Elementary

by Mercedes Lackey

  And so days went by, and in the meantime, things kept getting stranger. And less coincidental.

  They were still waiting for the gasolier to arrive when nearly every portrait in the drawing room was discovered hanging upside down.

  “Funny thing is, that room’s locked tight,” Julius told Aurelia the day it was discovered. “Not sure how it could have happened, unless my dad or one of the Fosters did it.”

  “Oh? Very interesting,” Aurelia replied, and had immediately gone into the pantry to reorganize all the jams and pickles she’d prepared for winter.

  And then. . . .

  Weeks passed without any more incidences, but there were also no opportunities for Aurelia to act with her mock-nostrum, or “mockstrum,” as she’d begun to think of it. Thanksgiving came with a flurry of dishes and activity, and then Christmas and New Year. January closed its grip on the city, the wind whipping off Lake Michigan, and every night the stoves were lit and fires built in the hearths.

  Aurelia was icing a coconut layer cake, Alice playing under the kitchen table with her doll, when an awful groan filled the house.

  Alice popped out from under the table. “What was that?”

  The groan happened again, coming from the front parlor. The walls shuddered.

  Aurelia gave Alice a look that said “stay put,” and hurried down the servant hallway to investigate.

  Mr. and Mrs. Foster weren’t home, but Julius and Oscar were. Oscar had opened the parlor; they both stood in the doorway, dumbfounded.

  The piano had moved from one end of the room to the other. Rips marred the rug where it had been dragged.

  The three exchanged looks.

  “That’s not possible,” Julius said at last.

  Oscar frowned at his son. “Of course it is possible. You see it, do you not?”

  Between the three of them and Wing Lee, the Chinese laundryman, they managed to move the piano back in place before the Fosters got back. Mr. Lee muttered a few curt syllables in his native tongue when they’d finished, then retreated back to his domain in the basement. It fell to Oscar to explain the rugs and the piano to Mr. and Mrs. Foster.

  That night, Aurelia retired to her room and curled up on her bed. It wouldn’t be long now. Someone would start saying it. They would start believing in it. And it would only get worse because of that. Escalation wasn’t just inevitable—it had already begun.

  Her greatest fear, though, was that someday someone would chance to talk to her previous employer. The subject of queer goings-on might come up. Things that had started while she’d been there . . . and stopped when she’d left.

  She’d been lucky so far. But luck never lasted.

  Julius said the dreaded word the next day.

  “What’s next? A floating cookstove?” he asked as the house staff sat about drinking coffee and waiting for Aurelia to finish making their breakfast.

  Please don’t give it ideas, she thought as she poured beaten eggs and cream into the bacon drippings and gave them a stir.

  “What are you babbling about?” asked Mary Campbell, one of the housemaids.

  “Mrs. Foster is talking about bringing in a medium,” Julius said, “on account of the house being haunted.”

  And suddenly there it was. It. Haunted.

  Aurelia froze, her ears straining.

  “Silly gossip,” Oscar said.

  “That piano didn’t move itself.”

  “Trains,” his father muttered.

  “Trains didn’t move the piano, Father!”

  Aurelia scraped the eggs onto a platter and turned around, forcing a too-bright smile. “Breakfast!”

  But Julius refused to be distracted. As they all piled biscuits, eggs, and bacon on their plates, he kept talking.

  “Mr. Grant from New York claims to be a Spiritualist,” he said. “He told her he can suss it out.”

  I very much doubt that, Aurelia thought as she slathered jam on her biscuit.

  “There is nothing to ‘suss,’” Oscar said, his normally kind countenance rendered gruff with annoyance. “There is no ghost!”

  “But have you considered that Mrs. Foster has had five miscarriages—”

  “Enough!” He slammed his fist on the table, causing them all to freeze and stare at him. “I will not have my own son talking that way at his employer’s table. No more talk of ghosts!”

  “Papa—”

  Oscar rattled off a rapid stream of German at his son. Julius sat back, his lips pressed tight together.

  The rest of the meal concluded in uncomfortable silence.

  That night Aurelia curled up on her bed, a book in her lap. The tension between father and son had become palpable. Yet one more thing that she was to blame for, though they didn’t know it—and hopefully never would.

  Things would only get worse. She needed to run, though she now wondered where she could go that she wouldn’t be found by her curse. San Francisco? Los Angeles? Perhaps there was an Elemental Master in New Orleans or Saint Louis who could help her? Probably not, though. In the beginning she had tried to find someone. A simple dismissal command would have freed her. But every Master she’d found had been a man telling her a woman “wasn’t worthy” of his precious time.

  It had made her realize how unique her grandmother was as one of the few female Elemental Masters in America. And it made her wonder what happened to all those women with talent who didn’t have her grandmother to teach them.

  Not that it had done Millie any good.

  Aurelia remembered the last time she’d seen her sister: curled up in an opium joint on Mott Street, a pipe to her lips. She’d changed shockingly. Her hair had once been like Aurelia’s—so dark brown it was nearly black—but it had turned pure white and brittle in mere months. Scabs dotted her arms and legs. For all that she’d been glad to see her sister—up to the point when Aurelia told her she was going to summon her first sylph and face the same test that Millie had failed: resisting the temptations of Air.

  Millie had laughed. “You’ll fail.”

  Aurelia frowned. “No, I won’t.”

  “Fly or fall. Isn’t that what the old bat always says? I fell. I haven’t stopped falling.” Millie’s eyes had grown distant. “They still talk to me, you know. Whispering in my head. Whisper whisper whisper . . .” She rubbed her cheeks. “The smoke is the only thing that drives their incessant chatter out of my mind. Secrets. Endless secrets. The city is lousy with them.”

  Aurelia drew away in horror. Her sister had been disinherited months back, and it had taken considerable effort just to find and visit her. Her grandmother hadn’t told her what had happened, and had even bargained with the Elements to keep the truth from Aurelia.

  She’d ultimately gotten around this by finding an Earth Master and paying him a great deal to send his gnomes to suss out Millie’s location. Her grandmother couldn’t control gnomes. Earth was a slow Element—at times maddeningly so—but eventually they’d found her sister.

  Aurelia wondered if she’d have preferred if they hadn’t.

  Millie had smiled and stroked her sister’s face. “Of course, you’ll still try. And you’ll fall. And when you do”—she patted the empty seat next to her, and then drew on the long opium pipe, her eyes drifting shut with exquisite bliss—“I’ll be here, saving a place for you, dear sister.”

  Back in her bedroom in Chicago, Aurelia leaned over and turned down her lamp until it was only a faint glow.

  I didn’t fall, Millie, she thought. I just didn’t finish what I started. And that failure of courage has come back to “haunt” me again and again.

  She lay back, wondering where her sister was now. Wondering if she had, in the end, stopped her fall.

  Aurelia wasn’t sure she had the courage to know the answer.

  • • •

  The next morning at the
Foster Mansion, opportunity finally chose to smile on Aurelia.

  “Mrs. Foster wanted to know if you could get her more of the syrup from the chemist?” Oscar asked.

  Aurelia’s head snapped up from where she’d been setting water to boil for the coffee. “Yes. Absolutely!”

  Oscar gave her a curious look but said, “It is appreciated. Thank you.”

  Aurelia had to quash a giddy giggle as she returned later that day, a fresh bottle of Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup clutched in her hand. She’d probably need to stay a few weeks more, titrating down the amount of syrup Alice received, but if this worked, she’d have at least done some good before she ran away from Chicago. That had to be worth whatever calamity would result from her staying longer.

  She replaced half of the bottle’s contents with her own decoction, then delivered the adulterated Soothing Syrup to Mrs. Foster. Aurelia walked on eggshells from that point, waiting at once for both the next supernatural event and one of Alice’s episodes.

  Alice usually took dinner with Aurelia, who was expected to teach the girl formal dining manners. It was one of many things a governess would have done if she’d had one, but Aurelia knew a thing or two about table manners, and in the absence of a nanny she’d absorbed this responsibility as well.

  Tonight was different—Grace Foster had joined them, as Mr. Foster was out of town, and on this rare occasion, Grace had nowhere to be and no one to entertain. She sat at the table, observing and correcting her daughter’s manners, when Alice suddenly toppled out of her seat, hitting the floor in a crumpled pile.

  Aurelia quickly pushed away from the table, running to pick up Alice, as Mrs. Foster produced a familiar bottle and spoon from her purse. “Step aside, Miss Weiss,” she said.

  The china began to rattle.

  And then the bottle flew out Mrs. Foster’s hand and smashed on the tiled floor—inches from Alice’s head. Shards of glass sprayed, but hit no one. The room filled with the sweet stink of the nostrum.

  Aurelia cradled Alice in stunned silence. Grace trembled visibly. “M-Miss Weiss,” she whispered. “D-did you see that?”

  Aurelia nodded, and realized that she probably wasn’t showing the correct reaction. Afraid. She should be afraid.

  Not livid.

  It wasn’t just that weeks of planning and preparation and waiting had suddenly shattered on the floor. She could have endured a little longer if it would help Alice. It was that she wasn’t being allowed to help. That if she tried again, she’d be sabotaged again. And worse—that the sabotage had involved Alice and her mother. Had directly threatened their lives.

  “Stay here, Mrs. Foster,” she said. “I may have something in the pantry that will help Alice.”

  Grace nodded, though Aurelia suspected she was too shaken to do anything else.

  Aurelia gently set Alice down and ran into the pantry, pulling the door mostly shut behind her. “I know you can hear me,” she said, her voice a low growl. “Leave them alone. This quarrel is between you and me.”

  Something laughed in the darkness, a malevolent trill. She felt a draft where there should have been none, and smelled elderflower and ozone.

  In the little light from the mostly shut doorway, she found the half of the syrup she’d set aside, and slowly poured a small measure of it into a Winslow’s bottle she’d rescued from the rubbish pile.

  She held up the bottle. “Does this make you happy?” she asked as the wind grew, making the jars rattle and her clothes flap. “Is this what you want?”

  The wind died the moment she touched the door handle, and she returned to Mrs. Foster, who sat silently beside her daughter, stroking her hair and whispering softly to her.

  “There was a little left over from a previous order,” she explained, kneeling down beside Alice.

  Grace Foster reached for the bottle, and in that moment, a silent war burst into life in Aurelia’s head. I don’t have to support this, she realized. I don’t have to give her this bottle.

  She would lose her job, but she’d already lost it. She had nothing left to lose.

  Aurelia drew the bottle back, leaving Grace grasping at empty air. “What are you doing, Miss Weiss?” she asked.

  “You know it’s not good for her, don’t you?” Aurelia said quietly. “It’s laudanum. It’s poison.”

  Grace’s jaw tightened. “Give me the bottle.”

  “Her ‘cure’ is the source of her malady—”

  “Enough, Miss Weiss! I will not tolerate this kind of talk from a—a cook!”

  Aurelia’s face twitched with barely contained rage. Would you tolerate this from Aurelia Weiss, New York socialite? she wondered. Or Aurelia Weiss, Elemental Master?

  “All the doctors prescribe th-this for the common maladies that plague children,” Grace said. “It is a well understood remedy!”

  On the floor, Alice moaned. Aurelia leaned forward, holding Grace’s gaze. “Do you believe that, Mrs. Foster? Truly?”

  Grace’s eyes unexpectedly filled with tears. “It’s the only thing that keeps her safe.”

  Behind her, the cookstove’s oven door creaked open. A small, scaly creature hopped out and flicked a forked tongue in Aurelia’s direction.

  A salamander? she thought as it flowed like a line of fire across the floor, stopping just short of them. Grace Foster stiffened.

  Aurelia gave her a sharp look.

  “You can see it,” she said. “You can see the Elemental.”

  Grace widened her eyes and stared. “You can, too?”

  The salamander blinked slitted eyes at them, then slithered closer to Alice. Grace shrieked and swatted at it, and the salamander skittered back, flicking its tongue in vexation at her.

  “Get away from her!” she yelled. “Get away!”

  Aurelia blinked, dumbfounded. She stretched a hand out and whistled to the salamander, which cast a speculative look at Mrs. Foster, and then—skittering in a wide arc around her—came over to Aurelia, poking its nose at her hand.

  “Are you . . . petting that creature?” Grace sounded horrified.

  “It’s a salamander,” Alice replied. “And yes. As much as it will let me. Fire isn’t my Element, though it is my ally.” She looked at Grace. “Is it yours?”

  Grace trembled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Aurelia sat back on her heels. “Mrs. Foster, do you know anything about the Elemental Masters?” Something most scandalous suddenly occurred to Aurelia. “Is Mr. Foster Alice’s real father?”

  Grace turned white as a sheet, then regained some of her regal composure. “How dare you—”

  “So many miscarriages,” Aurelia said. “It’s not always the woman’s fault, you know. Sometimes the father—”

  Grace slapped her.

  The salamander hissed and snapped. A wind suddenly sprang up in the kitchen, whipping around Aurelia and shoving Grace across the floor and into a wall. Aurelia turned to see an elfin figure floating in the air behind her.

  “The ghost!” Grace gasped.

  “No,” Aurelia said angrily. “Not a ghost. Never a ghost. An Elemental that refuses to leave me be.” To the sylph she said, “Stop it!”

  The sylph laughed. “I don’t need to listen to you,” it said.

  The wind blew harder, feeding the flames that licked the salamander’s scales. The kitten-sized creature began to grow, its Fire fed by the sylph’s Air. It advanced on Mrs. Foster, who stared, dazed.

  “Stop!” Aurelia commanded again, but the Elementals ignored her, the sylph swooping around and hovering above the salamander, laughing like a bedlamite.

  Tears spilled down Grace’s cheeks as she crawled across the floor and back to Alice. She pulled her daughter into her arms, shielding the girl with her body. Aurelia could hear her whispering Psalm Twenty-Three into her daughter’s hair.

 
Aurelia stood and took a deep breath. It had been years since she’d invoked her magic. The last time she’d tried had been in the attic her grandmother had converted into a kind of magical atelier, and the subject of her arcane attentions had been the very sylph that floated before her.

  Aurelia was certain her grandmother had deliberately chosen not to dismiss it. The sylph had spent the last three years chasing her, “haunting” every household she’d worked in, and Aurelia had played the good victim every time.

  She drew the threads of magic around her—Air from her own breath, Fire from the oven, Water from the broth bubbling on the cookstove. Magic swirled around her as she cried, “I invoke our Pact!”

  The salamander froze. The sylph turned and glided over until they were nose-to-nose. “There is no Pact, you silly goose,” the sylph said. “We are not bound. You never finished.”

  “So let us finish now,” Aurelia said, holding and keeping the sylph’s gaze. The intense blue eyes of the creature brought the memories of her grandmother’s atelier into sharp focus: the smell of cedar, the motes of chalk powder floating in the air, and her grandmother standing to one side, watching like a hawk.

  “Why would I answer to a creature such as you?” The sylph tittered indelicately. “You’re no Master. You’re just a cook. You allow this woman to treat you like nothing. And poor Alice. What has she been doing to her?” It leaned close to whisper in Aurelia’s ear. “You’re right about the child’s father.”

  Aurelia looked down at Grace, who still had her face buried in Alice’s hair.

  “Grace was quite the naughty girl,” the sylph continued, its words a private seduction of knowledge. “She acts proper now, but oh, the men she entertained when she was young! Would you like to know about them? Would you like to know about the Fire Master she met on summer vacation in St. Louis? The things I know would destroy her. She’d pay handsomely to keep them secrets.”