The Twisted Tragedy of Miss Natalie Stewart (17 page)

Father entered with some light lunch he’d procured for us both. Living so near to the Metropolitan, we had lunch together at home if I wasn’t with him at the acquisitions board, which had yet to give me any real responsibilities. Considering my more pressing duties, that was for the best.

Father welcomed Rachel like another daughter. Then I remembered they’d all had quite an experience, communing with my mother in a séance. Without me. I shoved that sting aside.

Rachel held out a note to my father. It read: “I’m so sorry for bringing any trouble upon your house. I’ll try to make it up to you.”

My father blinked back tears. He looked at her directly so she could more easily read his lips. “You gave me a chance to talk to Helen one last time. And that gift can never be repaid.” He cleared his throat, kissed Rachel on the forehead, and walked out the door to work. Tears were in my eyes too, before I knew it.

“About that,” I said, rubbing my face. “I want to know everything that was said. I’ve been desperate to talk to Mother. I wish I could’ve been there.”

“She’s always watching over you,” Rachel signed.

Damn. There went the tears again. “Well, she could at least give me a sign of it.”

“She does. Sometimes you’re not paying attention.”

I opened my mouth to protest but then shut it. I’d have to pay attention. “I want to know everything about what’s been going on, Rachel, but let’s get you to Mrs. Northe.” I took Jonathon’s letter with me.

Mrs. Northe was as welcoming as ever, looking fresh and summery in a lavender silk dress with a white lace modesty panel. There were no undue pleasantries. It wasn’t as though we were beginning as strangers, and by the look of Rachel, haggard and weary, she couldn’t have kept up the pretense of anything other than emergency. I handed Mrs. Northe Jonathon’s letter.

“Read it, please. I don’t know the strength or membership of the Master’s Society, but it’s something to work with. My poor, brave Jonathon.”

“Mary, will you give Rachel a tour and show her to her rooms?” Mrs. Northe asked, taking the letter and reading it immediately.

Mary nodded and took Rachel by the arm. Just as I had done, Rachel looked around in amazement at the finery of the Fifth Avenue town house that was in the same city and yet a world away from the manner in which she and I lived.

Once Rachel felt safe and strong enough, we tried to find out how things had gone terribly wrong. It took a while to get the account out of her, about Preston’s darkening days and the progression of the boxes tethering spirits to objects. Or, later,
parts
.

“What are the parts being used for?” Mrs. Northe asked. Rachel shook her head and shrugged. She signed that she had tried to get answers out of the spirits, but all she could glean was that they were angry, that they weren’t meant to be alive anymore, that they wanted her to let them go or to put them back where they belonged. That the natural order of things was being overturned.

“Preston’s chief interest seemed to be in reversing death,” I mentioned. “
Reanimation
, the Majesty said.”

Rachel’s pale, hollowed face turned pleading. “Please. Not evil,” she signed. “He didn’t start evil. Laura—”

“We understand,” Mrs. Northe said. “Hardly anyone drawn to dark depths begins that way.”

I thought of Samuel, and I was scared for him. If we could get him to New York, perhaps we could all help break the allure…

“The spirits,” Rachel signed. “They don’t stop. They have so much to say, so much wrong, but it’s all jumbled. I don’t know what I’m hearing, or who. A floodgate. It’s all just a sea of pain.”

And then she sank in her chair exhausted, her head dropping. I wondered if the spirits had been allowing her any sleep. Likely not. If they had no rest, neither would she.

“Well, then.” Mrs. Northe looked at me. “We need her to untie those spirits, but she has to be able to survive trying to reach them, to have the presence of mind to separate one voice from the pack. Poor girl,” she murmured. “Those with gifts so easily become targets. That Society likes to prey upon the most vulnerable and cut to the quick those who would fight against them.” The words hit me strongly, making sense out of what might have appeared to be a random pattern.

Mrs. Northe gazed at Rachel a moment and then took her up in her arms, showing a surprising strength. “Natalie, do me a favor. Gather my skirts and hand them to me.” She shifted Rachel’s weight, a large, tall child in her arms, and held out an open hand. I gathered the doubled layers of fine silk, handed them up to Mrs. Northe, and pressed the folds into her open palm while her forearm was tucked under Rachel’s legs.

“One of these days, women will be able to wear clothing that allows them to move properly and do something productive,” she muttered.

“Oh, but it’s such a beautiful dress,” I said longingly. Mrs. Northe laughed.

“And that is what we must do in these coming days, my dove. Hold tight to the positive.”

Chapter 16

My dearest Natalie,

This will likely reach you just before I see you again, but I had to tell you an odd thing that happened to me after I met with the Majesty.

Walking in Bloomsbury on business, I turned down a narrow street between Romanesque buildings. A severe woman—tightly buttoned in gray, with brown hair pulled taut beneath a hat—exclaimed as I came around the corner.

She blurted out as if she couldn’t help herself, “Good God, young man, you must be freezing!”

“Headmistress,” chided a tall man all in black. More severe than she, if that were even possible, he swept out from behind her and past me like some swooping raven, black hair and black frock coat billowing, looking behind me as if I were being followed by a parade or something.

“One moment, Professor. That’s too much for one boy to handle. Look at all of it,” she said, gesturing around me.

“Excuse me? All of what?” I asked.

She turned, piercing me with gray-blue eyes. “Pardon me if this seems rude and presumptuous, but you’re very haunted. Recent brush with death?”

I stared at her, then back at the man who, with a sour expression, was nonchalantly waving things off around me as if I were surrounded by flies. Or worse.

“Yes,” I replied slowly. What else could I say?

“That explains it,” she replied. “And why you’re wearing a scarf in summer. They do give off quite a chill.”

“What does?” I asked.

“Ghosts.” She clapped her hands in an authoritarian way and spoke sharply to the retinue of spirits that had evidently been following me. “Go on! Off with you. He’s the picture of health, no thanks to you.” She looked at me, behind me, then at me again. “There. All better. I shouldn’t be saying this to you, but I’ve a suspicion you’ve seen and heard stranger things than this.”

“Thank you…I think? And you are?”

“Oh,” the woman chuckled drily. “Don’t you worry about who we are. If darkness follows you, turn your face away. Don’t feed the shadows. You’re a doctor.” She tapped her temple, her eyes glittering though she never smiled. “I can tell. I’ve a sense about you. We need doctors, young man, of all kinds. My friends and I are doctors of sorts, in the way we’re called to be. Death didn’t claim you, so you’ve work to do. So go on and heal the wounds of this world, my boy. We can never have too many healers.”

She reached out to touch me on the cheek as if I were a long-lost son but thought better of it. Turning back toward the mouth of the alley, she headed toward the man all in black who awaited her with his arms folded, looking bored and impatient. He held out an arm for her and she took it, falling into intense conversation as they turned the corner toward the heart of Bloomsbury with no further thought of me or glance back.

I was a lot warmer. I felt amazingly better. I rolled my scarf up and tucked it in my briefcase.

What else can I make of this odd meeting but that it was a sign? A sign that there are others in the world who are drawn, like us, toward inexplicable callings. If there’s a Master’s Society, then we must form our own society of peers in resistance. Perhaps London is that much safer with people like those two. Now New York needs people like us. I’m filled with purpose and cured of my chills.

Rallied by the encounter, life surges in my veins, and I’m more determined than ever to expose the entire insidious operation before more damage is done. I shall honor the strange good deeds done to me by strangers down a Bloomsbury alley.

In visiting family deposit boxes, I retrieved funds and a few treasures. I’ve enclosed a cameo pendant from my mother. It isn’t doing her any good now, certainly, and I know she’d have liked you. Loved you. So please take it.

I’ll see you very soon. In a dream? I’d like to see you in a nightdress, unless you’re being modest. Which I respect, I do. Utterly. Even if modesty isn’t any fun.

Yours,

Jonathon

I laughed, as if the pall that had been lifted from Jonathon by those odd good Samaritans was lifted from me too. I undid the twine and thin paper to reveal a gorgeous white cameo on an onyx surface, surrounded by a glittering pewter filigree and hung on a silk ribbon. The girl in the cameo was nymph-like, with flowers in her hair, a faerie queen for our strange fairy tale. Gazing in the mirror, I held it up to my neck, then put it on and waltzed about the room. I’d need Mrs. Northe or someone to give me a waltzing lesson before Jonathon and I could attend a ball together.

***

I slept well, at first. But the hazy dream of moving shadows came into sharp focus, likely somewhere around 3 a.m., when all my dreams seem to reach their zenith.

Jonathon and I stood many paces apart, the usual corridor of my dreamworld windy and noisy as with the clatter of steel and rail, or the blowing of a terrible storm. His boat was coming across the ocean toward me, so a certain rocking lull came into our hallway. Light came into the corridor as if from windows, but it blinked in and out as though we were standing between passing trains on either side, or in and out of undulating shadow constantly in transit.

“I’ll see you soon,” he called to me, the black waves of his hair buffeted by the wind. I ached to run my hands through the locks.

He looked me up and down, and I noticed that I was only in my summer nightgown, a more revealing one. “Ah, thank you for the nightdress,” he said, grinning rakishly. “I’ll come for you soon.”

I stepped forward, reaching for him.

Love in its first bloom, all the poets said, was full of aching and impatience. So then was I. And so then was he.

But something changed.

The flickering lights went dark, and a single dim light from one far-off window cast my love into stark contrast and deep shadow.

It was not love that had him approaching me with the look I remembered from the demon. His eyes held that odd reflective quality of the demon’s. “I’m coming for you,” he growled. The noisy, echoing corridor was filled again with those dread whispers.

And he swiped a hand at me, ripping the neckline of my gown.

“You think they won’t know what you’ve done? They’ll know. My strength grows. I will kill you, Arilda, after all.”

Arilda
.

The name I’d taken when I tricked the demon. He had been targeting young women with the names of saints. It gave him some kind of added power. And it seemed he still remembered mine.

And then the reflective eyes were gone, and Jonathon stood before me as I knew him to be. But he stared at me as if in pity and turned to walk away.

“Jonathon…” I called after him.

“
Cruel
,” he spat.

He reached into the darkness, opening a door beyond the charred study. He slammed the door behind him, and I was left alone again with only murmuring darkness and the sting of jagged fingernail scratches upon my collarbone.

I awoke and was alarmed to find that there were indeed scratches where I’d felt them in my dreams. While my bond with Jonathon was stronger for the supernatural experiences we shared, perhaps something of the demon was still an echo somewhere inside? Was Jonathon fully rid of him? Whatever conduit brought my premonitions, did it let in something ugly too? How could I filter the good from the bad?

I fingered the scratch and tried not to cry. As with the runes on my arm, I felt violated. When a person sleeps, he or she is vulnerable, and nothing should
ever
attack a vulnerable being. No unwarranted or unwelcome, uncomfortable attention should ever be tolerated.

Pushing back my nightgown sleeves, I cried out to find more runes upon my arm, the same red thin markings, as if carved with a delicate pen-knife. I denied them, shaking my head, my hair falling from its bun. “I renounce thee,” I said, and they began to fade. I marked them diligently.