feel sorrow, grief—if I could not mourn—then by God, I would feel pain.
A ghost, I had become, and as a ghost, I left my bedroom to enter Fanny’s. Like mine, it was empty of all personal belongings. The furniture had not changed, the mirrors covered all the same, but nothing of the woman remained behind.
From room to room, down the stairs and into the parlor, I searched for any sign of my staff.
I found none.
When I finally made it into the study—Ashmore’s study, Fanny had often reminded me, and I had long determined to make it mine upon inheriting—I felt as if a stern word might break me irreparably. I leaned against the door, fingers splayed as if it could catch me, and rested my forehead against the gleaming wood.
The house stood, furnished as it always had been, with pieces collected first by my father in his varied travels, then added to by my father’s executor. Ashmore had often sent pieces back, some large and some small, of Indian make or Chinese, African or Russian, Egyptian, Greek. So much history, so many memories wrapped in each piece, and yet, it was is if the heart had bled from the place.
What was a roof, what were things, without the people that had made it a home?
Everything ached. My body ceased to obey all will, and I hovered outside that study for so long, the light filtered through black crepe changed.
Finally, seizing what little courage I had left—or perhaps just resigned for the final nail to be hammered into the coffin of my devastation—I pushed open the study door.
More of the mourning crepe covered the windows, turning the light to ash. I had expected to find the whole wiped clean, emptied of the things that had made it so much Abraham St. Croix’s study, but it was not.
I stepped into the room, my breath held, desperately afraid to make a noise, lest a single sound shatter this dream and leave me standing among empty shelves. My head ached so badly, it was all I could do to focus through the pressure.
With one shaking hand, I reached out to touch a ream of books upon one shelf.
They did not vanish.
The heavy wooden desk was still in place, and upon it the things that had always been there. The papers were gone, but the globe remained, covered in a fine sheen of dust. The small boxes carved from cinnabar, the ivory pipes and large horn upon the mantle. An astrolabe beautifully designed and worked in copper and brass sat beside a telescope whose sheen had dulled without polish.
And among them all, spines of every color and size, some worn and some new enough for the gilt to catch what stray bits of light it could, the books remained.
A sob wrenched at my chest.
I did not allow it passage.
Instead, as my booted feet made no sound upon the Oriental rug, I crossed the study and tore the black shroud from the mirror hanging beside one shelf. The frame, carved with scenes of Russian stories, gleamed as the material slid to the ground. I stared up into the silvered glass and did not recognize the face that looked back.
My mother’s face, I’d been told. All the coloring with none of the Societal accomplishments to ease the sting.
Too much my father’s mind.
My eyes were large in my face, too wide, the green of them so very dark. I sported no bruises from my fight with the Bakers, and while that should have been a surprise, I felt as if I carried all the wounds upon the inside.
I reached up with a trembling hand, touched the glass. Perhaps I considered climbing through, like Alice in her backwards Wonderland, but the mirror did not bend.
Behind me, reflected in reverse and looking all the brighter for the mirror’s unveiling, the study that should have been mine waited in silent serenity.
I would never claim the books within. I couldn’t, for upon my marriage, everything I was to inherit passed to Compton.
When he died, it all turned to his heir—his father, whose wife despised me for slights I had never understood. The same woman my mother had gifted her alchemical journal to.
It seemed, no matter what I was or where I would go, I would always carry my mother’s ghost.
My lashes lowered, heavy lidded with a fatigue so thorough, it took all I had to remain standing. In the back of my thoughts, a woman laughed—haunting memories, recurring dreams, from the night my father’s serum nearly ended me.
This had been my father’s study, a place so redolent of his tastes that I had spent many an hour hidden within, escaping Fanny’s searching and imagining that I could know my father through his things. I had spent so long among these items, associating them with a man who had not at all turned out to be anything like I had fancied.
As I dropped my hand, leaving a faint smear on the glass, my gaze fell upon a narrow book tucked between two larger tomes.
A thin volume, one whose beautifully tooled leather showed wear.
With trembling fingers, I extracted the book from the shelf. There was no gilt upon the spine, none at the front. Yet as I opened to the first page, a familiar elegant script greeted me.
Whoever had removed my things must have considered the book belonging here. I idled through the pages, allowing my eyes to skim rather than indulge, to drink in the symbols, the prose, the penmanship that was Josephine St. Croix’s own hand.
Filled with theoretical concern and moral discourse, this was proof that my mother had shared in Mad St. Croix’s scientific mind. That she had been every bit as brilliant as she had been lauded for her salon accomplishments.
She had not allowed the world to strip her of her mind.
My father might have been driven beyond all measure by his wife’s untimely death, but he had not always been so. The rumors often spoke of his genius. It wasn’t until after his supposed death in a Scotland estate I had never seen did they call him Mad St. Croix—a moniker long since earned.
But not then. Not when he had her to love.
My mother must have chafed under the constrains of Society’s mores, and yet here, I held proof she did not allow any to stop her.
Not even a marchioness.
I snapped the book closed, looking up from its filled pages to stare hard in the mirror in front of me.
Frizzed tendrils of my dark red hair jutted out from beneath the brown street boy’s cap hiding the rest. There were traces of dirt and grime upon me, likely picked up from simply passing through the soot-streaked fog, but beneath, I saw the nose and chin that shaped the cameo of my mother. I recognized the cheekbones, the mouth. I was my mother’s child, I had no choice in the matter, but I would not be her shadow. I would not be the dog kicked aside for lack of better breeding.
Josephine St. Croix might have been an angel—an auburn beauty with innumerable talents—but
No man could control me. No husband, no whip, no monster, no alchemical serum, no bloody secretive Veil.
I pushed the journal into one of the large pouches at my belt, clicking my teeth together when the ache in my throat sharpened.
So my plans had fallen through. So my challenge had worked all too well. Lily would suffer for it all her life, and I would bear that for all of mine. Hawke might think my pride broken, but I would not bend—not for him, not for anyone ever again. Foolish I might have been to consider he would help me—and more so for giving in to that manipulative temptation he was so famed for—but it was done. The milk had spilled, and I would shed no tears for it.
