The Long Past & Other Stories

by Ginn Hale

  Lawrence straightened and pushed up the brim of his hat. Frank and Cora turned as George bounded up the steps.

  “What on earth is the matter?” Cora asked.

  Out of breath, George simply slapped the front page of the paper down onto the table. A parcel, wrapped in weathered brown paper slid from between the broadsheet pages.

  Grover glared down at the grainy image of Nathaniel Tucker, which took up a good section of the newspaper’s front page.

  “Nathaniel Tucker commits suicide,” Lawrence read the headline aloud. “Famous Theurgist leaps to icy death in Potomac River. Final note reveals his role in creating the rifts and begs that the courage…” Lawrence’s voice suddenly failed him and he shook his head.

  “…that the courage of Lawrence Wilder, Gaston Jacquard and Grover Ahigbe never be forgotten!” George read out proudly. He beamed at both Lawrence and Grover. Then he snatched up the parcel and handed it to Lawrence.

  “This came by airship for you.”

  The address looked faded and full of ornate flourishes. Lawrence took the package and stepped back from the table to open it. His expression struck Grover as grim. All four of them on the porch glanced after Lawrence, but none of them were so ill-mannered as to pry before Lawrence had a chance to take in the contents himself.

  “I knew that Tucker was a bad egg.” Cora went to her husband’s side and picked up the paper. “I’d started to feel a little bad for him because his brother got killed but…” She trailed off as the details of the article absorbed her attention. A moment later she looked up with a shocked expression. “Oh goodness! That David fellow wasn’t even his brother!”

  “What’s this?” Frank asked. He strolled over to the table.

  Cora read out the entire article, revealing the contents of Nathaniel Tucker’s suicide note. Grover had wondered how long Honora had intended to continue impersonating Nathaniel Tucker after she’d ensured the ratification of the Proclamation of Emancipation. He’d imagined that in her place, he would have slipped away discreetly, but he supposed that just proved how much less of a showman he was than Lady Astor.

  He stood and offered Frank his seat, so that he could see the illustrations in the paper. While the further details of the article absorbed the others, Grover withdrew to Lawrence’s side.

  “It’s from Honora,” Lawrence informed him quietly as he turned the small package over in his hands.

  “Oh? How is Lady Astor?”

  “She’s on her way to some destination that she can’t disclose to me now that I’m no longer in the service,” Lawrence said, smiling. “She’s sent me my papers. I’ve been officially and honorably discharged.”

  Grover felt a surge of elation and only just stopped himself from throwing his arms around Lawrence in front of everyone. As it was, they leaned into each other, both grinning. Grover knew he owed his life to Lady Astor, but at this moment he felt more thankful to her for not dragging Lawrence back into service than for anything else.

  The last vestige of the past that had kept them apart for eight years dissipated like morning dew in the summer sun. Now, he and Lawrence were free to make what they would of today and all their tomorrows.

  “She promises to send me more masala soon,” Lawrence added.

  The Hollow History of Professor Perfectus

  Chicago 1893

  The Great Stage Magician, Professor Perfectus, rolled his black satin top hat over one white-gloved hand and into the other. His expression remained placid beneath his velvet half-mask. Out in the exhibition hall, hundreds of men and women leaned forward in their seats, following his every motion intently. He passed the hat over the supine body of the very pretty Miss May Flowers (actually called Geula Mandelbaum, but audiences expected a certain simplicity of name and function when it came to the assistants of stage magicians).

  Slowly Geula rose off the table. Her beaded red dress draped from her legs. A comb fell from her hair, freeing one long, lustrous gold curl. She floated upward with the slow grace of a column of incense until she lay stretched out a full foot above Professor Perfectus’s slim, gray-haired figure. He passed his top hat under Geula, brushing the loose curl of her hair as he did so.

  And I—a dark girl standing in the shadows, where no one watched—I drew in a deep breath, taking all the strength I could from the currents of the air that filled the large hall. I concentrated and made a motion, as if to shoo a fly aside.

  At once, three white doves escaped from Professor Perfectus’s top hat, winging around his suspended assistant. Gasps, cries and applause burst from the audience and grew wilder when a mob of scarlet butterflies burst from the breast of Geula’s dress. They followed the doves up into the darkness above the stage curtain and disappeared as a rain of red and white cut paper fluttered down.

  Someone in the audience screamed. Concerned voices rose from amidst the applause and cheers.

  I stepped forward into the flare of limelight, dressed as plainly as a governess. My hair had been pulled back into a severe bun, and a useless pair of gold spectacles perched on the bridge of my nose.

  Glinting, golden things like the spectacles captured the audience’s attention on a darkened stage, erasing its awareness of more subtle details.

  “Good people, please do not be alarmed.” I spoke slowly and calmly, suppressing the cadence of my natural accent. “Let me again assure you that none of the feats you have witnessed on this stage were the results of actual magic. The professor is not a mage or even a theurgist. What you have seen here were displays of the most ingenious slight of hand and misdirection, crafted and practiced to perfection, by a great master. My dear uncle, Professor Perfectus.”

  I waved my hand in the professor’s direction, and he executed a deep bow and flipped his hat back atop his head. Then he dropped his white-gloved hands into the pockets of his dark coat. Sweat beaded the back of my neck and dampened the high collar of my gray dress. Encores like this one always exhausted me, but it was very nearly over.

  “I cannot give away all of my uncle’s secrets,” I went on in a stage whisper as I drew closer to where Geula hung in the air. “But certainly a few of you must suspect that Miss Flowers is suspended by several very strong wires.”

  On cue, Geula reached up and wrapped her gloved hands around the black wires. She pulled herself up into a sitting position as if she were balanced in the seat of a swing. I knelt, retrieved her glittering, gold comb and handed it to her.

  “Why, thank you so much, Abril. I must look a fright.” She drew all eyes as she made a small show of fixing her blond hair and straightening the hem of her red dress before it exposed more than her dainty yellow shoes.

  And while the two of us blocked the view, Professor Perfectus stepped backwards into his black cabinet, hidden in the dark velvet folds of the back curtain. He pulled the doors closed behind him and locked the clasp from inside. With immense relief, I let his lace-cut steel body slump lifelessly back onto the supports in the cabinet. At last, I allowed my consciousness to slip from the automaton.

  I took Geula’s hand and helped her hop down from the wires. Then she and I stepped apart to reveal the seemingly empty stage behind us.

  A roar of happy applause went up through the crowd. Young men who had become regulars at the fair tossed flowers onto the stage while a few brave women threw handmade sachets embroidered with hearts and scented with lavender.

  Strange to think how much they loved to be fooled momentarily into believing they’d witnessed genuine magic, which they’d all but outlawed across the eastern states and most of the western territories. Yet six days a week, huge crowds paid to cheer at slight of hand and misdirection. They relished the smoke hiding all the wires and mirrors because it allowed them to conjure the presence of something amazing and dangerous. Here in the dark, they longed for mysteries and magic. But out on public streets, with carriages careening past and newsbo
ys shouting sordid tales of scandals and murders, the last thing these decent folk wanted was to discover a free mage lurking in their midst.

  That hadn’t always been so.

  But in 1858, during the Arrow War, mages had torn open a vast and unnatural chasm, flooding out most the southern states and dividing the east and west of America with a the Inland Sea. And up in the Rocky Mountains, behind the roaring saltwater, had come ancient creatures. Theurgists and naturalists called them dinosaurs, but most folks knew them as monsters. Twelve years after that, just as the waters had calmed and cattlemen had learned to rope and drive herds of burly leptoceratops, another battle between mages had unleashed the Great Conflagration. Eastern towns all across the salt marshes and as far north as Chicago had caught light. In Peshtigo, more than a thousand people had burned to death.

  Twenty-two years on, people still hadn’t forgotten the terror of those merciless flames. Hell, I’d been three then, but even I still woke shaking from dreams of my parents screaming as a blazing cyclone of brilliant embers engulfed them.

  So I understood what all these good, natural folks feared. I even understood why they wanted free mages like me rounded up and placed under the godly thumbs of theurgists. They felt terrified and powerless. They wanted magic if it came with assurances, federal offices and communion wafers. They wanted mages in the world—transmitting messages across the oceans and powering turbines—so long as they had us on leashes and electric collars.

  But I knew the man who’d created those damn collars, and he gave me worse nightmares than my parents’ deaths did.

  I’d also come to understand how corrupt theurgists could be. The papers were full of news of how the US Office of Theurgy and Magicum had ordered the 7th Cavalry to suppress Lakota free mages and their Spirit Dances. That hadn’t been upholding the law; it had been a massacre. I’d rather live all my life as a wanted outlaw than lend my small power to the men responsible.

  Geula and I agreed on that much. She didn’t share my suspicion of all theurigists as much as she dreaded the attention of the men who hunted bounties. Audience expectation wasn’t the only reason she’d abandoned her real name when she’d fled Boston ten years ago.

  We weren’t either of us angels—though Geula could look the part with a pair of dainty white wings strapped to her dress and a brassy halo pinned to her curls—but we didn’t hurt anybody. Not with our stage performances, and not when we kissed and delighted each other in the privacy of our little room backstage.

  I clasped her gloved hand, feeling the warmth and strength of her grip in my own. We bowed, applause and cheers rolling over us as the new electric floor lights bathed us in a yellow glow. Geula caught a sachet and smiled beautifully. I drew in another deep breath, taking power from the tiny whirlwinds that rose between clapping hands and in gusts of hot exhalations. Doors opened and fresh breezes blew in from the lobby. My skin tingled with pleasure.

  Air. I ached to feel fresh air the way a landed fish desired water.

  Geula glanced sidelong at me, and I caught the worry in her eyes. I forced a smile. We bowed again, and the applause very slowly died down. There were always folk who believed that if they clapped hard and long enough Professor Perfectus would reappear, though he never did.

  “You worried me for a moment there,” Geula whispered. “Better now, though?”

  “Much,” I assured her. Performing six days a week at the New United America Exhibition in Chicago wore me down, but if I could hold out a year, I’d have earned enough money for Geula and I to buy our own place out west where no one knew us.

  We straightened, and I followed her gaze out into the audience. The usual bunch of young men winked and ogled her. A number of older gentlemen stared at the stage with expressions of distant longing. Then I surveyed the upper crust we’d pulled into the box seats. I raised my hand, pretending to straighten my spectacles and hiding my scowl.

  Three women, wearing silk, lace and dazzling strings of pearls, gazed down at me from their gilded box. I recognized them, of course. The three “Jewels of Chicago Society”, papers called them. (Though the same newsmen deemed Fatima Djemille’s graceful dancing “obscene”, so their taste clearly didn’t align with mine.)

  Tall, long-faced Jane Addams and her mousy little companion, Ellen Starr, weren’t either of them much past thirty but already famous for their philanthropy and Christian charity work. Beside them, the elegant, silver-haired widow Mrs. Bertha Palmer looked like a bird of paradise perched alongside two pigeons. She controlled a vast fortune of properties and was rumored to know more about financing bars and brothels than any society lady ought to. She looked like the kind of woman who laughed a great deal at everyone else.

  But what truly set the three of them apart from most women in the country and made them a trinity were their statuses as Official Theurgists. With a word, any of the three of them could order me captured, jailed and collared.

  My stomach clenched like a snail dropped in a snowbank.

  “You see who is up in the box seats?” I asked quietly.

  Geula didn’t appear the least bit surprised. She simply nodded.

  “I told you I found us patrons, didn’t I?” Geula whispered.

  It took a moment for that to sink in. She’d invited them here. How much had she told them?

  “Abril, you can’t keep working like this. It’s wearing you down to your bones.” Geula cast me one of her soft, sweet looks. “You’re making yourself sick, darling. I know you want to make more money, but—”

  “You don’t know anything,” I responded in a less-than-pleasant sort of hiss. I jerked my hand from hers.

  Fortunately, the stage curtain came down before anyone in our audience could see Geula’s dismayed expression or witness my dash for the back door.

  Geula found me across the man-made lagoons, up on the observation deck that overlooked the resplendent Hall of Natural History. I stared down at the long swath formed by thousands of people, dressed in their best hats and coats, as they poured between the huge plaster statues of proud and savage beasts. Lions, plesiosaurs, elk and elephants posed on massive pedestals, while pigeons and small brown pterosaurs flitted overhead.

  Cold winds rushed up from Lake Michigan and surged over me. I drank in the force of them, calming the air around me and at the same time regaining some of my strength.

  How I loved the wind—I didn’t even care if it stank of fish or coal smoke. I felt as if the gusts could sustain me. Though in truth, not even the most powerful of wind mages could live on air alone. And contrary to popular opinion, none of us actually controlled the wind. We drew our power from it, just as earth mages needed the ground beneath them to cast spells and sea mages required water to maintain their power.

  Theurgists, on the other hand, built spells as complex as engines and powered them with alchemic stone—the same way an engineer might shovel coal into his boiler. (Though not so long ago theurgists had wired mages into their spells, using us like batteries and leaving us as drained husks.)

  I’d learned that much history from my uncle—not the masked automaton that I’d dolled up to pass for him on stages and in hotels, but the gentle old man who’d died to keep me and his invention from falling into the hands of theurgists or the monsters who served them.

  I glared into the distance.

  Studded with electric lights, Mr. Ferris’s Great Wheel rose so high into the twilight sky that it appeared to harvest shining stars as it slowly descended. Beyond that, veils of coal smoke spread a haze over the dark streets of Chicago, making the city seem as a far shore, vastly distant from the miles of verdant fairgrounds claimed by the New United America Exhibition.

  “So you gonna say anything or just stare off sulking?” Geula leaned against the cast-iron railing of the overlook. She’d brought her willow lunch basket and wore a long black coat over her beaded red dress. Several ivory-capped hatpins se
cured her wide black hat to her hair. One stray curl hung against the graceful line of her neck.

  “I’m not sulking,” I replied—though my tone wasn’t so convincing, not even to my own ears. “I’m thinking.”

  “About?”

  “Things.” I adored every inch of Geula—absolutely loved her laughter and easy conversation too—but for the first time, I faced how little I truly knew of her. Three months wasn’t a long time together, not even if it had been a giddy, glorious three months. I’d kept back much of my own history, not wanting her to think poorly of me. For the first time I pondered how much she might not have told me.

  “Things…” Geula hefted her small lunch basket and drew out a sandwich. She took a bite and chewed with a contemplative expression. “Could be better, could be worse.”

  She offered the sandwich to me, and I accepted it. We were making decent money at the exhibition, but not so much that we could often indulge beyond sausages and mustard on a rye roll. With only one railway bridging the Inland Sea, tickets didn’t come easily or cheap. Though now I had to wonder how foolish that fantasy might be if I couldn’t even trust Geula not to bring theurgists to my doorstep.

  I took a couple bites and returned the sandwich to Geula. She finished it off. We both watched as a young couple strolled past us, trailing a matronly chaperone. Geula’s fingers twitched, but she didn’t pinch anything from them.

  “I packed up your props and the professor’s cabinet,” Geula informed me quietly. “It’s all locked up in the dressing room.”

  “Thank you.” I felt slightly guilty about having left her with all that heavy work, but on the other hand, what had she expected me to do at the sight of three theurgists? Two days back, when she’d mentioned finding patrons, I’d imagined the usual bored, bearded old men who enjoyed throwing their money around in front of young women. I certainly hadn’t pictured myself facing down the Chicago Jewels.

  “What did you tell them?” I asked. “About me.”