“All right, Justine and I can start back on the Orient Express tomorrow. Catherine and Beatrice, can you follow us as soon as your shows are done? We’ll need to borrow money from Count Dracula, because I don’t think we can afford train fare. And Diana—well, she can come with us, or go with you, but I’m pretty sure she won’t want to be left out. Come on, let’s go. I’m sorry, Nurse—I mean Frau Gottleib, sorry, I keep forgetting. Would you mind putting the boxes back on the shelves? We’ll have to come back to Budapest—there’s so much more we need to look at. We were only just getting started. But right now I think we’d better get back to Múzeum utca and tell Mina that we need to leave at once.”
Justine and Beatrice were already replacing documents in their file folders. Catherine was waiting impatiently, the telegram in her hand. “Come on,” she said.
As they walked quickly back through the streets of Budapest while the sun shone on the Danube, talking about what to pack, Mary wondered what could possibly have happened to Alice. Was she truly Lydia Raymond, the result of yet another cruel experiment? Was Lydia the daughter of Mrs. Raymond, who had eluded justice in connection with the Whitechapel Murders? Mary remembered the grim, unsmiling director of the Magdalen Society, who had seemed so proper, but had sold the young women in her care to Mr. Hyde so Adam could harvest their body parts to create another Justine. And Dr. Raymond—was he yet another of these mad alchemists who acknowledged no boundaries in their quest for knowledge and power? She was more worried than she wanted to admit about Mr. Holmes—and now Dr. Watson was missing as well! In her head, she was already running over the schedule of the Orient Express and calculating expenses. How soon could they be back in London?
CATHERINE: All these questions, and more, will be answered in the third volume of these adventures of the Athena Club, assuming this volume sells sufficiently well—two shillings in bookstores, train stations, and directly from the publisher. And should anyone wish to bring out an American edition—
MARY: You really have to stop it with the advertisements!
CATHERINE: If our readers want to find out what happens to Alice, they will need to buy the first two books! Of course, if they want me to leave Alice in peril . . .
Alice sat in a forest glade. All around her grew ferns, their fronds swaying gently, the shoots curling like fiddleheads. She was sitting on a mossy stone, in the dim, dappled light that fell through oak and birch leaves high above. The air was cool, fresh. It smelled of last year’s leaf mold. She could hear birdsong—somewhere close, a chickadee was singing its two notes. Everywhere around her, the forest was rustling—ferns swaying in the breeze, branches rattling against one another, a stream burbling along out of her sight but close enough that she could hear it. Suddenly, she could hear birds everywhere, a cacophony of song. A shy rabbit hopped past. Then, a few minutes later, a doe and her fawn ambled through the undergrowth. The fawn looked at her with large, dark, sympathetic eyes. She would have liked to talk to it, but she knew it would not say anything to her that she could not have said to herself. She would have liked to stand up, walk around under the trees, among the ferns—perhaps drink from the stream. But there was a bright green snake wrapped around her left ankle. While it was there, she would not be able to stand up.
“Lydia.” The voice was harsh, imperious. “Lydia, stop this at once.” The forest around her wavered, then started to break apart as though it had been made of smoke. Wisps of it swirled around a woman in a gray dress with iron-gray hair. Next to her stood a tall man with an aquiline nose, a high forehead, and a receding hairline.
“I told you I would be able to find her for you,” he said. “Now that she’s here, we have everything we need to implement our plan. In two weeks, a month at most, you will be sitting on the throne of England.”
“If she cooperates,” said the woman in gray.
“I’m sure she will. Won’t you, my dear?” he said to Alice. “I don’t believe I’ve introduced myself properly. I’m Professor Moriarty, and this is Mrs. Raymond—your mother.”
“Hello, Lydia,” said the woman he had called Mrs. Raymond. “If I had recognized you at the Society of St. Mary Magdalen, I would have treated you very differently. You could have joined me in our enterprise. I’m glad you escaped from Hyde and his henchmen.” She paused for a moment. Alice did not respond. “I’m pleased to see you again, daughter,” she added. But she did not look pleased, or if she did, then her pleased face had a grim, distinctly displeased expression on it.
The last wisps of illusion dissipated as the mesmeric waves broke and scattered. Alice looked around the damp stone cell, with its single dim lantern and bucket latrine. A chain hung heavy from her left ankle.
“You will be a good girl and do what Professor Moriarty wants, won’t you, Lydia?” said Mrs. Raymond.
Alice closed her eyes and told herself that she was not there—no, not there at all. I’m not here, I’m not here, I’m not here, she thought, as intently as she knew how. But she knew it would not work. Not this time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I may have written the words, but this novel would not exist without the help of a great many people. I could not have written it without visiting the magnificent cities of London, Vienna, and Budapest, to walk the streets and imagine what Mary, Diana, Beatrice, Catherine, and Justine experienced. Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James invited me to stay at their beautiful house in London and guided my research into the late Victorian era. Katherine Pendill and Seger Bonebakker hosted me in their equally beautiful apartment in Vienna and helped me visualize the era of the Secession movement. Csilla Kleinheincz taught me so much about Budapest that I did not know, and corrected the Hungarian phrases in this book. I would like to thank all of them for their help and hospitality. My characters speak Italian, German, and Dutch, but I do not, and my French is not as good as Justine’s. I am grateful to Lesley Yoder, Ilaria Patania, Sasha Vivelo, Bernhard Stäber, Horus Odenthal, and Simone Heller, who helped me with those languages. Any mistakes are the result of my not following their excellent advice.
A heartfelt thanks goes to my agent, Barry Goldblatt, who believed in these characters before I wrote about them, and who kept me sane during the process of writing this book. Another goes out to my wonderful editor, Navah Wolfe, who sometimes understood this book better than I did and could tell me exactly how to make it better, as well as the whole team at Saga Press, particularly Bridget Madsen, Tatyana Rosalia, KeriLee Horan, and the designer, Krista Vossen. She and the cover artist, Kate Forrester, made this book more beautiful than I could have imagined. Elena Stokes, Brianna Robinson, and Taylan Salvati at Wunderkind PR were tireless at organizing publicity for the first book in this series, bringing it to the attention of readers who will hopefully also like this second adventure of the Athena Club. I am most grateful for all of their work and support.
Finally, I would like to thank my daughter, Ophelia, descended from a respectable line of mad scientists, who inspires me every day. The first time she laughed at one of Diana’s antics made all my efforts worthwhile.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PHOTO COPYRIGHT © 2017 BY MATTHEW STEIN PHOTOGRAPHY
THEODORA GOSS is the World Fantasy Award–winning author of many publications, including the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting; Interfictions, a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland, a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom, a novella in a two-sided accordion format; the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia; and debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, which was a finalist for the Nebula Award. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and her work has been translated into eleven languages. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program. Visit her at TheodoraGoss.com.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Jacket design by Krista Vossen
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European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman Page 66
