by Jess Faraday
The inspector had warned her not to leave Paris. She’d probably sent out guards as soon as she arrived back at the Conciergerie. If Maria ran, every agent in Paris would be looking for her. But what other choice did she have?
She shut the door. Turning, she nearly tripped over the inspector’s heavy umbrella. The hulking mass of oiled silk and baleen hadn’t been designed with a woman in mind, but it suited the inspector perfectly. She ran a finger over the carved handle, and unbidden sensations flooded her mind: the inspector’s callused hand with its fine, tapered fingers—held out in apology after she’d knocked Maria down. Maria had wanted to take it, to feel the hard muscles beneath the cool skin—but pride had prevented that. There had been a spark of recognition in the inspector’s eye when their conversation had veered into theories of supernatural phenomena. She was an intelligent woman, and experience had made her knowledgeable as well. And she hadn’t shied away from Maria’s scars, shorn hair, or her Eye. Maria slumped back against the doorway of her cluttered front room and let out a long breath. She’d spent so many years among untrustworthy people that she wouldn’t know honest if it walked up and bit her.
And she longed for honest. As far back as she could remember, relationships had always been an exchange of obligation. She bartered the skills she’d learned from her mother and aunts for money—spells and healing exchanged for coin in the dead of night. With money she bought herself out of the slavery in which most Roma still lived in her country. Money bought education as well and, later, medical training. She would have loved to remain in that jewel of a village she’d eventually settled in, attending the needs of both people and machines. But when disease had ravaged the village, her friends and neighbors had wasted no time declaring her a witch and driving her out at the pointed tips of the very tools she’d created for them.
Her correspondence with Claude Javert—the new prefect of the Paris police, and himself a tinkerer—had been a godsend then. He’d brought her to Paris to work in his new organization. Of course everyone knew how that had turned out. When Maria and Javert had fallen out, Hermine had been there to catch her. Hermine had pledged her love, and Maria had lowered her guard. But in the end, as always, the relationship came down to a cold-hearted exchange. From the moment Maria had made the mistake of mentioning the Left Hand of Justice, Hermine had no longer been content with their clinic. She had embarked on a crusade to “cure” all spiritual afflictions, whether or not the “afflicted” wanted to be cured. Hermine’s temper, she might have withstood. But this new ambition had hastened the end.
And what, Maria wondered, would Corbeau have wanted from her, when all was said and done?
Thunder shook the air, and the clouds threw down a wall of rain. Maria shivered and returned to the front room. Too little water was left in the samovar to bother with, so she removed the teapot from the top and let the coal smolder. The fire crackled away in the fireplace, the dried widow’s root she had thrown onto the logs now just a trace of sweetness in the air. She fished a monograph on mathematics out of the pile on her desk. Just as she was about to sit down, a shadow flashed against the front-window curtain. She drew the curtain back, gasping as a bird—a mass of black-and-white feathers, wild eyes luminous with reflected lamplight, hurled itself against the glass. The bird hit hard and slid down, and Maria heard it thump quietly to the ground outside.
Her grandmother had taught her a magpie was a message: quarrel and strife. As if she needed a sign to tell her that. More importantly, her research had forced her to recognize the spark of the divine—the Spirit, if you will—present in all living organisms, whether fish or bird or tree or even prefect of police. A thrumming, crackling field of spirit surrounded each and every living thing, which meant that it would be evil to simply let this creature drown in a puddle outside her window.
Dropping the magazine, Maria hurried out into the rain, crouched on the wet pavement, and gathered it up in the folds of her robe.
“Oh, you poor thing.”
The bird safe in her hands, she hurried back inside. Wiping her bare feet, now pale with cold, on the rough mat just inside the entrance, she locked the door behind her. Then she reached up to the wainscoting on the adjacent wall and withdrew a key. The small doorway in the corridor had originally served to connect the servants’ area with the upstairs. Maria had no use for servants. They were an expense and a liability. But the basement made an ideal laboratory.
The bird trembled in her hand. As she paused on the staircase, it stared up at her with a dazed expression, its neck at a disconcerting angle. It would not live. But it had served its purpose—it was a message, she was sure of it. All that remained was to decode it. The poor creature would not spend its last moments in fear, wetness, and cold. She paused at the bottom of the staircase to light the gas sconce.
Long tables stood at right angles against the two far walls. Piles of cogs, gears, springs, tools, fabric, and notes marked ideas under development. Such good ideas. Her eyes burned at the thought that this was as far as they might get before she’d be forced to start over. Or would she bother this time? Chill radiated from the basement walls. Laying the bird down on the edge of one of the tables, she lit the brazier in the corner. If she were to work that day, she’d need warmth.
After she tucked the tinderbox back in its place, she found a square of blue silk, shook it out, and spread it on the table. Gently, she laid the bird on top of it.
Hermine had begged her to find a cure for what she called her affliction. A kinder term, perhaps, than demonic possession, but just as inaccurate. The fact was that Hermine possessed untrained spiritual abilities, the likes of which Maria had never before seen. But in two years, try as Maria might, she had never been able to convince Hermine she was anything but cursed. In retrospect, perhaps Maria should have been more patient. It wasn’t her, after all, who had been beset from childhood with unwanted visions. Maria had never moved objects with mere thought. To have been raised in a society where such things were considered signs of indwelt evil—or at least of mental instability—must have been terrifying. Maria wondered whether part of her attraction to Hermine hadn’t been the desire for some of Hermine’s immense power to somehow rub off on her. That was definitely an aspect of her extraordinary charisma, whether her followers knew it or not.
All the same, Hermine’s constant demands that Maria search for a way to suppress her abilities made Maria—who hadn’t a gram of inherent spiritual talent—burn with rage. If only Hermine had been more patient, they could have found a way to control her talent together. Hermine might have seen it for the gift that it was. But Maria had been impatient as well, and she had been jealous. And now things had gone horribly wrong.
The bird shivered on the silk square in front of her. She stroked its head with her finger.
“Who sent you?” she asked. As if she could have understood the answer. Maria hadn’t the power to communicate with animals, though Michel Bertrand had.
The bird twitched toward her voice, but its eyes were going unfocused and it labored to breathe. She watched the light in its eyes slowly fade until the eyes were as lifeless as glass and the rise and fall of its chest had stilled. As she stroked its soft stomach, she noticed a small, hard protuberance. And therein lay the message. She was certain of it.
She jumped as someone rapped sharply on the street-level window. She had obscured the window with a thick curtain when she’d first moved in. Only a few people knew that, more often than not, the mistress of the house herself was to be found there. Who was it? What could they want?
“Doctor!”
At the sound of the boy Joseph’s voice, she let out a breath of relief. She had no messages for him to run—her network of acquaintances had been turning against her with frightening predictability—but fussing over him would be a welcome distraction.
“Come to the front door,” she called.
With a backward glance at the magpie, she climbed the stairs to let him in. Only after he had shut
the door behind himself and hung his thin coat on the hook in her vestibule, did she realize that, for the first time, she hadn’t heard the unique shuffle of the wooden post he used to walk on. He was using the leg she had crafted confidently and, apparently, comfortably. The graft of the mechanical device to his vital spiritual field had worked even better than she had hoped. The experiment had paid off for them both.
“The apparatus is working well, I see.” Of course it was. The device was well made, and the child was brimming with life force.
The boy grinned back. “Better than the one God gave me. If I had two of ’em, I bet I could fly. It’s a joke,” he said quickly, as Maria felt her expression go hard.
At the height of her devices’ popularity, several people had approached her about replacing perfectly healthy limbs with all sorts of terrible things. A few had even drawn up plans. In a way it had been a blessing when Hermine had declared the trend finished. Healing a defect was one thing, but replacing the perfect with the mechanical was an abomination.
“Come downstairs,” she said. “I have something to show you.”
He followed her to the basement—quietly, nimbly—and emerged just in front of her into the softly lit laboratory. She led him to the table, where the magpie lay, cooling and still.
“What is it?” Joseph asked.
“It’s a sign.”
“What does it mean?”
“You’re going to help me find out. Turn your back just a minute while I put on my work clothes.”
Suitably attired, she cleared a spot next to an iron torso cage and pulled up a stool for him. She took his small, thin hand and ran his index finger over the bird’s underside, pausing at the hard lump. “Do you feel that?” she asked.
“The breastbone?”
“A bird’s bones are hollow, delicate.” She pressed his finger down. “Here’s the breastbone. Feel how it gives way under pressure?”
“Feels like it swallowed something, then,” he said.
“But whatever it is, it’s too big for the bird to have swallowed it intact. Hand me a scalpel.”
Joseph selected a small one from the towel where she had laid out a selection of cutting tools. Maria fingered the protuberance again. Murmuring apologies to the bird’s departed spirit, she took the scalpel in her deft fingers and slit the carcass from throat to vent. She folded back the thin skin from the incision. Metal glinted between the liver and the gizzard. Gingerly, she worked it out and wiped it clean on the sky-blue silk.
“It’s Romani magic. This is a bridle ornament.” Like the one she carried in her pocket-charm. “We’re great horsemen, you know.” Her family had been metalsmiths but had shared the Roma people’s affinity for horses. She missed the animals’ smell, the feel of their muscles beneath her fingers. “Look, these are symbols I learned when I was about your age. Power,” she said, pointing to the image of a sun engraved on the surface of the disk. Inside it were inscribed two crescent moons. “And double protection.”
“Protection from what?”
She blew out a long breath. A long list of possibilities scrolled through her mind, none more comforting than the others. Romanian authorities? The Church of the Divine Spark? Monsieur le Préfet? His Holiness the Pope? The Fickle Hand of Fate?
She shrugged.
“Enemies are everywhere. Take your choice.”
“Who put it there?”
She frowned. The sign was one her grandmother had spoken of, though Maria had never seen it before. But everyone she had known in her home country had scattered a long time ago. The only Romani she currently knew was…
“Armand.”
“Monsieur Lambert?”
She nodded.
Armand Lambert was her only remaining ally in Hermine’s circle. His mother had been Romani; Maria had known it the moment she met him. The fact had bound them on a spiritual level from the start.
“Something’s happened to him,” she said. She had gained that much from her conversation with Inspector Corbeau. He must have set the sign to manifest in case some evil overtook him. “But it’s a strange message, if that’s the case.”
“He had an attack this morning, Doctor. Just like Mademoiselle Fournier and Monsieur Bertrand. He’s gone, now. Vautrin took him. A priest was there as well.”
Maria inhaled sharply. Her heart pounded. For Joseph’s own protection, she had tried to keep him ignorant of what transpired between her and Hermine. But he was as intelligent as he was useful. Surely he must have begun to sense a connection among the three servants, even if he was unable to articulate the nature of that connection. She hoped, for his sake, that he hadn’t realized Vautrin was more than just the chief inspector of the Sûreté. “Mademoiselle Fournier and Monsieur Bertrand, did Vautrin take them as well?” she asked.
“Nobody knows. No one’s seen them since last night.”
Maria rolled the silver disk between her fingers, catching the gentle light of the wall sconce. First Hermine’s lady’s maid, the driver, and now the footman—Vautrin was picking off her allies one by one. But the loss of Armand hurt the most. He had been the closest to Hermine. His assistance had helped Maria keep one step ahead of the Church of the Divine Spark, of Vautrin himself, who had sworn himself to her destruction. And now Armand was gone. And yet this sign—power and double protection, even in this most precarious situation—it was not yet time to lose hope.
She pushed a section of hair behind her ear. “Tell me what you think, Joseph. The situation worsens by the minute, and yet, despite the torment to which Vautrin and his priest must be putting him, Armand sends a message of hope. See here? The twin moons in the protective embrace of the sun. Claudine and Michel, perhaps? Or Armand and myself? My question, who is the protector?”
He blinked at her, his eyes, even in the gloom, clear and dancing with intelligence. “There was someone else this morning.” The lenses of her mechanical eye turned and clicked into place, as they often did when her mind was reaching unconscious conclusions it would later reveal. She had long ceased to be bothered by the sound but wondered what others must have thought. Joseph spoke more confidently, as if encouraged by it. “Inspector Corbeau of the Sûreté.”
Her eye whirred as she focused on his thin face. Her cheeks felt hot, and her pulse pounded.
“You know this person?”
“She was responsible for this,” he said, giving his bad leg a shake. “Then later she saved my life. You can trust her. The chief inspector tried to strangle her this morning.”
Maria felt a smile tug at the edge of her lips. She’d like to have seen the injuries Vautrin had taken away from the encounter. She had definitely misjudged Elise Corbeau. It wouldn’t be the first time fear had blinded her to possible sources of help. Would she have the chance to make it up to the inspector—to show she herself was worthy of trust as well? “You saw that? With Vautrin?”
“I was the one who took her there, to the Montagne Ste. Geneviève. And to see Mademoiselle Fournier and Monsieur Bertrand as well. I thought she could help them. She tried, but I don’t think she’s ever seen anything like this before.”
“Before?”
The boy excitedly related tale after tale of Corbeau’s heroic deeds with the Bureau of Supernatural Investigations—a bureau Vautrin had recently disbanded. Maria’s mind flashed back to the insignia Inspector Corbeau had worn on her collar—the bell, book, and candle. The insignia had been so similar to the one Javert’s Department of the Unexplained had used—no one could blame her for having confused them. The insignia had made her certain Corbeau was working for Javert. Could she have been wrong? She polished the silver disk with her thumb. Double protection. Inspector Corbeau would make a very powerful protector.
If only she weren’t convinced Maria had kidnapped Hermine Boucher.
“She was here earlier,” Maria told the boy. “I sent her away.” She sighed and sank down onto the stool. “Javert will never let me be. Not as long as I have what he needs. He must be getting
desperate now if he thinks his only option is to frame me for whatever it is that happened to Hermine.”
An enormous clap of thunder shook the building. Maria glanced at the amulet again. Running her thumbnail over the engravings—the metal tingled with magic beneath her skin—she tucked it into the inner breast pocket of her robe. It was a small thing, this mysterious hope, and she would have to think more about what it meant. But at this point it was all she had.
“Perhaps Monsieur Javert is your protector,” Joseph said. “He was once before. Was he really so bad?”
She thought about it. “He wasn’t, not on a personal level. But in the end he wanted the same thing everyone else did. And I couldn’t give it to him. Come.”
She folded the corners of the silk square around the magpie and slipped it into her pocket. She would lay it on the fire upstairs and let its body follow its spirit into oblivion.
She ushered Joseph up the stairs ahead of her, leaving the wall sconces and the brazier burning. It was time to start work again, and Joseph would soon be on his way. She really had thought things would be better in Paris, away from the small-minded villagers and ingrained superstitions. So many people in Paris, and so many ideas—and yet even in the heart of the modern, enlightened world, she was still a foreigner. If she were still alive in a year’s time, it would be interesting to see where she would find herself.
“Is this your umbrella, Doctor?” Joseph asked, as she shut the door to the laboratory behind her.
“It’s hers. What do you think? Should I walk it over to the Palais de Justice myself?”
