by Grace Draven
Jane finished her last course and excused herself from the table, the heavy slide of her skirts audible in the dining room as she ascended the stairs to her bed chamber. Lenore pushed aside the remains of her pudding and drained her wine glass, happier with the solitude than with her mother’s disapproving presence across from her.
Mrs. Harp entered to clear away the supper remains, and Lenore rose to help her. Constance Harp had been in service with the Kenward family since Lenore was still on lead strings, and more than a few times it was Constance she was tethered to in those early childhood years. Her grief over Arthur’s death was as profound as that of his wife and child.
She offered Lenore a sympathetic smile. “How was your papa, Miss Nora?”
Lenore followed her to the kitchen with the remains from supper. “Regrettably quiet. His manners regarding civil conversation have lapsed abominably.”
The housekeeper chuckled. “It’s good you visit him as often as you do. Good for you both.”
Lenore didn’t argue that. It was true. Visiting her father’s grave eased the grief. Her brief conversations with the fascinating Guardian presented their own charm as well. She said nothing of this to Constance. “I hope to convince Mama to accompany me next time.”
Constance took the dishes from her and stacked them near the dry sink. She dusted her hands and gestured to the door with a thrust of her chin. “It’s never been her way to reveal what’s inside. Give her time, miss. She grieves for him in her way.”
Lenore followed the direction of her gaze. Not once had she witnessed Jane shed a tear since her husband’s death. “I’ll trust your word on that, Mrs. Harp.”
When the housekeeper refused her help with the dishes, Lenore left the kitchen with promises to rise early to start the Friday ironing.
It was far too early for bed, and she was too restless to read or sew. The windows on the stairwell’s first landing revealed a back garden made bleak and bare by the winter cold. The rain had stopped, leaving the branches of cherry and apple trees Jane lovingly tended through every season to drip in the deepening evening.
Lenore had inherited a little of her mother’s skill with plants, but it was nothing compared to Jane’s innate magic. Her father often joked that his wife was the only person he knew of outside the Guild mages who could plant a broken stick in a coal heap and watch it flower into a great oak.
The greenhouse Arthur had built for his new wife nearly three decades earlier glowed softly in the darkness, lit not by candles or gas but by the numerous blossoms of white roses, lilacs, lilies and violets housed inside. Their soft luminosity reminded her of the Highgate Guardian, as pale as a new marble headstone draped in black weeds.
Each time they met, he drew her like a ship to a shore beacon and sent flutters through her belly. So oddly beguiling. Truth be told, his was a visage one might see in a danse macabre mural—spectral and strange as if bound to earth by the thinnest of threads.
Quod fuimus, estis; quod sumus, vos eritis - What we were, you are; what we are, you will be.
She shook her head to clear her grim thoughts and padded softly to her room so as not to disturb her mother. Dwelling on the legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead guaranteed nightmares, and she had no wish to lay awake half the night imagining skeletons dancing with the terrified living.
The temperature in her room made the rest of the house seem warm by comparison. Cold air drafted in from the partially open window, bringing with it the fresh scent of air cleansed by rain and a touch of the damp. She shut the windows and pulled the drapes closed before lighting an oil lamp with shaking fingers. The shawl she draped over her shoulders offered some warmth, and she added another from her wardrobe for good measure.
A book on steam engine design lay next to one of poems by the poet laureate Tennyson. Lenore traced the poetry book’s cover design. A finely made book with its gold-tooled leather and gilt-edged vellum pages. A beautiful book. An expensive one given to her by a man who’d likely spent three months’ hard-earned wages to obtain it.
Lenore made a mournful sound in her throat. Nathaniel. She closed her eyes, remembering his ready smile and eyes as blue as bachelor’s button. She thought of him every day, but lately, in the weeks following her father’s death, he was constantly on her mind.
She knelt before the chest at the foot of her bed. Inside were stored various keepsakes—sketches her father created for her, letters from Nathaniel posted from Madrid and Provence, St. Petersburg and Milan. Bound to the London suburb of Camberwell, where her longest adventure away from home had been the annual trip to rainy Bath, Lenore had traveled the world through Nathaniel’s letters.
He never spoke of the Redan, and the few times she’d asked him about the dimensional rift and the horrifics, he turned pale and taciturn. Whatever he witnessed during the barrier battles, it was as far removed from the beauty of lavender fields and marble palaces as one could get.
She found what she sought beneath the stack of beribboned letters and books of pressed flowers. Lenore carried the muslin-wrapped package to the table, unwrapping the cloth to reveal a folding case containing her most precious possession. The lamp’s yellow light bathed the ambrotype photograph, highlighting the hand-tinting the photographer had added to enhance the photo.
A man posed next to a desk, dressed in his Sunday finery, elbow resting casually on the desktop as he stared at the viewer with a solemn expression. Sandy-haired and broad-shouldered, he was a fine specimen guaranteed to catch the eye of any woman from fifteen to fifty. He had certainly enthralled Lenore at their first acquaintance. That Nathaniel Gordon seemed equally enamored with her still left her in a state of wonder. And deep sorrow.
She outlined his figure under the protective glass with one finger, recollecting his wide smile and the way he made her laugh with his witty remarks or go round-eyed at the stories of his travels. He had a way of wishing her good day that made her blush and Jane growl under her breath if she chanced to witness it—a flirtatious tipping of his pot hat that managed to convey both humor and keen interest.
A memory superimposed itself over the one of Nathaniel. The tall, elegant Guardian tipping his imaginary hat in a manner that made Lenore’s stomach jump into her ribs. An uncanny mimic; a strange coincidence surely. Lenore frowned, staring into the distance.
It was more than the hat tip. The way he shrugged or tilted his head as he listened to her talk, even the smile—gracing a face that looked nothing like Nathaniel’s—seemed familiar. How did two men, so vastly different, exhibit such similar movements and expressions? Or send butterflies whirling through her chest?
Lenore shook her head, frowning harder. She was spending too much time at Highgate cemetery; it was making her daft and even more melancholy. Despite the puzzling hold he had on her, the Guardian was nothing like Nathaniel Gordon.
She shuddered at the thought of what her mother might say if she knew of Lenore’s fascination for the keeper of the dead and the reasons behind it. A spinster bemoaning her unmarried state so much that she imagined the behavior of a lost love on a being who walked two worlds. That Lenore had no interest in marrying after Nathaniel’s death wouldn’t change Jane’s opinion.
She kissed her fingertip before pressing it to the ambrotype. “My darling boy, you are the husband of my heart. I will love and miss you until they lay me in hallowed ground. There is no shame in that.”
It was still early for bed, but Lenore had promised Constance help in the ironing, and that meant awaking well before dawn if they had any hope of completing the chore the same day. Lenore wrapped the ambrotype in its muslin envelope and carefully returned it to its place in the chest.
The kitchen was deserted, dishes cleaned and put away. Lenore blessed Constance’s name under her breath when she spotted two hot water bottles resting on the stove’s still-warm surface. She wrapped one in a towel to take back to her room and warm the sheets.
A ribbon of light crept under the library’s closed doo
r. Lenore paused in the dark foyer. She hadn’t noticed it on her trip downstairs. The comforting crackle of a fire reached her ears as she drew closer, along with the crisp turning of a book’s pages.
Her breath grew short, dark fancies engendered by hours in a cemetery and conversations with bonekeepers. She eased the door open slowly, half certain she’d find the ghost of Arthur Kenward lounging in his favorite chair by the fire, a book in his lap, his pipe in his hand.
What met her gaze made her throat close and her vision blur. Jane, not Arthur, sat in the favorite chair. A book rested in her lap, and in her hand she held a glass of port instead of a pipe. Firelight caressed her hair, bronzing her long braid where it draped over one shoulder. She had changed for bed, her white gown partially concealed by her robe. She wore Arthur’s dressing gown over the robe. Dry-eyed and expressionless, Jane stared into the fire, sipped her port and raised the dressing gown’s cuff to her nose for a long inhalation.
Tears dripped down Lenore’s cheeks, and she eased the door shut before making her way to the stairs. The spinster wept; the widow did not, but more than one woman grieved the loss of a loved one in the Kenward household.
CHAPTER SIX
“Brandy or Black Strap?” Nettie held up one decanter of brandy and another of port.
“Brandy.” Nathaniel rubbed his aching midriff, still sore from the round of shot she’d fired into him.
Nettie’s hands visibly shook as she poured a dram of brandy into each glass. She passed one to him before taking a seat in the chair opposite his. Her ruddy skin was still pale from shock, and she eyed him as if not quite believing he was real much less the man he claimed to be. “After what you just told me, I need something stronger. I’d pour meself chain lightning if I kept it stocked.”
Nathaniel scowled at her. “Stay away from the stuff, Nettie. It’s poison in a glass, and I’ve seen more families bury a poor lad baned by it.”
They clinked glasses in a silent toast, and Nathaniel sipped his brandy under his former captain’s piercing gaze. Her quarters were peaceful now, completely opposite from the riotous chaos a half hour earlier.
Nathaniel had pressed a hand against his riddled midriff, coughed twice and spat a mouthful of bloody shot pellets into his palm before spilling them to the floor. The wounds made by the ammunition closed up, and the silvery blood flow slowed to a trickle before ceasing altogether.
Nettie watched the entire thing with eyes slitted with fury and her hand steady on the Howdah she aimed at his head a second time. Even when half the ship’s crew threatened to pound her door down, her stare never wavered.
“Cut that racket and go about your business!” she’d bellowed over the noise. The pounding abruptly stopped, and Nathaniel recognized the worried voice of her long-time boatswain.
“Are you all right, Captain? We heard the shot.”
“I’m fine, Mr. Sawyer. Just a little mishap with the trigger.” She cocked an eyebrow at Nathaniel and the smooth expanse of his coat, no longer peppered with shot or silvered in his blood.
The silence on the other side of the door stretched for a moment before the boatswain spoke. “Aye, Captain.” A chorus of grumbles and questions followed, and from the sound of it, Mr. Sawyer was having a difficult time herding the crew away from Nettie’s door.
When it grew quiet again, Nettie gestured with the pistol. “How dare you,” she snarled through clenched teeth. “How dare you use my lost lad’s name as a weapon!”
Nathaniel’s already sore gut clenched at the agony in her voice. “Forgive me, Nettie,” he said, contrite. “That was unfair of me.”
“Who are you? What are you?”
He dared a slight smile. “Promise you won’t shoot me again if I tell.”
She matched his smile with a hard scowl of her own. “I promise to shoot you if you don’t, and I doubt you can put your skull back together after I put a pair of slugs between your eyes.”
She had a point. He was inhumanly strong and fast, with an uncanny ability to heal wounds that would kill a regular man, but a shot to the head from a pistol used to hunt tigers—well, he was tough, but he wasn’t invincible.
“You once had a lover named Tom Black,” he said. “A coster you ended up killing before he killed you. Widderschynnes is the name you took when you first signed onto the fleet. You sport a tattoo of a swan on your left hip, gotten in Algiers on a helium run.” Her eyes rounded as he recited fact after fact of a life none but a close few knew. His voice softened. “You had a sister named Ruth who died of the cholera in ’33. Your only child, an infant you christened Margaret, is buried in Abney Park. You carry a scrap of her gown in your pocket at all times along with a curl of her hair in a watch locket. They are the most precious things you own.”
The pistol wavered infinitesimally to the right. Nettie blinked, and her voice was hoarse and low. “How do you know all of this?”
The ache in Nathaniel’s chest had nothing to do with Nettie’s shot. “Because you were once my commanding officer, and I am still your devoted friend. It’s me, Nettie,” he said gently. “Nathaniel. Believe it or not, but please don’t shoot me again.”
A weaker woman might have fainted. Nettie Widderschynnes did not. She gazed silently at him for several moments before laying the Howdah on the desk. Nathaniel knew he’d won a small portion of her trust when she handed him a handkerchief to clean his hand and partially turned her back to pour them drinks at the sideboard. Now they sat across from each other, sharing a dram of brandy.
Nettie tapped a finger on her tumbler, her fingernail making a soft pink-pink pink sound in the silence. “My eyes are tellin’ me you’re a liar, but you know things only Nathaniel did. You move like him too, even if you’re thinner than a rasher of wind by comparison.”
The part of him wound up tighter than a new spring drive clock loosened. Nathaniel swept a hand from his chest to his knees. “This body once belonged to a knockabout droll named Jack Preston.”
Jack’s soul had departed his body before Harvel played God and rammed Nathaniel’s own dying spirit into it. While the soul was gone, some of Jack’s memories remained. An acrobatic comic who played the stage and entertained the low brow crowds of London, he’d lost his life to a thief with a knife and a fatal aim. The mad doctor had saved the body if not the man and bequeathed it to Nathaniel whose own physical form had been beaten beyond repair by war and the harsh Atlantic waves.
Nettie shook her head. “How is that even possible?”
He shrugged and swallowed half the brandy in his glass. “I don’t know. Galvanism combined with gehenna and whatever strange magic Harvel cooked up in that torture chamber he called a laboratory. All I remember are lights and the burn of liquid hell running through me.”
Liquid hell and lightning. The magic pairing that allowed dead men to live again. They lost most of their humanity in the process, turning the colors of ghosts and shadow. The seven men Harvel turned possessed extraordinary qualities beyond the abilities of normal men. Their blood ran silver instead of red, and like Nathaniel, all were much closer to the dead than to the living.
“I heard one of Harvel’s creations killed him.” Nettie arched an eyebrow. “Was that you?”
He only wished he could lay claim to that achievement. “No. His first experiment, Gideon, killed him. And rescued the rest of us.” All Guardians owed a life debt to Gideon.”
Nettie slapped the arm of her chair. “Good. He deserved it for what he did to you and the others.” She cocked her head, her sharp gaze noting every detail of his appearance. “Do you have the droll’s memories then, as well as your own?”
“Vague ones. More like shadows of memories. My own returned to me over time.” The first one had been that of a woman’s face. Smooth skin and brown eyes. Dark hair and an enigmatic smile. Lenore.
Nettie’s knuckles whitened where she gripped her glass, her features drawn and stiff. “You should have come to me,” she said in a low voice that quavered faintly. “The sec
ond you remembered, you should have come.”
Nathaniel rose, placed his glass on the desk and knelt in front of the woman who had been more a mother to him than the one who birthed him. He reached for her free hand, lacing his fingers with hers, trying to ignore the ghastly difference between the natural hues of her skin and his own deathly pallor.
“And you would have believed me just like earlier?” he said. “Look at me, Nettie. You just said it yourself. It’s difficult to accept this is the Nathaniel you remembered.”
Her fingers tightened on his. “Lenore doesn’t know.”
“No, and you can’t tell her.”
Her brief smile lit her eyes for a moment. “No worries there, lad. You have to be the one to bell that cat.”
Nathaniel shook his head and stood to resume his seat. “And I never will. Nathaniel Gordon is dead. My appearance alone should make that obvious.”
“Don’t be a fool. You might be keeping company with cold meat now and wearing some dead bloke’s body, but under all that you’re Nathaniel Gordon, and Lenore misses you as hard now as she did when she first heard the news of your dying five years ago.”
He crushed the swell of hope threatening to engulf him. “She’ll forget and love someone else.”
Nettie rolled her eyes and snorted. “Obviously your little journey to the underworld and back has made you a touch beef-headed.”
“I’m not here to talk about Lenore,” he snapped.
Another disbelieving snort. “Is that so? ‘I’m here regarding Lenore Kenward,” she repeated in an affected accent. Your words, lad, not mine.”
Nathaniel ground his teeth. “You know what I mean. Your crew members are experienced fighters. Each one has fought at the Redan at least twice. None of them are sheltered inventor’s daughters whose only close call with death was an accidental fall into the Surrey Canal when she was four years old.”
