Wrecker pushed on the brake and reached out to give me a hand up. “Fancy a ride through the park, Miss Kit?”
He liked driving through Center Park, both to show off his mistress’s carri and to worry his way through the noontime parade of tonners on horseback. So did I, but there was no time for a joyride. “I’ve a job to get to, sorry. Another time, Wrecker.”
He nodded and glanced at my lap to see I was belted in before he let off the handbrake.
Before the gold rush days had brought every scrabbler and digger from the eastern provinces to the west coast, Rumsen had belonged to the Fleers, who had crossed the plains rather than give in to Church and state. When I was a kid, some bone hunters had dug up the foundation of the only prayerhouse the Fleers had managed to build before the army caught up with them; from the number of scorched skeletons they’d uncovered, it appeared to have burned to the ground with most of the Fleers inside.
The governor had issued the usual statement about what a tragedy it was to learn that the fugitives had accidentally torched themselves in their illegal place of worship, mainly to remind us all that for Torians it still was Church or nothing, and if any of us were to break the faith laws, the same sort of accident could happen again.
I’d once visited the site of the old prayerhouse, over which a merchants’ exchange now stood. I didn’t see any ghosts floating around the building, but when I’d looked up at the second floor, every window I saw slowly turned white with frost.
All trace of the Fleers had been wiped away by the Occupancy, which had established Rumsen as a troop station and trading post, although it really was more of a dumping ground for the misfits and malcontents in the service. The Crown began sending over the deserters, upstarts, and failures from the ranks; if they survived the trek through native lands, they remained in Rumsen on permanent assignment.
In those days, the only females to be had as bedservants were native, and common practice was to capture and defile them before they could be recovered by their kin. Some of the old, crude cabins the surly troops had built for themselves and their squawks (named for the way they’d screech when stolen from their tribes) still stood on the fringe of the city. Rina’s people could trace their line back to a randy captain and a squawk who had borne him six children before finally cutting his throat one night while he slept.
I lived in one of the oldest sections of the town, in a small goldstone nestled among the slaterows and clopboard mercantiles. My flathouse had once been a granary, and on hot days the walls, which had once housed tons of seed wheat, still gave off a scent like that of bread baking.
Wrecker conveyed me straight to my door and even shut off the engine to jump out, come round, and hand me down like a fine lady. “Be back at half past, then?”
“That’ll do.” I pressed a couple of coins into his ham-size hand. “There’s a decent pie shop two blocks south. Tell the counterlass that I sent you, and she’ll fix you up with a special.”
I let myself in through the front door, locking it behind me. Although there were seven flats in my building, I was presently the only tenant. Over the years I’d quietly bought up the leases for the other flats, and then offered for the building. At first the former owner, a hatchet-faced pork trader named Billings, had flatly refused to sell to me. “Females can’t manage property,” he’d informed me. “You’d do better to bank your funds and find yourself a nice young man, miss.”
My money was as good as any man’s, which made me think about taking him to property court, but then bad luck solved the problem for me. Five of the pork trader’s buildings had been unexpectedly inspected and condemned as firetraps and promptly demolished. He’d come back to me, desperate for coin, and with a little dickering I bought the building for half my original offer.
I knew it was foolish to keep the other flats empty, but I liked living alone. When I had a little money, I did some renovating here and there. Eventually I hoped to convert the whole place from a flathouse into a single-family home.
For convenience’s sake I lived in the first-floor flat, which was also the largest, the other floors each being split between two units. This also gave me direct access to the kitchen, pantry, and bathing room.
I hung up the borrowed dress before I went in to stoke the stove and put on the kettle. I rarely cooked; it was easier to pick up something quick at the pie shop or one of the corner wichcarts. I retrieved a leftover tart from the piesafe, made my tea, and carried both into the bathing room.
I could hear my mother in the back of my head, gently scolding me: Ladies don’t eat in the bath, Charmian. They bathe.
I set down my mug and plate and went to my tub. It was an old claw-footer, made from thick clearstone gone white on the inside from years of use. I cranked the pump for a minute before I opened the tap and tested the flow with my fingers; there was no hot water left from last night. I needed to replace the old coal boiler outside with an in-house furnace, but then walls would have to be torn out to convert the pipes, work for which no decent piper would barter. I was saving up for it, though, and in the meantime made do with what I could coax out of the old blackpot.
Wrecker arrived at my door promptly at three thirty and peered at my face as he helped me up into the carri. “You all right, Miss Kit?”
“No hot water for my bath.” I pinched my cheeks to bring some color to them and recalled the ugly words sliced into the back of Diana Walsh’s hands. “Wrecker, do you believe in curses?”
He pushed out his lower lip. “Don’t disbelieve. All manner of things in this world, Miss Kit. Man’s gotta keep an open mind.”
I shivered a little and blamed it on the ice-cold bath I’d been obliged to take. “To the Hill, please, Wreck.”
He nodded and started off toward the main thoroughfare.
The Hill, also known to the lesser citizens of Rumsen as Poshtown or the Vineyard, constituted the newest part of the city. The land it occupied had once been sacred to a local native tribe, long since exterminated by the first settlers, who had then plowed and cultivated the slopes into enormous vineyards. The dense, fertile black soil had produced some of the sweetest dark wines in the province, but not for very long. When the Crown had decided to prohibit drink, the army had been obliged to round up the winemakers and distillers and smash their vats and cookeries. To protect the city, the vineyard had been subjected to a controlled burn, and the ashes plowed back into the ground.
Only clover and sweet grass had flourished on the Hill until that time when it—and most of Rumsen—was bought up by a beloved bastard son of an English duke. He had the slopes cleared again so that he could build a towering mansion from which he could overlook his new domain.
The bastard son had died without issue, but rather than add the property to his entitled estate, the old duke had sold it off piecemeal to other wealthy families in the queensland, who in turn built homes there for their undesirable relations. Over time the blues had intermarried with the merchant class to create the first ton. The result was the Hill: some four hundred mansions covering every square inch of the old vineyard, and housing Toriana’s only claim to aristocracy.
No doubt guilt over stranding their castoff kin on the other side of the world from the queensland had loosened many purse strings; some of the finest manors ever built on Torian soil marched up the Hill. Gildstone and bronze cast work glittered in the bright midday sun, while the genteel pastel colors of the paintwork gave off a subtle glow, thanks to the ground sparkglass that had been added to the different tints.
Many of the men who built the Hill soon after begun coughing up blood. All of them died lingering, painful deaths. The city’s more superstitious dolts had claimed old native magic had death-cursed the workmen, but more scientifically, it had been inhaling the sparkglass that took them out. Once breathed in, the tiny, deadly grains began eating into their noses, throats, and chests and caused them to waste away slowly from internal bleeding. The Hill was beautiful, but the price it extracted had bee
n too costly. There wasn’t a builder in Rumsen who hadn’t sent a dozen men or better to early graves from glasslung.
Walsh’s Folly, a modest-size palace occupying a respectable two acres, had been styled with the later fashion of turrets and crowswalks, with dozens of balconies from which the inhabitants could gaze upon the sea, the city, the pastureland to the south, and the forests to the north.
It was also pink and sported wardlings over every threshold, so I hated it at first sight.
Wrecker handed me down, promised to return in two hours, and took off before the butler could get a good look at him through the peeper. I gathered my borrowed skirt and made my way up the right steps of the two-sided stair—built so that ladies and gents could ascend separately to prevent any unintentional vulgar glimpse by male eye of female ankle—and took the correct place before the door so that I could be viewed from within. One did not knock on doors or ring bells on the Hill.
After a moderately insulting five minutes, the door slowly opened inward, and an iron-haired scarecrow in immaculate blacks glared down at me without a word.
“Miss Kittredge to see Lady Walsh.” I offered him a name card and waited with a blank smile as he read every letter on it four times over. He then looked around me as if trying to find something. “I have no maid with me,” I said helpfully.
“Come in,” he said in a dour, disapproving tone, and barely waited until I was over the threshold before closing the door. “This way.”
I followed the towering old winge through the lovely foyer and past several open doors, through which I saw beautiful rooms filled with enough antiques to stock several shops. Along the walls were portraits in oil of every Walsh who had ever drawn breath, I presumed, noting the succession of weak chins and receding hairlines. Walsh came from a family of bankers, judging by the bleakness of their dress and the cut of their waistcoats. Men who handled money for a living were the most conservative of dressers and never enslaved themselves to the whims of fashion; they wanted to project an aura of unwavering knowledge and sober experience, not flightiness and impulsivity.
The butler halted in front of two double doors, knocking once before opening them and standing on the threshold. “A Miss Kittredge,” he said in the same tone he’d use to announce that a stray dog, one that might possibly be rabid, had been found on the premises.
“Dear Cousin Kit,” Lady Walsh said, rising and crossing the room to take my hands in hers. “You’re as lovely as I imagined.”
“You’re too kind, Lady Diana.” I bobbed a curtsey to mollify the butler. I thought of all the glasslung that painting this monstrosity must have inflicted and added with a touch of irony, “Your home is quite breathtaking.”
“It is a lovely sanctuary from the worries of the world.” She squeezed my hands before releasing them. “Now come and let me introduce you to the family.”
The family present in the receiving room consisted of two men and one lady. The eldest, a weak-chinned, nearly bald man of fifty in a heavy dark-blue suit, was the master of the house, Nolan Walsh. A thin, mousy-looking woman dressed in an exquisitely fitted lavender half-mourning gown was introduced as Miranda Walsh, Nolan’s younger daughter. A leaner version of Nolan stood by the mantel fiddling with a timepiece; he was the only son and doubtful heir, Nolan Jr., called Montrose.
“My wife tells me you and she are connected through the Landaus,” Nolan said after introductions had been made. “It must be a happy thing for you to meet your distant cousin.”
The way he emphasized distant made me brighten my smile. “A great and humbling happiness, milord.”
Lady Walsh rang for tea, which she served with the elegance of long practice. I refused her offer of cakes and pretended to take a sip now and then while I let my tea grow stone-cold. We spoke of the fine weather, the agreeable effect it was having on the city’s gardens, and whether it promised a milder winter than last season.
As we began to run out of polite topics, Montrose shambled near and bent over oddly, until I realized he was peering at my face.
“I can’t see anything of Diana in you,” he said in a voice that sounded female and querulous. “Are you the get of the gambler or the drinker?”
“Monty, what a thing to ask.” Lady Walsh uttered an embarrassed titter. “Cousin Kit is the daughter of the third son of my great-aunt Hortense Landau.” To me she said, “You do bear a striking resemblance to her, my dear.”
That was my cue. “Thank you for saying so, cousin. I never had the pleasure of meeting my father’s mother.”
“Well, why not?” Montrose rasped. “The old bat lived until she was ninety-seven, didn’t she, Di?”
“She and my father were estranged for quite some time.” I noted the faint yellow tint to the whites of his muddy brown eyes, and the network of fine red lines webbing the skin around his nostrils. Even if I’d missed them, I couldn’t escape his breath, which reeked of gin. The drips might have rendered Junior barren, but it was the blue ruin that was going to kill him.
Montrose showed me his overbite. “What did your old man do, marry a squawk?”
Diana became a beautiful statue, Miranda sucked in a shocked breath and tried to cover it with her bony hand, and Nolan Sr. cleared his throat.
“Why, no, sir,” I said as pleasantly as I could. “That would have been against the law.”
“You’re as dark as one.” His gaze wandered over my black hair before settling on my eyes. “Who were your mother’s people?”
That proved a bit too much, even for the old man, who snapped, “That will suffice, Montrose.”
“It’s all right, milord.” I smiled at his jackass of a son. “My mother’s people were Welshires and Norders. Working class, I believe.”
As I expected, admitting that one-half of my family had been common laborers explained my coloring, invalidated any suspicion that I might be trying to better my situation, and satisfied Montrose’s desire to take me down to the bottom peg.
I needed to get away from these people before I decked someone. “My father always regretted the rift his marriage caused between him and the family. He had no portraits of them, but he often told me how much I reminded him of his mother.” I sighed. “I only wish I could have made her acquaintance before she passed away.”
“In my rooms I have a portint of Great-aunt Hortense when she was about your age,” Diana said, rising from the settee. “Would you care to see it, Kit?”
I managed a surprised smile. “Why, yes, I would very much, thank you, cousin.”
Diana glanced at her stepson before addressing her husband. “If you will excuse us, my dear.”
He nodded, clearly relieved. He must have assumed Diana was taking me off to give him the time and privacy to lecture his son over his wayward lip. I could just imagine how Father Walsh would scold: Gentlemen do not speak of such scum in polite company, my lad.
As soon as we were out of earshot, the lady touched my arm. “I’m so sorry, Kit. Monty usually doesn’t drink so much before dinner. Now, shall we—”
“Think nothing of it, cousin.” Aware that there were still servants around who could overhear us, I touched a finger to my lips to silence her, and then said clearly, “I am so anxious to see the portint of your great-aunt, my grandmother. Do you really believe I bear a resemblance to her?”
As Diana assured me at length of how much I did, she led me upstairs and through a maze of halls to her personal chambers, which included two sitting rooms, a dressing room, a bath, and an enormous bedchamber. A young, plump female sat working carefully to mend the torn hem of a gown hanging from a dress form. As soon as she saw us, she darted her needle and stood.
“Milady.” A well-trained lass, the chambermaid didn’t spare me a single glance. “Do you need something?”
“No, Betsy. This is my cousin, Miss Kittredge.” She waited until the maid dropped a curtsey my way before she added, “Actually, you know, there is something I want. Would you please run down to the apothecary and fetch
me a pain powder?”
“At once, milady.” The maid departed.
“I never have the headache, except now and then in the morning,” Diana confided as she led me into her bedchamber. “But it’s the only task I could think of that will take her some time to accomplish.”
“That will help.” I closed the doors before I opened my satchel and took out the echo. “Do you know how long Montrose was away on his tour after school?”
Her brows arched. “I think Nolan told me once that he spent three years traveling. Why?”
“Just curious.” I went to the wall nearest her bed.
Diana went to the window to look down at the city. “My stepdaughters are both kind in their own fashion, but Montrose . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t understand what compels him to be so provocative. Or vulgar.”
I did, and after a moment of silent debate decided to tell her. “Montrose never made a tour, milady. He likely spent those three years in hospital, taking the cure.”
“The cure?” She turned to me. “Whatever for?”
“The drips.”
She swayed and then abruptly sat down on her bed. “I didn’t know Montrose was already married, so I thought my father meant to offer me to him. I was so astonished when Nolan admitted his regard for me.” Her hand touched her ashen cheek. “My God.” She gazed up. “Montrose’s wife—he must have given it to her.”
“Doubtful, milady. After the first year the rot moves into the brain, where it harms no one but the unfortunate one infected.” I popped the cap on the echo and checked the lens. “It is likely the reason behind these attacks. Young Walsh can never inherit, of course.”
“Now I understand why Nolan is always so attentive to . . . his husbandly duties.” A giggle escaped her. “I’m to provide him with a new heir.”
“I’m so sorry.” And I was.
She blotted her eyes with a lace handkerchief. “How could you know this? Have you been one of Montrose’s . . . particular companions?”