded unpleasantly of public school: always some witless oaf waiting to thrash your lights out.”
“That explains a lot.” She eyed his Royal Society badge. “A dish best served cold?”
“Never crossed my mind.”
An electric carriage thundered by, purple coils crackling in the damp. A pair of harnessed horses sidestepped and rolled crazed eyes. Crossing sweepers darted beneath speeding wheels to scrape up dung. Housekeepers and kitchen maids loomed from the fog, balancing baskets of vegetables and meats from the market.
“I say, watch out!” Eliza dodged a sprinting clockwork servant with a bundle over its skinny shoulder. It whirred self-importantly and hared off, clank! clank!, scattering shoppers in its wake. She dusted her skirts angrily. “Stupid thing. They can build them so much better than that. But that’s what happens when you debase science with commercial concerns. Cheap materials and shoddy workmanship.”
“Stupid,” echoed Hipp dolefully inside her bag. “Cheap.”
A lady flounced by, a pet hedgehog on a chain tucked under her arm. Her decorative leather throat armor stretched from collarbone to chin, forcing her nose into the air at a comical angle.
Lizzie laughed, and Eliza snickered, too, earning a haughty glare. When Razor Jack had escaped from Bethlem, panic had ensued, spawning all manner of bizarre safeguards against that singular gentleman’s favorite weapon. Naturally, the society set had turned the practical, if fanciful, armor into a fashion statement.
As if an expert like Razor Jack would be thwarted by a device so banal. If he wanted you dead, you perished. End of story.
Lafayette tipped his hat to the lady, who simpered, until she noticed his iron badge, whereupon she avoided eye contact.
Shivering, Eliza tugged her shawl tighter. “Burglary, indeed. Reeve will never solve this case. Your case, that is.”
“Reeve doesn’t solve cases. He plays angles. Swift results, no questions asked. Not the sharpest tool in the box, but he’s accomplished at giving people what they want.”
Her sense of justice bristled. “Who’d want the wrong man arrested for murder?”
“I say, did it rain crime scene physicians this morning? I must have missed the weather reports.”
“Excuse me?”
“Black magic, secret debauchery, Lady Fleet’s reputation at stake? Do you imagine anyone cares who actually did it?”
“I care,” insisted Eliza. “Playing the angles, indeed. If this were my case—which it isn’t, of course, what a shame I haven’t time to assist further—I wouldn’t let anyone’s reputation pervert the path of justice.”
“Did I mention that’s why I’m besotted with you?”
“Really? I imagined you bamboozled by my exotic beauty.”
“There’s that. But mostly it’s your fortune I’m after.”
“Consider me forewarned.” More from habit than interest, she fingered through the offerings on a book-seller’s cart: The Daily Telegraph, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, a luridly illustrated edition of Burton’s famous Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah. A penny pamphlet entitled VARNEY THE VAMPYRE! sported a leering black-caped imp ravishing a swooning maiden on a canopied bed.
Newspaper headlines promised violence and mayhem:
ASSASSINATION FOILED
FRENCH ARSONIST ARRESTED IN COMMONS LOBBY
TOXIC FOG COULD DELAY GREEN PARK SKYSHIP LAUNCH
PALACE RISKS LAST-MINUTE DIPLOMATIC OVERTURES
“Massacre in Paris!” shouted the newsboy. “Blood in the Bois de Boulogne! Killer sorcerers run amok!”
Across the street, a pair of bulky brass-skeletoned automatons cataloged the crowd with glittering red eyes. Royal Society Enforcers, their white plaster faces impassive. Armed with twin pistols, electro-clockwork engines ticking indefatigably inside hollow chests.
Lizzie thrashed in Eliza’s belly. Dog-lickers! Turdbrains! Metal-dick freaks!
Lafayette looked at her oddly. “I’m sorry?”
Had she muttered that aloud? Mortified, Eliza fanned flushed cheeks. “Friends of yours?”
“Practically family,” he said cheerfully. “Morning, chaps. This horrid weather rusts the joints, eh?”
The machines ignored him, guarding a large cage that lumbered along, clonk! clunk!, on stodgy iron feet. An older lady twirled a sharp-tipped parasol in one iron prosthetic hand. Her steps jerked, out of kilter, twitching her silvery skirts. On her copper corsage gleamed a Royal Society badge.
Lafayette dipped a bow. “My lady.”
The lady nodded mechanically. Her face would have been beautiful, but part of it was missing. One glinting steel cheekbone lay exposed, scar-edged skin grafted with rivets. Her deep-set eyes glittered, one electric red, like an Enforcer’s, the other a dead black.
Eliza shivered. “Congratulations,” she whispered after they’d passed, “you’ve certainly charmed her sense of humor away.”
“I flatter myself that there wasn’t much to work with. Behold the Countess of Lovelace, my new observer. A formidable investigator with a jagged-toothed rat trap for a brain.”
Eliza resisted the need to turn and stare. That metalwork was both fabulous and gruesome. “Why the prosthetics? Was she injured?”
“The Royal’s instrument-makers rebuilt her after some terrible accident.” An ironic emphasis. “Blew her own face off with a ballistic pistol, they say, like Robespierre himself.”
“A dangerous choice of comparison.”
“An apt one, given the frightful things they did with that unlucky fellow’s remains. She’s using herself as the model for the new breed of half-flesh Enforcers she’s developing. With limited success, I might add, which isn’t improving her temper. François tells me she’s quite the curiosity of the town.”
Her mind whirred like Hipp’s cogs in alarm. She’d heard tales of the Royal’s artificial body experiments, mostly from her gleefully gossiping pharmacist, Mr. Finch. All that chilly metal, grafted to living flesh and nerves, in an attempt to make the Enforcers stronger, quicker, more responsive to stimuli. But the flesh kept expiring from the shock of transplant before it could recover from its wounds.
Eliza could have taught them a thing or two. When she changed, any scratches or wounds healed. As if her body were remade afresh. An elixir like hers would solve Lady Lovelace’s problems for good.
Just another reason to keep Lafayette at a distance.
“I’m told your brother’s quite the war hero,” she covered hastily. “He’d do better not to repeat scurrilous tales.”
“And how would you know, having avoided every opportunity to meet him?”
“Nonsense. I’ve been—”
“—very busy, yes. I don’t doubt it.” A tiny dog snarled at Lafayette, yapping. He arched an incredulous eyebrow, and it cringed away with a supplicating whine. “Scurrilous or otherwise: word is, Lady Lovelace went mad from unrequited love, and now she has a clockwork heart. Perhaps you’ve heard of the fellow. A certain Mr. Faraday, whom the Royal burned? They say it was she who betrayed him in the end. Isn’t irony a killer?”
Henry Jekyll’s colleague, in fact, executed for defying the Philosopher’s notions of light and electricity. Eliza remembered him vaguely from her childhood, as a kind young man with an incorrigibly curious mind. Now she liked Lady Lovelace even less. “Does she . . .” Eliza lowered her voice, fearful. She trusted Lafayette enough to believe he’d never betray her on a whim. But to
keep his own secret . . . “Does she know?”
A candid glance. “Relax. I’ve told her nothing about you.”
She flushed. “I meant about you. The wolf.”
“Oh.” A flash of bewildered smile, as if it surprised him she’d care. “Not that I’m aware. But I imagine the first I’ll hear of it is when I wake up chained to a dungeon wall, with my blood dripping into a test tube and electrodes jammed into unfortunate crevices.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Please.” Lafayette waved airily. “I proposed to you and walked out unscathed, didn’t I? I can surely withstand Lady Lovelace’s patented Glare of Epic Disapproval. Besides, her disdain for me is but a shabby façade. Secretly, she’s all a-flutter.”
“You think that about everyone.”
“Deny it if you can.” He waited, grinning. “Didn’t think so.”
“You’re insufferable, do you know that?”
“And you’re unreasonably enchanting, but I won’t let it get between us.”
Pedestrians sidled past the Enforcers, gazes downcast, hoping to escape notice. No such luck for one boy who flitted through the crowd, pointy-nosed, a strange green cast to his hair, as if he’d had a dyeing accident. People claimed such odd folk had fairy ancestors. Probably a thief, too, fingers too light for his own good in purses and pockets.
An Enforcer grabbed the fey boy by his suspiciously long ears. He yelled, struggling, but no one dared stand up for him. The metal machines nodded solemnly and tossed him into their cage.
He landed on his face—blam!—and the lid banged shut. Lady Lovelace jabbed him with her parasol through the bars. Zzap! Electricity crackled, and the boy jerked and yowled. She nodded, satisfied, and cage and Enforcers stomped away.
Lafayette wriggled his shoulders. “Chilly around here, isn’t it?”
Eliza’s bones itched, deep inside where she couldn’t scratch, and Lizzie’s rage flushed her with ugly heat. “What exactly was that boy’s crime? Looking too strange?”
“I’ll ask him, if you like. No doubt she’ll send me to pick his brains later.” He sighed. “You glare at me as if I’m already peeling his fingernails off. I shan’t, you know.”
“Isn’t that how the Royal extract confessions?”
Kill them god-rotted brass bastards and their iron-faced bitch queen, whispered Lizzie gleefully in her ear. Tear their faces off! Ha!
“If it pleased me to stoop to such atrocities, madam, I’d have stayed with my regiment in India. Or joined the Foreign Service. I hear they’re having a fine bloodthirsty time in Paris these days. I say, are you well? Suddenly your face glows a peculiar shade of pink.”
Eliza clenched sweating fists, willing Lizzie not to betray her now, not while Lady Lovelace watched. A pair of waiting brass horses creaked mildewed joints, their rudimentary clockwork driver motionless in its seat. She wanted to leap up and throttle it. “So . . . about this guest list. Since when did you care one whit for art?”
Lafayette grinned. “Did you imagine we soldiers to be all carnage and no culture? Carmine Zanotti’s Eve and the Serpent is the surprise sensation of the Summer Exhibition. I’ll get us an invitation, if you like. We could see what kind of people Sir Dalziel’s hangers-on are. Care for an evening out?”
Hell, yes, whispered Lizzie, don our fancy gown and go a-courting. ’Bout time he asked.
Eliza squirmed, cornered. “I couldn’t possibly impose—”
“Oh, and in case you wondered,” added Lafayette, as if he’d said nothing of import, “Brigham telegraphed me just after seven. Got me out of bed, if you must know. Lady Fleet could have driven to town this morning after she learned of the murder.”
“She could have killed Sir Dalziel at ten to four, and returned to Hampstead in time to pretend she knew nothing about it, too. Presuming we believe your pet butler’s story.”
“That clockwork idiot did confirm it. And Brigham seems artless enough.”
“Mmm. Hardly likely to lie for an employer who mistreated him.”
“Still, he could’ve killed Dalziel in anger. The old tyrant takes a hand to him once too often, he finally loses it, and blam! One dead baronet in a satisfying pool of gore. Always the quiet ones who pop.”
“The butler did it,” mused Eliza. “How cozy. But why the mutilations? And—unhappy infatuation aside—why call you, and not the police? Why stick around at all, in fact? Surely his best chance for a cover-up is police incompetence.”
“Whereas my shining investigative skills would swiftly pin him for the cowardly felon he is?” Lafayette fanned himself. “Madam, you make me blush.”
“And,” she continued, ignoring him, “those footprints weren’t Brigham’s. Five feet three if he’s an inch. Our man is taller.”
Lafayette wrinkled his nose. “What odds on Lady Fleet’s footman? Drives up from Wimbledon, bumps the old man off for her, splat! Makes a mess, knowing Brigham won’t risk a beating by coming up. Legs it back to the country before seven, and voilà! Lady Fleet gets a dead husband, the ‘stolen’ loot returned in secret, and a butler she loathes upon whom to pin the blame.”
They stopped at New Bond Street, where lamps in shop windows burned like beacons through the fog. Tree branches hung motionless in still gray air. A mare shied, clattering her ironclad hooves. Her eyes rolled in fright as Lafayette brushed past, and absently he edged away. Was his blossoming wolfish scent upsetting her?
A few yards up the street, Finch’s Pharmacy beckoned. Eliza’s head pounded, her skin rippling like a shedding snake’s. This was unendurable. Lizzie was threatening chaos. What if she’d changed in public? In front of Lady Lovelace? Eliza needed her remedy. Now.
But like that mare, her mind danced, unsettled. “It doesn’t seem right. Why would this murderous footman mutilate the body?”
“To throw us off the scent?”
“Surely. But why not just fit poor Brigham up for it properly? Without the ghoulish details, Reeve casts around for the closest thing with a motive and a heartbeat, and arrests our long-suffering butler. Case closed.”
“Whereas now, Reeve must investigate?”
“Exactly. Why would Lady Fleet want that? Even Reeve occasionally stumbles across the truth.”
“Perhaps her killer footman’s an idiot,” suggested Lafayette. “Did you notice him? Calves like a Greek god. I don’t imagine she hired him for his intellect.”
“But if Sir Dalziel was already suspected of black magic, why confirm it and risk Lady Fleet’s reputation?”
“Because the killer didn’t care?”
“Or he did it deliberately. Either way, something strange is going on.”
Lafayette grinned, contented. “Don’t look now, Dr. Jekyll, but you just took my case.”
“Humph. One almost suspects you dispatched the poor fellow yourself, just to get my attention.”
“It’s possible. You should investigate.” He offered his wrists to be cuffed. “Interrogate me thoroughly.”
She eyed him sternly. “I said I’d look, nothing more.”
“But you know you want more,” he insisted. “You need the job. You’re desperately intrigued. Reeve will be furious. What’s stopping you?”
She smiled weakly. “I’m afraid I’m late for work,” she lied. “How time’s getting on—”
“Please, Doctor.” Not threatening. Just sincere, a hint of disarming vulnerability that halted her in her tracks. “Lady Lovelace is watching me. I need your help.”
She hesitated. He’d trusted her with his secret. Shouldn’t she trust him? “Well . . .”
“You can’t deny we work well together.” A sly eye twinkle. “We might even have fun.”
Of all the things he could have said, that was the worst.
“I’m sorry, I can’t possibly fit it in.” Briskly, Eliza shook his hand. “Lovely to see you again, Captain. I wish you luck with your case. Good day.”
BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD
ELIZA MARCHED UP NEW B
OND STREET TOWARDS Finch’s Pharmacy, fighting for breath. Cloying fog swirled around her, stuffing her lungs like wet wool. Her corset was squashing the life from her, and this cursed acid air wasn’t helping. She pinched her waist with both hands, trying to heave in a proper lungful.
Lafayette didn’t follow, of course. Didn’t try to persuade her. Nothing so crude.
“Freedom!” shouted Hipp, muffled by the bag. “Confinement unreasonable. Motion imperative!”
She fished him from beneath Lafayette’s sheaf of letters. He sprang from her grip and screeched up the street, flashing his lights, blue-red-blue-red! “Finch! Freedom!”
At last, her cramping chest eased. She fanned her damp face, thoughts muddling like dark treacle. Lafayette knew how to engage her interest. His case, a blend of mystery and glaring inconsistency. His amusing conversation, unfettered by social pressures. His damnable flirtation, which thanks to Lizzie worked all too well.
Lizzie fought, a hooked fish. Right. All my fault, is it? As if you ain’t flirting right back.
But what did he really want? The spectacle of those Enforcers—and steel-faced Lady Lovelace—had only underlined his dangerous hidden motives. Too cunning by half.
Pain stabbed between Eliza’s eyes, an all-too-familiar symptom of her dependence on the elixir. Her wits clogged. Lafayette was tormenting her for his own murky reasons. Nothing else made sense.
“Aye,” taunted Lizzie. Somehow, she’d clambered from the bag, too, and sauntered alongside, a shimmering red-skirted specter. “Almost as if . . . hell, I don’t know. He likes you?”