Heart of Brass (2 page)

“Did you take a reading of Hammond?” Grant asked quietly as they maneuvered through the jammed workspace of wooden tables littered with tools, automaton parts and gears. “Says he was listening to phonographic discs as he worked and didn’t hear a peep from down here.”

She shook her head, gaze wandering distractedly over the tabletops. “I detected no guilt or malevolence from him. But he does feel remorse. Could be a guilty conscious, or perhaps he is simply mortified that a crime was committed on his property with him being none the wiser.” She stopped and picked up a rubber tube that was shaped like…a penis. She held it up with her forefinger and thumb, dangling it in all its flaccid splendor in front of the inspector’s face. “I didn’t know that the Hammonds had begun to incorporate rubber in their designs.”

Grant flushed a deep red—the color of a cooked beet. He couldn’t quite meet her gaze. “Er…yes. You may be aware that Hammond started this factory to make medical instruments to aid in the treatment of hysteria. He was one of the first manufacturers of automatons in England.” He cleared his throat, as though he wanted to say more but didn’t quite know how to word it, or how to justify it.

He didn’t have to. Arden knew all about Hammond and his inventions. A contemporary of her father’s, some of his earlier designs were rather ingenious, but it was his work in the field of mechanized human “marital enhancements” that had made him one of the wealthiest businessmen in the kingdom. Any man who dedicated his life’s work to the carnal pleasure and emotional well-being of women couldn’t be all that bad, could he?

But a murder certainly wouldn’t be good for business.

A few steps on she spied a female automaton lying on one of the tables, its realistic limbs splayed, revealing a degree of anatomical correctness that would have made a bawd blush. Arden’s lips tucked to one side in a caustic smile. Mr. Hammond obviously had decided to tackle the treatment of gentlemanly vigor as well.

Inspector Grant threw a tarp over the machine, but whether he did so to protect Arden’s delicate sensibilities or his own was a mystery that she hadn’t the inclination to pursue. Though it did not take even an ounce of emotional sensitivity to ascertain that the inspector was deeply mortified.

When they neared the end of the aisle, Arden detected a familiar, unpleasant odor, one she associated with murder: a mix of what she could only describe as fear, blood, and chamber pot.

Two more peelers and Inspector Grant stood between her and the source of that smell. Well, most of it.

The leg in the torn stocking and expensive silk pump looked like that of a burlesque automaton at first, so white and still was it. Were it not for the blood staining that stocking she might have been able to tell herself that it
was
merely a machine.

“I beg your pardon, Lady Huntley,” Grant said in that faint northern accent of his. “But this isn’t a pretty sight. You may turn back if you like.”

She gave him what she hoped was a grateful smile and not a grim twisting of her lips. She’d often been told her smile could sometimes look a little…demented. “Your concern does you credit, Inspector. I assure you I shall endure whatever it is you wish me to see.” She could do without seeing a dead body, particularly a bloody one, but if these men could look at it dispassionately then damn it, so could she. It wasn’t as though it was her first corpse.

Inspector Grant’s face was a resigned shade of pale beneath his muttonchops and heavy mustache. He nodded in acquiescence. “Pull back the sheet please, Mr. Fence.”

An ashen-faced youth swallowed hard and bent down to do as he was instructed. Arden’s confidence in being able to escape the viewing with the contents of her stomach intact diminished slightly.

The sheet—stained and wet with so much blood it was almost black in spots—pulled back with the resistance of the rind of an orange reluctant to leave the flesh beneath, to reveal the head of a pretty young woman wearing pearl earrings. Her neck was long, decorated with a matching pearl necklace, but beyond that…a pile of raw meat. Arden stared for a moment, her eyes not quite able to make her brain see reality. Finally, after a few moments—and a rather inspired bout of gagging from young Mr. Fence—she saw the scene for what it was.

Someone, or something, had torn this precious little girl apart. Her pale blue eyes were wide open, as was her Cupid’s bow mouth. Her flawless skin, the pale robin’s-egg waxy color of death, was dotted with freckles of blood. She was not a factory worker—a pair of fine silk gloves lay not far from her body. Nor was she a member of the demimonde, for she was far too fresh and sweet looking, and not nearly as fashionable. Her demure, ruined gown cost more than what the retching Mr. Fence probably made in a month.

She was a member of the upper classes, quite possibly of noble birth.

Dear God
.

Mindful of her skirts, she lifted them as she moved around the clotted puddle to stand at the girl’s head. She squatted down, tugging off her right glove so her fingers could touch the porcelain coolness of a stiff, delicate wrist. The girl had been dead for several hours—long enough for her body to lose all warmth and become fairly rigid.

A thin bruise spread like a stain beneath Arden’s fingers. She glanced up at Inspector Grant. The older man was the only one of the three who didn’t look ill. He was too experienced, too little shocked by humanity’s capacity for violence to be sickened by it anymore. Instead, he looked resigned. And worried. A murdered debutante meant trouble on so many levels for a man in his position.

“She was bound?” she inquired, swallowing against the rolling of her own stomach.

Grant nodded, his shrewd gaze resting on the ravaged girl. “Most likely the bugger—pardon my French, my lady—brought the poor gel here by force.”

It was possible, she supposed, but this bruise was purple and slightly yellow, not the usual raw red that one would expect if she had been recently restrained. This bruising was older and could have many causes.

The inspector jerked his head toward the entrance. “Fence, Brown, make use of yourself elsewhere.” He watched as the two relieved young men walked away before navigating around the corpse to squat beside her. “Do you think you might…be able to use your apparatus on her?”

That was often why she was brought to such scenes. And dear Grant was always so considerate to never take her compliance as a certainty. It was her father who had come up with the general principles of the mechanism prior to his death, and Arden who completed the device. If he hadn’t left so many unfinished projects, who knew what might have become of her? Mourning him and missing Huntley, she might have done something rash, especially without her mother to turn to, but instead she turned to cogs and gears and the reassuring hum of steam engines. Loss had given her more purpose than she’d ever wanted before.

“I will try,” she told him, as she had every other time he asked. She rested the bottom of her carpetbag on her bent knees and pulled the mouth of it wide open. She didn’t have to rummage through a muddle of automata and tools as her father always had, because she had outfitted the case with internal straps and pockets to hold each and every item. She barely had to look in at all to find what she wanted—two pairs of specially augmented goggles, connected by coils of wires.

“Inspector, if you would be so kind?”

Grant’s gaze jerked up from the mechanism. “Of course.” He took the bag from her lap and placed it to his left, as far from the carnage as his reach allowed. “Explain to me again how these Aetheric Reminiscent Oscillation Goggles work.”

Despite the smell and horrific visage before her, Arden smiled slightly as she placed the more ornate pair of goggles over the girl’s open eyes. She had begun using the device two years ago and the inspector had yet to refer to it by the correct name. “Aetheric Remnant Oscillatory Transmutative Spectacles,” she corrected. “You could use the acronym A.R.O.T.S. if you prefer.”

He shook his head. “I’d rather not use the term ‘rot’ in any capacity given the circumstances, my lady—with all due respect.”

Arden glanced at the girl’s decimated torso and the decay that had already begun, as she carefully placed the small metal prongs of the headgear on the appropriate spots on the poor thing’s skull. “Indeed. You are familiar, of course, with Aether?”

“Of course,” he sounded vaguely affronted that she had to ask. “It’s the Breath of God.”

As a woman whose religion was more science than spirituality, it took considerable restraint for Arden not to argue with the inspector. However, she was not one to besmirch another’s beliefs, no matter how ill-informed she believed them to be. “The energy of every living creature, yes,” she said. “Some believe it to be the soul, while science argues that it is the result of an electrochemical process in living tissue that lingers even after we shuck our mortal coil.”

Grant sniffed. “Sounds a bit far-fetched to me.”

But the “Breath of God” did not? A god who took her husband away from her? Who killed her father and made her mother…what she was? If it was the breath of such a creature that gave the engine of her heart fire then she would rather suffocate on a cold hearth. For every religious zealot there was another who decreed the Aether as the playground of the Devil himself.

“Regardless,” she continued through a clenched jaw, “there is no dispute that sometimes this energy lingers—around a body, or in a place where the person met their end. These goggles allow me to see the last things this young lady saw by utilizing that very energy.” The dark lenses over the sightless eyes of the girl would prevent any light or new images from penetrating once the prongs stimulated the appropriate areas of her brain, essentially restoring them to life for a short period. Once engaged, the optical response would parlay those images to Arden’s own goggles, where she would view the experience as though it were her own.

“Bloody amazing,” Grant allowed. Then, with fresh pink suffusing his cheeks, “Beg your pardon, my lady.”

Arden waved his concern away with a flick of her wrist. Then, something caught her eye. She frowned. “Inspector, did Hammond or your men rearrange her clothing?”

“No, ma’am. She’s exactly as she was found.”

Frowning, she leaned closer, and using the ear wire of the goggles in her hand, lifted the edge of torn gown. A small, bare breast, smeared with crimson, lay beneath. Elsewhere the fabric molded to the gore-soaked area, but not here.

“He took care to cover her,” she murmured.

The inspector nodded, seemingly unimpressed by her keen detection. “I reckon the monster knew her.”

Arden settled back on her heels. Her knees were beginning to ache from squatting so long. “Let’s see if she knew him as well, shall we?” She wiped the ear wire with her handkerchief before placing the second pair of goggles on her own face. With them on she was practically blind, and would remain so until the image transfer began.

Then she would see things she would later regret seeing.

She wound the key protruding from the side of the small control box attached by even more wires to both sets of eye gear. The simple engine inside, attuned as it was to Aetheric energy—a vast resource Arden believed could rival steam and even the new wonder of electricity—whirred to life, sending a charge to the dead girl’s mind.

Fuzzy images began to swirl before her eyes, dim and out of focus. She adjusted dials on either side of her goggles, making the images a little clearer. Sometimes, depending on how long the subject had been dead, she had to use all the lenses and settings she had to work with, and even then sometimes she only got a grainy, half-formed image.

She was not to be so fortunate that evening. She had barely slipped the secondary lenses into place when everything came together in razor-sharp clarity.

The girl was running through the aisles of this very factory, the world jostled around her as a man in evening clothes chased her. She saw only his shoulder and part of his side, not his face, but she didn’t appear to be running for her life, but with the lazy gait of a girl wishing to be caught. And catch her he did, turning her in his arms. A man’s torso came into view—neither too broad nor too thin. His cravat was perfectly tied, decorated with an onyx pin in the shape of a horseshoe.

Arden’s heart quickened, as it often did in these macabre situations. Everything was so keen, and sharp. If she could find a way to determine the emotional state and auditory memory as well, it truly would be an immersive experience.

The girl’s arms reached for the man, whose face remained maddeningly out of sight. Slowly, her gaze lifted, past the cravat pin, to the throat and jaw of the man wearing it, then the mouth.

“Just a little further,” Arden whispered as her heart pounded hard against her ribs. “Come on, dearest. Just a little more.”

The world seemed to jump in front of her eyes. Her gaze dropped from the man to the space between their bodies.

Arden cried out.

Her chest was ripped open
.

“Lady Huntley!” It was Grant. She could feel his warm hand on her arm. “My lady, are you all right?”

She shook her head, afraid that she would indeed vomit if she opened her mouth. Her hands clutched at the spectacles, and she wanted nothing more than to rip them off her face, but she held on until the images before her faded to blackness, signaling the girl’s death. Only when she was certain there was nothing more to see did she remove the apparatus from her own head.

“My dear lady,” Grant began, staring at her with wide eyes. “You look…”

“Like hell,” Arden supplied, smiling at his surprise. Just as quickly her mirth vanished. “He ripped her open while she was alive. She felt it. Saw it.”

The inspector turned his gaze toward the dead girl just as Arden did. He reached out and stroked the girl’s hair, as a father might. “Poor thing.”

“Indeed,” Arden muttered, attempting to pull herself together. She raised the back of her hand to her nose and took a deep, calming breath. The bergamot she’d dabbed on her glove lessened the scent of death, reminded her of happier things.