The Resurrectionist of Caligo

by Wendy Trimboli

  “Oh, that will come,” she snapped. “Perhaps if I’d known what you’d become, I’d never have let Harrod talk me into signing that prerogative.” No. She unclenched her hands, but her breaths came short and rapid. No, she couldn’t have brought herself to act otherwise. Even if Harrod had told her the truth, she’d have done the same.

  “Then why don’t you pair of carps send me back to Old Grim and get it over with?”

  “Because Harrod and I…” What could she say? That they loved him?

  That she loved him? Had loved him. She stared at Roger’s contused face, his rumpled clothes, and unruly hair. She’d wanted so badly to see him again and now it choked her. “I thought you were a decent man.”

  With a desperate look in his eyes, Roger reached for her hand – a reckless, futile gesture. In an instant the emperor nudged Sibylla aside. She heard the scrape of his short sword leaving its scabbard and felt the whish of air as he leapt past her and held his blade to Roger’s chin. Roger wobbled back, but the emperor grabbed his shirtfront and held him fast.

  “You’re done here,” he said, allowing the blade to nick Roger’s skin.

  Roger put a hand to his jaw. His fingers came away tinged with blood. “Call off your dog, Sibet,” he growled. “You’ve gone too far.”

  Sibylla clung to the rail in shock. Not once all day had the emperor’s eyes sharpened as they did now. She couldn’t coax words from her lips, but it didn’t matter. He had no obligation to follow her commands.

  The emperor eased his blade off Roger’s throat, unable to keep a steady grip from laughing. “I’m no one’s dog, Mr Weathersby, and you’re just a pup.” He sheathed his blade, then wiped the thin trickle of blood from Roger’s jaw with his thumb. “You may wish to consider whom you’re addressing next time you speak. We all serve our masters, whether they be of mind or heart. And isn’t she yours either way?” He patted Roger’s cheek.

  Sibylla risked touching the emperor’s arm.

  He turned to her with a smile so pleasant she thought she’d been drugged. “Your highness.” He bowed his head, then made room for her to pass by, jamming Roger against the wall.

  As she squeezed past, Sibylla risked a glance at her Straybound’s face, his jinxed eyes glassed, refusing to meet hers. She bit her lip. Hesitating now would do more harm than good. As she left the building, the bitter night air hit her face. Rounding the corner as fast as her hitched skirts would allow, she almost stumbled into a man who stood contemplating the carcasses in the shop window.

  Harrod bowed deeply from the waist and held the position, staring at the pavement. “Your highness.” He’d thrown on an overcoat to cover his uniform and conspicuous medal and looked more like a constable than a naval officer.

  “Why are you here?” She’d had enough of smug, self-satisfied men pretending to be humble. He’d been avoiding her for days, and only when he knew she’d found Roger did he show himself.

  Harrod lifted his head. “I’ve come to explain.”

  “You.” She slapped his face. The impact sent a wave of pins and needles up her arm. Everything she’d stoppered up inside began to spill forth. “I trusted you, Harrod. I believed everything you told me like some maundering fool.”

  Wearing the red after-stain of her smack, he remained obeisant before her. “I couldn’t let him hang.”

  “You bloody fool, stop bowing already.”

  “Sibylla.” Harrod’s arm twitched toward her.

  “Don’t.” Warm wet ink pooled at her fingertips, staining her gloves. She flung a black cloud between them.

  “I wanted to explain the matter privately.”

  “You had plenty of opportunity.”

  “I didn’t know how to tell you. He’s a wretch, a malefactor even, but not a murderer. I took him into my household. My plan was to make him fit for service to your highness, but he’s proved more of a challenge than–”

  “And what of the child?” Sibylla interrupted. “His pet poltergeist, more alive than dead.”

  “She’s not his.”

  Relief trickled through her but did nothing to quell her anger. She fumed at his detached response. “How can you be certain? Tell me, captain. Do you know where Edgar is this very moment? Edmund? Or Edward? Don’t your locating talents only extend to your closest blood relations? Myself, Roger, our father. Maybe your own little bastards.” Her entire body shook with rage. “How could you do this? You’re my brother, the only one I have. I adored you, but you used me without consideration or regret.”

  Harrod cleared his throat and nodded toward the emperor. “Your highness is obviously unsettled.”

  She didn’t know how long the emperor had been standing there, and she didn’t care. She peeled off her ink-stained glove and dropped it on Harrod’s shiny boot. Obviously, Harrod cared more for his half-brother than Sibylla – his half-sister. She’d humiliated herself today for him, and for Roger. Now, she had nothing left to hold onto.

  “You tricked me into signing that vile contract. Even when faced with the queen and Dorinda, I was loyal to you. I’ve spent my life afraid someone would find you out; the thought made me sick to the bones. But here you are, so busy saving his life, you never once considered how I’d feel in the matter.” She turned to leave, but Harrod reached for her arm through the ink. A whistle-click sent him reeling. His shoulder smashed against the brick exterior of the shop, and he cupped his ear in pain. Harrod either didn’t have the courage to follow her, or feared she’d do worse the second time.

  Inside the carriage, Sibylla stared at the fog-shrouded buildings, watching the last lamps being lit for the night. The emperor sat with her in silence, a reminder of her impropriety and foolhardiness. She’d made a grave mistake in coming here.

  Shaking off her remaining glove, she forced her mouth into a smile. Harrod and Roger had each taken a dinner knife to her heart, and now she hadn’t the lungs to breathe. “Do you wish to return to the palace?”

  “My preference is unchanged.” The emperor reached into his coat pocket, and produced his small notebook. He flipped through the pages she’d inked earlier that day, and stopped on a blank sheet. “A map for the driver,” he said. “Wherever the cicada instructs, I will attend.”

  Regardless of what the emperor may have heard, she might still blur his memory with a lively evening out, to include a sampling of Myrcnia’s strongest liquors. Ink pooled beneath her fingernails as streets formed on the page. After all, she’d made an agreement with Timur. Even if it killed her, she intended to uphold her end of the bargain. The emperor would at least have Caligo’s famous beef and kidney stew to look upon fondly. The rest she’d handle tomorrow.

  26

  Roger stumbled upstairs to his garret. Nausea at the princess’ cutting remarks brought him to his knees just inside the door, and he retched into the pail that still smelled of dead cat. Hot tears dribbled down his nose and chin.

  So she’d seen him for what he truly was, then. Somehow she’d known he’d kissed doxies, and unearthed corpses, and had neglected poor Ada. And though he knew he wasn’t a murderer, now that she’d called him one to his face, he almost believed it.

  To think he hadn’t recognized her with her hair pinned up and the face of a sun-starved morel – a far cry from the impish apple-cheeked girl he remembered, the one with the insatiable sweet tooth.

  He’d surely changed in her eyes, too, but to far worse effect. That austere glare of hers invited no flippant teasing, or kisses in the servants’ passage behind the sunfish hanging. She didn’t even smile, not once.

  “You look right sozzled.” Ada’s small hand smoothed back the hair that had fallen in his face. “You should water your gin more. That’s what my ma says when she’s in a state.”

  Roger glanced at the girl, registering the smudged face, bird-thin elbows, and her blood-smeared smock that told him she’d helped Mrs Carver with the boning, tying, and grinding down in the shop. At least she looked better than her mother. “What a sod I am, Ada,” he
said in a choked voice. “Why do you stay on in this hole? You’d be better off in one of them charity workhouses than with me.” He retched again, and she patted his back.

  “Poor sack-’em-up man. I don’t need no taking care of.” Ada daubed his face with a damp cloth. “I heard you get a lamming on the stairs. That man were a weasel. But I liked the moonstar lady.”

  “Well, they can both rot in hell.” He must have looked like a slug in need of a salt-dousing to the princess. She might as well have squeezed lemons into his wounds, waltzing in as she had in that gauzy faeriedress just to remind him her place was the aether, and his the mud. Roger closed his eyes until he’d regained most of his composure. Then he felt in his coat pockets and pulled out a sad little flattened package. “Blast. I brought you teacakes from Harrod’s, but they was mashed to crumbs.”

  Roger slumped back over his bucket, trying to push Sibet from his mind. Best not to dwell on the princess. He drowned out her uppish voice in his head with a long swig from his flask. He didn’t need the reminder that he wasn’t a good man.

  Besides, he told himself firmly, he had bigger things to worry about. In defiance of her mother’s wishes, Roger had returned to take Ada to the hospital. Let Celeste haunt him. Her shade couldn’t possibly be as trying as her flesh-and-blood daughter. His own mother, on that final day, had kneaded his hand with her brittle fingers as if to say – I can’t face death alone.

  His heart sank knowing where he intended to bring her. At least a promise of food might coax her out of the garret. Roger hauled himself to his feet and put on his hat. “Come on then, Ghost. Tonight the young lady gets her pick of pie at the Fox & Weasel.”

  “I ain’t no lady,” she said. “But I’ll take your pie. Maybe tomorrow we can get whelks? Pickled whelks.”

  “Pickled whelks? No one likes pickled whelks.” Roger had been working over in his brain how to broach the topic of her mother, but every expression sounded lame, or false, or cruel. He wrapped a scarf around her neck, and they tiptoed down the stairs so as not to draw Mrs Carver’s attention.

  “But you like ’em.”

  “They’re something ghastly. Like chewing bits of soap soaked in kerosene.”

  “Are they really?”

  “To me they are. I only ever knew one person who liked the blasted things. Whenever she wanted ’em, I had to run all the way to Beadle Street for the pricey ones. I got quite good at choking ’em down with a grin.”

  “How daft.”

  “Of course it were daft. I loved her.”

  “Then why ain’t you with her?”

  Ada’s voice rang in his head. There were plenty of reasons, but none he cared to share.

  While Ada curled up next to her mother, Roger observed the deterioration of Celeste’s body. As with Lady Margalotte and Claudine, her belly had the same soft mounds dotting her stomach. During his earlier evaluations, he’d suspected gallstones or cirrhosis of the liver, but that hardly accounted for the current amount of swelling. While some bloating of the deceased was normal, Celeste still lived to whisper in her daughter’s ear. It didn’t seem right.

  With Ada’s head tucked under her mother’s chin, Roger palpated the stomach, examining the soft protruding spots in her abdominal wall. They had been concave divots the first time he’d examined her in Will-o’-the-Wisp Lane. Now he guessed a tumor – or a host of them – had expanded among her organs. She wouldn’t be strangled, or buried alive, like the other victims of this disease. Whether that was a mercy, he was no longer certain.

  Celeste’s uneven breath caught in her throat as she and Ada whispered beneath the tented sheet – a ghostly foreshadowing Roger couldn’t bear to watch. He left the women’s ward for the quiet corridor, not wishing to intrude on Ada’s grief, and afraid of Celeste confronting him for going against her wishes.

  He stalked the halls of St Colthorpe’s like a phantom himself, unwilling to leave Ada behind, but unsure of his role – what was he to her, anyway? An unreliable source of buns and teacakes at most.

  Despising this feeling of helplessness, he sought out the physician on duty to ask about the official diagnosis and whether Dr Lundfrigg had left any patient notes regarding his experiment. At the very least, Roger would search the mortuary for any other potential victims.

  As Roger approached the door to the storage bay where he’d once made nocturnal deliveries, the senior physician on night duty exited one of the side offices to intercept him.

  “This area is off limits,” snapped the physician. Roger recognized a recent graduate; single young men often got stuck with the night shift. “I won’t have the likes of you skulking about our hospital. You’re to shove off, or I’ll send for the constables.”

  “I need to know the diagnosis for the patient in bed nineteen. I work here.” Roger inwardly cursed his roughed-up face. No one trusted him by sight. “Dr Lundfrigg – Sir Finch – gives his blessing. I’ve been doing rounds as his assistant.”

  “Well, I would hardly know it to look at you. Why should I trust your words?” He sucked his lips in revulsion. “You could be the Greyanchor Strangler for all I know. Such a clever villain, thinking you could toady up to the royal physician himself.” The doctor caught Roger by the lapels and collared him. “But I’ll wager your neck brand that you’re nothing but a common criminal looking to snatch a stiff out from under my nose.” He tried to get his fingers under Roger’s cravat.

  If the doctor glimpsed his Straybound Stigma, he’d swing from the gallows. Sod that.

  Roger clapped the doctor’s ear with the flat of his hand. The man lurched sideways and grappled at Roger’s throat to catch himself. Such an amateur move. Roger’s pulse hammered – his first fair fight in weeks! He might never knock a practiced pugilist like Harrod cold, but he could still scrap as well as any streetwise lad. He thrust an arm between the doctor’s wrists and wrenched himself free. With one swift kick, his opponent toppled.

  “You’ll be in the bag for this!” shrieked the doctor from the floor. “Show your face here again, I dare you.”

  The sound of running footsteps echoed down the corridor – orderlies and morgue assistants must have heard the struggle. No reason to press his luck. Roger fled into the still-dark streets. Let Ada have her space. He’d keep the promise he’d made Harrod to return after his hospital shift, which he’d planned all along to say had run late. Roger didn’t fancy being arrested and hanged the night before his Binding, and since he hadn’t figured a way to get out of it, he’d let them wave their incense sticks and pronounce him “bewitched.” He had never feared any of that religious tripe, and tomorrow would be no different.

  27

  “I hear you kept his imperial majesty out until the wee hours, Sibylla dear,” said Lady Esther, setting down her breakfast plate. Her aunt’s shrill voice echoed in Sibylla’s skull. The emperor had insisted on that second bottle of Greenkills Sap Liquor, and, because of her mood, she’d slugged down more than her share. By the time their carriage had returned to Malmouth, she couldn’t tell whether she was slumped against the carriage box or the emperor’s shoulder.

  The royal family and a smattering of bleary-eyed Khalishkan dignitaries served themselves tarragon potatoes and caviar-stuffed boiled eggs from large silver chafing dishes. Sibylla, who had chosen a seat with vacancies on either side so she could avoid conversation this early in the morning, flinched. Shading her eyes from the sunlight, she bit into her sourdough toast.

  “And yet,” continued Lady Esther, “you shamelessly show your face among us. No child of mine was ever so impertinent.”

  “No child of yours is much of anything.” The queen, who approved of buffets in theory yet insisted that three footmen serve food to her personally, rebuked Lady Esther with a look.

  “Your majesty!” Lady Esther brought her fork down sharply. “Just this morning, Edgar assisted Dorinda in inspecting the footmen’s livery for the Royal Heritage Ball, and Edmund and Edward…” Her voice fizzled, but the queen’s brow arced
in expectation. “Well, they haven’t been out all night unattended, with no proper chaperone to keep their behavior in check.” Then with a whisper deliberate in its volume, she added, “Why, I heard her highness’ breath smelled so strongly of pine sap that one of the palace dogs nearly mistook her for a tree.”

  Having had her fill of breakfast insults, Sibylla meant to defend both herself and the emperor. Enough rumors of her supposed dalliances had spread throughout the palace. No doubt Lady Esther continued to have a hand in the cholera-like epidemic of gossip. Edgar and his mother could both go shrivel like coalfish in the sun for as much as she cared to hear their opinions.

  Sibylla raised her voice above the general chatter. “His imperial majesty desired a tour of our city, and I can think of no more gentlemanly a companion. What ill-mannered individual would refuse such a request? I’m shocked to think someone would deny his imperial majesty a meal at one of Caligo’s finest eateries.” Sibylla sipped her tea and mustered an innocent smile. “After all, he is our invited guest. Why, returning by midnight when Myrcnia has so many cherished diversions is nearly insulting. How nice it would have been to watch the sun rise together.”

  “Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, would it dearie?” Lady Esther lowered her voice to elude the queen’s sharp ears. “It seems his imperial majesty is too exhausted by your escapades to join us for breakfast. I’d have stayed in bed myself, had I not been led to believe our presence this morning was mandatory. If our puffed-up princess were not such a delightful dollop of cream, I’d think she had soured the man to our ways.”

  Sibylla chased a remnant of caper omelet across her plate. “And if my aunt weren’t such a happily married matron, I’d say she was a jealous old trout.”

  Lady Esther gripped the lacy edge of the tablecloth and stared hard into Sibylla’s eyes. “You poor, silly girl. Did you actually believe Lady Brigitte when she said you could marry the Emperor of Khalishka? We’ve all known for weeks. Your return to Caligo is nothing more than a pretense to lowering cheese tariffs.” Sibylla’s gaze slipped to the head of the table where the queen sat finishing her plate. “Go ahead. Ask her majesty if you dare. We both know what her answer will be. You’ll be engaged to Edgar the very second that Cabbage King crosses the border for home.”