Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles

by Cooper, Karina

  “Charming!” Miss Dorring finally deigned to acknowledge me, her lovely, noble features suddenly so much more approachable as she smiled. “I do so love mysteries.”

  “The subject?” demanded a gentleman whose name I had heard twice and still could not recall.

  “Unknown.”

  “How can a murder victim be unknown?” I demanded.

  “Against the rules,” crowed Mr. Englebrooks from behind me, and I rose quickly as his hands came down upon the back of the sofa, framing my shoulders. The sheer speed by which I accomplished the distance left a wide-eyed appreciation upon his features, his thick mustache twitching, but Lady Rutledge didn’t appear to notice.

  She shook a finger at me. “Tut, Miss St. Croix, the rules are as follows. Time is of the utmost importance. The detective may only ask five questions. The detective may ask only questions whose answers are corroboration or refutation.”

  “Five? What detective would allow herself to be so bound?” I demanded. “That is impossible.”

  “Only five,” Miss Dorring repeated, quite seriously. “Yet it’s not impossible.”

  “Your own mother succeeded often,” Lady Rutledge added with a smile that still dared me to refuse.

  My choices were few, then. Accept and succeed, or refuse and risk the social consequences. I was not my mother, but it seemed important that I prove something of myself with her template. “Very well. Does everyone know what you know about the murder?” I asked.

  Her eyes glinted. That spark that suggested she knew so much more than she let on. That bit I recognized. “No.”

  “Then you are the sole personage to whom I should direct my questions to?”

  “No.”

  I was careful. That she said no to everyone else’s level of knowledge, and no to sole personage suggested others had answers. Just not everyone, and possibly not anyone present.

  This game could very well extend beyond the bounds of her parlor.

  I could not waste my last three questions cycling through names. Not only were there more faces here than I had questions allotted, I suspect such an easy way would disappoint her.

  And, truth be told, myself.

  This was interesting. This fed the hole left by the gnawing whisper of need curling inside me. Need for answers. Need for something to occupy me.

  Need for one more draught of laudanum, to ease my want for gentle sleep.

  To my surprise, even with all eyes upon me, I found myself warming to the game. An inexplicable murder. I turned, smiled upon Miss Hensworth who watched with her brow knitted, and then turned again in a swirl of chocolate skirts to ask, “Is the unfortunate soul a tradesman or laborer?”

  “Lovely one,” murmured a woman. Not Miss Dorring, who had once more resumed her argument with one of the gentlemen at hand.

  “No,” Lady Rutledge said. “Caution, Miss St. Croix, that is very nearly two questions.”

  I smiled. “Neither laborer nor tradesman. Interesting.” I almost began to pace a path, the better to think, but caught myself in time. Ladies did not pace.

  “Ooh, I’d wager the victim is a lord,” said the same voice, and I looked over my shoulder to find an aged woman in a suitable gray dress watching me. Her eyes were heavily lined, her face set into deep grooves, but she smiled upon my scrutiny and suggested, “All the best mysteries involve lords.”

  Unbidden, my thoughts turned to Lord Compton, and my disguised meeting with him on the stoop of an opium den. How surprised he would have been to learn it was me dressed as a street boy.

  How surprised I’d been to see him enter the very same opium den I’d stepped out of.

  “Don’t they just?” I murmured, and forced myself to cease drumming my fingers into my skirts as I studied the expectant faces around me. I stilled them. “How long—” I caught myself. “Has he been dead for longer than three days?”

  “No.”

  “Is it a crime of passion?”

  The lady’s beauty mark twitched. “Oh, yes,” she said, with much more relish than strictly appropriate.

  All right, I could follow this. So a man who was neither tradesman nor laborer. A man murdered due to some high emotion—my bets hedged on love. That often seemed to spark the worst in others.

  The victim was also a man who had not been dead long, which—if this were a real murder—would mean that his associates had only just discovered the body. But I had no body with which to proceed.

  Clearly, I would need to pinpoint who or what the murdered victim was. Once I had this, I could begin to investigate for clues.

  A lord was a dangerous target for a murderer, but given how long until the next Season, it was entirely within the realms of possibility that a murderer could assassinate a lord just as the Season ends. The body may not be found for— No, no. His staff would come looking, of course, and any crime of passion regarding a titled victim would certainly reach all ears.

  I couldn’t see it. I needed more information, but my five questions were up. “A question as to the rules of the game, if I may?”

  “You may,” Lady Rutledge allowed.

  “How long do I have?”

  This time, her mouth twitched into a smile that wasn’t entirely nice. Something both amused and edged. “That depends entirely, Miss St. Croix. The longer it takes you to solve, the more will die.”

  Much like the Ripper’s victims. Stacking up by the pound.

  “Does this have anything to do with the doxi—” I caught myself, but not in time. A collective gasp went up within the parlor. My cheeks burned. But Lady Rutledge laughed, her bosom heaving with each breath.

  “You are beyond your questions, detective,” she admonished as she sank once more to her chair. “You have more than enough to begin your hunt. Now, who would care for a drop more tea? Mr. Englebrooks, do be so kind as to fetch Miss St. Croix’s cup. She appears to be in quite deep thought.”

  I couldn’t deny it. I had precious little to go on, only a hypothetical murderer and a victim neither a working man nor a craftsman. Where would I go?

  “Do you suppose she’ll figure it out?” the gentleman asked, not so low that I couldn’t hear.

  Miss Dorring sighed. “So few do.”

  I would. I would because every man and woman in this room expected me to fail. I looked up from the full cup placed in my hand and looked not at Lady Rutledge, but at Englebrooks beside her. “Another question as to the rules.”

  “Ask,” the lady allowed.

  “Will I find answers any place else or is the game locked to your parlor, my lady?”

  There. A twitch of Mr. Englebrooks’s mustache, a flicker of an eyelash.

  I would find clues. Scattered by the scheming lady and her retinue? Or common events likely to trigger questions?

  “The game is always afoot,” Lady Rutledge said, mysterious but for the giveaway of the gentleman she now turned to.

  A flounce of pale pink beside me drew my attention to Miss Dorring, who smiled her charming smile at me. “Perhaps you’ll get farther than anyone else has.”

  Faint praise, but I would take it with the grace Fanny drilled into me. “You are most kind. I hope to surprise you all.”

  Her lashes, beautiful and golden, flickered. Interest? Or disdain? I suspected Miss Dorring might even give Fanny a turn.

  As if keen on proving my suspicions, she sat beside me, her smile kind—too kind. “I understand Earl Compton has returned to Town. Has he visited you to declare his intentions yet?”

  My fingers tightened on the fragile handle of my cup. Suddenly, all thoughts of murder—real and hypothetical—fled. “I beg your pardon?” was all I could manage, a misstep. It confirmed what she suspected; what all of London suspected.

  Mad St. Croix’s daughter was no longer quite the earl’s interest.

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” she said, every bit the picture of sympathy and intrigue. “I’m sure you’ll find a fine enough match in time.”

  “In time?”

&nbs
p; She had no need to explain. I knew the words left dangling between us. Find a husband before my age dictated me quite firmly on the shelf. Before I would be competing with the fresh-faced young misses introduced every Season.

  Appalling that even the ladies of this set focused so on marriage. But that was not what gnawed at me.

  How long had he been returned? Why had the columns not said?

  Had he deliberately failed to visit me? To send word?

  Not, I reassured myself as Miss Dorring prattled in my ear, that I cared a whit what one marchioness’s son did.

  And did not do.

  Booth took me home at the luncheon’s end.

  With the passage of the horse and carriage—no need for them on London’s narrow walkways—the stature of a household came instead on the design of the gondola.

  Some were fancy things, hand carved by master craftsmen and gilded to perfection. They boasted up to three pairs of pipes at the tail, from whence a steady stream of blue flickered. Others were subtler in design, dark wood polished to a fine gleam but with none of the excess.

  The St. Croix gondola is not the finest of them upon the drift. Commissioned years before I’d ever needed it, gifted to my mother from my father’s own coffers. To say my father had not been wealthy is a mild understatement, which placed value on the gift. He’d had it designed by a craftsman, an Italian working as a piano maker far below the drift in Hackney. It lacked the frivolity of many of the peerage’s crafts, and boasted only one pan-flute array of pipes along the back, but it retained a covered box and a privacy screen, as well as a clean-air machine for days the fog shifted.

  The apparatus by which aether was extracted from the air and used to fuel the device was among the more silent, only a distant hum as Booth guided the gondola along the surface of the fog billowing in the canals. There were those whose rattle could be heard for blocks, and others still even quieter than mine.

  But no matter how nice the gondola, the true value came with the skill of the gondolier. Booth was brilliant; not only could he hold a straight line, but he’d mastered the levers lining the driver’s seat to such an extent that the bottom of the gondola only just skimmed the fog.

  The ride home was quiet as I could like. Or, more accurately, as quiet as Fanny could like, who had stayed at home due to Lady Rutledge’s assurances as to my reputation’s safe harbor. Silence tended to give me too much time to think.

  Too much time thinking ended only in the same thoughts plaguing me from all angles. Earl Compton had returned from his hasty leave of absence, and he had not sent word either before or after.

  As Miss Dorring ever so neatly intimated, this could only mean that he had not meant any of the silver-tongued platitudes he’d levied upon me that afternoon in the exhibit.

  I had never needed evidence that a man, by his very nature, remained bent only on conquering. War was a telling thing, and so, too, were the auction tables in the worst of the gaming hells below the drift. The Menagerie sold women by the pound, and Monsieur Marceaux was not kind to the girls in his employ.

  Those girls, that is, who could not make of themselves something worth selling for alternate demand.

  I knew what men wanted.

  I should not have been so surprised—or hurt—that Earl Compton was the same.

  I must acknowledge how much admiration I hold for you, Miss St. Croix.

  My gloved fingertips settled over the softness of my own lower lip. It tingled as I pictured—remembered—the shape of the earl’s mouth as it touched mine. The tickle of his neat mustache.

  His eyes, so close; their typical reserve lit from within by something I’d felt curl inside me.

  One kiss. Only one, and I’d gone calf-eyed for the man. Preposterous.

  Micajah Hawke had done so much more than a kiss, but I was not mooning for him. Of course, the things he’d done to me, each memory gilded in a faint pink haze, had been done to save me from the grip of Abraham St. Croix’s opium serum. He may have tarnished me some, but he had not spoiled me.

  Not that it mattered, either. I would marry no man, so I feared no gossip.

  Perhaps, I thought in sudden, manic cheer, I would take a lover when I inherited. That would show him.

  That would show them all.

  The gondola bumped gently, jarring me out of my introspection with a swiftness that left me inhaling a sharp sound. I tucked a finger beneath the curtain, peered through the narrow seam to see my houseboy hauling a rope along the docking berth of my Cheyne Walk residence.

  Levi was a gap-toothed boy of perhaps twelve, thin as an imp and as like a troublemaker as not. He minded himself around my staff, but I had no doubts he didn’t bother elsewhere.

  I knew what it was to sneak away for some well-earned recreation. Whatever the boy got up to when he thought no one knew, it did me no harm to allow it.

  Within moments, he’d tied the gondola, placed the narrow stair beneath the door, and stood back as Booth helped me disembark. I flashed the boy a grin, but did not address him directly. “I shall go in,” I told my butler.

  “Of course, miss.” As I turned away, I heard him add, “Nicely done, Leviticus. See it put away.”

  “Rightly so, Mr. Booth.”

  I left them to pull the gondola into the charming carriage house once used to store horses and hurried inside. “I am returned,” I called, easily picturing my chaperone’s wince as my voice lifted through the house.

  My foyer was an impressive thing. Not so much in size as in decor. The walls were patterned in thin stripes of rose and burgundy—my mother’s touch, I was sure—while the hardwood floors gleamed in polished cherrywood. It was an outrageous display of affluence, but I admitted to enjoying the red-tinted dark wood beneath my feet. Light streamed through the fan window set above the door, illuminating the lamps affixed to each wall. The wicks were turned down at the moment, but the Westminster clock had sung out a warning that the day would end soon.

  Even now, the sky darkened behind the low-hanging bank of wintry clouds.

  A wide mirror framed in gilded wood provided guests opportunities to fix hats and overcoats, but I didn’t bother with mine. I untied the ribbons curled under my chin and swept my bonnet off my head with a heedless tug. Pins loosened.

  “Fanny?” Swinging the bonnet by its ribbons—and jarring its pale cream feathers, like as not—I sauntered through the hall to the parlor, where I suspected Fanny to be.

  She was not.

  I’d made it no farther than the staircase with its wider base and lion guardians when a rustle at the top caught my attention. I looked up, smiling. “There you are, I—” My smile vanished. “What have you done, Fanny?”

  Chapter Five

  “Cherry St. Croix, what manners.” My chaperone came down the stairs, one hand upon the banister, as regal as any queen. But her smile, mirrored by the sparkle in her eyes, spoke of mischief. “Don’t swing your hat like that, you’ll ruin the bindings.”

  Something had happened. Something good, I thought, at least for her.

  Which meant only one thing. I narrowed my eyes at the hand she held behind her back. “What are you holding?” I demanded, and it was a demand. Neither sweet nor patient.

  “A manservant came ’round while you were gone,” she told me, deftly tucking whatever it was she held into the folds of her overskirt as she swept around the boldly staring lion beside me.

  Who had come? Whose servant?

  Lady Rutledge’s? I wouldn’t put it past the lady to send the next clue straight to my door, but that hardly seemed sporting.

  “Come into the parlor.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Stuff and nonsense, Cherry, into the parlor.” She tucked her arm in mine and I had no choice. It was either follow her skillful lead or drag my heels like a stubborn child.

  Despite my reticence, curiosity plagued me. Was it a letter? A note from the so-called victim’s betrothed, demanding a detective’s help?

  Was it so
mething from Mr. Ashmore? No, unlikely, he’d have used the post, wouldn’t he? “It’s not from my guardian, is it?”

  “No, Mr. Ashmore is currently somewhere near India, as I recall.” Fanny’s smile didn’t fade. It didn’t so much as dim as she led me to the settee I favored. “Sit.”

  “Fanny, really.” I sighed. But I sat. “If you’ve any soul at all, you’ll at least let me ring for tea.”

  She turned, reached for the bellpull and tugged it gently. Somewhere in the kitchen, a faint chime whispered underneath the crackle of charring wood in the fireplace. The room was warm, much warmer than outside, and I was grateful for it. The air retained a sharp bite; warning that winter would be soon upon us.

  Within moments, I was perspiring gently, which reminded me that I’d left my coat on. I tugged at the ornate fur collar just as footsteps preceded my housekeeper into the parlor. In her hands, a silver tray.

  In her eye, a mirrored sparkle.

  Now I knew. “You’ve the same look as she does,” I accused Mrs. Booth, ignoring Fanny’s censuring sigh. “Will neither of you confess?”

  Mrs. Esther Booth was as much a mother to me as Fanny, perhaps more of the affectionate aunt. She and her husband minded my house well, and I’d never wanted in their care. Though I’d been a terrible creature at the age of thirteen, the Booths had kept everything running as smooth as could be.

  But I had no illusions as to the nature of their loyalty. Where I disliked Mr. Oliver Ashmore—and found his behavior exceedingly suspicious—Mrs. Booth doted on the absent man like a mother lacking her firstborn son. I knew they reported on me.

  I did not know if they’d ever written to my devil-guardian to inform him of my antics of September last. I had received no letter of censure, and my stipend had not ceased, so I could only assume they had not.

  “Let’s take your coat, miss,” Mrs. Booth told me, not unkindly as she worked it off my shoulders. She took my bonnet as well, though I saw her exchange a querying glance with my chaperone as she did. Ladies commonly wore their hats inside and out.