Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles (31 page)

My doing. I had left him for the collector to find. I had sprinted from his side with vengeance in my heart, pride riding me for insults delivered.

I’d as good as killed the man who’d sworn to protect me until his last breath.

How little he knew.

Fanny took the tea from my unresponsive fingers and placed it on my nightstand. Gone, the bottle of laudanum—packed in the luggage Lord Piers had delivered to the HMS
Ophelia.
My belongings had not been retrieved yet, waiting to be rescued from its sad and tragic little misadventure that ended so abruptly before it had begun.

My lord husband had remembered my fascination with the Queen’s own flagship. He’d remembered the conversation so long ago, when first we’d met.

He’d booked passage on the sky ship’s maiden voyage. Just us and the crew.

I could not cry. I had no tears to shed.

Only a fierce, boiling anger, numbing all it burned away.

“How is she?” Mrs. Booth’s whisper. Always, a whisper.

“The same, poor thing,” Fanny replied.

Tearfully, Mrs. Booth sniffed. “The marchioness is threatening litigation—”

“
Sod
the marchioness,” Fanny hissed.

I did not smile.

Booth’s uneven tread outside my door. “I’ve written to the master,” he said, quiet as his polished baritone allowed. “I expect a reply any—”
Click
.

Now they were only mumbles through my door. Concerned, worried, frightened.

Sad.

I felt none of these things.

I did not move for another hour, at least. Perhaps longer. The shadows shifted subtly with the day.

Murderer
.

Silently, I leaned over, jammed my hand beneath the mattress. The small, wax-wrapped bundle came easily to my grasp. Zylphia had brought it to me sometime in the past day. Perhaps to coax something of a response from me.

I sat up once more, looked down at the palm-size parcel.

Weep for the widowed bride.

Not today. Perhaps not ever. I unwrapped the waxen paper, looked down at the small selection of gummy opium tar.

My laudanum had been packed.

But I did not want laudanum now.

Murderer!

Quietly, wordlessly, I took a small square of the resin and placed it on my tongue.

The bitter taste seared through ice, burned through the dead husk that was all I’d become.

I grimaced; the first expression I’d managed for days.

The juices mingled now with my saliva. Tricked down my throat in tingling currents of warmth.

And then I swallowed.

Opium tar would relieve the shock, my scientist’s brain assured me. And when the shock wore off, it would deaden the pain.

And when the pain was no longer so great that I could not breathe, then it would be time to stoke the fires of fury and collect a murderer.

No matter the cost.

Chapter Twenty-four

B
lood splattered across a cheek pale as fine china and as dainty as the same. Crimson streaks left tracks where his pleading tears had not dried. “Please!” he begged, “I don’t know nothin’!”

Sweet Tom Billings had sometimes worked for me on occasion, but mostly he worked for the hand with the right coin. Beneath his femininely delicate features lived a mind as cunning as a rat’s, with every bit the instinct to survive and none of the animal’s more delicate sensibilities. Sewage or carnage, coin was coin, and Sweet Tom would no sooner turn a nose at one than go hungry for the other.

Which did not explain why he dared brave the collectors’ sanctum. We were not known for our tolerance of outsiders, and I was in
no
mood to play.

To that end, I held him now, pinned against the wall beside the collectors’ bounties, my knuckles raw and aching. I didn’t mind the pain of bones ground against flesh. It was something more real than the soul-deep promise of something a thousand times less civilized hovering in the back of my thoughts. Waiting.

Hungry.

Opium dulled the beast. Just enough that I could think through the bloody film saturating my mind. My fist tightened in Sweet Tom’s collar, my other held threateningly back, elbow cocked. “Don’t nose me about, Sweet Tom,” I hissed. “You’re no collector. Or have you cast an eye up in the world?”

He cringed, pushing up high on his toes as he could, his hat trod under my own boot and his scarf tangled up in the collar I clenched. His head wobbled, shoulders desperately flattened against the damp brick as if seeking a way through the pitted stone and away from me. Whatever mask shaped my face, it paled the boy’s own, until the whites of his eyes shone yellow-tinged in the lamplight from his turned over lantern.

When I’d come to the collectors’ station, I hadn’t expected to find anyone mulling over the bounties posted. I certainly would never have expected a noncollector, especially Sweet Tom.

If he’d gone collector, I’d eat his scarf.

“Answer me!”

“Was sorted out!” he squeaked as his scarf tightened dangerously about his skinny throat. His eyes, always pretty in a way that put me in mind of a cat’s, were slowly going lopsided beneath the shiner I’d given. “Paid right good to come by, find a notice. That’s all!”

“And you’re one who can read,” I finished for him. “What notice?”

“Anything what demands a toppin’.” A murder, then.

I bared my teeth at him. “For who?” I saw it on his features before he even opened his mouth to deny me. I thrust my face into his, smelled the copper tang of the blood leaking from his nose, an acrid trace of wine and a whiff of something both spicy and sharp. My eyes narrowed. “
Vin Mariani
.”

His fingers scrabbled into the wall behind him.

I glowered from underneath the brim of my cap. The brand of coca wine was one of those much beloved by Her Majesty and Pope Leo XIII, and too expensive to be found on the breath of guttersnipes of any stripe. “Where did you receive the coin, Sweet Tom?”

“What?” He laughed, a mawkish thing that showed at least three blackened teeth and a sickly yellow tinge to his gums. “No, that’s not—”

Crack.
My hand stung with the impact, but the heavy cloud of opium enfolding me soothed it away just as quick.

“Some bloke!” he screeched, thrashing now in my grip. His knee collided with mine, sending a dulled rush of pain and awareness to the part of my mind still aware of things. A quiet part. One I silenced mercilessly.

“Who?” I demanded. “A name, Sweet Tom, and I’ll let you limp off to a dollymop’s mercies.”

Fat tears rolled out of the frightened man’s eyes. The fingers wrapped around my wrist bit, but Sweet Tom was no scrapper, and well he and I both knew it. “He never gave no name, you got to believe me!”

I gritted my teeth. “What’d he look like?”

“Hat and coat and a real quiet voice,” my reluctant informant revealed. “But it were real dark! He said he needed a clever eye and quick hand and more’s the coin for silence.” Each word stoked that eager hunger within me, and I stared at him for a long moment, tracing the trickle of blood leaking from his left nostril.

When his eyebrows twisted together, a wince shaping his face as he drew his head back far from me as the wall and my grip allowed, I realized that I was smiling up into Sweet Tom’s terrified face.

I didn’t ease the expression. I wanted to laugh outright, but muffled it to ask, “How long?”

“Eh?”

I gave him a shake, the kind street mongrels the world over learned quickly to interpret. “How long have you been fetching bounties for him?”

“Just started!” He swallowed hard enough that I felt the bob of his throat against my knuckles; heard the sound it made as he forced his dry throat to cooperate. “Please, miss, I’m just a gonoph, don’t know nothin’.”

My smiled widened. “That’s where you’re wrong, Sweet Tom. Do you have plans to meet this benefactor of yours again?”

“No, miss. I just pick up the notes what look right and leave ’em where he wants.”

“Where?”

“Whitechapel Station,” he told me, and even as he spoke, the image of the fog-filled rail yard rose like a specter in front of me. Whitechapel, the Ripper’s own haunt and prime ground for the collector I hunted. “Just by the first gate, there’s an old postbox what don’t get used none.”

“When were you to deliver?” I asked, sweet for all I hadn’t let him go.

I was sure he recognized that fact. Smart lad, he said nothing about it. “Midnight,” he whispered. “Stroke of it by the bell.”

My cheeks ached from the width of my smile. “Good,” I assured him, although I’m positive the menace by which the word slipped from me did nothing of the sort. “You’re a good sort, Sweet Tom. Do be wandering, now. If I learn you’re lying, I’ll find you soon enough.”

“But—” A sickly sheen coated his sallow skin. “But if I don’t fetch his notes, he’ll kill me!”

“You think?” I let him go, straightening his scarf and patched fustian jacket as tenderly as his own mother might, if she’d ever cared. “Then keep low, mate, and if you’re lucky, neither him nor the collectors will find you.”

The smile he summoned looked ill, but he wasted no breath arguing. Hurrying from the hallowed grounds—which I was rather more certain he’d never attempt to trod upon again—he left a drifting wake of coal-stuffed yellow in his path.

My own smile faded as if it’d never been.

The bounties posted were the usual sorts, though a bit scarce. They’d pick up again before Christmas, they always did. Not much Yuletide spirit to go around when coin was the concern.

I’d already found nothing of interest. Nothing, at least, of interest specifically to me.

I sought a different quarry tonight.

Whitechapel Station, then? I wondered why there. As I snuffed Sweet Tom’s lost lantern and adjusted the protective seam of my fog-prevention goggles around my eyes, I ran the facts as I’d learned them through my head. A bloke rich enough to pay a man like Sweet Tom enough to afford the coca wine he’d always been a lush for, one who looked for murder and assassination dispatches over the rest.

It was possible that I could be dealing with one of the London above collectors, but none ever engaged in more than a simple shaking of the merchant tree, or so I’d heard. To think of any of the three Society collectors as murderers was to laugh outright.

I knew all three lordlings, at least in passing. One had offered for my hand in desperate bid for wealth, two pretended I didn’t exist. I could send any one of them pissing his drawers with a calculated word and minimal effort.

None would dare risk so much as a scrape, much less life or limb, on a dispatch request. And certainly none would dare murder an earl. No, I knew who’d done that; I still shuddered if I so much as fancied the whisper of a whistle in the gloom.

A part of me hoped he followed me now.

A part of me craved blood, just as surely as he’d spilled it in my lap.

I fished in my jacket pocket, fingers wrapping around the small wedge of wax paper I’d stuffed there before I left. I’d forgotten my respirator, but I’d pocketed the tar ball.

That should have bothered me.

Yet, rather than dwell on it, just before I stepped into the dark street, I unwrapped the sticky resin from its protective covering, bit a corner and grimaced at the first acrid taste of it on my tongue.

I would find this man, this monster. I would start with Sweet Tom’s mysterious benefactor.

God help anyone in my way.

Which seemed likely, as I crossed out of the collectors’ station and picked my way to Whitechapel. It took time, more than I liked but less than I expected. Not a soul crossed my path, not working girl nor footpad. Not even the shadow of those who spent their evenings trolling the streets for coin or company.

I floated as formless as the devil-fog that carried me adrift upon it. The opium I’d swallowed turned every sound into a symphony of the night. Where I did not see shadows, I heard voices. Where they lifted, they seemed like a hosanna. I felt uplifted and righteous; I felt guided and sublime.

I was neither Cherry St. Croix nor Miss Black, but a woman on a path of virtue and justice.

Opium has always done so much for me. This was simply another step taken, another benefit to a habit that had comforted me through the long nights and difficult times. And yet, as I continued to nibble corners off the tar ball, I failed to understand what would be made all the clearer soon enough: that there would, in time, be a price.

My sanity had already begun to pay.

The Westminster bell rang the eleven o’clock warning just as I arrived at the rail yard. It took no time at all to locate the postbox Sweet Tom had indicated, and even less time to find a place in the shadows from whence I could watch. For the next hour, I sat in the cold and damp and inhaled the bitter fog, succored myself with a bit of the Chinese tar when the cold proved too strong, and entertained myself with all the ways I would enact my revenge upon the soon-to-be-surprised collector when he came.

As Big Ben’s sonorous chime tolled the midnight hour, I did not give up.

As my skin turned damp and my body began to shiver, I watched the postbox with its crooked, sad little numbers and started now and again when a particularly dense weft of fog rolled past. My fingers twitched from within the gloves I’d pulled on, the index finger of one gnawed off because it’d given me something to do, and allowed for easier access to the paper in my pocket.

My heart pounded in slow, rhythmic assurance that I, at least, was still where I expected to be, but slowly the fog thickened. Slowly, the tar shrank, little by little, until my tongue burned and my vision was beginning to blur from the hours as they passed. The one o’clock bell, and then two more.

Pain spiked through my temples; when had I started gritting my teeth?

By the three o’clock bell, my legs had gone numb, and my heart followed suit. I stared blankly into the yellow-black fog, my working lens highlighting the postbox in a corona that I wasn’t positive actually existed, but who was I to worry? I could see it perfectly. Waiting. Undisturbed. Unapproached.

I should move. Return home, but I waited.

What was there for me to find above? A house swathed in black crepe. Fanny watching me with such sorrow in her eyes.

A dead husband.

So I stayed. Long after the rain had started and I was soaked to the flesh, long after the five o’clock bells chimed and the fog began to lighten as a cold wind ghosted through.

I stayed and watched an empty, lonely postbox, because I knew what it was like to feel the same.

Sometime between one breath and the next, lost in the opium mist swaddling me, I fell asleep.

“ ’E
y! ’Ey, what about me pay?”

I startled awake at the shrill demand, found one foot in the air and pitched over. I had a brief glimpse of the yawning void between the gangplank of the
Scarlet Philosopher
and the dock it berthed beside before I collided with the dock facing. The air slammed out of me, knocking any words I’d intended right out of my head.

“ ’Ere, now,” bellowed the captain, hurrying across the gangplank. Three large men closed the gap within seconds, their faces a blur as I struggled to stand. “You all righ’, then?”

“Yes!” I gasped, meaning anything but. The docks swirled around me; the men leered, though when I squinted, I was sure I saw only concern and, rightfully so, anger.

“Be careful, lad!” one barked, angry at the scare, I imagine, and the wasted time.

“You sure?” said the captain, grabbing my arm. Did I sway? I must have. He frowned at me, his fleshy jowls wobbling. “Need me t’ whistle down some ’ackney?”

“Gondola,” I whispered, and shrugged off his hand. I locked my knees with force of will alone, squinted to find myself atop the docks where I usually alighted after a night below.

How did I get here?

The men stalked off, cursing, while Captain Abercott grunted. “You didn’t pay me nuffin’,” he accused. “Cough up.”