by Jerico Lenk
My jaw tightened. Unlike with Zelda, it was a guessing game with him for which name he might speak. Force of habit, and all. “I understand.”
He softened then, slouched in his chair. He shook his head. “Where did you go?” he murmured, sounding truly worried. I softened a little, too.
“Waterloo Bridge.”
“Why the devil there?”
I avoided his frown, looking instead around the dark, smoky room with all its untouched books and trinket collections from travels made before my father had become a family man.
“To save Daphne,” I said. I didn’t know if it was right to tell him or not, but if nothing else he deserved to be aware of the moral states of his working girls. “She was going to jump, Daddy—”
My father heaved a sigh to interrupt, pushing out of his chair as if it were a great effort, to pour himself a small glass of brandy from the sideboard decanter. He turned just halfway, eyes lingering on my battered cheek. “You know she’s always seeking attention through pity,” he said flatly. “If it’s not a threat to drink the whole bottle of Daffey’s, it’s a promise to press a blade to her wrist, dash out before a speeding coach or eat the paint from the walls.”
My heart went hollow for a moment. “How can you be so flippant?” I demanded, in disbelief. “She’s one of your girls. One of your best girls.”
“I’ve already saved her, from Mile End. She wasn’t even a virgin when I bought her—though the brokers were trying to sell her off to Belgium as one, the conmen.”
I reared back, appalled.
“Why am I to be accountable for the penalties of her chosen profession?” Any previous kindliness had withered away; now my father just looked cold and disinterested.
Daphne and I hadn’t talked yet of what she’d almost done. She’d just been wandering about all dreamy and distracted like a quaint little Miss Havisham, her hair loose and her feet bare, as everyone else aimed to avoid her as if the self-despair were catching.
But how could he say such things? Didn’t he care whether she lived or died—not because of her situation, but because she was also a human being?
“Don’t look at me like that, darling,” my father murmured, voice gravelly but still tender as he reached out to stroke the hair off my brow. I’d clearly drained him, as all impertinent children were wont to do, according to Miss Valérie. “It was good of you to bring Miss Daphne back. You try so very hard. But, Willow, you’ll learn soon enough you can’t save others from their own demons. It isn’t your responsibility to save anyone at all.” His eyes were dark as he held his other hand out, gestured expectantly to the edge of his desk. I retrieved his pipe and tobacco for him.
Picking at the packet of tobacco, he said, “Now that we’ve remedied the matter of your running around uncivilised … ”
Again, his glance flickered to my scrapes; I hunched my shoulders up a little, begging he did not see the bruises, too.
“And the matter of your troublesome goodness,” he went on, “is everything else all right?”
Oh, wouldn’t it be a simple life to ignore things as easily as he? Then again, that seemed a miserable thing.
“Daddy,” I said, before I could really think about it, “you’ve had members of the Society for Psychical Research to dinner before.”
“I have,” my father confirmed as he lit his pipe.
“And members from the old Metaphysical Society, too,” I reminded. “But … what about the Black Cross?”
He tensed, briefly, then scowled at his smouldering pipe. In a thick voice, he said, “The Black Cross is a fraternity bent on glorifying the irrational, whereas the other two groups exemplify scientific explanation and have proven good reputation to invite on certain nights.”
I frowned, looking over at him without lifting my head. “I don’t really believe that,” I said quietly.
Weary anger flared on his face. “And why not?”
I bristled. I knew very well what types of arguments and lectures my brazen disobedience on this matter procured. But I couldn’t stop my tongue.
“Daddy, last night I encountered men from the Black Cross. They were at Waterloo, investigating the wraith everyone’s been talking about, and once I saw Athena and Daphne home, I went along with them to exorcise the spirit and … ”
I neglected to mention the mild possession part. In the past, he’d disparaged anything I’d said about the Missing; certainly, my playing a physical part in a Spiritualist activity would sit even less well with him.
“And it seems to me the Black Cross is just as scientific as the others,” I finished.
My father stormed to his wingchair, paced a moment before turning sharply and waving his pipe at me. “I do not approve of your associating with those charlatans,” he sneered through clenched teeth, eyes flashing. “They merely take advantage of the lost and confused, Willow. They did it to your mother and I will not permit they take you from me, as well!”
My mother … ?
I stared at him, dumbstruck. She’d known of the Black Cross? Feeling suddenly very small and helpless, I pressed, “They did what to Mamma?”
My father went rigid as if turned to stone. Finally, he pointed at me again with his pipe, clutching it so tight his knuckles bulged. “She is no ‘mamma’ to you,” he said, but the disapproval in his voice fiercely contradicted the mournful pinch to his face. “If she were such a devoted and family-oriented creature, she would not have disappeared.”
That belittling remark stung me far less than his words about Daphne. The fire under the library mantle crackled and sighed with a crumble of glowing embers.
“Never mind it anymore,” my father hissed. “I won’t hear another word about these so-called inspectors, or Spiritualism, or your mother. Stay here with me in the real world, Will, not the nightmares of yesterday or the fantasies of tomorrow.”
Something inside me gave a firm snap.
“That’s unfair,” I argued. “How can you object when you and Miss Valérie host séance parties now and again? How can you—”
“Parlour tricks and silly games to entertain guests!” He waved my protest away and cast his eyes elsewhere.
“Is it because you don’t believe? Or is it solely because you presume they took Mamma from us?”
A strange look twisted his face. “You will abandon these insolent fancies the moment you leave this room!” he roared. “Do you understand?”
“No.” The urge to cry tightened in my throat. There was a plain, undeniable division between us. We looked out at the world through very different windows; there was no changing that. And it was his fault if he could not see his forbiddance only deepened the chasm.
Voice pitching like my temper, I said, “I’m going to visit the Black Cross, at the least to understand, seeing as you won’t tell me! You never tell me anything even though I deserve to know. And well, you can’t keep me prisoner here forever, you know, I’m not your employee, I’m your child—”
Slap!
The back of his hand sent me reeling, shuffling away only to trip over the flat, snarling head of the tiger-skin rug and fall in a shocked tangle to the floor. One of his silver rings scraped against my already-tender cheek; the shock of the hit stung first, then throbbed fierce enough to make my head spin.
I gawked up at him, holding my face. He stared back at me, eyes wide as though he hadn’t expected it, either—but dark, impenetrable, like the coke of his library fire.
If he was afraid for me, he had a horrid way of showing it.
“Darling,” he said, brow furrowing.
“No!” I’d never tasted so much hatred for him in my life. Father’s neglect, Agatha had teased the night before. I hadn’t ever thought of it that way. I held on to little things like his smiles over the desk while I played card games with myself on the rug before the fire, the fantastic stories he still told about adventurers in faraway jungles and arid deserts, the way it had made me smile when I was smaller to hear his laughter fill a room, how safe I’d felt again
st his shoulder when, instead of Zelda, he’d carried me off to bed.
But suddenly, I felt the fool for that. I had never felt so much smarter than him, so different … so much more like a burden than a beloved child.
Livid, I jumped up and shoved out of the library. My father followed, at least at first. Perhaps to apologise, perhaps with cruel things yet to say. But I left him behind fast, pounding up the stairs past Zelda, past Agatha, and past Miss Valérie who had emerged from the morning room concerned in a meddlesome way.
They’d all heard us.
Of what was my father so afraid I should know or be? Myself? My mother?
I spun around on the attic stairs, trembling, and howled so hard it left me breathless, “You can’t stop fate, you know!”
All I found was Miss Valérie peeking up after me, light glinting off the brooch at her throat. Distantly, my father shouted for others to ignore me, to refrain from encouraging my emotional outburst.
And Miss Valérie stood there, regal and unruffled, eyes hooded. Smiling, I swear it. As though she’d been waiting for something like this to happen, some irreparable fracture between my father and me. She wished me gone. I was the last tie to my father’s former life, after all—to husbandry, to parenthood, to remorse and responsibility. And she had never liked that.
I flew up into my room and slammed the door, then kicked it for good measure. It rattled satisfactorily but my foot was not quite as pleased. Daylight bled dim through the dusty skylights as I sagged down to the cold floorboards and burst into tears.
It was hard to breathe, frantic as I was. I fumbled with my waistcoat and shirt, the undershirt beneath, loosening the bandages from my chest to cry hot, dry, and furious, like a miserable little fool, arms wrapped tightly about myself.
My mind was already made up. I wasn’t sure anymore what I’d expected, broaching that cursed subject with my father. Perhaps I’d simply needed a final injustice to prove I wasn’t wrong. He believed in the Missing, too, I was sure of it! But something he wouldn’t speak seemed to haunt him, drove him to preach against it, insist against it, keep my mother’s old room locked up even as he struggled to erase her everywhere else.
But it didn’t matter what he refused to say, did it? I had a calling card for the Black Cross.
You can’t stop fate.
The tears stopped almost as soon as they’d come, leaving my face raw and red, my nose sore. I curled up in the old armchair and picked at its seams as I watched the chimneypots of tiled roofs around ours belch their thick, grey smoke, and I did not stop Charlie and Colette from singing and playing.
I was not unhappy here.
But nothing—not my father’s temper tantrum, nor the possibility that my mother had had something to do with the Black Cross—none of it could do a thing to change the way the night with the Spiritualists had made me feel.
I’d glimpsed a world in which I might mean something, but only as if peeking through the keyhole of the door that kept me out of it. I needed to see more of it. I needed to see all of it.
Daphne brought me food because I refused to leave the attic. The anger distilled slowly, chilled in my veins and left me feeling clear-headed in a very numb way. If I were to leave my room, it would be to pretend the whole argument had not happened … or to leave for the address on the calling card, and see what the Black Cross was all about.
Daphne and I ate dinner together in my room but we did not speak much.
When the next daybreak coloured the smoggy sky purple and blue, I took my time rising, lying there idly trailing one hand up and down the wall above my pillow as birds called out from their roosts near the window.
On the armchair, my trousers lay sloppily folded and draped across the side.
The Black Cross calling card was still there, burning a hole in my pocket. A flash of the inspectors in the little cemetery as we’d set fire to Kitty’s bones, scorched into my memory.
I threw back my blankets and rolled out of bed, grabbed my trousers from the chair and tried not to dress so impatiently that I’d look a complete mess.
Downstairs, there was barely a whisper of life. Too early, too soon after the night had finally wound down. What had my father told guests inquiring about his quaint little server’s absence? That he was out? Under the weather?
Hashish and tobacco had left their ghosts in the halls along with French perfume; someone must have spilled liquor on a sideboard. Gin and tonic, it smelled like, when I investigated with a wrinkle of the nose.
I turned onto the last set of stairs and found a gentleman below at the front door, quite like a kitchen mouse as he fumbled into a bowler hat and overcoat. I stopped and peered down at him; at the sound of my footsteps, he froze and looked up at me. His first time at Julien’s-off-the-Strand, judging by how jumpy and ashamed he was, hastening to leave before anyone saw him.
“Good morning to you, sir,” I greeted, sliding my hand along the banister as I practically skipped down the stairs, avoiding the squeakiest ones. Despite the argument with my father, there was a strange lightness to my step today.
The man cleared his throat, eyes leaping all around as though he suspected I’d brought other witnesses.
“Yes, good morning,” he said in a thin, hoarse way as he bobbed his head and left.
I swung into the kitchen for coffee and a quick breakfast of bread and cheese. Cook waved at me with an elbow, his hands busy with the morning’s newspaper. Cigarette clenched between his teeth, he raised his brows and husked, “Where are you rushing off to?”
“I’m off to the Black Cross,” I said, shrugging into my light coat at the kitchen door. And speaking it aloud gave me pause for a moment or two, just staring at my shoes.
I really was off to see it.
Scruffy little Cook nodded, calling after me over his shoulder as I slipped out the door into the alley, “Zelda’s requested that beet and potato stew for lunch, like at Pagani’s! Don’t miss it!”
I poked my head back into the kitchen. “I won’t!”
***
Clutching the Black Cross calling card, I dodged through the street traffic of a crisp, bustling September morning and endeavoured not to immediately change my mind.
The Black Cross would surely send me away. I was just a tiny fool in a cap and a half-buttoned, slim-fit coat, brimming with obsessive questions. Of course, they wouldn’t have time to spare on endless inquiries. And yet what if they did? Maybe they took on students, or … did Spiritualists require office boys? How did one presume to request a purpose in life, anyway? Working for my father was far from purpose for me.
Midmorning sunlight glinted off the many different greens in the corner of Regent’s Park that jutted against Park Crest and Portland Place. The Black Cross was almost too easy to miss, an enormous, scholarly corner building of old-world limestone and Lincolnshire, rising four stories with smooth but tired columns redeemed by a lovely lace of green ivy as they propped up a wrap-around second floor promenade. Blackbirds perched on the highest window ledges. The building was the last on the row of lavish old noblemen’s townhouses encircling the park, but must have come before them because its romantic state of sleepy, rain-stained elegance spoke of a timelessness the townhouses lacked.
A bronze plaque announced the Order on the low, wrought-iron balustrade between columns.
98 ½ PORTLAND PLACE
THE BLACK CROSS
ORDER OF OCCULT OCCURRENCES
1701 – MDCCI
Strange, how excitement could make one feel so lightheaded and ill.
I climbed the shadowy portico and heaved open one of the heavy black walnut doors.
It groaned a wave of cold, slightly musty air as I slipped inside, and promptly stopped short to gawk around like an idiot. The front gallery was a bit dark, sparsely but nonetheless thoughtfully decorated by little potted palms, paintings and tapestries that drooped above a lacquered sideboard or two. On the far wall hung a massive oil painting, one of those surreal Romantic types
with a fair lady and a nightmarish creature.
The door thudded shut behind me with a thunderclap that echoed around the room. I jumped.
“Hello,” a sharp-nosed secretary called from the high desk off to the left, and I jumped again.
“Good morning.” Hesitantly, I crossed the room to present my calling card. “My name is Will Winchester. I would like to formally inquire about … ”
I frowned, waiting for the secretary to look up from some paper on which he busily scribbled with a satisfying scrape-scrape of his gold-tipped pen. Pale hair swooped to one side of his head, he raised his brows. “Are you reporting an incident?” he asked.
My mouth hung open for a moment as I considered the question. “I’m reporting … Actually, I’m reporting an interest in working with the Black Cross.”
The secretary raised his brows a bit higher.
“I have a card.” I stared at him. “I was given a card.”
“You’re in need of an interview, then.”
“Well, I’m not certain what—”
“Wait here, Mr. Winchester.” The secretary climbed down from his tall desk and left me in the gallery.
Shyly, I looked around. The room was about as somber and silent as an empty church. Somewhere, a clock stuttered along. Tick. Tick. Tick. Did I mention my mother to anyone? Would they know her name, or … ?
“Mr. Winchester?” The secretary leaned back in from the hall. “Sir Westwood and Officer Chesley will see you now.”
I followed him down a hall even darker than the gallery. We rounded another corner, and half the corridor became a stretch of multi-paned windows looking out on a humble, private courtyard. The whole place turned in an L-shape, forming a full square where it joined the neighbouring old slate and brick terrace. Clearly that was Black Cross property, as well; doors with little framed stoops opened onto the courtyard with its garden fountain and rose bushes.
Outside in the morning sunlight, a groundskeeper struggled with overgrown shrubbery while a group of men spoke together outside the brick terrace. Over their heads, a neatly-dressed woman opened the window of her room for fresh air. The whole place emanated a sense of preserved knowledge and quiet mystery. We passed a small den, where a gentleman in tweed paced with a lady in sky blue, their voices carrying.
