Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles (11 page)

“You have an unhealthy obsession with professors, Miss Black.”

I winced. He wasn’t far incorrect. “This one is different. Professor Isaac MacGillycuddy was found murdered—”

“Two days past, I’m well aware.”

The bastard, lovely as he might have been to look at, lacked all sense of manners. He did not hamper his stride to suit my shorter stature, so I quickened my pace. “Slow for a moment, won’t you?”

“No.”

“Damn you, Hawke.”

He stopped, so sudden that I’d ended three paces ahead by the time I turned.

The whip gleamed, sleek and black beneath the violet-tinted light of a Chinese lantern overhead. The same glint of color picked out in his hair, painted lurid designs against his cheek. His eyes flashed, warning.

Always warning.

“What draws you to murder, Miss Black?” A verbal knife, flung unerringly in the dark.

I opened my mouth. No words came.

A muscle ticked in his cheek. “Is there a bounty?”

“That’s what I wanted to know.” There. Honesty. I could manage that much.

His mouth tightened. “My sweets won’t know.”

“They might if it’s been talked about.”

“They do not.” Finality. Hawke picked up his long-legged pace once more. “I am not pleased to have been called from the rings to save you, Miss Black. Lost time is debt.”

The scorn with which he declared his displeasure slapped me, a bucket of icy water. “You did no such thing,” I countered hotly. “I saved them long before you arrived.”

He did not reply to that. The circus tent loomed taller and taller, and as we neared it, I heard the melody of lively music, the gasps and cheers of a crowd.

My stomach turned. That sweat I thought had passed returned, a damp, icy bloom down my spine.

How easy it was to remember the steps. A turn of the knee, a bend at the waist, and a knife whistling past my ear. Another dip, a wobble for effect, and an edge sharp as a razor taking a bit of hair.

“Miss Black.”

I blinked hard, realized too late that I’d stopped dead on the path, my gaze fixed somewhere beyond Hawke’s blue-clad shoulder. He stared at me, features unreadable, even as a lazy half smile shaped his mouth.

I closed mine.

“Every bounty you bring,” he said, not ungently for all he closed the distance between us with a step. “Every collection you achieve, every purse you turn away, only serves one purpose.”

I found my voice at last, raised my chin to meet his gaze direct over mine. “I’m well aware.” I was also keenly aware of his warmth, mere centimeters away. Of the powerful line of his chest, within reach.

I attributed the feelings I experienced to the shared memory of that night in his bed. The night he’d saved me from the serum that conspired to strip my very self away.

He hadn’t taken me then. I was not inclined to allow him the opportunity now. But the man had saved my life.

Blast it.
Just as he likely had now.

He raised his hand; I did not realize which until I felt the cold length of the whip’s handle along my cheek. “You only delay the inevitable,” he murmured, a husky warning. “The
móshù
, Miss Black, or it will be you they pay for.”

My blood turned instead to ice. I could not hide a shudder, but I raised one hand and pushed his whip away from my face with more strength than I think he expected.

“Never,” I swore, and took a step back, earning another lazy smile.

A knowing thing, too intimate by half. “I look forward to your eventual delivery. Whether it comes in a vial, or wearing your skin and little else.”

My cheeks flushed. “You cannot put me in the auction rings,” I snapped, eager for a fight to warm the sudden chill inside my soul. “The Veil has bartered that away.”

The whip uncoiled, a sinuous whisper. “Never fear, Miss Black. I take care of all my pets.”

I stared at him, met his challenge as my body vacillated between too hot with fury and too cold with fear. A roar went up from behind the thin red fabric behind him; the battle was lost.

“Return home,” he suggested softly.

Pride be damned. I turned tail and fled.

His laughter haunted my every step.

Chapter Seven

R
un I may have, but I would not flee home like a beaten dog. Instead, determined more than ever to prove Hawke wrong, I left the Menagerie grounds with my temper high and my common sense middling to low.

I cut straight across London, through Limehouse direct. The fragrant aroma of rotting fish and acrid lime stench the district was so well known for did not lift until I reached the Philosopher’s Square.

Before the stilts went up, the square—less a true square and more an asymmetrical collection of structures and courtyards in whatever haphazard format they were originally erected and added to—had been the home of every thinking mind in London. The University of London had claimed it until a fire destroyed much of the territory.

The dean, rather than rebuild entirely, took the opportunity to segregate himself and many of his more affluent students above the drift, leaving the less sociably fashionable below.

Thus were King’s College and University College divided, and thus does it remain. What few enough realize, or care to realize, is that the same affluence that guides King’s College still guides the secular and much less posh University College.

Women are, to a certain degree, welcome in the lesser of the two, but there were no scholarships, association, or tolerance of women in King’s College. While the faith restrictions had been somewhat lax in this, our age of reason, there were certain lines of the sex that King’s College refused to cross.

This was, of course, much to the detriment of the institution, for even those with power and brilliance—those like Lady Rutledge—could not attend. Or ever lecture.

I had never tried. University of any stripe had never appealed to me, and Fanny had always insisted that I’d no use for discourses and studies. Hadn’t I come far enough on my own?

Wasn’t I already rather skilled at elocution?

I was, certainly, but I chafed at the rift. Any woman who earned her diploma through University College would never be licensed. She could not practice as a doctor, or a barrister or a professor.

The fog filled the square from end to end. Unlike much of the city caught beneath its clinging blanket, the Philosopher’s Square was a blot upon the map
almost
respectable enough for visitation. Exhibits often came to the warehouses and facilities scattered across the district, and on some days, even Society gathered for an outing among the scientific minds of the area.

Yet, it was as dangerous by night as the gaming hells and opium dens. I knew of no gang that claimed it their own, which suggested to me it still hovered as neutral ground.

I took care. I hurried to my destination, keeping to the fringes lest I inadvertently stumble on late-night students or professors burning the post-midnight oil.

I did not often have cause to stroll the college grounds. The last time I’d been nearby, it had been on the arm of Earl Compton, and this as a St. Croix. How appalled would he be to find me here, now, wearing the trappings of a collector, and the trousers of a man?

I stifled a smile, though I didn’t need to. My respirator kept the worst of the scratch from my throat, and the yellow lens over one eye guided me easily along paths less obvious beneath shifting banks of yellow and black.

What would I do here?

It didn’t matter, truly. I would search the dead professor’s offices, perhaps find a clue the constabularies missed. Perhaps I would find nothing, and return home all the more clueless as to Lady Rutledge’s challenge.

There would be only one way to know for certain.

The University College boasted a fine array of twelve Corinthian columns and a pediment elevated on a plinth by at least nineteen feet. The triangular pediment boasted no ornamentation, but what it lacked in grandeur was more than supported by the large, round dome peeking from behind. Light from the cupola behind the columns shed an eerie flicker as the fog snaked between the dirtied pillars.

This was the main building, the central entry by which pupils and professors alike passed through. The gritty London fog had worn the once-pale stone to smudged gray, and the columns seemed to be suffering with time.

I walked quickly through the guttering lamps affixed to each column, found the doors unbarred. With so many pupils, it should not have surprised me, but I could not help but wonder if such ease of access only hastened Professor MacGillycuddy’s demise.

I stepped inside, pulling the door closed behind me, and took a moment to slip the protectives from my face.

All was quiet. Not so much as a murmur of a voice reached me across the vast halls. No footsteps, no echoes. The furnishings were genteel in nature, not fine but neither were they poor. Affixed to the walls, statues carved in exquisite detail loomed over the interior hall. As I passed, I noted Flaxman’s
Farnese Hercules
, his rather comically large Michael overpowering a cowardly Satan.

Here in this hall, I was surrounded by more men’s flesh than would ever be deemed proper were it actually
in
the flesh, as it were, and I could not help a sudden fit of laughter that I could not muffle behind my gloved hands.

I was no stranger to the concept of conjugation, nor to idea of nudity, but it bemused me, even as it tickled me, that such things cast in stone were wildly more welcome than wrapped in life.

But I did not come to view the art, powerful though it had been reviewed by critics.

Where would I be, then, if I were offices belonging to a professor of naturo-philosophy?

It took me virtually no time to circle back around to the main portico, and even less to locate the study halls of what must be the naturo-philosophers. The door, like the others, was unlocked.

The lights in the hall were kept bright, but only a distant flicker worked its way through the inky shadows clinging to the open gallery.

Vaguely threatening shapes loomed at me as I peered inside, outlined by what faint ambient light trickled through strangely wide windows. What views must be had on clearer days? Lucky pupils, to be so gifted with the apparatus of the institution.

My footfalls whispered as I crossed the hardwood flooring. No rugs dampened the sound, and I could just imagine the mild cacophony of bright, inquisitive minds filling the hall, seated behind each desk with book and quill—

I hesitated as I passed a long, cylindrical tube. Light danced across it in muted embers, and I reached out before I’d warned myself off. It didn’t matter. There would be no traps for me here; only the temptation of an apparatus I could not have.

A telescope, for one. I recognized it, though I’d never looked through my own. A shame, that. There was not enough light, too much fog, to direct it to the window now.

Smiling faintly, I stepped around a large globe hanging from two distended tubes whittled to points. The earth shifted as I brushed past it, but did not fall. A merry shimmer of crystal rang brightly around me as I set glass stars swinging by accidental purchase.

And behind it, a muffled thump.

I froze in a sea of winking light and tinkling glass, unerringly pointed to the front of the hall, and the offices to the right.

Somebody was here. Not a student, for no one would work in the dark. Not, then, a professor.

Or perhaps just so, I cautioned myself, and crept quietly to the first of the doors. I pressed my ear upon it, and heard only a muffled, indistinct sound.

An animal? It certainly couldn’t be too far-fetched. Naturo-philosophy covered much of the reasonable world, and animals were as much a part of it as I was.

Perhaps a great deal more free, on the whole.

I sidestepped neatly, pressed my gloved hand to the next door and bent to listen.

This time, I heard a woman’s voice. Clipped. Irritated. An argument?

What she said, or to whom she said it, I could not know. I reached for the door latch; it caught, but did not lift.

Well, locked, then. At least something in this university was.

With nothing for it, I raised my hand and knocked.
Rap, rap
. Businesslike.

The voice stilled. I heard nothing, and then, sharply, footsteps. I stepped back as the door latch lifted. “What ungodly hour it is,” grumbled the man who eased the portal open. A man? “No, there will be no delay on the tests scheduled for—” A pair of indistinguishable eyes framed by lanky brown hair widened as they pinned on me, in all my hand-tooled finery. “The devil are you?”

“Collector’s business,” I told him, and watched the color drain from his face. In the kerosene light afforded from the interior of the office, I could see that he was a thin man, made all the more apparent by the clothing that hung on his frame. His cheeks were a bloom of red, as if he could not cease blushing even should he demand it, and his hair was slightly too long for appeal. It was also mildly unkempt, suggesting he ran his fingers through it often.

Or perhaps, I thought as a shadow flitted in the room beyond his shoulder, I had interrupted that very act, but with someone else’s fingers.

“Am I interrupting something?” I asked, more than a little cheeky.

He stepped out of the office entirely, eased the door shut even as more rich color bled into his cheeks. “What do you want?” he demanded.

I raised my eyebrows, hands on my hips. “I am not here to wave a finger under your nose, sir.”

“What?” His eyebrows beetled, caught somewhere between confusion and worry. “What’s going on, then? Why are you here at . . .” He fumbled for his pocket watch. I let him, and took the time to admire the lovely casing as he opened it with impatient, ink-stained fingers.

The blend of tooled gold and worked copper was virtually unmistakable. The man may have no money now, but he’d once had enough to purchase one of Haldercourt Fussey’s finest. I’d long since promised myself that should my trusty little brass watch give out, I’d court the man for a custom piece.

“Past three of the clock,” I offered as he squinted at the glass. “That’s when we like to come out, didn’t you know?” But I smiled to soften the edge, especially when I watched him glance over his shoulder, snapping the timepiece shut. “You may be at ease, Mr. . . . ?”

“Professor,” he corrected me. “Professor Johannes Lambkin, newly minted professor of naturo-philosophical study.”

A mouthful, and a motive. “Newly?”

“Since MacGillycuddy died.”

A flicker of disappointment filled me. Was Lady Rutledge’s challenge going to be this easy?

Professor kills professor for tenure. How boring.

I frowned suddenly, aware of the words still ringing in my mind like a chime. Boring?

Since when were lives boring?

“Right,” I finally said, aware the silence had gone on too long for comfort. I raised both hands. “I’m not here to collect you, Professor. I am seeking MacGillycuddy’s murderer.”

Lambkin had the courtesy not to laugh outright. “A woman?”

“A collector,” I assured him, but I made no move to prove the point. Either he would believe me, or he would not, and I would have to tie him to something sturdy while I bothered his girl in the office.

The next move was his, and fortunately for him, Professor Lambkin was a professor of the mind. He did not question me. “Right, then. Murder. If you ask me, he had it coming.”

I tilted my head. “I beg your pardon?”

He smiled, a wry thing that pushed his too-thin cheeks into sharp relief. How a man could be practically blushing with good health and still manage to appear starved was beyond me, but he did. “MacGillycuddy was mean as an Irish bastard,” he told me. “I suspected he was one. Never had a kind word, pushed his pupils hard.”

“All of them? Did he have no favorites?”

“All of them,” he confirmed, tapping the side of his beaklike nose. “But especially the ladies.”

That surprised me. “Why the ladies?”

“My suspicion is he didn’t have a mother to coddle him.”

A bastard, and now a motherless one? It smelled an awful lot of vinegar to me. “If I were to ask you if you killed him, what would you say?”

He snorted outright. “I’d never kill a man with poison.”

“Poison?” The word came out before I’d caught myself. That detail had not been in the article.

His eyes gleamed; devilish mischief, for all the morbidity of the subject. “Didn’t know that, eh? Shame on your masters.”

I stilled. Masters? What kind of woman did he assume me to be?

Aware of his blunder, Lambkin raised both hands. As if by sincerity he could ward away Satan himself. “Now, now, didn’t mean nothing by it, miss,” he said hastily. “Just a rumor, is all. Dr. Algernon mentioned in passing a day past or so.”

“Mentioned what?” I demanded, lowering my voice to that octave that seemed to always cause men larger than I to quail. I watched it take root now, as if it weren’t I—shorter, smaller, likely even not as strong—standing before him, but something more dangerous. A man, perhaps.

I would never kill him; I would not even accost him without good reason, but Lambkin needn’t know.