Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles

Gilded

The St. Croix Chronicles

Karina Cooper

Dedication

In memory of Caleb “Flip” Kors.

Keep on shining, little man.

Acknowledgments

W
riting a novel set with a certain amount of historical accuracy is never a one-woman job. The amount of research that goes into a world modeled on our own history is a lengthy, often mazelike endeavor, and I’d be lost without help from the tools of the modern day and the patience of friends and fellow writers.

Where would I be without the internet? I will tell you where I wouldn’t be: huddled in a dusty library bent over ancient microfiche, that’s for sure. So to you, internet, and those who populate it, I tip my hat. From scanned copies of the
Leeds Mercury
to transcribed articles from gossip columns of the era, you made my research fun, easy, and fascinating.

Maire Claremont and Sarah MacLean: How you keep track of titles, courtesy titles, peerage titles in one’s own right and so forth is utterly beyond me. Somehow, between your help and the eagle eye of
Gilded
’s copyeditor, I’ve managed to keep social faux pas down to a minimum. Bless you with whatever blessings you consider most fine, and add chocolate besides.

Esi: For the hours spent on the phone, working out the details of a story that is as delicate as it is tragic. Thank you for having faith in me; and pushing me when you knew I had it in me to tweak just a
little bit
more.

You darling readers: The St. Croix Chronicles continue to be a fun romp through a re-imagined era, and I must take the time to thank all of you who join Cherry on her many misadventures. You will visit again, won’t you?

Yours most faithfully,

Karina Cooper

Contents

Chapter One

W
hen I was ten years of age, Monsieur Marceaux’s Traveling Circus retained a new magician. Unlike his jolly, rotund predecessor, this man was everything a so-called practitioner of the dark arts should be—tall, lean in build, darkly handsome like a hero out of an overwrought Byronic fantasy, and possessed of a fine sense of showmanship.

His tricks were dangerous things. I was an ambitious child, cloaked under a shroud of opium-induced amnesia, eager to taste all that this life of Gypsy freedom could give me.

By the time Mr. Oliver Ashmore, the executor of my father’s estate, found me some three years later, I had been locked inside trunks that were then speared by wicked curved blades, hung suspended from my ankles over pits of fire; shackled, singed, chained, cut by accident and for the titillation to a paying audience, and taught how to escape even the meanest knots. Tight places had long since ceased to bother me. Dark places were my bread and butter.

Aside from my employ, little has changed.

My name is Cherry St. Croix, and I live two rather different lives. In one, I am a collector, a seeker of bounties for coin. In the other, I make my home above London’s dreary fog. At twenty years old, I am months away from legally inheriting my late father’s estate, and by all accounts, I am considered a well-heeled young miss.

Or would have been, were it not for the tarnishing legacy of my mad father.

They say that my mother, Josephine, came from good stock. Aside from the ill fortune of perishing in a fire, she had been blessed by the favor of Society; a lady whose graces numbered many. I have inherited her green eyes and her hair—a deep shade of auburn red fancied by opera singers and actresses—but very few of her societal charms.

In contrast, I am reminded at every turn that my mother married down. My father had been a middle-class doctor, a scientist touched by a bit of genius—and more than a whisper of insanity, if the tales were to be believed.

I believed them. How could I not? My father was the reason I now stood in this dark place, forced to put my hard-won confidence to the test.

A test I had earlier failed.

This was the thirtieth day of September. I had already stood in this tunnel earlier this month, listening to these very same whispers, with no clue that the man who waited in the dark was the same man all swore perished years ago in the flames of a Scotland estate, my mother beside him.

Every sense I possessed urged me to flee; then and now.

As I could not then, I could not now.

“Zylphia, bring the light,” I called, perhaps too loudly. The interior of the Thames Tunnel plucked the words from my lips and carried them on sibilant waves down the dank corridor.

I could only blame the rapid pace of my heartbeat, thudding loudly inside my chest. The sound filled my ears; had since the moment we’d stepped through the twin tunnel entry. Fear stole my breath, but it came like a dream. Shrouded memories plucked at my thoughts until I felt harried from all sides.

I had nearly died here.

But, I reminded myself sternly, the ghosts I sensed in the darkness were merely nonsense. Chilling echoes of coming winter and the dank bite of the river-saturated air. My father was dead, well and truly. I’d seen him killed myself.

The tunnel on either side of me remained empty, and would be until the next train passed through.

Which would be soon enough that we should be quicker.

Years ago, after decades of planning and work, the Thames Tunnel finally saw completion and opened to the public. A marvel of engineering, it burrowed under the River Thames, providing access from Wapping to Rotherhithe. Initially a pedestrian crossing and gawker’s paradise, the East London Railway Company repurposed it, and now the trains traveled through the tunnel at regular intervals.

The dark played host to the occasional vagrants, prostitutes plying their trade, rumored entrances into the mysterious Underground, and—more recently—a secret laboratory.

I shuddered, only partially from the chill of the late September air. This far beneath, the dank gloom took on a life of its own. The lanterns kept lit at intervals did little for either the cold or the dark, and I caught myself rubbing my arms through my filched sack coat as my assistant came closer with her own lantern aloft.

“What did you find,
cherie
?”

I found it small comfort that I wasn’t alone this time. Zylphia had once been a prostitute for the Midnight Menagerie, yet she now served as my maid—and, of course, fellow conspirator. Called sweets by patrons and Menagerie hands alike, the women taken in by the Menagerie earned their keep in flesh.

Although her skills numbered far beyond that of seduction, Zylphia was doomed to forever look the role. Even in her simple trousers, thick fustian jacket and plain waistcoat, something about her long build and effortless carriage drew the eye. Unlike me, who could often pass for a somewhat rotund street boy in the dark and with distance, there was no world in which anyone could mistake Zylphia’s figure for that of a man.

An exotic mulatto, she boasted skin the same color as black tea lightened with a small bit of cream. Her eyes were shockingly blue against her dark skin, legacy of her unknown white father, while her hair was black as the night, coarser than mine but pliable, with enough unusual kink to point to her Negro slave mother. Tonight, like mine, it was pulled up into a severe knot and pinned harshly.

Unlike me, she did nothing to hide the color—black was not uncommon a shade, especially with her obviously dark skin. Which was why I continued to coat lampblack through my own red tresses when I took on the mantle of my collector’s role. Far be it from anyone to put two and two together and attach the name of Cherry St. Croix to the black-haired collector drifting about the fog.

Or to the strange goings-on of a few weeks past. Corpses whose organs had been carved away, mad professors, opium dens, deals made with the Midnight Menagerie . . .

And strange symbols carved into tunnel walls.

Exactly the sort of thing one would expect from a madcap adventure tale.

I beckoned with a gloved hand. Zylphia brought the lantern closer to the damp wall. The light flickered, casting the stone into sharp relief.

“Just some etchings, do you think?” But even my maid’s tone retained enough doubt to echo my own thoughts.

I crouched, bracing one hand against the cold stone for balance. “It’s low enough to remain out of accidental view,” I said slowly, eyebrows knotting in concentration. “A marker of some kind.”

“You think it points the way to the Underground?”

I shook my head, brushing away a clinging film as the light glistened off the carved edges. “Anyone who wants to find the Underground won’t be relying on pictures.” My voice bandied back at me even as the dark attempted to swallow it. I waved my free hand in front of my face, as if I could swat the echoes away like buzzing flies. “It’s all word of mouth, on pain of  . . .” I paused. “Well, there are worse things than death.”

“Charming,” my friend replied dryly. “Have you ever been?”

“Once.” And never again, if I had my way.

“Do you recognize it, then?”

No. It was not something I’d ever seen before. I studied the grooves carved into the stone, tracing each line with a gloved finger. A complex
E
, the bottom two rungs stretched too far, attached to a smaller
y
. “Eye?” I said aloud, testing it on my tongue. “That makes no sense.”

“A name? Initials?”

Neither of which belonged to my father. Abraham St. Croix was a mouthful on any given day, and even his secret alias would begin with a
W
. When I met him, Professor Elijah Woolsey had seemed to be a harmless, rambling man with excellent scientific theories.

How wrong I’d been.

At the time, I hadn’t told Zylphia the identity of the mad professor. I didn’t intend to now. There were things that defied explanation. One’s late father taking to secret laboratories in the Thames Tunnel, eager to supplant your soul with that of your mother’s, numbered among them.

“Perhaps it’s only a memory carved by a vagrant,” I mused.

“Not many vagrants what know their letters,” Zylphia pointed out, but needlessly. I knew that. I was just . . . hoping.

This little carving, whatever it meant, was my father’s doing. It had to be.

“Search for more.” I pointed to the wall. “This height, perhaps. There may be other letters. Perhaps they form a clue, or a word. Directions.”
Anything.

“Right, miss.” The lantern bobbed as Zylphia shuffled along the wall. To her credit, she had a keen set of eyes and solid knack for common sense. That she had been assigned to me by the Chinese masters of the Midnight Menagerie still stung, but Zylphia had been as near a thing to a friend I could claim in this identity, and that long before she became my keeper.

As per our agreement, the things she reported of my movements were things that would not cost me anything for the Karakash Veil to know. I worried for her, in this double role. The last time she’d kept a secret from the Veil, I’d found whipping marks upon her back. With that in mind, I retained Zylphia as an in-house maid, and did my best to protect her.

When she allowed it. As stubborn as I, my friend.

I shook my head, leavening a deep sigh. This was not the way I’d hoped to spend my evening. In my expectant fantasies, I’d imagined locating my father’s laboratory, stripping it of all useful items, finding the serum he’d concocted in his madness, and then . . .

Well, I hadn’t quite thought that far.

In exchange for saving my life from the very same alchemical compound my father had developed, I found myself indebted to the Veil. The price for my freedom?

The Veil demanded the compound—the
móshù
, as they called it—that nearly killed me.

Micajah Hawke, the dark ringmaster of the Menagerie and mouthpiece of the furtive Chinese organization that owned him, swore that he’d had this entire tunnel searched and found nothing.

I
would not walk away empty-handed. It was here. I knew it was here.

Unfortunately, my memory is not what it once was. Things in the past, even things more recent of late, often fuzz to a gentle blur. Much as it did when I was younger. I remember bits, and sometimes larger pieces, but try as I might, I could not remember the path taken either in or out of the ruddy laboratory.

My longtime association with the base chemical in Abraham’s serum suggested the opium was to blame. Much of my life is colored by it—and, an unfortunate side effect, swallowed by it.

I pushed at the symbol. Nothing happened.
E
and
y
.

Initials, Zylphia had suggested. Perhaps she wasn’t far wrong.

Elijah began with an
E
. And Woolsey ended with a small
y,
at least when handwritten. Perhaps it truly was that uncomplicated?

I braced the whole of my hand over the carving, testing each nook and cranny. When the brick failed to give away, I moved on to others. In a slow, circular pattern, I poked and prodded and gouged my gloved fingers into every edge and divot.

In my choice of work, I had learned to expect even that which seemed preposterous. A hidden catch seemed something out of a Gothic adventure tale; it also seemed rather likely, given my father’s predilections.

Click
. “Eureka,” I murmured.

A bit of brick withdrew beneath my right thumb.

“Zylla!”

She came quickly, lantern light bobbing. “What—”

“
Shh
.” Even as I levied the scolding sound, something caught inside the tunnel wall. Scraping, grating together, as if two slabs of stone ground against each other; I listened to an internal mechanism I couldn’t picture and counted the seconds.

It took twelve before a seam split along the tunnel wall. Bricks, jagged and sharp, swung outward, causing me to leap into Zylphia and send us both staggering back over the railway lines. My foot caught on a rail spike, tossed me to the cobbled ground. “Oomph!”

I’d fallen many, many times in my life. I had never managed to become gracious about it.

“Are you all right?” My companion caught my arm, helped me back to my graceless feet.

“Delightful,” I replied by sardonic rote, but did not stop for niceties. Balance once more firmed, I hurried to the newly formed entrance. Seized the edge of the door, hesitated.

Was I ready for this?

Musty air, oddly sharp and smelling of wet iron, ghosted out from the portal. Though the interior swallowed any hope of clear vision in its murky depths, I didn’t need sight to tell me I’d found it.

Something about the smell, maybe, like wet iron or rust. That sharp, acrid smell of the air after a lightning strike. Or perhaps it was the way every fine hair on my skin rose to sudden, nerve-prickling attention.