“I appreciate the vote of confidence, Mister Buckley. You’re right. It’s all very simple compared to my dearly departed automobile. The difficulty, of course, is that the automobile was never meant as anything more than a demonstration of what could be. A tantalizing glimpse into the future of spiritless technology. But this—” she rapped against the boiler with a disdainful look, “is supposed to be fully operational and in the hands of the public in only a month!” She sighed. “Which would be difficult enough, if not for how it’s far from the only thing on my plate.”
“Oh?” Olivia’s ears practically perked up.
Miss Banks shook her head. “Summergrove business.”
“Well, yes, I rather assumed. More detail than that is surely called for?”
Miss Banks took off her tiny gold specs, wiping them on her grease stained apron. “Top secret, I’m afraid. But if anything comes of it—and I think something will—well, you’ll certainly see why it’s my main priority, even over this system.” She placed her specs back on her nose and rapped the boiler again with the backs of her knuckles.
“Oh, good.” Olivia clasped her hands together before her chest. “You’re changing the world, after all.”
“So it would seem.” Miss Banks sighed. “Tell me, Olivia, how did you get me so wrapped up in this?”
“Oh, bollocks, Em, don’t you blame me for this!” Olivia held up her hands and backed up a step. “You know perfectly well I wanted to stay uninvolved.”
“I know perfectly well that you are incapable of being uninvolved in anything.”
Olivia huffed. “Oh, well, now you just sound like Maris!”
A cloying, troubled silence fell over the room. Chris licked his lips, avoiding looking at either woman. He could hear the water boiling inside the copper tank.
He nearly jumped when Olivia sighed loudly, dropping her arms. “Oh, let’s just say it. Maris, who is still petulantly furious at us and won’t acknowledge me beyond business anymore!”
“Maris, who is a very stubborn woman,” Emilia corrected, a pained expression on her face, “and very loyal to the… status quo.”
“Well, consider me thoroughly over it,” Olivia grumbled, and straightened. “Fine. If she wants to continue blaming Christopher and me for William bloody Cartwright’s dramatic courtroom appearance, she can do whatever she pleases. As she’s quick to remind me, she is my superior, not my friend!” The words dripped with bitterness. And, beneath that, hurt.
Chris averted his eyes. My fault. He couldn’t dodge the thought or the feeling of responsibility that crashed over him.
Emilia reached a hand toward Olivia as if to offer some comfort, but seemed to think better of it. “I’ll only be in the city for this afternoon,” she said finally, turning away. “And I was supposed to give you something.” She adjusted some knobs on the boiler before pacing off, heading out of the laboratory and into the interior of the house she shared with Officer Maris Dawson.
Olivia followed, and Chris dogged her heels, feeling an itch between his shoulders as they entered the lovely house. Miss Banks removed her soiled apron as she walked and hung it on a hook, transforming from hardy labourer to elegant aristocrat. She looked at home surrounded by the mahogany walls and chestnut floors. The warm amber glow of the wood provided a sharp contrast to the cool, jewel-dark tones beneath the engineer’s brown skin as she rifled through a carpet bag.
The home was beautiful. Normally, Chris luxuriated in such surroundings. But being in Maris Dawson’s sanctum when she hadn’t spoken more than a word to him since the summer, and knowing the two women shared the home together….
Miss Banks produced a paper from her things with a little exclamation of victory. No—not paper, but a photograph, which she passed not to Olivia as he’d expected, but to him. “A little something,” she said. “Since you only ever see her in the mirror.”
An unexpected lump materialized in Chris’s throat as his sister, Rosemary, gazed up at him from beneath the boughs of a row of apple trees. The straight lines of her simple country gown did wonders for her gangly adolescent frame, and her usually precise, porcelain-doll ringlets were tousled and windswept and tangled. He could see the points of colour on her cheeks despite the monochrome of the photograph. The ribbons of her straw hat blew out behind her, and she carried a bushel of shiny apples against her hip. “Gods,” he breathed. His fingers stroked the image of her cheek. “She looks so….”
“I know. I can barely believe it, myself,” Miss Banks smiled faintly. “Rather a stunning young lady, isn’t she?”
Rosemary’s fourteenth birthday had come and gone. Somehow, the face he saw in the magic mirror was completely unlike this hearty, spirited young woman caught in a flash of alp-light. “She’s going to be very tall,” he said faintly.
“She’s already towering over Olivia’s mother,” Miss Banks said, smiling.
He could barely stand to hand the photograph back to Emilia, but when he tried, she waved him off. “No, no. It’s for you to keep.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, of course. It was developed just for you. The good doctor has a new hobby, you see. He wants his life in exile to be well-documented for his granddaughter, and he says that Miss Buckley is a particularly enchanting subject. We thought it’d be worth the risk to bring one photo for you.”
“Thank you,” Chris breathed. He swallowed the lump in his throat.
“Really, Em,” Olivia murmured reproachfully. “Now you’ve gone and turned him all soggy with feeling. Goodness. We have things to do. You dragged us all the way here just for this?”
“I have a soft heart.” Emilia laughed. She rarely laughed, and it was utterly delightful, the sort of laugh that could turn any head and managed to be both full-throated and delicate, church bells and wind chimes. She tucked the rest of the papers she’d pulled out back into her carpet bag.
“Please tell me you didn’t come all the way from the country just to make my assistant misty-eyed.”
“Don’t be silly. I came all the way from the country to check in with Maris, of course. You know how she gets.” She smiled fondly. “How I get, for that matter. It’s hard being apart. For both of us.”
Olivia made a disgusted sound and waved the very idea off like it was an unpleasant smell. “Someone kill me if I’m ever so dependent as all that, please.”
“Mn. I’ll keep it in mind, Olivia.” Miss Banks lifted her carpet bag onto her shoulder and looked around the room sadly. “But I’m not so hopeless as all that. As much as I’d like to stay and spend more time, I’m back to Summergrove on the next train. As I said, elbows deep in something promising. Still all about the work, I’m afraid.” She made a face. “I do wish your mother had a functioning winged carriage, Olivia. I could be making these trips in half the time and expense.”
“Oh, please don’t bring that up with her.” Olivia sighed. “I swear, I’ll be hearing of nothing else all Solstice if she gets a bee in her bonnet about that damned thing again. It’s like the woman thinks the world wants to punish her, specifically.”
Em laughed quietly. “I don’t think she’s as bad as all that.”
Olivia’s lips twisted. “So people keep trying to tell me,” she murmured, and then she threw up her hands and heaved a dramatic sigh. “Well. What an unbelievably irritating waste of my precious time.” She couldn’t fool Chris. He heard the undertone of affection in her voice as she plucked the photograph from his hand. Her gaze lingered a little longer than was strictly casual on it, and he saw her nod faintly in approval. “Notebook, Christopher,” she commanded, extending a hand, and he produced it from his inner coat pocket. She tucked the photo in carefully and then, with a flourish, handed it back to him.
“Oh,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Well, it wouldn’t do for it to get bent, really.” She sniffed. “Now. Are we all quite done getting soaked and scalded and sappy, here? I really have to turn in some paperwork from our last case at the station before
it closes.”
“Of course,” Emilia was never affected by Olivia’s manner. She just smiled faintly and nodded. “Good evening, Olivia! I’ll give your love to your mother.”
“Gods, don’t. Spare both of us from that,” Olivia grumbled, linking her arm with Chris’s and steering him out the front door.
The elegant interior of the Banks-Dawson residence belied its modest exterior. The furnishings and trappings inside could have belonged to rich, isolated nobles out in the countryside, but when Olivia and Chris left the silent bubble of the soundshield, they found themselves amidst the bustle and jostle and chaos of central Darrington. It wasn’t exactly a shabby neighbourhood, but an air of desperation followed them down the walk and into the street. A young boy hawking a newspaper bulged his eyes out when Olivia handed him a crisp fiver for the paper, and Chris craned his neck to see the headline she read.
98 DAYS AND COUNTING SINCE BENJAMIN EDISON CATEGORIZED, the headline shouted with its own type of desperation.
“Would you look at that?” Olivia mused. Chris heard the amusement plain in her voice. He also knew that it was at least partially feigned. Even Olivia understood the gravity of the situation. “Missus Edison may have been cheated out of having a strong spiritbinder in her line, but at least she might have been given the honour of the last spiritbinder.”
“He can’t have actually been the last,” Chris murmured. He knew he didn’t sound convinced. He scanned the article. Doomsaying, mostly. Or was it still considered doomsaying if you actually were doomed? What level of hysteria was justified when the world as you knew it really was coming to an end?
“You can’t still actually believe that.” Olivia folded the paper and slipped it into her carpet bag. “ ‘Can’t.’ What’s ‘can’t,’ exactly? He ‘can’t’ have been the last. That’s what Hector and Avery Combs keep saying, too. Oh, tra la, doesn’t it just seem so unlikely that he would be the last one? Well, why? When a well runs dry, eventually one of the droplets of water that comes out actually will be the last. Can’t, bah. It only seems so unlikely when you naively expected the well to be bottomless.”
And maybe he had. Maybe he was like all the others, despite all of his ‘reformist leanings.’ He’d still been raised a Buckley, cradled inside a bubble that had fervently believed in the system. What would his father say about Benji Edison, Chris’s childhood tagalong, being the final spiritbinder categorized in history?
He suspected he knew. If there was one thing he’d come to understand about his father, it was that he had been very good at the utter denial of reality.
Paranoid and self-important. A voice whispered. The sort of man who would think he had a special mission from on high. A mission to hunt out a conspiracy of reformists trying to bring the establishment to its knees. How ludicrous is that, really?
That voice had become a bit of a constant companion. Chris couldn’t decide if it was the realistic incarnation of a young man realizing that his father hadn’t been the man he’d thought, or something entirely less charitable. A denial of responsibility. An attempt to convince himself that something nefarious wasn’t grinding its gears just out of his sight, fed by that list of names he’d given to the attackers at the Piffleman’s Gala House three months prior. He pulled his greatcoat closer around him, shivering against the fingers of cold wind plucking at him.
Olivia made a disgruntled little sound, and the sound jerked Chris back to the present. To the rattling of carriages without smoothing wheels, the nightsoil stench of failing plumbing systems, the cacophony of sound from buildings without soundshields. He didn’t need to imagine invisible gears turning toward some imagined apocalypse. Entirely visible gears were driving them toward a real one right in front of him.
“Oh, forget the paperwork,” Olivia grumbled, shouldering her bag and shivering. “It’s cold, I’m tired, and, frankly, I have no interest in meeting Maris’s judgey eyes. I’ll have a runner take them by later.”
He had some professional obligation to remind her that they were sensitive documents, confidential, not supposed to touch unauthorized hands, certainly not to be trusted to grubby youths willing to do most anything for coin. Instead, he merely breathed a sigh of relief. He had no desire to meet Maris’s eyes, either. “Very well.”
She shot him a look that could have meant anything and diverted their course away from the direction of the police station the next time the road curved. He had some irritated remark on his tongue about how if she was so cold, perhaps they ought to call a hackney? But in truth, he’d come to appreciate walking like she did. His legs had toned up, his stamina had improved, and the activity kept his mind whirring.
It was so easy to fall into that rhythm of thought and motion that he almost stumbled over the small, frenetic man who jumped into their path. He had thinning hair and a weak chin, wore thick, wire-rimmed glasses and no coat over his shirtsleeves and suspenders, and held a notebook before him. Isn’t he cold? But that concern vanished when the fellow opened his mouth.
“Mister Buckley!” the mole-like man demanded, his voice reedy and avaricious. “Christopher Buckley! Can I have a moment of your time?” Without pausing, he bowled over whatever reply Chris might have framed if he’d had a moment to think of one. “Mister Buckley, as you may have heard, it’s been almost one hundred days since the last spiritbinder was categorized! Do you have any comment on that?”
As always, when he was put on the spot, his mind went blank of intelligent thought, and the only thing left in its wake was brainless courtesy. “Excuse me,” he heard his mouth say, “I don’t believe you, and I have been properly introduced.” People were watching. Chris self-consciously ran a hand through his hair, unsure of how he looked with the brisk wind. Was he terribly untidy? And why did he care so much?
The myopic mole blinked and then shot a hand forward to be shaken. “Trenton Carter from the Daily Herald, pleasure to make your acquaintance, how do you think your father would react to the categorization of quite possibly the very last spiritbinder Tarland will ever see?”
Chris shook his hand. He hated that he did. He couldn’t see an extended hand and not shake it. “I—” he began. A reporter? From the Herald, the mouthpiece of the status quo itself? “Ah. I, well, that is—”
Olivia saved him. “I think you’re quite mistaken, Mister Carter.” Her voice was sweet as honey, and she nudged Chris behind her, gliding before him and making a fluttering motion with her long fingers. “This is Mister Wilson, my personal assistant, and hardly anyone worth interviewing.” She reached up, cocking her feathered hat at a jaunty angle, and popped one hip. “But perhaps you’d like to interview me? Oh, do say you will. I consider myself an icon of fashion, and I’ve been trying with such persistence to get a feature in your paper! For instance, see the trimming on my gloves?” She waved her hands right under the reporter’s nose, and he cringed and stepped back as if an angry butterfly had batted up against his nose. “Lace is out, and simplicity is in, but I’ll have none of it! See the rosettes I have trimming the slit up the side? Simple is just another way to say boring. Frankly, I preferred the lace! And if I could draw your attention to—”
“I am not a lifestyle reporter, madam!” Carter insisted, stepping away from Olivia’s displays. “And I have it on very good authority that this is Christopher Buckley, son of the late Michael Buckley, and you are his employer, a Deathsniffer—”
“Deathsniffer?” Olivia exploded. She sounded so positively incensed Chris almost believed it. The name she wore with such pride suddenly seemed like the very slur it was intended as, and the reporter blanched. “I beg your pardon? How dare you! I am Elouise val Cristoff, and you are a disrespectful little mite! Come along, Wilson!” She flounced with such skill and lied with such aplomb that Chris felt reality itself shift. For a moment, he actually was her put-upon assistant, she actually was an eccentric Old Blood noble slumming it with the populous, and he could do nothing but put his head down and hurry after her, shooting the baffled re
porter an apologetic look as he passed.
“We have about thirty seconds before reality asserts itself and he realizes he’s been duped,” Olivia shot quietly over her shoulder. “Come along.” She turned sharply down a side street, another, another, and back onto the main thoroughfare, tugging him along and burying them deep into the moving throng of people.
Soon they were out of breath and heading up a familiar walkway. Olivia nodded to the doorman, who nodded back and ushered her into the foyer of a fine tenement house. “Lift is still out, Miss Faraday. Couldn’t get a ‘binder in,” the doorman said apologetically as he left them, and Olivia blew a stream of air upwards, sending the feather in her hat dancing.
“Stairs, then.” She shot a quick look back at Chris. He pretended not to see the touch of colour in her cheeks. “Don’t think much of this. It’s probably best if you’re not home right away. I suspect Mister Carter will be there waiting.” She hurried away before he could react.
The first time he’d taken these stairs, he’d been winded by the top. Four floors all at once was rather a long way. But all the walking and running and dodging out of danger he did alongside Olivia paid off, and he felt remarkably fine when Olivia inserted the puzzle lock into the door marked “4J.” She had confided to him, once, that she rather liked the letter J. It had a pleasing look, made a pleasing sound, and so she’d chosen her flat based entirely on that criteria.
“The Combses use the Daily Herald,” Chris said, finally finding his tongue as Olivia allowed him to move past her into the plush bower of her flat. “There’s only one reason for them to be coming after me. No one actually cares what my father would have thought of any of this. No one outside of the old community—what’s left of it—even knows the Buckley family legacy.”
“Yes, dear,” Olivia said, not without sympathy. “I’m quite aware. I didn’t make my debut as an Old Blood noblewoman to save you having to endure some innocent gossip column.” She gathered pillows off the floor as she moved. “Bloody creatures,” she grumbled and raised her voice. “Tassels are not toys!”
The Heartreader's Secret Page 2
