Winterspell (3 page)

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.

But these photographs held nothing of the mother Clara had loved. Her body had been mutilated, clawed to pieces, torn limb from limb. Her scalp was missing, her face covered with blood; bits of dark hair clung to her neck and chest, where strange symbols marred her river-swollen skin. Her blood, strangely, seemed paler than it should have, gleaming in the grain of the photograph, moonlight turned viscous—but surely it was a trick of the lamplight.

Clara tried to detach herself from the horror of the moment and peered closer, drawn not by the blood but rather the markings carved into her mother's skin. None of the other bodies in these photos had sported such markings. A tiny alarm sounded in her mind, impossible to ignore. She peered more closely, struck by the markings' familiarity, for they looked almost like . . .

No. It cannot be.

She pulled out a folded-up sheet of paper from her stocking and Godfather's pen from her boot, and sketched everything she could—the number of wounds on her mother's body, the designs of those terrible markings. They were important, those symbols. What did they mean, and why were they there? And could it be true, this horrible thought?

A burst of laughter from down the hallway made Clara jump.
How dare they keep this from me?
she thought, her eyes stinging, her hands shaking.
How dare they? How
dare
you, Father?
But she continued until she had copied down everything she could. The investigation
had gone cold, the case notes said. There had been no witnesses, nor reports of strange sounds or struggles by the crowded riverside. Hope Stole had last been seen on her way home from a luncheon on the Upper West Side, and she and her coachman and the pair of carriage horses had somehow disappeared in broad daylight with no one noticing, until their bodies had appeared the next day beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.

Hope had been the only one hanging from the steel rafters, symbols carved into her skin.

Trying not to imagine the stench of horse meat and river rot, Clara read over Chief Greeley's notes, about how they had no leads, how he did not understand this case, how the mayor himself had hired detectives and even cut deals with the downtown gangs' most disreputable figures, to no avail. The only thing anyone could say, after months of questioning, searching, and blackmail, was that there were beasts in New York City.

The word appeared several times in accounts of testimonies and interviews, in the notes of hired detectives who had abandoned the case and fled without even collecting their pay: “beasts.”

One detective's report read:
There's talk everywhere since Mrs. Stole's murder, downtown and especially by the river, of bumps in the night, of humans and animals alike turning up maimed, of strange writing on the walls. These instances go unreported, for the common folk are too frightened of what it might mean. It's poppycock, if I may be so candid. It's the Townies, Gristlers, or Half-Hands, or one of the other gangs infesting the city's underbelly. They are playing tricks, striking fear into the hearts of the stupid and gullible for their own amusement.

The detective's next entry said only:
I must leave this place. I have seen . . . I don't know what I have seen.