Corroded tscc-3

by Karina Cooper

“It’s to be changed frequently,” Delilah answered softly, her tone filled with the sorrow I was not sure myself how to express. I wanted to scream my fury, promise my retribution, but what would that solve?

  For Lily, nothing at all.

  “‘Tis to be aired, then?” I asked, as if this were the most reasonable response.

  “Aye.”

  I nodded. Cautiously, I reached for the edge of the blankets, tucked them more firmly about her shoulders. “Have you opium for the pain?”

  “Aye, she’s taking it direct.”

  I glanced behind me, my throat aching with the lump within.

  Delilah shrugged helplessly. “There’s only so much can be done.”

  I wasn’t so certain of that. “What of the Veil?”

  The sweet called Ephe stretched her legs out, back settled comfortably against the armchair she leaned again. Her tone was not kind. “The Veil’s got other sweets. No use wasting magic on the likes of her.”

  “Ephe,” Delilah protested.

  “It’s true,” the girl replied with a sniff. “Saves it for more important folk.”

  The look Ephe shot me was not a friendly one, and my shoulders went rigid.

  Before I could take the girl to task, to enlighten her small mind as to the ignorance of what she called magic—before I could shift all this ache inside my heart to something I could sink my teeth into—a cold hand gripped mine.

  Startled, I turned back on my knees to look down into Black Lily’s clouded green stare.

  Black Irish, she should have been called. There had always been witchcraft in those eyes of hers. Not anything truly magic; just the allure of a sweet dove and a fetching smile.

  Now, she was barely aware, eyes fraught with pain and nightmares I’d have given anything to ease. I cupped her hand in mine, leaning over her to smile as reassuringly as I could muster. “‘Tis all right,” I soothed, gentle as I knew how. “You’re safe, Lily. You’re home.”

  For a lass gone on opium, she gripped me tight enough to hurt. “Please,” she whimpered. “Please!”

  Was she talking to me? With such terror, I could not imagine so. Biting back a broken sound, I raised the back of Lily’s hand to my cheek and made all the nonsensical comforting sounds I remembered Fanny doing for me on the bad nights.

  Her gaze searched the air between us, but I don’t think she could see me. She pulled at my hand, struggled upright. Sweat turned her skin sallow, and the cut beside her mouth gaped awfully as she gasped for air to scream—a sound that could not form.

  “Oh, my dove,” I whispered. I perched on the sofa beside her, cradled her shoulders with one arm. I pulled her to my chest until she could lay her good cheek upon it, and as if she realized—as if something in the act set her free—she folded in upon me, clutched at my coat and sobbed as if her very heart was breaking.

  I stroked her hair, rocking gently, and let her cry her fill as Delilah and I shared a moment of helpless sorrow.

  At her feet, Ephe’s rage simmered.

  How I understood that.

  When Lily’s sobs turned to choking hiccups, I eased my grip upon her. Carefully, feeling her weight drag in my arms, I laid her back upon the sofa. “‘Tis all right,” I whispered. “You’re safe. Delilah and Ephe are here.”

  Lily’s eyes finally pinned upon mine, as if she only just realized who I was. Her fingers clutched at my hands, my arms. “Cherry,” she mumbled.

  My given name, upon the lips of a sweet who had never known it.

  Fear turned my innards inside out. Replaced my blood with frigid water.

  If I maintained any doubt as to the motive behind Lily’s choosing, she had killed it with one word.

  Gently as I could, I forced her hands to settle, linked them upon her chest and covered them with both of mine. “You are safe, now,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

  My gaze flitted to the raw wound in her face, skated away.

  Her laugh fractured, so heartrending tears sprung to my eyes. “I’ve a message,” she managed, through lips that would not wholly connect on the injured side.

  Lord in Heaven, I could not bear it.

  “‘Tis not important,” I whispered. “Rest, Lily. You need to heal. Delilah?”

  “Here,” the sweet said, appearing at my elbow as if waiting for the summons. She carried a small glass, its ruby contents all too familiar.

  I took it from her. “Her shoulders.”

  Delilah eased her hands beneath Lily’s shoulders, helped her half sit so I could raise the glass to her lips.

  Lily did not cooperate. She turned her face away, the injury falling into shadow. Her good eye pierced through my brisk care as if it were smoke. “He said,” she began, her voice shaking with the effort of pain and fear. “He said he was sorry for not sending flowers. He wants this to be thought his reparation.”

  Flowers. Always, it had come down to flowers. The bouquet sent when he’d captured my Betsy. The florets he left when he’d completed a murder for coin.

  The sweet whose appearance paralleled mine, and whose name was that of a flower.

  How I despised flowers.

  The glass shook so violently in my fingers, the liquid threatened to slosh free.

  “Give me that,” Ephe said behind me, and her dark hand closed over the tumbler.

  I let her have it, torn between howling my rage and doing what I could to soothe the ghosts in Lily’s pain-wracked eyes.

  I compromised. It was all I could do, and still it wasn’t enough. “I am so sorry,” I said, my voice a hard, steely promise. “I will do everything I can to make this up to you, Lily. I will find this bastard who put his hands on you, and I will make him pay. I swear it.”

  Delilah strained to hold the girl upright. Though her gaze flicked to me, sharp with an awareness that said she knew of Osoba’s order, she said nothing. Ephe waited in like silence, as if even she was aware of how much Lily needed to hear me say so.

  Perhaps it would help her. Perhaps it was only wishful thinking for us all. Anything to make Lily stop screaming.

  The wounded girl closed her eyes. “Menagerie justice?”

  Given the orders to cease all action against the monsters, I didn’t think so. I could not say so. “He will scream before it’s done.” I trembled fiercely, wound so tight I felt as a clock spring coiled too far. One move, one wrong word, and I might uncoil with such violence as to lose all reason.

  If she cried again, I didn’t think I could bear it.

  I don’t know that she heard me. If she did, I wasn’t sure that she’d remember. Ephe reached past me to administer the laudanum, and Lily drank every last drop. As the ruby liquid vanished, I backed away from the sofa and let the sweets tend to their own.

  Pulling the hat firmly on my head, feeling emptier than I ever thought possible, I made for the door, and the device beside it.

  “Thank you,” Delilah called, quiet as she could.

  I did not turn to acknowledge the sentiment. I didn’t deserve anything of the sort. I departed the sweets’ quarters, shouldering the net-launching weapon Maddie Ruth had given me, with my heart in tatters.

  Leaving the Midnight Menagerie proved easier than I had expected.

  * * *

  There comes a moment when ’tis impossible to know whether all cessation of feeling stems from flagrant medicinal use, or the harrowing events of a body’s suffering.

  With every step away from the Midnight Menagerie, I felt as if I were becoming a ghost—stretched so thin, hammered so brutally as to become nothing.

  I was not so much a creature of logic and reason in that moment. I was not a thing of tears, or of sorrow. I simply...I simply wasn’t anything at all. I walked—which is to say, I was ambulatory, drifting through the midmorning fog as if I were an eddy to blow this way or that.

  How awful things had become around me.

  To think that I had begun this venture only some few short months ago, when word of a professor buying up all the
opium in London’s low druggist shops had forced a confrontation between myself and the man who would be named the sweet tooth within days of our meeting. If only I had known then what had been made all the clearer now.

  What a fool I had become.

  Yet though I thought the words sincere, they did not engender in me fear or anger. I could not summon sorrow or pain. Where once I had taken pride in the collections I had gathered, night after night, coin after coin, I felt nothing now.

  How long, I wondered. How long had this feeling crept upon me?

  Did it begin with the revelation of Woolsey’s true nature? Did this emptiness form when the man exposed as my father made clear his intent to murder me in the name of my late mother?

  I must have felt something then. Truly, I must have considered something when the sweet tooth whose hunt had led me on a merry chase across London had turned into my rescuer.

  Disgust. Relief.

  Admiration?

  No. Impossible. That he was intelligent, a veritable fox among hens, was never in doubt. His machinations reached for me even now. Cunning, thorough, skilled.

  But I could not admire a man who murdered so gleefully, and for so little reason.

  I assured myself this, yet I retraced his steps—retraced the dance we had done that fateful night. I passed into Whitechapel, a phantom among them what made their living by day, and I could not now think of the faces I passed.

  It must have been many. Whitechapel was never an empty place.

  I did not enter the railyard, I simply halted near enough that I could see the first piling supporting one of the many bridges crossing the whole. The peasouper frothed around it, playing a game of hide and seek with each post.

  I watched the mist for a time and did not feel fear, or the chill of ethereal memory. Something had broken, I think. Something integral to that internal mechanism that might keep a body going, hoping, slogging through a challenge until victory was assured for good or lost forever.

  I turned away from the railyard and melded once more into the streets—an urchin whose rounded shoulders and lowered head, whose slow trod through the idle carts and bustling pedestrians, spoke of defeat. The weight of the device upon my shoulders seemed as nothing compared to the burdens I carried.

  I realized then what I had not understood before—an insight that had escaped me when Miss Hensworth had all but thrown herself over that balcony in King’s College. I’d only meant to aid her, to stop her from her mad schemes and help her get her message of equality out in a manner that did not involve murdering them what stood in her way.

  She had been so ill, weakened further by the alchemical formula she had taken to achieve her goals.

  Instead of allowing me the opportunity, she’d chosen death.

  I did not cry that day. Something, perhaps that emptiness, had grown within me; a void I now acknowledged. I’d turned to Lord Compton’s comfort, listened when he spoke of my safety with startling sincerity.IThat Perhaps it was that feeling, that sense of his genuine caring, that allowed me to accept his proposal of marriage.

  In that, I think, I’d craved stability—a thing to hold onto when all else went mad about me.

  It began with a barmy old professor’s appointed collector. Through the vile murder of one of Communion’s bantlings, the carving of the sweets, the kidnapping of my maid and subsequent reveal of my father’s greater ploy, I had been dogged by this monster. He had taken Betsy, murdered Mad St. Croix in front of me, hounded me with flowers until I detested the very sight of them.

  He had stalked me, hunted my new husband, in the fog.

  Taking the earl from me had not been the end of it. No, he had followed me, tracked me like prey, harassed the girls who had taken me in. His antics cost me everything.

  All that I had, all that I could rely upon, was gone. I was alone. Isolated.

  Such utter brilliance in the execution.

  When I looked up again, I found myself standing beside the ferries of the West India Docks. Two were missing from the moorings, likely already above the drift and depositing or taking on passengers. I did not see the Scarlet Philosopher.

  A fine enough circumstance. I wagered Abercott would not be glad to see me. I had no coin for him, and last ride we’d taken, he’d given it for free, out of what little charity he could squeeze from his shriveled old heart.

  I did not intend to take a ferry up, I did not plan to walk into a knot of dockworkers ready to return to work above the fog. I certainly did not know what exactly I intended to do as we boarded the remaining sky ferry in a noisy group, our funds pooled so haphazardly as to raise no eyebrows when I contributed nothing at all.

  Yet in that sleeping void I walked in, my feet must have known that which I could not articulate.

  Hungry for foundation beneath me, desperate to remember anything at all of why—why I’d made the choices I had, why I had been picked by this cruel monster for his games—my body carried me away from the docks. I slipped from the workers so easily, it was as if I truly was a ghost.

  Did they know I had been there? Would anyone have cared?

  Perhaps not. ’Tis a safer life to remain apart from me.

  A madman’s attentions were no blessing.

  As if it had not been weeks since my late husband’s death, as if I were only returning home after a late night’s outing, I made my way through the servant’s alleys and back paths. I was a good sight cleaner than I normally was, allowing my visage to be mistaken more for house-boy or stable runner, and I made it to Chelsea with little interruption.

  All was as I left it. The district, once a fashionable haunt, had been placed too close to the docks for Society’s love affair to continue for long. The Cheyne Walk home that had been my mother’s now occupied a district known more for its bohemians, wastrels and artistic dreamers than for its modish residents.

  As I approached what had been my home for seven years, wending through the large hedgerows separating my—that is, the old property from Lady Pennington’s mother beside it, the first of the changes made itself clear.

  Black crepe covered the windows, hanging in large ruffles from the each of the doors. It was as if someone had dared to take this charming home and blacken its eyes, shroud its facing in deference to the presence of death.

  I would not be able to climb the wall to my window—and I was not certain the window would be unlocked—so I approached the back door instead.

  I was not surprised to find it locked, but I confess to disappointment.

  What had I expected? A welcome with open arms?

  After vanishing so suddenly, I did not imagine that anyone would be so kind.

  And yet, even as I tipped my head back to look up at the shrouded windows above me, my heart began to pound.

  Was there anyone home?

  I needed to see them. My family, my staff. I had precious little experience by way of blood relation, but the man who had sired me had also attempted to end my life, and all I had ever known of my mother had been flung at me in disappointment. I did not come from loving stock.

  Fanny had changed all that. Stern-faced Fanny, with her iron gray hair and pale eyes, her features a map of all the years that had shaped her. Night after night, year after year, she had molded me, guided me.

  Was Booth inside? If I knocked, would he come? Would he smile kindly down upon me and accept that his charge had returned unscathed, or would he allow Mrs. Booth to lecture me soundly as she’d used to in the kitchens when my mischief proved too much underfoot to handle?

  Was Leviticus here? The young house-boy had been Booth’s apprentice, as it were, learning how to guide a gondola and often up to no good when he wasn’t kept busy.

  I laid my hand upon the door and thought of each of my loved ones, as dear to me as any blood should have been.

  It was not that I made a decision, not really. I simply acted. What had I to lose? With trembling fingers, I plucked two pins from my hair and cracked my own home, picking the lock wit
h ease.

  There was no gasp or shouted call from Mrs. Booth to greet me as I slipped inside. There was no warmth in the kitchen fires, nor smell of food prepared. The lamps were dark, and had been for some time. Only the grayest daylight found its way through the windows, each draped in that damnable black.

  I shut the door behind me and listened to the stillness of my home.

  It echoed eerily that of the empty void within my heart.

  I do not know how long I stayed there, straining to hear a noise—any noise at all—but there was nothing. When I moved, I did so with a surety of purpose that my intellect did not recognize. I had no real plan, yet I put the net-launching device down in the kitchen, moved through the hall, one hand trailing over the stripes papered on its walls. I seized the head of the lion whose kingly form shaped the newel at the bottom of the stairs.

  I took them two at a time, shouting, now. “Fanny?” My footsteps thundered. “Booth!”

  No answer.

  I threw open the door to my bedroom. Dust motes skirled into the gray light. Black crepe masked the window, turning the dusky rose and burgundy patterns of my boudoir into a murky shade of gray and brown, and I saw the same black fabric covering the mirror of my vanity.

  At first glance, it seemed as if nothing at all had changed, but for the mourning shrouds.

  Then I noted the emptiness of that vanity. The lack of books upon my shelves. My desk, a delicate piece that had once held my journals, ink and paper, was empty.

  Everywhere I looked, there was nothing to find. No clothing in the trunks that had once held all the outfits Fanny had picked from Madame Toulouse’s stock, no books, none of the tools I’d stored beneath the bed for repairing my corset and fog-preventatives.

  Even the delicate silver frames, of French origin and gifted by my late husband, were gone.

  My mother’s journal, given to the Marchioness Northampton at one time and gifted in turn to me by Lord Piers Everard Compton, no longer sat where I had left it.

  It was as if I had never existed.

  For the first time since leaving the Menagerie, tears threatened to break free of whatever obstacle denied me the release. My throat ached with them, an awful pain forming in my chest, squeezing my heart. If I could not feel sorrow, grief—if I could not mourn—then by God, I would feel pain.