Winterspell Read online

  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.

  2

  Clara 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.

  As she progressed through Rivington Hall, the muscles of her legs and arms, strengthened over the past year of Godfather’s training into lithe, combat-ready limbs, knotted with apprehension. At every hint of noise her fingers itched
to release the daggers from her heels. Paintings of Concordia members past and present watched her progress with cold black eyes.

  She paused before the landing of the grand staircase. This would be the tricky part—sneaking across the landing and into Patricia Plum’s private office without anyone seeing her. According to the whispers Clara had caught, Plum herself was uptown for a luncheon, Dr. Victor was at Harrod House for the afternoon, and anyone else loitering in the Hall at this time would be drinking brandy, smoking, and fondling girls brought in from Allen Street.

  But without Patricia Plum around, smelling of sweets and poppies, gliding silently in her silks with gentlemen hanging off her arms, Clara hoped to sneak into the woman’s office without trouble. The air of Concordia’s headquarters was always more relaxed with its widowed queen elsewhere, and with relaxation came inattention. Clara was counting on it.

  From the corridor behind her drifted the sweet bite of cigar smoke and the trill of soft laughter, the slam of a door. The sounds jarred her, shaking her resolve. She wished suddenly that Godfather were here; the last time she had been to Rivington Hall, he had been beside her, and the danger had therefore not felt quite so dire.

  That particular exercise had been one of Godfather’s most exhilarating, a true test of her sneaking skills—both of them, cloaked in shadow and slinking through Rivington Hall’s empty corridors in the last hours before dawn. Together they had mapped each twist and turn, Clara struggling to memorize each room, each staircase. Godfather’s silent presence had never been far away, and it had felt like a terrific game. Each time Clara had successfully picked a lock or disappeared into silence beside him, Godfather had squeezed her hand in approval.

  Tonight, however, she was alone, and the game was much more treacherous. In fact, Godfather would probably rage at her in his dear, protective way, were he to find out she had returned here on her own. He would call it “an unnecessary risk, my dear Clara.”

  Risk, yes. Unnecessary? Hardly. Standing on the steps of the homeless shelter her mother should have been alive to commemorate, struggling to breathe through the pangs of memory as the anniversary of her mother’s death approached, had confirmed the need for this today—the need for action.

  She could not bear another year of grief without explanation.

  Clara stepped out onto the landing, body humming with readiness. Across from her stood a heavy wooden set of double doors, black in the dim lamplight. Plum’s office. If Clara weren’t careful, the Concordia gentlemen lounging in the lobby below could glance up the stairs and easily see her fiddling with the lock.

  At the beginning of her training, shortly after the murder, Godfather had taught Clara how to turn feline when the situation necessitated it—how to slink and prowl, how to press oneself to a wall’s contours and slide along it like a sigh.

  “Like you would to a lover,” Godfather had instructed, before clamping his lips shut. His pale cheeks had grayed. It was an odd quirk of his, one of many—his blush, unlike most people’s, tinged his sharp cheeks not with pink but with silver and shadows.

  Reflexively, Clara’s eyes had flitted to the hulking statue in the corner of the workshop’s cluttered main room—a silent, solemn figure amid piles of half-finished dolls and skeletons of clocks. The forest of lanterns that hung from the rafters dropped soft slices of amber light onto the statue’s face, illuminating its regal profile.

  “I— Godfather, I know nothing about lovers.”

  “Of course, yes. Forgive me, Clara. I didn’t mean—” He’d sworn under his breath, awkward and irritated. “For a moment I forgot to whom I was speaking.”

  They had stared at each other and then looked away, and Godfather had fiddled with the strap of his eye patch and ruffled his graying brown hair. When they resumed their lesson at last, Godfather dimmed every lamp but one and demonstrated from across the room.

  “Do you see?” As he slid through the shadows, moving in silence across the gear-strewn floor, Clara watched intently. “You must move as though through water. The room is yours to know, to possess. The energy within you subsumes its energy. You are the room. You are the shadows. Try it.”

  She did, awkwardly at first, knocking into tables and stumbling over a pile of discarded doll parts on the floor. Godfather snuck up beside her with instructions from the dark: “Slowly, my Clara. You are no longer a girl; you are not even a person. You are a cat, you are darkness, you are a storm too distant to hear. Try again.”

  After two hours the lamp gave out. Her muscles aching, sweat dripping down her back, Clara lost Godfather. She lost Dr. Victor and Concordia, and her dead mother, and her nerves—everything but the exhilaration of hiding not from someone, for once, but instead hiding with a purpose. Slipping so completely into the shadows that she knew nothing but the ache of her legs and the wall’s texture beneath her palms, she was no longer Clara; she was shadow, and silence, and supple heat. Even the darkness on her cheeks seemed to tingle.

  Then she knocked against the statue in the corner, and it was such a shock, such an awakening, that she had to gasp. Jolted out of her trance, her senses reeling, she used the statue to pull herself to her feet—and promptly forgot to breathe. The hard lines of the statue’s thighs, belly, chest, scraped against her skin, snagging at the cotton of her chemise, and she found herself moving slowly so as to prolong the contact. Molding herself to the metal, she sighed. Her palms slick with sweat, she slid them up the statue’s chest to cup the chiseled, handsome jaw, and pressed herself closer. She inhaled, shuddering, and tasted the tang of metal and the oils Godfather used to keep tarnish away. Curling into the crook of the statue’s left arm, she let the sudden fancy overtake her. What would it feel like if that iron-muscled arm could come alive and pull her closer, its spikes digging into the back of her neck, its cold fingers threading through her hair . . . ?

  The swipe of a match. The hiss of flame.

  “That’s enough.” In the fresh lamplight Godfather’s face was dark with fury, but his good eye was not on Clara; it was on the statue’s face, as if . . . admonishing it.

  Mortified, Clara peeled herself away. She stole a lingering glance at the statue’s arm, muscled and savage, covered with spikes and foreign etchings. Her heart beat practically off its hinges. She had touched the statue many times, but never had there been such . . . heat to it.

  In their sparring that night, Godfather’s blows had stung as sharply as the glare of his eye. It was as if he had known her fevered thoughts and wanted to shock them out of her for reasons Clara couldn’t fathom.

  Now, as Clara crept toward Plum’s office and went to work with her lock pick, she kept the reassuring presence of Godfather’s odd little shop in her mind. Twice she thought she heard someone coming, and paused, her mind fumbling for the memorized excuses. When the lock gave, Clara almost laughed with relief, and cracked the door enough to slip inside.

  She scanned Patricia Plum’s office—the heavy oak desk drawers, the glass case in the corner, the cabinets by the walls, all with prominently displayed locks. But this did not discourage Clara; working quickly, she used her pick to open each case and cabinet. She inspected each book and trinket, felt along the walls and the backs of bookcases for something to give way, and found nothing until her gaze landed on the massive desk at the right of the room. She crawled beneath it, scooting past the legs of Plum’s claw-footed chair. Even the carpet reeked of perfume and poppies, sweet, dangerous notes that sent Clara’s head spinning.

  With the blade of her dagger, she jimmied between each grooved edge in the desk’s wooden panels until she found what she was looking for—a hidden catch, a tiny click as one of the panels gave way.

  Clara closed her eyes and exhaled. Here, she hoped, lay the real treasures of Patricia Plum’s office. It was a Concordia trick that Clara had observed over the years. The gentlemen thought themselves so clever, storing their important papers in secret cupboards and hidden compartments. Clara’s own father did it: his sat behind a bookshelf,
which, if you could find the catch, slid back to reveal a safe.

  How easy it was, when pretending to fiddle with her skirts or read her book, to secretly observe those around her. How easy it was to excuse herself for a nap and instead hide outside her father’s parlor as Patricia Plum murmured of bought judges and hushed murders.

  For a few moments Clara dug through the narrow compartment, searching through wrapped envelopes and pages of correspondence. At every slight noise from outside, she froze, sweat beading on her forehead. Then, when she’d started to lose hope, Clara found something promising—several leather packets wound with ribbon and twine, the first marked DECEMBER 1898.

  The month of Hope Stole’s murder.

  Risking the light, giddy with sudden nervousness, Clara turned up the desk lamp and rooted through her findings for what felt like hours. Each packet contained newspaper clippings, tiny paper booklets, and photographs—all documenting murder after brutal murder. Maulings, flayings, decapitations. It was terrible violence; it wasn’t to be believed . . . but then Clara’s eyes fell upon a particular photograph and a few familiar words, and the reality of the evidence before her hit her like a physical blow. Her hands flew to her mouth as she forced down the urge to be sick, to run, to return to her earlier ignorance and be happy about it.

  Her mother, dead. Her mother, torn apart.

  These were the photographs her father had never allowed her to see or to be printed in the papers. No, those photographs in the Times had been of Hope Stole alive, buttoned to the throat and wrists, her dark hair pinned up with mother-of-pearl combs, her hands on her husband’s arm, and her face—full of light and mischief and a steady, solid strength—so unlike the faces of other women. Clara had often stood in front of her mirror and tried to imitate the look, putting up her chin and searching for the expression that would make her eyes light up with that same secret fire. Her father used to cup her mother’s face when he thought no one was looking, whisper, “Your eyes are full of stars,” and kiss her deeply, and from her hiding place in the shadows Clara would burn with embarrassment and curiosity.