Lady Killer

by Michele Jaffe

  “Thank you, Mr. Copperwith,” Clio said as she untied the gag from Toast’s mouth. “I’ll be cautious.”

  “I was you, I’d lock that monkey in the house and never let him out again,” the apothecary said as he opened the door to let them out. “He’s going to get you killed, Miss Clio, mark my words.”

  “I would trust Toast with my life,” Clio replied, little guessing how soon she would have to.

  The Great Hall at Dearborn House had long since ceased to vibrate with the sounds of men laughing, women’s heels clicking, gossips whispering, gallants complimenting, and fine silks swishing when Lord Edwin Nonesuch entered his mother’s chamber to ask if she heard the infernal whistling outside her window that was keeping him awake.

  Thirty-six women with distinct and highly varnished expressions looked at him from under thirty-six distinct hair-arrangements as he crossed the threshold. Or rather, thirty-seven, for Lady Alecia herself sat among the busts that held a portion of her famous collection of hairpieces, scrutinizing them.

  No one knew exactly how many wigs she had, but she could go for more than two months without appearing in public in the same one twice, each more elaborate than the last, and all made of real human hair. Her most valued pieces were those taken entire from the heads of the dead or dying, and it was these that stood arrayed around the room. Every time she acquired a new treasure of this stature she had a stand for it made in the exact image of the person whose hair would sit atop it. Indeed, she had earned a bit of a reputation in France for delaying the execution of a golden-haired shepherdess, supposed to be a witch, long enough to allow an artist to make a sketch of her face that could later be applied to a bust. By far the most esteemed piece in her collection was the Anne Boleyn, which had reportedly been scalped from that unfortunate at the very moment of her execution. She had just had that bust redone, having deemed the older version too morbid, and it was toward the now smiling face of that doomed queen that Lady Alecia gestured.

  “Do you think Annie would be better tonight?” she asked her son before he could speak. She was on familiar terms with all of her heads. “The Mary Hatfield kept getting in my eyes last time and distracting me, but I worry about sending the wrong message,” she explained. “It is really a question of whether one prefers to play the seductress or the murderess.”

  Edwin frowned. “Why should it matter? Who will see you in bed? Did you hear someone—”

  “Bed?” Lady Alecia laughed hollowly, interrupting him. “Whatever gave you that idea, Edwin? We shall not be abed for many hours.”

  For a moment Edwin looked at her in horrified silence, then he mouthed the word, “No.” Finally finding his voice, he said it aloud. “No. We cannot. You promised we would not do it again.”

  Lady Alecia’s face hardened. She reached for the Mary Hatfield—the famous murderess who had served a pie made of her husband and children to the neighbors who had come to support her in her time of loss; she would have gotten away with it, too, if the bullet her husband had lodged in his kneecap had not gotten caught in one of the guest’s throats—and lifted its long brown tresses carefully to her head. “I promised no such thing.”

  “But you will ruin us,” Edwin said, almost stuttering. “You will destroy us all. As soon as anyone finds out, we are done for. Do not do this, mother,” he implored.

  Her expression was anything but maternal. “You are a fool, Edwin. You have always been a fool. No one knows anything about it. They do not even begin to suspect.”

  “But how long do you think you can cover it up?” Edwin whined.

  Lady Alecia clucked with disapproval. “Idiot. Don’t you see? Everything is perfect. Something happened at the ball tonight that I could only have dreamed of. No scandal will ever touch us.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You wouldn’t and I don’t care to explain it. But trust me.” Her voice softened as she finished pinning the wig on and turned to look at her son. “Haven’t I always been right before?”

  Edwin hesitated. “Yes.”

  “And I shall not fail now. This is it. The moment and the means of our triumph are here. We need only grasp them.”

  “But someone is going to have to pay,” Edwin half pled, half moaned.

  “Someone will,” she assured him, picturing the face in her mind, and the long, brown hair—similar to the wig she was now wearing and yet much more precious to her—that she had coveted for so long. “Someone will.”

  I wonder if the hairpiece could be done in time for Mariana’s wedding, she thought as she left the room, dragging her son behind her. It would look so lovely with my dress.

  Miles stood at the open window of his room, drinking. From his position he could have heard the hum of crickets and occasionally have seen the faint glimmer of a firefly, but what he was hearing and seeing was not outside. It was in his head, a dreamlike vision he had seen many times before, a vision he tried to keep at bay.

  Three years earlier he had begun purging himself. First of love. Then of hate. He had intentionally organized his life so that slowly, all emotion faded from him, like the ink of an old manuscript, growing fainter and fainter until its traces were impossible to make out. He felt nothing now; his insides were blank. He had his work and his wine and everything in between was empty. He was like an elaborate binding that endured even when the pages it contained had yellowed and crackled away.

  Only three things remained. Anger. Pain. And the vision.

  She lay on her side, her hair splayed like a golden curtain out over the crisp white linen of the pillow, one arm thrown over her eyes. Her wrists were blue and green and purple with bruises. There were dark marks on her smooth shoulders where someone had held her struggling body down. And on her neck were the two brown pricks.

  “Liar,” Beatrice’s voice said in his head with the rich Devonshire accent it acquired when she was angry. “You said you would always protect me. You failed, Miles. This is your fault.”

  You failed you failed you failed.

  He drained his glass and reached for the carafe again.

  The Royal Astrologer, up early to cast the queen’s chart for the next day, looked up at the sky and made the following notation in his book: 4 hours past midnight. Moon—one degree beyond half-full. Waning.

  Chapter Four

  Clio awoke suddenly, hitting her knee against the edge of the old chest in her study. In the space it took her eyes to focus, she realized that she had been sleepwalking again, and that this time she had gone all the way downstairs. Outside it was a bright day and the foot traffic in the street was already heavy, but Clio felt as though she were still engulfed in night. She tried for a moment to catch the tail end of a vision—a memory?—she had seen right before she awoke, but it was gone. In its place she was left with only the vague notion that it had been important.

  “Drat,” she cursed under her breath, rubbing her bruised knee. Arthur Copperwith, Apothecary’s, Anti-Perambulation Serum had worked for three nights—for three blissful nights she had both laid down and awakened in her bed—but apparently its efficacy had worn off. He had warned her that might happen, that she might have to increase the dosage, but she still felt discouraged. And somehow she did not think the problem was with the dosage.

  Limping slightly, she followed the sound of voices back toward the kitchen. It was a large room made of rough-hewn stones with an enormous fireplace in one wall and a wide table in the middle. She had always loved kitchens—she spent most of her time growing up sitting by the fire and reading and trying to be invisible—and she especially loved this one because it was large and filled with light, and because it was hers. Or would be, she thought with a grimace, until she ran out of money.

  “The dawn arisith,” a male voice boomed at her as she entered, and she traced a mock curtsey in her nightgown.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hakesly,” she said.

  “Good morning, dear patroness,” he replied with a slight bow.

  Clio loo
ked around the kitchen. “Where is Mr. Williams?”

  “Quiet you two,” the other man sitting at the table shushed. “I’ve got to get this down.” It was Mr. Pearl, the scribe of the group. “Mr. Hakesly, on your cue.”

  Mr. Hakesly pointed to Inigo who was seated at the other side of the kitchen near the fire, holding two flat pans. At Mr. Hakesly’s signal, Toast dove for cover and Inigo brought the pans together with a resounding crash. A voice from above them began shouting “Bosun! Bosun!” and Mr. Williams burst into the room through the window, arms waving, hair frothing. “Mariners, fall too’t, yarley! Blow til thou bust thy wind! We’ll blast—no, no, no.” He stopped abruptly and shook his head. “Too blustery. Scare an audience senseless like that.”

  “I said before, and I maintain that it’s coming through the window that’s wrong,” Mr. Hakesly said. “Come in from stage left and you’ve got a winning scene.”

  Mr. Williams muttered something about no one appreciating innovation and disappeared out the kitchen door—stage left—while Mr. Pearl diligently crossed out part of what he had written and dipped his quill in ink. Over his shoulder, Clio could read the words “Bosun, bosun” in his tiny, precise script at the top of the page.

  Mr. Hakesly, Mr. Williams, and Mr. Pearl, known in the theater world as the Triumvirate, had been writing plays together for more than forty years, with an unprecedented absence of success. Not one of their plays had ever made it beyond the third act before being booed off the stage, shut by the censors, or pulled for lack of audience. Not that this bothered them. They went on writing because they loved it, and because they were certain that their masterpiece was just around the corner. And because, with Clio supporting them, they did not have to worry about eating.

  “I’m sorry I interrupted, I didn’t know you were rehearsing,” Clio apologized, but Mr. Hakesly waved it away.

  “Always a pleasure to see our muse. And I want you to know, we’ve been studying our charge.” He nodded toward Inigo, sitting poised with the pot lids. “We think the boy has a future as an artist. Look at this.” He held up a very good drawing of Toast.

  Clio was impressed, but before she could say anything, Mr. Williams called from the corridor, “Are we rehearsing or are we going to chat all day?”

  Chastened, Mr. Hakesly gave Inigo his cue. Toast hid, the pots clanged, and the scene began again, again ending abruptly, this time in a collision between Mr. Williams and the vegetable basket. He was in the process of extricated himself from a cabbage when he looked down at his hands and saw that he was holding a paper. He turned it over twice as if he did not recognize it, then said, “Oh, Clio, there was a messenger at the door. He left this for you.”

  Clio took the note, ran her fingers over the familiar seal, and slit it open. As she read it, she began to scowl. Asking the Triumvirate to keep an eye on Inigo, she carried the note upstairs with her, where she changed from her tattered nightgown into one of her tattered day gowns. On the way back down, she reread the message and her scowl deepened. She was just crumpling it into a tight ball when she reentered her study.

  It was a long room that ran the length of the house, with small-paned windows facing both onto the street and into the back garden. The walls housed shelves full of books, between and along the top of which were diamond-shaped inlays of gold and cherry-colored wood. A cherry mantle carved with medallion portraits of the seven muses picked out in ivory surrounded the deep fireplace, now unlit, and a worn but still richly colored rug in greens, blues, and creams covered the wood floor. The beams of the ceiling were whitewashed and painted with green vines and pink flowers, echoing the pink roses that clung to the facade of the house and pressed against the windows as if eager for entrance. There were a dozen chairs of different shapes and sizes arranged around a large trunk at the end of the room nearest the street, each with different colored cushions in varying stages of disintegration. At the other end of the room, closer to the garden, was a massive, scarred, and vaguely lopsided wooden desk. It, and most of the books, had belonged to Clio’s father and were her only inheritance from him—besides, of course, her wickedness.

  There was a man standing in front of the desk when she came in. He turned as she entered and her scowl became a smile at the sight of him. “Elwood! I cannot thank you enough for coming,” she said, taking his hand in both of hers.

  “You know I would do anything for you,” Elwood replied earnestly. He had practiced declaring his feelings to Clio so many times in front of his mirror that for a while he had been perpetually hoarse. Now he cleared his throat, clearing away the words that her presence always inspired, and said instead, “I would have been here sooner but the streets are a mess today. Not only was there a huge explosion last night, but apparently every dressmaker in London has been called in to fray the hems and sleeves of their finest gowns, and footmen from every house have been sent out and told not to return unless they bring a small monkey with them. A bidding war broke out in Southwark over what was supposed to be a fine specimen, but turned out to be a bear cub.” He looked at the threadbare dress Clio was wearing, and then at Toast as the monkey crept into the study and leaped onto her shoulder. “Is there any chance you had something to do with these new fashions?”

  Clio groaned. “You heard about the Dearbourn ball.”

  “I hear about everything.”

  It was true. Until the war with Spain two years earlier, Elwood had worked for Lawrence Pickering, the king of the London underworld. His job had been to collect and store all information about people whose last names began with the letters “A” through “F,” and he had continued in that occupation in the employ of the Special Commission for the Security of London after his boss had retired, rising to the rank of deputy commissioner. He and Clio had met during one of her first investigations, and since then she had found him an invaluable resource. And a very good friend.

  “But I do not suppose you called me over just to learn about the latest styles, or to have me tell you that there is a very good engraved portrait of you in today’s News from Court report on the ball,” Elwood continued, then eyed her closely. “You look like you haven’t eaten in days, Clio. Your urgent message would not happen to have anything to do with the state of your finances, would it? Your ledger was lying open on the desk and I happened to glance at it.”

  Clio shook her head. “No. There is nothing you can do about that.”

  “I have some money saved and—”

  Clio put up a hand to stop him. “Absolutely not. That debt is my fault and a result of my stupidity and mine alone to see to.”

  “You are not stupid, Clio,” Elwood said softly. Then, taking a cue from her vehemence he asked, “Does the debt have something to do with Justin?”

  She looked at him, then looked away, and nodded. “Don’t say it. I know you warned me against him. It was just that—”

  That what? Clio asked herself. That she was a fool. She had known without a doubt that she was not in love with Justin Greeley. She knew what it felt like to be in love, because for ten years she had been in love with someone else, quietly, secretly, and completely. But that man could never love her back. She did not need Princess Erika’s water-jug prediction that she would “not experience true love until the fireflies came out at noon”—that is, never—to tell her that.

  And so when Justin had said he was in love with her, she had decided that was enough. He understood her heart was not his yet, Justin had said, but he would wait, because it was worth it. She was worth it. And he loved her.

  It was the first time anyone had said anything like that to her. Anyone. After a childhood of being told she was no good and unwanted, it felt so wonderful to hear those words that she had entirely lost her head. So what if kissing his thin lips was not entirely pleasurable—perhaps somewhat less pleasurable even than the kisses she had experienced the day before. So what if he insisted on taking over her investigations, and mocking her for reading so many big books, and laughing off her suggest
ions as the ideas of “his silly, foolish little girl.” He had loved her.

  Said he loved her.

  Elwood had tried to caution her, but he had been able to give her no concrete information—Greeley starting with a “G” and therefore being outside his provenance—and so she had believed every word Justin had spoken. When he told her that he wanted to be with her forever but first needed a small loan, she had given it willingly, even happily. It was only once he had disappeared that she learned he had taken her bill of credit and used it to secure an even larger loan, in her name, with Captain Black, London’s most dangerous and notorious thug and a man she had sworn to destroy if she ever had the chance. It was only after Justin was already living with another woman in Paris that she had learned she now owed an enormous debt to the person she considered her mortal enemy, who refused to delay its repayment from ten days hence except under terms of exchange—Toast—which were unacceptable to her. It was only then, when relief mixed with her anger, that she knew he had been right, that she was a silly and foolish girl. It was only then that she knew how stupid she had been.

  But that was her problem and her fault and she would not get anyone else involved. For the moment, anyway, she had a far more pressing matter to distract her. According to her previous night’s rereading of the news sheets about the Vampire of London’s last appearance, he never went more than a day without killing. Apparently no body had been found that morning and since the Vampire seemed to go to pains to ensure that his kills would easily be located, that meant there had been none the previous night. Which meant, in turn, that there was a very good chance that tonight, unless she found him first, a girl would die.

  “Read that,” she said to Elwood, holding out one of the three-year-old news sheets she had been studying the night before and letting Toast curl his tail around her finger.