by C. L. Polk
She couldn’t see us. Tristan had hidden us from her view, a power from legends and stories I’d scoffed at even as I eagerly read those childhood tales. His hand on my mouth gentled, slid down to wrap around my waist.
We were touching from neck to knee. His breath flared warm over my ear, and I didn’t dare shift so much as an inch away from him. What if the boards creaked under our feet?
The woman returned to the front room, wine-painted lips pursed. She paused, thoughtful, and then a decision smoothed the lines around her mouth. She tiptoed into the study. Six wooden drawers scraped open and shut, four metal drawers echoed, and the woman shut the last one with frustrated force.
“What are you doing, Nick?” she asked the air. “And where have you gone?”
She came back to fetch her cocoon coat and shrugged into it with a discontented haste. She checked the dining room, the thud of her heeled shoes muffled against the carpet.
My shoulder itched. I was too warm inside my felted wool. Tristan’s breath on my neck traveled along my limbs in waves of gooseflesh. In my imagination, I could taste the fennel on his mouth, feel the cool silkiness of his hair tangled in my fingers. Too vividly, with him pressed up against me and a floor creak away from discovery. I shouldn’t be thinking of kissing anybody, let alone a half-divine, heartless Amaranthine.
The woman opened her purse and pulled out an engraved silver flask, drinking from it before she put on her gloves and left the flat empty-handed. Tristan tightened his grip, and we stood there until the stairs creaked under her feet.
I tore out of his arms and twitched my coat closed, fastening the buttons at my waist. “What did you do?”
Tristan shrugged. “I’m an illusionist. We’re lucky I managed to hide both of us. What was she looking for in the study?”
I was breathing too fast. “You made us invisible?”
He gave me an unsteady smile. “I did.”
The power he must possess … “Amazing.”
“Thank you.” His smile widened. “It took a great deal to hide us both. I’m hungry.”
He’d performed a feat out of a legend, and he was just hungry? “I’d be on my back seam.”
“I can hold on until we’re finished searching.” Tristan led the way to the study. “Whatever she wanted, she didn’t find it. Interesting.”
“Whoever came in here and cleaned up already searched the study?”
He stood in the middle of the room, turning a slow circle. “A poor man come to fortune is poisoned … for something he wrote? Ah, splendid. I hoped for this.”
“For what?”
Tristan slipped on his gloves and lifted the cover plate of an upright typewriter, and the satisfied look slid into vexation. He opened drawers just as the woman had.
“What is it?” I came over to inspect the typewriter.
“The ribbon’s new,” he said. “But look at this.”
He set a box on the desktop. The legend read Snyder’s Best Re-inking Kit. I opened the lid; the cranking machine was stained with use. No ribbons sat in the compartment meant to store them.
Tristan opened every desk drawer. “No spare ribbons. No boxes of new ribbons. Evidence Nick Elliot reused his old ribbons. The reason why Nick Elliot is dead was in this room, but it’s gone now. There’s nothing left.”
He checked the filing cabinet. “All the drawers are empty.”
“The evidence is gone,” I said. “It’s all gone. We didn’t learn anything.”
He rocked the filing cabinet. “Help me move this.”
I squeezed in on his left, and together we walked the cabinet away from the corner. We found a pile of dust. Tristan rocked the cabinet back into the corner, and we each took a side of the desk.
“Lift with your knees,” I warned, and we moved the thing a few inches. Lying in the dust was a scratchpad, probably one that had rested next to the telephone.
“It’s blank.”
Tristan snatched it up and held it to the light. “Not quite. Hand me a pencil.”
I opened the drawer and found soft sketching pencils. Tristan rubbed one over the pad. He glanced at me with wide eyes when he read the message. “You say you didn’t know him?”
“No.”
He handed me the pad and I read the letters exposed by the rubbing:
CMH = Dr. Miles Singer
Psych, BVH
—permission to interview patients?
—don’t spook him!
“BVH is Beauregard Veterans’ hospital,” Tristan said. “What does CMH mean?”
“It’s me,” I said. “He knew my name. Christopher Miles Hensley.”
“Ah. Any relation to Chancellor Christopher Hensley?”
“You could say that.” It was hard to breathe around the icy, shuddering sickness. “He’s my father.”
“So. You’re a gentleman after all.”
I nodded and tried to swallow. “I ran away to join the army.”
He tilted his head. “You came back earlier than most. You were wounded?”
I closed the door on those memories. I was in Aeland, in Kingston, and Camp Paradise was in the past. “Technically, yes.”
Tristan’s face pursed up in thought, and smoothed out to polite concern. “I won’t pry.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll even change the subject.” He led us through Nick’s flat to the kitchen door. “Nick was murdered by someone who had a lot to lose if whatever he was writing came out into the open.”
“But he writes about gardening,” I said. “Who would kill over gardening? Wait. What if that’s not all he wrote about?”
“What else would he write about?”
“The war. He said the soldiers deserved to know the truth.”
“Who would kill him for being anti-war?”
“Nationalists,” I said. “But not with poison. They’d beat him to death in the street, half of them drunk.”
“They deserved to know the truth behind the war,” Tristan mused. “What truth?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He didn’t make a lot of sense. He said something about souls, too.”
This arrested Tristan. He grasped my arms. “Yes. Nick had said ‘They’ needed the souls? He was on the same trail I am.”
“You’re looking for souls?” I asked. “I thought you were looking for lost magic.”
“Souls power magic.”
I stopped, openmouthed. “They what?”
“You’re a witch because you possess a peculiar strength of soul-energy. Don’t you know this?”
“No.” It was really that simple? A dozen thoughts whirled in my head, but this wasn’t the time or place to demand explanations. “So it’s true. The dead do go on to the Solace.”
“Of course it is. Why would you think otherwise?”
I should be sitting down for this. “Because the stories about ghosts are just stories. There’s no such thing.”
“You think ghosts don’t exist because Aeland doesn’t have any.”
I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t. Amaranthines were real. The Solace was real. I had a soul. I would go to the Solace when I died … and perhaps when I did, Tristan would be there, like the lone acquaintance in a distant town.
“All right. Souls are real, and a sufficiently strong soul makes you a mage, or a witch. Do you have any more shattering revelations for me?”
“Given how little you Aelanders know of magic, we don’t have time to go into the rest. Now make your best guess about what Nick meant. Who needed the souls?”
“If anyone would, it’s the Invisibles. My people. But you can’t get near them. And I won’t.”
“You’re right, I can’t.” Tristan released me, smoothing my rumpled sleeves. “I have to know what Nick learned, Miles. Will you help me?”
“He knew something about the war. Something the soldiers needed to know. I’m with you. What should we do first?”
“Perhaps a visit to his workplace would bear fruit.”
; “I don’t know if my inspection form would stretch to cover the trip.”
“No one has to tell us anything, but it can’t hurt to try.” He locked the door and motioned for me to follow him. The stairs complained at our passage. “Let’s find something for dinner.”
Dinner with Tristan. Knee and elbow around a little table in a dining room, or served in the cozy privacy of his home? My fingers flexed. I couldn’t be alone with him. I knew how stories of the Amaranthines ended. “I should get home.”
He straightened up and composed his features. “I’ll call on you tomorrow, after work? I’ll have my housekeeper prepare an early supper—”
“I’ll have the results from the teapot,” I promised.
I unhooked my bicycle off the back of his carriage, and we parted ways on Wellston Street.
* * *
I traded a fine meal in Tristan’s home for five and a half miles of headwind up the gradual uphill climb to East Kingston. The teapot bulged inside my medical bag as I guided my bicycle off the curb, the sight evoking a guilty little thrill. We’d broken and entered. If we’d been caught …
I stood on my pedals and bent over the curve of my handlebars against a force pushing me westward. I crossed train tracks with teeth gritted against the aether wires strung overhead. My legs quivered by the time I reached the wide gray house with white windowsills and the dead heads of autumn’s flowers in Mrs. Bass’s prizewinning front garden.
A carriage stood in front of Mrs. Bass’s front walk, the crest bearing the three boars of the Hensley family.
Flee, Miles. Get out of here. But my legs never obeyed me in Kalloo, and they didn’t obey me here. I straddled the crossbar of my bicycle, frozen.
The carriage jolted as a footman in livery— livery—hopped off the step and advanced toward me. “Dame Hensley awaits you inside, sir.”
He grasped the handle of my medical bag and lifted it out of the basket mounted over my front wheel.
I stirred, finally. “Don’t—”
“Sir? If I may assist you?”
He hefted my bag, its pleated leather sides swelled to fullness by the teapot resting inside it. He looked toward Mrs. Bass’s house, where my sister probably sat drinking broken-leaf tea in the aroma of boiled cabbage and minced mutton, eating carefully hoarded cookies from a tin.
He held my bag and in it the teapot, an assortment of medicines, my syringe case, and the scalpels I hadn’t used since I saved Pvt. James Wolf’s life and limb back in Mobile Hospital 361. I could give all those up, and everything in my room. I could ride to break my neck down the King’s Way and—
And go where? Grace had sworn on her blood. Whatever she was doing here, she wouldn’t walk away with me as her slave.
So I put my chin up and swung my leg over the bike’s saddle. I let him take the handlebars, and he walked two paces behind me as I took thirty steps to the front door.
I handed the footman my key. He locked my bicycle, gave me my bag, and took a place by the front door, immaculate in his orange coat and uncaring of the patch behind him where the house’s gray paint had chipped away.
Bells from a nearby clock tower sounded the hour. The front door snapped open before the first tolling faded. The pipefitter who snored in the room next to mine stepped outside.
“Doc.”
“Arthur. Is everything all right?”
“Fine, only—” He turned his neck slowly, wincing at the movement. “I think I slept wrong. Would you have a look? After your fancy caller.”
My fancy caller. Not my sister. A small mercy. I made my way to the back of the house, past the dramatic voices on the wireless muffled through the front parlor doors.
Grace relaxed on a cushion-covered wooden chair in Mrs. Bass’s homely green kitchen with one of the good teacups in her hand. Mrs. Bass rose from the table to serve me supper, expecting me to fall on a plate the way working men did while women visited in the kitchen.
“Just tea, Mrs. Bass—”
“Go on and eat, Miles,” my sister said. “You need feeding up.”
Chopped cabbage and mutton shoulder chops braised in wine gone half to vinegar steamed on my plate. A fellow with tar burns on his forearms stepped inside from the washing room and raised his hand. “Missus, Your Ladyship. And—”
“Dr. Singer, this is Douglas. He’s in the back bedroom,” Mrs. Bass said. “Douglas Fox.”
“Road-worker?” I asked, and shook his soap-clean hand. Stomach acid boiled in his gullet, trying to dissolve a lump that wouldn’t give way.
“I hear you’re a doctor,” Douglas said. “What’s a doctor doing living here? Beg pardon, Mrs. Bass. Are you one of them trainees?”
“I’m not an intern, Mr. Fox.”
“You’re a real doctor? Huh.” Douglas swiped his damp brow with his forearm. “I get a pain in my stomach after I eat. Why’s that?”
“Could be a few reasons.” It was a bezoar, and that meant surgery. I’d have to convince him to take time off work. A hard thing, when getting sick could mean your job. “I can have a look.”
“Tomorrow. You’ve got an important guest.” He bowed his head at my sister and stepped out, leaving me to my dinner.
Grace watched me take the first bite of my chop with barely a shiver. Mrs. Bass followed Mr. Fox to join the others in the front parlor, where they’d feed the aether-meter pennies and listen to the evening’s audio theater, full of unlikely plot twists and thrilling music meant to heighten the atmosphere. Once we were alone the look on Grace’s face writhed from politeness to scandalized ire.
“Birdland? You live in a single room in a boardinghouse in Birdland?”
She was as I remembered her, making an awful face at a supper she didn’t like or a notion she wouldn’t abide. The years melted away as I winked at her. “You’re sounding better. Cold cleared up?”
“After I nearly burned to death with your cure. I’m perfectly well.” She glanced around at the kitchen. I was glad Mrs. Bass’s enameled iron pots were free of stains and she’d never let a speck of dust settle anywhere. But Grace looked as if this kitchen were a pathetic hovel. “How much are they paying you?”
“Enough.” The meat had surrendered to hours on the simmer. “I could afford a flat, if I could find one.”
“Leave it to me. Birdland. Indeed.”
“Why are you here?”
She looked down at her cup before answering. “I came to see you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re my—my friend. And I missed you.”
I rubbed at the center of my chest, at the warm glow spreading to my limbs. It had been years. “I missed you too.”
“And I wanted to talk to you—” She shook her head. “Never mind. This place, you can’t live here.”
My sentimentality crumpled. She couldn’t make decisions for me as if I were her Secondary. “No.”
One eyebrow went up. “No?”
“You’re not finding me a flat,” I said. “You’ll pick out a ten-room folly. How did you find me?”
“I telephoned the hospital. Dr. Matheson was most helpful.”
“Oh, indeed.” The meat was sour.
“Don’t be sulky, Miles. Six rooms.”
“No.”
She rolled her eyes. “Do they even make flats smaller than six rooms?”
“Grace, do you know the cost of a loaf of bread?”
“Are you calling me a snob?”
“Can you deny it?”
She huffed. “What kind of flat do you need, then?”
“You didn’t come here to offer to find me new lodgings.”
Grace glanced off to the left. “You left work hours ago. Where have you been?”
I couldn’t tell her the truth. She’d call down the whole Circle against an Amaranthine. The cinema? She’d ask me what picture I saw. Dinner? I was eating like a starving man. The library? What books did I borrow?
“Miles.”
Lie. “I called on a friend.”
; “Who?”
I looked away.
“Oh. Still sharing the company of men? Aren’t you a bit old for that?”
“Grace.”
She sipped her tea. “I suppose it’s better than shackling yourself to a laundress.”
“Grace.”
“I’m joking. A secretary, surely.”
I stared at her, and she gave me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry. I’m glad you have a friend. Mrs. Bass said you kept to yourself.”
“I’m sure she told you everything.”
Outside the kitchen, a board in the hallway creaked. I stuffed my mouth with mutton. Grace drank her tea. Mrs. Bass knocked on the door before coming in. “Beg pardon, Dame Hensley, but I don’t allow guests after nine, and it’s ten past.”
“Of course.” Grace pushed back her chair. “Thank you for the tea. Miles and I will go—”
“You will go, Grace,” I corrected. “I will remain here. I can’t tell you what a surprise this visit was.”
Mrs. Bass and Grace looked down their noses at my remark.
“Indeed.” Grace pulled on a glove. “Surprises are rather the theme of our reunion, aren’t they? Goodbye, Mrs. Bass.”
She kissed the air next to Mrs. Bass’s cheek, and damn if my landlady didn’t beam like the sun. Grace glanced back at me before she left, the footman’s steps echoing hers on the porch.
Mrs. Bass turned on me. “Dame Grace is a fine lady. You had no call to treat her poorly, however she jilted you.”
“It wasn’t—” I shut up, started over. “It’s been a long time.”
“You finish up your meal.” She took the tea things away, glancing inside my sister’s cup. She went still, and her eyes widened.
“What is it?” I asked. “Didn’t she finish?” Grace would no sooner leave the insult of a half-drunk cup of tea than she would dance through Wellston Triangle naked.
“It’s nothing,” Mrs. Bass said, but her lips were white as she picked up Grace’s cup, taking it not to the stone sink but out the back way, the door to the yard creaking open. Then came the sound of bone-clay smashing on pavement, followed by Mrs. Bass spitting three times.
I’d nearly forgotten my dinner. My jaw hung open, but I shut it before Mrs. Bass could see. She flushed when she found me staring.
