Tarnished (15 page)

It also kept any sharp-eyed ferrymen from peering inside.

Fanny hooked her parasol on one arm, wrestled the large lever by her side to the on position, and sighed when the clean air machine rumbled to life beneath our seats. A subtle draft crept through the box.

Silence continued to reign. Fanny because she hadn’t yet forgiven my outburst, and I because I hadn’t yet forgiven her venomous put-down of my academic interests.

Booth and Levi sat above, each armed to the bloody teeth. I wasn’t positive that my houseboy knew which end of the small derringer to point at ruffians and which end to pull, but it was the only weapon small enough for his hands.

Not that I expected trouble. Not by day.

Eventually, with the quiet broken only by the laborious rhythm of the air machine, the gondola eased to a gentle stop.

I sprang out of the box without waiting for Booth’s hand, shaking out my skirts and waving a gloved hand in front of my nose as the fog hit me square on. I was more used to it than Fanny, but I had forgotten how badly the damp clung through layers of skirts. “We’re here!” I exclaimed cheerfully.

“And so is your escort.”

I whirled at Fanny’s smug pronouncement, covering my nose and mouth with one hand as I spied a large, sleek gondola with bronze plating and a dual set of double-finned tail pipes. The Northampton crest emblazoned on the side gave me pause, but not as much as the broad-shouldered man now striding our way.

“Good morning,” he called, only somewhat muffled through the cloth set over his mouth. He pulled it down, as if politeness dictated it. “I came as soon as I received your summons.”

“My summons.” Although I did not phrase it as a question, my eyes flew to Fanny, who opened her parasol and looked back at me with steady, innocent regard. She blinked rapidly, almost ruining the effect.

“I understand you’re in need of an escort,” Lord Compton replied, and doffed his hat. “I am only one man, and not given to meanderings of the scientific mind, but perhaps I may serve for this outing?”

“My lord, we are ever so grateful for your company,” Fanny interjected, eyes sparkling at the man. “Why, Cherry was so thrilled when we saw the advert for the exhibit. I would have been dreadfully saddened to deny her for lack of a proper escort.”

“The honor is mine, madam,” he replied.

My jaw shifted. So this was Fanny’s answer to my outburst. The cunning woman. I accepted Compton’s arm, tucking my hand gently in the crook of his elbow and sweeping my skirts out of the way with the other. “Grateful,” I repeated, shooting my chaperone a narrow-eyed look behind his back. “You know how Society does talk.”

Fanny coughed, but I was sure it was as much reproach as caused by the air.

He looked down at me, his mouth pulled down into a small frown. “Unfortunately so.” His eyes were shrouded behind a pair of protective spectacles in the thick fog, but I remembered them all too easily. Green shot with gray. Sharp, but kind. Speculative.

Now staring at me. I resisted the urge to pat at my bosom like an overanxious miss. “Shall we, then?” I asked, false cheer.

“Certainly.” He replaced his hat, tugging the brim over his swept-back hair. “Miss St. Croix, forgive me, but have you no fog protectives?”

It was on the tip of my tongue to assure him that I possessed the finest in all of London, but hesitated. Of course I couldn’t tell him about my goggles, and to be honest, it’s not as if I stepped into the fog as a St. Croix very much. It hadn’t occurred to me to acquire a pair of protective lenses for myself.

Well, for myself as
me.

He must have read something in my pause, for his expression settled into something I couldn’t help but read as determination. “Never you mind,” he said before I could answer. “Let us proceed.”

He guided me across the cobbled lane. “Have you come to the Square often, my lord?”

“Not at all since I was a boy.” He matched his longer stride to mine, hampered by my skirts as I was. “Once I’d come to see a display of engines for the gondolas. They were early models. The first, I think.”

“What, really?” I blinked at him, as much to clear my tearing gaze as telegraph my disbelief. “I thought you said you weren’t given to science.”

Behind the glass spectacles, his eyes crinkled, golden mustache twitching as he looked down at me. “You doubt my interest, Miss St. Croix? Or my attendance?”

“Your attendance,” I responded, unable to help my grin. “Although I can easily imagine you as a boy admiring tiny engines on paper kites.”

His eyebrows raised. “Certainly you were only an infant if you attended.”

“It’s true. I only read about it from the periodicals,” I confessed, dropping my eyes to study the way my white glove rested ever so neatly against his dark sleeve. Shockingly contrasted. “There were articles of the prototype engines, and a drawing of Dr. Finch’s first self-propelling aether tubing. Do you remember it?”

His chuckle startled me, rich and deep from his chest as it came. This was a side of Cornelius Kerrigan Compton I hadn’t yet seen; something not completely relaxed, but at least somewhat more at ease. Something human.

He dipped his head closer to mine, and a whisper of surprise mingled with the feather-light shiver at my nape as he said lightly, “Remember it? I was there, after all. I watched as he lifted the yellow kite into the air. It shot out a blue stream, long as a snake’s tail, and promptly set the paper wings aflame.”

I laughed, then, because I knew it was true. Dr. Finch’s first prototype wasn’t a success in that it worked without a hitch. It was a success in that it worked at all.

“Oh, how I would have loved to see it,” I sighed.

Our footsteps didn’t echo in the Square. The fog acted like thick cloth, dampening every sound we made. Here and there, other figures passed around us. We exchanged only the barest civil pleasantries in passing, but Lord Compton kept one hand firmly over mine at his elbow. As if unwilling to release me to leave his side.

Or perhaps protecting me from the vagaries of the district?

Surprise forced me to tilt my head, studying him sideways from beneath my lashes. I knew, after all, that my lord came below the drift for the dens. Did he, too, develop a sense in the fog?

He looked up at the paint peeling from the surface of the warehouse we approached, studying the banner hung across the beams. “Professor Elijah Woolsey’s Electrical Anatomy,” he read. “What on earth is this about, Miss St. Croix?”

“Dead flesh,” I responded promptly, and hurried to add as he blanched, “and the reactions of same when touched with electrical current. Do you know, my lord, that we are conductive to electricity?”

“Of course.” His brow furrowed, handsome features torn between disgust and the propriety of good manners. I was losing him.

“In the periodicals,” I continued quickly, “there are accounts of hearts beating when a low current of electricity is channeled through them. Beating, my lord! Without a body to support it. Does it mean we are creatures of electricity, too?”

“It is a . . . difficult theory,” he said slowly.

I spun, letting go of his arm to raise my arms over my head. As if I would embrace the banner hanging above me. “Just think what we could do if we understood the body more. The medical advances we could make. Things to salve the wounded soldier on the field, a process by which the birth of a child could be made easier.”

Compton’s features tightened. Disapproval. “Certainly this is no fit topic for a lady?”

I resisted the urge to kick him. Barely. Lowering my hands, I said with some asperity, “And what would you have me consider, my lord? The state of flowers at the height of autumn? Perhaps the nature of my wardrobe when fashions come so quickly and fade as easily?”

I watched him look up at the banner again, then at Fanny. She trailed more than a few steps behind us, though it was only the illusion of privacy. She would hear every word, and was in fact watching me now with a warning in the set line of her mouth.

I put my hands on my corseted hips and asked baldly, “Would you prefer me deaf and dumb, my lord? Or perhaps stupid and meek?”

He looked at me, then, meeting my eyes. His own were wary. But his mouth quirked at one corner.

The same as it had during our scandalous dance.

“Never stupid,” he avowed. “Although perhaps Mrs. Fortescue would prefer meek on occasion?”

My smile was slow, but I felt it curve at my mouth. Reach my eyes, fill me with a quiet, insidious warmth. “On many occasions,” I admitted. “My lord, despite all appearances, I am my father’s daughter. It is not magic or willful ignorance that will assure our place in this world, but science. And science is not always . . .” I trailed off, searching for the right word.

“Proper?” he supplied, with more understanding than I ever expected from the eldest son of the marchioness.

“Or expected,” I offered.

“Much like you, Miss St. Croix.”

My heart skipped a beat. “Me?”

Compton offered his arm once more, and scarcely sure what to make of the events, I took it. “Neither exactly proper,” he said conversationally as he led me inside, “nor at all expected. Perhaps unfashionable, but hardly without merit.”

I stared up at him, at the clean edge of his jaw and the golden sideburns he kept so meticulously maintained. “I did warn you that I might be uninteresting,” I said, appalled at how breathless I suddenly sounded to my own ears.

He smiled, but he didn’t look down at me. “I never listen to ladies in the ballroom,” he said simply. “I find them all too eager to impress. Ah! And here we are.”

The many doors built into the façade were all closed, marked simply by a plaque declaring the beyond to be for official guests and authorized attendants alone. Compton, ever the gentleman, bowed shortly as he swept a door open for Fanny and I.

I walked in first, unable to make sense of this new earl below the drift. What was he thinking?

And why did he agree so readily to come below with me?

Fanny gasped behind me.

Truth be told, even I was forced to stare.

The interior was large, much bigger than it seemed from outside. The ceiling soared high above, girded by solid wooden rafters even I could tell were layered in dust and cobwebs. The lighting was decidedly stark, and more old-fashioned than I expected given the Square’s scientific background. Large twisted-iron lanterns hung from the beams on thick chains, each capped by an inverted dome of hammered metal. It focused the light like a bobby’s lantern, forcing it downward to highlight rows upon rows of metal and glass containers.

Although I had known what to expect, my mind was not allowing me to think too hard on what floated in those tanks.

And how many there were.

Compton caught Fanny’s arm as she swayed, but his eyes raked the warehouse interior with a sharpness, a readiness, I hadn’t expected. “This is an exhibit?”

“It appears so,” I replied slowly. I squinted, shading my eyes from a light centered directly above us. “It appears to fill most of the space.” That was . . . well, quite a bit of dead flesh, anyway.

I looked up, impatiently brushing away the jewel-bright fringe of my hair from my eyes. A railing passed along each wall, designating some kind of walkway from the main thoroughfare. I spotted ladders here and there, metal rungs inset individually into the walls before it faded into darkness. “Hello?” I called.

A shadow detached from the musty edges of my vision. “You,” whispered a ragged, frail voice. “Jo . . . Josephine?”

Fanny’s gasp turned into a mild, breathy shriek. I spun, skirts rasping loudly as they swirled around my feet, and found myself face to face with a thin, stooped old man with a wild bush of gray hair like a thorny crown atop his head.

He caught my hand. His fingers dug into my gloved palm, too-long nails sharp and ragged. “By the Maker,” he breathed.

“Now, see here,” Compton snapped. “Unhand Miss St. Croix immediately.”

The old man blinked wide, owlish eyes at me. Was he confused?

Obviously.

Pity stirred in me as I surveyed his white apron, stained with dirt and what looked to be old blood, and the rumpled fit of clothes at least a decade out of fashion and too large for his frail frame. Buried in the untamed jungle of his hair, a pair of thick goggles winked at me.

“Here,” I said gently. “Let me . . .” Disentangling my hand, I delicately extricated the clear lenses from his scalp and set them carefully, cautiously, on his nose.

Suddenly, his eyes were four times the size, filling the brass frames and extraordinarily gray. They blinked at me, rapidly, and he patted the bridge of his nose with two fingers as if surprised to find himself there.

“No,” he declared, with greater strength than his words earlier. “No, silly me, of course not. Miss St. Croix, the younger of course. The daughter!” His laughter was akin more to the rasp of dried hay across a barnyard floor than obvious humor, but it didn’t keep him from once more seizing my hand to pump with great enthusiasm.

Compton bristled as he stepped up beside me. “And you are?” he asked stiffly.

I had an inkling. Turning, I offered, “Professor Woolsey, I presume?”