Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles

by Cooper, Karina

  The whistle drew me deeper into the district, teasing, taunting; he knew what it did to me. The memory, shrouded in the vague sort of oblivion that comes with opium use, still haunted my dreams.

  I would not allow him to haunt me.

  “Cease your running,” I called. The fog shifted, revealing a lamppost flickering mightily against the damp. I spun. “Come out!”

  A whistle in the dark . . . A tuneless thing, a lazy drift of sound.

  I hiked up my skirts as a shadow darted just out of sight, lowered my head and sprinted like mad for my quarry.

  Perhaps he did not expect a frontal attack. Perhaps he had not realized how close I was in the drift.

  Perhaps I was meant to catch him.

  All of these things collided in my brain as I leapt at the narrow back fleeing from me. We fell to the street in a tangle of limbs and curses, and seizing my opportunity—sucking a breath through the pain of elbows and knees jammed against damp cobble—I wrenched off the low-pulled bowler hat.

  “Don’t ’urt me!” begged a voice too young to be more than fifteen, perhaps less. On the brink of becoming a man, it cracked in terror.

  I scrambled off him. “Where is he?” I demanded, already convinced this was not my true quarry.

  The youth scrabbled backward on all fours, like an awkward animal. “I dunno,” he pleaded, “ye gotta believe me, miss!”

  I took a step forward, fists clenched. “Where?”

  “ ’E just paid me to put on that bleedin’ ’at and whistle!”

  Blast! I spun, searching for any signs. Had he watched, laughing? Had he sprinted after me, a merry jester with the upper hand?

  No.

  A gunshot echoed across the smoke-filled streets.

  My heart stopped. Time ceased to move. In that fraction of a moment, I understood.

  “Cornelius,” I breathed, and ran. Somehow, perhaps the years I’d spent combing much of the city, my feet knew the direction my brain could not fathom. Every step screamed in my head; every second an eternity of torture.

  I ran harder, faster than I had ever run, in or out of a skirt, and it wasn’t fast enough.

  The collector had let me chase his decoy in the dark.

  I stumbled out of an alley shortcut, caught myself against the brick facing and sucked in a raw breath at the sight that greeted me.

  Two figures, long of form, wrapped in greatcoats against the chill. They leaned against each other, two silhouettes merged into one. The guttering lamp overhead painted each in flickering light and shadow; I saw only a hat pulled low. A top hat knocked free, shading sandy hair in depths of gold.

  “Cornelius!” I screamed.

  One figure separated from the other.

  One clung to the lamppost behind him.

  The first turned to me. I saw nothing, only shoulders and a gesture impossible to read in the faux night. But I could not misapprehend the words. “Weep for the widowed bride,” he spat, a masculine taunt that ripped my scream from the air and hammered it to a death of swallowed echoes.

  “What the—” Another man’s voice, terse and baffled. And then, three strode from the fog—workingmen, factory laborers gauging from coal-stained skin and clothing. All three stilled.

  And then one broke into a run. “Hey! Hey, you!”

  The other two hurried to the fallen earl; I had no breath for further words. No thought for safety. I raced across the street, my lungs ready to burst from the constricting stays, and could not follow when the silhouette faded into the dark.

  The earl slumped to the damp sidewalk beneath him. His skin, ghastly pale in the sickly light, gleamed wetly. The men bent over him, I shoved one aside.

  “Oi, lady, you can’t—”

  “He’s my husband!” Oh, God. Oh, God! I fell to my knees, gloved hands hovering over his shoulders, his head, his waist. “Are you hurt? Are you all right? Cornelius!”

  His breath guttered in his chest. Grimly, hastily, I tore at his coat buttons. Flinched when his features constricted in agony, his staggered breath choked. His gaze clouded with it.

  “Cor,” whispered the heavyset one. “Get the doctor, mate. Hurry!” His friend darted into the fog.

  “Please,” I sobbed, tears thick in my throat. Burning my eyes. “Please, don’t—oh, God.” My gloves came away crimson, obscenely bright against the tan fabric. So much of it, warm on my skin; too wet, too much. “No, no, this isn’t—I never—!”

  A hand touched my shoulder. “Dr. Lattimer’ll be right along. Lives on this street.”

  Not soon enough. The earl’s legs shifted as if he struggled to stand. It wouldn’t help. As I covered the gaping wounds in his chest, as I pushed hard and moaned with his ragged, garbled sound of pain, I knew it wouldn’t matter.

  “Please!” I screamed. “Hurry!”

  “Jesus have mercy.”

  “Ch-Cherry,” he whispered. Blood flecked his lips.

  The tears ran hot and blinding as I lowered my forehead to his. “Don’t die,” I ordered. Begged. “Cornelius Kerrigan Compton, you will not die on me.”

  A quirk at the corner of his mouth. A drop of blood, a series of bubbles blown on his uneven exhale. One hand encircled my nape. Too heavy.

  But if he meant to say anything, if he meant to tell me anything at all, he could not.

  A lung, I thought hysterically. The knife wounds had gone deep. Two, three. They spilled blood in a growing pool, soaked into my skirt, my hands.

  The ground beneath us.

  The knife, nearly a straight razor but for the point and hilt, not a yard from us.

  Rage carried each blow. Terrible, black fury. Why? For God’s sake, why?

  Footsteps pounded on the street.

  “This way,” yelled my sympathetic witness.

  Too late. All too late. I sobbed as Earl Compton’s gaze drifted from mine. Clouded.

  “Out of the way,” blustered a new voice, old but not worn.

  Hands grabbed my shoulders. Voices lifted. The fog wafted across it all.

  Surrounded by strangers, everything ended.

  I did not recall losing consciousness.

  I sat in my bed and did not look up when Fanny stepped inside. I had been sitting up for an eternity; I did not eat the food they laid for me. I did not touch the tea.

  I stared into the darkened room of my boudoir, lavender and rose dulled to gray and brown, and I said nothing of the pain ravaging me from the inside. Of the voices clamoring for my attention.

  Of the accusations weighed upon my soul.

  Until death do us part. For all my bravado and claimed skill, how quickly I had allowed that condition to come to pass.

  Fanny tiptoed around me. Mrs. Booth whispered even when she thought I was asleep.

  It had been . . . some days, perhaps, since my lord husband passed on. The doctor, bless his soul, could do nothing for him.

  I could do nothing.

  “Come, now, my dove,” crooned my chaperone—now simply my friend, as I was a widow with no need for a chaperone.

  A widow who’d seen her husband dead before the honeymoon had even started.

  I knew the talk. I did not hear it, I did not have to. I spoke it aloud. I whispered it to myself in the darkness and the night. I did not rise from my bed, and I did not leave it but to tend to my business.

  And even that I did as if from a distance. A shell, shocked beyond all reason. Beyond understanding.

  I could not even reach myself.

  Was this what the ghost of my mother had seen as my father toiled all those years? The ruined shell of her widower husband, mindlessly working to restore what was his.

  Yet I did not work to restore anything. There was nothing to restore. There was only vengeance. A man to unmask; a murderer to hunt, like the mangy beast he was.

  Weep for the widowed bride.

  I did not look at Fanny. I did not smile. I did not do anything with the tea she placed in my hands, cradled in my lap.

  I stared into the du
sty shadows and saw them painted crimson. Heard the death rattle of a man who could not even say his final words.

  My doing. I had left him for the collector to find. I had sprinted from his side with vengeance in my heart, pride riding me for insults delivered.

  I’d as good as killed the man who’d sworn to protect me until his last breath.

  How little he knew.

  Fanny took the tea from my unresponsive fingers and placed it on my nightstand. Gone, the bottle of laudanum—packed in the luggage Lord Piers had delivered to the HMS Ophelia. My belongings had not been retrieved yet, waiting to be rescued from its sad and tragic little misadventure that ended so abruptly before it had begun.

  My lord husband had remembered my fascination with the Queen’s own flagship. He’d remembered the conversation so long ago, when first we’d met.

  He’d booked passage on the sky ship’s maiden voyage. Just us and the crew.

  I could not cry. I had no tears to shed.

  Only a fierce, boiling anger, numbing all it burned away.

  “How is she?” Mrs. Booth’s whisper. Always, a whisper.

  “The same, poor thing,” Fanny replied.

  Tearfully, Mrs. Booth sniffed. “The marchioness is threatening litigation—”

  “Sod the marchioness,” Fanny hissed.

  I did not smile.

  Booth’s uneven tread outside my door. “I’ve written to the master,” he said, quiet as his polished baritone allowed. “I expect a reply any—” Click.

  Now they were only mumbles through my door. Concerned, worried, frightened.

  Sad.

  I felt none of these things.

  I did not move for another hour, at least. Perhaps longer. The shadows shifted subtly with the day.

  Murderer.

  Silently, I leaned over, jammed my hand beneath the mattress. The small, wax-wrapped bundle came easily to my grasp. Zylphia had brought it to me sometime in the past day. Perhaps to coax something of a response from me.

  I sat up once more, looked down at the palm-size parcel.

  Weep for the widowed bride.

  Not today. Perhaps not ever. I unwrapped the waxen paper, looked down at the small selection of gummy opium tar.

  My laudanum had been packed.

  But I did not want laudanum now.

  Murderer!

  Quietly, wordlessly, I took a small square of the resin and placed it on my tongue.

  The bitter taste seared through ice, burned through the dead husk that was all I’d become.

  I grimaced; the first expression I’d managed for days.

  The juices mingled now with my saliva. Tricked down my throat in tingling currents of warmth.

  And then I swallowed.

  Opium tar would relieve the shock, my scientist’s brain assured me. And when the shock wore off, it would deaden the pain.

  And when the pain was no longer so great that I could not breathe, then it would be time to stoke the fires of fury and collect a murderer.

  No matter the cost.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Blood splattered across a cheek pale as fine china and as dainty as the same. Crimson streaks left tracks where his pleading tears had not dried. “Please!” he begged, “I don’t know nothin’!”

  Sweet Tom Billings had sometimes worked for me on occasion, but mostly he worked for the hand with the right coin. Beneath his femininely delicate features lived a mind as cunning as a rat’s, with every bit the instinct to survive and none of the animal’s more delicate sensibilities. Sewage or carnage, coin was coin, and Sweet Tom would no sooner turn a nose at one than go hungry for the other.

  Which did not explain why he dared brave the collectors’ sanctum. We were not known for our tolerance of outsiders, and I was in no mood to play.

  To that end, I held him now, pinned against the wall beside the collectors’ bounties, my knuckles raw and aching. I didn’t mind the pain of bones ground against flesh. It was something more real than the soul-deep promise of something a thousand times less civilized hovering in the back of my thoughts. Waiting.

  Hungry.

  Opium dulled the beast. Just enough that I could think through the bloody film saturating my mind. My fist tightened in Sweet Tom’s collar, my other held threateningly back, elbow cocked. “Don’t nose me about, Sweet Tom,” I hissed. “You’re no collector. Or have you cast an eye up in the world?”

  He cringed, pushing up high on his toes as he could, his hat trod under my own boot and his scarf tangled up in the collar I clenched. His head wobbled, shoulders desperately flattened against the damp brick as if seeking a way through the pitted stone and away from me. Whatever mask shaped my face, it paled the boy’s own, until the whites of his eyes shone yellow-tinged in the lamplight from his turned over lantern.

  When I’d come to the collectors’ station, I hadn’t expected to find anyone mulling over the bounties posted. I certainly would never have expected a noncollector, especially Sweet Tom.

  If he’d gone collector, I’d eat his scarf.

  “Answer me!”

  “Was sorted out!” he squeaked as his scarf tightened dangerously about his skinny throat. His eyes, always pretty in a way that put me in mind of a cat’s, were slowly going lopsided beneath the shiner I’d given. “Paid right good to come by, find a notice. That’s all!”

  “And you’re one who can read,” I finished for him. “What notice?”

  “Anything what demands a toppin’.” A murder, then.

  I bared my teeth at him. “For who?” I saw it on his features before he even opened his mouth to deny me. I thrust my face into his, smelled the copper tang of the blood leaking from his nose, an acrid trace of wine and a whiff of something both spicy and sharp. My eyes narrowed. “Vin Mariani.”

  His fingers scrabbled into the wall behind him.

  I glowered from underneath the brim of my cap. The brand of coca wine was one of those much beloved by Her Majesty and Pope Leo XIII, and too expensive to be found on the breath of guttersnipes of any stripe. “Where did you receive the coin, Sweet Tom?”

  “What?” He laughed, a mawkish thing that showed at least three blackened teeth and a sickly yellow tinge to his gums. “No, that’s not—”

  Crack. My hand stung with the impact, but the heavy cloud of opium enfolding me soothed it away just as quick.

  “Some bloke!” he screeched, thrashing now in my grip. His knee collided with mine, sending a dulled rush of pain and awareness to the part of my mind still aware of things. A quiet part. One I silenced mercilessly.

  “Who?” I demanded. “A name, Sweet Tom, and I’ll let you limp off to a dollymop’s mercies.”

  Fat tears rolled out of the frightened man’s eyes. The fingers wrapped around my wrist bit, but Sweet Tom was no scrapper, and well he and I both knew it. “He never gave no name, you got to believe me!”

  I gritted my teeth. “What’d he look like?”

  “Hat and coat and a real quiet voice,” my reluctant informant revealed. “But it were real dark! He said he needed a clever eye and quick hand and more’s the coin for silence.” Each word stoked that eager hunger within me, and I stared at him for a long moment, tracing the trickle of blood leaking from his left nostril.

  When his eyebrows twisted together, a wince shaping his face as he drew his head back far from me as the wall and my grip allowed, I realized that I was smiling up into Sweet Tom’s terrified face.

  I didn’t ease the expression. I wanted to laugh outright, but muffled it to ask, “How long?”

  “Eh?”

  I gave him a shake, the kind street mongrels the world over learned quickly to interpret. “How long have you been fetching bounties for him?”

  “Just started!” He swallowed hard enough that I felt the bob of his throat against my knuckles; heard the sound it made as he forced his dry throat to cooperate. “Please, miss, I’m just a gonoph, don’t know nothin’.”

  My smiled widened. “That’s where you’
re wrong, Sweet Tom. Do you have plans to meet this benefactor of yours again?”

  “No, miss. I just pick up the notes what look right and leave ’em where he wants.”

  “Where?”

  “Whitechapel Station,” he told me, and even as he spoke, the image of the fog-filled rail yard rose like a specter in front of me. Whitechapel, the Ripper’s own haunt and prime ground for the collector I hunted. “Just by the first gate, there’s an old postbox what don’t get used none.”

  “When were you to deliver?” I asked, sweet for all I hadn’t let him go.

  I was sure he recognized that fact. Smart lad, he said nothing about it. “Midnight,” he whispered. “Stroke of it by the bell.”

  My cheeks ached from the width of my smile. “Good,” I assured him, although I’m positive the menace by which the word slipped from me did nothing of the sort. “You’re a good sort, Sweet Tom. Do be wandering, now. If I learn you’re lying, I’ll find you soon enough.”

  “But—” A sickly sheen coated his sallow skin. “But if I don’t fetch his notes, he’ll kill me!”

  “You think?” I let him go, straightening his scarf and patched fustian jacket as tenderly as his own mother might, if she’d ever cared. “Then keep low, mate, and if you’re lucky, neither him nor the collectors will find you.”

  The smile he summoned looked ill, but he wasted no breath arguing. Hurrying from the hallowed grounds—which I was rather more certain he’d never attempt to trod upon again—he left a drifting wake of coal-stuffed yellow in his path.

  My own smile faded as if it’d never been.

  The bounties posted were the usual sorts, though a bit scarce. They’d pick up again before Christmas, they always did. Not much Yuletide spirit to go around when coin was the concern.

  I’d already found nothing of interest. Nothing, at least, of interest specifically to me.

  I sought a different quarry tonight.

  Whitechapel Station, then? I wondered why there. As I snuffed Sweet Tom’s lost lantern and adjusted the protective seam of my fog-prevention goggles around my eyes, I ran the facts as I’d learned them through my head. A bloke rich enough to pay a man like Sweet Tom enough to afford the coca wine he’d always been a lush for, one who looked for murder and assassination dispatches over the rest.