The Heartbeat Thief

by Ash Krafton

  Her literature studies, her father’s voice as he read from Shakespeare, narrated her realizations. To die, to sleep—no more. She didn’t just sleep, she died—she became a lifeless being, unanimated. She did not live, not anymore—and it was most evident when she went to sleep.

  To sleep, perchance to dream…ah, but there was the rub. Senza dreamed no longer. Sleep was a tiny death during which she had no awareness at all.

  And it took a haircut for her to realize exactly what her Unbirthing had done.

  She could never chance falling asleep in the presence of another. She had no idea what they would see, or sense, or learn about her. She could not take that chance. Her secret would be discovered.

  She, the thief, would be caught.

  The morning sunlight sliced into her still-darkened room through a gap in the drapes, a single sharp ray that dispersed itself into a puddle on the bedroom floor. Such was the mental illumination—a single, sharp realization that she could never marry, never spend the night in the arms of a husband. A single, sharp pain that sliced through her once-beating heart, leaving behind an echo of loneliness: loneliness of the eternal moment in which she’d be forever suspended…loneliness in a future that suddenly seemed large and bleak and empty.

  Senza dragged herself out of bed and shuffled to the window, pushing aside the drapes, drenching herself in a sun-lit warmth that did not fully penetrate her shell.

  Eternal youth, eternal life. Such a cold, cold comfort.

  Another change lay in the secrets of her personal hygiene. It became necessary to perform occasional routines designed to mislead the others that all was normal. All the while, her family marveled at her health. Such a sturdy constitution she possessed!

  It wasn’t until mid-summer that she realized her courses had ceased. The discovery struck like a dull blade, the pain of the truth causing a deep, fathomless ache.

  Children. She could never bear children.

  Not that she was ready to become a wife, much less a mother. But now, that choice had been snatched away from her.

  She’d unwittingly measured the lives of people around her in terms of their progeny and deep inside she’d taken a great comfort that she never would leave her own grand-daughter, the way that grandmother had left her. She’d never have to bear the burden of hurting her loved ones with goodbye.

  Never occurred to her that she’d be left with no one to say goodbye to.

  So deep was the pain, it could not even register grief, only a numb shock. Such a price ought never to be tallied against anyone.

  And so another wall went up between Senza and the legions of eager young men who sought the loveliest rose in the garden.

  First, the worry that she might accidentally hurt someone by pulling too many a beat. Now, the loss of children that would never be. More than that, if she were to marry, and never bore a child, the doctors undoubtedly would flood in to examine her, and her secret would be found out.

  Ironic, she thought, that she could find so many things to preoccupy her mind, momentarily distracting her from missing the man who had caused it all.

  Because more than anything, she longed to see him.

  The seasons changed around her as if she stood still, a statue in a dark garden. Wild roses and brambles crouched at the edges of the crushed gravel path that circled about her, the fiery blooms cowering from her stony gaze. The only light that ever shone constant was the cold unfeeling moon.

  The moonlight had no heat, no love, and she turned her face increasingly away from the world. Senza imagined the heart of the moon lay there, hidden away in its dark side.

  Cold. Dark. Protected and safe. There was much to be admired in a heart like that.

  She’d grown in the sunny countryside, where summers spread lushly over the land, the heat visible in the distance: the coveys that made homes in the trees and the bushes, the butterflies that churned the air over the gardens. Winters were white fleece blankets, dark brown bark with branching fingers under spreads of snow, deep evergreens that spilled their fragrance over the scent of the iron chill, crimson berries clinging to ice-covered sprigs, drops of blood and life contrasting against the frozen slumber.

  But this wasn’t the country, and she was no longer a child.

  Gone were the hills and the seasons and the expectations of her youth. These past many years since her Unbirthing—she’d seen such pain, such grief. One by one, her family grew old and slipped away like leaves on a stream, each in their own time, the threads of their lives having been measured and snipped. Her own thread dulled the scissors of the Fates, time and time again, refusing to fray beneath its cruel sharp blades.

  Her mother ceded her defeat when Senza grew completely unmoved toward the idea of marriage. It struck a great blow to Mrs. Fyne’s pride as a mother; her only daughter, a spinster. Her three sons had married, and she seemed to take great delight in her daughters-in-law and her grandchildren, but whenever she looked at her daughter, there was only a haunted, hollow look in her eyes. A look of unrecoverable failure.

  Another thorn for Senza’s unmoving heart.

  When her mother passed in 1878, from a silly fever that gripped too tightly to let go, the entire family fell into mourning. It should have been no match for Mrs. Fyne’s healthy body, but her wounded spirit left open a door for deeper malady.

  Her father ordered the mirrors covered, great drapes over every doorway, and every person clothed themselves in the darkest of blacks. It was an outpouring of grief the household had not seen since the death of The Queen’s beloved Prince Albert many years earlier.

  But not Senza. Black was no longer for her, not even to mark the passing of her own mother. She ordered her gowns to be cut from the darkest aubergine, a purple so deep as to blot out a moonless sky. But not black. Never black. She was of the living. She would always be of the living.

  Even her veil was dark, dark purple, the hue gentling the harsh light of the sun, the sharp looks of those who tried to see her face within the ruddy shadow of her not-black veils.

  As the family made their way from the grave site, a lone figure near a copse of trees caught Senza’s eye.

  Beneath a great, ageless oak tree, she spied the shadowy slimness of a fine black coat, the glint of bright black eyes. Knell. Her knees went rubbery with relief. He had shown. He was here. He’d come back.

  And he would be the reason for her eternal youth, her continuance…him. They would be united at last and they would never part, never again.

  The tease of his smile thrust her into motion and she bolted toward him, turning heads and eliciting startled cries from her family. He strolled around the tree disappearing from view and she knew—just knew—

  She knew it was pointless. She knew she’d never reach him, just as she knew she was chasing smoke on the wind. All that he was—all that he’d given her—all of it was both gift and curse, boon and bane. He would never be standing around the corner, arms crossed and tipsy grin. He’d always be that impossible spot on the horizon, that twilight star just beyond her grasp. And she knew she’d never stop trying to get there.

  Breathless, Senza clung to the tree. Stones and silence and solitude. Nothing more. A graveyard never could hold more.

  The wound his absence had torn inside her gradually numbed, but it had felt like the passage of a forever, in and of itself.

  She glimpsed him a few months later, when she found herself at the family plot once more, after Mr. Fyne, heartbroken, followed his wife into the Hereafter.

  She spotted Knell at the back of the church during the service, and there was nothing she could do about it. This time, she could not spring up and clamber after the shadow that would melt away from her. She bore it with a stony silence, staring hard enough at her father’s casket to bore a hole through it, to crawl into it, and to die.

  In time, she realized Knell was always around, just never close enough to touch. He was always in the crowd, down the street, in a window high above her. He was just never wi
th her. Never hers to touch, never hers to hold.

  Never again. But it never stopped her from chasing, and it never stopped her from yearning.

  Her parents were dead and buried. Senza decided the veils would never come off, and not only because she had to shield the freshness of her features, despite being nearly forty years old. Loss and grief seemed to settle themselves upon her shoulders like a valley fog, thick and impenetrable. She needed a way to separate herself from the contagion of death. She did not wear a shroud; rather, it was the world that wore it. A world that seemed determined to die, soul by soul around her.

  They perished and faded and she could do nothing but stand by and watch. Wake after wake, another face disappearing from view. She had no choice but to let them go. And as each light extinguished, the darkness about her grew. The shadows grew deeper as the stars winked out, leaving at long last only she, the uncaring moon.

  And each time she said goodbye, the veil she wore over her face took on another layer, and another, and another, putting even more distance between her heart and the world. Her quiet, wretched heart, that struck its chimes against her ribs, a hollow ringing of every purloined heartbeat.

  One afternoon, when she dandled Henry’s youngest daughter upon her knee, the child reached up to grasp the fluttering edge of her fine silken veils and lifted, ducking her own chubby face beneath them in a game of peek-a-boo.

  Senza nearly dropped the child when she scrambled to tug down the veil. If someone should see—if someone should know—

  The child was startled, and began to fret. Senza shushed her, rocking her to complacency before setting her down in her basinet.

  “Shh, child, hush-a-bye.” Senza lullabied the little one and blinked against the sting of bitter tears. The veil served its other purpose, hiding the lines of her profound grief.

  It was soon time to go. She’d delayed this moment long enough.

  The life she’d wanted to hang on to had all slipped away, leaving her stranded, a leaf caught at the water’s edge, tangled and caught and never to be freed. Hers, the only leaf upon the bank, watching the seasons freeze and thaw and melt away around her. But the chill…

  That never subsided. Not when his leaf was nowhere to be found.

  Why had she ever thought that she would not be alone in any of this?

  Knell occupied her thoughts constantly. Eternally eighteen, and eternally in thrall with the dark seducer who never reappeared—years passed and nothing changed, least of all the state of her abandonment. She’d almost resigned herself to never being with him again.

  Almost, but not quite.

  During the week of her thirty-ninth birthday, cards and parcels arrived daily in the post, well-wishes from her now large and thriving family, far and wide. Letters and sentiments from the children of her loved ones, from cousins and distant kin. She read each one with her tea, pausing to recall a face, a voice. So many to recall, so many slipped away.

  Her maid urged her to her room for an afternoon nap, unaware of the irony. Senza locked the door, slid loose the ribbon beneath her chin and tugged off her close bonnet. The sudden sunlight made her wince and she closed her eyes, flopping backwards onto the bed, rubbing her long-stifled scalp, delighting in the freedom of her disguise.

  Her head thusly massaged, she let her arm fall wide upon the bed. Her fingers brushed against a sheet of paper on her pillow. Senza sat bolt upright, alarmed. Who had been in her room?

  She gingerly picked up the note, a piece of folded parchment, across which crawled a spidery script. A thump in her gut told her instinctively it was his hand, his doing. Waving the paper in front of her open mouth, she caught the distinct scents of roses and cloves.

  His scents. A decade condensed in a single inhalation, the memory of his breath and his skin and his single staggering kiss as fresh and new as the morning’s tea.

  You’d better see to your children. You’ve many more lives to lead.

  Children? What a cruel thing to say. She had no children and never would. She was the last of her line.

  She tapped her lip with a trim fingernail. She may be the last, but the world would never comprehend it. If she were truly going to live forever, she had to do it like everyone else—or, rather, like the exotic cultures who believed in reincarnation did.

  And thus, a distant cousin’s grand-daughter—and her namesake—was “born” in a desperate flash of necessity. A word in the right ear during a tea with friends, stories of her distant relations to women who had reason to doubt her. Tale by tale, this fictional cousin grew and, as she neared the age for a proper debut, Senza the Elder planned her own retirement.

  She announced to her family that she was going to travel to ease the sorrows of her mind, to see the beautiful sights while they were still to be seen. Senza boarded the train at Woking station, her entire family waving on the platform to see her off. Henry’s sadness weighed his brows, even as he tried to send her off in cheer.

  Goodbyes were never easy. Senza suspected he was all too fortunate, knowing his goodbyes were a manageable finite thing.

  Senza travelled directly to London. If ever there would be a heartbeat of England, it would be pounding here, flush and full of life.

  When Aggie and Winston had first married and moved to the city in 1861, the girls had written frequent letters to each other. London seemed so full of excitement compared to their quiet country life, with no end to the sights or the wonders, Aggie wrote. Despite the many requests to come to London and stay for a while, Senza hesitated to encroach upon her cousin’s hard-won kingdom. She remembered the longing Winston had kept about his eyes when he looked at her, even as the couple said their goodbyes and waved from the windows of their coach.

  Running a household in London was complex work, as well, it seemed. Winston became a partner in his father’s practice and there were endless clients to entertain. Over time, Aggie’s letters had become less and less frequent until they were reduced to Christmas tidings or birth announcements. And always, always, too busy to come back to Surrey to visit, even at Christmas.

  Senza couldn’t fault her for not writing, or finding time to break away from her duties. Mrs. Fyne had always had her hands full with her own household in the country, so Aggie’s London home by comparison must have been a constant buzz of activity.

  Now, Senza had finally arrived to see this city with her own eyes, to witness firsthand the multitudinous wonders that had so ensnared her country cousin. The main trick would be in avoiding Aggie’s circles, and ultimately Aggie herself. How would she explain looking not even a day older than she did the last time they’d met? No creases about her mouth, no laugh lines near her eyes. Her cheeks were still like dewy apples, without freckle or frown line. She was a wide-eyed child in the city, fresh and full of innocent life.

  On the outside, at least. Inside she was thirty-nine. Aggie would be forty, the wife of a prosperous barrister, mother of four sons and soon to be a grandmother by the eldest one.

  So many milestones to mark the passing of twenty years. Senza chewed the tip of one gloved finger as her train neared London. What did she have, besides a hollowed heart and a locket full of stolen beats?

  She had time. She had an entire lifetime ahead. With a curt nod, she silently reminded herself of the unique advantage of her situation. She had all of time before her, and she was determined to live.

  And she had want of nothing. Knell’s magic followed her as she pursued her purloined life, ensuring she had lodging and contacts. She didn’t even have to worry what she’d find in London because all had been arranged for her.

  The morning of her departure, she’d woken to find two bags packed at the foot of her bed. At first, she’d panicked, thinking her maid had come in during the night. What did she see? What had she discovered? Did she alert the house?

  However the door was still locked, her fortress unbreached. No one had entered during the night.

  She eyed the bags. Who, then, had packed them?

&n
bsp; Curious, she’d opened one of the cases to find an array of gowns, all in the current style. She’d never seen them before. The other bag had shoes and sundries, a few of her most cherished books. Creature comforts. Beneath them, in a small wooden chest, a beribboned key poking from its lock, she found a pouch full of sovereigns and a tiny leather journal, full of banking firms, their addresses and names on account. A red ribbon marked a page with an address in Chelsea.

  So. She had a destination, and all the trappings of a new life.

  It was only a short cab ride from the station to the neighborhood, and a pleasant ride at that. Upon arriving at the address, she found herself on a quaint street, neatly-stoned road lined with proper sidewalks. Rows of cream-faced homes, although smaller than country manors, stood in smart lines, fronted by dainty gardens and ornate iron fences. Most picturesque were the bay windows that flanked each door, their roofs joining to create a small but tidy porch at each entrance.

  When she knocked on the door of Number 42, the landlady herself answered, calling her name as if she’d known her all her life.

  Not that it would have been inconceivable; the landlady appeared to be the same age as Senza. The woman simply looked her age, whereas Senza never would.

  “You must be Miss Constance. Such a pleasure, miss. I’m Elizabeth Forrest. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  It had been a very long time since Senza had been addressed by her Christian name. It took a moment to sink in. “Um, thank you, ma’am. I believe—I was…told there may be room here. For me?”

  “Not if you stay on the porch all day. Come in, come in.” She drew Senza inside to a side parlor, making room for the carriage driver. He brought in her bags and set them by the stairs before tipping his hat. The landlady pulled coins from her pocket and pressed them into his hand before closing the door. “Let us go to your rooms. I hope they will please you.”

  Upstairs, an apartment had been made ready for her. A parlor, with great windows that overlooked Lawrence Street, contained great bookcases stuffed top to bottom with books on every conceivable topic, from natural history to modern engineering. A knock at the open door made them both turn.