Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles

by Cooper, Karina

  Unlike most soirees, hers was not closed to those who were not titled or landed. In truth, the yearly event was often filled to the brim with the most ornate creatures—men and women masked and bedecked in outlandish garb, each invited out of some unknown formula. None knew exactly how she comprised her guest list, or what qualifications she demanded. In many cases, the location would vary. This year, she held the lavish event in King’s College.

  The dean was all too happy to offer the college grounds for the last great event of the year. He was nobody’s fool, and he knew quite well whose families his pupils came from. Society demanded much of a man in his position, and so the college retained grounds for soirees, balls, events to keep him circulating among the elite.

  A clever business.

  I had, in the past, received invites. I had never gone, sure that I would be out of place—a creature to point at and whisper over. Mad St. Croix’s daughter. Yet when the summons came last month, shortly after being introduced to the lady herself, I’d decided to hedge my bets entirely and go.

  Fanny wasn’t convinced; she didn’t like events that turned into a crush, and this one would be that and more. At the time of the invite’s receipt, I wasn’t positive of the intent behind my going.

  I knew now that I would seize the opportunity to speak to Lady Rutledge and the dean about my suspicions. Or, rather, perhaps only to the lady and allow her the trial of maneuvering the dean.

  Professors were dying. If I were Miss Hensworth, and in fact murdering those who stood in my way as my theory suggested, I would target the dean next.

  She was a smart woman. I was sure she’d do the same.

  Still, of all the events I’d been invited to, this one piqued my interest. Lady Rutledge’s set seemed geared more toward intelligent thinking and scientific interest than the frankly useless claptrap spouted off by most of London’s elite.

  Zylphia rolled my hair into three elegant knots and pinned them in place. It was fetching enough, and would do until we prepared for the masquerade.

  “Cage sends his regards,” she said offhandedly as she cinched my corset tight.

  My breath whooshed out. “Oomph! Charming,” I managed. “I assume . . . gracious, Zylla . . . you did not tell him of my engagement?”

  “Of course not.” She tied off the stays, tugged them hard to be sure they’d hold. “If anyone knows your identity, I haven’t said a word about it.”

  “Thank you.” I took a testing breath, winced. “You’re meaner than Betsy was.”

  Amusement flashed in her eyes. It sobered, as did her expression. “What will you do about your mysterious murderer, then?”

  I turned, then, perched upon my vanity seat as she fetched my rose day dress. The stain had been removed, thanks to Mrs. Booth’s expert hand. “I don’t know,” I said honestly, rubbing at my waist idly. The brocade corset was rough against my palm. “I believe the strongest candidate is, in fact, Miss Hensworth.”

  “Why?”

  A fair question. “At least one professor was directly standing in her way,” I pointed out thoughtfully. “Professor MacGillycuddy allowed no women into King’s College. Lambkin took on the role, yet it’s possible that he believed the same. To that end, he, too, must go.”

  Zylphia nodded, but cautiously. “It’s speculative.”

  “Of course. But let me pose you this,” I said, eagerly warming to my subject as she helped me step into my skirt. “Say you have dispatched two men, only to find the real obstacle is another entirely. What would you do?”

  She didn’t take long to consider. “Having killed two, I would feel a third is rather easy pickings.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “But it’s still speculative,” she told me. I knew it, but what else had I to go on? “What of the earl?”

  I blinked. “What of the earl?”

  “Marriage is a different world, you know.”

  “Do you speak from experience?” I asked, but she only smiled—a quiet thing, something weightier than I had ever seen upon her lush, exotic features—and said instead, “If you marry this earl, you cannot continue as you are.”

  This caught me, even more than the presumption of my interest in marriage. “As I am?”

  “Your laudanum,” she clarified, buttoning me into the gown.

  “No one will care that I drink it for my night terrors,” I scoffed.

  “Not that.” As Zylphia smoothed my dress, ensuring she did not meet my eyes in the mirror. “I mean the rest of the time.”

  I stilled.

  How did she know? I’d done for years without Betsy catching on.

  “I have seen many a good soul lose themselves to the smoke,” she said, awkward now, yet no less sincere for it. “I would not see you go the same way.”

  Lose myself? I wouldn’t. It wasn’t so bad as that. At least I wasn’t eating it by the cube, as the Turks were known for. “You worry too much,” I said, forcing cheer. I caught her hand and added with a grin, “Besides, I’ll have you to help me, won’t I?”

  “Will you?” Zylphia removed her hand from mine, yet not unkindly. “Go on, then, breakfast is waiting for you.”

  I obeyed, rubbing the back of my neck as I did so. Doubt weighed upon me.

  Why was it that part of my house was so blissful and happy about the hope of marriage, yet the part from below the drift remained so skeptical?

  Why did both parts of me feel the same?

  I found both the London Times and the Leeds Mercury waiting for me at the table. Fanny, as well, though she only gave me a brilliant smile and chirped, “Good morning, my dove.”

  “Good morning, Fanny,” I replied dutifully. “You look well.”

  “Just wonderful. Are you quite prepared for Lady Rutledge’s masquerade?”

  If the many, many hours of fittings I’d endured meant anything, I was. I said as much, only in much more polite terms, and picked up my paper as Booth filled my plate with his wife’s handiwork. “Thank you, Booth.”

  “Of course, miss.”

  ANOTHER WHITECHAPEL MURDER.

  The headline seized my attention. I stiffened, excitement and dismay curling through me, warring for supremacy over the other. Another murder.

  Not the sort I was looking for, mind, but gruesome and tragic all the same.

  I read the article in the Times, and found my appetite wholly diminished by the end. “Jack the Ripper has struck again,” I said, frowning. “That makes the seventh murder in the area.”

  The details in this one were gruesome indeed. The victim, Mary Kelly, had been brutalized terribly after her throat had been slashed. A messy, ghastly end. The article spared no ink for the tale, and I did not share the details. Not with my chaperone, who would like as not faint.

  “Dreadful,” Fanny said sadly, shivering in shared sympathy for the departed. “Just terrible. I do wish the constables would capture that beastly person.”

  “As do I,” I murmured, surprised somewhat to find such ready conversation on the subject. Fanny often did not share my love of the morning papers.

  Perhaps the subject of Jack the Ripper had finally infiltrated even the most delicate sensibilities. The murders were real and very present. If the amount of ink given to the news was any indication, the doxies’ plight seemed to resound much more strongly than the fateful deaths of two professors.

  “It’s a wonder he hasn’t been caught yet,” she continued, her frail fingers curling around her teacup. I set the paper down, head tilting as I studied her somber expression. “With as many police as I’m sure must patrol those streets.”

  “Not as many as you’d think,” I said before I thought, and watched her flinch at the pointed reminder of my habits. “Still,” I hastened to add, “I imagine it’s only a matter of time. This so-called Ripper can’t possibly get away with this any longer.”

  Perhaps I would see about a bounty myself.

  Promise me, the earl had demanded, and I shook my head hard.

  F
anny sighed. “One might wonder if this monster were invisible to the searching eye, the way he carries on.”

  “Fanciful,” I replied with dry amusement. “Why, I—” Invisible. I froze, words only half formed on my lips.

  “Cherry?”

  I saw Fanny, saw her thin gray eyebrows knot and lines form between them. Saw the way she stared at me in mingled surprise and concern.

  Yet I didn’t linger there. Invisible.

  An empty dress. A figure cowled and then gone.

  Why didn’t I think of this before? I’d spent all bloody night reading my mother’s blasted journal. Notations had been scarce, only enough to illustrate this point or that hypothesis, but I’d seen the same symbols.

  What had my mother’s journal included? Of course: ppt, a notation for preparation.

  My brain turned over and over, gears spinning in place, working, smoking with the effort.

  “Prepare the formula,” I murmured, and if what I recalled of the notations was correct, it involved a process of distillation. Aether, water, fire, a Star of David. The star . . . Mr. Pettigrew had made clear that such symbols no longer meant what religion and order had assured.

  The star . . . meant . . .

  I bolted upright, upset the table and caused the china to clink merrily. Both papers slid to the floor. “Imbibition,” I said, suddenly and without further preface. “Zylphia!” My voice rose, loud enough to send Fanny into fits of indignation.

  “Cherry St. Croix, we do not—”

  I waved her into silence. “Zylphia,” I called again, rounding the table. “Get down here this instant!”

  “Is all well, miss?” Booth’s baritone echoed from the far entry, his eyebrows mirroring the shape of my chaperone’s. Worry. I engendered a lot of worry in my staff, I realized.

  I waved at him, not so much dismissal as an indication for patience, and caught the edge of the entry as Zylphia’s step pattered down the stairs. As her white-capped head cleared the rail, I pitched my voice to carry. “Zylla, have you my gloves from the day I visited Mr. Pettigrew?”

  Her eyes rounded, wild blue flowers in the dark frame of her skin. She seized the railing, bent over it to talk to me directly. “Er, which . . . ?”

  “The last,” I said impatiently. “When he was murdered. Have you laundered them?”

  “No,” she replied, and then looked beyond me and hastily added, “miss.”

  I had no time for it. “Good, fetch them.”

  “They’re in the rag bin,” she explained, and hurried down the steps. “They were quite ruined.”

  “Hurry,” I urged, and turned back to the breakfast table to find Fanny watching me with unconcealed displeasure.

  I couldn’t take the time to argue with her. “I promise this will soon be over,” I said instead.

  This seemed to mollify her. At least a little. “Once you are wed,” she told me, quite firmly, “all this will stop.”

  “I will not—” I bit my tongue, ceasing the careless cruelty of my distraction, and was spared the need by Zylphia’s return through the same door Booth and his wife now looked in on.

  Her expression as she sidled past my butler was perplexed. “Ah, Cherry?”

  I ignored Fanny’s sharp intake of scandalized breath, and the echoed sound I heard from beyond a pained-looked Booth. “Quick, give them here.” I beckoned impatiently.

  “Of course, it’s just that . . . Well, see for yourself.” She pulled two scraps of white bands from behind her back. As if someone had taken the palms and a portion of the fingers and cut them directly out.

  “What on earth?” Fanny demanded, and raised a lecturing finger to my maid. “Young lady, if this is how you launder—”

  “Leave her be,” I cut in sharply, yet I could not help my grin. It spread ear to ear, filled my chest with something exciting and sharp. Something I recognized well.

  The rising blood of a chase.

  Digestion. Not so literal, after all.

  All eyes turned to me as I took the ruined gloves and laid them out on the table.

  It was as if bits of the cloth were missing. Whole section, exactly in the shape of fingers whose tips and joints were gnawed out. A bit of the palm.

  How strange. How interesting.

  How lovely that I was right.

  “The formula,” I said as I plucked one from the table and stripped a glove from my hand, “used the letters D and G. Digestion.” I began to pull the ruined glove over my fingers. My palm. “Among various other instructions, it also required aether to imbue it and water to carry it.”

  “What are you babbling about?” Fanny demanded. “There’s no call to put a glove full of holes on your hand.”

  Yet as my fingers slid into place, I watched them appear within the empty portions. Watched them, yet felt the indication of fabric where none showed. “Digestion,” I murmured, more now to myself. “As Mr. Pettigrew suggested, it could also be the process by which one element overtakes another. Much the same as the fabric what took on the liquid, bonding both. If it seeps through the body, then won’t it do the same?” Worse, to my way of thinking, for the unique properties of a body allowed for a richer consumption through the blood.

  “Cherry, really,” Fanny said, once more cutting into my thoughts.

  I looked up, fingers flexing within the indication of the vanished fabric. “What? Oh.” I smiled, distracted and more than a little manic. “Eureka. We are searching for an invisible killer.”

  “Invisible? Preposterous,” Fanny dismissed.

  When even Zylphia looked skeptical, I raised my patchworked hand and added, “Oh, not truly invisible. It’s science, not magic. Zylphia?”

  “Miss.”

  “How long will it take for my costume to be ready?”

  “All day,” Fanny interjected, deliberately stripping any intent I might have had to go searching for evidence or hunting down my invisible woman.

  For I had no more doubts. The dress in Professor Lambkin’s office had been my first clue, after all.

  Miss Hensworth was dabbling in the alchemical arts. That would make this much harder, but that much more important.

  “But I—” I sighed. “Fine. Ready my costume.” I stripped off the glove once more.

  Yet as I did, I felt what we all heard. A subtle sound, a whisper, but loud as a scream in the silence following my order. Rip.

  Frowning, I studied the glove. Ran it through my fingers. It gave. Just like that. And what fibers gave, soon crumbled to nothing.

  I looked up, my frown turning to sudden concern. “It is wearing down.”

  “What?”

  “It weakens the structure of the fabric,” I told them, and spun in agitation. “Perhaps the aether reacts poorly with the long term viability of the material it imbues. Blast! We must be at that masquerade. ’Tis life or death, now.”

  “Cherry,” Fanny sighed, and dropped her forehead into her cradling hand.

  I left her there, left Mrs. Booth and Zylphia staring in my wake as I hurried up the stairs to begin my own preparations.

  Alchemy was not magic. Yet like most scientific endeavors, there were drawbacks to be had. Drawbacks that could build, like a slow poison or a quiet, subtle killer.

  I knew this more than most. The drawback to my father’s serum had been fatal.

  Miss Hensworth might not realize the same.

  Chapter Twenty

  It was nearly impossible to retain my focus.

  The entirety of King’s College had been transformed for the masquerade, turned inside out in a sheer wonderland of surreal decor and unique display. What belonged inside was now outdoors, and what was meant to be outside had gone in.

  I had never seen the like.

  And clocks, clocks everywhere! So many devices fashioned from so many materials. Guests filed past two large grandfather clocks that I could only assume had cost a small fortune apiece. They tolled out at random increments, skewing my sense of time as I was sure they’d been intended. We
passed tables set for tea, shelves filled with books and protected by faux walls attached to nothing at all. The path stones we tread upon were clocks, tiny gears open beneath a pristine plate of glass, numbers lacquered in stark black.

  Each gave a different time, each ticked on a different beat.

  Over it all, protecting us from the rain falling to the London streets in icy sheets of cold and wet, rose creations in scrollworked metal to resemble pieces of ceiling and dreamlike portions of an abstract house. Telescopes mounted on brass fittings looked out of windows set in walls with no interior.

  Desks and bookshelves, parlor furniture, all of it exactly where it shouldn’t be.

  I did my best not to stare as Fanny and I walked in step with a knot of richly garbed strangers, yet I failed more often than not.

  My costume was truly inspired. Madame Troussard had outdone herself. In the guise of a masquerade, gentlemen and ladies can always stretch the bounds of propriety for the favor of surprise and awe. I did both.

  Yet there were many who had taken it even farther. I did not see simple sky ship captains or old-fashioned lords and ladies. I saw creatures who stepped from the pages of fantasy; a truly magnificent collection of gowns, coats, hairpieces, masks. The noise, even in the queue, was astonishingly deep; not so much loud as rich and full and vibrant.

  My gown was shockingly pink, a paler shade than I usually dared to wear. The sleeves were a diaphanous material that revealed my arms to any who bothered to look, yet whose gathers at the elbow turned them to large puffs of shimmering confection. It was not lace that spilled from the hem but a waterfall of crystals linked together by sturdy net, and they caught the light in a thousand glittering shards.

  And clinked like tiny bells with every gesture.

  The bodice of the gown was low—much lower than I was usually comfortable with, and I constantly worried for my ability to move, much less my modesty—yet the same crystal net shaped my décolletage, hugged my throat and made it appear as if I wore crystalline armor. It fastened to a large, ornate brass collar, whose inset cameo did not feature a woman but a single faceted crystal in the shape of a rose.