A Study in Silks (53 page)

Feeling slightly steadier, he rose and crossed to the worktable. Serafina still lay there, naked. Edgerton must have come by, because her legs were properly attached, the issue with the hip joints solved in record time. Again, Tobias had the irrational urge to cover her.
It’s cold in here. Magnus should have brought her some clothes. Surely she must have some?

Tobias picked up the drawings, shuffling through them. There must have been more reasons why the doll had been disassembled. Oh, yes, something with the logic system. Magnus had said he’d fixed that, hadn’t he? She was ready for a new trial.

If he had doubts about his inebriation, those moments quashed them. He could feel Serafina’s eyes watching his every move. It had to be his imagination, because in his own mind those eyes belonged to one of his many mistresses, and then another, and then Evelina.

When he looked up, the doll’s eyes were peacefully closed. He made a disgusted noise, fed up with his own weakness. He needed to work. If he could turn his hands and mind to a practical problem, everything wrong with the world would fade away. It was the only time he was truly at peace.

He peeled off his coat and settled to work on Magnus’s doll. At first his fingers were clumsy, drink-addled, but concentration pushed past the fog, sending him into a state that was almost hyperalert. The arms attached easily, only needing an hour’s effort. The head was another matter. It was missing a pin that slid from ear to ear, unlocking the spring-driven programming mechanism that served as Serafina’s brain. That had to be one of the bits and pieces at the bottom of the trunk.

It was too dark to see inside the box, so he knelt and searched the bottom by touch. He didn’t find the pin right away, but instead found the trunk was lined with thick black card. Wedged halfway beneath the card were papers that looked like they’d escaped the portfolio of sketches.

Tobias pulled them out, finding the pin stuck between two sheets of paper. He carried the lot back to the lamplight and then began sorting the pages into order, looking for any further instructions on how to activate the automaton. He couldn’t see a proper power source, and that made him curious. In terms of appearance, she was a superior product, but the real test of manufacture came when the gears were in motion.

Tobias leaned with his back to the worktable, his legs crossed at the ankles. The spidery writing on the pages was in Italian. Not his best language. Still, it didn’t take him long to realize it was the notebook of Serafina’s original maker.

“I am dying,” he read. Lovely. He was distinctly not in the mood for someone else’s brooding. “I stole the pin and threw it in the holy well before the cathedral. God willing, this theft will save my life.”

Holy well? What was he afraid of?
Tobias flipped over the page, frowning. The man was a complete lunatic. Moreover, his plan had been a failure because the pin—or its replacement—had been in the trunk, along with the notebook pages.

Tobias dropped the pages back into the trunk and picked up the brandy bottle, returning to the table to stand looking down at Serafina.
Well, let’s see what this lady can do
. Lifting the soft, waving locks of red hair, he slid the pin into place. Nothing happened. He was oddly relieved.

It was hard not to be rattled by something that looked so alive, but wasn’t. In the flickering light of the candle lantern, the porcelain features seemed soft as flesh, the intersections of jaw and joint nearly invisible. Whoever had sculpted her had loved the female form, down to the details of her perfect, pink-tipped breasts, and the swell and dip of belly and thigh. Shadows seemed to press in around them, the silence in the room profound. He could hear the pulse of his own blood.

Tobias blinked, his fingers tightening on the bottle. He could swear the shadows were actually seeping into the doll, like a thick, dark smoke. Weird, roiling darkness was rising
from the floor, creeping up the legs of the table and worming under the inanimate form like something insectile. The doll was absorbing it into her sawdust flesh.

And Tobias felt himself growing weaker, as if he were losing blood.
This can’t be happening
. He set the bottle down, pushing it away. He was drunk. He was just feeling that sudden fatigue that comes a few hours after a hard drinking session. That point where a nap sounds like the best thing in the world.

He unhooked the lamp from the hook on the ceiling, bringing it closer to the worktable. Details jumped into focus. The patch of Serafina’s hair that was uneven had not been cut, but burned away, as if she had leaned too close to a candle.

He leaned close. The hair smelled of smoke, but there was a fresh scent, too, as if she had been out of doors not long ago. He would have expected staleness, but she could not have been locked in the trunk long. Magnus must have taken her apart for repairs very recently.

And brought her to SPIE to be put back together. The task the doctor had set wasn’t to challenge their skill—that was certain. It had taken a delicacy of touch to hook the doll’s fine workings back together, but Tobias could have done the whole job himself in an afternoon. So what had the doctor said?
Serafina represents a test. The questions she poses are not a matter of springs and gears
. What did that mean?

He didn’t have long to wait for an answer. The sawdust chest rose in a breath.

Terror bolted up his spine. Tobias skittered back from the table, his disbelieving cry bouncing off the lowering shadows.
Magic!

The following silence was suffocating. Suddenly, there seemed to be no air in the place, despite the doorway open to the night. He rubbed his eyes, sure his imagination had run riot. But his mind raced anyway, trying to straighten out what he’d seen the way a maid tidied an unmade bed. No rumples. No wrinkles. Just rational, tidy corners.

I’m not in a nursery tale
. This was London, a real London
full of real monsters like his father and Jasper Keating. With them around, dark magic was superfluous.

No, but the last man who worked on Serafina took out the pin and sunk it in holy water. That can’t be good
.

Nausea robbed the strength from his legs. He sat down hard in the chair.
If this was a nursery tale, the power source she doesn’t have would be magic and Dr. Magnus would be a sorcerer. After all, didn’t he say artists put a bit of their soul into their creations? Isn’t that theft of life how sorcery works?

“Sorcerers don’t trick men into assembling evil dolls.” He said it out loud, trying to forget all Magnus’s prattle about bridegrooms and nourishment, and all Bucky’s talk about vampire brides.

He needed to reject these thoughts out loud, because he was quite clearly drunk and nearly swallowing the nonsense whole. But he might have also said that strangers didn’t unexpectedly mentor talent that rested on the fame of a single prank at the opera. Good Samaritans didn’t lure talented young men by appealing to that hurt in their soul left by a bitter father.

If Tobias wanted a fairy tale, he had to look no further than his own wishful thinking. Magnus had taken an interest because he wanted Tobias for his mysterious other project.
And he only wants me if I pass the test that is Serafina
.

He rose, approached the worktable, and put his hand on the doll’s chest, ready to convince himself that it wasn’t actually moving—but he felt it lift. Tobias started to tremble, tears filling his eyes.
The breathing must be part of the mechanism
. He hadn’t really had a good look inside the torso.

“I am dying,” the Italian had written. Death magic worked by stealing life. Did Serafina survive by draining her makers?
Don’t be ridiculous!

So … what was he looking at? A mechanism? A miracle? The stirrings of a creature set to devour him? In the nursery tales, there was always a test of faith. Was he supposed to trust Dr. Magnus, no matter what? To keep courage and
accept whatever dark, shadowy horror the doctor threw at him, because that was the only way to move onward to the bigger project, to the next level, and to get the support he needed to be his own man?

Serafina’s eyes snapped open, the relentless china blue fixed on his face. Then one hand lifted, the delicate, porcelain fingers reaching out and grazing his cheek in a slick, chill caress. Then her jaw opened with a slight click, showing the white tips of tiny, perfect teeth in an eerily charming smile.

Tobias made a sound between a groan and a cry of terror. Before he could stop to think, he pulled out the pin. He stood with it in his hand, tears hot on his cheeks.
The questions she poses are not a matter of springs and gears
.

He’d wondered who he was. Now he knew.

Tobias Roth was a desperate coward.

EVELINA SAT BEFORE HER DRESSING TABLE MIRROR, NOT
seeing the image before her. She was aware that it was a sunny morning, sparkling as champagne on ice. She could hear Imogen’s excited voice down the corridor, exclaiming about a button or a feather or some crisis of absolutely national import. She could feel the heavy richness of her presentation gown, the white folds like a blanket of snow around her.

But none of it could quite penetrate the haze in her mind. She was adrift, spiraling like a twig down a stream, powerless against the rushing force. Evelina had known even as a child that leaving the circus would take her away from all she knew, but now she understood how irrevocable that act had been. There would be no return. Even if she could go back to Ploughman’s, it would never again be the place she knew.

Gran Cooper was dead. Nick hadn’t told her. She had learned it from Old Ploughman himself, his manner kind and delighted to see her again, but unsure what to say. The winter had taken the old woman barely two years after Evelina had left. All her other kin was gone, too, taking up regular occupations or moving on in search of richer shows, though Ploughman had kept the Fabulous Flying name of the Coopers’ old act.

She hadn’t asked for any more details. Too shocked to prolong the visit, too afraid of whom else she might have lost, she’d left at once, collecting Imogen on the way. Without Gran, nothing would seem right anyway.

Evelina still hadn’t cried. She would, eventually, but the pain had gone too deep, like a splinter the flesh couldn’t eject until it had festered. All she could do was go forward, a twig in the stream, anchored to nothing.

Behind her, Lady Bancroft’s maid pushed another pin into Evelina’s dark hair, fastening in the headdress of feathers required by the Lord Chamberlain’s precise dress code. Usually Dora dressed her hair, but for the presentation Lady B was taking no chances.

“How does that look, miss?” she asked.

It would look fine, Evelina knew, because the girl was excellent at her work. Nevertheless, she forced herself to focus on her image in the mirror. A stranger looked back, the formal hairstyle and her mood conspiring to disorient her. “Lovely, Jeanette. Thank you.”

The maid left. Evelina stayed seated at her dressing table, feeling the morning flowing downstream. She was grief stricken, but nothing had changed. Not really. She would go to the presentation, make her bows, and go on. Marriage or college.

Why didn’t Nick tell me Gran had passed?

His omission hurt. But then it was old news to him, wasn’t it? Who was she to think that everything had remained the same just because she had left? And she hadn’t exactly taken the time to sit down with him and chat.
No, I can’t blame Nick
.

The rose was pressed between the pages of
Barrett’s Guide to the Mechanics of Ancient Europe
, the cover safely closed over the scarlet softness. A keepsake, and a token of what might have been. Nick was the king of his own world now, and she had no right to drag him into danger. His weakness was his constancy, and she had to be wary of that for both their sakes. If she could wish for anything on this presentation morning—supposedly the
open, O sesame
to a
young girl’s future—it would be a secure future for them both. Sadly, that meant leaving him be.

The clock—Magnus’s clock—chimed the quarter hour. Numbly, she rose, picking up her long white gloves and her fan.

Her mother had talked about Court. It had been Evelina’s bedtime story—the pretty dresses and nice manners, the gentry and glittering palaces, the assurance of heat and light and enough to eat. Being presented was the culmination of her father’s dreams when he ran away and took the queen’s shilling, signing up for a life of war just so he could better himself.

Evelina was completing the family mythology. She had won the brass ring.

She wished she could have been happy. To top off her gloom, there had been word that morning from Dr. Watson. Uncle Sherlock was back in England, but had stopped overnight to see Grandmamma Holmes. The old lady wasn’t well, and it was more than her usual complaints.

Despite their sometimes stormy relationship, the news had worried Evelina, but the last thing her grandmamma would thank her for was to forget Court and rush to her bedside in an excess of sentimentality. Grandmamma was expecting Evelina to eclipse her mother’s transgressions. Still, the timing couldn’t be worse, after hearing about Gran.
Don’t make me lose them both. Not now
.