by Jerico Lenk
My stomach gave a sick little pinch. Avoiding his eyes, I sank down into one of the armchairs with a twist of a smile in surrender and my coat flopped across my lap. God, but I wanted to tell him. Someone. Anyone. Especially tonight, I needed a confidante. Over and over with my mind’s eye, I kept seeing my father and Miss Valérie in Trafalgar Square.
I needed someone to be there for me, and Cain Kingsley, controversial “child” Earl, was clearly willing despite all my inadequacy.
“My father,” I conceded, and I very much meant to be cool and collected about it, but something in me just suddenly broke open. “My whole life he’s reproached me for my gifts, or curses, or talents, however you wish to define it, this sensitivity to spirits—clairvoyance, I suppose.”
“Yes,” Cain confirmed.
“And I don’t care if he meant to protect me or if he really just doesn’t believe me. He could have at least pretended to listen.” I paused for a sharp breath, the words chalky in my mouth. “No one understands. No one, Cain. That night on Waterloo, though, I … When I came here and signed on, it was utterly against my father’s orders. He loathes this place. Loathes Spiritualists. And I’ve been horrified—petrified—he’ll find me and force me back home.”
“But he hasn’t,” Cain guessed.
“Not yet. I don’t know whether to be saddened or grateful for that.”
“A conundrum for sure.” He nodded, brow pinching as he frowned in a puckered way, uncertainly, tongue twisting to the inside of one cheek.
“I saw him tonight,” I said. “On the trip back. And what if he saw me? I don’t want him to come after me. I don’t want to go home. This is my new home. I’ve already decided it!”
Catching another breath, I glimpsed myself in Cain’s mirror—fingers twisting in my coat, a dark and unforgiving look of stifled resolve on my lowered face. My eyes churned. A stormy sky, Miss Agatha’s lover had said. And I understood it now. Yes, a very daunting and merciless stormy sky in my eyes, just before the rain burst forth.
I resembled my mother, in a way.
From that photograph Zelda had given me. My mother had not looked so angry, but she’d radiated a mysterious intensity with the same wide-eyed, relentless stare …
Instantly I was self-conscious of it. I looked to Cain.
His eerily mismatched eyes were fixed on me. With an absent nod, he returned the grave look with the ghost of a smile. Pleased, almost, again as if … as if there were some secret only the two of us shared.
“Ah,” he murmured. “You’re but a tragedy just like the rest of us, aren’t you?”
I looked away again, blushing. What on earth was that supposed to mean?
He slid off the edge of his bed and wandered over to stand under that huge portrait, all rich, dark colours and thick brush strokes of a lithe and handsome man. Perk of a smile, dull brown eyes. Same dark, little freckle under the right eye.
“This is my father,” Cain said, pointing. “He passed a few years back. I’m sure you remember that rocking London’s Season, my decoration as Earl before even coming of age. But strict inheritance entails are hard to dissuade, aren’t they? Anyway, the thing is, the rest of my family was powerfully opposed to me affiliating with the Cross, like yours. I did, though.” He flashed me a little grin over his shoulder, propping a hand on his hip. It shifted his short night-shirt along the small of his back, the hem catching on the soft knit of his long flannel under-pants there. “I’m a tad spiteful at times, perhaps. But mainly I signed on because it felt right for me. And it’s never proved otherwise, not for the year I’ve been here.”
He slid his eyes back to the portrait, smile fading.
“Sometimes,” he said with alarming maturity, for a moment sounding as if within him hid the soul of someone, something, much older than it should have been, “I long so deeply to know whether he’d be proud of my decision or not. I’ll never know. I have to trust myself.”
He was quiet a moment. But he shook the grimness easily, bouncing over to drop to his haunches and untie my shoes. I sat up straight, giving him a funny look.
“Stop that,” I laughed, embarrassed.
“Well,” he parried with a roll of his eyes, “you’re staying tonight, aren’t you?” He caught my shoes as I tugged them off, setting them neatly near the chair. “Think about it, Will. If your father wished to remove you from the Cross, shouldn’t he have done so by now? Unless, of course, he wants you to feel comfortable first.”
I froze, looking to him in horror.
Cain’s eyes widened. “Ah!” He laughed, waving his hands. “I’m teasing! I’m sorry. Will, you’re safe here. I promise.” He stood and drew back the layered blankets of his bed. “Oh, your nightclothes are still in your room, aren’t they?”
“I’ll go fetch them.”
“No, I have an extra pair or two.”
He handed me a clean night-shirt and went back to readying his bed. I flopped the shirt over one shoulder as I began unbuttoning my waistcoat—
Ah. Right.
The difference between Cain and me, under the waistcoat, under the shirt.
“Don’t look, I’m self-conscious,” I said quickly, fighting the brief surge of panic. It wasn’t a lie, anyway. I hadn’t thought of that at all today, hadn’t even remembered my bandages until I’d gone to undress, myself. They were just a part of my routine, a second thought and a habit. Sleeping in bandages was the last thing I wanted to do, though. I’d done it before a few times, and it was terrible. But I’d just broken down about my father; following up with my gender-queerness was a bit too much for one evening.
“Would you prefer the edge of the bed, or the spot next to the wall?” Cain asked, still facing away as he plumped the pillows.
“I think I can sleep on the chair,” I told him as I hurried to unwind the binding from myself under the long shirt he’d handed over.
He scoffed kindly. “Nonsense. I’ll take the edge.”
I was safe, between Cain and the wall on his sumptuous nobleman’s bed.
Like we’re brothers, he’d said. I couldn’t pretend I completely believed the sentiments. We hardly knew one another yet, and we came from rather different worlds. But at the same time … the two of us were young martyrs in a world of towering skeptics. The way he’d looked sitting on the edge of his bed, the way I’d looked after my dark outburst. The shadow in his eyes after that wretched gossip in Hermes Hall the other day. He seemed a troublemaker, sure, but taking a bit of pride in his family’s scandals did not excuse him from the hurt of being ostracised, ridiculed, deplored.
He understood, I realised then.
So if I told him everything, about my mother, or my peculiar gender ambiguity, perhaps he would get it.
I didn’t quite know how best to form friendships, but Cain Kingsley was somehow becoming my friend. I couldn’t deny it, falling asleep safe with my back to his and my knees drawn up against the wall. If I told him the rest of my secrets, it would have to be later. If we were to have a brotherhood, it was still young and fragile, and I was not prepared to lose the only friend I had right now.
Creak, creak …
Tiny footsteps on the faded wooden floor behind me. I bristled. The ear-ringing feel of a new presence infected the dark classroom. It weighed on me, left its whispers on the back of my neck. Like knowing someone walked behind you even if you didn’t look.
The classroom was all hard, pointed shadows except for the spill of muddled light through the painted-glass windows overlooking the street below. I’d been stationed there on my own for my first solitary call-and-answer. Goosebumps tickled along the back of my neck, but the silvery chill of anticipation during inspections was beginning to feel exciting.
On the blackboard, lines of grammar drills written in chalk slanted this way and that, in crooked, looping cursive.
Tap, tap, tap.
I listened closely to the new sound, one that very much resembled the dainty sound of a pencil being dropped on a desk.
Tap, tap �
� snap … creak …
Someone drew closer, tentatively. Slipping between the long desks behind me. Slowly, very slowly, I turned from the blackboard to face the rest of the classroom. The footsteps stopped. No suspicious shadows. No figures. No Missing.
“Was that you?” I called softly. My voice bounced tiny and thin around the empty room. “Hello … ?”
I sighed. A mirror stood near the desk, perhaps for the teacher to keep an eye on students’ attentiveness without having to turn around. Arms crossed, I leaned back against the first row of desks, eyes roaming the room through the glass. A plain bookcase, an Anglican crucifix on the wall beside it. A massive supplies cabinet shrouded in shadows, heavy drapes drawn on the windows below the painted-glass, two little legs peeking out from under those drapes, real as could be. Two little legs and two little feet, pasty and grey.
A sharp shiver zipped down my spine, fast to come and fast to go.
“Aha!” I whispered, eyes widening.
Carefully, I weaved through the desks. I was within a step of the ghost. Still it stood there, hiding behind the curtains. Little legs and little feet!
I curled my fingers in the dusty drapes and flung them back from the mullioned window, wondering if the ghost hid from me or if it waited for me.
Gone.
Like the shadow of a bird flying past, a chill against my side darting off in some other direction. The classroom doors crashed as they slammed shut after it.
“Clement!” I called, dashing off to the room in which he and the others held their own antiphonary session. Or … never mind Clement. “O’Brien!”
Open Spectral File No. MCDXCVII. St. Mary-le-Strand Girls’ School, Proprietors troubled, To be investigated 12 October. Obituaries on file for three young girls and one young boy.
The girls’ school may as well have been Jane Eyre’s Lowood for how remarkably cold and isolated it felt, tucked away off Houghton Street just above the Strand. A large, churchlike building, the colours of its old painted-glass windows providing the only real life.
“Do you want it gone?” Clement had prompted, bored, down in the Anglican deacon’s headmaster offices, where the Father ended the pre-investigation tour and gathered his things to leave for the night.
He’d given Clement a hard look of suspicious disbelief. “Of course I do!” he’d said. “The Bishop won’t hear a word of it, and what else are we to do, call in the Catholics?”
Clement flashed him a hot glance. “No, of course you shan’t,” he’d hummed with a grand smile, in just the right way that the rest of us knew his subtle mockery while the deacon took it as comfort. And then he’d slid his eyes over to me—perhaps in warning, perhaps to ensure I’d been listening, maybe even to check my response to that request. I didn’t know if he’d meant for me to see it, let alone if it was out of spite or thoughtfulness.
Quinn had been lent to a different team, so we were given Officer Dorland, a Cross man who’d moved on for the most part from fieldwork to archives work. But the Cross, much as it felt otherwise to me, being new, was not exactly overpopulated by spectral department inspectors, and Dorland had apologised gratuitously on the way over for being rusty, as he had not been on a true field inspection in quite some time. All with a smile that didn’t seem as apologetic as it did obligatory.
Dorland … He felt familiar to me, but I couldn’t place how. Perhaps I’d run into him in the halls or the dining room before. He was a tall man, not too overweight, red-haired and barely bearded with a sagging throat like a turtle’s chin and beady eyes that glittered like the chain of his pocket watch. As with most upper middle-class fellows, he seemed to care quite a lot about coming across dignified and levelheaded, though it ran the risk of presuming superiority over everyone else. Especially a young lead inspector like Clement.
He sat primly and stiffly as I turned in slow circles with my head tipped back, admiring the angel faces carved in the coffered ceiling, and O’Brien documented what I said about the little bare feet under the drapes.
“Well, perhaps it is time to use this, then!” Dorland suggested, extraordinarily proud of the little Edison Talking Doll he’d brought along. “A child spirit will love it.”
Clement rolled his eyes with great drama, sprawled on a daybed. “We don’t know that the spirit is a child.”
Dorland set the doll down and paced about slowly with his hands behind his back, enunciating and projecting every word with grating monotony as he resumed call-and-answer. “Are you here, spirit? You’ve been quite a pest to the poor Father and the girls here, yet you can’t even show yourself to us? Come then, I’ve a doll here for you to play with. Unless you can’t manage it, you weak little thing … Inspector Clement, there are four known deaths in the place on file, and all are children.”
I plopped down in a chair next to O’Brien. “Do you know what my favourite claim is?” I whispered, desperate to keep my mind off the inevitable—the end of the case and the deacon’s intolerance of any ghostly guest. O’Brien glanced at me with a tight smile; he seemed particularly spooked tonight. I smiled back, hoping it put him more at ease. “The two girls arguing about closing the drapes as ‘the boy who came through the walls’ asked them to, so they could all play, and one girl wished to, and the other was afraid. It’s fascinating!”
O’Brien’s eyes skittered down to the ambience compass in hand, smile dimpling uncertainly. Clearly, he did not share in my fascination.
“Cara? Judas? Rachel? Temperance?” Dorland beckoned, rattling off the documented names.
“We shan’t assume identity,” Clement reminded. Slumped against his arm in childish impatience, he issued a huff of a sigh.
“I said come, then, don’t you wish to play with the doll? I’ve brought it just for you. Are you so helpless a phantom?”
“Right,” Clement muttered, unamused, snatching two single wax tapers and lighting them from the lamp. “Well, you just keep to it, man, and Winchester and I will move to the upper floors.”
I stared at him for a moment until he thrust one of the tapers into my hand, and I understood it was a certainty.
“It’s got to be a child,” Clement grumbled as he and I climbed the stairs. “All the obituaries are for children. Two died of influenza, one of appendicitis, another of concussion after a spill.”
I threw him a perplexed glance. “But you told the Officer … ” Unless he’d just wanted to argue with Dorland out of principle. I sighed. “Well, I didn’t see a grown man’s feet below the sashes, anyway.”
“Are you tired?” Clement dug around in one of his breast pockets. “To keep us alert,” he suggested as he withdrew his cigarette case and showed me the little white tablets inside it. “Cocaine tablets.”
My eyes veered back up to his. “Clement,” I said.
“Don’t worry. It’s prescribed to me.”
“You’re in pain?”
“Not when I have my prescription,” Clement replied with a little smile. Lately it had been said wonder drugs were perhaps more detrimental to health than previously thought, but all the most fashionable of circles still indulged. Daphne had urged me to try a tincture or two with her before, and from Zelda I’d endured a week-long lecture for taking it without a doctor’s orders.
I gawked at Clement, utterly thrown. Never mind that; was he, like Cain said, not angry with me for the Triviat case?
Well … there was no use exacerbating the contention if he wasn’t acknowledging it. Perhaps it was even a peace treaty.
“All right.” I sighed again. “I am a bit tired, yes.”
Clement passed me the tiny fold of paper he’d pulled out from under the tablets, white powder scraped along the crease where he’d ground a tablet up with the corner of his cigarette case.
“Well, don’t spill it everywhere,” he warned.
“Well,” I parried, “I apologise, but I’m a novice, unlike you, apparently.”
We both sniffed, and Clement let out a hiss of a satisfied sigh; with a fingerti
p, he poked at the last of the powder and rubbed it along his gums lest the dose of medicine be lost. Timidly, I mimicked him.
The stairs were old and dark, each step issuing sharp cracking sounds underfoot as we continued forth. “What’s the most popular complaint?” he asked, moving slowly and carefully to keep the noise down.
“Mischief?” Daintily, I dusted off my nose in case any of the good powder still lingered there.
“It’s more active at night, isn’t it?”
I shrugged. “Perhaps she doesn’t want to be alone when everyone retires for the night. She knows she’s frightening, but all she really wants is to be paid attention. Or he. We don’t know yet.”
Clement stopped at the second landing, where the stairs turned one last time before opening onto the upper floor. I ran into him then shuffled back down a step or two, avoiding his narrow glance.
“Did you hear that?” he whispered. He could be quiet when he tried.
I peeked around him, feeling eerily weightless and alert now. “Hear what?”
A quick, deliberate whistle sounded from somewhere on the second floor.
Clement pointed. “That.”
“Was it the wind?” I murmured, knowing it was not. The whistle had been markedly human.
“Listen!” he whispered, throwing a hand out as if to cover my mouth.
Shadows throbbed along the old stairwell, cast by our meager lights. Beyond the whisper of linen and squeak of the steps, as Clement shifted in place, were the faint, rustling thuds of someone walking around up there.
When we climbed the last set of steps, the shuffling movement halted. Silence could be peculiarly loud in the absence of noises. Clement drifted along, his taper like a ship’s lantern pushing through the dark. Slowly, he eased down to sit cross-legged against the wall, between the door to the girls’ long bedroom and the door to the morning room, under another old hanging crucifix. I sat opposite, leaning back against a large curio cabinet.
We waited in a lengthy silence, just our breath and the distant ruckus of Westminster, the closer but still muffled echoes of Dorland’s slightly aggressive antiphonary inquiries. Senses, open to the dark. Waiting for something, anything to happen.