Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles

by Karina Cooper

  I don’t know how long we sat in my bed, his back to the headboard and his hands cupped around me as I drifted in silence against his naked chest. I didn’t want to sleep—didn’t want to dare the ghosts that haunted my memories—but fatigue and my lingering weakness stripped the choice from me. Loosely clasped in Ashmore’s arms, I slumbered.

  It was the first in a very long time that I did not truly fear to do so.

  * * *

  I awoke with no awareness of my surroundings.

  With the uncertainties of one who had stepped from a dream to waking bemusement, I found myself perched upon a vanity’s seat, delicate glass jar in one hand and a startled reflection of myself framed within the mirror I stared into.

  How had I gotten here?

  A fragrance drifted in the air, a little sharp for my tastes and smelling faintly of lilies. Immediately, my nose twitched. I had always been adverse to the smell, often lapsing into fits of sneeze on the ballroom when the blasted flower became the rage.

  I glanced at the indigo blue jar, but did not lift the nozzle to my nose. I could well assume it as the source of the needling odor. I set it down with great care, its fragile design much finer than anything I’d be likely to possess.

  Silk rustled when I moved.

  My gaze darted back to the mirror.

  My hair was parted in the middle, my too-long fringe at the front now swept into the mass and allowed to blend. While it seemed I’d made an attempt to create a loose knot at the nape of my neck, half now hung awkwardly over my shoulder, as if I’d gotten too tired to continue. A delicate ivory comb rested on the vanity in front of me, ready to be tucked into that coil.

  It was not a fashion of the day, but it suited the gown I wore, which was many years out of style. The fabric was a brilliant shade of blue, one so deep that it that turned my hair to a ruby shine. It hung loosely upon me, neither structured by a corset nor wholly suited to this unhealthy thinness I had acquired, but it was nevertheless an exquisite creation.

  I splayed a pale hand over the bodice, which would have fitted more closely had it been made for me, my shoulders bare and draped sleeves hanging over my arms. The waist was rather more high than I was accustomed to.

  I startled to recognize the gown from that of the painting within the library.

  This was my mother’s. I had found my mother’s gown, somehow put it on without my being aware of it. I’d even begun to mimic the hair style within the painting.

  I stared at the reflection looking wide-eyed back at me. I did not look like my mother—I did not even come close. In the silvered mirror, I looked a child playacting in her mother’s clothes, a shadow too small to ever compare to the radiant flame her mother had been.

  I looked pitiful.

  I rose so quickly, the delicate chair I sat upon tottered. As I spun to catch it, the heavy skirt swept it aside. The chair crashed to the floor.

  I did not realize how badly my hands were shaking until I looked down to see them reaching uselessly, tremblingly for nothing.

  A heavy film of dust and murky light turned everything to a dreary gloom, save for the splash of brilliant fabric spilling from three open trunks arrayed along the farthest wall. From vivid verdigris to muted lavender, the yellow of a daisy’s eye and a hint of red; these were the gowns of a bold, confident woman.

  Had I walked here in my sleep? Did I dream of that painting, or of my mother?

  I recalled nothing of my sleep at all.

  I didn’t like this. It felt wrong. I shouldn’t have lost time and memory, not since coming off the tar. Was I falling into relapse despite Ashmore’s efforts?

  Was it something else?

  Ice slipped down my spine, curling my toes and fingers with the force of a fear I had not felt since I’d escaped the malice masked within the dreary London fog. Those of us who spent any degree of time in the thick miasma saturating all of the poverty-stricken streets learned to sense danger before it came. Of all I recalled of my prior adventures, it was that malevolence evoked by the men who stalked it that I remembered most clearly: the Ripper, monstrous in madness, and the sweet tooth whose calculated assassinations put even the Ripper’s to shame.

  Even in my dreams, I remembered what it did to me to be stalked through that wretched fog by a murderer.

  It was that I felt now. That lingering evil, that ooze of malevolent intent.

  I was being watched.

  I spun slowly, shoulders rounding as if I expected a blow; shadows and silhouettes turned to evil lurking where only décor had been moments before.

  Seeing nothing did not salve the visceral fear.

  It was the same feeling I’d harbored in my room only the day before. My skin prickled, my instincts shrieked at me. In the gloomy bedroom I stood within, I heard only the wheezing rasp of wood settling, groans and creaks as filled this empty house, and I could not move.

  The knowledge coalesced inside my thoughts like a splash of icy water. If I did not escape right bloody then, I would not survive what came next.

  I did not pause to think that could possibly happen. I did not truly believe that the house would come alive to snap me up into eternal darkness, yet my senses screamed that it was so. Such terror bloomed within me that I did not think. Seizing the heavy skirt in both hands, I fled the boudoir as though the Devil himself gave chase, the back of my neck and shoulders prickling as though I ran a mere finger’s length ahead from skeletal hands.

  I spilled into a large open hallway, my bare feet tangling into the too-long hem of the borrowed gown, and nearly tumbled to the dusty carpet softening the floor. Turning, limbs flailing, I bit back a scream as a figure rose tall and threatening before me.

  Ashmore caught one arm as I stumbled. “What the devil is all that racket?”

  Had I the presence of mind to speak, to form coherent thought beneath the onslaught of pervasive terror, I might have managed a sensible word.

  I could only flutter my hand behind me in wordless terror.

  His glance flicked to the open door over my bare shoulder, then narrowed and fell not upon my face, but my attire.

  Ashmore pulled his steadying hand back so fast, it was as if I’d burned him. “You look ridiculous,” he said, angry where I’d expected sympathy. “Put it back where you found it.”

  “I—There’s someone there!”

  He had no interest in my flights of fancy. “There’s no one,” he snapped. He turned his back on me. “Take it off and put it back.” Without further wasted word, he strode from the hall. The sharp, angry staccato of his footsteps echoed long after he turned from sight.

  I stood in the corridor, abandoned and confused. Terror rode me, and as his footsteps faded into nothing, I swore I heard the creaking echo of a mirrored tread knocking from within the looming walls.

  I groaned, a shuddering sound.

  Was I mad?

  Was it the want of a draught that finally pushed me to such meanderings of the mind?

  Although I understood the logic of such a trick, that my desperation created for me a motive to demand the balm of laudanum, it did not matter. My senses would not heed such reasoning.

  Once more hiking the skirt high enough to clear the floor, I escaped the gloomy wing and its imagined ghosts.

  Chapter Eight

  I stared at the cloth covering the painting once more and could not bring myself to get off the sofa and remove it. It was not all fatigue, though it seemed I suffered it more acutely after my ill-fated wanderings into my mother’s boudoir of some days past. There were times I could not fight the need for sleep, and others when I wanted so badly to pace but could barely sit on the sofa I claimed as my own.

  No matter what I tried, what distractions I contrived to lose myself in, I could not shake free of the certainty that I was watched. Such abject paranoia had become my most steady of bedfellows that it was all I could do to bury myself in what books I could and ignore the urge to rail at the dark.

  We were alone, Ashmore and I,
of that I had no doubt. My alternate theory, that this house despised me as much as loathed it, was so far-fetched as to be ludicrous.

  That left me mulling over a scientific explanation, and that was that I had done myself irreparable harm by the ongoing consumption of opium.

  This conclusion caused me no end of concern.

  I had no need to remove the white covering to see Josephine St. Croix’s radiant smile. It all but blistered me where I lay, my feet curled up beneath my wrapper—likely hers, too, now that I’d thought about it—and a book left open and abandoned over my chest. She judged me from her gilded frame, and I could do nothing but glower back at the white drape that covered it.

  Somehow, I doubted very much that she would ever have allowed herself to be in this situation, were it her. She was too flawless for such mishaps.

  For the past four days, Ashmore had been the perfect guardian. The food he brought had begun to gain a little more character—sausages with breakfast’s usual toast, a bit of jam to sweeten the dry fare. The portions continued to be small, but I still could not eat more than a bit at a time. I simply enjoyed the variety, forcing myself to eat a little of everything while I bolstered my strength and attempted to earn back some lost flesh.

  He made no complaint when I asked to be taken to the library, and wheeled the heavy chair I was forced to use with conscientious patience.

  We did not speak of that stolen kiss, or the sweet comfort he had afforded me—nor did I attempt to be given that comfort again. He did not bring up the strange moment in the hall, and I did not mention the elegant blue gown balled up and shoved beneath my bed.

  I had not been able to bring myself to travel past the staircase and into the abandoned wing again. I told myself that my unwillingness stemmed from the weakness turning such efforts into difficult endeavors, and that was true—but it was also an excuse I comfortably hid behind.

  The whole of it frightened me. I jumped at shadows that had, as near as I could discern, always been there. I heard noises in the walls that I truly understood to be nothing more than an old house suffering all the rotted aches and pains of neglect, and yet they inexplicably made me afraid.

  I had never been one to jump at shadows, yet when I faced straight ahead, I was certain that hands reached for me from the side. When I looked, I shuddered to imagine that a shape flitted away too quick to see. My heart no longer remained content to beat in easy rhythm, but juddered within my breast so loudly that I thought I heard footsteps instead of a pulse.

  When I watched the library carefully, nothing moved but firelight and shadows, and still I was not convinced. Even the halls became a lesson in endurance.

  I did not like to be alone in my room until I was certain that Ashmore occupied his beside me. I’d have preferred he stay in mine, yet to ask seemed a loss of pride and an admittance to a deep concern now preying upon my mind.

  So I did not tell him.

  Instead, I read all I could, ignoring the periodicals left abandoned on the floor beside the sofa. When I felt capable enough—or simply gave in to restless fervor—I scoured the shelves I could reach for anything that might interest me.

  I wanted something more personal than these books. The thoughts of my grandfather’s illness would not leave me be, and I wondered many times what it was that afflicted him—and why Ashmore was so certain it would not touch me. It felled my grandfather, did it not? And it had affected my mother, though her life was so tragically shortened by the laboratory fire.

  I wanted to know more about the family I had not known existed.

  Why did they keep no personal journals? My mother was known to keep diaries—I had been given one by Compton’s brother as a gift. The journal was a small one, but it catalogued many of my mother’s thoughts on aether and alchemy. It was the first time I’d ever known that my mother had fancied herself something of an alchemist—or that she and the Lady Northampton had been friends, once.

  I’d given it, the remaining sample of my father’s alchemical serum, and a drawn picture of the cameo device he’d used to secret it, to Ishmael Communion before I’d gone hunting for the sweet tooth and the Ripper. Communion was not the sort of friend Society would have been pleased to know I had, but I trusted him beyond all things. An extremely large man whose black skin and near-black eyes gave him a terribly intimidating demeanor, he was a member of the Brick Street Bakers—one of London’s many under-fog gangs.

  Ishmael had refined much of my cracking knowledge—to wit, how to break into a building—and was among the most skilled lockpicks I knew.

  I hoped he still possessed the things I’d given him to hold. Hoped, too, that my flight from the Menagerie that fateful night had not forced the Veil to turn its eye on the Bakers. While the accords between them had always been civil, I was a known associate of Ishmael’s. If the Veil felt particularly slighted, it could cost my friend greatly. The Bakers were strong, but small, and, when I’d left them last, already embroiled in a conflict with the Black Fish Ferrymen.

  I chewed on the broken skin of my thumb and glowered again at the covered painting.

  If my mother was a chronicler of any sort, surely she had learned it from her father. The man who had raised a theoretical alchemist such as my mother must also be a mind given to intellectual pursuit, wouldn’t he? Such minds always maintained diaries of one kind or another.

  No matter how often I’d searched, I found nothing.

  Ill-tempered and denied every opportunity to quiet my chattering mind, I let my hand fall over the side of the sofa and stared blindly up at the high, vaulted ceiling.

  The shadows leapt and frolicked across it, a mesmerizing ebb and flow of light. I allowed myself to watch the patterns flicker, even so far as so entertain a brief moment to close my eyes in rest.

  So it was I found myself in a strange state of dozing and wakefulness when an awful baying rose above the merry pop and sizzle of the fire. My eyes snapped open, my body torn between sitting up and guarding what little strength it could claim, so that I only jerked sharply in aborted motion. “What—!” A bitten off gasp.

  Nothing in the library had changed, though I no longer expected it to. My idle-minded dreams were no different than the opium-induced delusions I’d harbored for so long; my efforts to ignore them were only somewhat more successful when I was in the library with the fire bright and books.

  Still, my heart pounded as the baying increased—a terrible, mournful sound echoing from somewhere beyond the walls I hid within.

  I seized the back of the sofa and hauled myself upright, frowning fiercely.

  Dogs. Whatever my imagination wanted to paint the sound, I was not so missish that I didn’t know the sound of dogs. They howled and barked in the manner of hounds clambering for attention.

  Inside the house was quiet, or those parts I could hear from where I held a lonely court. That meant the dogs were kept outside.

  A stable, perchance, or a groundskeeper’s abode?

  A flash of recollection parted through the cloudy haze my youthful memory hid beneath, its vision bright as a summer bird’s wing and startlingly sharp. I recalled a time when I huddled in my own bed, not so long ago, while the hall of my Cheyne Walk home filled with a presence I thought dangerously hungry. Snuffling filled the space behind my closed door, and I recall associating Ashmore’s demonic memory with that of hounds unleashed by hell itself.

  Perhaps the grip my years of laudanum wrapped about my shattered memories was slipping; if so, I could thank Ashmore for the care that allowed me to recall such small a thing and place it.

  The man kept dogs.

  I buried my face against the brocade and laughed in helpless embarrassment.

  How far gone was I then that only now in my restless sobriety did I recognize the truth for what it was?

  Somewhere, a door slammed, and Ashmore’s voice murmured through my rueful amusement. Feminine laughter undercut whatever it was he said.

  My laughter abruptly died.

&nb
sp; A woman?

  The devil it was. Mr. Oliver Ashmore was a mystery in many ways, but I found the concept of his bringing a woman to this, the site of my convalescence, utterly out of character. In all the years he had served as my guardian, he did so absently, and never once brought a woman to the home he held until my inheriting.

  That left perhaps a maid. A cook? Neither necessary, for Ashmore saw to what little care was needed—although in retrospect, I had not seen him take a duster to the furniture yet.

  What else was there to mind?

  Me.

  Of course. A companion. Hadn’t he claimed to have sent for one? How many days had it been? Surely more than enough to fetch some busybody of a creature from whatever village was closest.

  My hand curled into a determined fist atop the sofa’s back.

  I didn’t want a companion. I had no reason to trust one, no desire at all to exist with a stranger underfoot and hovering.

  I was already convinced that Ashmore was avoiding me as often as his conscience allowed. This woman, whoever she might be, would only allow him to do so with impunity.

  I turned, wincing when the act of putting my feet down upon the carpet only drew my attention to how tired I seemed to be. My muscles ached as though I abused them; my bones felt heavy and fragile. It wasn’t a sleepiness of the mind, though I did not sleep enough already. I simply felt as if I lacked all energy.

  I would be forced to pretend, then. Long enough to rid this creaking house of its new guest.

  The voices came closer, echoing eerily from my vantage, and I caught myself lifting my thumb to my mouth.

  No. Such tells betrayed my worries. Ashmore would surely see that for what it was.

  A gentle rapping came upon the library door, and I did not turn when it opened. “Miss St. Croix, we’ve a guest.” Ashmore’s tone was not the deferential respect of a butler—Booth would have been far more elegant in his introduction—but there was a self-satisfied air about it that I yearned to take him to task for.