Corroded

Weep for the widowed bride!

So much venom in the murdering collector’s spittle-flecked demand, never more than a hairsbreadth away from echoing in my memory. So much hate in so few words, spat at me from across my husband’s bleeding body.

All for so much blood.

I would never scrub it from my mind.

Blood for blood would have to do.

I turned away from the inviting stoop of the opium den and the sweet escape that waited within, hunching my shoulders beneath the thick fustian coat that was all that stood between me and the chill of mid-October’s autumnal bite. Tucking my cold fingers into the pockets, I began the short trudge back to the gates of London’s decadent pleasure gardens.

It was there, alone and in the cold embrace of the damp fog, that the black tendrils of despair began to creep in.

It all seemed so very hopeless.

On the one hand, I missed my staff dearly. My chaperone, the widow Frances Fortescue, who had been my governess when first I stepped foot in my old Cheyne Walk home. So stiff and unyielding was her facade, but she’d cared for me as only a deeply nurturing soul could when faced with the hell-spawn I’d been as a girl of thirteen.

I keenly felt the loss of my butler, a war veteran missing a leg from his time in Her Majesty’s infantry, and whose beautifully groomed chops and thick mane of white hair had always put me in mind of a gentleman pirate. It was his respectful propriety, his ever calm presence, his wife’s efficient housekeeping and the subtle indulgences of a childless couple that had earned Booth and his wife a place in my heart.

I wondered what happened to Levi, the young house-boy Booth had taken under his patient wing, and whether my maid of only some months ago, Betsy, had found her new home in her husband’s Scotland village to be everything she’d hoped.

I wondered, too, if they suffered the scorn of my reputation. If the letters of recommendation promised by the marchioness had carried my staff far out of my reach.

That I had vanished only added grist to an already humming gossip mill.

My guardian, the executor of my father’s will, surely would hear of this most recent scandal soon, if he hadn’t already. Mr. Oliver Ashmore, an absentee man in trust, had never spent more than a few hours under the roof of the home that was technically his, at least until my majority made it mine. He traveled the world, as my father had before my birth. I’d seen the man by face only once, and aside from a lingering terror of the man, I remembered nothing useful.

I knew that my household often sent letters to him, likely fraught with all my latest antics and troubles. If he had ever written back to assure them of his sympathies, I did not know.

Would he wash his hands of me, then? Upon my marriage, he was no longer forced to act my guardian. Even as a widow, the inheritance he vouchsafed now belonged to my husband’s benefactors—in short, not me. Mr. Ashmore had no further responsibility to me.

I suffered a freedom now from such matters that was almost as terrible as the gilded captivity of Society above this blasted fog. Although I could come and go here, nearly as I wished, I still owed the Karakash Veil for the actions that had saved my life when my father’s alchemical serum nearly ended it.

That they demanded my father’s alchemical concoction as payment—a thing they called magic in their foreign tongue—was the terrible price of that freedom. I could not locate the device that had carried it.

Even if I had, I was not prepared to give that sort of uncertain power to a criminal enterprise.

What, then, was I doing? Collecting Menagerie-posted bounties alone, in the hopes that each one would soften the Veil’s demand?

It was a foolish hope, and a vain one.

But what else was I to do?

As I made my way ever deeper into Limehouse’s filthy avenues, I squeezed my eyes shut against a burn that seemed as if it came as much from the heart as the fog frothing behind me like a wake.

I had betrayed everything. My staff, my dear friends, my husband. This was not mere misery, this was unavoidable fact—ladies of any stripe did not cavort with the creatures below the drift. They did not marry earls with one hand and wield knives in the other.

They did not ever risk behavior that would see their staff ridiculed and turned out, cut by the rest of London’s elite and their own servants, whose airs mirrored their masters’ and mistresses’ so closely.

I had done all of that, and more.

What good, then, was a mistress who could not provide for herself, much less her staff? Who could not stand beside her husband?

Who could not even state with any degree of certainty that she had loved him?

None. Not a whit of worth in a creature as that.

Even less when she struggled in debt up to her coal-blackened head.

I passed one of the many narrow lanes carved between shop stalls and cramped Limehouse quarters, shuddering with an ache in my chest that no amount of opium could soothe. I all but hunched into myself, so much so that I had no inkling of motion or movement as fingers curled into the shoulder of my overcoat and wrenched me off my feet.

I managed a gasped sound, a coughing rasp, and a thickly callused hand slammed over my nose and mouth. Pain lit like a brand across my cheekbone. I tasted the salt of sweat, a gritty layer akin to charcoal or soot, and then the air was shoved from my lungs as my back crashed into damp brick facing. My hat flew off my head. Firelight flickered behind my eyelids as the opium dulled the senses that should have registered such abuse.

“You’re that collector bird,” came the accusation, a guttural breath sweetened by smoke and soured by decay.

I had no opportunity to answer. I felt only an immense pressure constricting my voice and breath. Steely fingers banded around my throat, squeezing the high collar around my neck until my heartbeat pulsed within the confines of my skull and I felt as if only a second more might turn my head into so much pulp.

My feet hung from the ground, leagues away from the command of my thoughts, and the brick gouged deeply into my shoulders. I seized the meaty wrist beneath my chin, so wide that I could only just scrape my fingertips together around it, but I could no more move it than I could will aside a locomotive.

My breath rattled. My ears rang. In tune with my laboring heartbeat, my vision blurred and sparked. The shape before my straining, bulging eyes was man-shaped, beard-colored, but I was blind by darkness and what terrible melancholy had gripped me in the seconds between leaving the den and meeting this beast of a man.

My eyes closed.

“Not so much a fight,” my would-be murderer grunted. “I ought’er—”

Whatever he ought to have done, he did not do. What he did instead was widen his eyes, as if something in my face surprised him. The skin there flinched, masking a glint of red I could not ascertain as reflection or rage, and he cursed a gritty wheeze, his body jerking abruptly. The grip at my neck flexed, grinding flesh to bone, then loosened as my flailing frame lurched like a fish trapped in the killing air. Suddenly, the weight in my chest was gone. My thoughts cleared; anger set in.

What bollocks had I been on about? What had I been thinking?

I floundered, clawing at the brick wall behind me, feet seeking purchase. A knee, a corner edge, anything would do. One foot flattened against the alley wall, the other found soft flesh that earned a taut yelp as Coventry staggered backwards.

He dropped me to the ground, a discarded doll gasping for breath, choking through the swollen flesh of my throat. I managed to get to my knees just as smaller, faster hands dug into my coat. They dragged me to my feet. “Come, cherie, speak to me!”

I coughed a word that wasn’t a greeting. As my vision cleared on the tail end of my quarry’s worn trousers, as he vanished into a swirl of fog and fading, pounding footsteps, I whirled on my erstwhile savior, shrugging off her hands in violent recoil.

It was not her appearance that put me off, though there were many both in the drift and out who could not claim the same.