Winterspell (2 page)

“There's no money, my sweet one,” John Stole would tell her again and again while he smoked imported cigars and reeked of fine alcohol, and while the other lords of the underground syndicate-turned-empire that called itself Concordia attended the theater with their wives, in silk top hats and heavy furs.

No money, indeed.

Clara was not her mother; she could influence her father only so much. Concordia had chosen him for their figurehead two years before, when Boss Plum had helped her father become mayor, bribing and threatening John Stole's way to the top. But at what price? Her father's integrity, for one. John Stole had barely resisted the most heinous of Concordia's demands that first year in office. Clara had heard her parents' arguments through their cracked-open bedroom door—her father insisting he must bow to Concordia's wishes, her mother incredulous that he had gotten himself into this position.

But Hope's murder had weakened John Stole, destroyed in the space of a day the last vestiges of his crumbling fortitude. It was as though something had eaten away at him over the past year, transforming him
into a powerless ghost. Sometimes Clara felt as though she had lost two parents instead of just the one—one to murder, the other to the snarls of Concordia's web.

She could still recall the headlines from that dreadful day, just after Christmas last year:
HOPE IS DEAD!

“The headline writes itself, don't it?” Clara had heard one of the scandalized servants whisper to another outside her mother's parlor. There Clara had sat, sixteen years old and numb, her eleven-year-old sister, Felicity, sobbing in her arms, for once not worrying about her face turning blotchy.

The headline
should
have read,
HOPE IS MURDERED: BLUDGEONED, SCALPED, MAIMED, AND HUNG LIKE A SPLIT-OPEN DOLL BY THE RIVERSIDE!
Her father had not allowed her to see the photographs of her mother's body, but Clara had heard Concordia gentlemen whispering about the grisly details at the mayor's mansion when they'd slipped in through the underground entrance and thought no one was listening—especially not the mayor's quiet elder daughter, who, thanks to Godfather, knew how to sneak.

And in sneaking—through the mansion and throughout the city—she had learned many things. Though her mother had been officially declared a victim of the downtown gang wars, Police Chief Greeley had confided to a Concordia gentleman, “The way she was killed, the unnecessary, disfiguring violence . . . The Townies don't kill like that. None of the gangs do. I think it was something else entirely.” And there had been similar killings, more and more of them, in the past few months—bad ones, violent ones, most of them by the water and all of them so shockingly gruesome that Concordia had ensured they were kept out of the papers, to prevent a citywide panic.

Clara had also learned that her father was losing favor. In recent months, during lunches and private meetings at the mayor's mansion, he had begun slandering his own people—Concordia people. He would accuse city council members, bought judges, even the chief of police, of
unthinkable crimes. It was mutinous talk. Mutinous, anti-Concordia talk. Entrenched in every city department from sanitation and fire to law enforcement and the courts, the empire of Concordia had noticed John Stole's discontent. At first they had dismissed it graciously as the rantings of the recently bereaved. But their patience had worn thin now, almost a year after Hope's murder, and they were not happy. John Stole's efforts were largely ineffectual; Concordia could see, just as Clara could, that he was all froth and bluster, without any real power behind his words. But a loose tongue, even that of a grieving, weak-willed figurehead, could be dangerous, and John Stole knew too many secrets for his actions to go unpunished.

Clara had to act fast, before her family lost all credibility with Concordia, before she lost her chance to find out what had really happened to her mother. At least for tonight, she had to become the person Godfather seemed to think she could be—someone not trapped by circumstance and crippled by fear.

She had to be more like her mother.

Hope Stole had never let Concordia weaken her. She had looked its cruelest lords straight in the eye and lambasted them unflinchingly for their corruption.

Clara wondered if they'd had her killed for that.

Regardless, it seemed an unattainable goal. “I'm not my mother!” she had cried more than once during her training with Godfather, frustrated that he would expect such things of her, things so far out of her grasp—her mother's strength, her mother's courage.

“No, you are not,” he would say each time, with the sort of conviction that had eluded Clara since her mother's death, “but you are her daughter. You have that same fire within you.”

Godfather said it to encourage her, but his words served only to increase her fear. Yes, her mother had had a fire within—and look what had happened to her.

Mr. Wiley cleared his throat; the commissioner had finished his
speech. Clara took the offered pair of shears and positioned the blades around the red satin ribbon stretched before her. She paused so the
Times
photographer could adjust the plates of his camera just so.

“Nice smile, Miss Stole, there we are,” said Mr. Wiley. “Nice and bright.”

Yes, a smile. A smile for the city still recovering from the recent depression, for the city thick with the rising violence of the downtown gangs and reeling from the unstable food prices, for the streets poisoned by a fear as rampant and deadly as disease.

She had to keep smiling, despite the many reasons not to. Concordia grew suspicious otherwise.

Clara pressed the shears' blades together and cut.

The bright red ribbon floated away on either side. Tepid applause came from the weary-eyed crowd.

Mr. Wiley directed her down into the press of people—to shake hands with Commissioner Higgins, whose fat, grinning face shone pink; to place a hand on the shoulder of a stooped old man who scowled up at the shelter.
Coffin house
, his expression seemed to say. He knew—he was not a fool—and yet what was there to do?

Clara swallowed, each brush of someone's arm against hers, each glance of every citizen she passed making her flinch. For there
was
nothing to do, except to pretend, and take what was given, and stay silent.

In this city Concordia had become law. And for the daughter of its figurehead, Concordia had become life.

So Clara stood beside the scowling old man and turned toward the photographer with a smile on her face. The old man's shoulders shook with cold against her arm. Above them a bedraggled cluster of ribboned holly hung limply from a streetlamp.

All things considered, the decoration looked ridiculous. Parodic. Cruel.

Clara stared up at it, the crowd dispersing around her.

Merry Christmas, indeed.

C
lara hiked up her bustle, top-skirt, and petticoats, clipping their hems to her waist with the hook apparatus Godfather had fashioned. She could release the hook in an instant to cover herself if need be, but until then, she would need her legs free to move.

It was fifty minutes after her speech, thirty after she had slipped away from Mr. Wiley and lied once again to her poor maid, the unsuspecting Mrs. Hancock. Hope Stole would not have allowed someone so dim-witted to remain in her household's employ, but Clara was grateful for the maid's gullibility. It was what allowed Clara to so frequently disappear.

She took a moment, here in this quiet alleyway beside Rivington Hall, to close her eyes and forget who she was—fearful Clara, trembling, pretending Clara—to slip into that steady, hot, flinty place she only ever found after an hour of throwing punches at Godfather, when her hair clung to her skin and her body stung with bruises. She needed her wits about her if she was going to do this.

And she
was
going to do this.

Voices drifted out from one of the windows overhead, a white curtain fluttering in the chilled breeze. A bark of laughter and the jingle of harness bells came from nearby Essex Street. Fear seized her. She crouched low, hugging the wall as though it could do something to save her should she be discovered.

“Keep your head, Clara Stole,” she whispered, fumbling to secure her petticoats, her fingers streaking them with street grit. Felicity would be appalled.

The thought gave Clara a fleeting smile—until her fingers brushed against the cotton breeches she hid under her gowns every morning. To feel the contours of her legs unimpeded by the usual layers of fabric made her shudder, as though she were touching some alien thing. The knobs of her knees, the curving lines of her thighs . . . She drew her hands away. She did not trust the tingling sensation her touch produced, and she was quite sure that the prospect of such a sensation, of such intimacy, was what made Dr. Victor watch her so hungrily.

She cringed to think of Dr. Victor, one of the more powerful men of Concordia. Elegant, handsome, and disgustingly rich, he had a disturbing preoccupation with Clara. He would threaten the perfectly nice young men who had attempted conversation since her debut, frightening them away forever; he would stare at her with that unholy light in his eyes that said he would like nothing more than to corner her and slide his hands, roughly, where he had no right to go.

In those moments it was not Clara's place to fight back. Dr. Victor was too powerful a man to defy, and her family could not afford to further upset anyone, especially Concordia's walking bank account. She needed to be seen as spineless, unthreatening, and most of the time that perception was the truth, a fact that filled her with relentless shame.

But it was not so today. Today she would dare to follow her mother's example. Hope Stole deserved for
someone
out here in the world of the living to know the truth about her death.

Clara forced her mind back into its fraught compartments and traded her lace gloves for dark leather ones that molded to her fingers like a second, sleek skin. Wearing them transported her into a sturdier state of mind, made her feel deadly and capable, as did the boots encasing her legs. Godfather had modified them for her months ago as
a birthday gift—simple and cream-colored with plain laces to anyone who glimpsed them peeking out below her hem, but underneath her skirts they stretched above her knees, generously supple, blades hidden in the heels and ready to detach with the release of a concealed spring-loaded mechanism.

“The city is dangerous,” Godfather had told her upon gifting them. And then, tenderly, tilting up her chin to kiss her brow: “I won't let the same thing happen to you.”

The unspoken word had lingered between them like a bad dream: “murder.”

Clara grabbed her parasol from where it leaned against the grimy brick wall, and scowled as she felt it bend in her grip. Unforgivably ridiculous, cumbersome frippery. A man would have his cane, his pocketknife, his gun, perhaps. He would not be weighed down by useless lace and handkerchiefs. It was as though society wanted its females to be at risk. Were it not for Godfather, Clara would not have had the tiny automatic blade in her bodice and the dagger in the holster buckled around her thigh, to say nothing of the skill to use them.

She had imagined it, desperately, over and over—driving the jagged blade into Dr. Victor's handsome face. But when she saw him in the light of day, her fear melted away any thoughts of bloody justice, leaving her feeling helpless and wretched.

Sometimes she would catch him looking at her in
that way
, as though she were his already. She tried as best as current fashions allowed to cover the curves she'd been developing over the past few years, but that did nothing to dissuade him. And whenever he saw her alone, he would sidle close and whisper, “It's your fault, you know, for being so beautiful, so wanton.” His voice would slither across the words. “I can't help myself, Clara Stole.” And Clara would want to gag because the chemical stench of him was so near, and she would believe him.

Thinking of it, Clara wiped angry tears from her eyes. She
was
weak,
as he always said, pathetically so. She couldn't banish these thoughts from her mind, couldn't stop her hands from shaking at the thought of Dr. Victor's cold white fingers upon her.

Fighting for calm, torn between the comfort of her boots and breeches and the terror of what Dr. Victor would say if he saw her in such a state, Clara slipped the lock pick from her parasol's shaft and crouched down to work. Years of haunting Godfather's shop had taught her many things—how to replace the gears of a broken clock, how to bake clay figurines in a kiln, how to pick a lock.

How to incapacitate someone with a kick to the head.

Not, of course, that Clara had ever found the courage for that. Opportunity, yes, loads of times. But
courage
? That was something else entirely.

The lock gave way, and Clara slipped inside before she could convince herself not to. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the corridor before her, lined with plush carpet as dark as blood, and polished wood-paneled walls. Down the corridor to her left, the wall opened to reveal a small staircase and curling banisters.

Clara crept toward the stairs and then up them, each footfall measured, each breath a risk. If she were caught by a Concordia gentleman, if she couldn't release her skirts in time, if they saw her here, unescorted . . .
If, if, if.
The word infected her thoughts, a hissed refrain. Pausing every few steps to listen for sounds of approach, she mentally recited her planned excuses if caught—simpering apologies and manufactured coquettishness that still might do her no good. Despite being raised in a political household, she was a terrible liar, as Godfather always said. “You wear your heart on your face,” he would tell her, and smile his sad smile.