and treacle employed by orphanages and governesses the world over—and too many years in the employ of a traveling carnival, was it any wonder that I had come to feel more at home in the fog-ridden streets of London below the drift than I’d ever felt wearing silks and gilded feathers above?
Of course, my fascination with all things improper had placed me in this untenable position. It had been a long time since I’d lost a quarry so obviously.
I kicked at the street, muffling an uncivility against gritted teeth as the fog curled and drifted beneath the golden lights flickering on either side of the innocuous facade. It stung my nose and eyes, forcing a sheen of irritated tears, which I swiped at with impatience.
Anger does not come so easy to a body blissed on the Chinese smoke. For me, who had not yet eaten a bit of my remaining tar, it came more like a sluggish burn than a high dudgeon. I could grab it, feed it until it carried me through the streets I knew so well, but to what purpose?
A waste of the sweet lassitude of the evening, that’s what.
The night was not young, and though I had missed my opportunity here, there would be more.
There would always be more.
A few hours spent in sublime delight could not be counted as a loss, could it?
I was sure that the Karakash Veil would not see it as such, and more than certain that the Veil’s spokesman would even be so bold as to outright disagree with my logic, but what was done was done.
If Micajah Hawke had a problem with how I conducted my business, he could seek me out himself.
I shivered as the fine hairs on my nape lifted in abject alarm. Miserable as my memory had become, there were some facts—some recollections—that would not leave me.
Most sharp were the memories of Mad St. Croix, my gifted father who all of Society had long thought dead. I found him only some few months ago, masquerading as a harmless professor. What should have been joy in the discovery of my father turned to a waking nightmare as he attempted—once by accident and then again by design—to end my life.
His goal had been to return his wife, my mother long since deceased, to the world of the living.
I told nobody of this. Only Zylphia, my then-maid, knew the barest details—that a wily old professor had mucked about with alchemical affairs beyond his understanding and paid the price. Even now, in my chilled flesh and blissed state of mind, I could not wholly embrace the depth of my father’s crimes.
To destroy his own flesh and blood in the name of love.
It does not bear remembering.
Though Abraham St. Croix learned by accident that his alchemical formula considered me an ideal candidate for his machinations, he did not manage to take advantage of this fact at the time of its wayward administering. Ishmael Communion, my brave friend, had taken me—insensible under the influence of that first terrible concoction—to the Midnight Menagerie.
For all it was the bloody ringmaster who had kept me from losing myself to the terrible effects of the drug I had been accidentally given, I still owed Ish a debt of gratitude I had not yet considered how to repay.
Would that it had ceased there.
Hawke saved my life in other, less respectable ways. Because of that, or perhaps in spite of it, I was viscerally uncomfortable with the knowledge I read in his mismatched eyes when he spoke to me. The ringmaster of that decadent place was all too familiar with my skin for my ease of mind.
He demonstrated no inhibition in reminding me of the fact. To keep my mind from straying—my soul, he had insisted, from leaving my earthly body—he had placed his mouth on me in places I daren’t not say, forced my attention to the flesh lest I lose it.
An unorthodox solution, to say the least.
I was too worldly to be a prude, and not nearly so proper as to be unaware as to the conventions of the goings on between a man and woman, but half out of my senses as I was, I had no opportunity to come to terms with what had happened between us. I gave myself no occasion to try.
My focus was bent on other, more important things.
Such as, in the greater scheme of the world, searching for that black-hearted villain that murdered my husband mere hours after the vows that would have seen me freed of this debt.
Or, rather closer to the present concern, acquiring the quarry that I could give to the Veil in exchange for a little more time so that I could
Smoothing my hands along my cheeks, and likely smearing the soot from the lampblack I used to coat my distinctive dark red hair, I spun in a semi-circle, held my breath as the fog forced me to clear my throat sharply.
For many who plied their talents below, a constant throat-clearing was as a dinner bell for the starving. One could always tell a visiting toff by the tickle in the throat, and I had not been raised below the drift. I lacked the tolerance to the grit I inhaled with every breath.
I hadn’t bothered to put on my fog-prevention goggles, or the respirator that protected my lungs from the black air. They hung in the tool pouch at my side, heavy and eager for use, but I ignored them.
It seemed only right that I at least make an effort to blend in to the world I now inhabited, even should it continue to gather like an ache in the throat. Since I did not care to always wear the distinctive devices of a collector, I split my time between bare-faced forbearance and protectives.
It was not the most comfortable of choices, especially during true peasoupers like tonight’s devil-thick miasma, but I had little choice. While I hid from my mother-in-law, a deucedly manipulative marchioness whose love for me had never warmed beyond civil intolerance, I could not return to the London I once knew. Not until I’d completed my objectives. Marchioness Northampton mourned her eldest son, I could understand that. That she chose to do so by painting me as the target of her grief—by attempting to imprison me in the confining trappings of grieving widow for the whole of my life—was a circumstance I could not allow. Not, anyhow, just yet.
I would go back, eventually. I would grieve Cornelius Kerrigan Compton, both on my own and as Society deemed proper. I would wear black and drape the windows and hide the mirrors; pen wistful notes thanking others for their sympathies, whatever fashion demanded of a widow. But I would do so on my terms, and only after I had collected the murderer that had taken him.
This was what drove me in the dark and the gloom.
This was what haunted my every waking moment, and even those of sleep. That I had turned my back upon the man I’d married, left him to die in the fog alone as the villain I hunted outwitted me at every turn, was my own great burden.
I was not a complete halfwit. I knew, logically, that I had fallen into a trap—that the vile murderer, whose efforts below the drift put even the Ripper to shame, had laid for me the sort of bait I could not willingly ignore. He had lured me with my maid and dear friend’s abduction, captured me when I had given chase, even saved me from my father’s dark and secret laboratory. His games were that which I professed to despise, and yet I played them.
The flowers he left upon my window sill when I was recovering from my father’s villainy, the midnight sweets he murdered for Mad St. Croix’s diabolical schemes, all designed to put me in Bedlam.
If I owed Hawke my life, I owed this sweet tooth—so named for his taste for Menagerie flesh—something much darker: the midnight sweets demanded his collection. Menagerie justice, they called it. I did not fool myself into thinking it would be anything kind, but I had long ago learned never to ask the outcome of my collections.
I had failed, in every respect. Whatever this man was, monster or madman, he styled himself my rival, and I found myself lacking.
If I were stronger, smarter, perhaps I could have saved Lord Compton from the sweet tooth’s angry vengeance. I could have waylaid the fiend before he murdered the man I had chosen to marry.
I could have...
I did not. I failed, and a good man had suffered the terrible consequences.
What could I say? Even here, in the dark where no one could see me, I felt watched. Always, I felt watched.
I knew it was the eyes of the dead who watched me.
My fists clenched by my sides. Pain knifed through my chest, the same ache that forced the love of laudanum into something much less benign.
