Grave Expectations (The Ministry of Curiosities Book 4)

by C. J. Archer

  "He is."

  "There is another English word." She clicked her tongue as she searched for it. "Int… Intimid…?"

  "Intimidating." I suddenly felt awkward discussing him like this while he was in the room.

  Lincoln must have known that I was talking about him because he once again squeezed my hand.

  "You think he loves you?" my mother asked.

  "I know it."

  She stood and smoothed her ghostly skirts. "Charlotte, it is my duty as your mother to warn you that men are not like us. They do not have soft hearts. To them, love is a way to get something else they want."

  "You're wrong, Mother," I said very firmly. "I'm sorry your experience was unfavorable, but I know some very good, kind men. The ones in this room, for example."

  "You are a young woman," she said gently. "And sheltered too."

  "Not as much as you may think."

  "You must listen to me when I tell you to be careful. I am your mother and I wish you to be happy. Find a man who is not so…strong. Find one less intimidating, who will do your bidding."

  I pressed my lips together. This meeting was taking a turn in a direction I didn't like, yet I didn't have the heart to continue to disagree with her. "I will consider your advice. Thank you, Mother. Mama. May I call you that?"

  "Of course." Her sweet smile momentarily filled out the hollowed contours of her cheeks and chased away the dark shadows circling her eyes. "That is a word I hoped to hear one day from your lips. I wish I were alive to hold you, dearest daughter, but this spirit form must do for now."

  "We'll see one another again, won't we?" I asked, my tears once more close.

  "Of course. You may summon my spirit whenever you need me. I am here for you, Charlotte. Always."

  I nodded, no longer able to speak through my tears.

  "Promise me you will get your necklace from him." She angled her head at Lincoln. "If he refuses, steal it. Listen to me, your mother, not him. I know what is best for you. You are always in my heart. Do you understand?"

  I nodded again.

  "Bon. Now, we must say farewell." She kissed her fingertips and held them up. I kissed mine and touched them to hers, although I felt nothing.

  "Goodbye, Mama," I whispered. "I release you."

  She slipped away, gliding up to the ceiling then disappearing altogether.

  "She's gone?" Lincoln asked.

  I nodded.

  "Well?" Gus prompted. "What did she say?"

  "Gus," Seth hissed. "That's private."

  "I was askin' about the un-private bits."

  "She spoke about the amber pendant," I told them. "She said I should wear it at all times." I mentioned how she'd commissioned it, and why, and how to release the imp from the amber. "The words must be spoken in French while I wear it."

  Lincoln withdrew his hand from mine. "The creature sounds too unpredictable. We can't risk it escaping."

  "She wanted me to steal it back if you didn't return it to me."

  He refilled my teacup and handed it to me. "Research it further. There might be something in the library."

  "You've read every book in the library and you have a fantastic memory. Do you recall reading about an imp?"

  If he heard the challenge in my voice, he gave no indication. "All sorts of creatures are mentioned, but nothing trapped in amber. Perhaps that's a new technique."

  "Very well, I'll see what I can find." I didn't tell him that I would have it back, one way or another. If my mother thought it important then I would wear it. I didn't want to argue with Lincoln. Not when everything was so lovely between us.

  * * *

  Lincoln finally gave in and allowed me to go to the prison with him after I caught him at a rare weak moment—he was in the middle of kissing me.

  With my back to his door, his hands on my waist, I gently pushed him away and simply told him I was going too. With a resigned sigh, he said, "I suspected as much."

  What followed was a list of rules, most of them boiling down to staying vigilant and staying close to him. I did as told because his commands were entirely sensible—and he said please.

  The entrance gate of Surrey House of Correction rose out of the landscape like a grim, austere medieval castle presiding over its subjects. Lincoln and I were shown into the governor's office in the heart of the complex. The prison was designed like an octopus with four tentacles; the central office windows overlooked each yard between the tentacles. A smattering of prisoners huddled in the corners out of the wind, but otherwise the yards were barren.

  "He's in the infirmary," Governor Crease said upon our inquiry. "You can't visit him." He was a tall, imposing man with impressive muttonchops and moustache but no beard. Small, round eyes peered back at us with intense focus that seemed to be searching our souls for our crimes.

  Lincoln passed a fat envelope across the desk. Crease peered inside and, without so much as a blink, opened the top drawer of his desk and dropped it inside. He locked the drawer with a key that he slipped into his watch pocket.

  "I'll have one of the guards escort you."

  A few minutes later we were shown into another building that reminded me of the wards at the Bedlam asylum. Men dressed in shapeless, drab prison garb lay on beds divided into two rows. There were no blankets to cover them and no nurses to tend to them. Some watched us warily, but others were either asleep or too sick to open their eyes.

  Only one guard stood at the door. He directed us to the bed three down on the left. It took me a moment to recognize the figure lying there, curled over and clutching his stomach. Holloway was so changed. He'd lost weight and the usually neat man had grown a patchy beard. Without Macassar oil, his hair hung loose and lank past his nape. The blue spidery veins on his closed eyelids stood out alarmingly against pale, glistening skin.

  "Holloway," Lincoln said. "Are you awake?"

  The man I'd affectionately called Father for thirteen years, and less affectionately for another five, cracked open his eyes. Whatever ailed him clearly didn't affect his mind because he took us both in then grunted.

  "The devil child." His voice was as fragile as the rest of him. "Come to take me to the pits of hell?"

  "You're not dead yet," I said, feeling bold now that I saw how sick he was. I thought I'd feel anger and hatred, but I felt neither of those. Indeed, I felt nothing for him except a small kernel of nostalgia that took little effort to quash.

  "What do you want?"

  The prisoner in the next bed began coughing uncontrollably. The warden and other prisoners took no notice.

  "Sign these papers." Lincoln produced a folded document from his inside jacket pocket. He'd come prepared.

  "What papers?" Holloway asked.

  "Charlie is going to wed."

  Holloway pushed himself up on his elbow with effort. I stepped forward to help him, but he flinched and gave me a look of such horror that I hung back. "She needs my consent." He chuckled and lay down again. "How ironic."

  "Sign it," I said, "and I will be out of your way forever. You'll never have to see me again."

  "No."

  I exchanged a glance with Lincoln. He looked like he wanted to thump Holloway. "Why not?" I asked. "Why do you care what I do?"

  "Marriage is a sacred endeavor in the eyes of God. I cannot allow a creature like yourself to enter a house of God and speak vows meant for good, Christian folk. What sort of vicar would that make me? What sort of man?"

  "A forgiving one. A kind one." But the more I spoke, the more I saw how hopeless it was. Holloway wasn't the sort of man who feared death, or Lincoln, or me. He thought he was in the right, and nothing could sway him.

  "I tried to save you," he said to me. "I tried to remove the devil from you—"

  "By digging it out of me with a knife!"

  "If I were in better health, and not confined to this hell, I would try again. Now it's up to you to fight the devil alone. If this man you wish to marry truly loved you, he would help you fight it." He sighed
and seemed to sink further into the bed. "Be gone, Devil. Get away from me."

  I moved off, but Lincoln did not. He leaned down to the figure in the bed and whispered something in his ear. Holloway's eyes widened. His Adam's apple bobbed.

  "What did you say to him?" I asked as we followed the warden back to the governor's office.

  "I told him that he will die soon, and that he'd better hope his treatment of you does not go against his God's wishes. I may have recited a few lines of the testament that counsel compassion to everyone."

  "How do you know he'll die soon? He might recover."

  We arrived in the governor's office and he didn't have a chance to answer me. Nor did he respond as we drove off, and I didn't ask again. Neither of us mentioned Holloway or his refusal to grant his permission.

  I knew from Lincoln's rigidity that he was seething. His black fathomless eyes stared out the window, and the muscles in his jaw stretched taut.

  "We'll speak with a lawyer," I said quietly. "It will all work out, Lincoln. You'll see." A small, cold place inside me hoped that Holloway would die, handing over my guardianship to the state, but it was not the sort of thing I could admit out loud.

  Seth drove us to the newspaper offices of The Times, where we placed our advertisement for a housekeeper, then drove home. I felt flat, restless, and it only grew worse as the hour for the committee meeting approached. As the first arrival rolled along the drive, I began to regret my insistence that I face them too. While I wanted to present a united front with Lincoln, I was in no mood for their snobbery and, in the case of Lady Harcourt, jealousy.

  The first to arrive was General Eastbrooke with Lord Marchbank close behind. They eyed me with curiosity as we sat in the library and waited for the others to arrive. I folded my hand over my engagement ring to hide it until they were all present.

  "What's she doing here?" Lord Gillingham asked before he'd even fully entered the library. "Get rid of her."

  "Charlie is staying," Lincoln said blandly.

  "Why?" Lady Harcourt asked, with a defiant tilt of her chin. She looked lovely in a lavender gown, cinched at the waist to show off her feminine figure, her hair arranged in a style that must have taken her maid an age to do. "Are you still insisting we call her your assistant? That's all well and good, but Lichfield needs maids for now."

  "We've placed an advertisement in The Times for a housekeeper."

  Her face froze. "We?"

  "Where did you go, Fitzroy?" Lord Gillingham cut in.

  "On holiday," Lincoln said.

  Gillingham snorted a laugh but when no one else joined in, he said, "To where?"

  "That is none of your affair."

  "It damned well is, man." Whenever Gillingham grew angry, his face turned the same reddish hue as his hair. He was well on the way to that color already and the meeting had only just begun.

  Lincoln said nothing. He stood by the fireplace, a severely drawn frown on his brow. I sat in the only vacant armchair, and he switched to the other side of the hearth to be closer to me.

  "You're the ministry's leader," Gillingham went on. "It's your raison d'être and ought to be your priority. It's not work from which you can come and go. It's your life."

  I took a breath to counter him, but Lincoln put his hand on the back of my chair. I would stay silent if he wanted me to—for now.

  "Gilly is correct," Eastbrooke said. The general's physical presence always commanded attention when he entered a room, but it was his military authority that made him the unspoken leader of the four-person committee. That and his age. At sixty-odd, he was the eldest. "Holidays are not for the likes of you, Lincoln. Do not disappear like that again."

  "Stop it, both of you," Lady Harcourt hissed. "Of course he should be allowed to get away, from time to time. As long as it's not in the middle of an investigation, or for long, what's the harm in it?"

  "What's the harm?" Gillingham echoed in a high-pitched voice. "Julia, in light of what's happened in his absence—"

  "What happened?" Lincoln snapped.

  "Two supernaturals are dead."

  "Murdered," Lord Marchbank added.

  I gasped. "How?"

  "You don't ask the questions," Gillingham sneered.

  "Both shot." Marchbank was the least talkative of the lot, but when he did speak, his words had far more impact than anyone else's. "It appears the killer was the same man."

  "Or woman," Lady H added. Why did she look at me when she said it?

  "How do you know they were supernaturals?" Lincoln asked.

  "They had files in our archives."

  "You've memorized the names on file?" Disbelief edged the blandness.

  She stiffened. "I looked through them during the investigation into my stepson's disappearance in the hope a name from my late husband's journal would match one on file. I remembered Reginald Drinkwater, since it's an unusual name. When his death was reported in the papers, I checked the address and it turned out to be the same one in our files. The second victim, Joan Brumley, died in the exact same way as Drinkwater, and it was the newspapers that linked the two deaths as having been committed by the same killer. If it weren't for that, we would never have realized she was a supernatural too."

  "What was Drinkwater's magical ability?" Lincoln asked.

  "It's listed as levitation, but we now believe it was something more."

  "According to the police and the papers, Drinkwater was a scientist," Eastbrooke said, folding his hands over his considerable girth. "He was involved in the area of mechanics. Specifically, mechanical limbs for people who've lost them through accident or birth defect."

  Another scientist in the medical field. My stomach rolled.

  "His devices were very good, apparently," Lady Harcourt said. "They worked well, but only while Drinkwater was in the room. Based on that information, we think he was using his magic to make the mechanical limbs work like real ones, seemingly of their own volition."

  "The man was a charlatan," Gillingham said. "The limbs never could have operated without him present. They needed his magic."

  "Indeed." Eastbrooke nodded. "Very devious practice, if you ask me."

  "He hadn't sold any," Marchbank pointed out.

  "I'm sure he would have, if he hadn't died first."

  "Perhaps that was why he was killed," I said. "Perhaps one of the trial patients found out that the limb didn't really work and was so angry that he killed Drinkwater."

  "Your opinion was not sought, Charlotte," Eastbrooke intoned. "If Lincoln insists that you're an assistant now, and not a maid, then make yourself useful and fetch the tea or take notes instead of espousing on things you know nothing about."

  Lincoln's cool fingers skimmed the hot skin at the back of my neck. "You'll refrain from speaking to Charlie in such a manner in this house."

  Eastbrooke spluttered a protest, but the rest was cut off by Gus and Seth's arrival with trays.

  "The second victim, Joan Brumley, was an historian whose opinions were often controversial," Marchbank went on, setting his teacup aside.

  "Why?" Lincoln asked.

  "She claimed to have spoken with the spirits of historical figures in person."

  "Bloody hell," Gus muttered, earning a glare from all four committee members. He went back to serving tea then sank into the shadows near the door.

  "It was a recent claim," Lady Harcourt added, "and not made in one of the respectable academic periodicals. She was soundly ridiculed of course, and there was even discussion of having her committed to Bedlam."

  "But we believe her," Marchbank said.

  My chest constricted. My heart stilled. A woman in communication with dead historical figures could only be one thing.

  "She must be a necromancer." Lady Harcourt turned hard, glittering eyes onto me as she accepted a cup from Seth.

  I arched my brow at her in what I hoped was defiance, when all I felt was cold through to my bones. A necromancer…dead. And someone had tried to kill me too.

&
nbsp; Chapter 4

  "Stupid woman," Gillingham muttered. "Joan Brumley could have caused panic on a grand scale with her claims."

  "Not to mention drawing attention to herself," Eastbrooke said. "There are enough madmen in this country who would believe her and try to use her necromancy for their own ends, as they tried to do with Charlotte."

  "It's just as well she died then." Gillingham sipped his tea, oblivious to my shocked gasp and Lady Harcourt's quiet chiding.

  Lincoln shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "Aside from them both dying in the same manner, and both being magical, did you discover any other links?"

  "What more do you need?" Eastbrooke asked. "They both have the potential to use their magic for harm."

  "But did they?"

  "That isn't the point."

  "I think it is."

  "The point is," Eastbrooke ground out, "that if they fell into the wrong hands, they would have been very dangerous tools."

  Like me, he could have said. The look he gave me from beneath his bushy eyebrows implied he was thinking it.

  "What were they like?" I asked suddenly.

  "Pardon?" Lady Harcourt said.

  "It seems to me that neither of them were doing anything harmful. Giving working limbs to those who have none is charitable, and historical research is benign enough. Drinkwater and Brumley don't sound like people who want to use their magic for ill. No one can force them."

  "We don't know that for certain," she said. "Everyone has a price."

  "Not everyone," Lincoln said.

  She bristled. "And if money fails, then blackmail or a threat to a loved one will work. Even a saint can turn bad if the right sort of pressure is applied to the right place."

  She sounded ruthless. Knowing her background as a dancer, I almost understood why, except that she continued to want to climb higher up the social ladder and grow richer, despite being rich and powerful now. She'd even admitted as much when she claimed she couldn't marry Lincoln. Even though she knew he was the son of a prince, she also knew that could never be publicly acknowledged. Lincoln was a step down from her previous husband, and she wouldn't have that.