Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles

by Cooper, Karina

  When Fanny only shook her head, a fraction of dismissal, I rose once more to my feet and pointed an accusatory finger. “Mrs. Frances Fortescue, what devilish mischief have you been up to?”

  “Saints above,” she said, reproach in the prayer as she reached for tea. She dropped two sugars into the delicate cup—fine with its pale rose pattern and gilt-trimmed edge, but nowhere near as posh as Lady Rutledge’s—and passed it to me. “You are less than patient.”

  “As a rule,” I confirmed, removing my gloves before taking the tea. I enjoyed the robust flavor of tea. I found a cup bracing, especially on days when what I really wanted could not be had.

  I had not yet grown accustomed to coffee, though many of my acquaintances above and below the drift favored it. Tea was my choice, when a choice was had.

  “Are you quite calm, then?” Fanny asked me. A test.

  A carrot dangled from a stick.

  I was not a circus pony to bite. “Barely,” I told her. The anticipation ate at me, clawing at my tolerance with every minute wasted on niceties. “You’d think you held an invite from the Prince.” Of course, should His Royal Highness grace my door with an invite, I’d have been rather out of my head, as well.

  Her Majesty’s eldest son was a known supporter of the arts and sciences. Bending his ear for even an hour would give me wings. Of course, I’d need my inheritance to make any such dreams come true.

  No, given that Fanny was firmly seated and her color was otherwise normal, it was not anyone so fine as that asking for me.

  That meant only one thing. My gaze narrowed as my grip tightened around my saucer. “You’ve heard.” I didn’t need to elaborate.

  She offered her hand with, had I not known better, what looked like a flourish. Certainly not. Fanny did not flourish. “This was left for you.” Neither confirmation nor denial. Telling in itself.

  No wonder she’d hidden it from me. The earl’s family crest had been burnt into the narrow box, unmistakable even from a distance: a fierce lion surrounded on three sides by a knight’s helm. Starched into holding its shape, a simple gold ribbon wrapped around the narrow width.

  My palms itched fiercely. A lump gathered in my throat, one part anger that he thought me so simply bought, and two parts curious excitement.

  I wanted to know what was in the box.

  I set my saucer down upon the Japanese table within reach. It was, unlike much of the rest of the furnishings, one of the few things Mr. Ashmore himself had acquired. I didn’t know how; I wondered, of course, but I would never ask him.

  That would involve talking to the man, and I’d sooner slit my throat than invite that demon to my table. Which was his table, for the moment.

  I shook my head.

  “Open, Cherry.”

  “I don’t want to,” I snapped.

  Her eyebrow arched, forming lines of age across her forehead. Her smile dimmed. “You don’t want to know what it is?”

  I did. Very much. But if I opened it, would I then lose the moral ground I fancied I stood upon?

  She rose, the pretty purple sheen of her silk skirt offset beautifully by the velvet-patterned overskirt pulled up into an elegant bustle behind her. Zylphia was getting better at the fashionable draping.

  “At least open it,” she told me, pressing the box into my hands. She squeezed my fingers around it, insistent as well as reassuring. “He may have given you something to wipe all your concerns away.”

  “Unless it’s a pistol, I don’t want it,” I told her, childishly pleased by her gasped “Cherry!”

  I shrugged, and because it cost me nothing, I stripped the ribbon from the box and studied its surface. The wood was perfectly smooth, varnished to a gleaming shine. Where the crest had been branded at the side, the edges only faintly tickled the sensitive pad of my fingertips.

  It wasn’t large enough for a pistol—and besides, there was a matching set upon the wall of the study, and a handful of Booth’s hidden through the house already—but the box seemed heavy. Either the wood was solid, or the item was.

  Maybe he’d sent me a box full of opium.

  I almost laughed at the ridiculous thought. Smothered it just in time. Fanny would not understand the jest, and I hadn’t told anyone about my run-in with the earl outside one of Limehouse’s opium dens.

  “Come on, then.”

  “All right, all right,” I replied quickly, and slid the very tip of my unfashionably short nails under the hinge. It opened easily, not a creak to be heard. Gold winked in the firelight.

  “Oh.” I made the sound before I could halt it, as much a gasp of delight as it was disappointment.

  So Lord Compton thought me easily bought after all.

  But what taste he offered. As Fanny leaned over my shoulder, I carefully withdrew a pair of delicate fog protectives from a velvet bed. The gold rims winked brightly, reflecting back a warm sheen. They would clip directly to the nose. Delicate barriers etched with scrollwork around each socket would protect my eyes from the encroaching fog, providing respite from the sting. The nose piece where it would grip, the frames, the shining clarity of the glass, all of it bespoke care and craftsmanship. French, unless I was mistaken. Much of the craftsmanship coming out of France bore distinctive etchings.

  I owned my own set of fog-prevention goggles, of course, but I could never wear them in polite company. In that instant, my memory returned to that place outside Professor Woolsey’s exhibit. A time before I knew the man inside was my father. That conversation with an earl had flowed as freely as any conversation between two people could.

  Forgive me, but have you no fog protectives?

  He’d thought me too poor, perhaps. Or too unfashionable. But he had not pressed. And now, I found he remembered.

  Fanny withdrew the card left at the bottom of the box. “A gift for Miss St. Croix,” she read, excitement in her voice. “For our next foray into the scientific realm.”

  I dropped the delicate protectives back into the wooden box, snapped it closed. “I don’t want them,” I said, and pushed the box into my chaperone’s hand.

  “What?” Her fingers closed around it by rote, yet before she could push it back to me, I let go. “Cherry, be reasonable.”

  “Send it back.”

  Her eyes widened, brow furrowing deeply as lines of stern disapproval bit into her weathered cheeks. “That would humiliate His Lordship,” she replied, clutching the box to her bosom as if it were a love letter or a favored pet.

  She was right. Refusing a gift, especially from a gentleman, was not only rude, it was all but unheard of.

  I turned away, leaving my cup on the knee-high table and did not bother to stoop for them when my gloves tumbled to the floor. “Rightfully so. Send it back. Send it all back.”

  “We will do no such thing.”

  “Then you wear them,” I snapped, and strode from the room. I ignored Fanny’s call, knowing that dignity would not allow her to chase me through the house, and fled instead to the dubious sanctuary of my boudoir.

  My heart pounded in my chest, an ache echoed in the too-dry texture of my throat. My mouth. I couldn’t breathe. Suddenly, it was as if I’d been squeezed around the middle. I needed to stop. I needed to take a moment, take a breath.

  I needed a draught.

  But there wasn’t enough to risk it. Taking some of my precious store of laudanum to calm myself now meant lacking it when I truly needed it. I was all right. I shut the door behind me, leaned against it as I closed my eyes and counted slowly to ten.

  I made it until four before my lungs constricted. Six brought a shiver from deep inside, and my hands fisted against my corseted waist. The boning dug into my ribs, forced the air from me in a shuddering breath as my heart threatened to explode out of my chest.

  “Eight,” I forced through stiff, bloodless lips, “nine . . .”

  It took me well past ten, onward to twenty, past simple digits and through all sixty-six of the elements within Mr. Dmitri Mendeleev’s organized
periodic table. I was well into the recitation of Mr. Edward Horatio’s aether-to-oxygen ratio—of which I thought most to be incorrect—before the bands around my chest loosened.

  My vision cleared.

  I stared at my ceiling, unable to recall how I’d made it to my now-rumpled bed. I’d shed layers of my jacket and bodice, leaving them strewn on the floor, but somehow I’d left my skirt, bustle and petticoats intact. Even my ankle boots. My hair tumbled into my eyes, loosened by whatever antics I’d managed. My corset had been undone, but I was alone.

  Grateful, anxious, I drew in a deep breath.

  Damn Lord Compton. Without even showing his face—and how dare he?—his very presence in London sent me into a fit of the vapors.

  This would never do.

  My hands shook as I dragged myself upright. Fingers trembling, I redid my corset laces as best I could, once more dressed, and pinned my hair. At a glance, it would appear as if nothing had gone awry.

  I knew better. Cherry St. Croix did not lapse into fits of hysteria. I had to get a handle on myself, on the situation.

  I needed to collect a bounty that actually paid.

  When I was done, I withdrew a large diary from its place upon my writing desk, prepared the quill with its brass nib affixed to one end, and set my mind to something more useful than earls and scoundrels.

  Lady Rutledge had set before me a challenge.

  A mystery. A murder. One man, neither a tradesman nor a laborer. I had no information on the murderer, either, or even the method by which the victim became such. She knew all there was to know, of course, as the game’s mistress, but what kind of detective would I be if I directed all my questions to a single witness?

  Murder, I wrote, the nib scratching softly across the fine French parchment. Lord? Unlikely, but I left it. Beside it, I added, Street gang. There were many claiming the streets below the drift. The Hackney Horribles, the West End Militia, the Black Fish Ferrymen. The one I was most familiar with called themselves the Brick Street Bakers.

  Of the many things one could accuse the Bakers of, maintaining a profession was not one.

  What other type of man was not a laborer or a tradesman?

  Scientist. After a moment, I murmured, “Professors, doctors, philosophers. Sailors? Or is that labor?”

  “What’s that, cherie?”

  I looked up from my small writing desk to find Zylphia setting out my collecting garb, her clear eyes on me as she shook out a pair of mended trousers.

  I hadn’t even heard her come in.

  By rote, I reached for the brass watch I’d left discarded beside my diary.

  “It’s near full dark,” Zylphia told me, even as I realized that fact from the worn facings. “I assumed you’d be departing tonight.”

  Clever girl. “You are correct,” I told her, and snapped the watch closed. “Choose the brown woolen, and be sure my knives are sheathed properly.” I stared at the words I’d scripted across the pages, only vaguely aware of Zylphia’s voice across the lamp-lit room.

  What else had been said at the soiree?

  Conversation about Mr. Horatio and Dr. Finch. About the horseless carriages that would never make it in London, about a series of patents claimed by a man called Tesla. And, of course, about Lord Compton and his return.

  If there were clues in any of it, I was not seeing them.

  There was barely a thread to hold them together. Finch was a brilliant man whose work with aether engines revolutionized London. Horatio was an upstart whose claim to scientific infamy involved browbeating the public into sharing his ridiculous theories, even if Teddy tended toward belief in the subject.

  The horseless carriages reported in the periodicals would never take hold. Aside from the noise generated by the motors, the energy required for movement would never be as efficient as Dr. Finch’s aether engines. It simply lacked logic.

  Mr. Nikola Tesla appeared, by all accounts, a disgruntled employee no longer working with America’s brilliant Thomas Edison, yet his theories regarding single-speed motors and energy-over-distance transference seemed to hold potential.

  Lord Cornelius Kerrigan Compton was merely an earl whose eyes strayed from a prize he likely realized he could never have, thereby breaking any conversational mold.

  My fingers drummed on the desk. Rat-a-tat. What had I missed?

  We spoke of gossip. Of the periodicals, of—

  My pen clattered to the disk, ink drops splattering as I jerked upright in sudden comprehension.

  “Cherry?”

  I waved away her concern. “Have we all the papers today?”

  Zylphia paused, her fingers entangled in the laces of my heavily reinforced corset. “Are you asking if we’ve kept them?” She shrugged, a graceful slide of gray-clad shoulders and white pinafore cap sleeves. “I’ll go down and take a look, then. Which do you need?”

  “All of today’s. Include Mrs. Booth’s gossip.” I waited with barely concealed impatience as my maid set the corset aside. She left my bedroom, leaving me to study the pile of my collector’s garb where she’d left it.

  Fanny would have conniptions if she knew.

  My bedroom, although not the largest master’s bedroom—and that not for lack of trying—was not so much a sanctuary as it was the single room where I could maintain my belongings without Fanny’s upturned nose. My books could share a shelf with Mr. Ashmore’s in the study, but my chaperone tended toward thinly veiled disgust when she caught me reading some of my more grisly scientific dissertations. It was no longer worth the argument.

  Here, with the three-panel vanity mirror, my comfortable bed, the delicately worked writing desk I now paced in front of, I could tend to my own business and leave Fanny to hers.

  The instant I inherited my estate, I would claim the study once and for all, but until then, this would suffice.

  I widened my pacing to include the whole diameter of the room by the time Zylphia returned, a small stack of papers cradled in the crook of her arm. “One or two have already been torn for kindling,” she said by way of greeting, “but I’ve the rest from the bin.”

  I took them, spread them over my bed and quickly sorted them in neat rows according to quality of the information within. Gossip and other such useless drivel to the right, actual news to the left. My science periodicals weren’t in the pile—I saved them elsewhere specifically so they would not be used for kindling before Teddy and I could meet to discuss them—but I didn’t suppose I’d need them.

  Murder was not a scientist’s preference.

  Except for my father, in retrospect.

  I frowned. “Where is the Leeds?” I answered my own question even before my maid could draw breath. “Likely burnt. No matter, I’ve read that one already. Now, Zylla, answer me a riddle.”

  “Oh, grand.” I ignored the sarcasm of the reply as she perched at the foot of my bed.

  “A man has been murdered.”

  “A man?” Her eyebrow climbed, an elegant slash of black in her dark tea skin. “Not a West End whore?”

  “Them, too,” I allowed, but waved it away with a single swipe of my hand. “For now, let us focus on the man.”

  She nodded. “Fine. Who is he?”

  “We don’t know,” I replied, twitching through three of the six papers. They crinkled noisily. “He is neither a tradesman nor a laborer. Nor is he a lord,” I added after a moment’s thought. Gossip ran too quick in London to assume all of Society would not know of such a tragedy.

  “How was he killed?”

  “That is the mystery,” I told her, and pulled one set of papers from the rest. “Look through here for any notice of murder. We seek men only, so leave out the Ripper’s endeavors.”

  “Why?” She took it, but over the paper’s edge, her eyes met mine in quizzical bemusement. “What is this for?”

  I grinned, my lips stretching, pushing as if the skin of my cheeks were too stiff for an easy smile. But I forced it, because I needed to smile. To share my excitement. “
A challenge, Zylla.”

  “By whom?”

  “No time to waste,” I said over her question, and quickly retrieved my own paper from the lot. It didn’t matter which. I did not sit, instead resuming my pacing as I leafed through page after page of Jack the Ripper headlines, notice of impending strikes, editorials written by gentleman I had no interest in unless they were my murderer or his victims.

  Behind me, occasionally in front of me as I walked the length of the room like a manic housecat, Zylphia calmly read through her half.

  I enjoyed having a literate assistant. I hadn’t been certain when I’d first met Zylphia, painted up like the Whore of Babylon all those seasons past, but—

  I dug my fingers into my eyes. Where had that unkind thought come from?

  Exhaustion, perhaps. I was feeling out of sorts. That episode, of course that’s all it was.

  That and my acute awareness of the near-empty jar of laudanum on my bedside table.

  I had control of myself. I would simply keep myself busy.

  There were always murders aplenty in London below the drift. If the Bakers weren’t executing someone in an alley for a cause, footpads were relieving Abram men of their day’s earnings, or some wife living in a hovel decided she’d rather be charged and alone than shackled to the now dead man with a knife in whatever extremely unfortunate organ earned the stabbing.

  In this case, I found no dead men, but plenty of women. The Ripper’s doxies, of course. One woman whose throat had been slashed by her lover, who’d confessed. Another who drowned in the river, mysterious circumstances.

  I dropped each paper as I skimmed it, leaving a trail of them from bed to vanity to closet to door.

  “Nothing,” I muttered, nearly a growl in my frustration. “Nothing, still nothing. Bloody hell and bells, Zylla, what’s a lady ought to do to find a dead man about?”

  She snorted a laugh, but rustled her gossip rag at me. “Look harder, I’d imagine, or murder her own.”

  I couldn’t imagine myself doing so. I’d never killed a man. Not even for the sometimes ludicrous amount of coin offered to do so on the collection boards.

  Unlike my rival, who appeared to prefer assassinations to all other bounties posted.