Prince of Hearts (Elders and Welders Chronicles)

by Margaret Foxe

  With The Luclair’s enhancement, one high C would break every window and chandelier in the entire townhouse.

  "How could he do this to me?" Luciana cried, clutching the remains of Romanov's letter against her bosom, which was every bit as spectacular as the mantle above it. "I am singing Desdemona tonight! My nerves cannot take it, Miss Finch. He is cruel and uncaring to abandon me in my hour of need!"

  Aline was quite certain The Luclair had not seen Romanov in at least two months, so she didn't add abandonment to the list of Romanov's manifold sins. Poor judgment and bad taste came to mind, however. Aline had to admit that Romanov had outdone himself this time. What was he thinking, to have liaisons with women of The Luclair’s ilk?

  Perhaps because it makes leaving them so easy, she thought to herself.

  Aline glanced across the room where Madame Kristeva, Professor Romanov's Russian housekeeper, stood, rolling her eyes. Apparently Madame Kristeva didn't care for the opera singer either – and she understood English better than she let on.

  "I am ruined! How can I live another day when I'll never love again?" The Luclair sobbed.

  As Aline was quite convinced that no hearts had been broken at any time during this particular relationship, and that The Luclair would doubtless live an irritatingly long time, she counted to ten, summoning up the last reserves of her patience, before answering.

  "I know this must be a difficult moment for you, but give it time,” she choked out half-heartedly.

  Luciana dropped her handkerchief and narrowed her suspiciously dry eyes at Aline. She gave an irritated huff. "And what would you know about a broken affaire, Miss Finch? What could you possibly know of broken hearts? Of passione?"

  Gritting her teeth, Aline started to count to ten again. The exaggeratedly Continental way Madame pronounced her name, “Meez Feench”, was worse than fingernails on chalkboard. Plus Madame was right. What did she know about passione? A great deal in terms of second-hand accounts. Very little in the way of actual experience.

  But she did know a thing or two about the Professor and his mistresses, and the way these little tête-à-têtes always went. It was the time in the interview that the scorned lover decided to take out her frustrations on the secretary, a common refrain. Aline sometimes wondered if these women all read the same script beforehand.

  Not wishing to extend the interview any longer, she wrenched open the top drawer of Romanov's desk, pulling out the satin-covered case from the jewelers.

  Madame eagerly opened the case, but her face fell as she peered at its contents. "What is this?" she demanded, holding up the garnet brooch Aline had spent hours picking out.

  Clearly, Madame was not impressed. She was looking at it as one would look at a dirty stocking.

  Aline bit her bottom lip to physically suppress a groan. She didn’t see what there wasn’t to like about the brooch. The gold filigree setting was exquisite, fashioned in the nouveau style, and the garnet insets were of the first quality.

  “It’s a garnet brooch,” she explained, with a dryness Madame did not appreciate.

  “I know what it is. It’s brown,” The Luclair huffed. “Like your hideous gown.”

  “It’s quite a unique piece…”

  Madame dropped it back in the case. “I don’t want unique. I want diamonds.”

  Of course Madame wanted diamonds. She should have gone with the gaudiest diamond necklace at the jewelers, as had been her first instinct, but she’d been in too foul a mood over the Professor’s continued absence and failure to respond to the thousand tickertexts she’d sent him.

  A fortnight indeed!

  So she’d purchased the brooch instead, something she’d liked – something she perhaps unconsciously knew Madame wouldn’t – even though she didn’t think The Luclair had much use for necklaces, with the giant one permanently attached to her chest.

  Aline reached for the brooch, as if to take it away. “If you don’t want it…”

  Madame’s eyes grew wide, and she snatched the brooch back, tucking it into her bosom.

  Aline rose from her seat, and Madame did the same, but it seemed Madame was not as eager to end their delightful interview. She glared down her nose at Aline, all righteous indignation. "I know all about you, Miss Finch. Sasha’s loyal little lapdog. You pant after your master's heels like those two beasts of his."

  Luciana was right about the dogs. They were beasts. But Aline took offense at the comparison of herself to those two mongrels. She did not pant. She’d never panted in her life.

  And certainly not after Professor Romanov.

  "You English women are so dreary, without an ounce of passione in your blood. The women like you are the worst. Bluestockings who insist on working like men and being treated like men, while secretly you are in love with your handsome employers."

  "I assure you, Madame Luclair, I am not in love with the Professor. I leave such an onerous task to beautiful ladies such as yourself."

  Madame didn't believe her. "Who would not be in love with Sasha? You are not blind. You are not a man. Unless you are one of those women who prefer the company of other women..." Madame's tone grew speculative, her gaze assessing.

  Then, gasping dramatically, she clasped her hands over her mantle and cleavage as if she had discovered her modesty. Apparently she was seeing Aline's ugly brown frock coat in a new light.

  Aline bristled. She tried counting again, but only got to three before her patience expired. “My preference is none of your concern, Madame. But should you like to know, I have gentlemen callers aplenty."

  Madame looked incredulous at the blatant fable. Aline obviously didn't have gentlemen callers aplenty. But she did have one, thank you very much. One very reliable, entirely respectable, and genuinely attractive gentleman caller. One Charles Netherfield, and she planned to marry him, just as soon as her damned employer returned.

  But that was neither here nor there at the moment. What was pertinent was Madame’s swift departure from the premises. Abandoning courtesy, she stalked over to the French doors leading out into the back garden and opened it. She stood aside and watched Ilya and Ikaterina lope inside, straight for Madame’s skirts.

  It had rained, so the hellhounds were quite muddy.

  So was Madame by the time she managed to extricate herself.

  SHORTLY after Madame had departed in tears – real for a change – and the dogs were brought in line, Aline snatched up her reticule and stormed towards the door, telling Madame Kristeva to expect her back in a few hours. She had an errand of her own to run in St. Giles – a distasteful one at that.

  She was not going to let the opera singer’s tirade dampen her mood, which was already low. The afternoon spent enduring insults had almost been worth it, however, when she saw the look on The Luclair’s face when the hellhounds had pounced with half of London’s muck on their paws.

  What was she thinking? Of course it had been worth it. Aline hadn’t felt so perversely satisfied in some time.

  Her spirits fell, however, as she exited Romanov’s townhouse on Berkeley Square and began trudging towards Piccadilly. It was quite a hike to the East End, her destination, but she was too strapped at the moment to afford a steam hack and had barely scraped together enough coins for the air car that traveled between Piccadilly Circus and Covent Garden, a mode of conveyance that she loathed. Pitching about on the bumpy public transport coaches surrounded by unwashed bodies – as she was always so lucky as to encounter the filthiest Londoners in transit – made her green about the gills just thinking about it.

  And just thinking about her upcoming task sent a shudder of mingled shame and apprehension through her. She did not know how she would be received down at Witwicky and Sons, Bookmakers, even though she came prepared to finally settle her debt.

  The last time she’d been there, she’d only narrowly escaped being thrown to Witwicky’s brutish henchmen. The only reason he’d extended her a grace period had been out of respect for her late uncle, a friend to man
y in the St. Giles underworld, to whom Witwicky still felt indebted. She couldn’t remember ever being so terrified.

  Or so humiliated at having sunk so low as to be in debt up to her eyeballs with a St. Giles bookmaker. She’d never thought herself one of those sad cases who haunted the dodgy alleyways outside of a betting house, having lost everything to their addiction, yet still hungering for a few sovereigns and a roll of the dice, a fever in their eyes. She’d not lost everything quite yet, but she’d come perilously close over the last few months, unable to resist the siren call.

  Usually she had some restraint. But she’d come to find her life so unsatisfactory on so many levels that misery, pure and simple, had driven her to wager more often and in larger quantities. She gambled to feel the thrill of victory, but when she did not win, she kept on playing until she did.

  Even when the money ran out.

  “Never again,” she told herself as she boarded the air car.

  Upon reaching Covent Garden, Aline alighted from the conveyance, then crossed to the eastern edge of the piazza until she reached the turn onto Bow Street, crushed with traffic both shod and airborne. She made her way southward, towards the Strand, the street growing shabbier, the people growing louder and less respectable by increments.

  Even so little as ten years ago, when she’d lived with her eccentric uncle in this neighborhood after she’d outgrown boarding schools, Aline wouldn’t have dared to wander these streets alone. But since the days of Jack the Ripper and his successors, the London constabulary, led by Inspector Drexler, had gained a foothold over the Cockney stews, despite the Black Market’s attempts to keep the police out.

  Indeed, many still believed St. Giles was not a place for gently bred ladies to explore even with an armed guard. Fortunately for herself, Aline had no missish sensibilities or reputation to damage in rubbing elbows with the inhabitants of the East End. As a somewhat anomalous being herself – educated, employed, independent and single in a society that deplored every one of these adjectives conjoined to one of female persuasion – she enjoyed a great deal more latitude than women both far above her station and far beneath.

  She turned off a side street, and the noxious fumes arising from the effulgence of the general environment, mingled with the raw tang of the costermongers’ wares, hit her like a brick wall. The poverty of the area kept out most of the technological advancements that pervaded the richer sections of the city. So despite the occasional glimpse of an unfortunate Machinist – victim of the early, unregulated post-War factories, whose limbs had been replaced with machine parts – and the militant Luddite preachers – with their eerie white robes and scars, who ranted to the market crowds against the government – life here continued much as it had before the Great Exhibition of 1851 had ushered in the Steam Age.

  At least on the outside.

  The first time Aline had come here following her parents’ deaths, the sensory experience had been overwhelming. But she rather came to enjoy her visits here, and her uncle’s reputation had offered her a measure of protection.

  One of the pioneers of the Steam Revolution, Thaddeus Finch had turned his back on his career and devoted himself to the plight of the Machinists and other victims of unsanctioned Welding after the War. He’d earned a certain measure of respect in the stews, even among the criminal classes.

  Now, years after his death, Aline continued to visit, excited, as always, by the thrill of doing something not entirely without risk. She was, alas, a born gambler. She had, in fact, received inspiration for her column in the Post-Dispatch from the people and events she’d witnessed in the narrow warrens near the Embankment.

  For instance, she’d based Ping, her hero’s valet, on one of the Chinese “doctors” who peddled herbs, roots, and tinctures smuggled from their motherland in the shadows of Fleet Street. She had even set the denouement of her first series in Covent Garden, wherein her villain tried to escape justice in the crowded market place. He had, in the end, been felled by a basket of overripe melons.

  That first series of The Chronicles of Miss Wren and Doctor Augustus had been wildly popular by the end of its run, surprising the newspapers’ editors and even herself. She had fallen into writing the serial novel rather by accident, submitting the half-cocked idea to the newspaper in a moment of desperation – brought on by a bad run at the Automaton Races, her favorite venue, and a particularly draining week doing Romanov’s bidding.

  She’d been penniless and despairing over her job and wondering why she never made an effort to do something that she wanted to do. So she had written a story and the Post had agreed to run it. Thus A.F. Riddle was born. Despite the column’s success, however, the money wasn’t good enough to allow her to resign as Romanov’s secretary – especially when one factored in her little habit.

  Aline passed a fruit stall and smiled wryly at a crate of honeydews well past their prime displayed to one side, a painted sign above them reading “Augustis Melens: 2 p”. Horribly misspelled, but nonetheless gratifying to the ego. The cockney street vendors had taken a proprietary view of the Covent Garden melon scene in the Chronicles. Now any overripe species of melon were Augustuses.

  Though Aline held no romantic illusions about her current environs or its denizens. She knew exactly how the rouged women loitering at the lamppost she just walked by made a living. She knew that the small, underfed, unenhanced, and often light-fingered boys who hawked oranges were runaways who lived in flash houses along the Embankment.

  She knew, from listening to Inspector Drexler recount various misadventures, how very dangerous a place this area of London could be. She knew, for instance, that the Chinese “doctor” she’d used as Ping’s inspiration probably earned his money selling opium under the table, not from his boxes of desiccated roots and foul-smelling poultices.

  Even worse than the opium blight devastating this part of the city was the all-powerful Black Market, a consortium of underworld gangs who controlled the illegal Welding industry. Horror stories of Weldlings who wandered into the wrong part of the city and were murdered for their parts were not uncommon. The Black Market was Scotland Yard’s greatest adversary, and, unfortunately, nearly untouchable.

  Aline had little to offer in the way of parts for the Black Market, however, considering her particular affliction, and was therefore relatively safe from its attentions. But Aline certainly appreciated the risk she ran when she went to Witwicky’s. The last time she’d come here, having lost it all at the Races, she’d been literally quaking in her boots.

  She’d not prayed in years, but after that dreadful meeting, she had returned to her flat, buried her face in her pillow, and muttered an incantation of thankfulness to the Lord on High for the reprieve. She’d vowed before God there and then to leave off gambling for good.

  After she paid Witwicky, she was never visiting a bookmaker’s or the tracks again. She was about to become a respectable, married woman after all, and if Charlie ever learned about her problem, he would simply faint from shock, then ask for his mother’s ring back.

  Thank God she’d not gambled that away.

  No, she was never even playing a round of cards again unless she wagered in buttons and thimbles…

  Well, perhaps she’d put a few quid down on her favorite automaton at Ascot this year, but aside from that, no more betting.

  With a huff of decisiveness, Aline slipped into Witwicky and Sons: Bookmakers, a shabby, unobtrusive business on the corner of Aldwych and Fleet Street, the doorbell jangling above her head.

  Suspicious eyes fastened on her through a haze of tobacco smoke, Witwicky’s lunchtime regulars lounging in the cramped public area talking statistics and studying the charts posted at the back of the house. It was not exactly forbidden for women to come to such places, but neither was it the usual order of things. A bookmaker’s was one of the few establishments in the world where Aline was noticed.

  Her heart plummeted as a hulking figure bounded off a stool and clanked in her direction. The B
ull himself, Witwicky’s favorite henchman, and more automaton than man. She squinted through the smoke, noticing he looked even worse than usual. His nose appeared to have been recently broken – again – and he was missing an entire mechanical arm. He glared at her venomously from a pair of crude, goggle-like Black Market eyes.

  Or at least she thought he was glaring. It was hard to tell, since he only had one eyebrow left.

  He bellowed for Witwicky, who came barreling out of his office at the back of the house. Witwicky’s right arm was in a sling, and both his eyes were blackened. When he caught sight of her, his face drained of color, as if she were a ghost. Or Jack the Ripper.

  “Wot’re ye doin’ ‘ere! Are ye wantin’ to get me bloomin’ ‘ead shot off?” Witwicky breathed, taking her by the arm and leading her into the shadows of one corner of the room. The Bull hovered menacingly over his boss’ shoulder.

  Aline had no idea what had gotten into these men. The last time she had been here, they had been as oily smooth and full of themselves as a pair of snakes toying with a mouse.

  “I came here to settle my debt,” Aline said, reaching into her reticule for her purse.

  Witwicky gasped and stepped away, holding up his hands as if she were about to extract a gun. “I won’t be takin’ your money, Miss Snitch, so just turn that little rump of yers out the door and don’t be comin’ back.”

  “What are you talking about? I am no … snitch! And I thought you rather wanted my money, since last time I was here, you made that point very clear.”

  Witwicky’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Aye, after that ye sent yer friend from the Yard ‘ere to settle your debt for you,” he said, gesturing towards his broken arm, then at the Bull’s missing one.

  Aline was thoroughly baffled, but deep down in her belly, an awful suspicion was unfurling. “I sent no one. Who came here?” she demanded.