Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles

by Karina Cooper

  Despite all my best efforts to impress upon him the wild imaginings I had long associated with the man, Ashmore steadfastly refused to sprout horns or breathe hellfire. I was hard-pressed to recall just why I thought him a terror for so many years, and did not like wondering if it were a matter of laudanum.

  He regarded me without rancor, his expression one of maddening patience. “Have you read the books already?”

  I had not. The books he’d acquired for me were not interesting—dry, dusty texts regarding such inane subjects as the mathematical processes of migratory birds. I would have preferred something far more intellectually stimulating. I would have especially enjoyed the penny dreadfuls Fanny occasionally turned a blind eye toward.

  I wrinkled my nose.

  He raised his dark red eyebrows, his eyes a hue reminiscent of a brown-eyed cat and the look within them nearly as critical. “What, then, do you propose?”

  “I want to go out,” I said immediately.

  “You cannot.”

  And thus was the crux of my issue with the man.

  Ashmore’s demeanor tended towards a detached gentility—as if I were an experiment for a scientific periodical, and his efforts to bring me food merely reminiscent of a need to water a particularly delicate plant. Although he had not shaved the lengthy whiskers from his jaw, his hair was somewhat more tamed than I’d remembered it being previous, swept back from his forehead like a guided flame. His rustic attire, while hardly the height of fashion, was worn with an easy confidence and without cravat or tie. He spent an inordinate amount of time in his shirtsleeves; a fact that would scandalize Fanny to no end, were she here to see her so very proper Mr. Ashmore.

  I wish I’d recalled that his hair was so very red prior to this. It might have softened my initial impressions of him; after all, red was no more fashionable for gentlemen than it was for we unfortunate females born with such bold coloring.

  When I attempted to dredge up earlier memories of the man, they tangled—those fears from my girlish nightmares and the gentleness with which he’d treated me after my disastrous attempt to take the life he’d sought to protect. From my muddled memories, I could recall only a sense of fearful presence and monstrous growling, though I might have dreamed the latter. My impressions stemmed from the few visits he ever made, wherein he returned to the Cheyne Walk home under cover of late night, and slept the days away from my frightened curiosity.

  The rest—eyes that glowed like hot coals, a demonic rage and the smell of sulfur—surely must be victim of my own opium machinations.

  I could not shake the belief that I had vilified my benefactor most terribly.

  Ashmore left the tray beside me upon the bed, its warm bread and steaming tea telling me he’d only just made it fresh. “Once you are hale,” he said, “then we will revisit the subject.”

  I said nothing, not even the courtesy of gratitude. All of my attempts at conversation fell stilted and short. I didn’t know how to treat him, how to address the man I had spent my youth fearing, only to learn that he was rather more decorous and patient than I had credited him.

  Even this, a compromise that acknowledged my wants and promised a later opportunity to address them, was more than I had expected. Hawke would have categorically denied me, and Compton would have been much gentler with the same result.

  Ashmore’s patience bothered me, if only because it undid the resentment I wanted to feel.

  “Try to eat what you can,” he said. With a well-mannered bend, a stiff courtesy, he and his sharp eyes left me to my own devices.

  I did not eat that meal, though the tea was welcome. I ignored the books I had no interest in, and stewed within the confines of my frustration.

  I was not allowed knitting needles nor embroidery accouterments for fear of doing myself harm. I was not allowed paper and ink, simply because the nib of a writing instrument could be quite sharp.

  I was not a fool. I knew what the attempt on my own life had cost me. I did not require Ashmore to explain his reasoning.

  As I’d neither thrown anything nor attempted to do myself harm with what few items I was allowed, he had returned the privy pot—and a second, for those moments when what little food I attempted did not wish to linger. The hours where the need came upon me—sudden, angry, almost violent in intensity—I was denied every request to soften the want.

  The room felt smaller than it was, the walls leaning inward with looming intensity.

  I could not pace, for I had no strength. I could not focus. Such manic thoughts came upon me, and I would lay in my bed, ranting and raving at the ceiling as if it would debate my every point and give to me a reason to funnel such awful rage.

  When night fell and a hush spread over the world, I struggled to remember why it was I should keep breathing.

  As the darkest hours painted the room in shades of black and deepest gray, I imagined that the walls whispered. Shadows filled my room, thicker than simple darkness should be, and I feared smothering beneath their torturous weight. The house came to life in the night, swaying with the wind that howled across the moor, creaking wildly.

  Bound to my bed by terror, I struggled to find a sense of self in all the wild fancies afflicting me. Filled with such agitated energies, I flung the covers from my bed. Somehow, despite my weakened state, I took long steps—not to the door, but to the window, where I twitched at the curtains and retraced the path.

  I was wont to pace when I had no other recourse, a fact that caused Fanny such fear when she found me at my worst, yet I did not make it beyond two circuits before my debilitated limbs gave way. I fell to the floor in a pitiful mound of frothy white cloth and angry tears. The floorboards shifted beneath my weight, a jarring pain rippling up my hip and through my elbow as I sprawled—graceless and weak.

  It did not take long before the door to my bedroom eased open, and light spilled over the tangled mess I had become.

  Beneath the veil of my matted hair, I watched two stockinged feet pause beside me.

  “Go on,” I snapped, squeezing my eyes shut. “Laugh.”

  The golden tint behind my eyelids brightened as Ashmore placed the delicate lantern upon the floor. “I’ve no intention,” he said, in a tone so kind I was convinced I’d only imagined it. A hand curled around my left arm, the other sliding beneath the right and splaying over my shoulder. “Up you go, Miss St. Croix.”

  That he did not refer to me as a countess was not a subject I was ready to brave—not yet, and most certainly not in these circumstances.

  He lifted me all too easily; an observation having more to do with my fragile state of being than any admission of strength on his part. Ashmore was not a particularly hefty man, not at all like the bruisers in London’s gangs below the drift, but his understanding of mass was sound. I found myself not so much placed upon my feet as permitted to set my feet upon the floor, the bulk of my weight held against his own body.

  I looked up, allowing my hands to rest on his shoulders. I assured myself that doing so would help him balance the burden that I had become, though even I, in my illness, understood that he did not struggle beneath my weight. The shirt he wore must have been neatly starched at one time, but felt soft and worn nearly thin beneath my hands. His collar was crooked, left unbuttoned and with no pressing.

  His eyelashes were not overly long, but they glinted copper in the firelight, framing eyes that seemed endlessly deep—all too knowing for the apparent youth of his features. I might have thought him no more than thirty years of age, yet there was a worldliness about the man that I considered alternately engaging and disconcerting, as if his gaze should be trapped in the wrinkled and gaunt face of a man three times his age.

  The hair at his jaw graduated from that uniquely fiery color of that atop his head to the more jewel red tones similar to my own. My fingers moved with no determination from me. They slid over his cheek, the length of his untended whiskers softer than I expected against my fingertips.

  His eyes widened.
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  Mine mirrored the act, and I pulled my hand back so fast it thumped against my breastbone—a hollow sound that echoed between us.

  “I-I’m terribly sorry.” The stuttering apology was mine, the embarrassment I felt clashing with the utter confusion of my gesture. What had I hoped to ascertain?

  Ashmore’s surprised countenance quickly vanished; contained, perhaps, behind gentlemanly courtesy. “No need,” he assured me, shifting his grasp upon me so that his left forearm curved around the small of my back. That it tucked my hips more firmly into his did not seem to register with him. My face, however, turned hot. “You are in a phase not uncommon for returning intellect. Many in your very position have found their senses engaging once more in the most unusual subjects.”

  My fingertips tingled, as though I’d touched a current of moderate electrical activity. I dragged them against my nightshift; this did not remove the sensation. “You mean to say that I am confirming the veracity of my surroundings?”

  “Just so.” He looked down at my bare feet, then up over my shoulder to the bed. “Might I inquire as to what you were attempting?”

  I latched upon that as if it were a veritable rope in my drowning state. “I’m bored,” I insisted. “I’ve these thoughts in my mind since waking and they’re a cacophony of…of madness. They will not let me sleep.”

  He considered this, his lower lip moving somewhat as though he gnawed on the inside. It was a habit I was relieved to recognize, for it somehow humanized the man.

  I desperately needed Mr. Oliver Ashmore to be human. Not that I suspected he wasn’t—such fantasies were better left to dreams I no longer wanted. Rather, I needed to see that he was not a perfect thing, neither the formed marble of Society’s demand nor the cold logic of a scientist. I was no longer afraid of him as I once was, such foolishness did not linger after the state in which he’d cared for me, yet there remained a great gap of understanding between the demon that I once thought I knew and the man who stood before me now.

  Such flaws as gnawing on one’s own lip or chewing on a nail were fundamentally small, but necessary to my peace of mind.

  Since waking, my recollection had slowly filled in the wispy fragments of my time in this house. I had come to feel such a deeply seated sense of vulnerability while in Ashmore’s company that I did not know what to do with myself. I could barely look him in the eye, could not see his hands without recalling how often he cared for me, could not hear his voice without remembering the night he held me in the dark and encouraged me to grieve.

  He had seen me at my worst. How was one to move beyond such a hateful cast?

  “Will you sleep now?” he asked me.

  “No.” I did not require time to think of it. Sleeping invited dreams, and with them, the night terrors of years past. Without laudanum to ease my way, I dared not risk the attempt.

  Or so I had always believed. That I still feared the night without a draught might have been habit, or simply the intoxication of the opium grains I craved.

  “Can you?”

  This time, I hesitated.

  Ashmore looked down at me, his eyes a candlelit flicker reflected back in gold. “Is it fear that keeps you or want?”

  My throat closed on the lie I had summoned; I looked away, beyond his shoulder to the door he’d left open.

  He expelled a quiet breath. It stirred the hair tangled over my ears. “That, too, is reasonable,” he assured me, and eased my weight so that I stood more firmly upon my own legs. “Come. You need rest.”

  Guiding me back to the bed took more effort than either of us was wholly prepared for, and as I leaned back among the pillows, a fresh bout of perspiration clung to my skin.

  Ashmore deftly pulled the covers over my shoulders, his breath a little harder than when he’d started. “Regain your strength, and I’ll search for books of your own choice.”

  “How would you know what I like?” I asked, not entirely without derision.

  “I gather it isn’t mathematics,” he pointed out, dryly enough that a bit of my scorn faded under a surprising wash of humor. I nearly smiled, but when I locked eyes with the man and saw in his gaze all that I desperately did not want to concede, my amusement choked.

  If I asked him why it was he cared for me now, I would be forced to ask why he had been at the Menagerie then. I would have to ask what it was that painted my memories of that event with such startling colors—red as blood and blue as azure silk, green and violet trapped in a bottle and setting all it touched ablaze.

  My imagination, desperate for resolution, whispered magic when I dozed, but my intellect fought back; magic was simply a thing science had not yet acquired answers for.

  I wanted those answers, truly I did.

  It was only that I didn’t want them yet; a contrary stance that confounded me, because to get those answers, I would have to ask questions. When I asked all my questions, I would no doubt be forced to endure Ashmore’s, and I was not prepared to talk about all the things that led me to that moment in the Midnight Menagerie, when I was naught but a showpiece for a sadistic creature wearing a lover’s skin.

  Once more, I looked away.

  “Have I misunderstood?” asked Ashmore, puzzled.

  “No,” I replied, a lame enough concession that deliberately did not explain my hesitation. “My interest in mathematics begins and ends with scientific formulae and measurements therein.”

  “A scientist, Miss St. Croix?”

  There was no mockery in the question, not as I’d come to expect from nearly all around me, but I could not meet his gaze again. “Once,” I said softly. I turned upon my side, my back to him as he stood by my bedside, and pillowed my cheek upon my arm.

  Once, I had considered myself quite the scientific intellectual. Every week, I would devour the recent periodicals, convene with Teddy in my parlor and debate the merits of such theories as were written within. I called myself a scientist because that is what I chose to believe.

  A fallacy, that. Hubris.

  I was no better than a fool repeating a lie as though it would make it truth.

  I had too long been bent upon my longing for the opium grains I needed to truly practice the scientific theory I so enjoyed.

  A gentle press of fingers against my shoulder was all the farewell my erstwhile demon guardian afforded. The floorboards creaked with his passing, the lantern was picked up, and shadows danced like wicked sprites across the wall.

  The door eased shut behind him.

  This time when I cried, I managed to be quiet about it.

  Chapter Four

  “I am well aware that you are concerned,” I said crossly, watching Ashmore pick up the tray I had once again failed to eat much of. Half a bit of toast, dry and without the jam I so favored, was no honest meal, but I couldn’t stomach much else. “However, unless you’ve got laudanum just laying about—”

  “Talking about it does your case no favors,” he cut in, always with the mild and brisk tones of a man certain he held the winning hand.

  Blast him, but he did.

  I let out a gusty sigh. Today, I’d managed to sit up on my own without too much struggle, braced by a veritable fortress of pillows at my back. I was much more cognizant of my environment, and also of myself. I had, much to my surprise, lost a great deal of weight. Beneath my borrowed nightshift, I was scandalized to know my ribs protruded rather more than they should.

  I had always been taken to task for my unfashionable figure, retaining rather more thickness to my waist than even a corset could satisfactorily tame, but this was not the way in which I felt it should be addressed. Cleansing me of opium’s bitter hold had cost me much more than time.

  I could not rectify this situation while I was so confined and forced to nibble on toast. I wanted my appetite back—and my freedoms. I folded my arms over my upraised knees, the coverlet making a tent in front of me.

  “I’m trying to be reasonable,” I pointed out.

  “Your judgment is less th
an sound.”

  And a right bloody la de da to him. I pulled a face I hadn’t bothered with in years, sticking out my tongue and widening one eye in a caricature of frustration.

  He merely raised an eyebrow, tray carried easily in his hands. Not so much a rattle of the dishes, even. I couldn’t decide if Fanny would love his concepts of masculine authority or be appalled at his determined lack of propriety in regards to his dress, his insistence on tending me himself, or his manners.

  “All I’m asking is to visit the study where the books came from,” I said, giving up on the expression. My jaw thrust out. “I’m well aware there is one.”

  “Yes, I can see that.” His tone was once more wry.

  If he thought me so unintelligent as to remain ignorant of where the books he’d brought me had come from, well, I simply had nothing I could say about it. It was obvious that he’d acquired the new tomes from somewhere. He hadn’t left the manor, not that I’d been made aware, and certainly this estate was nowhere near a bookshop of any repute.

  Each tome was a volume regarding various scientific matters, including one written by Angelicus Finch—inventor of the aether engine, among other various sundry implements not nearly so well-known. A rather rare first edition. This suggested a collection was close at hand.

  I’d devoured most of the stack in a day and a half, reading by candlelight when I’d finally convinced my cautious captor that I had no intention of burning the estate down.

  Not that the thought didn’t occur. I had not grown comfortable in this neglected house, and even my small room afforded me no respite from the pressing weight of the whole. Often, the house creaked and groaned around me, jarring me from my reading with my heart lobbed up in my throat and the certainty that I was being watched.

  Burning the whole down might do the world a greater favor than letting it settle further into decay.

  Yet as I’d stared into the heart of the small flame the first night, I had also considered that were it to be burning one’s self alive or quieting the ghosts of my memory by feeding my intellect with books, the latter would prove much less painful.