The earl frowned. “I beg your pardon?”
“That guest, in the black and white.” I straightened, pulled away with a surge of manic interest. Turning, I began to push my way through the crowd, the dancers. “He lost stature!”
“Miss St. Croix, wait!”
I didn’t dare. The man who’d pushed by me in that very same costume had been so much taller. I didn’t recall seeing eyes this time.
Mask, gloves, costume.
And a faint, nearly imperceptible trace of lilies.
Chapter Twenty-one
It took effort, but I elbowed my way to Lady Rutledge’s side. Ignored her ring of sycophants and friends and caught her arm. “Where is the dean?” I demanded.
Gasps ringed me at my interruption, rude as it was.
“Dean Figgins-Coop?” She did not pretend to not know of whom I spoke. “At the beverage table, I believe. Miss St. Croix, you look quite fetching.”
I had no time for that, and waved it away with an abrupt hand. “When did you see Miss Hensworth last?”
Beneath her diamond-studded mask and truly inspiring birdcage-decorated wig, Lady Rutledge’s mouth pursed. Her beauty mark winked. A diamond inset within it.
Scandalously effective.
I tore my gaze away from the bit of sparkle and met her gaze.
And found it all too serious. “Not since the luncheon some days ago, I’m afraid.”
“I need to find her.” I turned, gathering my frothy skirts in hand, and added, “Before she finds Figgins-Coop!”
“Do you think—”
I did not allow the lady the chance to finish. Did not allow Compton to catch up with me. Using elbows and shoulders, smiles and apologies, I forced my way across the ballroom. The beverage table would be set up away from the dancing, away from the chaos.
Yet as I ringed the ballroom proper, passing one of the strangely large yet silent cannons, I knew I’d come too late.
A cry set up from the far end of the room. A gasp of horror and dismay that slowly worked its way through the crowd, building strength, building momentum as any hue and cry would.
Whoosh! The sky ferry’s engine lit up overhead, casting a blue sheen across the crowd.
“He’s dead!”
The cry rose like a banner.
“He’s been stabbed!”
I was too late, then.
But not too late to catch the culprit red-handed.
I studied the suddenly shifting crowd, searched its rampant tides as color and chaos melded into one. I saw no black and white figure, but I expected nothing of the sort.
Unfortunately, I did not expect the crowd to surge against me, either. A group of men hurried past me, a shoulder clipped mine and I staggered backward. My booted heel slipped on the grass, tumbled me into the cannon that did not give so much an iota as I collided with its polished surface.
The back of my head introduced itself to the barrel. Gong!
What stars there were tripled in my sight.
Yet as I struggled to right myself, my hand slid into a basket of powder so fine, it was like water.
Gold dust.
Of course. The answer came to me as the memories of figures in the fog.
When a quarry was on the run, leave them nowhere to hide.
It did not take a genius to figure out the cannon’s purpose, and though my mind had been working as if through wet wool of late, I was still an intelligent being. Within moments, as the guests all but stampeded in the social clash of those who had seen the corpse fall versus those who had no inkling that anything at all had gone amiss, I’d found the mechanism that would trigger the firing array.
I did not bother to aim. The cannon’s barrel already pointed up.
I pulled the string and held my breath.
I should have plugged my ears.
Boom! The weapon fired, shooting a comet of gold dust out of its mouth like dragon’s fire. The glittering dust ball expanded as it soared, layering a golden fog upon the bemused guests.
Not enough. It wasn’t wide enough a net!
But as I started to scramble down the small hill, another controlled explosion of sound thundered across the ballroom. Then again, and finally, a fourth.
My cannon’s release must have convinced the other minders that it was time for the display. Luck favored me.
Gold dust shimmered in the air, clung to skin and clothes. I squinted, safe behind the cannon yet already regretting the stuff I knew would get in my nose and throat. It drifted, saturated all it touched.
Just like the damned fog.
And also like the fog, it would reveal my quarry.
I did not have to wait long.
It took effort, but I learned to filter the clothed and bulkier frames of guests now darting this way and that from anything else.
And the anything else I spotted came in a lithe figure not so much revealed by the dust as indicated by where the dust moved. As when she’d tossed her cloak in the fog below, she’d shed her costume here to do the deed.
“There you are,” I whispered, my heart hammering with a fierce joy. Manic anticipation.
I slid down the grassy hill, kicking a clock off its perch in the process, and pushed my way through the crowd. The sylphlike figure had gone for the stair at the back. Fighting the surge of momentum, I caught more than one elbow or shoulder for my troubles.
I would feel these bruises tomorrow.
For now, I was too filled with the chase, the search, the need to catch my quarry, and it was to this end that I pulled the most daring maneuver I’d ever committed in full view of Society.
I had to hope they were not watching me. And if they were, that they could not know who waited behind the mask in pink and crystal.
I seized the end of a golden silk ribbon, did not dare check to see if it was occupied at the top. I had to trust that any performer knew to hang on when things went awry. Weighing my options left me with little enough—I grabbed the ribbon hard in both hands, wound it around my wrist and forearm as taught long ago, and ran like the very devil himself was on my heels.
I could not have timed it better. My skirt and bustle, bulky though it was in the back, provided ample freedom to leap to the wall and use the ribbon and my own momentum to keep me in tensile motion. My feet touched the wall, and holding the ribbon tautly in both hands, my weight hanging from the higher, I ran over the masquerade guests’ heads.
When I gauged the angle correctly, I leapt, the elation of it loud and familiar in my veins. Once more, I found myself high above my audience.
In that few seconds, a strange thing happened. As if I was me, yet I was also a child once more; as if the ballroom filled with shocked people looked up at me, and yet I swung over the heads of an audience gasping in horror and delight.
It was not the fragrance of too many bodies I smelled, but that of sweat and spice. Of something that reminded me of . . .
Of incense.
I shuddered.
A golden blot vanished into the balcony at the top of the stair, jerked my attention into sharp relief. I swung to the staircase, bypassing the need to fight through the crowd again, and landed halfway up.
I staggered, caught the railing, wrenched myself forward.
Gold grit stung my eyes, coated my skin, but I could not stop to fish the stuff out of my mouth and eyes.
Miss Hensworth was coated in every inch in the stuff. She would be found.
I darted out of the ballroom, following the corridor at the top of the stair. It branched left and right; golden footsteps told me all I needed to know.
“Hortense!” I called, abandoning propriety in favor of speed. “Stop this instant!”
I wouldn’t be so lucky. I followed traces of dust, aware I left my own behind me. Hurried past paintings of men all very smart-looking with labels declaring them professors or thinkers or geniuses of old, past the open galleries where this corridor looked down into the ballroom.
The raucous sound of it all faded
in and out, like a gramophone whose record had been scored too shallowly in places.
“Hortense,” I called again.
“Blast it!” A woman’s curse. Anger and vitriol and bitter, bitter disappointment.
It came from the end of the hall, where a set of French doors opened beneath a hand I could not entirely see. Only a shimmer of gold warned me of her presence. Not nearly as thick as I’d hoped.
“Stop!” I called. “Hortense, you must hear me out.”
I followed her outside, gasped as the October cold snapped the air from my lungs.
If I were this cold, I could not imagine how she felt, nude as she had to be.
I scanned the darkness, only the back-lighting of lanterns from beneath offering anything to see by. It was much darker up here, and the rain sluiced to the terrace, making difficult footing that much more treacherous.
More, it would wash away the dust.
I stepped out onto the veranda. “There’s nowhere to hide, Hortense,” I warned, as gently as I could. “I want to help you.” Rain flattened my sleeves almost immediately. Pounded into the fabric and turned it heavy and unwieldy.
I could not take the time to be cold. Even as a shudder of frozen cognizance began in my spine, I stiffened it.
A rustle to my left. Ivy not yet deadened by winter’s grasp sprang into motion. Not rain. A body, a footstep, a hold. I reached out; gold dust turned to liquid and dripped from my fingers.
My eyes strained to see what wasn’t there.
“Miss Hensworth,” I tried again, “I know what it is you’ve concocted. ’Tis dangerous. You must let me help you.”
“You!” The voice came from somewhere farther down the veranda. Shuddering. Cold? Or anger?
Both, I’d imagine.
“How can you choose to help them?” she spat.
“Them?” I inched out into the dark. The rain pierced through my gown, set me to shivering violently.
“Them! Detective St. Croix.” The moniker all but dripped venom. “Puppet of the same society that keeps women like us on a leash!”
Ah. Rhetoric.
“I’m not here for them,” I replied, soft as I could manage. I reached out; nothing but air filtered through my fingers. I heard a slide of something, footstep on stone, all but muted beneath the patter of the precipitation around us. “Miss Hensworth, you must let me help you.”
“Help? You are no help to me. Betrothed to an earl, meddlesome bint that you’ve been!”
I winced, but swallowed my angry retort. “Hortense, the tincture you’ve been drinking is exceptionally dangerous in large doses. You must believe me.”
Silence.
“Please,” I pleaded, turning away from the place I was sure she no longer was. But where, now? Look for the rain. Where it fell, and did not fall. “I understand that the digestive qualities allow you to remain all but invisible to the naked eye, but it weakens the—”
“Lies!”
I turned, but too late. A body collided with mine, sent me staggering toward the veranda railing. All the breath left me as my lower back struck the stone balustrade, but I was not alone. Limbs I could not see enfolded me, a body free of clothing to grasp pinned me, breath from a mouth invisible to me wafted over my face.
Too bitter. It smelled wrong.
Sick? No. Different.
I grunted a wordless refrain as fingers scrabbled at my throat.
Bless Madame Troussard and her worked brass collar.
As Hortense’s grasping fingers failed to find purchase, I found something that seemed like flesh beneath my palms. Grasped whatever it was and wrenched hard.
I received an elbow—a fist?—to my face for my trouble, skewing my mask. Darkness slapped over my eyes; I couldn’t see. I flailed, letting go of whatever portion of unclothed anatomy I’d managed.
Blind, grasping, I did the only thing my instincts allowed me to.
I bent, hip gouging against the stone railing, angled my shoulders and pushed with all my might. “Allez, hop!” I gasped.
Miss Hensworth went flying.
“No!” Her outraged scream came at me from an angle too sharp to be the direction I’d intended. I struggled to right my mask, panting for breath.
Found myself facing the rain-drenched air beyond the veranda.
My heart dropped like a stone.
“Hortense?” I flung myself at the balustrade, but I saw nothing. Desperate, I patted at the wet rock, hanging half off the railing with my rear quarters curled around it for balance. My skirts dragged at me; I struggled to hang on. I found cold stone, but no chilled flesh. “Hortense! I can’t see you, where are you?”
And then I heard it. A low, wild laugh. The kind of laugh I’d heard once before, deep in a tunnel where the sane should not go.
“You will never keep me from it,” came the whisper. “I will walk these halls of learning as a free woman. An equal—no.” The whisper became a bitter sound, a laugh. “Better than them! I deserve this!”
I blanched, reached as far as I could for nothing. Nothing at all.
I could not see what was invisible.
“I am a woman,” Hortense rasped. Stone grated. Somewhere to my left? I peered hard.
There! A flicker of droplets where rain did not strike the terrace itself.
And a muted sound beneath. Rock grating. Fingers scrabbling.
I tossed one leg over the balustrade. “Stay where you are, I’m going to—”
“Don’t you dare!”
I ignored her, reached until my weakened shoulder screamed with the effort. My fingers found flesh; I grabbed hold, joints popping.
She wrenched at me. “For years I’ve been forced to endure the scorn from these worthless jackanapes. Placed beneath the boot of men less than myself. I will not go back to nothing!”
“You cannot give up,” I countered through my gritted teeth. Rock crumbled as an ornamentation gave way beneath her weight. I cried out as the limb in my grasp pulled, dead weight. The railing grated beneath my leg. “Hortense, you must . . . listen . . .”
“I am tired of listening,” came the half-screamed words beneath me. Fingers I couldn’t see pried at mine. “You should have died below! Why didn’t you die?”
I took a deep breath.
Smelled lilies.
The same fragrance I’d caught while trapped in the closet. Organic, sweet, as out of place in this driving force of mania as I was in this sopping pink confection. More of the material gave way like wet tissue, and I jerked as my weight slid to the side.
I winced, muscles burning. “Why?” I demanded. “Why kill the others?”
“They were in my way. All of them, in my way!”
“Even Lambkin?” I demanded. Her limb twisted, slipped. “Hortense, I need your help!”
“Never,” she spat, and a grip made of molten steel seized my wrist. I could not see it, only feel the pain of it. See the indentations left by invisible fingers. “You . . . You don’t understand! I’d given him everything . . . The position, the knowledge. He filled the tenure that should have been mine and all I ever received was a toss when he wanted it. He laughed at me. Laughed!”
“Hortense—”
“No man will ever laugh at me again!”
And with that ragged scream, as the weight held in my grip thrashed, something cracked. The bone beneath my fingers, I think, although I had no way of being sure. Stone gave way. My wrist popped, sending searing agony up my arm; my fingers loosened as I bit back a cry of pain, even as my other hand curled around the balustrade and clung with all my might.
Hortense Hensworth plummeted to the courtyard below.
Saplings snapped beneath the weight of a woman whose very blood had taken on the qualities of the tincture she’d fed it. I heard the sound of flesh striking earth.
And I screamed in the rain as the same indifferent force of gravity pulled me after her.
“Cherry!”
Fingers locked around my ruined wrist. Another scream, thi
s one made of pure pain, stripped the flesh from my throat. My ribs collided with the anterior stone facing, pushing every last bit of breath I had left from my lungs. “Oomph!”
Rain drove into my eyes, blurred the air above me to a subdued glow of lantern light, yet I heard clear as a bell the genteel curse of a man who’d spent more time with an uncouth navy than the civil company he currently kept.
“Hold on!” Lord Compton ordered, and it was an order. I gritted my teeth as fire and gaswork lights popped through my vision. Each press of his finger, each pull twisted my arm until agony was all I could see or feel or breathe.
Until stone scraped at my hips, my legs, and gave way to the banded steel of arms warmer, but no less confining for it.
For a long moment, I shuddered, gasping, my arm aching as I stared over Compton’s shoulder and saw nothing. Only a void where the rain could not reach the earth. Nothing at all, in the shape of a body.
The invisible corpse in King’s College. The woman who would make her mark on the university after all.
Miss Hensworth had achieved her wish. Even if no one would ever see it.
“Are you hurt?”
My shoulders, already slumped, shook as Earl Compton’s effortlessly authoritative tenor cut through my shock. My numb dismay. I was soaked through, the pink confection I wore now a sodden, ruined mass of lumpy cloth and sheer tissue.
My hair clung to my neck and shoulders, half pinned and mostly plastered to my skin, inelegant hanks. My wrist ached, a throbbing pain that warned of deeper damage.
I braced for a lecture, for questions.
One came, but it was not the one I expected. “Miss St. Croix,” he said as he guided me away from the ledge that had nearly claimed two tonight, “are you all right? Do you require aid?” Something warm draped across my shoulders.
A coat. His.
I clutched it to me, even as I knew the rain would soak it, too. Drench him, beside me. “I . . .” My breath escaped on a whispered sob. “I think I’d like to go home. I don’t feel well.”
It was a lie. Sort of.
The earl let me go, but only enough so that he could grip my upper arms and glare down at me. “What possessed you to run off like that?” he demanded, yet it wasn’t a sharp sound. An angry sound.
Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles Page 27