Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles

by Cooper, Karina

  “Halt!” I shouted, my voice rebounding across the narrow cobbles.

  He did not. They never did.

  As I ran, I became aware that the footsteps grew fainter. But the shouting of voices behind me, somewhere in the direction of the yard I’d left behind, grew louder. Shriller.

  Finally, I burst out of the alley onto Commercial Road, my hair clinging to my sweat-damp cheeks and my breath rasping in my lungs. I bent over, gasping, a fierce knot of raw agony stitched in my side, and realized that while I’d plenty of strange looks from the knot of women lounging by the alley mouth beside me, I had no more quarry.

  The fog swirled in the street, streaks of gray and white and lamp-lit gold turned filthy by soot.

  I sucked in a hard breath, straightened with effort. My ribs burned against my corset; my shoulder throbbed, and I clutched it in my right hand. “A man,” I gasped.

  One of the women, a dumpling of a thing with a sour face, laughed outright. “Wot’s yer type?”

  I didn’t bother with censure. These were prostitutes; one of many soiled doves working the streets. “Broad, dark overcoat long enough to flap as he ran. Out of breath?”

  I received only blank stares for my trouble.

  Bloody bells and damn. I turned, peering down the narrow corridor, but I saw nothing. Heard nothing more than the mild din of an uproar farther up the road. And a voice, I realized. Coming closer, shrill and fearful.

  “Oh, bother,” I muttered.

  “Murder!”

  The women started, three of them sending up a shriek piercing enough to wake the dead. “Oh, it’s ’im!” one cried. “ ’E’s found ano’ver!”

  It seemed that way.

  The murderer known through the broadsheets as Leather Apron had already slashed the throats of two women. One in late August, one in early September. The things he’d done to their corpses, to their organs, were the stuff of nightmares.

  I could not blame them their fear. Especially since I knew, or at least had been reassured, that there were two such killers in London, and more victims than had been printed in the papers. One, the collector working at the behest of my father. His victims—midnight sweets, all of them—had never made it into public awareness. The Menagerie made sure of that.

  The other was this Leather Apron.

  Talentless lout, the collector had snarled when pressed for answers. Eager for attention. Such derision in the words.

  Did I interrupt the very same killer this night?

  I watched as the women hurried away across the street, into the well-lit interior of a shop whose upper floors likely provided lodging. Watched still as a man, eyes wild and voice already tearing, sprinted past me. “Murder, murder! Fetch the rozzers!”

  With that sort of ruckus, the constables would find him first.

  I leaned against the brick facing, forcing myself to breathe, to collect my composure once more, and waited for Zylphia to find me.

  I’d taken a right good knock. My shoulder ached clear to my elbow, snaked around my ribs. Whether it was that pain or something triggered by it, my lungs burned. Ached with every breath.

  It’d take some time before I’d be able to tell if I’d done myself in, but I wasn’t sure if I should risk a bounty as I was.

  My companion would have me turn in; I knew it.

  She wasn’t wrong, either. ’Twas dangerous work I chose, and an injury could so easily compound into something worse. As I waited, I gingerly unfolded my arm, bent it at the elbow. It wasn’t until I attempted to raise it at a perpendicular did agony tear through the tender joint.

  I hissed in a breath, clapped my bent arm to my chest. The rotter. How could I have been so clumsy?

  Zylphia didn’t take long to find me. As she approached, I tipped my head and led the way up the street, in the opposite direction of the morbidly curious hurrying to the scene I’d left behind. She was silent as she matched my pace. Only once were we well out of hearing of any constables or curious ears did she offer explanation. “There’s a dead twist in Dutfield’s Yard.”

  A woman, then. “And?”

  Her gaze, shockingly blue even behind her glass protectives, met mine. “Couldn’t tell much else in the black before the cart near ran me down, but—” She held up one hand, the gloved fingers saturated nearly black to the first joint. “There were a lot of blood.”

  I rubbed at my face, anger curling like a fist in my throat. I had him dead to rights, chased him halfway up Commercial Road, injured myself in my haste, and for what?

  Had I just lost the Whitechapel murderer?

  The journey home passed without incident, and the sky ferry manning the West India Docks carried us up from the fog-drenched streets to the clear, chilled night above the drift. My shoulder ached fiercely as I disembarked, worrying me.

  How would I hide it?

  Captain Abercott of the Scarlet Philosopher, a rotting canoe barely worthy of calling itself a sky ferry much less a ship, was no closer to the title than I was to declaring myself a duchess. He was often sotted, and always eager for ready coin. I paid him to take me from upper London to lower, and he rarely asked a word.

  Abercott was a thick man, portly yet surprisingly spry for it. He’d lost most of the hair on the top his head, which he made up for by donning a sailor’s cap and cultivating a disheveled trimming of stringy fringe around it.

  He had taken a strange dislike to my new companion, which gave me a privacy I’d had little of before. Once wary of his quick hands, now I left Abercott to Zylphia to handle.

  She settled with the captain rather more quickly than I’d have ever expected, and we moved out of the docks.

  Fortunately for my already mildly tarnished reputation, much of London’s to-do had long since arrived at the various soirees and gatherings held from one end to the next. Although the best of the Season was all but over, there were those who remained in town come sun or snow, and the best way to remain solvent in fashionable reputation was to be seen.

  This was why I chose to remain unseen.

  Unfortunately for us, half past one of the clock still left a number of folk about. Many traveled by gondola—no proper gentleman would be caught strolling across the arched bridges connecting each district to the next, and certainly no miss of any distinction—but many of the aether-driven devices had windows, or remained open despite the chill.

  It would not do for any gentleman to escort a lady in a closed gondola box, unless they were already wed.

  Dirty, damp, coal-smudged and dressed as a man as I was, I did not fit in with the standards above the drift.

  “How do we get home?” Zylphia asked me, her voice low. Like myself, she had stripped off her goggles before stepping foot on the ferry. Captain Abercott had a keen eye for business. Which translated to a tendency toward blackmail, when he thought he could get away with it.

  I paid him well enough to keep his trap closed, but not so well that greed could overtake what few good senses he retained through drink.

  Now, without protectives or respirator, I surveyed London proper with a critical eye.

  Decades ago, the Queen’s Parliament finally addressed ongoing complaints from the peerage forced to endure the oily smoke and thick fog surrounding the factory districts. Every year, the fog grew in mass, pushing its borders relentlessly. Her Majesty retained, among various other unique habits, a decided view on etiquette and propriety. The end came with a simple declaration: Rise above it.

  This sparked one of the greatest auctions the civilized world has ever seen, culminating in the efforts of a minor German baron and his son. Baron Irwin Von Ronne went well and truly mad before the first stilts could be completed, but his gifted son completed the plans and construction rather more quickly than expected. The end result was the cleaving of London’s well-to-do from its poor, its immigrants and those who couldn’t maintain appearances. The accordion girders now held London proper high above the fog bank, leaving canals between districts spanned by walking bridges. />
  Hackneys had been replaced by gondolas, but much like the drivers below the drift, gondoliers were known to be just as chatty as any fishwife. Zylphia’s question wasn’t simply an inquiry as to the means of getting home.

  She meant how to do so without speculation.

  I have been a collector since I was fifteen years of age. I knew London, above and below, as well as I knew my own name. “Stay close,” I told her, and set off across the nearest bridge.

  This near the docks, we’d like as not get mistaken for laborers. Once we stepped into some of the more posh districts, we’d keep to the back streets and servants’ footpaths.

  I was very careful. The servants’ routes weren’t as keenly lit—the better to retain focus on the more attractive byways—and there were few who took to the streets this late. By Society’s standards, the evening was well under way. Those who labored would be abed, and those with less kind motives would not wait about so far away from the fog that protected them.

  A faint blue glow lit the canals, visible as far as the eye could see. It is entirely possible to note the most popular soirees simply by the glow cast off by the aether engines affixed to each gondola. Where the blue sheen was brightest, the more gathered.

  My own district tended toward a constant shine, but it did not come from the peerage’s gondolas these days.

  Within half of the hour, we made it to the safety of my Cheyne Walk home. Set in the bohemian—and rather more unfashionable—district of Chelsea, flanked on both sides by neighbors with a penchant for enormous hedgerows, my home is an elegant thing large enough to hold myself, my chaperone, a maid, butler, housekeeper and one houseboy.

  And, upon the rarest of occasions, one demon in human flesh.

  Mr. Oliver Ashmore, my mysterious guardian and the executor of my father’s estate, spent most of his time abroad. I had only seen him once in my five years as his ward, caught in the throes of one of the worst night terror episodes in memory, and the event had left me terrified of him. Logically, my scientist’s mind knew him to be just a man—a seasoned traveler, wealthy enough by Society’s standards, but apparently less keen than I to indulge the peerage with his company. I did not know his profession, or if he even had one.

  I did know that many of the house’s foreign furnishings were in part due to him. He shared the same taste for exotic decor as my father and mother before him. This, at least, was not a trait I disliked.

  I simply disliked him.

  “There are lights in the parlor,” Zylphia whispered behind me. We crept along Lord Pennington’s carefully manicured hedges, keeping to the shadows as much as we could. I had no fear of discovery from my neighbors. Lord Pennington’s mother-in-law, a delightfully wicked woman with a penchant for painting the most extraordinary nudes upon her balcony, kept early hours and would be long abed.

  The house on the other side was empty for the rest of the year, to be aired out once more come the next Season.

  It made keeping out of sight quite simple—child’s play, by this point—and we crossed the small yard easily. Yet what should have been the end of it turned into something much less fortuitous.

  I rubbed at my throbbing shoulder, frowning deeply. “Where is the ladder?”

  Zylphia made a small inquisitive sound behind me. A lilting note given form with a baffled “Whatever do you mean? I left it out as— Oh, no.” That lilt soured.

  I knew why. Once, some years ago, I’d smuggled a ladder made of rope into my bedchamber for nights just as this. It allowed me to retire for the night and leave without my staff being the wiser.

  It did not occur to me—and perhaps it should have—that I would have to be even more clever, now that my secret had been unfortunately tipped. Someone had been inside my boudoir. Taken the ladder in. Left me stranded without.

  I suspected I knew just who.

  “Fanny,” I muttered dourly.

  As if on cue, light seamed around the kitchen entrance. The delicately painted door creaked open.

  Bother.

  I did not attempt to do anything more than straighten from my criminally inspired repose within the shadows. The jig was decidedly up.

  The silhouette framed in the dim light cast by candle was poker straight, unyielding as the ramrods my butler used to clean his unique collection of pistols. The small, pointed chin and elegantly coiffed hair caught in the flicker were pale, but there was no mistaking the edged gleam in eyes I knew were pale as the morning sky and, at the moment, just as cold.

  “Inside,” came the clipped order, delivered in tones that offered me no chance to explain.

  Not that I needed to.

  My chaperone, the widow Frances Fortescue, had once been my governess. She’d been with me since my arrival, had seen me at my best and my worst—more often, my worst. She’d stayed on when nannies had fled, and taken me into her own hands when all others swore I’d end up an unfortunate victim of Satan himself.

  But until the events of early September, she had never known about my propensity for collector’s business, or my routine outings below. Not until the day I’d first run afoul of the alchemical serum Abraham St. Croix had concocted, and lost my mind for a day and night.

  I had unwittingly tipped my hand—my father’s meddling tipped my hand—and now my chaperone knew what she’d never even had reason to suspect before. Of the many consequences my father’s desperate acts of alchemy and betrayal had left me to shoulder, Fanny’s knowledge was one of those I regretted most. Now, every foray below had to be carefully timed, and I never would know if she’d check upon me during the night when I should be abed.

  She had not quite come to terms with my choice of entertainments, as it were. This without the accompanying knowledge of my steady laudanum intake; I shuddered to think what she would do if that truth came to light.

  I hastened to the door, well aware of the lampblack coating my cheeks and the trousers outlining my legs in stark relief. “Fanny, I—”

  Her thin lips tightened, drawing the fragile, lined skin taut over her cheekbones. “I refuse to hear it,” she said, cutting my words off in icy reproach. The door closed softly behind us—my proper chaperone was not a woman to give in to fits of violent pique by slamming doors, but she may as well have. I heard the gentle thud, felt it all the way to my bones. “Get yourself upstairs and bathed immediately.”

  I could not argue with such cold tones. Even the glint in her candlelit eyes seemed remote. “Yes, Fanny.”

  Unappeased by my capitulation, she glared at my maid. “You, girl. Prepare a bath. We will converse about your role in this mischief tomorrow.”

  I winced at Zylphia’s meek “Yes, madam.” In trouble again, and on my behalf.

  I turned, caught my maid’s hand and tucked her behind me. Unlike my diminutive stature, Zylphia had the length of leg and torso to place her nearly a head’s height above me. Fanny was also a tall woman, a creature of fashionable length, though as an aged widow she no longer felt the sting of fashion’s consequence.

  Still, I stood between them, frowning at my chaperone. “Zylphia is not to blame, Fanny.”

  “She is a girl of her own mind,” Fanny told me, neatly cutting through my argument with a well-placed observation. The same type I have been known to make just to spite her. “She will be responsible for her own actions.”

  “You’ll not lay a finger on her,” I warned, a fit of anger curling in my chest.

  Fanny stared at me over the candle’s dancing flame. The light was kinder to her aged features, smoothing lines I knew marred her cheeks. Deep lines had settled into the corners of her eyes, bracketed her mouth, and it startled me to see them.

  Had they been there forever? Or was I only recently all too aware of my dear chaperone’s aging demeanor?

  She sighed softly, the sound keener even than her anger and thrust straight to my heart. “Go on with you, Cherry.”

  I fled. The weight of Fanny’s disapproval settled hard upon my shoulders.

  I
could not afford the laudanum to ease it.

  Chapter Three

  “The London Times is growing lazy,” I observed the next day at the breakfast table. I spoke to myself, and to the pages of the newspaper I held in front of me.

  There was no need to pretend otherwise. Fanny had not yet forgiven me my evening’s excursion and was not currently speaking to me. Guilt stung my conscience. It found a ready home in the dark hole already carved into my chest.

  I’d slept eventually, finally giving in to the night’s disquiet by taking a small amount of the dwindling laudanum that was all I had stocked, but I did not sleep well. Guilt and anger and frustration conspired to wend through my dreams, leaving me feeling as if I’d spent all of my sleeping hours running through vista after vista. Chasing something.

  Chasing someone.

  I did not wake refreshed, and this was a startling habit seeded sometime in early September. I once slept the sleep of the dead.

  I had not felt the same since my father’s conspiracy unfolded beneath my feet.

  Zylphia had been reassuring as she dressed me in a gown of peach poplin trimmed in chocolate. The color flattered my hair, turned my cheeks pink. A fine choice.

  I felt like summer when all I wanted was to hide away in my bedroom until nightfall.

  Nevertheless, I knew Fanny would be hard-pressed to find fault with my appearance. Especially since the fitted jacket helped conceal the mild swelling at my shoulder. The bruising there came in spectacular colors. I would have to be ginger with myself for a time.

  The Times headlines said nothing of murder; a far cry from the broadsheets printed earlier this month. I wasted no effort on the articles within—I could peruse them at my leisure another time—and turned instead to the Society columns.

  The rhythmic and unique cadence of my butler’s approach served to ease the heavy weight of silence from the table. Step-thunk, step-thunk.

  I smiled cheerfully at the man who, with his wife, had run my home with an iron-fisted rule marred only by the subtle indulgences of a childless couple. Booth was a broad-shouldered man, a fine figure impeccably garbed at all times. Unlike most men sixty years at least, he sported a full head of thick, leonine white hair, impressively groomed white sideburns, and a rather surprising collection of firearms from his infantry days in Her Majesty’s service.