Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles

by Cooper, Karina

  Which gave me pause. “Do you suppose the murdered victim could be victim of a collection?”

  Zylphia sighed. “Cherie, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Nothing, no,” I mused, more to myself as I glanced down at the last sheaf in my hands. “I suppose that’d be too—” I stopped. MURDER ON UNIVERSITY GROUNDS.

  It really wouldn’t be so simple, would it?

  “Ah.”

  “Ah?” My maid glanced at me, but I didn’t look away from the small, nearly invisible article buried in the London Journal.

  “Ah,” I repeated, mostly for the reason that my mind was already three steps ahead of my mouth and I knew Zylphia awaited an answer. And then, once I’d read the extremely short article in its entirety, I added, “And here we are. One professor murdered.”

  “A professor is neither a tradesman nor a laborer.”

  “Nor a lord.” I handed the paper to my maid, picked through the leftover periodicals upon my bed while she read it. “The University College is below, just near the Philosopher’s Square.”

  “Will you be going there tonight?”

  Oh, how she knew me. I smiled. “Yes, of course. But first?” I smacked the paper lightly. “I want to see if there was a bounty for this professor.”

  “How?”

  A fair question. I didn’t have much recourse. Collection notices were pulled by the collectors who took the work—or removed entirely once complete. Obviously, this one had been complete, were it actually to exist.

  Zylphia slid off the bed. “The sweets might know.”

  A fair point. The midnight sweets, as I’d already considered, heard a lot about life above and below the drift. Maybe they’d hear about death, too.

  I stared at my ink-smudged hand for a long moment, considering my options.

  I didn’t have many.

  “We leave after supper, then.” Which would be soon enough.

  Zylphia left me to help Mrs. Booth prepare the meal. I busied myself collecting the discarded articles and daily gossip rags. I set them in a pile, entertained myself longer with straightening my bed, arranging my perfume bottles, anything but sitting still.

  My hands trembled. Excitement, I thought. Nerves. I’d found something to hunt, something so much more than a simple challenge from a Society lady.

  What did Lady Rutledge know?

  Perhaps nothing. To her, as life could be to so many of the wealthiest denizens above the drift, it was just a game. A challenge. Who could solve the mystery of the murdered professor?

  Was this even what Lady Rutledge had meant?

  I stilled, my gaze falling to the untidy pile of newspapers and print.

  What if the cunning lady’s game were simply that? A game. Nonsense drafted on paper. Was I desperately searching for something to occupy me? Something that did not come stored in a bottle, smelling of cinnamon and spice and a faintly bitter edge.

  I needed to focus. My hands grew damp.

  Perhaps I would beg off from supper. I wasn’t all that hungry, anyhow.

  Chapter Six

  Deep below the drift, not so much hidden as deliberately avoided, there is an abandoned train station. Once upon a time, it had serviced much of the East End’s railways, but the rails moved and with them, the station center.

  Now, it was one of many fog-ridden buildings lost to time. And, as opportunity must be addressed, claimed by the collectors.

  No outside gas lamp light pierced the devil-thick fog as it wafted through the open doors and long shattered windows. I didn’t need much. The single working lens of my goggles painted a yellow path through the smoke. It hovered low to the creaking floor as I made my way inside, each stride displacing the pea souper in an eerily muffled echo of my own footsteps.

  I did not know who leased the building, if it was owned at all, nor who had decided that the dark, abandoned interior would make for a perfect collection agency. If it was run by a shadowy figure, I had never seen evidence of such. At most, I had come across the occasional collector perusing the wall of notices, but as a rule, I did not often engage with them.

  As far as I knew, I was the only woman among them, and if that weren’t dangerous a circumstance enough, collectors only supported each other when a bounty was not on the line.

  I knew my limits. Just as I often left the assassinations to those who wanted to risk a knife from the hand of one of their own as much as whatever dangers the mark posed, so did I choose to remain outside the collective.

  I was never here if a bounty weren’t the purpose.

  The gas lamps left burning on the east and western walls had always been there. As before, I did not know who tended them. Perhaps other collectors, choosing to refill the basins when the kerosene burned too low. I’d never done so. They flickered now, dim but not impossible to read by.

  The far wall, where the brick had long since turned black and pitted, served as the notice board. Bits of paper clung to the surface, some clean-edged and others torn as if pulled from the pages of a greater work. There were voids where bounties had been pulled, claimed by those who pulled them.

  It was a safe way to ensure that no other collectors would be on your back.

  I scanned them quickly, bypassing many for want of a weighty purse. There weren’t more than a dozen tonight. The usual fares, I noted. Money owed, money squandered. Debts accrued a rapid pace below the drift.

  Them what held the purse strings didn’t take kindly to lost fare. The Menagerie often posted bounties, but I saw none this time. Taken already, perhaps. For all of Hawke’s mystery and showmanship, the Menagerie had a reputation for paying well.

  When I could get them to pay me, of course.

  I frowned at the board, the respirator masking my mouth and nose turning my contemplative sound into something raspy instead.

  Something was wrong, here.

  I studied the notes again, reached up to rifle a gloved finger through those that overlapped.

  As one fluttered in the passage of my hand, I realized what it was I saw. Rather, did not see.

  My rival had not been here.

  My index finger pinned on a scrap of torn parchment, crinkled about the edges and stained black from the constant coal-laden fog. Written in a careful hand were three simple words and a promise of a purse that might turn most collectors into dreamers.

  Jack the Ripper. Demanded dead, and then some.

  So a bounty had been placed on him after all.

  Yet it wasn’t that what bothered me. The paper was dirty, fingered a few times by the smudges across it, but otherwise untouched. Unclaimed. The collector who taunted me often left his chosen bounties upon the wall, but he marked them. A single slice, leaving the two halves parted but still pinned.

  The rotter loved his knives. I owned one; the same one he’d used to pin my hair to the ground when Zylphia had rescued me from the Thames Tunnel.

  Had he not seen the bounty yet?

  Possible. How long since I’d seen his claim? A week, perhaps? A fortnight? Since the flowers had stopped.

  I studied the wall, shifting my weight back on my heels. Only the strangely sibilant whisper of shifting fog reached my ears, emphasized by the occasional flicker of flame from each lamp. I heard no footsteps. No breathing.

  A part of me always wondered why it was I dreaded to hear a whistle in the dark. I suspected it had something to do with that collector, and the knives he wielded so casually from the shadows. Much of my relations with the anonymous man remained shrouded in a cloak of opium and alchemical concoctions, which bothered me.

  What if it were a clue I failed to recall?

  I withdrew from the wall, curious by my rival’s absence. I couldn’t help it.

  If he was not actively collecting, what was he doing?

  I hurried from the collection station as a shudder stroked icy fingers down my spine.

  The gates to the Midnight Menagerie stood open, welcoming as a devil’s bargain on a cold night. My breath
mingled with the fog as it tumbled gently just outside the Menagerie’s border.

  Years ago, longer still than I’d lived in London and shortly before the stilts that raised the city, Vauxhall lost favor with the fashionably elite. While the once-infamous pleasure gardens turned instead to footpads and street doves, rumors of a new decadence began to reach those with coin and time to spare.

  The Midnight Menagerie. Circus, private gardens, fairground, events catering to Society affairs or the simpler pleasures of men; anything could be had for a price.

  Anything, that is, but subtlety. Neither the Menagerie nor the criminal association that ran it did anything by half measures.

  As expected of an enterprise whose specialty often included ownership of one’s soul in exchange for earthly delights, the Menagerie’s dangerous ringmaster maintained debt that bound me to his precious Karakash Veil. The Chinese organization claimed all magic as its purview and insisted that my father’s alchemical work qualified.

  Whether I believed in magic or not did not change the fact that I was, in essence, the Menagerie’s pet collector. Thank God they hadn’t yet demanded that I perform in the circus rings to make good.

  I strode through the gates unmolested, stripped off my goggles and respirator. I would not need them inside the grounds. By all reason, the Menagerie should have maintained the same air of stinging fog, decaying fish and acrid chemical stench that filled the rest of the district. It did not. How the caretakers managed to keep the infectious miasma away was a closely guarded secret I had yet to uncover.

  I passed the footmen standing watch on the inside. Those, I knew, weren’t for the protection of the gardens. No one would dare take on the Veil on their own grounds. Rather, the uniformed men served as a marker of importance, levying just another layer of gilt over the corrupted heart of what was, in essence, little more than a flesh-peddling operation.

  But, oh, how dazzling it looked by night.

  I stopped on the neatly graveled path, taking in the vista with an unavoidable frisson of admiration. Say what I will of Hawke and his gardens, even I had to admire the effect.

  The architect of these grounds had outdone himself. Open fields had been sculpted into a fairy tale by the clever application of pale rock paths through miraculously green grass—somehow, the caretakers managed to grow things beneath the foggy drift—and ornate fountains. Sheltered groves were given an incandescent glow by hundreds of Chinese paper lanterns in every conceivable color. They hung overhead, strung along the paths and cleverly affording shadows by which to entertain one’s self, or one’s companion, in.

  Even as the pooled circles of light offered teasing glimpses of the activities in those same shadows. Everything had its price in the Menagerie, after all.

  Various structures dotted the grounds—the private gardens surrounded by tall hedges, the rows of vendor stalls for market events, the ornate façade of buildings that hosted various festivities—but none drew me, and repelled me, so strongly as that of the circus tent lit like a crimson jewel.

  I tucked my fog-prevention goggles into a pouch designed to secure them, glowering at the tent as if it could somehow sense my distaste. I didn’t need to be inside to know what it would feel like. Cramped, trapped between an eager audience and the thin canvas of the tent above, the heat pulsating like a living heart. Fear squeezing my throat, my lungs constricting even as that first step over nothing is taken. . .

  Even if I could not recall everything about my time in Monsieur Marceaux’s . . . let’s call it employment, I do nevertheless remember what it was like to stand before a crowd and wonder if the next step taken would be my last.

  The skills I learned there, I would not perform.

  I turned away from the tent’s meandering path, shaking my head hard. The cold air bit at my cheeks, and as I ran my gloved hand over my brow, I realized I’d broken into a sweat.

  How close I stood to the crevasse of my past. And yet, I still came. Why?

  Certainly not for Hawke.

  And not a lie, that one. As the serpent of this earthly Garden of Eden, Micajah Hawke would be inside that tent, smoothly directing the crowd as all ringmasters must. I had no desire to talk to him; a decision with multiple motives. The less I saw of him, the less I would be reminded of my untenable position. And the less opportunity he’d have to remember that though he calls me Miss Black, my hair is red. He should know. He’d seen rather more of me than any other stranger.

  I snapped out a word that would have had Fanny turning faint and strode instead for another batch of structures placed deep in the heart of the grounds.

  I needed the sweets.

  The women of the Menagerie were well cared for. Cleanly, healthy, pampered to a degree. The footmen protected them, and many were slightly more educated than the whores found by the docks.

  The payment of such came in flesh—their own. Whether under a man or with a woman, whether by skin or conversation, each sweet fulfilled a role within the gardens that ensured money would continue to be spent. Lures and bait, temptation and more.

  I’d bargained with the anonymous Veil to keep myself out of the sweet tents, yet I knew many of the women within and liked most. They tolerated me, even held me up as a type of mascot among them. A woman collector, how exciting.

  I strode the path, wiping at my forehead and cheeks as if it would help. I imagined I’d smeared lampblack once more, but it didn’t bother me overmuch. Being dirty only dissuaded others from looking too close. I didn’t expect anyone to place the black-haired collector in red-haired Cherry St. Croix’s delicate kid slippers, but care still came easy.

  I’d had my fill of unfortunate coincidence. Especially since the rival collector knew where I made my home. He’d said as much, even called me by name.

  Zylphia, this collector, Fanny; the list of them what knew my double lives was already too long for my taste.

  “Let me go!”

  The cry pierced through the lantern light, shrill and more angry than frightened. Feminine, no mistaking. Without stopping to consider, I darted off the path and into the dark, a roundabout route to my destination.

  A crack of sound, a sharp cry, and I heard masculine laughter. “Keep ’old, boys,” came the raspy, soot-stained voice of a man who’d spent his life at sea rather than study. Not a lordling, then, out for a tussle.

  My fingers flexed as I crept closer, skimming a line of hedgerows. To my right, the path remained a golden trail—too obvious an entry point. To my left, buried amid the foliage, I heard the trickle of fountains, or perhaps something more decorative. A pond, a waterfall. I couldn’t recall.

  “You leave her be!” Another woman, this one husky, as if broken by tears.

  My jaw set. Where were Hawke’s footmen? Thugs, the lot, but they should have been here.

  I crept forward another meter, and found my answer. A man groaned as my foot came down on a limb, twisted and sent me nearly toppling to the earth.

  “You ’ear that?”

  “Shut up,” snarled the sailor, his voice a lash. I heard muted sobbing, now, and the whisper of women held at bay.

  I grinned fiercely in the dark.

  This was not my strongest moment, but I can only say now that I had no real care for my well-being. I wanted only something to take the sting from that terrible need in my belly, and this proved the first opportunity. As I crouched over the still figure of the coshed footman, I measured the distance between where I hid, guarded by foliage, and the location of the voices.

  “Ca’mon, ’urry up,” complained a man, a third one, now. Three to my one, and at least two women.

  A sprint, then. If I could break up whatever hold they had on the girls— “Hsst!”

  I looked up by instinct, though I couldn’t say now why I looked directly up and not over either shoulder. Buried memory, perhaps. A voice carries a distinctive quality when spoken overhead.

  Nothing but black.

  “Hsst!”

  This time, I turned,
looked across the narrow confine between my hiding place and the path.

  I met dark eyes, near-black in the reflected light of the red lantern nearly concealing him. The boy, his shaggy dark hair hanging into his eyes and his teeth bared in a grin, pointed at me.

  I cocked my head.

  A child. Perhaps ten, or a well-formed eight. More, I’d bet my last dregs of laudanum that this boy worked at Hawke’s circus; if the way he clung to the post was any indication, he was at least one part agile monkey. His grubby bare feet propped around the ornate iron post as if glued in place.

  As I raised my eyebrows, a burst of raucous laughter erupted from the gathering I was afraid would not remain tame for much longer. The boy doffed an imaginary cap, scrambled to the very top of the post and darted over nothing.

  He did not fall.

  Instead, as the lights dipped and swayed, I glimpsed his nimble figure, a faint silhouette colored by the lights, as he sprinted across the lantern line—as smooth as any tightrope walker as I’d ever seen, back the way I’d come and to find, I assumed, help.

  The husky-voiced woman shrieked. “You keep your hands off her, you bleeding sodomites!”

  “Keep ’er still, damn it.”

  I heard the unmistakable sound of something weighty against flesh.

  “You whore,” roared a man, and there was my cue. I leapt over the prostrate form of the useless footman, barreled through the hedge and directly into the broad back of a man in my path. Fortuitous chance. He bellowed like a bull, and all I glimpsed was a frothy pile of blue tulle, blood like a crimson smear against the lace-frosted edge, and a still body upon the ground.

  Sweet, golden-haired Talitha, the theatrical “sister” to Jane, who fought in the hands of two other men.

  I had no time to take in other details. As I rode the man to the ground, my knees in his back, I reached for the knife slatted into my high-necked collecting corset. It whispered out, obscenely loud in the shocked silence.

  The man beneath my weight shifted, shoulders squaring as he braced both hands against the ground. He could easily shake me off. At least until the point of my blade dug into the nape of his neck, impossible to ignore.