Corroded

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 with 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