Aether Spirit

by Cecilia Dominic

  “We can’t worry about that now. We have to do something for Claire.”

  “Then you assemble your device, and I’ll isolate the aether. It shouldn’t take us long.”

  Chad looked one more time at Claire. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully, but her eyes moved under her eyelids. She was dreaming. He hoped it was something enjoyable, but he doubted it.

  * * * * *

  Claire floated in a fog somewhere above her body, and a cold hand took her left one, a warm one her right. She looked over to see Mrs. Soper, whose dark hand twined warmly in hers, and the general’s daughter, who was the cold one.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “You kissed him,” the girl said with a grin. “It was very romantic.”

  “It was stupid is what it was,” Mrs. Soper told her. “You knew what would happen.”

  “I knew, but I hoped it wouldn’t. He said my name, and it only hurt a little. But I need to talk to my father.” She looked at the ghost girl, whose name she recalled was Emma. “Can you find him for me?”

  “He’s gone on now that you and the doctor have found each other again and he doesn’t need to watch over you anymore.”

  “Oh.” Claire looked down at herself, now carried in Radcliffe’s arms. She could feel what it was like to be cradled against his chest and closed her eyes to embrace the feeling of being enveloped in his wiry strength, but a tug from Mrs. Soper made her open them again.

  “Not yet, girl. You need to get the information those boys are looking for.”

  “They’re hardly boys.” No, Radcliffe was most definitely a man. She looked more closely at Mrs. Soper, who had a strange glow around her. “Are you dead?” Claire asked. “You’re very warm.”

  Mrs. Soper grinned with dazzling even teeth. “I don’t play by the same rules the rest of y’all do.”

  “She’s not human, dummy,” Emma said. “So she doesn’t have to.”

  “What are you?” Claire asked Mrs. Soper.

  “I’m one of the gardeners, and the rose is opening and spreading its thorns with its petals. Now you get on to your memories. I’ll tell you more if I can.” She squeezed Claire’s hand, and Claire fell through the air into a dark tunnel, coming to rest standing on both feet on a wooden floor. Her father pulled lenses from a box one by one, held each up to his eye, then studied it through a magnifying glass under a light.

  “What are you doing?” Claire asked. She wore a corset under her clothing and recognized the blue dress as her favorite when she was sixteen.

  “Come here, I have something to show you,” he said. His eyes had fewer lines around them than when he had appeared to her as a ghost, and his hair was redder. Claire caught sight of the date on a newspaper—12 August 1864—and the headline, “Stalemate in Tennessee.”

  She stepped close to the desk and saw he had laid out the lenses in order. “They look clear, but they have coatings on them that allows light to pass through in different ways,” he said. He picked one up and held it in front of the lamp, which glowed yellow around the lens but white through it. “See? This one filters out the longer wavelengths.”

  “What are they for?”

  “They’re to help concentrate light so it can be used for more than just illumination.”

  When he said that, one of the blocks in Claire’s mind released, and she recalled their subsequent experimentation with lenses made from different materials, which ended up being more stable than coatings, which could burn off, but the magic combination turned out to be—

  “Now look at this one…” She reached to touch his shoulder, but she fell through time again and landed on a bench in a spacious workshop.

  Warm spots tingled on her head, and she opened her eyes to see Radcliffe looking at her intently.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  She struggled to sit, but he pressed her back down. “Let me remove the aether helmet first. The hoses aren’t that long,” he said.

  He took something heavy off of her head and helped her to sit. Her scalp crawled, but she resisted the urge to rub it.

  “You don’t have to stare at me like I’m going to break,” she said. “And I remember what you wanted me to.”

  He took her hand. “Are you all right sharing it with us?”

  She squeezed his hand, which was warm like Mrs. Soper’s had been. “Yes. Although I hate to make something that will kill and maim more soldiers, it’s better to bring the war to a close rather than patching people up and sending them back out. It reminds me of something my father would say, that you can only repair something so many times, no matter how strong or well-made it is.” She took a shuddering breath, remembering her father as he was when he was younger and missing him again. “It’s what he would want, to bring this awful war to a close.”

  The door opened, and O’Connell walked in with a truly frightening scowl.

  “What is it?” Radcliffe asked.

  “I’d managed to salvage my notes and my model from the workshop, and I thought I put them in a safe place in our room, but someone broke in, and it’s all gone.”

  Radcliffe went gray. “Did they go through my things too?”

  O’Connell nodded. “Yes, go see for yourself.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Fort Daniels, 27 February 1871

  Chad stood at the door and clutched the frame of his and Patrick’s room in the barracks for support. The beds were overturned, and their storage lockers underneath pried apart.

  “How is this possible?” he asked. “Did no one hear anything?”

  “According to the clerk in charge of the barracks, everyone was out at their various duties, at least in this part of it,” Patrick said. “He said he wanted for us to wait for the base police to get here before we move too much, but we can start listing what’s missing.”

  Chad stepped over wood fragments, bits of mattress cotton, and blankets to approach his bed, or what was left of it. Whoever had done this had left it looking messy, but something about the mess made him think there was a methodical search, not a haphazard robbery. But what had they sought? Neither he nor Patrick had many valuables, and what they had they typically carried with them.

  Except the ring. His stomach twisted as he looked through the remnants of his locker. The false bottom had been pried out, and as he feared, Claire’s engagement ring was missing, as was the letter.

  “It’s gone,” he said. He didn’t have to say what.

  Patrick nodded and placed a hand on his shoulder. “I was afraid of that.”

  Chad stood and gingerly stepped over the obstacles again to join Patrick at the door. He shouldn’t feel so dejected at its loss since Claire was gradually coming back to him, or he hoped she was. But had he been foolish enough to think he would be putting the ring on her finger again?

  “I need to get back to Claire, see how she fared after her first treatment. I shouldn’t have left her.”

  “She was resting comfortably in the workshop and insisted you go. You can’t coddle her.”

  “No, but she’s my responsibility. I can’t allow the loss of the remnants of the past to keep me from my present.”

  “And hopefully your future?” Patrick asked. “She still loves you. I may be just a dumb brute of an Irishman, but that much is obvious. Took her long enough to realize it.”

  “You’re not dumb, and I don’t dare to hope…” He rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t one to believe in signs—he was a man of science, after all—but the loss of the ring and letter felt like a bad omen.

  Perhaps I’m the one who needs a neuroticist if I’m going to start letting my feelings dictate what I do.

  “You can dare to hope, and even more, you can believe you deserve to be happy with her. Just think, we’ll get La Reine to working, and then we’ll win this war so you and Claire can continue your lives togethe
r.”

  “With the interference of her aunt just like before, no doubt. Just because times have changed doesn’t mean her circumstances have.”

  “You’re not going to be much good as a romantic if you continue to be such a pessimist.”

  Chad turned from the mess in the room. It echoed his state of mind too much. He gestured for Patrick to follow him to the clerk’s office. “Are you all right sorting out this mess?”

  “Aye, I can handle it if you can charm someone to let us have rooms in the Negroes’ quarters.”

  “That’s fine. I’m going to find Claire, and we’re going to get something to eat, and then I’m going to walk her back to the Negroes’ quarters like a gentleman. Then I’ll secure us a room and turn in early. We have a lot of work to do if we want to get that thing up and going.”

  “With Claire’s help. She’ll be a tinkerer like she was meant to, not a neuroticist.”

  “Although it doesn’t surprise me that she joined them. She’ll beat anyone at their own game if given the chance.”

  “That’s our Claire.”

  Radcliffe didn’t feel jealous at Patrick’s pronouncement. It would be like old times, the three of them tinkering about, but instead of her father’s workshop and steam engines, they’d be in a military facility working on a machine of death they all had mixed feelings about.

  Well, except for Patrick. He was always determined to take up for the oppressed. It was how they’d become friends, after all.

  He headed back to the workshop but found it locked. Only Patrick had a key for security reasons, so Chad surmised Claire had left. But where had she gone? She hadn’t gotten confused and wandered off, had she? He looked more closely at the lock and saw a slip of paper rolled up and stuck in it.

  Gone to visit Mrs. Soper before dinner. Find me when you’re ready. Regards, Claire.

  She hadn’t signed it with love, but she also didn’t know if he would be the one to find the note. He decided to check in on his replacement at the hospital to see if he had questions about any of the patients, then find Claire.

  He didn’t realize he was grinning like a silly schoolboy until one of the soldiers he passed gave him an odd look.

  * * * * *

  Claire went back and forth on the note to Radcliffe. Should she have signed it with love? She didn’t have the energy to argue with herself over it. She did love him, dammit, and she relished the sensations of her newly realized feelings clicking into place like the pieces of a clockwork.

  She liked it when things made sense, which is why she wasn’t sure why she was visiting Mrs. Soper. Major Longchamp’s strange utterance had combined with the woman’s appearance in Claire’s dream to make Claire wonder if there was something odd going on, something beyond the strangeness on base—ghosts, mostly—she’d become accustomed to.

  That was one of the interesting things about the human psyche—people could become accustomed to just about anything, whether it was right or wrong.

  Whatever it was, she would figure it out.

  It’s all probably lingering effects of my own hysteria, possibly the hypnotic blocks fighting back in a way that will drive me back to Salpêtrière or another asylum.

  She approached the front desk of the women’s hospital, where Lillian sat making notes in charts. She looked up when Claire approached, and her expression tightened into exasperation.

  “It’s about time you got here!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mrs. Soper has been difficult, won’t eat until she talks to you.”

  “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  Lillian frowned. “You didn’t get the message I sent to the hospital?”

  “No. I was with Doctor Radcliffe and Mister O’Connell in the workshop doing some work for the general.”

  “Well, come follow me. She wants to talk to you, and I need her to eat something so she can take the pain medicine that came in this afternoon.”

  “Has she been very uncomfortable?” Claire asked and followed Lillian up the stairs to the Negro women’s ward. It was quiet.

  “She hasn’t complained much, but she has a broken arm that was crushed when the house fell on her, and I know that’s gotta hurt.” She lowered her voice. “It will probably require surgery or amputation, but I’m going to let Doctor Radcliffe tell her. He has a way with her.”

  “I noticed.”

  Lillian knocked and then opened the door to Mrs. Soper’s room, and Claire had the briefest of impressions that smoke billowed out, but then it was gone to be replaced by a smoky odor.

  “That’s odd. It’s like someone lit a match in here.”

  They walked in, and Claire covered her mouth. Mrs. Soper laid in the bed, but her body steamed, and she seemed to have sunken in on herself, her skin wrapped around her bones.

  Lillian gasped and ushered Claire out. “I don’t know what caused that, but we don’t need to be breathing it.”

  Claire looked down the hall and saw a shadow move. It resolved into the figure of a girl with her hair wrapped in cloth. She stood beside another dark shape. Claire blinked, and they disappeared. She didn’t have time to investigate what she thought she saw—she needed to get Lillian in hand. The woman looked like she was about to go into shock. She leaned against the wall and stared into space, her mouth working but not getting any words out.

  “You can’t go into a hysterical reaction now,” Claire told her. “We have to figure out what happened to her. If it’s an illness, we should quarantine whoever’s been in contact with her.”

  “It’s not an illness,” Lillian said. She grabbed Claire’s arm. “Have you ever had a nightmare that was more than a nightmare?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “The last time I went in to check on her, I thought she was asleep, but she turned her head to me, and I thought I heard a voice that wasn’t hers come out of her.”

  “What did it say?”

  “That the rose is opening, but it has thorns, and no old one was going to keep it from blooming. Then she returned to her regular voice, and that’s when she insisted on seeing you. I thought I must have just imagined what I heard, and maybe we both needed a neuroticist.” She let out a high-pitched giggle and put a hand over her mouth. “But you saw it, didn’t you? The corpse with the staring eyes?”

  “I thought her eyes were closed,” Claire said. She was sure she would have noticed otherwise.

  Lillian shook her head. “Oh, dear lord, it’s happening. My mother ended up in an asylum, and I always wondered if I’d be doomed to follow. It’s the old degenerate theory. I didn’t want to believe it.”

  “It’s not what you think. Look, I’m going to go in there and make sure she’s truly dead. Someone needs to confirm it. Then we can decide what to do.”

  Lillian nodded. Claire went back into the room. The windows threw golden squares across the bed, which now was empty. The door slammed, and Claire whirled around, half expecting to see the corpse reaching for her, but she was alone in the room. When she turned back to the bed, the light peeled like sheets and entwined until it formed a figure that glowed like the aether the first time she’d seen it and felt it.

  “What are you?” Claire asked. “What did you do with Mrs. Soper?”

  “The old one is not here. They tend to disappear when things get weird. Do you not recognize me?” It looked at its hands. “You touched me, and that’s when I knew I was awake. No, that’s not the right word. When I knew I was alive.”

  Claire squinted at it. “Are you the same aether that Chad just drew me into the past with?”

  “No, that is a sister. She will become alive as well, though. Or maybe not. It doesn’t matter.”

  A shadow moved and coalesced into the figure of Mrs. Soper. Claire made sure not to look at it directly. She wasn’t sure what the creature on the bed was, but she di
dn’t want to alert it to the presence of the old one, whatever that was.

  What is all this?

  The shadow Mrs. Soper crept up behind the light creature and grabbed it. It threw its head back and let out a scream like a train whistle, but she grappled with it, and they both disappeared, leaving Claire’s ears ringing.

  “What. The. Hell?” She didn’t stick around for anything to answer but opened the now unlocked door and ran out.

  “What was that?” Lillian asked. She seemed to have recovered her composure. “Is she dead or not?”

  Claire looked at her open-mouthed. “Did you not hear any of that?”

  “Any of what? I heard you say something, but that was it. I thought you were talking to her. Is she alive?”

  “No. No, she’s not. At least not in a way either of us can understand.”

  Lillian gave her a strange look, then opened the door, looked in, and closed it again. “She’s lying in the bed, but she looks peacefully asleep.”

  She walked in, and Claire sagged against the wall. Her ears still chimed with the after-effects of the creature’s scream. Or maybe it was a hysterical reaction to… To what? The treatment she’d had that afternoon?

  Lillian returned. “It must have been a trick of the light. She’s asleep. I won’t disturb her. Are you all right?”

  Claire swallowed the bit of stomach acid that had risen to her throat. “I think we both may need a neuroticist. I have to find Doctor Radcliffe.”

  * * * * *

  “I think the aether treatment is having unintended side effects,” Claire told Chad.

  She sat across from him in the mess hall, where she’d found him after she left the women’s hospital. She knew Lillian had told her something strange even though she pretended she hadn’t, and then Claire had seen…

  She still couldn’t believe Lillian hadn’t heard the creature scream. Did that mean she’d imagined it?

  She hid her shaking hands under the table after a few attempts to lift the stew to her mouth had failed, and she knew she’d be sending her borrowed dress to the laundry.