The Twisted Tragedy of Miss Natalie Stewart

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  “Isn’t that what drew you into this?” I posited, pressing my luck and trying to get my mind around these people. “Isn’t that why you called upon the likes of me? Isn’t it one of the occupations of the leisure class? To see what you could get away with?”

  “Oh, you mustn’t get caught up in our games and think it’s all about the experimentation. Our aim remains the grand restoration of power where mankind intended it.” He leaned back, and I could see a corner of his face in the light.

  An unattractive face with a balding pate and pockmarked cheeks. He appeared dull and sallow, yet his eyes were dark and sharp, and clearly his tone was meant to reassert his authority. He continued with his sense of mission:

  “During one of your…tumbles, don’t lose sight of the main goal of seizure. We want as many deeds and purse strings as possible. You may be called out from those shadow-lands as our colleague, but you are here under Society rule, and we mustn’t have chaos. Not yet. Chaos comes far later on our schedule.”

  I bowed my head to him in acquiescence.

  “And so,” the Majesty said proudly, “with the soul-rending we’ve managed on you and the good doctor in New York working on reanimation and another on pharmacology, we’ve the tools of our operation in the process of implementation. In order to overturn the world, we must have fear on our side. Well, and opiates for the fearless. But our creations will wield a staff of fear that will clear our way like Moses once parted water,” he said, chuckling.

  Fear. Opiates. I thought of how I’d been kidnapped and tricked in an opium den. I kept my roiling anger well hid. A good doctor keeps his diagnosis veiled behind an impassive face. My visit had served as much of a purpose as it could.

  “Back to New York, then, Majesty?”

  “Back to New York with you. Check in on Dr. Preston. German Hospital, one of those benevolent places that treats whoever comes,” he grumbled with distaste. “I suppose he has to work somewhere. His trial should be operational soon. Tell me everything. Send a secure address to this one, and we’ll correspond from there. Remain clear of the telegraph wires; letters will do. Don’t let me lose track of you again in any of your little games. Don’t get attached to anyone or anything but the cause.”

  “Give me tasks, and I will see to them,” I replied, “but give me leave and space. Do not have me followed or hovered over. Crenfall was miserable company, and I’ll not tolerate the like. If you don’t let me be a lone wolf, I will kill you in your sleep.” I used the quiet pitch the demon used. It worked. Fear flickered across the man’s ugly face.

  “Agreed. Beyond your duties, your time is as you’d like it to be, provided you compromise no one but yourself. Enjoy the body provided you.”

  “Oh, I shall. Good then.” And with that I bowed my head, going for the door. “Ta!”

  A grunt of amusement was all the good-bye the Majesty gave.

  I maintained a jaunty walk down the three floors and around the corner to where Knowles had shifted the carriage. I hopped in and nearly collapsed against the leather cushion, my knees suddenly weak. Sitting inside with a hat tipped low over his long face, Knowles gave me a moment to sit up and regain steady breathing before he asked, “Any luck?”

  “Oh, indeed, Mr. Knowles. More than I bargained for.”

  So there you have it, Natalie. I’m sent off again to New York.

  I need a day to collect my resources. Only a fool would keep all his assets within his estate and obvious family holdings. So I send you this account and am off to collect some treasures and the bulk of my personal holdings.

  Did I mention it’s strangely cold in London? Perhaps I still walk the valley of shadow. I’ll send word of my exact arrival time. Until then, dream well of me, and I promise to do the same.

  Yours,

  Jonathon

  I shook so hard while reading the letter that my arms ached.

  When he meets me in New York, will we have to look constantly over our shoulders, even though he demanded he not be trailed? I’d hoped that getting his affairs in order would mean we’d be free to exist as any normal, courting young couple might do, without fear of death, spells, or evil institutions hanging over them. But the moment I met Preston, I knew it wasn’t so simple. The Society was the spider, and its web was large.

  As I looked into the vanity, my reflection back was deathly pale. This new part Jonathon had to play was yet one more obstacle between us, one more matter to be resolved before we could be together. “Don’t get attached to anything,” had been the warning. The demon had no sweetheart, no fiancée, no woman he courted.

  He only had victims.

  Chapter 15

  My door open, I was sitting and reading, hoping Dickens could get my mind off everything, when Bessie came into my room. “You’ve a visitor, Natalie. Miss Horowitz.”

  “Rachel!”

  I tore down the stairs to see a dark-haired girl who had grown taller and even more waifish than I remembered, as if she’d become one with the spirits who spoke to her. She didn’t turn at the sound of me on the stair, but she did jump as I threw my arms around her from behind.

  I sat down beside her, and she took one look at me, her lovely face drawn, dark circles under her eyes, and tears flowed down her cheeks. She fell into my arms and wept there a while.

  Stroking her hair, I just let her cry, small sounds and sniffles muffled by the handkerchief she put to her mouth. After a long moment, she pulled back.

  “I’m sorry,” she signed to me.

  “For what?” I signed back. “For reaching out to me? Everyone else would have thought you were crazy.” I finished signing. She looked at me sheepishly. Then I grinned. Her face broke into a wide smile. “Guess what?” I signed. She raised her eyebrows in response. “I am speaking now,” I said aloud, making sure she was watching my lips. “It’s a long story, but I regained my voice. Just like you always thought I would.”

  This pleased her, and she clasped my hands in hers.

  “Should I sign or speak?” I signed. She shrugged. I continued to sign. “Mrs. Northe wants you to stay with her. Not your house. For safety.”

  “No trouble?” Rachel signed. I shook my head. She shifted to pin me with a gaze that said she was desperate to be believed as she signed, “I promise I’m stronger than this. I will do the right thing. I’m just tired—”

  “I know,” I said and squeezed her white-gloved hand. I’d worked so hard to break this girl out of her shell in school, but I couldn’t blame her now if she wanted nothing more than to retreat back into it.

  Father entered with some light lunch he’d procured for us both. Living so near to the Metropolitan, we had lunch together at home if I wasn’t with him at the acquisitions board, which had yet to give me any real responsibilities. Considering my more pressing duties, that was for the best.

  Father welcomed Rachel like another daughter. Then I remembered they’d all had quite an experience, communing with my mother in a séance. Without me. I shoved that sting aside.

  Rachel held out a note to my father. It read: “I’m so sorry for bringing any trouble upon your house. I’ll try to make it up to you.”

  My father blinked back tears. He looked at her directly so she could more easily read his lips. “You gave me a chance to talk to Helen one last time. And that gift can never be repaid.” He cleared his throat, kissed Rachel on the forehead, and walked out the door to work. Tears were in my eyes too, before I knew it.

  “About that,” I said, rubbing my face. “I want to know everything that was said. I’ve been desperate to talk to Mother. I wish I could’ve been there.”

  “She’s always watching over you,” Rachel signed.

  Damn. There went the tears again. “Well, she could at least give me a sign of it.”

  “She does. Sometimes you’re not paying attention.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but then shut it. I’d have to pay attention. “I want to know everything about what’s been going on, Rachel, but let’s get
you to Mrs. Northe.” I took Jonathon’s letter with me.

  Mrs. Northe was as welcoming as ever, looking fresh and summery in a lavender silk dress with a white lace modesty panel. There were no undue pleasantries. It wasn’t as though we were beginning as strangers, and by the look of Rachel, haggard and weary, she couldn’t have kept up the pretense of anything other than emergency. I handed Mrs. Northe Jonathon’s letter.

  “Read it, please. I don’t know the strength or membership of the Master’s Society, but it’s something to work with. My poor, brave Jonathon.”

  “Mary, will you give Rachel a tour and show her to her rooms?” Mrs. Northe asked, taking the letter and reading it immediately.

  Mary nodded and took Rachel by the arm. Just as I had done, Rachel looked around in amazement at the finery of the Fifth Avenue town house that was in the same city and yet a world away from the manner in which she and I lived.

  Once Rachel felt safe and strong enough, we tried to find out how things had gone terribly wrong. It took a while to get the account out of her, about Preston’s darkening days and the progression of the boxes tethering spirits to objects. Or, later, parts.

  “What are the parts being used for?” Mrs. Northe asked. Rachel shook her head and shrugged. She signed that she had tried to get answers out of the spirits, but all she could glean was that they were angry, that they weren’t meant to be alive anymore, that they wanted her to let them go or to put them back where they belonged. That the natural order of things was being overturned.

  “Preston’s chief interest seemed to be in reversing death,” I mentioned. “Reanimation, the Majesty said.”

  Rachel’s pale, hollowed face turned pleading. “Please. Not evil,” she signed. “He didn’t start evil. Laura—”

  “We understand,” Mrs. Northe said. “Hardly anyone drawn to dark depths begins that way.”

  I thought of Samuel, and I was scared for him. If we could get him to New York, perhaps we could all help break the allure…

  “The spirits,” Rachel signed. “They don’t stop. They have so much to say, so much wrong, but it’s all jumbled. I don’t know what I’m hearing, or who. A floodgate. It’s all just a sea of pain.”

  And then she sank in her chair exhausted, her head dropping. I wondered if the spirits had been allowing her any sleep. Likely not. If they had no rest, neither would she.

  “Well, then.” Mrs. Northe looked at me. “We need her to untie those spirits, but she has to be able to survive trying to reach them, to have the presence of mind to separate one voice from the pack. Poor girl,” she murmured. “Those with gifts so easily become targets. That Society likes to prey upon the most vulnerable and cut to the quick those who would fight against them.” The words hit me strongly, making sense out of what might have appeared to be a random pattern.

  Mrs. Northe gazed at Rachel a moment and then took her up in her arms, showing a surprising strength. “Natalie, do me a favor. Gather my skirts and hand them to me.” She shifted Rachel’s weight, a large, tall child in her arms, and held out an open hand. I gathered the doubled layers of fine silk, handed them up to Mrs. Northe, and pressed the folds into her open palm while her forearm was tucked under Rachel’s legs.

  “One of these days, women will be able to wear clothing that allows them to move properly and do something productive,” she muttered.

  “Oh, but it’s such a beautiful dress,” I said longingly. Mrs. Northe laughed.

  “And that is what we must do in these coming days, my dove. Hold tight to the positive.”

  Chapter 16

  My dearest Natalie,

  This will likely reach you just before I see you again, but I had to tell you an odd thing that happened to me after I met with the Majesty.

  Walking in Bloomsbury on business, I turned down a narrow street between Romanesque buildings. A severe woman—tightly buttoned in gray, with brown hair pulled taut beneath a hat—exclaimed as I came around the corner.

  She blurted out as if she couldn’t help herself, “Good God, young man, you must be freezing!”

  “Headmistress,” chided a tall man all in black. More severe than she, if that were even possible, he swept out from behind her and past me like some swooping raven, black hair and black frock coat billowing, looking behind me as if I were being followed by a parade or something.

  “One moment, Professor. That’s too much for one boy to handle. Look at all of it,” she said, gesturing around me.

  “Excuse me? All of what?” I asked.

  She turned, piercing me with gray-blue eyes. “Pardon me if this seems rude and presumptuous, but you’re very haunted. Recent brush with death?”

  I stared at her, then back at the man who, with a sour expression, was nonchalantly waving things off around me as if I were surrounded by flies. Or worse.

  “Yes,” I replied slowly. What else could I say?

  “That explains it,” she replied. “And why you’re wearing a scarf in summer. They do give off quite a chill.”

  “What does?” I asked.

  “Ghosts.” She clapped her hands in an authoritarian way and spoke sharply to the retinue of spirits that had evidently been following me. “Go on! Off with you. He’s the picture of health, no thanks to you.” She looked at me, behind me, then at me again. “There. All better. I shouldn’t be saying this to you, but I’ve a suspicion you’ve seen and heard stranger things than this.”

  “Thank you…I think? And you are?”

  “Oh,” the woman chuckled drily. “Don’t you worry about who we are. If darkness follows you, turn your face away. Don’t feed the shadows. You’re a doctor.” She tapped her temple, her eyes glittering though she never smiled. “I can tell. I’ve a sense about you. We need doctors, young man, of all kinds. My friends and I are doctors of sorts, in the way we’re called to be. Death didn’t claim you, so you’ve work to do. So go on and heal the wounds of this world, my boy. We can never have too many healers.”

  She reached out to touch me on the cheek as if I were a long-lost son but thought better of it. Turning back toward the mouth of the alley, she headed toward the man all in black who awaited her with his arms folded, looking bored and impatient. He held out an arm for her and she took it, falling into intense conversation as they turned the corner toward the heart of Bloomsbury with no further thought of me or glance back.

  I was a lot warmer. I felt amazingly better. I rolled my scarf up and tucked it in my briefcase.

  What else can I make of this odd meeting but that it was a sign? A sign that there are others in the world who are drawn, like us, toward inexplicable callings. If there’s a Master’s Society, then we must form our own society of peers in resistance. Perhaps London is that much safer with people like those two. Now New York needs people like us. I’m filled with purpose and cured of my chills.

  Rallied by the encounter, life surges in my veins, and I’m more determined than ever to expose the entire insidious operation before more damage is done. I shall honor the strange good deeds done to me by strangers down a Bloomsbury alley.

  In visiting family deposit boxes, I retrieved funds and a few treasures. I’ve enclosed a cameo pendant from my mother. It isn’t doing her any good now, certainly, and I know she’d have liked you. Loved you. So please take it.

  I’ll see you very soon. In a dream? I’d like to see you in a nightdress, unless you’re being modest. Which I respect, I do. Utterly. Even if modesty isn’t any fun.

  Yours,

  Jonathon

  I laughed, as if the pall that had been lifted from Jonathon by those odd good Samaritans was lifted from me too. I undid the twine and thin paper to reveal a gorgeous white cameo on an onyx surface, surrounded by a glittering pewter filigree and hung on a silk ribbon. The girl in the cameo was nymph-like, with flowers in her hair, a faerie queen for our strange fairy tale. Gazing in the mirror, I held it up to my neck, then put it on and waltzed about the room. I’d need Mrs. Northe or someone to give me a waltzing lesson befo
re Jonathon and I could attend a ball together.

  ***

  I slept well, at first. But the hazy dream of moving shadows came into sharp focus, likely somewhere around 3 a.m., when all my dreams seem to reach their zenith.

  Jonathon and I stood many paces apart, the usual corridor of my dreamworld windy and noisy as with the clatter of steel and rail, or the blowing of a terrible storm. His boat was coming across the ocean toward me, so a certain rocking lull came into our hallway. Light came into the corridor as if from windows, but it blinked in and out as though we were standing between passing trains on either side, or in and out of undulating shadow constantly in transit.

  “I’ll see you soon,” he called to me, the black waves of his hair buffeted by the wind. I ached to run my hands through the locks.

  He looked me up and down, and I noticed that I was only in my summer nightgown, a more revealing one. “Ah, thank you for the nightdress,” he said, grinning rakishly. “I’ll come for you soon.”

  I stepped forward, reaching for him.

  Love in its first bloom, all the poets said, was full of aching and impatience. So then was I. And so then was he.

  But something changed.

  The flickering lights went dark, and a single dim light from one far-off window cast my love into stark contrast and deep shadow.

  It was not love that had him approaching me with the look I remembered from the demon. His eyes held that odd reflective quality of the demon’s. “I’m coming for you,” he growled. The noisy, echoing corridor was filled again with those dread whispers.

  And he swiped a hand at me, ripping the neckline of my gown.

  “You think they won’t know what you’ve done? They’ll know. My strength grows. I will kill you, Arilda, after all.”

  Arilda.

  The name I’d taken when I tricked the demon. He had been targeting young women with the names of saints. It gave him some kind of added power. And it seemed he still remembered mine.