“How did you know he’d take the money?”
She came back to the dock. “His shirt’s been mended with sailmaker stitches, so he probably did it himself, and his left boot is cracked just above the sole. Every cent he has goes into his boat.”
“You sound like you approve?”
“It’s a beautiful boat.” The Vand Hjerte was close to a hundred feet long, her cabin rising almost a full three feet above the foredeck, and she gleamed. Not a bit of peeling paint, not a frayed line; no doubt the sails would be mended and tight. She could probably hold a crew of seven or eight, but with the mizzen aft of the rudder post, she could also be sailed by a single man. A single strong man, Marie amended, watching muscles ripple under shirt and vest.
“Does your nurse know you’ve got so much money with you?” A pause. “Marie?”
“Sorry.” She shook her head. “I was admiring the boat. No, she doesn’t know.”
“What will she do when we’re not there at four?”
“She’ll go to your father, and he’ll explain. He’ll know where we’ve gone.” Marie untied her hat and pushed it back, letting the sea breeze dry her curls. “He’d stop this himself, if it were on land.”
• • •
They were out of the harbor when Ahlquist shouted something that didn’t sound polite and Captain Williams shuffled along the tiny walkway linking stern to bow until he could crouch beside her. She’d refused to be stowed in the cabin like baggage. “It’s not going to take sixteen hours, is it?”
Marie laughed as a spray of water rose against the wind and drenched him. “No, it’s not.”
• • •
Ahlquist steered by the stars after dark, standing at the rudder with his shirtsleeves rolled up while Captain Williams napped. Once they were in the lee of Sable Island and the sea anchors were out, they traded places. Wrapped in a rough blanket, Ellie curled up on one of the narrow bunks under the foredeck. Marie didn’t sleep. She didn’t need to sleep, not surrounded by the sea.
Captain Williams came to her at dawn, dark hair and whiskers spiky with salt. “The sea’s mercurial enough that Erik’s accepted the speed of the journey out, but if he sees the serpent . . .”
Marie pulled a small brown bottle from her bag. “It’s calm enough to light the stove; make him a strong coffee and put in half a teaspoon of this. If it doesn’t put him out, he’ll be sleepy enough to be convinced he’s dreaming.”
The captain’s eyes were a surprisingly pale hazel, with flecks of gold in among the brown and green. “Why do you have laudanum?”
“I have a broken back.”
“You’re in pain?”
His voice held no pity, so she told him the truth. “Sometimes it’s like dancing on knives.” But not in the sea. Never in the sea.
• • •
The sea rocked the boat slowly up and down, a mother’s hand at the cradle.
As the sun rose, Marie slipped out of her jacket and shirtwaist, unfastened her skirt and petticoat and inched her way back out of them, thankful that she was free of most of the complications of women’s clothing. Laced into a corset at the hospital, she’d screamed until they removed it. Shoes off, stockings rolled down, she could hear Captain Williams explaining Ahlquist’s sudden return to sleep. As she hand-walked to the rope lines, legs trailing behind her, she heard Ellie complain he’d made the coffee bitter enough to hide a pint of laudanum.
Marie slid under the lower rope and pushed herself forward into the water.
Three of the deep undines rose to meet her. Beautiful. Translucent. Bodies twice her size, their tails twice that again. There was no demarcation where their trailing hair and flukes met the sea, flowing one into the other.
When she surfaced, Ellie looked shocked, but Captain Williams merely said, “If there’s a serpent in the water, you’re going to need a shield.”
Ellie turned to glare at him.
Marie laughed. “I know.”
“You’re going to tell me the ocean is your workroom, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
The Vand Hjerte had fifty feet of rope on her life-ring, so Marie had the undines move her almost fifty feet away. Arms sculling in slow circles, she built her shields layer by layer, currents of blue and green and turquoise wrapped around her.
“Marie! To your right!”
“Starboard,” she sighed as she turned. The angle of the light on the water hinted at a long, sinuous curve just below the surface. She felt the currents moving her legs change, then felt the serpent’s confusion as it dove beneath her.
The boat rocked violently as it returned. Ellie screamed, the captain swore, and Marie sent the undines. The last thing she needed was a Fire Master in the water.
Then loops of serpent filled the sea between the Vand Hjerte and her. It slammed against her shields as it passed—in curiosity, not aggression, but if it could get through her shields, its curiosity would kill her.
She’d be another set of bones on the ocean floor.
When the serpent approached again, she took a deep breath and dove.
Her legs were still useless but so nearly weightless, it barely mattered.
Enormous dark eyes met hers. It was scaled pewter and beautiful the way deadly things were beautiful, perfectly designed to hunt and kill. Driven in from the Grand Banks by the summer storms, far from the deep currents that could have led it home, it was confused by the amount of light, by the relative warmth of the water, and the lack of familiar prey.
Mouth open, teeth shadowed crescents, it lunged.
Shifting the shape of her shields, Marie slapped its nose with power. She’d have laughed at its affronted expression had there been air to laugh with. It was a simple matter after that to instruct the undines to lead it home, although harder to convince the serpent that these were the currents it was meant to follow.
She could see the last sinuous curl of its tail heading northeast as she surfaced, the original trio of undines still with her. Borrowing their strength, Marie licked salt from her lips and remembered how to breathe.
“You didn’t destroy it?” Ellie called.
“I never meant to.” Marie tipped her weight back and watched the water lift her legs. “It was where it shouldn’t have been, so I sent it home. The banks have been fished for centuries; it’s probably passed harmlessly under thousands of vessels.”
“You were under the water for a very long time.”
“She’s a Water Master,” Captain Williams answered as she stroked her fingers through the fluid length of an undine’s hair.
“Marie, it’s time to come in.”
They’d help her if she stayed, help her until they took her down to join her father. She dove under again, just because she could, feeling strong and graceful. Nothing hurt.
“Marie!” Ellie’s voice had picked up an edge. Impatience? Desperation? Marie wasn’t sure. “We need another Water Master. Captain Conner can’t get out of his chair.”
Marie laughed, got caught by a wave, coughed, caught another wave, couldn’t find the line between air and water . . .
Then she was lifted high and laid, nose running, lungs burning, in a puddle on the deck. As her teeth began to chatter and Ellie wrapped her in a blanket, she heard Captain Williams say, “Don’t worry, El. If she’d really wanted to stay, they wouldn’t have given her back.”
• • •
Dr. Harris and Uncle Edward were waiting on the dock.
“I had to tell a number of lies to your nurse, Miss Hudson,” Dr. Harris said as the captain carried her to her chair.
“And then I had to tell more.” Uncle Edward shuddered. “Terrifying woman.”
“How did you . . . ?”
“I sent a telegram to Sydney.” Dr. Harris glanced at Ahlquist securing the bow some fifty feet away, then lowered his voice. �
�Is it taken care of?”
“Yes.” Marie tilted her head back and met his gaze. “I sent it home.”
“Good. However . . .” He turned a distinctly unhappy expression on her companions. “You and I will talk of this later, Ealasaid, but you, Captain Williams, should not have gone along with such a dangerous scheme.”
“I’m not going to argue with a Water Master about a sea serpent, sir.”
To Marie’s surprise, her uncle laughed. After a moment, Dr. Harris shook his head. “Fair enough.”
• • •
With her uncle instructing the cabbie on how to load her chair, Ahlquist stepped forward and lifted her inside.
“If I don’t take the extra fifty,” he said quietly, “may I ask questions?”
“Not and get anything like an answer, Mr. Ahlquist.”
“Erik.”
“Erik.” He smelled of salt and hemp and tar. He smelled of the sea. “But I might have need of a fast ship again.”
“Then you know where to find me.”
• • •
“Thank you, Conway.” Marie removed her arms from around the coachman’s neck as he set her carefully down in her chair at the top of the stairs. If she could get to Sable Island, she could get to the second floor.
Mrs. Barton waited by her mother’s door. Opened it. And said as she closed it again, “I’ll be out here if you need me.” She’d been remarkably understanding about the edited version of the adventure, if a little too interested in Erik Ahlquist.
Rugs tugged at Marie’s wheels as she rolled across her mother’s room to the windows, but she flexed arms made strong by the sea and refused to yield. Ignoring the protests from the shadowed figure on the chaise, she pulled back the curtains and used the rain to fling open the shutters. “It’s time to start living again, Mama. Papa would not want you to shut yourself off like this.”
Wrapped in black, her mother raised her hands against the light and whispered, “You can’t know what he wants; he’s dead.”
Marie thought of dead men’s bones at the bottom of the sea. “I know he’s gone, Mama. And the winds no more betrayed you than the sea betrayed him.” As her mother reached to pull the curtains closed again, Marie grabbed her wrist and turned her to face the window. “You got lost. Blown off course by a storm. But the wind has changed . . .”
“No.” Thin, pale fingers touched the glass.
Marie released her, leaned forward, and threw open the sash.
There was water enough on the wind she thought she could make it behave, but she didn’t have to.
It wrapped around her mother like a lost child.
Her mother was crying now.
Marie gathered her mother onto her lap, wondering when she’d gotten so small, and pressed her lips to her hair while the winds danced round them both and her shirtwaist grew damp.
Salt water.
Salt water to save her.
London Falling
Ben Ohlander
I stepped down from the darkened doorway that looked across to the rooming house that my brother had given as his London address. His lodging proved a decrepit thing, all over crumbling brick, fly-specked curtains, and piled garbage. It squatted in the thick gray fog, flanked by an aging warehouse and a pawnbroker whose cracked shop window displayed nautical pieces of unknown provenance overlaid by a thick coat of dust.
The rooming house fell far below my brother’s accustomed standards, a clear sign that he was down on his luck. His preferred prey, the widow of means, had become a wary beast in New England. His presence in London suggested he was attempting more fertile ground, where his quarry might be less bounded by attorneys and male relations who read newspapers.
The noisome stink of the thoroughfare hung in my nostrils and blotted out the view around me, restricting my sight to narrow tunnels, dimly pierced by the Whitechapel gaslights. A single flame danced a moment some yards away before failing, startling me. I absentmindedly reached out, my mind easily coiling around the gas, containing it, and feeling the tiny particles within rub and chafe as I constrained them. I added some small energy until the lamp glowed brightly, and flame returned. The casualness of the act, one I had performed a thousand times before, settled me and calmed my nerves. The dank, fog-enshrouded streets reminded me too greatly of the tunnels beneath Dr. Holmes’ hotel, where I had too rashly ventured and only barely escaped.
The memories of the terror as I had been trapped and tormented washed over me. I closed my eyes, and my gorge rose in my throat. I desired nothing else but to flee back to Massachusetts and my beloved woods. The Campania was still in port, and I might yet escape the stinks and closeness of the streets.
Steeling myself against my anxieties, I touched the rough paper of my brother’s telegram. I need you. Come at once. Six words graven into my mind. My brother, so prideful, to be brought so low as to make a naked appeal spoke more to his distress than the terse message. He had been the stronger of us, both physically and in his Mastery of our Art. I had been perhaps the quicker to learn and more deft in application, but the weaker in pure force. I, like others less endowed, served as an object of his derision. My rush to join him served both to protect one whose blood I shared, and also the thought that I might yet prove myself worthy in his eyes. How could I not rise in his esteem if I were the instrument of his salvation?
The thought of gaining estimation in his eyes lent me a courage badly shaken by my time in Chicago, though I confess I drew also reassurance from my father’s pistol. The weapon, a heavy horse pistol, proved an object of special contempt in my brother’s eyes. He had never understood why Father, a Fire Master and our teacher, kept the thing. Its heavy weight bespoke a totem of a religion I did not worship—technology—but the drag on my coat from its substance lent me courage.
I drew back into the doorway as a gaslight flared to life in what I estimated to be my brother’s lodgings. Had he returned while I mused? Had I missed his entrance? I wished I had some sense of his movements and habits, but I had only docked this afternoon, and come straightaway to where he bade me. I stared at the gas-lit windows, seeking a glimpse of my sibling, hoping to confirm that I had found his scent.
First one shape, portly to stout, and then a second, as long and as thin as a beanpole, passed the shabby curtains. Neither man had my brother’s broad shoulders. They both moved back and forth in front of the lit shrouds a time or two, their movements more of searchers than lodgers. After some time, they seemed to pace, as though waiting. A long, damp hour passed before the gaslights snuffed out and the room went dark again.
I retreated deeper into my dank abode, uncertain as to how to proceed.
Two men, clearly the same as had been in the chambers above, left the rooming house a few minutes later. They stepped into the gaslights, and I had a clear glimpse of their dress. They both wore hat and coat, natty and out of countenance with the state of their rough surroundings.
Their dress and manner told me they were not from this district, and supported my conclusion that these men might be familiar with my brother’s troubles. I suspected that England also had its share of toffs seeking widowed money, and like Boston, possessed a ready supply of consulting detectives to send the rakes on their way. I considered also that they might be relations of a woman my brother had courted or seduced. I’d settled into a comfortable hypothesis regarding my brother’s difficulties, and reasoned this was in the same lines as his quick departure from Philadelphia.
I’d no sooner settled into this familiar pattern of familial trouble when I was just as quickly forced back out of it. The taller made a gesture as they stepped into the yellow puddle of gaslight, and the lamp overhead snuffed out. The act bespoke Mastery, either of Fire or Air, and took my brother’s situation out of the realm of merely draining bank accounts.
The tall man’s casting gesture seemed odd and unnatural, and as he mo
ved in the foggy gloom, I gained a clearer view. Enough light remained from the rooming house’s windows to illuminate him as he walked. His steps had a marionette’s seeming, a jerkiness of manner suggesting I looked at a puppet manipulated from the outside. I would not have noticed his cohort’s oddity had it not been for his own. The shorter, rounder fellow moved with a smoothness as strange as his companion’s lack of it. He didn’t seem to walk so much as glide, and the movements of his legs did not match his gait. Whatever I saw, it was not two gentlemen of means.
They moved away from me, heading toward the warehouses I had passed as I came up from the dockside where the Campania had disembarked. I heard their voices indistinctly, a bass note mingled with a tremulous treble, as they continued up the street toward the end of the block. In a moment, they would pass too deeply into fog for me to see.
The stouter turned into a narrow alley between two buildings across the fetid street. He emerged a moment later, carrying two sacks, each large enough for a single man or a dozen cats. Shouldering one bag that appeared heavy, though he hoisted it with ease, he passed the second sack to his fellow. The bottom half of the sack appeared black in the dim, indirect light. The taller man took it, holding it awkwardly at arm’s length as if to avoid staining his clothes.
A trick of the street allowed me to hear their voices clearly. “I’m sorry you broke yours, Mr. Blue,” said the deeper voice. I could not see who spoke, so assigned the deeper voice to the stouter. “You shall have nothing for later, I should fear.” The voice, now that I heard it clearly, broke into parts. The words arrived in my ears as if spoken by two persons reading the same part, but a fraction of a second apart.
“I will find another, Mr. Grey,” the other said. The voice, high and reedy, frightened me less, for it least it came whole and at all at once. Its sound seemed off, though, as though air escaped from a valve as it built pressure before giving voice, the way a steam whistle might. It gave his voice—for I presumed he—a sibilant quality, full of esses and long pauses.
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