Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles

by Cooper, Karina

  Magic was the recourse of the unenlightened. And my memories were only the product of opium dreams spun from that ruddy serum.

  But the corpse of my father, that would be real.

  I stiffened, shaking my head. I had to see. “Zylla, do not touch anything.”

  “Not even if my life depends upon it,” she said, matter-of-fact aversion. Anyone who spent any amount of time among the likes of the Menagerie knew better than to muck about with things one didn’t understand.

  In my case, I knew how dangerous any laboratory could be. I’d grown up among them.

  I stepped over pipes I didn’t remember, stirred up dust with every footfall. The laboratory was dark, and I didn’t dare throw a switch. The last I remembered, electricity had crawled across the metal girders, the rafters, even along the pipes laid out across the floor. The currents traveling across every metal surface in the area must have left at least some remaining charge; I didn’t dare risk it.

  I remembered my father’s laughter. And my mother’s eyes.

  Only she was dead, wasn’t she?

  Actually dead.

  I passed the first table, copper bindings left hanging loose where I’d picked the lock to get free. The thinner band that had been tightened around my head still dangled, motionless in the quiet tomb. I’d managed to roll off the table, I remembered that. The tube affixed within my arm had torn free; I no longer carried the mark left by it.

  Like the first time I’d been drugged by the serum, my wounds had healed quickly.

  And then . . . His voice. His whisper. Not just a bounty after all.

  The murdering collector had saved me. Carried me out of the tunnel to vanish after.

  I’d woken—not for the first time, but certainly I intended it to be the last—in Micajah Hawke’s bed. Unsullied, as far as I could remember, but confused.

  I raised the lantern high, flinching when the shadows danced at the outer edges of the golden light. Dust caked the gurney, unmarred after a month of idle abandonment.

  But where there should have been more on the second table, there was not.

  “Oh, bloody bells.”

  Somewhere behind me, my maid sighed. “And twice, for that.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll want to see this.” I didn’t. “Best get on with your bit first. What did you find, then?”

  It’s what I did not find. I rounded the table to stand directly in between both. In front of me, an amalgam of metal and wire tubing reached for the dark ceiling. Like spidery fingers, the ends of the tubes vanished into shadow.

  But the slot, the groove where a golden cameo the size of my palm had once fit, remained empty.

  The collector. He’d taken the cameo and the alchemical serum it held. It had to be him.

  “The—” My tongue tangled on the words, and rightfully so. It seemed too gruesome an affair, even for my drug-addled memory. “The body that should be here is gone. And with it, the professor’s work.”

  “Then that makes two for sure. You said the professor was killed here by the dials?”

  I turned, stepped over wires and metal girders to where my maid waited. Beside her, a panel of switches and gauges remained grimy and dark.

  I brought the lantern, held it over the place where she gestured.

  The place where my father had stood last.

  Blood dries to an oily brown, like embedded dirt or forgotten paint. Beneath a month’s worth of dust, the color stained the floor in unshakeable evidence—I had not imagined everything.

  A body had fallen here. Bled out here.

  My father, stabbed through the heart.

  But everything else was gone. The corpses I expected, the cameo bearing my mother’s face, even the odds and ends I vaguely remember scattered upon the desk beyond the panel I stood beside.

  Someone had come back for it all. And I suspected who.

  I lowered the lantern slowly.

  “I’m sorry, cherie.” Zylphia did not like touching as a rule—legacy from her role as flesh for pay, I was sure—but for the second time that night, she touched my arm. Comfort, even small as it was.

  I summoned a smile; it came wearily. “I had hoped, but it seems there are no answers for me tonight. I would have been better served finding a collector’s bounty.”

  “At least you know it happened,” Zylphia replied, her eyes earnest, for all they remained shadowed in the dim light provided by the lantern I held. “As you say, even.”

  I knew what it was she inferred. Unlike everyone else in my household, Zylphia knew of my love for laudanum. Began by the orphanage who relied heavily upon a trick of opium and treacle to keep their charges sedate, continued by Monsieur Marceaux’s deliberate bribery, and carried on into my adult life. I used to take it to keep terrible nightmares at bay.

  I took it once upon a time to calm my nerves.

  I take it now because I must.

  Its use had saved my life in this very laboratory. For without its constant supply, I would have succumbed to the serum and died—or worse.

  It is a common adage among its heralds, that those who eat it always must eat the more.

  I did not eat it. Only Turks and savages eat it whole, as if it were a sweet or bit of fruit to savor. Civilized folk here in England distill it, either by liquid or fire. I was not so far gone that I must take it raw on the tongue. Laudanum was my choice of draught.

  However imbibed, I owed my life to its use.

  “There’s nothing here,” I said with some asperity.

  “But there used to be.” My maid observed the laboratory through narrowed eyes, smudged in the lantern light. “Where’d it get off to, then?”

  A good question. But not one I had the wherewithal to answer. “Needless to simper about it. Come along. We’ll be late if we tarry much longer.”

  “The twelfth bell is not long past.” She took the lantern from my unresisting fingers. I frowned at the laboratory, at the empty, skeletal remains. There wasn’t even a machine left to show my father’s genius. Only the structures that once housed his mysterious electrical components.

  As we left the laboratory, pulling the door once more closed behind us, I looked back. In the part of my mind that remained ever dreaming, I fancied I saw a pair of eyes. Watching, always watching. And in the still, musty air, I strained to hear a tuneless whistle in the dark.

  Bodies did not simply vanish. This was not the last I’d deal with Mad St. Croix’s legacy. Somehow, I knew it even then.

  Perhaps it is, as they so often say, truly in the blood.

  We exited the tunnel without trial, paused just long enough so that I could place my collecting gear firmly over my eyes.

  The fog in London is a vicious thing, made of coal smoke and damp and stench. It sucks at the throat and stings at the eyes, especially for those who do not live among the pea-soup miasma.

  I had developed my own pair of protectives for use when I hunted. One lens was tinted yellow, which I had discovered quite by accident to be ideal for peering through the fog bank. The other was plain, a simple circle of glass inset into a bolted metal brace and wrapped in thin leather for comfort.

  Unfortunately, a tussle with a rival collector had cracked that lens into four separate pieces, and I lacked the means to repair it. So for now, I had one good lens and one buckled in place by a strip of leather.

  The detachable respirator I left in its pouch. It tended to distort my voice, and I needed the freedom to speak with Zylphia, regardless of how often I’d have to clear my itching throat.

  She did not carry the same concern. I found that many of the denizens of the lower reaches of London developed an affinity for the scratchy fog. Whether it came from growing used to it or, as I suspected, a certain kind of lung scarring that would be difficult to bear later in life, few were as bothered by the fog as those from above.

  Like me.

  For this reason, I remained careful not to tip my hand as to my origins.

  As Zylphia adju
sted her plain, clear goggles over her eyes, she turned to me. “Where do we go from this point, then?”

  Unspoken came the obvious: We had no clues.

  I shook my head, frowning briefly at the blackened tips of my gloved fingers. The lampblack in my hair tended to smear at the first sign of damp, and it was always damp in London below the drift. I was certain my forehead and cheeks had turned gray and blotched by now.

  I did not dare forgo it, just as I did not dare shear the long, thick curls that were my mother’s legacy. Caught between both worlds.

  “Cherie?”

  “I must go look at collection notices,” I said abruptly, striding from the tunnel mouth. Just near Wapping, the tunnel didn’t fall under the same pervasive fog as the rest of London. The stench of coal mixed with the rotting reek of the river just nearby provided the kind of fragrance that could stand to be scrubbed out of one’s nose with a stiff brush and lye.

  My maid hurried to catch up with my sudden frenetic pace. “What do you hope to find?”

  “Anything.” A clue. A sign that I was not the only body on this world who knew what went on in that tunnel. Perhaps a hint that the collector I hunted—the so-named sweet tooth Zylphia and her fellow sweets had hired me to collect—was still out there.

  I knew he was. He left me flowers for every successful assassination he answered on the collection board.

  He left them for me upon my windowsill, regardless of its height above the ground. Somehow, he knew who I was, and I only knew that he taunted me.

  Yet, even as I considered it, it occurred to me that I had not seen flowers for near a fortnight now. Perhaps he’d injured himself on a bounty?

  Or he was simply lying in wait. Like a serpent under a slimy rock.

  I needed evidence. A trail that would lead me to him.

  “We don’t have time for a collection—”

  “If ’tis easy,” I cut in, “we’ll risk it.” Fishing a small, scratched pocket watch from a tiny pocket inside my collecting corset, I opened the brass facing not to calculate how much time I had left before I would be required home, but when the next train would pass.

  Only a few minutes.

  “I’ll meet you at the West India Dock,” I continued after a moment. “I’ll have information, if all goes well.”

  I did not say aloud what we both knew. I would not let noncollectors into the place where all collectors went, and I would not trust Zylphia with the role.

  We collectors tend to be a competitive lot. Supportive only when a bounty did not ride on it, and secretive beyond. Zylphia’s role was complicated enough without adding the necessity for collection to it. I paid her a fair wage.

  The money we acquired for bounties went entirely to easing the sting from my debt to the Veil. And, if there was any left over, to opium from the druggists below.

  “If you’re sure,” she said slowly.

  I was.

  “Come, then,” I told her, and hurried to make the Whitechapel connection.

  Chapter Two

  A city gripped by fear is an eerie place. Since the first prostitute was murdered in August, all of London below the drift has held its collective breath. Workers tended to their labor, the doxies of Commercial Road plied their trades from the dilapidated corners of haunted Whitechapel to the Limehouse district so named for its lime kilns, yet there seemed over it all a sense of waiting. Of watching.

  We passed through the yellow- and black-tinted streets, painted luridly by gas lamps lit at irregular intervals and the damp that infested every cobble and corner. Zylphia said little, and I did not encourage conversation. My mind scattered along paths that held no promise of answers.

  I was trapped. There would be no rescue, no saving me from the hole I’d dug unwittingly for myself. The fact of the matter was, I owed the criminal enterprise that ran much of Limehouse’s Chinese population. Whether I liked it or not, they did save me from my father’s serum.

  Or, more precisely, Micajah Hawke saved me.

  The methods by which he’d done so haunted me, but in the intervening month, I’d managed to shove those memories into a tiny compartment and had no intentions of inspecting them any closer.

  Now, I only recalled the feel of his mouth upon me in the darkest part of the night, and I looked to the laudanum I had not been taking for those.

  With my collecting coin cut so short, I could not afford the opium grains I had grown accustomed to. I rationed them dearly; and I keenly felt the loss.

  It took careful use to balance my need with my supply.

  I needed distractions. I needed, in some unconscious way, to exhaust myself, and I believed Zylphia knew that. This is why she went out with me most nights, despite the lengthy hours she kept by day acting as my housemaid.

  The time, almost one o’clock of the morning, would allow for an easy bounty, assuming there would be one to collect. I would split with Zylphia just before we crossed into Limehouse, meet her at the West India Docks with—I hoped—information of that wayward collector and a handful of collections to perpetuate. At least one would need to be for coin, the rest for the Menagerie.

  I had hopes that every Menagerie-funded bounty I turned in, but did not get paid for, would chip away at the debt the Veil held over me. I doubted it, but I needed leverage.

  Raucous singing pierced the fog, the hoarse laughter of men and women deep in their cups echoing eerily through the darkness. Beyond the alleys we navigated, St. George-in-the-East played host to all manner of folk. The singing I heard told me we were near the International Workingmen’s Educational Club; a front for immigrant anarchists, as well a favored social center.

  I’d been inside once or twice, on the search for the rare Jew hauled up on the bounty boards.

  That put us practically on top of Dutfield’s Yard. “We’ll go through here,” I murmured, by habit as well as an overabundance of concern. My voice is a feminine one, and most footpads see females as easy sport.

  That made individuals foolish and groups more than dangerous, but it would also waste my time. Without my respirator, I erred on the side of caution.

  Zylphia, no stranger to the dangers of these evening streets, only nodded.

  Dutfield’s Yard is one of many ways to travel from back alleys to main streets. A narrow strip of yard between the club and Berner Street, it had seen my passage before and would probably do so again. Few bothered to pay much attention to the comings and goings of the bodies that traipsed through the gates. The large gate should have been closed this late, but rarely was.

  The shadows clinging to the interior of the yard were thick as treacle and deucedly difficult to see through. Black as pitch, and this even with the lights from the surrounding tenements struggling to pierce the pea souper.

  I was used to dark places, and I thought nothing of it as we passed through the four-foot-wide gate left open to the alley behind us. Already, as my feet navigated a path I knew by rote, my mind lingered over the many troubles weighing upon my shoulders.

  It was Zylphia who scented the disturbance first.

  I felt her stiffen beside me. Then a hand, reaching perhaps for my shoulder but missing in the dark and colliding with my back instead. I grunted a surprised exhale, the sound slipping into the yard and taking wing.

  But the echo that came back was not something the dark crafted alone.

  A gurgle, strangled as if a breath struggled to escape through mud or worse, and an intake of air. Nearly a growl.

  We were not alone.

  I froze, eyes wide and painful as every sense desperately tried to carve a swath through the foggy night.

  In that single breath of silence, weighted by what seemed an eternity of sudden, crushing fear, a sonorous melody lifted across the sky.

  The clock tower at the peak of Westminster Abbey, whose chimes could be heard far as the Menagerie on even the thickest of soot-ridden days, sang a lilting warning.

  The first and only bell gonged, one o’clock, and the darkness sha
ttered.

  I felt it come before it reached me, but I was too slow. A warm body slammed into me, a man’s body, impossible to see but heavier than me and broad enough to send me careening into the side of the club.

  My shoulder rebounded off the rough brick siding, sending stars of pain shooting through my vision, and I heard Zylphia cry out as the same figure crashed into her. But this time, I also heard the tangle of feet, a scuffle, a grunted impact with the ground. He hadn’t expected two of us; he must have tripped over Zylphia as she floundered.

  I pushed off the wall, blind but determined, ignored the frightful pain in my shoulder to run for the same narrow gate we’d only just entered. I heard the clip-clop-clip of hooves on the cobbled road across the yard.

  Someone was coming, and that alone was permission enough for me to give chase. Whoever manned the pony and cart I heard entering from Berner Street could tend to the body I suspected had made that terrible bubbling sound; I had a footpad to catch.

  I don’t wholly understand myself at times. I am a collector. By very definition, I have no reason to give chase if I do not have the coin promised.

  Yet something about that night—that dark enclosure and the bulk of the man who slammed into me—demanded I chase him. So I obeyed the instinct to follow and sprinted out of the pitch-black yard, through the gate, into the narrow street that was little more than an alley.

  Footsteps echoed, splashing through puddles from every direction, but longtime familiarity with the streets of London below allowed me to discern the pattern. I turned right, followed the uneven, heavy tread. Through the yellow lens of my goggles, I picked out a shape—broad, like I’d already deduced, wrapped in a heavy overcoat. Too dark to see more than the silhouette of a man and his hat, but enough.

  Nobody ran unless they were guilty of something.

  I heard Zylphia’s voice behind me, but I ignored her in favor of the chase. Sweat gathered across my shoulders—I came to regret the man’s coat I wore over my rigidly plated collecting corset, but I didn’t dare pause to shed its weight. My shoulder ached fiercely; I feared I’d twisted the joint or something just as unfortunate, yet I could not stop.