Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles (17 page)

“No, Mr. Pettigrew, I am not here for you,” I reassured him. I approached the armchair across from him, its upholstery a rich, lovely shade of red reminiscent of Fanny’s ball gown. The wood was scarred and scuffed, its arms bearing witness to many a comfortable visit.

Beside it, shedding heat as I sank to the chair in grateful reprieve, the brazier shone spotless and brassy. Small by design, yet fitted with bolted copper and brass pipes, the stovelike mechanism took coal through its grinning grate and pumped the excess smoke up through the pipe in the ceiling and out. The grate was bolted in place, not a single ember could fall from within, and the heavy piece proof against accidental falling or knocking over.

It was a fine bit of engineering, certainly.

I held my hands to the warmth, but my gaze remained fixed on my host. “Are you well?”

His eyes vanished behind a web of crinkled lines as he grinned a yellow-toothed grin. Amusement, snapping as brilliantly as the fire within the brazier. “I am old, girl. That I still live is a matter of courtesy from the Almighty.”

“Come now, you aren’t so old as to be digging your own grave just yet,” I countered lightly, unable to keep my smile from tugging at my lips.

His long, spindly hands folded over his patched dressing gown. “We are both so much older than we used to be,” he said, cryptic and discerning all at once.

And not wrong. I inclined my head. “I am delighted to find you well.”

“And awake, no doubt.”

“I apologize—”

One finger rose from his entwined hands. “You speak like a toff and behave like a collector. Pick one, girl, or you’ll forget which is what.” It was on the tip of my tongue to apologize yet again, but I sealed my lips as his faded, rheumy eyes crinkled once more. “As for me, not a worry. I sleep less and less as the days go by. I’d offer you tea, but I know you won’t take it, and I don’t drink it much no more.”

Nothing would mark me as obviously from London high as the way I took my tea. Fanny had done an excellent service in my training.

“No,” I agreed. “Mr. Pettigrew—”

“Gus, then,” he corrected me with a dry, whispery laugh. “That’s what they call me when they come by now and again. ‘Checkin’ up on ol’ Gus,’ ” he mimicked.

“Gus, then.” It cost me nothing to use his name, and the old man likely didn’t get as much company as he liked. I shifted on my chair, eyes flitting to the shelves. “I search for a book.”

“Ah.” A parched sound. “Which, exactly?”

“Mr. Humphry Ditton’s
The New Law of Fluids
. Do you know of it?”

Mr. Pettigrew rested his head back on the chair, the thin cords of his throat and sharp Adam’s apple thrust into stark relief beneath his wrinkled, fragile skin. “Early seventeen hundreds, unless I am mistaken. Not the entirety of the title, either.”

I twitched a grin. “You are correct. I can’t remember all of it.”

“
The New Law of Fluids
,” he whispered slowly, “
or, a Discourse concerning the Ascent of Liquids in exact Geometrical Figures, between two nearly contiguous Surfaces
.” He shook his head, rasped a chuckle. “It has been a long time since I’ve seen a copy.”

My face fell. “Oh. So you don’t have it?”

“No, girl, I’m afraid not.” His gaze remained on me, not to the shelves I’d have expected if he were telling a lie. The firelight turned the watery depths of his eyes to something glinting and unreadable, but his frail frame remained at ease, fingers linked, slippered feet crossed.

I read no falsehood here, and my heart sank. “Well, it was worth finding out for certain. I apologize for taking your time.”

I placed both hands upon the arms of my chair to rise, but he lifted his head and asked baldly, “What are you after, then?”

I hesitated.

His smile faded, and he leaned forward carefully, his bald pate cherry red in the light. But the eyes beneath his still-bushy white eyebrows did not drop from mine. “You’re on business, then,” he rasped. “Fine, fine. I don’t have that book, but I have many. Tell me your need and I’ll direct you to a book just as good, if not a counter argument to the contents.”

I reached into my coat, withdrew the sheaf of papers I’d stolen. “I am not sure exactly what it is I’m looking for,” I confessed, abashed at his raised eyebrows. “Whatever is in Mr. Ditton’s book directly correlates with the information on these pages.”

“Ah. Let me see.” He patted his pockets with trembling fingers for a long moment, searching for the spectacles he finally found in a stitched pocket. He placed them over his nose, beckoned impatiently.

I rose, crossed the narrow divide and offered the sheaf to him.

“My glass,” he said as he took them. “Fetch it.”

Glass? I looked about me, found no snifters or any sign of such drinking. Then, on the narrow counter that doubled as desk and shop cashier’s station, I saw a large magnifying glass.

Spectacles and a glass. The poor man.

I collected it, running my gloved fingers along its use-polished haft. A lovely piece, solid brass around the perfectly maintained glass.

I returned it to Mr. Pettigrew’s searching grasp and waited, shifting from foot to foot in my sudden impatience.

He took his time; perhaps it was his faded sight, perhaps instead the complex symbols drawn on each page. The handwriting was the same as the notation in the notes I’d left back home, neat enough but cramped, and strung together as if full words were too much trouble to take the time to write out.

After a few agonizingly long minutes, I understood that I would not get an immediate answer. I left Mr. Pettigrew’s side to walk instead along the shelves, allowing my fingers to trail over the books within.

It was, I could admit, a guilty pleasure to be surrounded by so many books. Mr. Ashmore’s study—once my father’s—was fine enough. I’d spent many an hour hidden beneath the large desk, reading the things Fanny hadn’t yet given up on forbidding me from.

I loved books, even as I loved the similar way opium had of transporting a mind elsewhere. Both habits had formed from a desire to escape; my advanced age at the time of learning my letters meant simply that I devoured more books when I’d finally realized what magical things I’d missed in reading.

Papers rustled softly as Mr. Pettigrew shuffled through them at a snail’s pace. Finally, as I wandered back to the chair and braced one hand upon it—quietly lifting one leg to ease the ache within—he looked up, mouth set in a slanted, thoughtful line. “This,” he said on a sibilant note I translated as deep in thought, “will take some time, my dear. Complex. Not impossible, but certainly complex.”

“What is it?” I asked.

He set down the magnifying glass. It thumped gently. “Before I answer a question much deeper than you know, I must ask you one.” He did not wait for my agreement, raising the papers like proof at a trial. “What is it you seek from this?”

“The author,” I said, not bothering to think too hard on the subject. It was true. “And if the author is a murdered man, then I seek his murderer.”

“Hmm.” The sound became a long exhale. Mr. Pettigrew lowered the papers, his gaze returning to it in the vacant way of a man no longer seeing what was in front of him. Then, suddenly, he nodded. “Very well. Come back in three days’ time. I should have something to show you then.”

Three days. That was a lifetime in the scope of an investigation such as this, but I had precious little else to go on.

“Very well,” I allowed, though I didn’t like it. “Now, what is it? Is it a formula?”

“Clever girl.” He rose on unsteady limbs, his faded purple dressing gown swishing about his ankles. But he gripped the papers with a surety, an interest, that had seemed less focused when I’d first come in. “Perhaps. I can’t know just from looking, but it seems to me that you have in your possession a working theory.”

“On what?” I asked, bemused. “I don’t recognize those symbols from existing scientific elements.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” he murmured, shuffling by me. Distracted, I realized. I couldn’t hide my smile this time, rueful, though it was. I recognized that level of distraction.

I often did the same.

“This is alchemical theory,” Mr. Pettigrew said.

My smile faded. “Alchemy. You’re sure?”

“Oh, yes. Quite.” He set the papers on the counter, then turned, one hand flat upon them. His weathered, skull-like face split into a grin. “Come, I’ll show you.”

Curious, I approached his side as he spread the papers on the surface of his worn desk. “This,” he pointed out, tapping a triangle with its point down, “is water.”

“Just water?”

“The symbol by itself, yes,” he explained, “but look at this beside it.” Another symbol, three circles arranged in another triangle, with a fourth in the center. “Aether.”

“What?” I scowled at the unfamiliar figures. “That is not. Aether is characterized by the periodic table, not by random etchings.”

His chuckle, reminiscent of the papers he shuffled, was amused. “It is to alchemists, girl. You must recognize the language of those you search for if you hope to find them.”

Bloody bells. I refrained from sneering outright, but I also raised a finger as an idea struck. “Sir, do the letters
E
and
y
mean anything to you?”

His brow folded. “Show me.” He gestured to the quill and blotter at his desk.

I took it, turned the paper already there over and sketched the
Ey
as I remembered it. And then, because I couldn’t not, I added
DG
and
ppt
with its double underline. “This,” I said as I placed it in his hand.

“My glass,” he said again.

However did Mr. Pettigrew manage without another soul? I crossed the small shop, bypassed the brazier and fetched his magnifying glass.

This time, as I put it in his hand, he patted mine in absentminded thanks. After a long moment, he said, “The first is not an
E
. It is an
F
. This symbol represents fusion.”

My knees buckled. My heart surged into my throat, and I seized the edge of the desk for balance as I stared at his earnest, studious face. “Fusion,” I repeated, my mouth suddenly dry. An “
F”
and a “
u
”, with ornate tines to confuse the eye.

He did not look at me. “It has many applications, notable most by what elements surround it.”

Fu
. Fusion.

As in the ghost of Josephine St. Croix and the living shell of my body?

As in the combining of the living and the dead?

Or was this just another one of my father’s terrible jests?

I swallowed hard. “Do you know the others?” I asked, working to force my voice into a semblance of normality.

“Digestion,” he said after another moment, “and I’m not as certain on the last. I recall seeing it, but not as an element. A notation, much like digestion. A rule? Ah.” He rubbed the bridge of his bumped nose. “Not to worry. I’ll find your answers. Three days, girl.”

I frowned. “Digestion? As in, it must be eaten?”

“Not always so literally,” the old man replied, suddenly eager to warm to his subject. The heart of a scholar would always lend itself to lectures. “While that could be one aspect, it could also be the process by which one element overtakes another, or draws it in. Imagine a parasite, if you will—”

I raised my hands, a gesture of tacit retreat. “I understand,” I said hastily, before he truly lost the thread of the conversation to whimsical hypotheses leading him away from the point. “When you find out what this actually means, you will know which form of digestion it points to?”

“Three days,” he repeated. “And the sooner for it if I return to work.”

I sighed. “I shall be back on the third.” Sensing the dismissal for what it was, I fished out my protectives. I did not have to look up; the man had stooped from age and years hunched over books, his thin frame bent to my height. “Be careful, then,” I said seriously. “There’s a great deal of mystery here.”

“That, there is,” he said, and patted my shoulder with an awkward, affectionate hand. “Do be safe.”

I never made such promises. With a smile, I affixed my goggles and breather in place and left Augustine Pettigrew’s strange and lovely little bookshop behind.

Three bloody days of twiddling my thumbs.

I had come below with questions; mysteries compiled within mysteries.

The answers I’d received—alchemy, fusion, digestion—only served to bring me more questions.

Why was I suddenly surrounded by elements of alchemy?

And how did this all fit with Lady Rutledge’s challenge?

I had much to mull on as I returned above.

Captain Abercott was well into his cups by the time I returned to his docking berth; I’d swear he guided the ferry by sheer habit, now. He eyed me from his station at the levers where a wheel now stood as useless decoration, but said nothing I could make out.