The Baskerville Tales (Short Stories) (4 page)

An orphan, Evelina was the product of a mésalliance. The Holmes family’s only daughter had eloped with a lowborn army captain. After his death, Evelina’s mother had come home begging for shelter for herself and her unborn daughter, only to be turned away. The worst misfortune was that her brothers—Sherlock and Mycroft—had never learned of the incident until years later and far too late to help their wayward sister.

Fortunately, Captain Cooper’s relations—the colorful members of Ploughman’s Paramount Circus—hadn’t been so particular. They had raised Evelina long after her mother died, right until Grandmamma Holmes had swept in and taken her to Wollaston to be civilized.

That had worked, more or less, but what came next? All the other girls had family arriving, plans for their presentation to the queen, and maybe a shopping trip abroad to celebrate their coming of age. Evelina had no fortune and no prospects. She had become too much a lady to go back to the circus, but couldn’t see herself pouring tea for her grandmamma until she faded away like a carpet left too long in the sun—not that the old lady permitted errant sunbeams beyond her drawing room’s heavy velvet drapes.

It was almost natural to imagine the day when every last girl went from the academy to their brilliant futures, and Evelina would be left standing on the drive, her suitcase at her feet. Alone and penniless, just like her mother had been. Were things really that bad? Was she really so unlovable that no one would come?

Everything depended on a letter being in the box. A cold wave settled through her like a sudden fog and she actually trembled, admitting in some distant part of her soul that she had
brushed up against the thing she feared most.

Evelina cut the string and swept it aside. The box was plain but sturdy and the lid resisted opening. Or maybe her fingers were clumsy. Eventually, it came away with a rustle of white tissue paper. Evelina peeled it back to reveal a bodice of soft green satin, the exact hue of tender new leaves. It shimmered like a lake of liquid summer.

Evelina gasped. She recognized the dress. It had hung in a wardrobe filled with her mother’s things—the beautiful party gowns and formal dresses abandoned in her wild flight to marry the handsome Captain Cooper. And her grandmother had sent the treasure to her!

They were the same height, and her mother had possessed the same dark hair and blue eyes. The green would be perfect—feminine without making her look like a sickeningly sweet petit four. This was a woman’s dress, not a girl’s.

And Imogen’s handsome brother, Tobias, would be there. Tentative, questing, Evelina’s fingers trailed over the delicate net of gold threads that rimmed the neckline of the gown. She realized it had been altered, the shape subtly recut to match the current styles. If her grandmother had gone to that much trouble, surely that meant she cared for her? When would she allow herself to let go of her doubts?

A letter. There had to be a letter. Evelina’s hands dove into the box, searching for notepaper between the layers and layers of gleaming satin. She found no paper, but her fingers closed on something moist. She jerked them out, clutching a fistful of frost-blighted plants with dirt still clinging to their roots. It was the wrong season for blooms, but she knew at once what they were.

Violets.

Panic thudded against her chest. With a wheezing gasp, she ripped the dress from the
box. The sound that came next was between a snarl and a cry of pain.

The bodice was intact, but the magnificent skirt of her dead mother’s gown had been slashed to ribbons. Nothing wider than a handbreadth of fabric remained.

Violet Asterley-Henderson had got to the box first.

* * *

Violet was about to pay dearly—and in ways that would astound even the most lurid writers of Gothic novels. Pain. Shame. Remorse. Pleading. The show would have it all. Evelina would milk the moment. Spectacle was something a girl from Ploughman’s Paramount Circus understood and relished. Unfortunately, it would have to wait until she stopped sniveling like a girl of five.

Stomach cramped with stifled sobbing, she sat curled on the roof in the freezing cold, her knees under her chin. She was leaving the school in days, a grown woman, but right then it felt as if she had been thrust backward to childhood. The only good thing was that the rain had stopped.

Once, she had come to this perch often. The first year at the academy had been perfect hell, and Violet its chief devil. The rooftop had been the one place where safety from her taunts was guaranteed. Despite the cold and slippery wet, the climb from the window and up the drainpipes was easy for Evelina, who was raised to the tightrope and the trapeze. The circus belonged to the air.

Violets belonged in dirt. Fine. Evelina was going to pound her into said dirt.

She looked up at the sky, which had cleared with the dusk. The first icy stars were pricking through the gloom. She wiped her face, the skin stiff with the dried salt of tears. She
was freezing cold.

Her stomach was easing, the hard knot of sadness and anger loosening as the first wave of shock wore off. Reason was inching its way into the tumult of her thoughts. What, exactly, was she going to do?

The dress had been beautiful—the most luxurious thing Evelina had ever almost owned. And it had been a link to her mother as well as to her grandmother, a strict woman who rarely made a kind gesture. Violet had destroyed far more than she realized. And there was still the question of whether there had been a letter in the box. Evelina hadn’t found one, so had Violet taken it?

And why? Was it just because she’d stood up to her that afternoon?

Evelina shifted. The roof tiles were not the most comfortable surface. A sudden breeze swirled around her, cold and frosty fresh.

What is the matter, girl on the roof?

The voice sounded inside her thoughts, breathy as the wind through leaves. Evelina sat a little straighter, searching the dusk. A smudge of light hovered at the edge of the roof, its slight iridescence barely visible. It was a deva, an elemental nature spirit. For the most part, devas seemed to fall into four types—air, water, fire, and earth. They lived in plants or streams or trees, and anyone who loved the wilds could feel their presence. However, only those of the Blood, like the Coopers, could see and hear them.

The deva hovered closer, just outside of Evelina’s reach. Although it had no scent or substance in the conventional way, she could smell and feel cool, clean wind in her mind. That marked it as an air deva. She’d talked to it before; this deva seemed more curious about humans than most.

“I’ve had a very unpleasant day,” she said.

So have I, roof-girl
. The light flared and flickered with what might have been disgruntlement.

“What happened?” She wondered what ruined an air deva’s day. “Were you run down by a dirigible? Had a fight with a bird?”

The flickering grew more intense.
There is wrongness in the world
.

That was hardly news.

It hurts us
.

Evelina frowned. “Something is hurting the devas?”

Nature has been wronged. Graves are opened. Three, four. One walks
.

Evelina took a breath to answer, but no words came out. None of what the creature had said made sense—not even enough to know what question to ask. She knew about Tom’s grave, but had there been others? She hadn’t gone into the cemetery that afternoon to see.

Then something caught her eye.

There was movement in the middle distance, right where the path to the school forked off from the road down below. Evelina squinted, straining to see against the gathering darkness. Her vantage point from the roof was excellent, but she still doubted what she saw. The figure was bizarre—manlike, but swinging its arms almost like an ape. And it had three arms. She craned her neck as the figure disappeared behind some trees. She waited, and there it was again, making a zigzagging line toward the house.

“What’s that?” she asked the deva, but then realized it was gone. It must have left the moment the strange figure started to draw near the school.

Her curiosity grew edged with alarm. Who was this? Her first instinct was to go down to
investigate, but caution stopped her. Or maybe it was the fact that the third arm the figure was holding was not attached.

Oh
. A sick, crawly feeling slithered over her. Yes, it was fairly safe to assume something wasn’t right about the visitor. Evelina shrank down against the roof, still watching but now careful to hide. The cool wind cut through the fabric of her dress and brought with it the pungent stink she’d smelled earlier that day. Her gaze fastened on the spare arm, which was glistening with a thick ooze of putrefaction. It looked in even worse shape than the one Mary had delivered.

The figure was right below her now. Something about him was familiar, but the gait was all wrong and people were hard to recognize just from the top of their heads. And his seemed oddly shaped, almost flat in the back.

Evelina carefully raised her head, trying to get a better look. The clothes looked rumpled, but were a gentleman’s cut. The figure wore no hat or gloves but, taking into account the fact he was carting around a rotting arm, he obviously subscribed to different standards than most of Society.

Mesmerized, Evelina watched as he approached the school. The odd, sidling gait made it hard to guess his intended direction, but he eventually came to a halt in front of the parlor windows. Everyone now would be in the dining hall, but a lamp had been left burning. The light filtered through the drawn curtains, casting the figure into stark relief. Evelina saw him reach up, fingering the edges of the casement windows and making an odd snuffling noise. It grew to frustrated grunts as the fingers clawed with increasing force, trying to open the window.

Evelina’s mouth hung open, a soul-deep horror nailing her to the roof. She couldn’t move now if she wanted to. What was this creature? Man? Animal? A lunatic escaped from some attic, out to terrorize the countryside?

And then she saw it raise the dead arm it held, grasping the elbow and carefully peeling back the rotting fabric from the shoulder joint. And then it bit down, slurping a mouthful of gelatinous rot from the flesh.

Without warning, Evelina heaved, upchucking everything she’d eaten that day and perhaps that month. She spit, the sourness flooding her mouth nearly making her retch again. She blinked her streaming eyes, trying to pull the world back into focus.

She found her handkerchief just in time to stifle a scream. The thing had looked up, searching for the source of the awful gagging sounds she’d just made. “Oh, dear God,” she breathed.

The features were warped and sagging, but she knew the face. Tom Cannon, Wollaston’s handsome young ne’er-do-well. He was supposed to be dead and buried. But he’d been a flirt and a daredevil in life, and apparently not even a bad case of putrefaction could keep him down. Suddenly, everything the deva had said made sense. Nature had been subverted, and the dead walked.

“Tom?” she said in a tiny voice.

Something like intelligence flickered across his features. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. He’d died from a blow to the head, but that was only the half of it. Decomposition was loosening his face from the bones beneath.

“Why are you here?” Evelina croaked.

To her infinite relief, he dropped the arm. “Garagargh?” he replied in a gurgling hiss.

It was too much. Evelina’s stomach made another leap for freedom. Tom fell back a step, apparently repulsed. Now there was irony.

Someone opened a window, light fanning out into the darkness. “Who is out there?”
demanded a familiar voice: Mrs. Roberts poised to quash impertinent suitors. Evelina froze, still as a rooftop gargoyle.

Obeying some ingrained reflex, Tom turned and loped a few yards away, slowing when he reached the safety of the shadows. Then he looked back at the academy, longing on his melted face. He was there for someone or something inside the school.

Well, no one would be pining for the handsome rake now. Or was that true? The rector had a book of magic found inside the walls of Wollaston Academy. Love spells and cures for warts.

Evelina was reasonably sure Tom wasn’t there for the warts.

* * *

She pounded on the door of the rectory. Mary opened it, her mouth dropping open. “Miss Cooper, whatever are you doing here at this time of night?”

“I have to see Dr. Larch.” She pushed in, shouldering past the maid. It was past the time when she could afford to be a young lady. Dark magic was afoot.

“You cannot see him!” Mary protested. “Miss Cooper, don’t force me to call Mr. Webster!”

Evelina didn’t give her a chance to summon the rector’s manservant. Made bold by the light in the study window, she pushed past Mary.

“Miss Cooper!”

Evelina pushed through a set of glass doors. When she got to the room she wanted, she didn’t bother to knock.

As she opened the door, she found Larch in a smoking robe, his bony feet tucked into carpet slippers. He looked up. “Miss Cooper? What is the meaning of this?”

He was kneeling on the floor, surrounded by a snowstorm of books and papers, worse even than the mess she had seen at the church. The tiny writing desk was buried. So were the seats of chairs. One enormous volume was open on the carpet in front of him. He held a candle close, a forefinger marking his place on the page.

She wasted no time on useless pleasantries. “It’s Tom. Tom Cannon. I saw him tonight.”

Larch winced, fingering the few hairs still clinging to his head. “I know.”

“You
know
?” Evelina squeaked.

“I suspected.”

She took a step forward, then sank down to see the rector eye to eye. “I need whatever information you have, Dr. Larch.”

Mary looked on, eyes wide and mouth agape. “Should I make tea?”

“I’m afraid this is no time for tea,” Larch replied.

Evelina gave Mary a meaningful look. “I think Dr. Larch could use a cup, though.”

The servant nodded and backed out. Evelina took the candle from Dr. Larch just before it dripped wax on the book. It ran over her fingers, but she bit her lip to stop the gasp of pain and set it carefully back in the holder sitting on the hearth.