Lightfall One: Clock, Cloak, Candle (Lightfall, Book 1)

by Jordan Taylor

  Book One

  Clock, Cloak, Candle

  Jordan Taylor

  Copyright © 2014 Jordan Taylor. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author. Reviewers may quote brief passages in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or animals—living, dead, or otherwise—is coincidental.

  Adoxography Books

  “Ivy” photo by Natalia Ciobanu: www.soul-portrait.com

  Very special thanks to Leigh Allen Taylor, Matt Feisthammel, Angel Prado, and Natalia Ciobanu.

  For my mother,

  Who made Lightfall breathe.

  How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.

  ~ Bram Stoker

  First

  The Station

  Ivy yanked her arm from her father’s grip, twisting to face him through the swarming crowd. “I won't go. I’m not a child—”

  “Ivy—”

  “No!” She jumped back, crashing into an imposing lady in a violet dress and bustle too large for the jammed train platform.

  The towering figure whipped around to glare, silk and feathers swishing.

  The gentleman on her arm only tipped his beaver top hat to Ivy as they stepped past. “Sorry, miss.”

  Dr. Jerinson caught Ivy’s wrist. “Listen to me, Ivy.” Normally such a soft-spoken man, he had to shout above grinding trains and the louder thousands of human beings fighting in all directions. “This is no matter of your maturity. If it were, you know there would be no question of you remaining in this city. The Transcontinental Railroad will be shut down any day. We have no time left to argue.”

  “I can help you. You need help, Father.”

  “I can manage.” He dragged her through the crush, among a mob fighting into first class.

  Ivy braced her heels on boards, feeling them scrape over nails, snap loose splinters.

  Dr. Jerinson spun so his nose was close to hers. “This is not the moment to behave like a child.” For the first time in her life, he caused her physical pain by the deadly hold on her wrist.

  She recoiled, then caught herself, glaring back into his eyes. “Allow me an adult choice.”

  “I have already lost my wife to this plague.” His words were daggers, his tone harsher than she had ever heard. “I will not lose my only daughter.”

  For heartbeats they stood as waxworks in an ocean of violent waves. A handbag smacked Ivy’s elbow. A trunk compressed her layers of skirts. Soot breezed over them like snow, filling the air with reek of fire and steel. Her father’s face looked as pale as if several quarts of blood had been drained from him. Ivy’s eyes burned from smoke or shame or anger or fear—she could not say.

  “Father—” Her voice cracked.

  His arms went around her. Thick wool of his suit pressed her skin as she concealed her face against his shoulder. He crushed her to him, arms tighter than the corset around her ribs, yet unable to still the shaking which consumed them.

  “I am sorry, Ivy,” he whispered in her ear, his neat mustache tickling her skin. “It’s not forever. I love you.”

  He pulled her to the coach door. A porter held out his hand. The train whistled as if in protest at the load of humanity spilling aboard. Up steel steps to the shuddering railcar, Ivy turned as the last few women and children surged past with the porter’s aid.

  “Father!” For an instant, she thought she already lost him.

  No, swept back by the crowd. He stood with his hat held to his chest, gaze on her eyes, the sole motionless figure in the world, jacket dusted with soot, pale as a ghost, tears streaming down his prematurely lined face.

  “You will find a cure!” she shouted over the crowd. “And I’ll return—soon!”

  He nodded once, still watching her.

  The car lurched, groaned. A thousand voices called, waving from train and platform. Handkerchiefs and hats and badges and flowers flew through the air. The porter tried to close the door as Ivy leaned out.

  She could not hear her own voice as she called again, the figure of the doctor fading to a tiny form in a vast crowd. Heart hammering, she lifted her hand from the rail inside the door and blew him a kiss.

  As the platform slid away, the last glimpse Ivy caught of her father through smoke revealed a slight, graying man with his head bowed above his hat, a handkerchief pressed over his eyes.

  Second

  New Mexico Territory

  Rattle and bump, head pounding, teeth jarred, boots jammed against the wood floor. If the train had been bad, the stagecoach was a nightmare.

  There were all kinds of rumors back East about robberies, attacks by outlaws on coaches, dangers of Indians and wild animals—often referred to as one and the same. Ivy would welcome any if they meant a momentary stop to this torture. Change of train in Chicago, again in Kansas—dust and blue sky, brown towns, brown horses, brown streets, brown dogs lying as if dead on brown board sidewalks, brown and filthy men—then the final small train to Raton Pass, on the edge of New Mexico Territory, before this stagecoach to Santa Fé.

  Rattle and bump. The lady across from Ivy, turning green below a faint suntan, held a lace handkerchief to her lips. Sweating in many layers of dress, petticoats, corset, chemise, drawers, gartered stockings, boots, hat, and gloves, dry of mouth, lightheaded, Ivy closed her eyes. Her own handkerchiefs were stiff with blood after recurring nosebleeds since leaving Kansas.

  They were days on the last stretch of the Santa Fé Trail, hardly a stop for the passengers, only trading horses and drivers at stages. By the time Ivy slid from the coach beside Santa Fé’s Plaza, which appeared to be “downtown,” her legs shook, her head spun, and the ground below her feet seemed to pitch and heave.

  Her uncle, greeting her and taking her trunk, looked as brown and dusty as everything else out here, despite his frock coat and bowler hat. He said nothing as she followed him across San Francisco Street to her aunt, waiting with a buggy and Uncle Charles’s saddle horse from the ranch where he raised them. Her father had warned her not to expect conversation from her uncle: “That man speaks with greater fluency to horses than people. I hope he will teach you to be a good horsewoman.” Ivy was grateful not to open her mouth.

  Aunt Abigail hurried forward from the bay horses standing before the Second National Bank of New Mexico. She held Ivy a long time while Ivy wished she would not, hoping her aunt did not notice the sweat and filth and stink of her from that horrible journey.

  “I’m so sorry,” Aunt Abigail whispered and Ivy forgot the trip, forgot the spectators, as her own eyes filled and she hugged back. Mother had been Aunt Abigail’s little sister. Living worlds away, Aunt Abigail was not even able to attend the funeral.

  Ivy never sat a horse in her life—one walked or took the trolly anywhere one wished to go in Boston. For a trip outside the city, a cab or the light steam rail could be employed. Now, Ivy sorely wished her aunt and uncle had brought a riding horse and sidesaddle. She settled herself on the bench seat beside her aunt, took a deep breath, folded her white—now grayish brown—gloved hands in her lap, and tried to smile for her aunt’s sake.

  Rattle and bump. Three more days to the horse ranch far south of Santa Fé and even of Albuquerque.

  The ranch. So much desert, scrub, prairie, rolling hills leaping upward in the distance to great mountain peaks. Dusty corral, dusty barn, dusty feed lot, dusty house. The air felt so dry, it seemed her lungs would crack like the dry skin on her hands. The sun felt so
hot, she could not set foot out of doors without a hat and had always to keep her face downturned. Every passing desert cottontail or plains pocket mouse threw up dust.

  If she stood in the front lot and turned all the way around, she could see not a person or settlement, no neighbors, no towns, no buildings beyond the ranch. The vast, endless space sent shivers down Ivy’s spine. A bitter pain lodged in her chest like a knife.

  Trollies, merchants, fish and Atlantic steamers, shout of voices and slap of ocean waves, movement and action below looming buildings sheltering, enveloping, forming the city maze. Libraries, bookshops, store-made clothes in every color and material one could wish, latest from London and Paris, fine foods in glass cases from Dutch cheeses to French pastries to Canadian meats, air filled with rich smells: brine, smoke, perfume, sewage, fresh ink from a dozen competing newspapers and periodicals. Clink, buzz, whirr—an ambitious maker trying to sell his or her latest:

  “Come to the pier! See a man fly on Saturday night!”

  “Waste no more time with wood stoves! This oven heats to an exact temperature every time!”

  “Latest model! So easy a child can work it!”

  “Turn on your tap and feel hot water, ready for the bath! All with the miracle of steam!”

  “Why waste time on balloons? Ride inside Dr. Frepson’s Spectacular Dirigible! See the harbor from a bird’s eye view! Experience the wind in your hair! Fun for everyone! Only one dollar a ride!”

  Ivy blinked. She smelled dust. She saw blue sky and mountains and a vast plain. She heard absolutely nothing. She felt very, very alone.

  Silently, listening to coyotes yap in the hills, she cried herself to sleep at night, the pain in her chest building until it was all she could do not to scream and never stop.

  Then the kit. Tiny, brown, wriggling, dropped in her cupped hands.

  “Late in the season,” her uncle grunted. “Ma’s dead. Get your aunt to warm milk and you can try raising her if you like.”

  He walked away, back to his horses. It was the most he had said to her since she arrived. Ivy watched him go, thank you choked off by dryness of her throat.

  “What on Earth?” Aunt Abigail recoiled when Ivy held out the kit in the ranch kitchen a minute later.

  Ivy bit her lip, tasting dust. “Uncle Charles said I could raise her.”

  “A fox? Raise a fox on a ranch?” Ivy thought Aunt Abigail was about to laugh, but she stopped herself. She looked into Ivy’s eyes, reached out to squeeze her shoulder. “Yes, of course, dear. I’ll warm some milk.”

  Feeding and cleaning, holding and whispering her troubles into that tiny ear, eased the pain in her chest to a dull ache. With her eyes open, past the most delicate stage, Aunt Abigail showed Ivy how to bathe the kit in lye water and rub bacon grease in her coat to evict fleas. By now, Ivy carried the fox everywhere: under her arm while she went out of doors to feed the chickens or milk the single cow with her new calf, or on her shoulder while she helped Aunt Abigail about the house.

  It was high summer, the kit two or three months old, when she sank her tiny fangs into Frantzisko’s boot as he sat with the family around the table for dinner. Frantzisko, who, for half the year, helped Uncle Charles with the care and training of his horses and lived in a room built on the barn, pushed back his chair as everyone leaned over to see the snarling fox. She had her teeth and both forepaws set around the toe of the boot, kicking vigorously with the hind paws, growling all the time.

  “I beg your pardon, Frantzisko.” Ivy’s corset would not allow her to reach under the table, but she stood, then knelt to seize the kit by the scruff of her neck.

  Frantzisko chuckled. “Tienes un zorro salvaje. Es feroz.”

  Uncle Charles smiled.

  “What did you call her?” Ivy asked, leaving the kit on the floor with a cotton rag to turn her savagery on.

  “The fierce one.” He grinned at her. “She is a brave, fierce swift fox, señorita.”

  Es Feroz. Ivy returned his smile. Given Uncle Charles’s reticence, she learned what she did about horses and riding and milking from Frantzisko and Aunt Abigail. She only realized her pet was a swift fox, not a red fox, from Frantzisko’s explaining the difference.

  As far as the horses went, Aunt Abigail had assured her Melchior, her grown son, only a few years older than Ivy, would teach her to ride when he returned. Yet Ivy had never set eyes on him. Melchior, apparently against his parents’ wishes, rode off before spring to join cattle drives in the east, running from Texas ranches to Kansas railheads. Ivy was never able to get a clear picture of why this was so horrible, yet her aunt and uncle seemed to feel that working as a cowhand on a drive was little better than working as an outlaw robbing banks—with much lower return.

  Though wishing to meet her cousin, Ivy did not mind limited riding instruction and sparse time around her uncle’s herd. She found Aunt Abigail’s sidesaddle difficult to accustom herself to: being able to mount only with much assistance, doing so with her back to the horse, rising up, then sitting down to rest her right leg in the brace below her skirts, left boot in the single stirrup. All this while feeling she would fly over backward and crash to her head on the animal’s far side, finding nothing but open air at her back.

  Then, the horses themselves were wild and filthy compared to groomed, docile city cab horses. They made her take several steps back as they snapped and kicked each other like feral animals.

  Frantzisko laughed at her concerns. “These animals are kittens. Good working stock. Men come from miles around to buy Charles L’Heureux’s horses.”

  “They would have to. There is no one within miles,” Ivy muttered.

  Frantzisko grinned. “Relax for them, señorita. And they will relax around you.”

  Indeed, with Frantzisko and Uncle Charles, the huge animals were like dogs, following at their heels, waiting for a gesture, rather than word, of command.

  Ivy found it far more pleasant to milk the sweet Jersey cow, Lucy, or gather eggs, all with Es Feroz draped across her shoulder like a curious doll, than to work around the horses.

  Autumn. Melchior did ride home, months late, astride a blue roan stallion swishing his tail in ill temper as he loped down the dirt wagon road to the ranch.

  Es Feroz was the first to know he approached. Long before the two mongrel dogs roused themselves from dusty shade of the house, the young vixen had her ears pricked and her nose turned northward.

  Aunt Abigail waited with her eyes shielded from sun by both hands. She knew at one hundred yards it was her son and ran to him.

  Ivy had long looked forward to the return of her cousin. Melchior would finally be someone around her own age, someone who, clearly, longed to see places beyond this monotonous ranch and its drudgery and repetition. Someone to whom she could relate.

  He walked up leading his champing horse, one arm around his mother, trying to get a word in as she went on about how thin he was: What happened to keep him so long? Why did he limp?

  He shook his head, grinning. “Fine, Ma, really—”

  “You look near starved to death.”

  As they drew close, Ivy took in dusty, high-heeled boots and leather chaps with rainwater fringe. Gun belt with revolver and bullets lining it, leather gloves tucked into it. Waistcoat open over a dusty shirt, red cotton bandana around his neck, brown, broad-brimmed hat. His blue eyes laughed and his face looked smooth despite months on the trail, thin and sunken below cheekbones with a sharp jaw and pointed nose.

  Ivy stared. Other than being emaciated, as his mother kept pointing out, and perhaps younger, Melchior looked like the riding Western heroes streaming their way East via dime novels which even some of Ivy’s educated peers secretly gobbled up. After so much disappointment out West thus far, she could not take her gaze from her older cousin.

  When he looked up, their eyes met. Mortified, she felt herself flush. Should she nod, curtsy, offer her hand? Two seasons in the country and her manners fled like rain on parched earth.

  �
�Oh, Melchior, this is your cousin, Ivy,” Aunt Abigail fluttered and gasped.

  “How-d’ye-do, Cousin Ivy?” He walked past, toward the barn. Didn’t pause, didn’t give her time to answer, didn’t remove his hat. Did not even touch his hat. “Ma, please. Let me put up the horse. Then will return to your kitchen, stand the gaff, and take any nourishment you feel due.”

  When Aunt Abigail rushed by a moment later, into the house, calling to Ivy about needing help getting a big supper ready and she was all of a dither with her boy come home, Ivy did not move.

  Shock faded to cool anger, then outrage as she stood with her her jaw set. That was the kind of barbarian her aunt and uncle raised? No wonder he went against their wishes and did as he pleased without thought for others. Back East, they said the Indians and Mexicans out here were savages. Well, she could not say about Indians, but Frantzisko always tipped his hat to her. Dime novel “heroes” indeed.

  Frantzisko went on his way for the autumn, leaving Melchior to work the ranch as bitter winds swept in from mountains and snow flurried through November.

  Her cousin remained just as rude to her as he had been upon their first meeting, although he did teach her to ride better, his eyes roaming northward, one elbow leaned on the rail corral fence, a cigarette in his mouth. Unless he was teasing her—“Mighty fine fur ruff you brung from the city,” referring to Es Feroz across her shoulders, or, “Plaster on one more layer of skirts and this horse won’t be able to haul you around.”—he ignored her. Somehow, he even managed to ignore her when they were doing things together, like saddling a horse or feeding corralled horses.

  He made her so angry she finally began to wonder, why was she so angry? Then she endeavored to treat him with chilly indifference, though she remained always on her very best behavior with her cousin—someone had to demonstrate manners.

  Under his mother’s feeding, he soon lost his corpse-thin appearance and looked even more handsome than she first thought. Sharp featured and wiry, fitter than any three men in Boston, with those blue eyes always possessed of a faraway stare, like a wolf in a cage. She tried not to notice these things. Tried very hard not to notice him at all.