by Jerico Lenk
Fwump.
Clement draped his patchwork coat about my shoulders, a bit large but warm from his body. I looked his way, perplexed, feeling quite the nuisance now.
“Brisk tonight, isn’t it?” Clement remarked to Kingsley, rubbing his hands together. Kingsley’s eyes slid from Clement to me, and then back to Clement, his brows just gently raised.
Bashful—but thankful, of course—I wiggled around to poke my arms into the long sleeves of Clement’s coat.
O’Brien rummaged through his knapsack for two small glass flasks and a few tied leather bags as big as coin purses … all of which he handed to Clement. Mr. Zayne and his men, under Quinn’s curt instruction, knocked the wood away from the top of Kitty’s coffin to uncover her remains.
It felt as though my heart fell right through my chest to look at the dirty grey bones and calico, the mud and the sawdust. Beetles, nested in the wiry mass of dead, unkempt hair. A skull seemed remarkably more grotesque when one knew to whom it belonged.
Clement splashed the contents of the flasks over the rotted remains. He dug into the tiny bags O’Brien had given him, following up with some sort of powder. Quinn struck a match and threw it down into the mix. Little flames slithered fast along the bones and rags, as Kitty’s remains went up in smoke.
Crossing himself, Clement spoke flatly, below his breath.
“… Deus, in nomine, tuo salvum me fac … et non proposuerunt Deum ante conspectum suum … ”
I backed away, lest the other stinking, broken coffins catch fire in turn.
But the fire was confined to Kitty’s crooked casket and Kitty’s alone, like some unseen boundary had fallen to keep it contained.
“… Deus, exaudi orationem meam … drive away from the places you are sprinkled every apparition, villainy, and turn of devilish deceit … the living and the dead, amen … ”
Clement watched the remains burn in a half-bored, half-distracted way, it seemed, the hot glow of the fire softening his face a little. Now and again his hooded eyes caught a flicker of the flames. Maybe the fire danced in my eyes, too, wide as they were as we stood over the burning corpse.
“What is this, sir?” I whispered, mouth dry.
Clement glanced my way. But before he could reply, a horrendous gust drove down through the little churchyard, carrying on its back a low, hellish moaning distinctly more human and less of the night. Mr. Zayne and his men and I all clutched at our collars and winced against it. It was as though the wind had aimed for us. Meant to tug and drag at us. Stank of the Thames.
Swiftly, the moaning thinned into a rattling, whistling sound like distant screaming. The flames leapt higher from the coffin, and up from the middle of the fire sprang Kitty.
Somehow the apparition had been summoned from the bridge. But there was scarce enough time to recognise that before it dissolved into a writhing mass of shadows and whirled off into the smoke as the flames died away.
Save for the blackbirds cawing from the nearby belfry, the churchyard was quiet once more. And the night felt empty.
Mr. Zayne whistled long in relief. Then he and his men went to work piling dirt atop the broken coffin.
Clement returned to my question. “We with the Black Cross Spectral Department inspect hauntings in the Greater London area. This is the end of the case. We ascertain the phantom’s identity—well, your mild possession did tonight—and … ” He held up the flasks and the little leather bags. “Holy water. Chancel oil and kerosene, blessed salt. Burn the bones and that’s all, fin. Kitty McGowell’s spirit has been freed. No longer here and shall never be again.”
“Like an exorcism, then?” I asked.
“Ah … in a sense, I suppose.” He paused. Then he muttered, “Please, don’t call me ‘sir.’ I go by Inspector Clement.”
The Black Cross. Where had I heard that before? A séance party, some time ago. The lecturer had been introduced as a member of the Black Cross … Order of Mysteries, or something?
They were Spiritualists, then.
I gawked at Clement, fingers curling in the ends of his coat sleeves as I struggled to wrap my mind around such a concept. No longer here and shall never be again. The cause and effect was conceivable enough, yes, but for some reason, it had never occurred to me quite in that light, whether the place in between living and dead was permanent, or even preferable. I’d just thought the Missing were—well, dead. Or perhaps, naïvely, I just hadn’t wanted to think about it.
And these Spiritualists not only believed in it all, they desired to do something about it.
With the grave filled in, Mr. Zayne and his men bid us good-bye; we squeezed into a coach and I directed the way to Julien’s-off-the-Strand. Quinn took my testimony as we rode, O’Brien jotting it all down. Clement bemoaned to no one in particular, “Wouldn’t it be more efficient to simply implement a biannual inspection of the bridge? Instead of building case after case … not to mention reconnaissance … Do you know how many jump from there each year? O’Brien? Quinn?”
We came to a stop at the junction of Winston Crescent. Clement walked me to the townhouse stoop; I returned his coat to him. The West End was still alive and merry, and would be nearly into dawn. But the townhouse had quieted down a bit. The coach’s horses stamped and snorted. A bicyclist wavered past, spraying muck at nearby foot-passengers. And standing there where the glow from the townhouse pooled on the walkway, I dreaded going inside. Suddenly all the warmth and the lights felt deader and more despairing than the cool dark outside, Waterloo in the fog, the wind in the cemetery and the blaze of some fire going up in me …
My brow knotted. With a scrape of my heel, I turned around and beseeched Mr. Inspector Clement from the stoop.
“Tonight … ” I ventured demurely. I was still rather dazed by it all, yes, but hopelessly stirred up. “You perform these inspections routinely?”
Clement nodded and shrugged, avoiding my eyes. He was quiet for a moment. Then he finally looked at me and said, in a soft and secretive way, “Do you really wish to know?”
I nodded mutely.
Out of the breast pocket of his waistcoat, Clement plucked a small, ornate cigarette case, and from the case, he pulled a visiting card—a crisp little rectangle, thick white parchment with neat letters below a gold-embossed crest.
I took it as he bid me good-night and climbed back into the coach. Hands cold and still a bit shaky from the adventure, the card slipped from my fingers and fluttered down to my feet, glowing like a dull pearl in the spill of streetlamps. So small, so seemingly insignificant. Waiting to be stepped on, or kicked off somewhere never to be rediscovered, simple as that.
I crouched down and snatched it up, framed between both sets of thumb and forefinger to read in the dim light:
BLACK CROSS ORDER OF OCCULT OCCURRENCES
PRETERNATURAL INVESTIGATION
NO. 98 ½ PORTLAND PLACE
It was as fate would have it.
Snip—snip, snip.
The last little damp tendrils of hair fell to the floor of Zelda’s room as she brushed them away with the towel on my shoulders.
“Handsome thing, you are,” she muttered, sharing the reflection in the looking glass. Her fading blonde braid fell over one shoulder; the creases of a smile cradled her sensitive brown eyes. Pride and sadness made for an interesting tone of voice.
“It’s a real shame,” she lamented, taking a comb to my clean hair. “Long, flowing locks, and you could dress up with petals and pearls like your father’s girls. Except not like your father’s girls, a bit more respectable.”
She made a face and I laughed a little. But something in my chest tightened, just for a moment. “That wouldn’t fit me, Zelda,” I murmured, shrugging off the towel and carefully folding it near the wash bowl. “You know that.”
“Still, Willow.” Zelda turned away as if I wouldn’t know what she thought. “To keep this up for your father … ”
Willow.
The name felt so foreign to me sometimes, although it wa
sn’t rare from Zelda’s mouth. Today it didn’t necessarily feel wrong. Biting idly at my lower lip, I took the comb from her for the last of my cowlicks. Nothing I might truly tame with sweet-scented styling pomatums or wax; my hair fell of its own accord, a stubborn, tousled laurel of hair framing my ears and the nape of my neck.
“Well,” I sighed. “If my mother hadn’t run off before I was even reading, my father wouldn’t have had to face the decision of how to raise a daughter himself, hmm?”
I hadn’t meant to sound so bitter; the words just thickened in my throat on their way off my tongue. Raise a daughter himself. Not entirely himself. There hadn’t been too long an interim between my mother and Miss Valérie, but it was obvious from the start even my father was far more inclined to parent than she. Zelda’s gaze roamed me through the mirror from head to toe—inspecting the hair she’d just trimmed and the trouser braces hanging limply from my narrow waist, then the locket that had slipped from hiding under my shirts where it always danced safely over the bandages there that kept me bound.
I was, after all, contrary to the way I appeared and oftentimes felt, a sixteen-year-old girl when it came to anatomy. But only Zelda and my father knew me as anything but Will, son of Julien Cavanaugh Winchester II.
I couldn’t recall exactly when or how my mother left.
No one ever divulged to me if she’d been one of my father’s ladies or born into something better. I never asked. I certainly didn’t ask if she died or just took her leave of us, either. One day, she was there. The next she was gone like she’d never been there at all. My father sat me down on the floor of his library some night after and just stared at me, deep in rumination. Second guessing his aptitude as a parent, perhaps. He’d said quietly, to himself, pre-grey mustache of his younger years barely moving around the words, “We shall do this together, shan’t we? We will manage.” And I climbed to sit on his knee, wondering why someone might cry and smile at the same time.
He’d had Zelda cut my hair. No more little dresses, only knickerbockers and sailor suits, and I’d been publicly Will instead of Willow every day and night since then.
“Poor little boy blue!” my father’s different girls had said over the years when they heard of my mother’s desertion. The occasional room-renters spoiled me each in their own ways, I think because they knew they didn’t have very good chances at families of their own, but … it was nice to be worth something to them, however sad and unspoken the significance was.
My father’s unorthodox strategy was selfish. Yet at the time, perhaps he hadn’t thought through its immense potential to become problematic. He never told me why he chose it; that was easily the better or the worse of his decisions, somehow. I’d concluded by now that it was the only way he felt he could manage single fatherhood—as even my father wished to be a father once, it seemed—and succeed at protecting me in a world that swallowed innocent young girls whole. I only had to look around his business to know that much.
Whatever his reasoning, it didn’t seem to bother him in a different way than it didn’t bother me, but clearly it bothered Zelda quite a lot yet.
It’s a shame, Willow, she’d said, as though she feared I’d become a character instead of my own self and had to remind me of who I really was.
But this is me.
I was not confused by the whole thing, as Zelda seemed to dread. There had been confusing moments, of course. Bodies are all rather the same up to a point, and it wasn’t as though I’d had any ordinary female friends to whom I might contrast or compare myself. I didn’t really form any ideas of my own about it at all until I’d woken one night and thought I was dying thanks to my anatomy, and Zelda explained and I sat there in the candlelight with her feeling as though the world were both very different yet exactly the same.
Truthfully, like Charlie and Colette were both dead but alive in a particular sense, I felt both a young lady and a young man. Not at the same time—sometimes, Will; other times, Willow. And despite how it sounds, it all felt very normal to me. My normal. A kind of bi-genderness, something fluid between the two. Simple as that.
But nobody could know that part of me, especially now. Even it did not exempt me from the dangers that awaited a young lady—a young man—on their own. Beyond that, though, how might anyone know how to treat me? I wouldn’t ever be taken seriously again. Deformity, sexual inversion, deception was all anyone would see. Worse yet, perhaps betrayal.
At times, I wondered about being the type who liked wearing dresses and had long hair through which boys could run their fingers or which their mother might pin up in little curls.
But there was something sort of wicked and liberating about no one knowing whom you really were, so I was thankful for now. Zelda always said one must find something for which to be thankful in every day; I was lucky to have many things. An upbringing, even untraditional, that provided everything and left me wanting for little. The kind of independence not generally reserved for those who more strictly fit the gender role that accompanied a girl’s anatomy. Laughter over Turkish coffee and English biscuits or late-night reading of serials and penny dreadfuls with Daphne and Agatha. And Zelda herself, who loved me like a family maid and governess irrevocably loves the children they raise whether they wore dresses or not. If I only had a clue as to how, I would come out and tell her about my queerness.
For now, though, I was content with the way things were.
Zelda clucked her tongue. “Pretty face,” she hummed, trying to lighten the mood. She pinched me gently at the chin so my mouth pursed in a little pout as she had me observe myself in our shared reflection, then shook her head in half-teasing disapproval of my scraped cheek and bruised jaw. “And you treat it so terribly!” she scolded. “Don’t tell me what happened here last night … I don’t know that I could handle it … a scuffle, you rascal? Boxing matches?”
I laughed. Me, boxing? Preposterous. I was a bit impetuous, but I unquestionably lacked the stature or the nerve for that sort of thing.
She knew I’d gone after Daphne. Everyone knew.
Smiling sheepishly, I tried to wiggle free of her arms, debating whether I should tell her about my wild night with the Black Cross inspectors and how long I’d turned the calling card over and over in my hands before finally going to sleep.
Suddenly Zelda cried out, slipping into French, her fast and melodic first tongue, as she tugged down my collar to inspect the dance of bruises on my throat. My eyes widened. I’d known they were there; I’d been gravely disturbed to find them this morning upon waking. And then I’d completely forgotten to hide them from her—
Judging by the look on her face, Zelda did not suspect the faint pink and purple came from fingers. She thought the marks left by someone’s mouth.
“Oh!” I shook off her arms and clapped both hands over the bruises, blushing and uttering a short, frantic laugh. “It’s not that!”
She kept haranguing me in and out of English, swatting as if at a pesky cat at the kitchen door. Imagine, me in such a position with another person. Imagine, she was imagining I had been, and I wasn’t sure which was the more flustering.
“No, not at all!” I insisted, embarrassed but so overwhelmingly relieved. What could I have said to help my case if she hadn’t misunderstood? “I promise it’s not that, Zelda.”
The only possible source for the marks was Kitty’s ghost cruelly grabbing me on the bridge. Which meant that everything last night had been real. The dimensions of it all still felt so beyond my grasp, the meaning of what we’d done in that churchyard in the grand scheme of things.
It terrified me. Yet, even looking at the bruises another time now, I wanted to do it again.
“Shoo! You unbelievable thing, all my good upbringing for naught thanks to your father.” She ushered me away with a flap of the hands. “He’s waiting for you, and now I send you down to him in such an unpresentable state!”
I caught her by one hand and cleared the way to peck a kiss on her wrinkled cheek, extra
sweetly, before hurrying on towards the door. She shook her head as she hobbled over to her corner chair.
“You’ve worn me out, now … ” she muttered.
I flashed her a repentant smile as I swung out the door into the hall. Thank God, to be escaping that mishap.
But I was not quite as jovial as I played. My father wanted to see me. And my father was not happy.
With a long, nervous breath, I trudged downstairs, past my mother’s locked room, to the humble office that served as his library, where he waited.
His leather wingchair was turned away from the mahogany desk and backed against the window, which was opened just a crack for the late afternoon air. He sat with bags under his eyes and a greyness to him that spoke of the toll his business had begun to take. Never mind that by the time tonight’s scheduled affair started, he’d be replenished and ready to go again. How much longer before it took more than a day’s hangover to revitalise him?
“That was quite the event last night,” he greeted me. “Your leaving so abruptly and rather inconsiderately.”
I frowned, closing the thick walnut door behind me. “Daddy … ”
“You left with no explanation!” he cried. “How could I know you’d be safe, wherever you were off to? Look at your face, first of all! And abandoning our guests in such a way—can’t you grasp how poorly such actions reflect upon the business? How ill-mannered you’ve presented yourself before those to whom impression is all?”
I stood on the old tiger-skin rug in the center of the cramped, cluttered library, hands twisting together behind my back as if I were a guilty child again. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t regret or feel guilty. I felt gravely misunderstood. I’d felt gravely misunderstood for a long time, and suddenly it was not something I could brush off.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I mumbled. “I didn’t mean for any disregard.”
“I won’t accommodate such carelessness any longer. Do you hear me, Willow? Do you understand?”