Heartless: The Parasol Protectorate: Book the Fourth (15 page)

“We can but try.”

Lady Maccon nodded and attempted to shrug herself out of her normally regal posture, trying to be less overbearing and physically threatening. She didn’t want to scare the ghost. Not that a woman in her corpulent condition boasted so fearsome a visage.

Madame Lefoux yelled, her normally melodious voice sharp, “Aunt, where are you? Aunt!”

Several moments later, a ghostly form shimmered into existence out of the side of a conveyer belt spool, looking grumpy.

“Yes, Niece, you summoned me?” Formerly Beatrice Lefoux had been in life an angular spinster of severe attitude and limited affection. She might once have been pretty but obviously never allowed herself, nor others, to enjoy that fact. There was much of her in Madame Lefoux, tempered by a level of good humor and mischief that the aunt had never bothered to cultivate. The specter was beginning to go fuzzy, not so badly as Alexia’s ghostly messenger but enough for it to be clear she wasn’t long for this world.

As soon as she spotted Lady Maccon, the ghost drew herself inward, appearing to wrap the drifting threads of her noncorporeal self closer, as a werewolf wraps his cloak around after shifting.

“Why, you have the soulless visiting you, Niece. Honestly, I don’t know why you persist in such an association.” The ghost’s voice was bitter, but more out of habit than any real offense. Then she seemed to lose track of what she was saying. “Where? What? Where am I? Genevieve, why, you are so old. Where is my little girl?” She
swirled in a circle. “You have built an octomaton? I said never again. What could possibly be so dire?” As she spoke, the ghost shifted between French and heavily accented English. Luckily, Alexia was tolerably competent in both.

Madame Lefoux, her expression stiff in an attempt to hide distress, snapped her fingers in front of her deceased aunt’s face. “Now, Aunt, please pay attention. Lady Maccon here has something very serious to ask of you. Go on, Alexia.”

“Formerly Lefoux, are you familiar with the attempt on Queen Victoria’s life that took place in the winter of 1853? A Scottish werewolf pack was implicated. It was a matter of poison.”

The ghost bobbled up and down in surprise, losing some small measure of control over bits of herself. An eyebrow detached from her forehead. “Oh, why, yes. Although not intimately, of course. Not from the actual assassination perspective but more from the sidelines. I lost one of my students because of it.”

“Oh?”

“Why, yes. Lost her to the mist of the moor. Lost her to duty. So promising, so strong, so . . . wait. What were you asking? What are we discussing? Why must I forget things all the time?”

“The Kingair assassination attempt,” Alexia prompted.

“Silly dogfight. Poor girl. Imagine having to take on that kind of responsibility. At sixteen! And over werewolves. Werewolves who planned a poisoning. So many things wrong with the very idea. So many things out of character. Out of the supernatural order. Was it ever put right, I wonder?”

Alexia pulled a measure of this rambling together. “Sidheag Maccon was your student?”

The ghost’s head tilted. “Sidheag. That name is familiar. Oh, why, yes. So hard to finish in one way, so easy to finish in another. A strong girl, good at finishing. But then again, strength in girls is not so much valued as it ought to be.”

Lady Maccon, as interested as she was in anything to do with her husband’s great-great-great-granddaughter, now one of the only female werewolves in England and Alpha of the Kingair Pack, felt she must still steer the ghost back onto more relevant matters. “Did you happen to hear, at the time, whether there was a connection between the assassination attempt and the Order of the Brass Octopus?”

“Connection? Connection? Of course not.”

Alexia was taken aback by the firm confidence in the ghost’s voice. “How can you be so certain?”

“How can I not? Imagine such a thing. No, no, not against the queen. Never against Queen Victoria. We would have known. I would have known. Someone would have told me.” Formerly Beatrice Lefoux swirled about in her distress, once more catching sight of Madame Lefoux’s latest project. She paused as though hypnotized by the imposing thing. “Oh, Genevieve, I can’t believe you would. I can’t. Not for anything. Why, child, why? I must tell. I must convince . . .” She ended up facing Alexia once more and, as though seeing her for the first time, said, “You! Soulless. You will stop everything in the end, won’t you? Even me.”

Madame Lefoux pressed her lips together, closed her eyes, and gave a sad sigh. “There she goes. We won’t get any more sense out of her this evening. I’m sorry, Alexia.”

“Oh, no, that’s quite all right. It wasn’t precisely what
I was hoping for, but it has convinced me that I must contact Lady Kingair as soon as possible. I must convince my husband’s old pack to reveal the details of the original plot. Only they can fully unravel this mystery. I can’t believe that the OBO was not involved, but if your aunt says so with such conviction, only the source of the threat itself can reveal the truth of the matter.”

“And, of course, my aunt was never a member of the Order.”

“She wasn’t?” Alexia was genuinely surprised.

“Absolutely not. Women weren’t allowed to join back in her day. It’s difficult enough now.” The French inventor, one of the smartest people Alexia had ever met, reached behind her neck to finger the octopus tattoo that lay hidden there, just under the curls of her scandalously short hair. Alexia tried to imagine Genevieve without her secret underground world. Impossible.

Alexia said, “I shall have to send someone to Scotland. I don’t suppose . . . ?”

Madame Lefoux looked even more unhappy. “Oh, no. I am sorry, my dearest Alexia, but I cannot afford the time. Not right now. I have this”—she waved a hand at the monstrous thing she was building—“to finish. And my aunt to think of. I should be with her, now that the end is near.”

Lady Maccon turned to the inventor and, because she seemed to need it more than anything else, embraced her gently. It was awkward given Alexia’s belly but worth it for the slight lessening Alexia could feel in Genevieve’s stiffened shoulders. “Would you like me to send her on?” she asked in a hushed voice.

“No, thank you. I am not yet ready to let her go. You understand?”

Alexia sighed and released her friend. “Well, worry not on this particular matter. I will get to the bottom of it. Even if I have to send Ivy Tunstell to Scotland for me!”

Fated words that, as is often the case with frivolous speech, Alexia was going to come to regret.

W
ere they not recently moved into new accommodations, Lady Maccon might have made a different choice—one of Woolsey’s older clavigers, perhaps. But the pack was in chaos over the relocation. They were nowhere near as tethered to a place as vampires, but werewolves were, in simple terms, tethered to each other and were creatures of profound habit. Such arbitrary reorganization ruffled the fur. Solidarity and proximity became ever more necessary for the pack’s continued cohesion. Were BUR not occupied with its own investigation as to the current threat against Queen Victoria, Alexia might have tapped Haverbink or another experienced investigator. And, finally, were the Shadow Council supplied with its own agents, the muhjah would have had manpower to call upon. However, with none of these options readily available, Lady Maccon cast about herself and found that she had only one possible choice—as unlikely and as addlepated as that choice might be.

Mrs. Tunstell ran a tight household, despite overseeing her rented accommodations with a floppy hand and absentminded disposition. Her abode was clean and neat, and callers could be assured of a decent cup of tea or candy dish of raw meat, depending upon taste and inclination. Despite an interior resplendent in every shade of pastel, Ivy’s home was a popular watering hole. As a result, the Tunstells had developed a name for themselves among the more esoteric members of the West End as agreeable hosts interested in a wide range of topics and ever willing to open their door to the friendly visitor. This meant that, at any given time, one was practically guaranteed to find some breed of indifferent poet or insipid sculptor in residence.

So it was that when Lady Maccon called around teatime that summer afternoon, a delighted Mrs. Tunstell welcomed her inside with assurances that while they had indeed adopted a stray poet, that versifier was quite firmly asleep and had been for the better part of three days.

Ivy’s good-humored little face fell. “He drinks, poor man, to forget the pain of the embittered universe that subsumes his soul. Or do I mean sublimes his soul? Anyhoo, we’ve had to remove the tea quite forcibly from his grasp on more than one occasion. Barley water, says Tunny, is the only thing one should take when suffering such ailments of the emotional humors.”

“Oh, dear,” commiserated Alexia. “I suppose one might recover one’s spirits out of desperation if all one had to drink was barley water.”

“Exactly so!” Ivy nodded over her husband’s evident sagacity on the application of revolting beverages to
despondent poets. She motioned her friend into her front parlor, a diminutive room that boasted all the elegance of iced Nesselrode pudding.

Lady Maccon deposited her parasol into the small umbrella stand and made her way gingerly toward a wingback chair, careful not to upset any of the decorative objects strewn about. Her visiting dress was of flowing blue paisley with a stiffened quilted skirt. Designed to accommodate her increasing girth, it was much wider—and thus more dangerous to Ivy’s receiving room—than the current trends dictated.

She sat heavily in the chair, sighing at the relief of getting the weight off her poor feet, which seemed to have swollen to near twice their original proportions. “Ivy, my dear, I was wondering if I might prevail upon you for a very great favor.”

“Oh, Alexia, of course. You have only to ask and I shall do whatever.”

Lady Maccon hesitated, wondering exactly how much to reveal. Ivy was a dear little soul, but was she reliable? She decided to buck up and take the plunge. “Ivy, have you ever wondered if there might, just possibly, be something slightly unusual about me?”

“Well, Alexia my dear, I never liked to say, but I have always wondered about your hat preferences. They have struck me as mighty plain.”

Lady Maccon shook her head. The long blue ostrich feather of her not-at-all-plain hat wafted back and forth behind her. “No, not that, I mean . . . Well, dash it, Ivy, there’s nothing for it.”

Mrs. Tunstell gasped in enchanted shock at Lady Maccon’s lowbrow language. “Alexia, you have been fraternizing
with werewolves overmuch! Military men can be terribly bad for one’s verbal concatenation.”

Alexia took a deep breath and then blurted out, “I’m preternatural.”

Ivy’s dark eyes widened. “
Oh, no
! Is it catching?”

Alexia blinked at her.

Ivy donned a sympathetic expression. “Is it a terribly painful condition?”

Lady Maccon continued to blink.

Ivy put a hand to her throat. “Is it the baby? Will you both be well? Should I send for barley water?”

Alexia finally found her voice. “No,
preternatural.
You might know the term, as in
soulless
? Or curse-breaker. I have no soul. None at all. As a matter of fact, I can cancel it out in supernatural creatures given half a chance.”

Ivy relaxed. “Oh,
that.
Yes, I knew. I shouldn’t let it concern you, my dear. I doubt anybody minds.”

“Yes, but . . . Wait, you knew?”

Ivy tut-tutted and shook dark ringlets at her friend in mock amusement. “Of course I knew—have done for simply ages.”

“But you never mentioned a thing to me on the subject.” Alexia was not often flummoxed. She found it an usual sensation and wondered if this was what Ivy felt like most of the time. Her friend’s revelation did, however, give her some degree of confidence in her next move. Despite all her frivolities, Ivy could clearly keep a secret and, it turned out, was more observant than Alexia had previously given her credit for.

“Now, Alexia, I thought you were embarrassed about it. I didn’t want to bring up an uncomfortable personal disability. I have more sensitivity and care for the feelings of others than that!”

“Ah, oh, well. Of course you do. Regardless, as a preternatural, I am currently engaged in some investigations. I was hoping to enlist your aid. It has to do with my husband’s work.” Alexia didn’t want to tell Ivy absolutely everything, but she didn’t want to fib outright either.