by Alma Katsu
I started with a trip to visit a professor at Harvard College who I had met at one of Adair’s parties. Not just any afternoon tea party or salon to fete intellectuals; no, I’d met this man at one of Adair’s parties of a special variety. I tracked down his office in Wheydon Hall, but he was with a student. When he saw I was waiting in the hall, he dismissed the young man and came out to fetch me, the most charming smile on his devilish old face. Perhaps he was half afraid I’d come to blackmail him, since the last time I’d seen him, he was astride a rent boy even younger than his students and crowing proudly. Or perhaps he was hoping I was delivering an invitation to another party.
“My dear, what brings you here today?” he said, patting my hand as he led me into his office. “I am so seldom blessed with visits from fair young ladies. And how is our mutual friend, the count? I trust he is in good health?”
“As fine as ever,” I said truthfully.
“And to what do I owe this happy visit? Perhaps word of another soirée …?” His eyes glinted with the sharpest of hungers, his appetite whetted from too many afternoons gazing over fields of fresh young boys.
“I was hoping I might impose on you for a favor,” I said, reaching into my drawstring purse for the page I’d stolen. The paper itself was unlike any other I’d seen, thick and coarse and nearly as brown as butcher’s wrap, and now that it was freed from the press of its wooden cover, had begun to curl into a scroll.
“Hmm?” he said, clearly surprised. But he accepted the paper from my hand and brought it close to his face, lifting his eyeglasses to inspect it. “Where did you get this, my dear?”
“From a bookseller,” I lied. “A private bookseller who claims to have a trove of ancient books on a subject dear to Adair’s heart. I thought I might purchase the books as a present for Adair, but the language is unreadable to me. I wished to verify that the book is as the dealer claims. You can never be too careful.”
“No, you cannot,” he muttered as he examined the page. “Well, the paper is not of local manufacture. Not bleached. Possibly made by an individual for his own use, as it were. But it is the language you came to me about, isn’t it?” He smiled modestly over his spectacles; he was a professor of ancient languages, that much I’d remembered from our fleeting introduction at that party. Exactly what languages, I couldn’t recall.
“Prussian, I would think. Similar, at least. Very odd, possibly an archaic form of the language. I’ve not seen the likes of it before.” He reached back to a shelf and pulled down a fat, heavy book and began flipping through its onionskin pages.
“Can you tell me what is being talked about? The subject?”
“What do you expect it to be about?” he asked curiously, still flipping pages.
I cleared my throat. “Magic. Of some kind.”
He stopped what he was doing and stared at me.
“Alchemy?” I said, more weakly this time. “Something to do with transforming one thing into another?”
“Oh, my dear, it is most certainly about something magical, possibly a spell or incantation of some sort. Exactly what, I can’t tell you. Maybe if you left this with me for a few days …?” His smile was coy. I knew enough of the work of scholars to suspect what he might do with this paper left in his care: he might try to stake a career on it, using it as the basis for this or that study, and I’d never see it again. Or, worse yet, if Adair were to find out that it was missing, given over to our randy professor friend, well … to say it would go badly for me was an understatement. He lifted an eyebrow in expectation, but I leaned over his desk and snatched the paper back.
“No, I couldn’t, but thank you for your kind offer. What you’ve told me is sufficient,” I said, leaping from the chair and opening the door. “And please, do me the favor of not mentioning this to Adair if you should see him? When it comes to gifts, he is a difficult man to please. I do want to surprise him with the books.” The old professor looked faintly surprised himself as I bolted from his office.
Next, I went in search of a midwife.
She was hard to find. They were becoming scarcer in cities such as Boston; physicians had almost taken over the job of delivering babies, at least for those who could afford them. Nor was I looking for just any midwife. I needed one like those you’d find in the country, one who knew all about curing and healing with plants and such. The ones who, a hundred years earlier in this very same town, might have been called witches by their neighbors and met their deaths pressed beneath the board or hanged.
Street whores told me where to find the midwife, since she was the only help the prostitutes could afford to cure their clap or help with unwanted pregnancies. I felt a shiver run down my back when I crossed the threshold of this woman’s tiny room: it smelled of dust and pollen and old things kept close to rotting, not unlike the secret locked room in Adair’s attic.
“Sit down, dearie, and tell me why you’ve come,” she said, motioning to a stool on the other side of the hearth. She was an older woman with a hard, pragmatic cast at the center of her gaze, but an expression of understanding on her face.
“I need to know what this is, ma’am. Have you ever seen it before?” I took a handkerchief from my purse and opened it for her to see. The pinch of botanical I’d stolen had been roughed up in transit, separating into tiny stems and slivers of brittle, broken brown leaves. She held a leaf up to her eye, then crushed it between her fingers and sniffed.
“That is neem, my dear. Used for a great variety of illnesses. Not exactly common in these parts, though, and in this natural state, rarer still. Mostly you see it in tinctures and the like, watered down to its most diluted to make it go as far as possible. How’d you come across it?” she asked, matter-of-factly, as though she might be in the market to purchase some. Perhaps she thought that was why I’d sought her out. She dusted her hands over the fire and let the fragments of leaf fall into the flame.
“I’m afraid I cannot tell you,” I said as I pressed a coin into her hand. She shrugged but accepted it, tucking the money into her pocket. “Here is my second request. I have need of an item … I need you to fix something to bring on a very heavy sleep. Not necessarily a peaceful one. It must render the person unconscious as quickly as possible.”
The midwife gave me a long, silent look, wondering perhaps if I really meant that I wished to poison someone, for how else could you interpret that request? At last, she said, “It can’t be coming back to me, if the authorities are called into this matter for some reason.”
“You have my word.” I put five more coins into her hand, a small fortune. She looked from the coins to me, then closed her fingers around the gold.
In the carriage on the ride back to the mansion, I sat and peeled back the handkerchief from the lump the midwife had given me. The lump was stony hard and white, and though I didn’t know it at the time, deadly white phosphorus, probably purchased from a matchstick maker, who in turn had stolen it from her place of employment. The midwife had treated it gingerly, as though she didn’t like to handle it, and instructed me to grind it in a mortar and mix it in some wine or spirits, adding laudanum to help the concoction go down. “It’s very important to dilute it for medicinal effects. You could use laudanum alone, but it takes a while to be effective. Phos will do the trick quickly, but … if a body was to take this amount of phosphorus, the result would be bad indeed,” she said with an unmistakable look in her eye.
I’d already settled on a plan, a very dangerous plan, but as I took my leave, I could think only of the true Adair. My mind was full of pity for the unfortunate peasant boy, without even a grave because there was no corpse to give back to the earth. His handsome form was the possession of the man who had overtaken his body through the dark arts.
As for the last bits of the physic’s story—well, it was beyond me to know how much was true. Maybe he’d visited Adair’s family and left a tribute out of guilt or in thanks for giving him their son, for handing over such a fine body. Or maybe that part was a lie,
told to make the story palatable and tragic, to influence the listener’s heart in his favor, to deflect suspicion. And the loss of his kingdom? A calculated risk … but maybe it was worth it, in the end, to gain a fine new vessel to hold his miserable old soul. But if I didn’t stop this terrible man, he would take the dearest thing in the world from me—Jonathan.
Handsome, strong, and able, with a fearsome manhood, the peasant’s body must have seemed like a godsend to the physic. But here in the new world, the peasant’s body had its limitations. Or rather, the limitations were with the face: it was disconcertingly exotic, olive toned, framed by wild, wiry hair. I saw it in the expressions of the Brahmins when they met Adair, by the wrinkle to their brows, mistrust flitting across their eyes. Here, among descendants of the British, Dutch, and Germans, who had never seen a Turk or an Arab and for whom the hair was not unlike that of their slaves, the peasant’s body was a liability. Now I understood Adair’s cold, appraising eye as he studied the beautiful but clubfooted scholar Tilde had fetched, and his hungry appreciation for Jonathan’s flawless beauty. He’d sent his hellhounds out into the world scouting for the perfect vessel; he even had Jude scouring the countryside for a replacement. But here in Boston, time had run out for Adair and he needed a new body, one that would be amenable to the tastes of the masters of this new environment.
He wanted Jonathan. He wanted to slip on Jonathan like a disguise. People were drawn to Jonathan like bees to sugar, dizzy and powerless with this unknowable attraction. Men wanted to befriend him, orbit him like planets around the sun. Women gave themselves up to him wholly—and none knew this better than I. They would forever crowd around him, open themselves up to him, not realizing that the spirit inside was evil and waiting to exploit them.
And because no one knew Adair’s secret, there was no one to stop him. No one except me.
FORTY-FOUR
I arrived at the mansion to find the household in an uproar. The servants were scurrying down the stairs like water rushing downhill, down to the cellar, hiding in storerooms, away from the ruckus coming from above. Fists pounded on doors, latches rattled. The muffled voices of Tilde, Dona, and Alejandro echoed from overhead.
“Adair, what is going on?”
“Let us in!”
I ran up the stairs to find the three huddled helplessly at the foot of the attic stairs, unwilling to interrupt whatever was happening beyond the closed door. We heard terrible noises: Uzra crying out, Adair roaring in response. We heard the flat sound of flesh striking flesh.
“What’s this about?” I demanded, whirling on Alejandro.
“Adair went looking for Uzra, that’s all I know.”
I thought of Adair’s story—the physic’s fury over things stolen from his table. “We must go up there! He’s hurting her.” I reached for the doorknob, but it refused to budge. He’d locked the door. “Get an ax, a sledgehammer, anything. We must break this door down!” I shouted but they only looked at me as though I’d lost my senses. “You don’t understand what he’s capable of—”
Then the sounds ceased.
After a few minutes, the key turned in the lock and Adair emerged, pale as milk. Uzra’s serpentine blade was in his hand and his cuff was stained bright red. He dropped the knife to the floor and pushed by us, retreating to his room. It was only then that we found her body.
“You had something to do with this, didn’t you?” Tilde said to me. “I can see the guilt on your face.” I didn’t answer. Looking down on Uzra’s body, my stomach lurched. He had stabbed her in the chest, and also slit her throat, and that must have been the last thing he did because she’d fallen to the ground with her head thrown back, some hair still twisted where he had held it in his fist. The words “by my hand and intent” echoed in my mind—the same words that had given her eternal life had been uttered again to take it away. Thinking of them now sent a shudder through me, as did spying the tattoo on her arm, thrown carelessly to her side. In the end, his mark upon her body meant nothing. He would retract his troth when it pleased him.
The fight could have been about anything and I would never know for sure, but the timing made it unlikely that it could be about anything other than the secret room. Somehow, Adair must have discovered that things had been taken, and blamed her. And she hadn’t disabused him of his assumption. She had either wanted to protect me or—very likely—welcomed this, her best chance at release through death.
I had taken those things knowing what the penalty might be. I just didn’t think it would lead back to Uzra. Nor did I think he would kill any of us, least of all her. It was far more in his character to deal out a brutal physical punishment and to keep his victim within his grasp, shivering in terror, wondering when Adair might decide to do it all over again. Never in a million years did I dream he would actually kill her, because I thought that, in his way, he loved her.
I dropped to the floor and held her hand, but it had gone cold already, the soul perhaps fleeing the body more quickly in our cases, so eager for release. The terrible thing was that I had been planning my escape, mine and Jonathan’s, but hadn’t given a thought to taking Uzra with us. Even though I knew how desperately she wanted to flee, it hadn’t entered my mind to help this poor girl who had borne Adair’s sick obsession for many years, who had been so kind to me and had tried to help me navigate this house of wolves. I had taken her for granted, and the cold recognition of my selfishness made me wonder if I wasn’t Adair’s soul mate for sure.
Jonathan had followed the commotion upstairs and, on seeing Uzra’s body on the floor, wanted to burst into Adair’s chamber and have it out with him. It took both me and Dona to restrain him. “To what end?” I shouted at Jonathan. “You and Adair could pummel each other from here to the end of time and never settle it. However much you might wish to kill each other, it’s not within the power of either of you.” How I wanted to tell him the truth—that Adair wasn’t who we thought he was, that he was far more powerful and dangerous and remorseless than any of us could know—but I could not risk it. I was afraid as it was that Adair would intuit my fear.
Besides, I could not tell Jonathan my true suspicion. I knew it all, now. Those soft looks Adair gave my Jonathan, it wasn’t because Adair was planning to bed him. The covetousness he had for Jonathan ran much deeper. Adair wanted to touch that body, to fondle and stroke, to know every dip and bulge and crook not because he wanted to swive Jonathan, but because he wanted to possess him. Possess that perfect body and be known by that perfect face. He was ready to inhabit a body that truly could not be resisted.
Adair sent out instructions: we were to clear out the fireplace in the kitchen and set up a bier. The scullery girl and the cook fled as we commandeered the kitchen, and Dona, Alejandro, and I took the cooking things from the hearth of the huge fireplace. We scrubbed its blackened walls and swept out the ash. The bier was made of wooden trestles laid with wide planks and we built a pyre in the space between the trestles, dry twigs and pinecones slathered with beef tallow for kindling, compacted straw and cured firewood for fuel. The body, wrapped in a white linen shroud, was laid on the planks.
A torch was put to the kindling, which lit easily enough. The logs took some time to catch and it was almost an hour before it had built into a great leaping bonfire. The heat in the kitchen was tremendous. Finally, the body caught fire, the shroud consumed rapidly, the fire dancing across it in streaks, the fabric curling like skin, black ash catching on the draft and spiriting up the chimney. The smell, alien and innately frightening, made everyone in the house restless. Only Adair could bear it, and he sank into an armchair pulled before the fireplace and watched the fire devour Uzra in stages: her hair, her clothing, then the skin of her downy arm before biting into the flesh. Finally, the body, heavy with moisture, began to sizzle and roast, and the smell of burning flesh filled the house.
“Imagine the stink rising over the house, out in the street. Does he not think the neighbors will smell it?” Tilde said tartly, eyes watering.
We huddled in the doorway to the kitchen, but eventually Dona and Tilde slinked off to their rooms, muttering darkly, while Alejandro and I remained outside the door to the kitchen, sunk to the floor, watching Adair.
By the time the sky outside started to lighten, the fire had burned itself out. The house now was filled with a thin gray smoke, which hung in the air, its perfume the acrid smell of wood ash. Only when the hearth was cool did Adair rise from his chair, touching Alejandro on the shoulder as he passed. “Have the ashes swept up, and scatter them on the water,” he commanded in a hollow voice.
Alejandro insisted on doing this himself, crouching inside the still warm firebox with a small willow broom and dustpan. “So much ash,” he murmured, oblivious to my presence. “All that wood, I suppose. Uzra herself cannot account for more than a handful.” At that moment, the brush touched something solid and he reached down, searching among the silt. He found a charred nugget, a piece of bone. “Should I save this? For Adair? Someday he may be glad to have it. Such things make powerful talismans,” he mused, turning it over like a rare specimen. But then he dropped it in the pail. “I suppose not.”
Adair withdrew from the rest of us after that. He stayed in his room and the only visitor he would receive was the solicitor, Mr. Pinnerly, who rushed in the following day with a profusion of papers exploding from his overstuffed satchel. He emerged an hour later, his face as red as though he’d run a country mile. I intercepted him by the door, proclaiming concern for his flushed complexion and offering to fetch him something cool to drink.
“Most kind,” he said as he gulped down some lemonade, mopping his forehead. “I’m afraid I cannot stay long. Your master has rather high expectations of what a mere lawyer is capable of accomplishing. It’s not as though I can command time and make it dance to my tune,” he harrumphed, then noticed the papers threatening to fly out of his satchel and attended to tucking them in place.
