For now, though, her attention was focused on the letters stacked on her work desk, the ledgers open to her left. She had men to do her accounting for her, and she employed them, but she kept a private record of her sales, her holdings, her wealth. Her power. Her ledgers were expanding by fewer and fewer lines each month, and her power would begin to fade soon, without the endless growth to sustain it.
The boundaries of her world were drawing inward. The noose was tightening.
The letters ranged from invitations to dinners she would never attend to requests from merchants who were trying to jump past the men she had hired to interact with them. Most would be burned. There were, however, three letters she would attend to: from Captain Reynolds, from the doctors, and from Officer Pollard.
They all reported much the same thing. After every crew member had been accounted for, seven in total remained in a catatonic state. The doctors had been unable to find a cause. The wives of two had requested a merciful death for them (and Reynolds informed her of the death payments he would be making to the widows). The rest had been moved to one of the sanitariums outside the city limits.
Perhaps the same one Violetta’s girl had been trying to get to? Evelyn massaged her temple, fingers slipping up beneath the short veil she wore in her home. It came down only to the tip of her nose, allowing her to eat and drink on the rare occasion she remembered to. She still wore her stiff-necked mourning dress, but that was only for the benefit of the servants. Half her grief was an affectation, a shield. Only the smallest bit of veil served to mark her actual loss.
The period of mourning for her mother had passed twenty years ago, but Evelyn would not forget her so neatly. She owed her better than that.
Pollard’s letter, she was frustrated to find, requested that she return to the dock offices to fill out some paperwork related to clearing The Verity for continued travel into and out of the city. He could have sent it directly to her, for her to complete and return. Why summon her? She pressed her fingers a little harder into her skin, twisting her nails into her thinning auburn hair. Perhaps he wanted to question her. Perhaps her ship would not be cleared at all, and he wanted to discuss it with her in person. There were no good reasons for him to summon her. That much was certain.
She continued with her morning tasks, and checked on her patient one last time, before she called for Violetta to ready their carriage. The rains cleared as she waited, sitting still and quiet in the foremost parlor, gazing out at the hill on which her house rested.
At last, Violetta came in to fetch her, and they climbed together into the carriage and set off down to Delphinium.
The cab smelled not at all of the rescued soldier, his blood and filth scrubbed off the seat that Violetta now sat on. Its absence served as its own reminder. There were no traces left of him beyond the interior chambers of the mansion, just as she had requested.
But the coachman knew. Was it Evelyn’s imagination, or had he been slow to shut the carriage door, hoping for some explanation, uncertain at what he’d been drawn into? And what of the servants, preparing food for an unseen guest? Violetta was the only one to tend to him directly, but she could not make broth for him without the cook knowing.
They would talk, and Violetta could only do so much to quiet them.
As Evelyn turned her options over, the carriage wound its way down from the hills, water rushing beside them in the deep gutters. The cobbles remained slick, but with full sunlight her driver managed to make good time. As houses and businesses began to grow in density, Violetta leaned into the central space, looking out the window in the door.
It was the same path they always took. There was nothing of interest out that door.
Violetta’s brows drew together in confusion, before she surged up out of her seat and banged on the roof of the carriage for their driver to stop. She pressed herself against the door, face against the small window.
“What is it? Another discarded soldier?” Evelyn asked, biting back harsher words. The sooner she reached Pollard’s offices, the sooner she could be back in her home, guarding her prisoner.
“No, my lady. It’s—what is she doing?”
Evelyn frowned, leaning towards the door herself. A light touch at her shoulder moved Violetta enough out of the way that Evelyn could look out as well.
And there, standing in the muck by the side of the road, was the girl she’d given the bryony to at the club. Her hair hung limp around her face, unwashed and unstyled, and her clothing sat strangely, as if she’d forgotten how to dress herself. But where Evelyn would have expected her expression to match the pitiful
state of the rest of her, she found the girl’s eyes alive and bright. She was focused wholly on the carriage door, and a small smile played upon her lips.
She took a step towards the carriage, then another, reaching the cobbles and then crossing the drainage channel.
She did not blink. “It’s not natural,” Violetta breathed, and reached up to bang on the carriage roof again. Evelyn reached out and caught her wrist.
“No,” Evelyn said.
“The remedy you gave her—”
“Bryony does not do this,” Evelyn said.
“She doesn’t look right, my lady. We should go.” Violetta pulled against Evelyn’s grip, but Evelyn did not relent.
“Something in her eyes,” Evelyn murmured. “There’s something in her eyes.” The girl was only a few feet away now, and her face lit with an unearthly delight as Evelyn pushed Violetta out of the way, coming into full view through the window.
“Evelyn Perdanu,” the girl said. Her muffled voice had a strange tremor to it, a warbling that made Evelyn’s spine stiffen, made her hands feel unaccountably cold. The horses were whickering, and the carriage rocked as they shied from the girl. They could sense it, the strangeness that Evelyn could see in every ill-animated line of her face. And those eyes, those unblinking eyes—
A fly landed on the girl’s eye, and none of her features so much as twitched.
“The ship,” Evelyn breathed. “Just like the ship.”
“But better than the ship,” the girl said, as if she could hear Evelyn through the door. Her smile widened. “We will not go out with the tide, now.”
She came another step closer, and the horses revolted. The carriage threatened to overturn, to jerk forward, to be pushed back.And then her driver came down from the box, brandishing his whip. The girl did not turn to him, ignored his shouts to get off the road. The whip fell once, twice upon her upper back,
too lightly to cause serious injury. But the girl fell, all the same, suddenly an empty, motionless doll, dress and hair spilling into the gutter.
Her eyes remained open. Her face became slack. A thin line of blood trickled across her temple.
The driver looked to Evelyn, face stricken. She eased open the door with shaking hands, stepping down from the carriage, heavy black skirts trailing behind her. She went to the girl, crouching down and reaching for her throat. She half expected the girl to grin again, to leap up, but she was as still as The Verity’s first mate. Her pulse was tangible, though uneven. Blood was beginning to spread out from where her skull had struck the cobbles.
“I didn’t—” the driver began, then stopped. “I wasn’t—”
“She is ill,” Evelyn said. She had no room in her for her employee’s shame; there was only stunned silence, growing fear. “She fell counter to your blows. It was not your hand that did this.”