Beauty and the Clockwork Beast

by Nancy Allen Campbell

  “Who discovered her?” he asked.

  Marie shrugged. “Probably one of the ’tons. They would have checked on her when she never rang for a tray or to dress for the day.” She looped an arm around the footpost and leaned against it, surprised to feel faint. She had seen death before—her parents had both passed—but they had died of natural causes. Marie harbored strong suspicions that someone in the house had murdered Clara. And the most difficult part of all was that Marie now had no idea who to trust. Guests had been in residence for weeks, people had come and gone, and her suspect list was long.

  Mrs. Farrell returned to the room with Jonathan and Mr. Arnold, the butler. Jonathan looked at Marie with huge eyes and made his way to the bedside.

  “What . . . what has happened?” he managed.

  Marie shook her head.

  “I must call Miles home,” Jonathan said. “Is he in London today?”

  “I believe he is at the hunting lodge.” Marie left the room and crossed the sitting room, her emotions in turmoil. Perhaps the only silver lining in the tragedy was that Miles probably wouldn’t be implicated in Clara’s death should Marie be able to prove foul play. He hadn’t been in residence for more than one or two weeks since marrying the young woman, and he clearly wasn’t present when the poor soul passed.

  Marie heard someone knocking at the front door as she passed the second floor landing but she was on a mission. The visitor could wait. She approached the guest rooms in the east wing, looking for signs of the spent tin punch cards or anything that might give her a clue to the killer’s identity.

  She heard voices in the hallway as she moved from one room to the next and spied Oliver speaking with the local constable. She considered sharing her suspicions with Miles’s friend, but he might be the guilty party, Bow Street consultant or no.

  Marie made a quick examination of each guest room, using a hairpin to unlock those that were locked. When she found the spent punch cards and slipped them into her telescriber to read the programming instructions, her heart pounded in her chest.

  And near the punch cards was an equally damning piece of evidence in the form of an illegal medicinal aid.

  “Well, well,” she murmured, stunned, “we have a vampire among us.”

  Miles returned to the manor that night and, after briefly acknowledging Marie and Jonathan, went straight to his study. His eyes were bleary and his expression more drawn than Marie had ever seen. She’d determined to tell him what she’d discovered, but she wanted to wait until they had a moment alone.

  The house was swarming with people, and Miles had his hands full speaking with the constable and Oliver and handling preparations for Clara’s burial and notifying the family. Marie had been on pins and ­needles the entire day but had stayed busy helping the frantic Mrs. Farrell.

  The night wore on, and as the home finally began to clear of people, Miles disappeared. Marie searched for him but to no avail. He was home a day early, after all. She supposed he needed to get away from the house. Her nerves were strung tight, and her heart ached as she thought of her brother facing his demons somewhere alone. Things had to change. She would talk to him, tell him that she knew of his condition and convince him to allow her to help shoulder the burden.

  As the hours crept onward, she returned to her room, exhausted but pacing the floor. She heard a commotion at the front of the house; her relatives had returned. She placed her fingers to her temples. Taking a seat at her vanity, she opened a drawer and pulled out her diary and pen. Scribbling furiously, she tried to make sense on paper of what she had discovered. Her diary was her release, her one safe place to write everything down and see it all before her in black and white. She flipped through some of her earlier entries—observations of the household, the guests, Clara’s worsening illness—and realized the clues had been there all along. The evidence was definitive, and she felt a grim sense of satisfaction that the guilty party would suffer.

  A knock on her door sent the pen flying from her fingers, and she cursed under her breath. Opening the door with a little more force than was strictly necessary, she eyed the ’ton on the other side. He held out a paper to her and bowed. Marie grabbed it with a mumble of thanks and closed the door.

  It was a note from Miles, telling her that he needed to speak to her privately and to meet him at her garden gazebo around midnight.

  She looked up from the missive and stared out the window into the dark night. Perhaps Miles had decided to take her into his confidence after all. The timing made sense—if rumors were accurate, midnight was the magic hour. Marie glanced at her pocket watch that was attached to her hip pocket with a copper chain. She had less than fifteen minutes.

  Quickly selecting a cloak from her wardrobe and grabbing a Tesla torch from a table near the door, she made her way through the house and into the night. Her cloak did little to protect her from the damp cold that accompanied the thick pockets of fog hovering over the ground. The path behind the gardens wound through a dense, darkly wooded area, and the beam from her torch scattered in the heavy mist, offering little guidance.

  Her breathing sounded loud to her own ears as she picked up her pace. She ran along the twisted path until she saw the familiar tall stone walls of her own sanctuary, her garden. Enclosed on four sides, the garden had been unofficially hers since childhood, and she had spent hours there, tending it with Mr. Clancy, the gardener. Her mother had loved it, had spent hours in it herself, which was probably why Marie adored it so much.

  There was a lock on the gate, but it was never employed. She swung the gate open wide and frowned. The fog had a light, eerie quality to it that lifted some of the darkness, but she was unable to see more than a few feet. The gazebo situated at the back wall was lost in the mist, but she felt fairly certain she would have seen the glow of a lantern or a Tesla torch if Miles were already there.

  She made her way to the gazebo, the familiarity of the garden offering scant comfort as her torchlight bounced in the fog but offered no real help. It was so incredibly, awfully quiet. She hoped desperately that Miles would hurry; the sense of urgency she felt at having discovered that Clara had been murdered weighed heavily on her. She needed to speak with him.

  She climbed the steps into the gazebo and turned. A faint light appeared in the fog as she rubbed her arms, and she wished she’d have taken the time to find a better wrap. She felt her heartbeat in her throat, and chided herself for allowing the eerie night to try her nerves.

  “Miles?” she called softly and heard a twig snap as the light grew ever closer. She stood at the edge of the steps but drew back into the gazebo when the torch shined directly in her face so she was unable to see who held it.

  “Miles!” she repeated, her tone sharp as she continued her retreat, feeling a surge of anger that finally had her standing her ground in the center of the structure. “Take the light from my eyes, I cannot see you!”

  Her corset felt tight as she breathed harder, and she moved to smack the torch away when the one who wielded it clutched her by the throat. Her head spun as she gasped, trying to draw a breath through her crushed airway. She grasped at the wrist that first lifted her from her feet and then released her, hurling her down onto the stone floor.

  Marie rolled to the side and tried to crawl away when she felt a slash come down across her face, raking from her forehead down to her neck. She reached up desperately as she fell back to the ground, blood obscuring her vision as she clawed wildly at her attacker. She ripped a button free, but when her head made contact again with the unforgiving floor, her arm flung outward and the button slipped free.

  Her gaze followed along the length her arm to her extended fingers where the button rolled to a stop. Her thoughts were scattered, frantic. She tried to move her limbs but found them unresponsive. Conscious, coherent thought dimmed as the world slowly enclosed her in blackness and searing pain sliced across her midsection and chest.


  Miles . . .

  Her lips formed the name but no sound issued forth as she finally registered a blissful deadening of the pain, a measure of peace. Feeling as though a hand had reached down and pulled her into the air, she looked around wildly to see who had rescued her even as the choking, blinding pain ceased altogether.

  She hovered in the gazebo, her vision suddenly sharp and clear. She saw through the dark, through the fog, noting her attacker leaning over a prostrate and bloodied form. Fury bubbled in her chest as she lashed out, only to realize that her hand passed ineffectively through her assailant’s head.

  Marie looked down again, her senses reeling, as she regarded her own earthly end. Stunned, she watched as her attacker rose, straightened clothing, and turned and left the gazebo. The Tesla torch, dropped and forgotten, rolled slightly and then was still, the light casting a ghostly glow over Marie’s mortal remains.

  Sorrow replaced the fury in her chest, and she screamed, hearing it echo only inside her head. She sank down next to her battered body, noting the direction her eyes had taken in those last, frantic moments before her corporeal form had succumbed to the assault. Her mortal, sightless eyes gazed down the length of her arm, the line of her bare hand pointing to the one piece of evidence she had managed to take from her murderer.

  Alone . . . She was utterly, devastatingly alone. She heaved breaths that weren’t breaths at all, felt the frantic, ghostly heartbeat of an organ that lay still and lifeless on the floor before her. She welcomed the surge of anger that swelled around her until the air fairly pulsated with it. She would not leave. She would remain at her home until she and her sister-in-law were avenged.

  As she felt her eyes burn with tears that weren’t really there, she thought of her brothers and sobbed.