I had grown to rely on these items, just as I had come to rely on the opium I’d used to salve my mind.
Of the two, I knew it was not the tools of my trade I would have reached for first, but it was the only option Ashmore would allow me. I simply needed the supplies to build more. And the time to do so, which I had not yet given myself.
Nor yet been allowed, truth be told.
Previous antics—of my own design and of my mad father’s, who had not been quite so deceased at the time as I had been led to believe—had placed me within the Karakash Veil’s debt. The first of Hawke’s open rebellion against his Chinese masters unfolded in the wake of my father’s mad schemes, and though I did not know that he acted out of turn, he had saved my life.
Later, I witnessed the scars left upon him for that temerity.
I had been too fixated on my revenge, and though I labored long and hard to rid myself of the burden of debt, I had been too blind to see what shackles I’d forged for myself. The cage the Veil closed about me proved to be unbreakable, and I’d lost more than my identity—I’d lost friends.
I had lost the security of a life I now knew had not been entirely mine, but indirectly safeguarded by those who had come to care for me.
That was a debt I would repay.
That was why I stood in this godforsaken line, why I listened to the strident fury of the orchestra and thought to enter the one place that had terrified me from the start.
Responsibility, keenly felt whilst sober, was a damnable burden.
Ashmore knew of the Menagerie’s many dangers; just as surely as he knew of the lure to be found within. Although most anything could be purchased within its borders, discretion was not among them, and what I asked now would not be discreet.
I had thought to simply set eyes upon Hawke, to judge for myself his placement and the state of his being, but if I could not even do that with the ease of a common spectator, how did I expect to extract him from the Veil he served?
The appreciative chatter of the queue behind my escort, the swish of fine fabrics and gossamer hems in sway alerted me to the presence of the midnight sweets—flesh for purchase, girls owned by the Menagerie that peddled them like fine wares.
Some worked the circus rings, as bits for show or ringside flirts, and all knew how to work the crowds in order to loosen purse strings. That they bantered along the line was common enough.
I recognized none who teased and laughed with them that waited, tickets in hand. A relief, for the sake of my purpose, but also a disappointment.
I wanted a friendly face to step outside; better were it the less-than-friendly but all the more important face of the ringmaster.
If I could simply see him.
My chest squeezed. My breath shorted as my pulse knocked hard enough to nearly drown the trilling music. I could not get enough air.
I had to be better than this.
My only recourse was to cause a scene, the sort that might garner the ringmaster’s interest. I had known Hawke for years. He was a man who handled all matters under his watch with his own hands. Fearsome though the Menagerie ringmaster could be, he was nothing if not efficient and brutally responsible.
Far more than I, who had allowed him to take the burden of my well-being too often.
I forced myself to inhale deeply, silently apologized to Ashmore, who suffered for his concern for me, and whispered, “Allez, hop.”
My escort’s jaw tightened until I thought he might grind his teeth into dust. Although the corona of copper bright hair that so distinguished him had been turned to a deeper brown, the eyes beneath his drawn brows were the same catlike brown they had always been, and they filled now with steely resolve.
And no small amount of reprisal promised.
I slapped him. Not so hard that it might bruise, but a flash of my ivory glove and a weak echo. There was no need to mark him to make my point.
A sudden gasp from the closest told me my ploy had been seen.
Ashmore, always quick, did not disappoint me.
“You bleeding tart,” he snarled, loud enough that the accusation might carry. The blow he delivered was, to my relief, of the open-handed variety—loud enough for the crack of it to carry farther than a raised voice, but not so brutal as a fist. Still, his knock was much harder than my own.
As per propriety, a gentleman did not take a fist to a woman, though what else he did with a bit of muslin in the dark was his own business. That he did so here jarred loose my terror, and allowed me to uproot my frozen limbs.
I cried out, face stinging, and whirled with the force of the blow—deliberately away, before Ashmore forgot himself and lost the thread of this little drama.
He was, by and large, a good man, well-heeled, and one whose longevity of years did not show in the youthfulness of his appearance. He was sworn to my protection by the strength of a vow made generations before my birth. Hurting me directly strained his sense of honor.
I was not without sympathy, but I was no fragile flower to be carefully tended.
Gasps and murmurs from the queue rose like a tittering tide, and without looking, I knew that the Menagerie’s people would not allow such an affront to continue. There was always a mechanism by which a show operates, and as much as I disliked the Veil’s manner of operation, it certainly succeeded. The patterns, indistinct to them what had never been part of it, flowed like the tides of a river.
I cowered into my hands, my cheek on fire, sobbing pitiably as Ashmore grabbed my arm and shook hard. “You’ll regret that,” he thundered, with the suggestion of slurring to it, as though he’d already taken to his cups.
I nearly gritted out a caution as my elbow popped most unceremoniously, but bit my tongue and shrieked as though afraid instead.
It felt good, in a sense, to let loose some of my bottled tension.
Voices rose, footsteps came running, and as I allowed myself to hang helplessly—fuming at the embarrassment of allowing myself to be treated so—three men converged upon us.
One wore a dockman’s cap and the tatty overalls of a worker—likely one of them what maintained the various mechanisms by which the Menagerie operated. Among those apparatuses were enormous fans, each cleverly concealed and placed so as to cause minimal draft. They functioned in much the same principle as Angelicus Finch’s patented aether engines. As long as there was air and flow, there would be power.
I had no doubt that there were other devices just as clever.
The appearance of the second man lobbed my heart into my throat. The colored lights surrounding the circus clashed with the brilliant red gem that the canvas tent became, creating a chaotic array of shadow and hue. This illumination, pretty as it was, did nothing to salve the dangerous air which His Highness Ikenna Osoba, so-called lion prince of far-flung Africa, displayed.
This was a man with whom I had history—the sort that would end in a life forfeit, if we crossed paths too soon.
Hopefully not mine.
He was tall, even for a man, and wiry enough that his performing apparel—made of rolled sticks over a muscled chest and thatches of dried grass and brown cloth—did nothing to make him appear weak or under-prepared. He was all but nude, as his savage character demanded, but I had seen this ebon-skinned man upon a battlefield, and his was not a presence to take for granted.
Osoba was a whip—one of those whose authority in the Menagerie stood above everyone else but the Veil itself. While each whip was still in some way answerable to the Veil’s immediate servants, who were all Chinese and trained in their mysterious martial styles of pugilism, I had always assumed that Hawke led them as a whole.
He, too, was called a whip, but his authority had seemed to be higher.
The absolutes of the Menagerie’s hierarchy baffled me, save that one could always tell those of authority. The lion prince bore all the hallmarks of it, effortless upon shoulders oiled to a black gleam.
The click, click, click of his multitude of braids, each bound by what l
ooked like wooden beads, scored a mix of anger and terror in my rapidly beating heart.
I owed him for the murder of Black Lily—a sweet I’d befriended, and who had suffered for it.
Ashmore’s grip hardened to very real pain upon my arm, and I realized then that I’d fallen still, as though preparing myself for an attack I was not ready for. I struggled against him as our roles demanded, tearing my gaze from the lethal menace that was the Menagerie’s lion prince, and nearly plowed into the formally attired chest of another.
“Mon ami, surely this is no way to treat a lady,” came a voice so placating, so smooth and polished and French that I suffered a moment of acute vertigo. I found myself reeling, grateful for Ashmore’s rigid grasp.
Through an effort that appeared to be accidental, I stumbled away from my apparent captor, tearing free of his grip and ignoring the concern that flashed in his narrowed eyes. It took me in the opposite direction of Osoba’s approach, but too close to this new figure. He was slight of stature and somewhat round at the red-and-white-striped waistcoat, short enough that I could look him in the eye without craning.
They were blue, his eyes, small and narrow, like a rat’s—and also like a rat’s, his front teeth had always been a little bit too long.
I’d never truly understood how much of my near-forgotten history simmered so close to the surface.
Not until I came face to face with a visage I’d thought gone forever.
Monsieur Marceaux, traveling master of a rickety show, cupped my reddened cheek in a tender hand, gloved in pristine white, and smiled with all the charm of a ringside host. Older, he was, pallid and with signs of meticulous black added to his abnormally long and waxed mustache, but he had lost none of the malice that had hung over his addled children—of which I had been one—like a bitter pall.
“Come, come,” he crooned, in a manner nightmarishly sweet and altogether revolting. “A circus is no place for such tears. Let us mend this, dear lovers, and enjoy the night, oui?”
I’d never been overly restrained as to what I wished for. The old caution that one should be careful of such matters had been designed in part for me. As I’d hoped, fate delivered a ringmaster—but it was not the one I’d come to see.
The heart in my throat burst.
Chapter Two
If I had planned it, I could not have imagined myself in a more dangerous environment. I had been flanked by the whip with the most to gain by my exposure—should Osoba be keen enough of sight to see beyond the dull brown hair and fancy dress—and the cruel ringmaster who had dominated my youth so utterly that I still tasted the tar on my lips when I closed my eyes.
I dared not look at Ashmore, lest he read the panic sure to crack my features at the barest provocation.
Monsieur Marceaux, whose presence I had never dreamed might occupy the Menagerie, took my hand in his, the other settled upon my waist as though he had a right. The light caught in the red band about his shiny black top hat—newer fare, I thought, and did not know why I thought so. I could recall no details of his attire before, but the tall hat did not suit him.
I could not snatch my trembling hand away as he raised my clammy fingers to his fleshy lips. Only the thin material of my glove saved us both from my retching. “There, there, ma cherie,” he said, so oily slick that the word used by way of affectionate moniker seemed foul and filled with innuendo.
I repressed a shudder.
Hard fingers closed around my other arm, and the good monsieur simply let go as I was jerked from his not overly subtle caress—little more than a doll caught between grasping men. “That will do,” growled Ashmore, playing his part to the hilt. “Get ahold of yourself, Marie.”
Marie, was it? We hadn’t settled on names, not likely needing them in the mass of the circus audience, but it would suffice.
“I apologize for the interruption,” he continued over my head, and I understood that I was to take the opportunity to cling like a grateful and helpless female to my patron.
The life of a kept woman was too overly complicated for my taste.
“If your petite fille requires a rest,” the monsieur said, gesturing with a flourish, “we are pleased to show her somewhere safe and warm.”
Warm, I had little doubt. The air was chilly, though it lacked the markers of winter’s promise, as had been the case before my sudden departure. Now it came with a whisper of spring, as mid-March would soon deliver.
Fortunately, I did not have to fear that clever Ashmore would believe the word “safe” from a man like Marceaux. He clasped his hand over my head, ensuring my face remained tucked into his shoulder—a mark of ownership I granted him for the ruse.
We needed to escape these eyes, and hurriedly. The circus was beyond me for the moment, much as I hated my inability to simply stride through all places without fear. It had once been my wont to do just that, but I had borne the bolstering sip of laudanum or nibble of tar to do it.
I was determined to work without them.
The monsieur was little more than black trousers and inordinately shiny shoes in my downcast eyes. If Osoba was still watching this fray, I could not see his shadow. The crowd, denied a spectacle, returned to the queue, and the merry tunes the orchestra cajoled spilled from the tent beside us.
I could breathe again. As though all the elements of surprise and fear—the proximity to the circus tent I hated, the recognition of a man I thought buried in my past forever, the fury pent up beneath a desperate façade—combined to create within me a certain balance.
I could breathe without gasping for it.
I could move.
Surreptitiously, I tugged upon Ashmore’s jacket.
He did not fail me. Ignoring the eyes fixed upon him, Ashmore bodily dragged me away from the monsieur’s reach. “Please excuse us,” Ashmore said, replete with that drunken slur that turned his ordinarily polished vocals to something just this side of insulting.
“Do be free to enjoy the sights,” Marceaux called after us, and in such an innocent phrase, there was placed within it a knowing that felt vile upon the skin. While Hawke had always been the very Devil, tempting his visitors to such delights that they may not be aware they wanted, Marceaux seemed more a peddler. Grimy wares for grimy coin, fondled in the dark.
Revolting.
Ashmore’s pace was long, his fingers firm enough to leave marks if I tripped, and so I allowed him the lead while I held my skirts above my ankles and gritted my teeth.
The paper lanterns spotted our path in shades from shadowed blue to eerie violet and serpent green. He paused finally in the gloom between a circle of gold and one of faded pink.
When he let me go, he did so on a hard curse. “Are you all right?”
I favored him with a cheeky smile. “I’ve had worse from them what run the drift.” Yet my face felt clammy, even under the overwhelming heat trapped between my scalp and the netted wig.
“None of your collector sass here,” he replied grimly, not charmed by me or my efforts. “You still cannot enter the circus grounds.”
I shook my head, rubbed my aching arm. Beneath my jacket sleeve, a scar puckered thick and white—remnant of the bloody familial confrontation Ashmore and I had faced together. It was healed, for the most part, and did not itch, but it was tender still. “I thought I could,” I admitted, “but ’tis not over. I will go, if I have to. However,” I added quickly when Ashmore’s aquiline nostrils flared and his lips parted, “I don’t suspect I must tempt fate again this night. Hawke isn’t there. I hadn’t expected that.”
This gave him pause. A small knot of men in working togs hurried across the maintained path beside us, one of many that meandered over the Menagerie grounds. Each was lit by the paper lanterns, though some were darker than others. Deliberately, to be sure. A pleasure garden required dark places for risqué deeds.
In the distance, a single violin soared in mournful refrain. I’d never met the player, but had often marked the skill.
Ashmore steppe
d closer, tucked my body firmly against his, and where this once might have started my heart to pleasantly racing, now it simply felt comfortable.
I had, at one time, lain with this man as lovers do. I never forgot what it was he did for me at the darkest of my existence. It was pleasant—he was a skilled partner in matters of bedroom play, and taught me much that I had only suspected in hypothesis—and surely things could have been different, were it not for the choices we had each made in the years prior to our fateful meeting. In the end, we had forged a stronger bond outside of the boudoir than within.
It was thanks to him that I had been introduced to the alchemical arts, which I had once thought little more than the fantasy of fools. My eyes had been opened to the truth hidden from all but a select few, and I hungrily feasted upon the knowledge he gave me.
We understood each other perfectly well.
That what I felt for Ashmore was an affection for a man who knew all of one’s deepest flaws and forgave one despite them, but it was not the same emotion as what I could not help feeling for Hawke. Of the two, it was the latter that burned the brightest—a brand that seared itself into my thoughts and feelings until all I knew was the pain of it.
I did not know if that was love. I did not like the word.
Love made fools and murderers of the greatest of men.
Ashmore’s sigh stirred the damp skin at my temple. “What do you mean, he isn’t there?”
I allowed myself to rest upon his shoulder, the better to discourse while appearing little more than lovers making amends in the gloom. “They have no need for two ringmasters,” I whispered. “It would create a ripple in the continuity of the Menagerie.”
“I don’t understand.”
Nor would he, not until he’d spent more than a few years apprenticing in such a place. I shook my head. “The man we met was already serving the role.”
“What makes you certain?”
“The apparel,” I explained, ensuring my voice remained sweet and quiet. A good bit of muslin brought to heel. “The stripes upon the waistcoat, the gloves, top hat with the bright band—all meant to play the host. Two such men would only confuse the audience. As long as Marceaux is here—”
Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles Page 2
