Eterna and Omega (11 page)

A shudder consumed Clara, a sense memory of the seizure on this spot. For a sensitive, she was
too
sensitive, her gifts sometimes entirely counterproductive. No great revelations came from the fits, and she thought this a wasted opportunity. For what she suffered, she'd at least have hoped God spoke to her during paroxysms. All she got for it were raging headaches and bruises.

Clara knelt, lifting the light mauve skirts of her linen day dress to pool around her in a draping bell so as not to create a muddy mess of herself and removed her embroidered white gloves so as not to ruin them entirely. The trowel she took to the ground was plucked from the same carpetbag she'd brought everything in with in the first place.

In moments, she revealed the shallow pit of materials she had so hastily dumped, marked by dirt, damp, a bit of the ink ran on folded pages that had tumbled out from their folders.

“Not too much the worse for wear, thank God,” she murmured.

All went back into the carpetbag; she'd sort it out at the office.

She stood, and with Lavinia close behind, left the churchyard. As she passed Bishop at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, he fell into step beside her. Though the senator was a head taller than Clara, she always managed to keep up, it had been a point of pride even in her youth to do so. Poor Lavinia had to pick up the folds of her black crepe gown and trot after them.

The Eterna Commission offices on Pearl Street, near the tip of the island, occupied the uppermost floors of a dark brick and brownstone edifice. The city records stored on the first floor gave the building its cover as a government bastion, shielding the commission's search for immortality and related supernatural matters.

The recent addition of security guards inside the front hall, iron bars, and a few clever trip wires, while unnerving and a reminder of Clara's kidnapping, gave the team a sense of increased safety about the building. Eterna's offices were as much home to her as the town house she shared with the senator down the street. They were a place of meaning, of a sacred purpose that had once been so clear and now was so muddied.

However, Clara wouldn't allow the building to carry that burden. This edifice represented a life far larger than what most women were afforded, a profession that suited her restless mind and the legacy of her past lives. She hoped to make her old adventurers and explorers proud by charting the waters of the spirit, mapping the sixth sense.

Making Louis's idea of a protective Ward created from sentiment and sediment a reality might be her great achievement in this life, provided they could put the pieces together while avoiding Louis's fate.

Once Rupert opened the new locks, Clara raced up the stairs.

“Remember the trip wire, Clara,” Lavinia cautioned, taking her position behind her desk at the landing alcove, the tulle mourning veil of her black crepe hat trailing over a host of variously morbid curiosities upon the desk before draping to rest on a canopic jar.

“Right, trip wire. Thank you,” she called halfway up the steps. “These new safety measures will take some getting used to, will they not?”

“Indeed,” the other woman said cheerily, her bright disposition an amusing contrast to her melancholic wardrobe and fascinations. Clara had similar interests but hardly the fashion commitment.

Pausing on the landing to disable the trip wire that would lead to entrapment by rope, Clara then unlocked the wooden door of her top-floor office and swept in. She could feel the dramatic swing of her skirts as she moved about, lighting the stained-glass Tiffany lamps she so cherished: her jewel boxes of light, taking after Evelyn Northe-Stewart in thinking the whole world should be redone by their studios.

The rich hues illuminated several wooden desks and a slew of sacred talismans, many mounted on the room's plate glass windows. Clara immediately went to her rosewood beast of a desk with a bay window behind, and set down her bag. Here was her esoteric enclave built from ideas, stubbornness, and her guardian's fondness.

Bishop, a few steps behind, called to her from the landing. “Shall I work with you or fetch you a cup of coffee, Clara?”

“Both,” Clara declared. He chuckled, and his footfalls retreated. The building was so quiet that she could hear the cups rattling, the maw of the coal stove clanking open.

She turned her attention to the papers she had retrieved from Trinity, spreading the material out on her desk. She plucked a thin-haired brush from a drawer filled with random implements such as Masonic tools she wasn't supposed to have or understand, a medium's séance bell, and vials of medicinal herbs used in folkloric magic.

This brush had been used to sweep debris from archaeological digs in Alexandria. New York was gaining impressive collections of that region's plunder. It had been given as a token to the senator, who passed it along to Clara, as he did any item he thought she might find interesting. Removing her gloves once more, she used the brush on the papers, dabbing at moist spots with blotting paper.

Clara traced her fingertips around the edges of the diary that held the key to Louis and Barnard's system. She and Bishop would have to put this to the test, see if they could recreate it multiple times, to protect multiple spaces. A successful Ward would need to be broadly applied.

She turned to the page of ingredients headed “The Heart of the Matter” in Louis's neat yet flowing script. He was an artist; his penmanship spoke of dreams and brilliance.

The theory of Eterna in Spiritual Materialism is as simple as it is profound:

Seven ingredients are an ideal combination.

Separate: inert.

Combined: potentially the compound, and that which keeps this uniquely ours, American.

From these distinct, live cultures, the tether to a long life begins.

Herein are distinct examples of our localized compounds.

Several cities were used as examples; Clara and Bishop had already put Salem to the test in a spontaneous adventure of curiosity. The results had been inconclusive but encouraging.

They had yet to create the Ward for New York, but that
had
to be the next step, for Clara cared for her city as if it were an extension of herself.

NEW YORK—The Economy and Engine of the Matter

BASE MATERIALS:

Take from the most charged place of the city; where the striving meet the gods.

Soil of the harbor; cross—waters of the world.

Mix with the air of the center of the city.

Find haunts. Add item from scene.

ADDITIONAL CHARGED ITEMS:

Bone shards from Potter's fields.

Stone from Trinity churchyard.

A Wall Street dollar.

Final step: Burn elements collectively.

Rupert entered then, carrying two cups of coffee. He handed one to Clara before seating himself opposite her and helping her clean and organize the files.

“These are more of Barnard Smith's notes than I recall we had before,” he said, pausing to sip his coffee.

“Yes, I got more of them from Columbia,” Clara replied.

Bishop's familiar sigh spoke of his dislike for her doing things without telling him, but he did not pick a fight or complain, to Clara's great relief.

“Before us lies a precarious magic,” Clara said softly. “Laid before us like an offering at an altar. Vital, specific keys to magic … What if we put it together incorrectly?”

“If Mr. Dupris has advised you to make these compounds as his papers instruct, then that is what we'll try,” Bishop said, leaning toward her. “Together.”

Her shoulders relaxed.

“It was never our job to save the world, Clara,” he said calmly, adding, “It might just be that we have to cast a few magic spells in the right direction.”

Clara smiled at his take.

Several cups of coffee later, Clara and Bishop had laid out the notes in as much of a chronological order as they could manage. The senator sat across the desk from Clara, examining the theoretical Wards pertaining to other cities and making notes in a small leather notebook of what to recommend to fellow statesmen if advising Wards as course of political action.

Clara had shifted into her musing spot, tucked into the bay window, layered mauve skirts bunched up around her like a cloud of fabric. Her eye kept resting on the New York Recipe. Testing the assembled Ward would be critical—it would mean seeing if it held up against evil. And that meant risk.

Although evil was entirely subjective, Clara was very good at sensing the tone or atmosphere of a person, place, or thing. The evil that wafted from the carvings in Mr. Goldberg's home, where the Eterna scientists had breathed their last, reeked of a particular bent, one she had sensed in a few cases nearly two years prior. Could she run an experiment in the tainted property from that older case to see if the Ward would be successful? There was no proof the case was related to what Louis endured, but Evelyn seemed to think so.

Franklin Fordham joined them in the offices, a gentle, noble-spirited man with useful powers of past insight. His psychometric touch Clara found of higher value to the team than the troubling pedestal he liked to place her upon.

“I'm glad to see you, Miss Templeton, I was worried hearing you'd had another
incident
. Downtown Manhattan is very haunted—increasingly, it seems, considering a constant influx of immigrants and deaths at countless new factories. You might want to take your walks uptown, where there is open space, cleaner air, and fewer ghosts.”

She nodded as if he were saying something very sensible, got to her feet, and took a more formal seat at her desk. Lavinia swept into the room moments later in a flurry of black crepe, always dramatically herself.

“Your ladyship,” she said, handing Clara a wire from the telegraph office, bobbing her head, and retreating back down the stairs almost without pause.

Clara examined the missive.

DEAR TEAM,

ENGLAND FULL OF INTRIGUE. TEAM OF JACKS NEW YORK BOUND. A ROVING FEW. TRAILED. OFFICES. LOCALE VIA FORTHCOMING TELEGRAM. MURDERS HERE RELATING TO SOCIETY. PARALLELS WITH STEVENS OF EARLIER CASE. TRYING TO ASCERTAIN GOVERNMENT DEPTH AND INVOLVEMENT. ACCUSATORY TO US RE: BODIES OF THEIR COUNTER-TEAM. US MOBILIZATION OF OFFENSES.

Clara sat with this news. It would seem things were about to get even more complicated.

“News from our Effie?” Bishop asked hopefully. She passed the telegram across the desk for the senator and Franklin to read. She hoped Effie hadn't had a difficult time of it, there.

Ephigenia Bixby's intrigue was doubled by her and her brother deciding to “pass” in hopes of better treatment from society. Clara and Bishop wished that was unnecessary—but that was easy for them to say. And so they simply reassured Effie and Fred that as far as Bishop and Clara were concerned, having lived as Quakers and fought for equality all their lives, the siblings were valued entirely for who they were and needn't make any other choice on their account.

Light skinned, with a dusting of dark freckles and dark eyes, Effie was a gifted field agent, efficient, autonomous, moving between races and classes with seemingly effortless skill. Clara admired her fiercely … and, ignorantly, coveted some of her freedom, as Bishop would never allow the same of her. She'd remarked upon that once to Effie.

Effie clucked her tongue at Clara's expression of envy and spoke with a bite. “Oh, no, people like you are too important to send out into the field; those with titles, standing, and lineage are seen and missed. I love my job, Miss Templeton, be assured. But my being ‘unimportant' is a part of my success. My ambiguity and understanding of more than one social code, it all comes with a cost of feeling expendable in either world.”

Clara had no idea what to say to any of that, but she didn't dare argue. Passing necessitated a complex double life. The Bixbys had seen pain and injustice in ways Clara had not, that was simple fact. They all had hope for a city that at its very best, if it held to principles and innovations, could reject cruelty, injustice, and systematic racial and cultural disenfranchisement. It was a hope for a distant future, perhaps. Clara wondered if it was any different in London.

Gazing down out her window onto the bustling waterfront beyond, she knew that New York had a very long way to go toward their hopes.

“Note a forthcoming telegram,” Bishop stated. “She knows not to list direct sources of intelligence in one place. We should consider relocating our offices,” he added. “Perhaps shift locations like our scientists did.”

“Are any extra precautions enough if British agents are already en route to Manhattan?” Franklin asked.

Clara frowned. She liked this office. For years Eterna had gone almost entirely unremarked upon by the government, at least once the shock of Lincoln's assassination had waned. Each year, Bishop had seen that they were funded, but they went conveniently ignored. Recent events had made it clear that England found them of more interest than they'd hoped.

The important question now was how involved was England in the unfolding evil. Was it their doing, or were they merely observing? To this, Effie offered no answers, and they didn't know how long it would be until they dealt with the Empire once more descending on their harbor.

 

CHAPTER

FOUR

Andre Dupris abandoned the prospect of New Orleans before he even got to the great river that would have carried him home. He forsook the southbound call of the Mississippi and turned back toward the murky confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers.

Were all twins as opposite as him and Louis? Gentle Louis, fair and ardent in the understandings and practices of his mother's Vodoun principles of faith and transcendent supplication to
Bondye
and the
mystères.
Andre, a vastly more restless, complicated, unsatisfied man. During his travels in England, he had seduced more than one important English aristocrat of more than one gender. Lord Black, a friend of the variously offended, had offered him one path to redemption: Spy on what his devoted brother and Louis's Eterna Commission were up to back in the States.