As Roger offered Ada the waxy stub, something fell from the folds of his corpse-bundle and lay glinting on the gravel. Some personal effect must have been cleverly hidden, for Roger took care in checking his wares and had never before missed an artifact.
Ada scrambled after it, but Roger kicked it away and snatched it up first.
“Hands off, you sack-’em-up man!” Ada snarled as she tried to pry open his fist.
“That belongs to my stiff, you imp.” Roger yanked his hand out of her reach and studied the object, a decorative hatpin with a small pearl centered in a swirl of petals.
Ada clawed at his coat. “Give it back! What does a stiff care about a pretty metal flower?” She tried to climb him like a tree, but he held her firmly by the wrist.
“The constables find that on you, and you’ll be the one hanging, or locked up at the very least. I can’t return it now. But I’ll drop it in the Mudtyne soon as I can. You’ll thank me later, little ghost. Now be off with you.”
Roger crossed a field of headstones. When he reached the trees he looked for Ada but she had disappeared. Loaded down as he was, he cleared the necropolis wall with difficulty. He didn’t find his hat. Feeling naked without it, he headed for town.
He trundled his freight up Goatmonger Street in a handcart he kept stashed in a shed at the bottom of Greyanchor Hill. It could have been a coal delivery, or firewood, laundry, any number of things. As he turned onto Mouthstreet, the bell at St Colthorpe’s sounded four languid tolls.
Entering Eldridge’s College of Barber-Surgeons by the back courtyard, Roger rang for the night porter.
“Have you brought a specimen, Mr Weathersby?” Instead of the porter, old Dr Eldridge himself had sat up overnight to welcome the deliveries. “Good weather for it, with the fog. Blackett just brought a hanged man fresh off the gibbet. He’s not got mass enough on him to use for my lecture on musculature, but he’ll do for the digestion talk.”
Roger unwrapped his bundle for the physician to examine. “I’ve brought a lady, sir. I know you was looking for a lady, for that series on female health. I scouted her funeral yesterday.”
Dr Eldridge pressed his palms together in delight. “I’ll give you nine for her. Has she her teeth? Then ten.”
As Roger fumbled to check this, he noticed purple bruising around her throat. He hadn’t seen these marks back in the dark crypt. Someone had forced her into that coffin against her will. Even worse, she had a hard belly with odd, soft raised bumps in her abdominal wall. A wave of nausea passed over him.
Second thoughts plagued Roger about passing off this corpse as a medical specimen after suffering such an unusual death. And here he was, tampering with what looked like evidence.
Roger tossed the sheet over the corpse and pressed his hands to his thighs. “I confess, sir. I can’t take money for this one. Now I’ve seen her in the light, I fear her death were… not right. But can I leave her in the cellar, just for a time? I have some asking ’round to do. You can keep her as you like, but I don’t want to bring you trouble, and I can’t very well summon the constables to look into the matter.”
“Constables? Certainly not.” The doctor rested a wrinkled hand on Roger’s shoulder. “This one will keep for a time in the cold cellar. My female series starts next week, and I always take the most discreet precautions. The face will be covered as usual, along with identifying marks. She’ll be put to worthy scientific use. No one will be able to trace her to you, that I promise.” Dr Eldridge counted out ten Myrcnian shells and tucked them into Roger’s pocket. Begrudgingly, he added an eleventh. “For your discretion. To think I was on the verge of cancelling the series. They don’t hang enough women in this city. Lucky for me I have a bold lad like you who goes beyond the easy pickings of the Old Grim gibbet. Well done. I’ll see you tomorrow evening, Mr Weathersby. The hanged man needs to be readied for my next lecture, and I think it’s high time you did a full dissection by yourself.”
“Me? I – well, thank you, sir.” Roger knew he should have felt grateful and flattered at this last pronouncement, but recent events had dampened his enthusiasm for hands-on practice. “Tomorrow evening it is.”
2
On the first of every month since her expulsion from the palace, Princess Sibylla’s cousin Prince Edgar sent a chocolate box roughly thirty miles from Myrcnia’s capital of Caligo to Helmscliff estate in Tyanny Valley. For three-odd years, these boxes of violet-and-rose filled chocolates had been delivered to warm her to the idea of marrying her younger cousin, yet his obligatory wooing had a chilling effect instead. After all, Edgar had no more interest in wedding her than she him. It was their grandmother, the Queen of Myrcnia, who wanted to force the match. Only when Sibylla agreed to the royal union between cousins – a prosaic tradition to strengthen their family’s magic – would she be welcomed back at the palace.
Her mouth salivated as her fingers hovered over the sweets, but despite being a favored treat, she had never eaten one of the fondantfilled bribes, certain that ingesting a single chocolate meant saying “I will” in church.
She tucked her feet into her slippers, and resealed the box of confections for a second delivery. Outside her room, heavy tapestries lined a stone corridor where cold morning air seeped through the seams of her dress and little clouds formed from her breath. She only knocked once before bursting into Captain Starkley’s room.
“Harrod, a moment of your time.”
The captain paused in the middle of fastening the gold buttons of his naval frock coat. He watched wryly as she shut his bedroom door behind her and inclined his head. “Your highness.”
Sibylla flung herself into a wingback chair near the meager fireplace and tossed the rose-colored chocolate box at Harrod. He caught it and raised a curious eyebrow, then finished buttoning his uniform one-handed. Though only thirty years old, her warden protector fussed over his uniform like an aged valet. Scrutinizing himself in the mirror, he straightened the skirt of his jacket over well-ironed trousers, pinning on his most important medal last.
“Is her highness in ill spirits this morning? Or is this her way of protesting my departure?” He jiggled the chocolate box. “Rose and violet? I’d sooner eat a bowl of begonia and clover.”
Sibylla exhaled unhappily. “Give them to your replacement if you don’t wish to eat them. He’s already sent word that he’ll be arriving this afternoon.”
After assuming the previous warden protector’s post, Captain Starkley had been trapped with Sibylla at Helmscliff for two years. A different kind of officer might have enjoyed the stationing – one who preferred taking walks in the garden to hunting down rogues on the open ocean. Harrod was not that man.
“You sound angry.” Harrod lifted the lid of the chocolate box and wrinkled his nose. “Shouldn’t your highness be thanking me for my service rendered? Perhaps you might offer some additional remuneration.”
Sibylla flicked wool lint into the hissing firewood. “Be grateful I don’t blackmail you to stay on another two years.” Having grown up without siblings – not counting the bastard half-brother she couldn’t mention in mixed company – she’d enjoyed every one of Harrod’s exasperations with her these past few years, and often teased him in return.
“I see your highness’ renowned humor is intact.”
“It’s no jest.” She slipped out of her shoes to warm the soles of her stockings. “I know all about your time aboard the HMS Whalestooth.”
“Ah yes, my thrilling experience as the master gunner. Did you know the cannons of a warship must be cleaned by hand six times a day to prevent salt corrosion? It was non-stop adventure on the high seas, your highness. I became an expert in the various grades of chamois cloth to best bring out the sheen.”
“You became an expert in pineapple piracy.”
Harrod feigned a look of wounded dignity. “Piracy, your highness? Me?”
“After ‘escorting’ a merchant ship carrying her royal majesty’s pineapples to an Ibnovan port, the captain cl
aimed the cargo lost at sea in a storm, then turned around and sold them to the port’s mayor. A certain master gunner, I hear, bartered the fruit’s price to double its worth.”
“How did you–” Harrod cleared his throat. “Your highness was barely fourteen.”
Sibylla grinned. “One must learn the art of intrigue sooner rather than later.”
Harrod compressed the corners of the rose-colored box in his hands, but gave no other sign of discomfort. “I acted under the orders of my commander.”
“Who now serves as Admiral of the Fleet. I doubt the Lord Harlum would be held accountable while you’re at hand.”
“Wasn’t it your highness who once trounced all the young ladies at some poetry competition in Derbershin by writing an elegy for the fall of man’s morality?” Harrod shook his head as though aggrieved. He removed a dark chocolate from the box and popped it in his mouth. “To think that little girl has grown into a blackmailer.”
He was teasing her now. So much for her threat.
“Perhaps we might take one last tea together? Do you still have that chicory from Lipthveria?”
Harrod pitched a log onto the fire. “I’ll ring for the maid.”
While they waited, Sibylla flexed her fingers. She’d have liked to return to Caligo with the captain, but she was only permitted to leave Helmscliff when her chapel’s monstrance required a fresh supply of “divine fluids.” Despite all of Myrcnia’s noble houses bearing magic blood, only the royal family was worshipped. Most fervent Myrcnians believed the queen, her children, and grandchildren were divine, and, as such, on her sixteenth birthday Sibylla had been brought to St Myrtle’s cathedral to bless her own chapel. Her blood was drawn and placed in a large gold monstrance for commoners to venerate. Even exiled she was expected to perform her spiritual duties.
“What will you do first when you return to Caligo?” asked Sibylla, knowing Harrod hadn’t taken a day of leave during his stationing.
“I intend to catch a man who is plummeting off the precipice of social respectability. I’ll try, anyway.” He twisted his mouth. “You may recall a certain Roger Weathersby.”
Sibylla jolted upright, but Harrod crossed his legs without a care.
He swallowed a second chocolate before noticing her interest. “So you are curious about what’s become of him?”
Sibylla’s throat tightened, and she answered in a reedy voice. “Of course not.” She hadn’t seen that two-faced liar in years, not since she spied him locking lips with a certain royal attendant beneath the weeping ash in the palace gardens. Once she’d even let that blackguard sit beside her on the ash’s gnarled roots and amuse her with rambling yarns that ended in cringeworthy puns.
“Your highness doesn’t wish for me to deliver some private correspondence, then?” Harrod leaned back in his chair with a smirk. “You could clear the air between the two of you, as it were.”
Sibylla’s tongue curled. “If you provoke me further, you’ll find inking isn’t my only talent.”
Her magical gifts had emerged between the ages of twelve and fourteen, passed down through her parents. From her mother’s House of Cornin, Sibylla had inherited an inking trait that allowed her to manipulate black fluid that bloomed beneath her fingernails, while from her royal father Prince Henry, she’d inherited a touch of bioluminescence and her great-grandfather King Rupert’s whistle-click – a shrill burst of air shaped by her tongue that could upturn a collar or make a person’s ears ring.
“Shall I give you a taste of old King Rupert’s ear-shattering whistle?”
Harrod grimaced and dropped the subject. He reached for the poker and prodded a half-charred log. “Blast. How long does it take to bring up some damned tea?” He squeezed her shoulder before leaving to fetch the tea himself.
Sibylla suppressed a laugh at how quickly his patience broke. Here at Helmscliff, none of the staff relished their duties – not the maids who left the stairs dusty and the foyer pocked with muddy boot-prints, nor her lady-in-waiting whose only interest lay in teaching her to play the concertina. Technically, she shouldn’t come and go from Harrod’s room as she pleased either, but after a mere month, he’d stopped caring whether she behaved like a proper lady or not.
Her brow wrinkled in dismay. Though she’d certainly miss his model ships, engraved pistols, and the atlas she loved perusing in the evenings, she would mourn the absence of her favorite person most of all.
Sibylla pulled the chair closer to the fire, her eyes drifting to the secretary desk in the corner of the room. Should she write Roger after all? Invent some exotic ailment, perhaps, to lure him from his medical studies in Caligo. She imagined him arriving in a neat frock coat and hat, an auscultation scope around his neck and a shiny leather bag at his side. “Dr Weathersby, at your service,” he’d say. “Tell me where it hurts.”
Such foolishness! She sat on her hands as she tried to let the desire pass by, but after a few crackles from the pitiful flames she stood with a huff. Removing parchment from the slender desk drawer, she flexed her fingers. Her own magic rendered ink and quill obsolete. What had first manifested as an ability to release dark ink-clouds into the air similar to a squid’s underwater escape she’d perfected into precise manipulations.
As bodily ink pooled beneath her fingernails, black letters appeared on the sheet as though penned by quill.
Dear Roger,
Her pinkie twitched, and a line of ink sliced through his name as though skewering the man himself.
Dear Snotsniffer,
Too mean? The nickname had a certain sentimental value if only for its ability to elicit a rise out of him. She encircled the salutation in a slender daisy chain.
I couldn’t say I’ve given you much thought until today. After you departed with full pockets from a royal bribe, it was clear the mistake I made in trusting you. When I learned you’d lost your mother, I thought to send you a letter, but found myself in an unfavorable position. Although I had once imagined you and I carrying on for some time, I never knew how black your heart could be.
I regret having stolen those kitchen scraps for you when I was eight, and playing hog-the-wash with Lady Esther’s skivvies in the yard. I should have never taught you to read and write so you could send love letters to other ladies too old for you by far. The first kiss I gave you, your mouth tasted like smoked haddock.
Did you know I spied you with Dorinda the night before you vanished? And afterwards she showed me your treasured physician’s medal as proof of your dalliance with her. A gift that demonstrated how you treated her with more kindness than you did me. At least with the funds you were given you’ll have no recourse for regret. A generosity I wish I’d been shown.
Was it worth it? Do you have your own practice now? Or perhaps you’re still in residency as a medical student. I never did receive any apology, though I waited on the docks and behind Mrs Pennystack’s hay barn. If I’d meant anything to you, you’d have given me one already. At least then I could have forgiven you.
Dodge, you really are the most awful man I’ve ever known.
With warmest regards,
Sibylla
Without a single word asking Roger to liberate her from Helmscliff, the letter read more like a whipping than a wish for reconciliation. She was still angry after five years.
She sighed as the ink beneath her fingernails thinned. She had little control over her marriage prospects, and Roger had known that. But he left without a word – and for money, too. He should have suffered a half-hearted farewell, if only to spare her feelings. At least, he might have written. She’d taught that man to write. He had no excuse.
She crumpled the parchment into a ball and tossed it toward the damp fireplace.
When Harrod finally entered with a silver tray in his hands, she’d returned to her chair. As her personal bodyguard, he had often doubled as an attendant over the last two years. While the tea steeped, he slipped a small box next to her cup.
She lifted it. “What is this?”
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He cleared his throat and avoided eye contact. “A parting gift.” Inside, housed in blue velvet, lay a locket – silver with an oval etching of a ship. She cracked it open with her fingernail. No picture, no lock of hair, just a slip of heavy white paper waiting to be inked. She raised her eyebrows.
He waved her off. “Just magic whatever you want in there.”
“How sentimental, Harrod.” Smiling, she took a sip of tea.
Without removing the cardstock from the locket, Sibylla used her magic to ink a portrait of a man. When she’d finished, she blew onto the ink to make it dry faster. Harrod leaned over to get a closer look, but Sibylla snapped the locket shut before he could see her handiwork.
“Don’t worry,” said Sibylla. “It’s not of you.”
Sibylla’s bedroom window afforded her a view of the front yard where Harrod stood, making final adjustments to his saddle. Snow stuck to his uniform like cotton gauze and in a matter of minutes his hat and shoulders had turned solid white. The muscular bay gelding huffed steam while its master mounted. Sibylla pressed her hand against the glass. Branches of ice covered the bottom of the pane. She half-hoped the horse would rear up and throw him, so he might stay one day more at Helmscliff.
By the time she stepped away from the window, only the horse’s hoof prints remained in the snow. Seeking solace from the sudden emptiness at Helmscliff, she retrieved her copy of Salston’s The Barnmaid of Bareth from beneath her pillow and threw herself into his sinuous tale. Curled next to the fireplace, she devised a way to trap the lecherous priest in the first act and outsmart the lascivious opera singer of the second. She was deep into the third act, where the heroic lawyer rescues the barnmaid from falling into the clutches of the randy ventriloquist, when a knock on the door startled her. She’d forgotten to take her luncheon, and a maid must have thought to deliver her meal.
Instead, an unfamiliar young man entered with a tray in one hand. He wore the uniform of the queen’s light cavalry, a cranberry-colored pelisse over a jacket, and riding breeches in deep marine blue. His blond mustache seasoned his face, and Sibylla admitted he was amiably good-looking compared to the hoary regulars posted at Helmscliff.
The Resurrectionist of Caligo Page 2
