Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles

by Karina Cooper

  Gossip columns, my slippered foot. I’d rather use them for kindling. What was it about a woman that enforced this belief that we preferred gossip rags to that of the educated periodicals? I had gone ’round and about with Fanny over this very topic, and here I’d thought Ashmore much more modern in his way of thinking.

  Perhaps I would give him some time to cool.

  After all, he’d gone to all this trouble for me when he could have left me to rot in that bed, bored beyond words. It seemed only right that I at least pretend to enjoy the offering, before I made further demands.

  Although pretense wasn’t an appropriate word for the ambivalence I felt. While I was grateful for the use of this library and all its books, I felt somehow ignored, as if I’d been tucked away to amuse myself while he took care of heaven knew what—masculine things, I’m sure.

  Once I was no longer the invalid I despised being, I would search the grounds for things of interest. This estate had a great many rooms, many likely untouched in the intervening years since my grandfather’s demise. It wasn’t likely that Ashmore had sorted through them all himself.

  If I looked hard enough, would I find journals in my grandfather’s hand? What of mementos? Keepsakes?

  Perhaps I might even locate accountings of his illness, the better to investigate the details.

  For much of my civilized existence—that which came upon my delivery to London—I had operated under the certainty that my parents were killed in a laboratory fire. Until Mad St. Croix resurrected himself, I had no reason to doubt the veracity of those claims.

  Suddenly, I had been forced to reconsider the information I’d been given. My father was alive, but my mother was still dead. She died from a fire; only wait, she was dying anyway of a wasting illness, and nobody had bothered to tell me that until Mad St. Croix hinted at it in his lunacy.

  To have it confirmed by Ashmore, to suddenly be told that my grandfather died of the same, was one more crack in the crumbling foundation that shored up my whole life. It was almost too much to take in at once.

  I resolved to give him time to cool, and in so doing, allow myself the same.

  So decided, I settled in—a kind of ceasefire between myself and the unwitting Ashmore—to read about the Society I had fled, and the people whose existence had become little more than a dream.

  Had Fanny read these same words?

  Not for the first time, I wondered how much my chaperone had known of my family’s circumstances. Did she know of the illness that afflicted my mother and grandfather?

  I chewed on the tip of my thumb as I opened the London Times to the middle and skimmed news of strikes threatened at the docks—again, or still, I wasn’t sure. I passed over various reams of print, not so much reading as picking out a sentence here and there. It all seemed so jarring, as if I was reading the news of an unfamiliar land I could not completely grasp.

  The paper I held was one printed sometime in November.

  I had lost so much time to my sickbed, I did not even know what month it was now.

  I folded the paper, ready to set it down for more interesting reads, when a headline writ large in a narrow column caught my eye.

  ANOTHER WHITECHAPEL MURDER

  All the air fled from my lungs. Time froze about me. The silence filling the library tightened to such a degree that I felt caught in a vacuum, stretched thin.

  Impossible.

  The fire lost its luster. As I held the paper between shaking fingers, the air went cold.

  The article did not begin with kindness.

  During the early hours of yesterday morning another murder of a most revolting and fiendish character took place in Spitalfields.

  A faint ringing sound filled my ears as I read the accounting. A woman had been found not very far from the location of the first of the so-called Leather Apron’s victims, and while each of the murdered women prior had been mutilated, this murder had gone beyond even the fragile bounds of insanity. Whatever this was—whatever visceral rage drove this man—there could be no name for it. His victim’s throat had been cut, so viciously deep as to bare the spine. Her nose and ears were removed, breasts cleanly cut off and left on a table beside the bed as if in revolting gift. Her liver, her abdomen—all removed.

  The details brought a surge of nausea to my throat. Such brutality was the mark of the very murderer I’d hunted in the Whitechapel railyard. The one I had killed.

  As I read more, sparing no details of the grotesque mockery made of the victim’s corpse, the ringing in my ears turned to a desperate shriek. Had I dared to give voice to anything, it might be a scream.

  I’d hunted that man, that monster—Jack the Ripper, he called himself. I’d used him to lure the sweet tooth out into the open.

  The Ripper had injured me gravely, but I’d finally won. It was I that stuck him with one of my own blades, me who had killed him in the dark and cold. Not the sweet tooth who fancied himself my rival. Me.

  That man, that monster, was the first I’d killed, and I felt that wound in a deep, dark place within myself—it was a scar I would forever carry.

  I could still feel the knife sliding into flesh, the warmth of the mad man’s blood as it pumped over my hands.

  Swallowing hard, I let the paper slip from my grasp. It fluttered to the floor at my feet.

  Had he mended? In the few weeks between that late October night and the printing of this November paper? Was this, the most awful of all the killings in Whitechapel, his answer to me?

  The one occasion I’d accidentally interrupted the Ripper at work, he had fled the scene and turned his rage on another hapless woman, marring her so awfully as to be monstrous beyond measure.

  That I’d murdered him in that dark night should have been the end of it.

  If he lived, had I caused this surge of rage? Was this death on my hands too?

  Was I to be given no quarter by the demons that haunted me?

  Trembling violently, I reached for another periodical—even as I forced air through my nose and into my straining lungs.

  My fingers spasmed. Had I the means, I would have salved this panic with the opium tar I’d once kept in my pocket.

  I had no such recourse now.

  Swallowing as much oxygen as my too-tight chest would allow, I very deliberately set eyes upon the first column revealed to me from the thin pages of the periodical.

  A gossip column. As tension ratcheted through my bones, I forced myself to read the first paragraph. The second. The names meant nothing, each tittering word little more than a dull roar through my tunneled senses.

  When I found a name I knew, all of the world ceased to exist.

  That the Viscount Helmsley and his brood were not in attendance at a certain pastoral rendezvous continues to raise eyebrows and complaints of boredom, no doubt, from the rather more well-to-do of the rural set.

  Such snide tones. From them, I ascertained only that the viscount had withdrawn his family from the usual country gatherings they attended come Christmas. The Viscount Armistice Helmsley the Third and his three sons had long been admitted as hedonists across all of London.

  Until now.

  They were in mourning. My doing.

  I had not stopped the bloody reign of the Whitechapel murderer, but it was my attempt to end us both that cost Teddy his life—and any chance at redemption.

  I could bear no more. It seemed as if the very world outside this estate were determined to strip the sanity from me.

  I flung the periodical away from me with such force that the thin paper tore. I was on my feet before it touched the ground, without any true understand of what it was I did. A mania of such vicious fury gripped my heart.

  I could not live like this. I could not rise each day and look at what was left of my world. “More rags,” I muttered, my voice hoarser than even a whisper should allow. “Always, rags.” The gossiping papers, the whispered rumors. No matter where I looked, where I turned, whether here faced with periodicals or in Lond
on surrounded by a Society that did not care, I would never escape the reminders.

  I could not think of Teddy without drowning in such fierce guilt that it rose to choke me.

  I did not want to live this life with a broken heart.

  There was a cure for my pain, and it was no different than the panacea physicians all over London suggested for that very thing. I was not the unreasonable one here. I was the victim, the invalid; it was my pain needing curing, and I no longer chose to be denied.

  I began by turning the desk drawers all but upside down. Within, I found books, yellowed papers, even some boxes whose contents revealed mementoes and the odd cigar, but nothing of the tar or laudanum I knew Ashmore must maintain.

  He’d weaned me from the stuff, it would be here somewhere.

  I was half across the room, my steps short and quick, when I realized he wouldn’t be so foolish as to leave such things in the same room where he deposited me.

  I fled for the door, hurried into the hall as a painful vise clamped about my head and chest.

  I could not breathe.

  The echoes of my own gasping efforts followed me as I fled for the stairs I recalled in the foyer. I did not meet Ashmore between here and there. I did not see any sign of living thing, attributed the leap of shadows to my fumbling efforts to see through the gloom. I did not even scream when a cobweb clinging to the bannister I gripped on my climb wrapped itself about my hand.

  I craved sedation. I desperately needed the soothing burn of the opium grains within the ruby liquid Ashmore carried, and I would do anything to get it.

  On the assumption that he would not want to be far from my quarters—the better to hear such sounds as I might make—I darted to the left as I finished my climb. My rasping breath filled the hall, surrounded me with the echo of harsh whispers.

  I was gasping for air as I seized the first doorknob that came to hand. Locked. I staggered for the next.

  Also locked.

  Again, and again, I tested every door, falling upon them in desperation.

  The first doorknob that turned sent such sweet elation through me that I did not pause—I did not hesitate, did not think what I might do. I simply threw open the panel, let it slam hard against the wall and stumbled into the room.

  Gray daylight streamed from the windows, the curtains opened to allow as much of it to fill the interior as possible. The bed within was much like mine, a valise opened upon it, although the colors of both bedding and drapes were blue and burgundy.

  Ashmore straightened from his bent scrutiny in a vanity mirror, his now beardless face glistening from a wash and an open razor held easily in his left hand. He was shirtless, a fact that did nothing to halt my advance, and the ghostly light turned his skin so white as to be nearly blue. A cloth had been wrapped about his shoulders for care, and the fact that he bore a certain lean muscle beneath his dreary brown togs should have warned me that he was no weakling.

  I did not care. I could not even be bothered to study the markings staining the skin of his forearms with any pointed interest.

  He would not be the first man of my acquaintance to display tattoos. I had met many a sailor in my time, and even some few sweets wore ink on their skin.

  He took one look at my advance, and something in my carriage must have warned him. The blade in his hand clattered to the vanity’s surface, ringing a shrill scream in my ears as it hit the bowl of water he’d used to rinse the shaving soap from the blade.

  Seizing my moment, I grasped my wrapper and shift in both hands and sprinted for the valise.

  Ashmore was not a slow man. He caught me half across the room before I’d registered that he moved at all, arms banded about my waist, and pulled me clean off my feet. Spun in a circle, it was all I could do to beat at his restraining arms.

  “Stop,” he ordered, voice terse in my ear. “What are you doing?”

  “Leave me be!” I sobbed the order, kicking my feet wildly. I couldn’t summon enough thought together to will my body to fight as I knew how. All form had left me, all instinct—save one.

  The light bent as I strained against his grasp, my head against his shoulder and his chest plastered to my back. I screamed my fury when he did not let go.

  “Stop this at once,” he demanded, shaking me hard. “What has gotten into you?”

  “I don’t—I don’t want to be here!” An elbow driven into his ribs earned me a muffled curse. My heel driven into his knee caused him to dance out of the way, my body held at an angle so awkward I could no longer do anything but flail at the air.

  He dragged me from his room and into mine just beside. Kicking the door closed took enough of his attention that I was able to drop my head far enough to seize the sinewy muscle of his forearm between my teeth and bite as hard as I could.

  This curse was not a muffled one. Yelling it, he caught me by the hair, pulled me free and spun me about so my back plastered against the door. My wrists in his grasp and pinned above my head, Ashmore held my body in place with his own and stared down into my upturned face.

  I couldn’t summon enough air. Gasping, I watched his tense features soften through my watery sight.

  His mouth seamed into a twisted line that might have been sorrow. “I knew it was too soon.”

  I wrenched at his grip. “Give me the laudanum.”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “No,” he repeated, so patiently that I would have bitten him again—just by the towel now draped loosely about his shoulders—if he did not seize both wrists in one hand and slap the other against my brow, holding my head in place against the door. “Stop that.”

  I clenched my teeth together so hard, my panting breath hissed between them. The dark pigment on his skin was so close, I could not see it clearly.

  “What the devil caused this?” he asked me.

  My nostrils flared as the scent of something more woodsy than soft filled them. As if my mind could not bear to let it go, the fragrance turned abruptly to that of coal-choked fog and the coppery odor of fresh-spilled blood.

  When the train had made impact, Teddy’s blood had spattered all over me. A veritable wash of it.

  I would never be rid of the stain.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Don’t want to what?”

  I tried to shake my head, but his grasp over my forehead denied that.

  His voice lowered, body straining to keep my struggles in check. “Talk to me, Miss St. Croix. Tell me what you need.”

  “Opium!” I sobbed the word.

  “No.” A firm denial. “What is it that makes you think so?”

  Memories. Guilt. Craving.

  He wouldn’t care. Demons didn’t, after all.

  “Tell me.”

  I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I simply couldn’t bear it. I clenched my eyes shut, as if it would block out the sight of him underneath his hampering palm—steady, resolved. So much more in control than I.

  The fight bled from me.

  Slowly, the hand over my forehead lifted. Long fingers smoothed back my hair, damp at the hairline from my exertions.

  “Such relapses are bound to happen,” he told me.

  I opened my eyes to find his close enough to drown in—a brown that now seemed glossed with green, like a thin coating of moss over a stone. His hair blazed so brightly as to be nearly blinding against his milk-white skin.

  His mouth, softer at the lower lip than such a stern countenance might have ordinarily allowed, eased into a slanted smile. “There’s no shame in it,” he added.

  So he claimed.

  My breath came slower, but no less easily. As if I’d run a race, or sobbed my heart out.

  With every rise of my chest, the warmth of his bare skin seeped into my wrapper—eased into my chilled flesh. My lips parted.

  Ashmore’s gaze dropped to the small motion.

  Red climbed his cheeks, so stark against his pale skin that it was as if he’d been branded.

  He did
not let me go. Whether flushing in discomfort or of sudden awareness that he was a gentleman half-dressed in a woman’s bedroom, he was not so easily swayed as to risk letting me loose again. That I had once been his ward no doubt helped nothing.

  I took a breath that shook. “Ashmore.”

  I watched his pupils dilate in a hazel field.

  A heady rush of power filled my veins, turned ice to warmth and craving to something much different—for all the outcome might be the same.

  He could help me. In that moment, with the fragrance of his shaving soap in my nose and the strength of his grip about my wrists, I resolved that he would do for me what Hawke had taught me to understand.

  Ashmore would be my diversion. If I could not have the tar, the draught or the smoke, then I would have flesh.

  I would become flesh.

  I licked at my bottom lip to wet the dry skin.

  His throat worked as he swallowed hard. “I want you to comprehend—”

  “Would it be so bad?” I asked, breathy with the force of a wanting so sharp as to bleed in a wholly different manner than the guilt that rode me.

  He frowned. “You have come so far, Miss St. Croix, but you can’t be expected to handle your recovery so smoothly. These things—”

  “No.” Again, I cut him off. “I mean, would it be so bad if you were to distract me?”

  Possibly, he had never once in his life considered such a proposition from his ward. He only looked at me as if he was not sure whether I was playing a game or handing to him a venomous snake wrapped in a gilded bow.

  Then, as my meaning sank in, his eyes widened. “I don’t think that is at all proper.”

  “’Tisn’t,” I admitted, my voice husky.

  “Nor do I believe it helpful.”

  “Care to acquire evidence to support your claim?” Slowly, I leaned my head forward, aware of his hand braced against the door behind me. All he had to do was seize my hair, and I would go nowhere.

  He did not.

  A tremor ripped through his body as my tongue flicked out over the sharp angle of his clavicle.