The Heartbeat Thief (26 page)

Senza focused on the inherent vileness of such an act, if only to drown out the more distressing thought. Aggie, her beloved cousin and dearest friend, had grown to resent her to the point that she could not bear to look upon her likeness.

They toured the rest of the collection with an odd disconnect, although Senza did her best to play up her part. Breckenridge was a keen man, however, and had scented the storm on the wind, even though the wind pretended to be cordial and fair. He entertained her gallantly and they promised to dine together soon, pretty promises that neither believed to be true.

A decent man, through and through. And from a large family, too…

London would be full of Aggie’s progeny. Senza felt stifled, as if all the air disappeared. Upon arriving at her apartments, she ordered her things packed even as she strode the stairs. Fervently, she prayed for a sign that she could escape the suddenly oppressive city, full of heartbeats for which she had no appetite.

Taking off her hat, she walked over to her vanity and set it down, spying at once the folded parchment note in front of her mirror.

His script.

Her next escape.

At least, Knell had seen to that. She crumpled it in her hand, fisting it against her mouth against a wash of bitter tears. After all these years, after all she’d endured, nothing had truly changed.

She was well-kept, indeed.

Senza became a wanderer, and all the world was an open door.

Despite the abundance of open doors, however, the world never offered more than the scantest of allure; open doors led to cavernous, echoing hallways and sparsely-furnished quarters. It was almost as if each new country, each town were little more than an empty manor house, a shell of pretty façade, lacking hospitality or reason to stay past a curious walk-through.

She moved in slow-motion, like a ribbon trailing through still water, flowing against the stream of time in her timeless, motionless way. The rest of the world was a raging river, full of life and a cacophony of crashes on the rocks and on the shore. No two moments were ever same, despite the perilous, inescapable sense of “now”.

Her “now” and the “nows” of the multitudinous masses were two very different things. To the rest of the world, “now” was a single sweet moment easily missed, fondly remembered, often regretted. Senza’s “now” was simply a snapshot of eternity, played out again and again. Her “nows” were one and the same, forever without end. Empty and bereft of companionship, genuine love, true comfort.

The world sped on around her, cities swelling and industry blooming like daisies in a field, bigger and better and faster and louder.

Yet, she was part of none of it. Deep in her heart, she would always be a scared young girl from the English countryside. Each new invention and accomplishment just ate away at the world she’d known, corroding it and replacing it with the new and the metallic and the modern.

In all its shiny newness, Senza saw only decay.

She sailed from Europe, crossing the Atlantic, seeing the new world for the first time. It was not new at all. All was awash in the inevitable shades of decay. And when she stopped and looked at the people surrounding her, she saw only the hollow despair that came from living their fleeting lives, desperate leaps from one “now” to the next, fervently praying for yet another…

They never noticed the decay that mouldered the shadows, darkening each footstep behind them.

Could she sleep forever? Could she ever escape these heavy sentiments?

Upon arriving in the Americas, she travelled by southbound train, exploring the costal colonies—states, she’d remind herself—but never finding roost. She felt most at home in the South, finding welcome at the wealthiest homes. The stock market crash and the second Great War did not pollute the most prosperous of families, who ignored the tribulations of the world around them, lost in their cotillions and grand teas populated by belles and sharp-suited gentlemen.

In Georgia the plantation manors with their long, scenic tree-lines drives and imposing column-faced homes reminded her most of the home she’d once knew. The lilt of the aristocrats’ voices sounded like music to her English ears; their manner of speaking, their eloquent diction, and their loquacious expressions mimicked the mother tongue, despite the distinct Southern melody with which they spoke.

She lingered longest in Savannah, attending many a coming-out ball, able to wear ballroom finery without shame. She took to society the same way she’d done at her own debut, submerging herself in the comforts of rigid propriety and social intercourse. So easy it was, to become that girl she’d once been.

Georgia in 1931 felt so very much like the England of a century earlier.

It would have been a balm to her hollowing soul, were she not constantly reminded of her wretched state. The locket hung like a stock lock around her neck, a weight she could not escape. Heartbeats were stacked in heaps about her, hers for the taking. Her beauty untarnished, she watched the world around her sour just a bit more, darken as if drawing another tick of the clock toward midnight. Senza drew men to her orbit, her beauty and wit and allure impossible to resist. She was the embodiment of Southern Charm, even though she was never truly a part of that world. Always the flame. Never the moth.

Never the moth again.

The current population of Savannah did not bear the same sentiments for history or tradition as did she, and eventually the pleasant squares were shredded to make room for traffic, the historical building razed to make way for the newer, more glorious age. Senza could not bear to watch another love die, and fretted until her parchment dispatches arrived.

Even as she boarded the west-bound train, she mourned Savannah, with its decaying eloquence, the dripping moss in the trees, the songs of the insects and the smell of the river. Eyes closed, she listened to the clickety-clack of the train on the rails but in her mind’s eye she saw the carts on River Street, wheels rolling in rickety bumps over the cobblestones.

There was something timeless about that town that tugged at her deepest regrets, the way a wistful child pulled at the sleeve of a beloved caregiver. Perhaps the city recognized something inside her, a kindred spirit, and felt as desolate as she. Senza and Savannah shared a tender grief that each wore with stubborn pride, beautiful even as the world turned to grey around them. The past was gone, over, perished, and each of the timeless ladies pinned their hats and spread their fans, too polite to acknowledge time’s regretful passing.

Savannah would never die, not all the way. Neither would Senza. The bitter sweetness of her affection for that city was precisely the reason she left. If she loved, she could lose, and Savannah did not deserve so cruel a fate.

She made her way across the seemingly endless country.

Decades passed. Clothing, music, entertainment…it changed and evolved with every passing decade. All she could bring herself to do was acknowledge that times had indeed changed. That was all. Her days in the throbbing pulse of society were over. She’d tried to remain mainstream, always possessed the means to blend in wherever she wanted to be—to blend in before standing out, her eyes, her skin, her mouth. A hundred years earlier, these were things to be admired from a politely aloof distance.

Now, manners were becoming increasingly familiar to the point of vulgarity. Conversations were bluntly intimate. Sex was a public spectacle, commonplace to the point of being commercialized.

And nowhere was it more evident than in the land of California, deep in the bowels of Hollywood.

When she tired of the offers and the comparisons, she headed back east to New York. No longer the steel glitter of Frank Lloyd Wright and Fifth Avenue, the city had aged, weakened its façade, and the reality peered through. She swam through the nightclubs, packed with pulses and delirium a thousand times worse than the opium dens of Whitechapel. She drifted through the raging river of the nineteen-seventies, engorging herself on the beats of life, stealing from people who seemed all too intent on burning themselves out upon the throes of too fast a life.

In 1984, she stood in the middle of Times Square, surrounded by cacophony of motion and sound and light. The veins of this city ran slick with emotion, dark spurts of desperation and lust and pain. The ragged and torn that clung to the fringe, the fiery predators that hunted the tides of society—these are the heartbeats upon which she fed. And what was she feeding upon, if not the precursors of death?

The realization staggered her. She averted her eyes, not wishing to remain a single moment longer.
Please, Knell. If you have any compassion, any thought of me at all…

A shoulder rough-shoved her from behind and she fell to her knees, dazed. A group of loud teenagers swarmed around her, commenting loudly about weirdoes and druggies. On the ground before her lay a strip of parchment. Wild-eyed she looked up, catching the sight of a man with a glassy black ponytail walking away, a head taller than anyone in the crowd around him.

She clutched the paper and, crumpling it to her chest, pushed to her feet. No one acknowledged she’d even fallen.

The paper bore an address in Canada.

Her locket was full, heavy with the beat and the rhythm of life, so many pulses stolen from the streets of this ceaseless city. It was time to go, and all too easy to leave another world behind.

She boarded a bus in Port Authority, looking very much like some of the waifs that stood in line with her. They looked like orphans, with weary haunted eyes that spoke of despair and loss and surrender. They may have come to this city to realize their dreams, only to learn those dreams may as well have been stars, out of reach and so much brighter when looked upon with eyes that knew hope.

Those souls would one day find peace. Senza could reach up and pluck stars from their perches sooner than peace would be hers. Farther North she travelled, straight through New York to the colonies above.

New England, they called it. The land was as unlike the South as she could have imagined; very much like the north and the south of old England. Massachusetts was the Manchester to the Carolinas’ Brighton; they simply stood a greater distance apart.

Originally, she intended to continue on through to Canada as she’d been instructed, perhaps to visit Prince Edward Island, if only to dispel the notion that the island would have appealed to the ancient boy-king. However, she’d become travel-weary and, during a transfer in Massachusetts, she left the station to seek a room, intending a brief stay.

Boston was quaint and charming in its austerity, the colonial trappings and fierce revolutionary pride that flowed through the veins of the city. She explored the town, as she’d done countless others, and with each conversation, each greeting and pleasantry, another root took hold. Her two-night sojourn turned into a week, a week that became a month. Senza was attracted to this new England and its ever-changing sameness. Slowly she gave in to the admission that she’d finally found someplace to drop an anchor.

She was home, and for once it was a home of her choosing, not a destination on a scrap of parchment.

It wasn’t the home of her childhood, nor any of the temporary homes she’d known. Only a single element beckoned to her, a quality so odd she found herself shaking her head and laughing at herself for admitting it. She stayed because of the voices of the people, their absurd accent. Unlike the English quality of the Southern vice, these northern voices were broad and hard and sharp, nearly savage in its lack of gentility.

And she loved it, because of all the sounds of the world, it reminded her most of Felicity and her absurd voice.

It had been so very long since she’d heard that sound but, here in the Northeast, there were so many reminders of Felicity. A Bostonian accent was the other side of the world from a Melbournian tongue, to be sure, but both had been English colonies at one point. Both had a common mother. Growing up so far from their proper place and time, the accents had evolved.

Boston was English no longer. Time had changed the accent, somewhat, hammering it out broader and flatter. But it was close enough to Australian for Senza to take comfort in it.

She was positive a linguist would disagree to the point of argument, but it didn’t bother her in the least. Part of her heart still felt, still remembered. If the memories had been distorted by the shrouds of time, she of all people would have the greatest excuse. And if the linguists wouldn’t forgive her, so be it.

She’d done more than enough to be repudiated.

She took refuge in a bed and breakfast inn and ignored her suitcases, which seemed to position themselves closer to the door with each passing day, as if trying to nudge her along.

Not this time. Senza would pull the bags away from the door and close the door on them, stubborn in her resolve to thwart him, just once. Day after day, she took in sights and tourist attractions, relishing the idea that a fight for independence began in this very place, ordinary people struggling against an unseen hand. So fitting. The thoughts gave her immense satisfaction.

When the week was out, the proprietor reluctantly told her that her stay must conclude, as the rooms had been reserved by another. He gave her a copy of the newspaper in response to her query of more permanent lodging.

She spent several hours trying to make sense of the classified advertisements. This was the first time she’d truly had to fend for herself. Chewing her lip, she scoured the listings, trying to make sense of their cryptic abbreviations, not willing to admit she’d made a foolish decision.

When she went up to her room to retrieve her bags, she found the journal lying open on the bed. For the first time, her journal and its seemingly-endless list of addresses bore a correction. The Canadian address was crossed out, and his familiar handwriting beneath detailed the location of an address to the east.