Beneath a Waning Moon: A Duo of Gothic Romances Page 13

“Nettie, I know the risks, but I've wanted this all my life—before I met Nathaniel, before Papa's death. You saw me when I was a child, how I'd pretend to be you." Lenore didn't miss the faint blush warming the older woman's cheeks and pressed her advantage. "Other women serve under you on the Pollux. Will you not consider it?"

  Nettie took a long swallow of her beer and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Brilliant with his inventions, your papa. Not much of a sailor or crewman. Got airsick each time he went on a night run with us, but he loved it all the same. Said you would too had you been old enough to accompany him." She scowled at Lenore. "I'm not sayin' aye, but I'm not sayin' nay either. I want to think about it."

  Lenore's shoulders sagged, and she slumped in her chair with relief. "Thank you, Nettie. For what it's worth, you might well save me from a slow death of needlepoint, alphabets, and smelling salts."

  "And put you in harm's way with a quick death from a stray bullet." Nettie pointed an accusing finger. "Don't play the savior card with me, missy. If I say no, you keep your dignity, accept my decision and walk out of here without argument. Understood?"

  Lenore saluted. "Aye, Captain." She didn't dare smile.

  "We sail in three days' time for the Redan, providing escort for the Andromeda. It's a month out and a month back. You'll have your answer then. No sooner."

  The Redan. Lenore's heartbeat stuttered. She'd been raised on tales about the defensive perimeter. Bordering the length of Atlantic coastline from Hammerfest in Norway to the Strait of Gibraltar, the buffer protected the continent from the horrifics that sometimes erupted out of the dimensional fissure. Many airships, along with their crews, had been lost fighting at the Redan. Nettie had almost lost the Pollux, and Nathaniel had died there. If she joined the crew, it was a guarantee she'd see it first-hand.

  "You'll be careful, won't you, Nettie?"

  Nettie shot her a reproachful look. "Not much choice. We're playing nanny to a cargo lifter loaded with flyers and munitions." She gestured to Lenore's untouched glass. "You might not want to let that get too flat. It turns bitter."

  Accustomed to the captain's pragmatic view of her job, Lenore didn't expound on her concern over this latest mission. She rose from her chair. "No more for me. I'm off to visit Papa, then home. I need my wits sharp to face Mama's tirade. She won't soon forgive me for sneaking away." She didn't hide her distaste. "I missed Aunt Adelaide’s weekly one o'clock visit, along with her atrocious piano playing."

  Nettie's chuckle was less than sympathetic. "Better you than me, ducks. I'll take a good battle at the Redan over that nonsense any day." She stood with Lenore. "You'll give my best to your papa when you visit, yeah?"

  Lenore gathered her shawl and reticule. "Always." She paused, remembering the funeral and the Guardian who vowed to protect her father's grave. "Did I tell you I met the Guardian of Highgate?"

  The other woman's eyes widened. "Did you now? And how did you manage that? They're not known for socializin' with the living."

  "He revealed himself once the sextons bricked Papa's grave. I approached him…"

  Nettie's bark of laughter interrupted her. "You've a backbone tough as those corset steels you wear, girl. Guardians scare the lights out of most people."

  Lenore's cheeks heated at the compliment. "He had a fearsome aspect. Tall, dressed in black armor—and the strangest eyes, as if he looked back on eternity."

  "You make him sound like a right 'andsome bloke."

  She shrugged. "He was, in an odd way. Very gentlemanly as well. He promised none would disturb the grave, and he's kept that promise. The bricks are as they were laid." She didn't mention the sense of recognition that struck her at their first meeting. Even now, weeks later, his image burned darkly in her mind's eye, along with the unwavering certainty she knew him. "I haven't seen him since then, and I go to the cemetery weekly."

  "A good thing, I think." Nettie escorted her out of the captain's quarters and into the corridor that ran the length of the keel. "He's one of Harvel's experiments. Who knows what terrible things those poor souls suffered and how much it changed them—for the worst I'll wager."

  They bid each other farewell at the gangplank. Donal McCullough, Nettie's master rigger, escorted Lenore to the omnibus waiting at the depot. "Sure you don't need me to take you to the station, miss?"

  "I'm certain, Mr. McCullough. Thank you." She boarded the omnibus and found a seat next to a woman cradling an infant. She returned McCullough’s wave as the driver pulled away and settled in for her journey to the train station.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NATHANIEL GROANED UNDER HIS BREATH at the sight of Lenore strolling down one of the cemetery paths to her father's grave. Hidden by an ancient elm bedecked in ivy, he consumed her with his gaze, taking in the bombazine gown of unrelenting black, the upswept hair that revealed her pale neck and highlighted the line of her jaw.

  She tortured him with these weekly visits to her father's grave. Pulled from the opposite side of the sprawling cemetery as if by a lodestone, he sensed her presence the moment she passed through the entrance archway. Coves of hanging ivy and the shadows cast by crypts kept him hidden from view as he admired her profile and listened to the easy pitch of her voice.

  She conversed with her father at each visit as if he were standing before her, his eyes bright with the avid curiosity he'd passed on to his only child. Nathaniel could have told her that Arthur's spirit didn't linger the way some did, that it had crossed the ethereal barrier; the body beneath the bricks had been an empty vessel at burial. Nathaniel was not, however, a cruel man. He recognized her need to hold onto some remnant of her loved one, to accept her sorrow and gradually let it go. Other mourners did the same. The difference was he didn't eavesdrop on their conversations with the dearly departed.

  Many might say he breached every form of courtesy in listening to her one-sided conversations with her father. He invaded her privacy, but he couldn't stop or bring himself to feel any shame. He'd thought his love for Lenore Kenward had been ripped out of him along with his humanity. His first glimpse of her at her father's graveside had re-ignited emotions once lost in the hazy memories of a distant life. Seeing her again had been an ecstasy. Knowing she was forever out of his reach an agony. He concentrated on her words and closed his eyes as a wave of homesickness washed over him.

  "I visited with Nettie today, Papa. She sends her regards. The Pollux will be in port at Maldon for a few more days, then Nettie is taking her out. I'm to understand she will act as escort for the Andromeda. They will face the Redan."

  The Redan. The dimensional fissure. Images flashed behind Nathaniel's closed lids.

  He'd never get used to seeing it, never lose the terror that churned his guts and sucked the air from his lungs. The black tide of roiling clouds pounded the protective barrier, searching—always searching—for the one weakness that would allow it to breach the wards woven by Her Majesty’s best guild mages and rip the fissure even wider.

  The nebula writhed and twisted, illuminated by flashes of sour yellow lightning that revealed the monstrous things surfing its waves—colossal maws baring teeth the length of cathedral spires, segmented legs of insectile abominations bristling with spiky black fur, and slick tentacles that whipped from the fissure to tongue the wards with a barbed stroke.

  Wind, flecked with ice crystals and smelling of ozone, blasted across the Pollux's gun batteries and glazed the empyrean-loaded carronades in a thin sheet of ice.

  The gunnery crew shouted as one when a tentacle lashed out of the obscuring cloud, the curving claws stretched across its underside extending and retracting as it reached for the Pollux. The ship dove, narrowly avoiding the shredding appendage. The tentacle retreated into the miasma.

  "Steady, men," he called out to the other gunners.

  "Look sharp, lads." Nettie's command traveled through the speaking tube, as bracing as the wind threatening to freeze his hands to the battery shield.

  Despite the numbing cold, sweat tric
kled down his ribs beneath his heavy woolens. The fissure contorted and labored as if trying to whelp the unearthly life squirming within it.

  Three tentacles burst out of the nebula and struck the ship.

  "Fire!" he roared into the link. "Fire!"

  Crimson light filled his vision as the carronades belched empyrean from their barrels. An explosion deafened him. The Pollux squealed and yawed hard to starboard. Wood shrapnel and broken tether lines exploded into the air. A wash of heat splattered his face. Blinded, he wiped at his eyes and came away with a glove smeared in blood. Something heavy struck his shoulder and bounced across the gunnery deck—an arm, shredded at the shoulder joint, and no body attached to it.

  The Pollux suddenly pitched back on her rudder, sending him careening into the nearest cannon. His tether cable jerked taut, smashing his stomach against his backbone. Scorched wool filled his nostrils. He clutched at a broken railing to stay upright. Hot metal burned through his glove, searing his palm. He gritted his teeth against the pain and held on. The agonized screams of men rent to pieces filled his ears.

  He looked up—far, far up to the boiling sky where an arching nightmare laced with curving white claws hurtled toward the wounded Pollux. The deck bucked hard beneath his feet. He lost his grip on the railing and jittered across the slick surface like a marionette dancing to the tune of the shuddering ship...

  ...the shuddering ship.

  Nathaniel's eyes snapped open. He inhaled a strangled breath. A voice, achingly familiar, cut short its casual monologue.

  "Who's there?"

  He blinked, desperate to clear his mind of the images that seized and held him fast in frozen horror.

  "Who's there?" The sharp tones of Lenore's repeated question, didn't quite disguise her fear. She peered into the ivy shielding him from view, poised to take flight at the slightest motion, her brown eyes wide in her pale face.

  Nathaniel breathed deep, willing away the terror, the memory of the churning nebula, the whipping tentacle.

  ...the shuddering ship.

  "Forgive me, miss," he said in a smooth voice and stepped from the ivy's concealment. "I didn't mean to frighten you."

  Despite his knowledge of her character, he still expected to her run. She didn't. Instead, she wilted, her stiff shoulders relaxing in obvious relief. It was a first for him in this new incarnation. Guardians weren't persecuted outright, but they were shunned and feared. Most people avoided them as if they were plague-ridden. Lenore wasn't most people.

  She drew closer, head tilted. “The Guardian.”

  He acknowledged her designation with a low bow but said no more.

  Her somber features softened a little, and her eyes warmed. “You’ve done a fine job taking care of Highgate’s citizens.” She gestured to Arthur’s grave. “Not a brick moved. Even the flowers I placed here last time are as they lay.” She bent to trace the discolored edge of a wilted white rose with one fingertip. It had taken all of Nathaniel’s willpower not to claim the small bouquet for himself or at least the ribbon that bound it together.

  “It isn’t safe to be here alone, miss. Have you no companion?” Some things never changed. The one time he’d remarked on Lenore’s penchant for taking solitary jaunts, she’d arched an eyebrow at him and tipped her chin in such way that he braced himself for a setdown. She wore the exact same expression now.

  “This isn’t Whitechapel, sir, and we’re in broad daylight with many perfectly respectable people nearby taking the air.” She shrugged. “Besides, had I a maid or companion with me, she would no doubt have abandoned me to my fate the moment you made an appearance.” The eyebrow lowered, and she offered a faint smile.

  He tipped his head. “While I might argue the wisdom of taking the air of London, I cannot refute the last. Guardians aren’t sought after for their charming wit and illuminating conversation.”

  “True, but there is a difference between avoidance and fear.” A puzzled line creased the smooth skin of her forehead. “People flee when they see Guardians, as though their lives are in immediate danger if they so much as glimpse you, yet I’ve never heard of a Guardian doing harm to anyone.”

  That was because he and his brethren made certain there was nothing to investigate or report when they did away with resurrectionists. The only evidence left of the ones Nathaniel had immolated were soot marks on the grass, and those had washed away with the next inevitable rain. All but one body thief’s soul had crossed the Veil, and Nathaniel ignored that ghostly voice which joined the chorus of others. He admitted none of this to Lenore.

  “We’re frightful sights to look upon, and our choice of employment far too macabre to discuss over tea.”

  Her mouth tightened, a sure sign she was settling in for an argument. “Those aren’t adequate reasons to flee as if the Dartmoor Hound were snapping at your coat or dress hem.”

  “For some, those are perfectly acceptable reasons.” He suspected people would be more inclined to linger and stare if they saw the Hound. It was a creature far removed from themselves in every way. He, on the other hand, was still a little too similar for comfort. After Harvel’s experiment, and with gehenna-tainted blood in his veins, he was no more human than the Hound and a hundred times more terrifying. Like those fearful folk, he’d once been an ordinary person. Now he represented the horrors that might have happened to any one of them but by the grace of God had not. In his observations, people feared the almost far more than the what if.

  The ever-present pall over London deepened. Clouds, heavy with rain, lowered even more. Drizzle that had threatened all afternoon finally fell to beat an arrhythmic tattoo on High Gate’s crypts and verdant landscape.

  Lenore snapped open the umbrella looped on her wrist and swung it over her head. She raised an eyebrow. “Improper or not, it seems hardly fair that you become drenched while I remain dry. I’m willing to share.”

  Nathaniel smiled a little, as charmed by her offer cloaked in challenge as he was by the memory of her subduing a belligerent pack of butchers boys on a Camberwell street with the same umbrella.

  Rain didn’t bother him. He acted as sentinel here in all weather, had even survived a lightning strike once with only the acrid smell of burned hair to mark the event. Still, her offer tempted him beyond words. To be close to her once more, breathing in her scent of bergamot and lemon water and hearing the gentle rise and fall of her breathing...

  “Your offer of shelter is kind, miss, but it’s only water. Everything dries in time.” He noted the continually darkening sky. Once the rain stopped, the fog would roll in, blotting out what little light still remained and turning the city into a murky sea. “You should return home. Even the hardiest person doesn’t stroll through a pea-souper if they can help it.” He frowned. “And it isn’t safe for those alone, even when you aren’t in Whitechapel.”

  A soft whirring sound overhead forestalled her reply. Nathaniel followed her gaze to watch one of the many airships dotting London’s sky drift past them. It flew low under the cloud ceiling, the whirring noise that of the two rotating disks that spun around its girth at bow and stern. Nathaniel recognized the ship; so did Lenore.

  “After the Pollux, my father was always partial to the Merope. Her design made it easy to retrofit her engines for adiabatic demagnitization.” Her smile was wistful. “He was almost as proud to see her inaugural flight after the upgrade as he was to watch the Pollux after retrofit.”

  Rain sheeted off the ship’s sleek exterior as it glided past them. Nathaniel had sailed on the Merope once years ago when Nettie brought him with her to inspect the gun batteries for ideas on how to improve upon her own ship’s arsenal. He’d come away unimpressed. The engines were indeed a marvel, no longer subject to overheating from the volatile empyrean used to fuel them, but the Pollux’s firepower remained superior. The Merope was built for transport, the Pollux for war, and their designs reflected their different purposes.

  “She’s a good ship for a thermal and her pilot one of the best
. He’d have to be to keep her from porpoising every time the throttle settings change.”

  The weight of Lenore’s measuring gaze rested heavily on him. “You know something of airships,” she said in a voice both curious and admiring.

  “A fact here and there,” he replied. The common knowledge they shared—his through experience as a deckhand, hers through design and theory—had provided him with the perfect excuse to talk with her when he visited her father’s workshop. She’d seduced him as much with her passionate descriptions of membrane structures and buoyancy ratings as she did with her beauty.

  She asked him a question that made the breath die in his chest. “Would you like to sail in one in the future?”

  Of everything he’d lost since the Pollux’s near disaster at the Redan and Dr. Harvel’s experiments, the greatest—besides Lenore herself—was his post on Nettie’s ship. Any ship for that matter. He strove to keep his voice even and free of bitterness lest she sense it and question him, as had always been her wont.

  “I’m neither a creature of air nor ocean, miss, but of earth.” He swung an arm to encompass the cemetery with its wide field of headstones, crypts and mournful angels. “My place is here.”

  Despite his best efforts, something of his regret must have colored his words. Lenore’s pitying gaze turned his stomach. He steered the conversation back to her. “And you, miss? Would you like to see the world from an airship gondola?”

  Her expression lightened, but his delight in the change was short-lived. “I would, and I may yet have the chance. I’ve requested a post on the Pollux, serving under Captain Widderschynnes.” She grinned, unaware of Nathaniel’s growing horror. “I’ll know in a few days if I have a place.”

  Nathaniel stared at her, no longer seeing a woman clothed in black under an equally dark umbrella silvered with rain, but the gunnery deck of the Pollux slippery with ice and blood.

  “Sir, what troubles you?”

  He blinked, refocusing on Lenore’s pale features and the puzzlement clouding her expression. He shook his head. “I beg your pardon, miss. I’m more familiar with the ships than I am with their captains.” A lie as white as his hair. “But Widderschynnes is well-known.”