“Are you sure?” I asked, because anything else seemed too complex to give voice to.
I had known something was amiss about Hawke’s behavior of late. I’d seen it with my own eyes. What she told me now only verified it.
She nodded, clasping her hands in her lap. “The girls what come back from his shows are bleeding, some broken so awful, they won’t talk of it. Hawke isn’t right, anymore.” Her mouth drew into a sad line. “Ikenna Osoba’s the whip what does all the talking to the likes of us.”
“Osoba.” As I shaped the name, a vicious hiss came out with it. It was the savage lion-prince of far-flung Africa what had twisted Black Lily’s head until her neck snapped. “Didn’t Zylphia take him on?”
The girl stared at me. “What? When?”
“The mutiny.”
“I don’t know about that, but if so, it’s a wonder either are standing,” she said, awed. “Zylphia’s got a thing about her folk only whisper of, and Osoba’s always been respectful-like about it.”
I felt as if I’d missed an important detail, but needling at my head wouldn’t help. “You didn’t see them go at loggerheads?”
“No, I wasn’t anywhere near the fighting.” She shrugged a single shoulder awkwardly. “Us down in the pits, we don’t talk with the others much. Maybe they meant it that way to keep us clear.”
I could see Zylphia doing just that. “Do you know what it is about her that’s so odd?” I asked, but Maddie Ruth’s expression shaped into a moue of utter curiosity—and no fear, I noted, which is partially why I did not want her taking up the collecting profession. She had no instinct for self-preservation.
“Never you mind,” I added, cutting off her obvious denial. Instead, hoping it would come in time, I asked, “Are you sure it’s Hawke doing the hurting?”
“Aye.” She grimaced. “And taking the hurt.”
I sat up straight. “What?”
“The Veil has him punished all the time,” she told me. “They keep him locked away like a tiger, starving him from all comforts until he’s practically foaming at the mouth.”
Each word drove another shard of guilt into my chest, until I leapt to my feet, hand plastered over the imagined ache. “What is wrong with him?”
A steady hand slipped under my elbow. “I don’t know,” Maddie Ruth said.
I frowned at her. “I knew something was off when I first saw those eyes. Blue isn’t Cage’s color.”
“Cage?”
I blinked, then looked down at Maddie Ruth’s grip where it supported my arm. When I looked back at her, it wasn’t surprise that shaped her expression but a willful kind of smugness. “Well, that’s…It’s part of his name, isn’t it?”
“Only for them what earned the right,” she said, satisfied as a cat. “I wasn’t certain you’d still felt the same way about him after you and he—”
I slapped a hand over her mouth so quickly, it caused her to yelp in mingled sting and surprise. “Shush, Maddie Ruth,” I hissed, looking warily over my shoulder.
She caught my wrist and tugged it down, amusement rife in her eyes. “You mean your cove doesn’t know?”
“Not as much as you do,” I retorted. I twisted free of her grip, shaking her off as I turned away, my mouth tight with worry. With anger. Not at Maddie Ruth, bless her for coming all this way, but certainly at the news she brought.
What was I supposed to do about it?
I imagined Hawke restrained by the Veil he’d chosen to serve, and anger mingled with bitterness and no small amount of worry. Hadn’t he made his own bed? I would much rather leave him to lay in it with whatever companions he felt he deserved.
Micajah Hawke was no longer my concern. He’d tried for years to make me understand that I was not welcome, and it took his final performance to make that clear. He had abused my affections, betrayed my trust, and in the end, he had demanded I leave.
I did. I was free of him, free of concern or all those I left behind in London. Ashmore had done me a service. Zylphia was in Communion’s care, who was himself no fledgling when it came to violence. They would be fine. Maddie Ruth was here, safer than she’d be at the Menagerie, and my staff was likely ensconced elsewhere; good, honest work would see them through.
I had no reason to return.
So why did this very thought cause my throat to thicken?
“I’m not going back,” I said, and turned in a swish of ruffled skirts. I tightened the belt at my wrapper firmly. “Thank you for telling me all this, but I’m quite content where I am.” It was a lie, although a possible truth in the making. I had made no plans; I had no idea what plans I should make, and resented my own guilt, which suggested I turn my eyes back to the London I left.
Maddie Ruth had always possessed a sharp eye. “You don’t look content,” she told me.
“The devil I—”
“I mean it,” she insisted over me. Frowning in bemused impatience, I watched her bend on the other side of the couch and retrieve a small pack.
It couldn’t have held much. Was it all she’d come with?
She braced the case upon the sofa. The whole of it was so small, I imagined she’d been forced to roll whatever her clothing into as small a bundle as possible. Maddie Ruth did not believe in corsets or underskirts, which made traveling lighter as a rule, but surely she believed in changing her clothes now and again.
“There’s no reason to be making any sort of decisions about your future right now,” she said firmly, denying me the opportunity to commit. Clever girl that she was, I’d wager she knew just what it was I struggled over. “You’ve mending to do, and I’m here to see you do it. So, let’s not worry about anything else, right?”
“I am serious,” I replied, frowning. My hands tucked up on my hips. “Look at me, Maddie Ruth, I feel fine.”
“You look like death on a pike,” she said, a bald-faced truth even I recognized as genuine. “Mr. Ashmore specifically instructed—”
“Sod Mr. Ashmore,” I returned hotly, smacking the empty air with the back of my hand as if I could ward him away like a bothersome gadfly.
“Aye, as you say. Mend first, and then I’ll go with you to bring them what for, hey?” She grinned, utterly unimpressed with my temper. She’d grown saucy in the intervening weeks. Once upon a time, I’d frightened her some.
Knowledge of my identity likely turned me into something less a threat.
I’d show her. For all the luck that had seen her through a Baker brawl, the vagaries she spoke of in the Menagerie, and her own pigheaded foolishness that demanded she try to walk in my footsteps, she was not me. I had earned my place on that collector wall in London low; it was me who had put the fear of London’s only female collector into the hearts of vagrants and degenerates all over the city.
I’d caught murderers and thieves; she greased gears and serviced aether engines in a small room beneath a bloody circus.
That I was being unfair only aggravated my ire, and a fresh bloom of sweat gathered on my upper lip. A wave of exhaustion tumbled over me so suddenly, it was as if a pin had been taken to my inflated strength of limbs.
I sagged, head hanging, and let out a long sigh. “You may stay, if you must.”
“Good.” Her smile widened. “I’ll just go put this in the bedroom next to yours.”
“Isn’t that Ashmore’s—”
I should have kept my fool mouth shut. Maddie Ruth’s brown eyebrows climbed so high, they nearly vanished into her hairline. “You mean that handsome cove has been right next to you this whole time?”
I bit my lip.
Her mouth shaped that shocked o again. “You didn’t.”
“I didn’t,” I snapped, but I flushed.
Maddie Ruth laughed, her young voice so at odds with the subject we spoke of. She shrugged. “Pity. I might’ve.”
My spine straightened. “You are too bloody young for that sort of thinking.” I waved at her. “Go. Get out. I don’t want to hear you spouting off this nonsense.”
> Still, it wasn’t all anger as she slung her case under her arm and smiled with unapologetic glee. “I’ll be back.”
“If I’m lucky, I’ll be dead,” I muttered, not at all meaning it.
She knew it, too, for her laughter cracked without a shred of propriety about it. Leaving me to my devices, she left the library to set her things in the room Ashmore must have abandoned for her.
So I was right about my initial concerns. He had abandoned me to my new companion’s care. With Maddie Ruth plucked from London low, was he to once more turn into the absent guardian whose comings and goings came like smoke on the wind?
I stood in the empty library and folded my arms over myself.
Looking up, my gaze snagged on the cold white cloth hanging over the mantle.
It bothered me. Not the painting—my mother had always been a figure looming over me—but my conflicted emotions as to the nature of Ashmore’s care. I knew how much I owed him for this, my drying out, and I was somewhat surprised to learn that I liked him. The somewhat easy camaraderie I’d found in his company was not the same as that I’d enjoyed with Teddy, but I recognized something of a kindred spirit in Ashmore. Even his stiffness was something of an endearing trait.
What would have happened had he taken me up on my offer of shared flesh and pleasures during the night?
I honestly did not know. The one man I’d ever given myself to was not the sort who waited about until morning. It was quite possible nothing would have come of it with Ashmore, either.
I felt the familiar press of guilt.
All of my thoughts circled back to what Maddie Ruth had told me. Everything came down to Hawke, and the manner in which I’d left him.
Ashmore had plucked me from that decadent show Hawke had strived to make of me, but as happened before, I saw Hawke clear in my mind’s eyes—his tawny skin, black hair and the brilliant flare of azure eyes that did not belong in his face.
First he’d humiliated me, and then he’d called my name and demanded I leave him.
All the colors that haunted such memories, the flashes of light, the screaming, smoke and blood, masked the truth of that night, and all I understood was that Hawke had turned me away. Whether he’d meant to end my life, sell it, or save it, I couldn’t possibly know.
The Veil claimed that he was a sorcerer of some stripe, and while I had a great deal to say about the quaintly unenlightened views of the Chinese organization that owned the Menagerie, I wondered if my imagination had taken such a conversation and twisted my memories to suit.
A man did not require magic to betray a girl; it was Hawke who had fooled me so utterly. Hawke, and my own imprudent choice to trust in him regardless of the warnings I knew in my heart to be true.
A woman could do far, far better than the fickle attentions of a showman such as he.
Unexpectedly, tears pricked at my eyes.
Damn it all to perdition. Stripping me of the protective layer of opium’s smoke had softened my resolve too much. I cried at the faintest provocation. Impatient, I dashed at my eyes with a forearm and determined to focus on one thing at a time.
I needed to get better.
In order to do that, I needed to occupy my mind to the point where everything I was remained bent on one puzzle.
My grandfather would provide the source. If it was at all morbid that I searched for details about a man long dead, I did not let that bother me. With so much tumbling about in my mind, I needed something to sharpen my re-emerging intellect—or so I assured myself when my mind raced at the simplest provocation.
I felt rusty, like an old hinge left too long to accrue the detritus of all that passed. I was very much out of practice; it seemed like ages since my last scientific debate. My grandfather would serve to hone my sluggish skills. His death might provide answers to my questions regarding the illness that afflicted our family, and his life—were I fortunate enough to find records of such—might give me something in my ancestry I felt attached to.
Certainly, I felt no kinship with my parents. If my grandfather’s only sin was in allowing his daughter to marry Abraham St. Croix, I thought it an easy sin to forgive. Based on his library, I liked to imagine that we might get on smashingly.
My interest in the man’s life and death meant I would need to find Ashmore and plumb his mind for all the details he could recall—or figure out where the man had gone and ascertain if he’d be back anytime soon to impede me from my efforts.
So armed, I stepped away from the mantle.
Another surge of fatigue nearly drove me to my knees. I stumbled, caught myself on the sofa.
“Bloody bells,” I muttered, allowing my weight to sink into the brocade.
First, I would rest. It would do me no good to collapse in the middle of this great big empty tomb.
I allowed my eyes to close. A moment, I’d only need a moment.
I took more than one. My restful comfort turned to the relief of a body too tired to continue on. I fell asleep where I lay, and did not wake again for hours.
* * *
When I finally opened my eyes, it was to find Maddie Ruth asleep in the striped chair beside the sofa. A book was splayed open against her chest, her legs hiked over the arm as if too tired to bother with propriety.
Knowing Maddie Ruth, the word had likely never entered her brain.
The fire had burned low, turning the light into an orange glow painting only a portion of the darkened library with light to see.
I rubbed at my eyes, easing the sleep from them. I hadn’t intended to rest for quite so long.
I could not ascertain what had woken me.
I lay in silence, listening to the noises of the house as it breathed around me. Deep in the recesses I had never been to, walls groaned, floors settled. The creak of old wood and the draft whispering through rafters became something of a phantom, lending a living presence to the old estate.
There were no timepieces in the library—a deliberate remission, I wagered, to keep me from fretting at the passing hours—but it did not feel very late at all.
I rose from the sofa, cautious that I did not wake my new companion. Maddie Ruth slept as one of the dead, lines of exhaustion touching her youthful face and her hands tucked beneath her chin like a child’s at rest. She breathed slowly and deeply, but did not snore.
Children who made their way on the streets learned how to sleep with no sound. Sleep turned us all into our most vulnerable, and this upbringing showed in the girl who wanted so badly to follow in my footsteps.
What she did not know—what I had only just come to realize myself—was that during my time above the drift, ensconced in downy beds in the care of my sweet, stern chaperone, I had forgotten what it was like to sleep with one eye open.
I rubbed at my chest. It hurt. Worse, it felt empty—hollow of all the things that would have made me real, such as laudanum, tar or smoke. I felt as if my insides had been scraped out, removed like those of the Ripper’s victims, and a throbbing ache had taken residence in my fingertips and toes.
I needed a reprieve.
That what I wanted would not be allowed me, and if I spent too long thinking about it, I could very well drive myself mad with the need.
On the round table beside her chair, a small brass chamberstick waited for the ember that would light the waxy slope of its pale candle. The perfect accessory to my plans.
I lifted it with care, made my way to the fireplace and knelt to flick at an ember with a quick finger. The bright flare sparked, caused the remains of the wood to pop loudly, and I froze.
Behind me, Maddie Ruth slept on.
Poor girl. She’d best get used to all hours if she was to mind me.
Tipping the candle to the glowing ember, I waited until the wick caught, then righted the chamberstick once more. Cupping it in both hands, I sidled around Maddie Ruth’s chair and turned quickly, blocking the light with my body, when she stirred.
I held my breath.
Beyond the window
s, night colored the heath in a black so thick, it was as if pitch had been poured over the land. I had never been out to the country, no matter how often I’d begged to go to Balmoral Castle for the Halloween festivities. I’d always wanted to see the large bonfire, the theatrics of the witch burning, the carnival-like atmosphere.
Fanny had never allowed it, and I had never been invited.
Now that I knew much of the countryside was dull, gray moor and empty landscape, I was somewhat less concerned with my lack of visitation.
The wind had strengthened, rustling against the shrouded glass and causing a shutter to rattle in eerie rhythm. When no sleepy inquiry came from Maddie Ruth, I glanced behind me to find her awkwardly shifted to her side, her cheek pillowed on the hand braced against the arm of the wide chair. She slept the sleep of the innocent; or at least that of a child who found for the first time a roof over her head and occupants within she trusted. I wished her joy of it. As for me, sleep was the very last thing my body demanded. An empty, aching hollow had opened somewhere within me, hungry and searching, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt what it craved.
It had been made clear that I would not be allowed the opium I wanted, no matter how badly I craved the bliss. No rational argument, no emotional plea would serve. Though my body hurt as though I’d broken something within, though the night seemed overly black in answer to my hopeless craving, I crept out of the library.
I needed to find Ashmore.
The very thought sent nerves skittering along my skin, but I would not be swayed. If I could not have the tar that would soften this awful, empty ache, then I would have the man to ease it.
Outside the library, a faint ream of orange slipped into the hall from the open doors. My shadow danced in every direction, cast into sharp relief by the candle I held aloft.
By day, the house was gloomy and foreboding. By night, it became a nest of looming shadow, thick malevolence, and a presence I could not quite put a finger on. It was as if it read the fearful imaginations I struggled not to give voice to, then turned them about in a seething black mass.
Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles Page 12
