Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Genevieve knew she was dreaming because sunlight trickled through the curtains of her childhood home.
She sat on a comfortable sofa beside her father and listened as he read, blinking at the patterns of light on the rug.
The warm rasp of his voice soothed her, even if she couldn’t understand the words.
Lips as soft as a cloud brushed against her cheek as slim, feminine hands curled around Genevieve and her father from behind.
“She’s falling asleep, Ezra; it’s time for her nap,” Genevieve’s mother murmured.
“She wants to hear the end of the poem,” her father objected.
Her mother replied with fond amusement, “Dear, you’re reading in Old English; she doesn’t understand. She just likes the sound of your voice.”
Genevieve came awake slowly, the flicker of a candle stub replacing the memory of the sunlight’s brightness. Her throat ached with the pressure of unshed tears.
It was a happy dream. A happy memory, she insisted, rubbing eyes that felt filled with sand. Don’t ruin it. Hold on to it.
She sat up in her corner of their earth-and-stone bolt hole and drew back her cloak. The sun must have gone down below the horizon. She could feel her body waking up.
Their bolt hole was a pocket in the rock and clay of the catacombs, barely big enough for the three of them together.
As vampires, they no longer had to eat or relieve themselves or suffer many of the human indignities that cropped up when one lived on top of another, but they still had to sleep when the sun rose, and they all barely had a place to lay their heads.
But it was like that everywhere in the catacombs.
Elspeth was already awake—she had been the one to light the candle.
She faced away from Genevieve as she pinned her blonde hair, the texture of fairy floss, carefully over her ears.
Then she settled her bonnet on her head.
Genevieve had bought her the blue bonnet with the first coins she had earned.
“Good evening,” Elspeth whispered, mindful of Sparrow still curled up at the back of their bolt hole. “Sleep well?”
Genevieve nodded. “You?”
“I stayed up too late finishing the lace, but I did rest well afterward.” Elspeth pulled out the finished lace and displayed it for Genevieve. “Isn’t it lovely?”
“Gorgeous.” She marveled over the tiny, intricate stitches that would make anyone other than Elspeth go blind.
“You could pull it through a ring,” Elspeth said proudly.
Genevieve hugged her. “I can get you more thread today.”
“Here.” Elspeth bundled up the lace. “Take this with you.”
“To sell? But you should—”
“Silly; I’m not going to wear it down here, am I? And coin will help us more.”
“I don’t have to sell it today,” Genevieve protested. “You ought to have time to be proud of your accomplishments.” When Elspeth frowned, she added, “Bacchus is gone, you know.”
“And glad I am of it. But Laurent isn’t.” Elspeth turned away, her face shadowed.
Genevieve bit her lip.
She could recall with perfect clarity walking home that last day in Oxford, just a week before Christmas.
It had been raining, and darkness had come early.
She’d wanted to get home. Her head had felt curiously light, and she’d kept reaching up to feel the hair that had brushed against the nape of her neck.
Still unused to what she’d done for Hetty, her friend in need, only a few days earlier, she hadn’t noticed the two young men emerge from an alley until they’d laughed.
She had thought them university students who had had too much to drink. She could even remember what they had said as they had loomed closer. “The doxy’s cut her hair. Nothing left to sell, mm? Come along with us, girl. We’ll pay for your time.”
She should’ve run. Should’ve done anything else other than drawn herself up and given them a tongue-lashing worthy of a governess, haranguing them for their drunkenness and impaired discernment.
They hadn’t appreciated the scolding.
She remembered that all too well. It was everything after she couldn’t recall.
There had been pain, she knew that. Blood.
Fear. Darkness in the place she was held—and Elspeth.
Elspeth had always been the constant, her hand to cling to in the dark.
And then after, when the fools had drunk too deep from their veins and wounded too badly to heal, and hadn’t wanted to lose their playthings, Elspeth had still been there when clarity had returned after death.
Now Bacchus, Genevieve’s maker, was dead.
He had been the one far more likely to hunt them down in the Ossuary and cause mischief.
And he had been far more gleeful in ordering Elspeth about.
He had no blood tie to her to force Elspeth’s compliance, but each had commanded those of their bloodline to obey the other crony, and they gained far more enjoyment from that than puppeteering their own progeny.
Only in the last few years had Bacchus grown bored with them and turned his attention elsewhere, allowing Genevieve to start using her talents to earn coin for them.
But Laurent, Elspeth’s maker, remained—somewhere. Lurking. An unseen threat. With Genevieve’s bond broken, she also was no longer beholden to the command to obey Laurent. But Elspeth’s fetters remained.
“All right,” Genevieve conceded, taking Elspeth’s hand in her gloved one. “I’ll sell it and bring you back more thread. How much? And is there anything you’d like? They’re your earnings, you know.”
“Bought with your earnings.”
“There is no ledger between you and me,” Genevieve insisted. “You know that.”
Elspeth squeezed her hand. “I do.”
Sparrow rolled onto her back and stretched, propping her legs up on the wall. Her skirts rode up and revealed her patched and threadbare stockings. Genevieve made a mental note. Stockings for Sparrow.
Her brown hair loose around her head, Sparrow yawned, her small fangs glinting in the candle’s light. “I dreamed about roasted chestnuts. I saw a hawker selling some when I fed last evening, and then I dreamed the exact taste. Roasted chestnuts always make me think of Christmas.”
“It was a good Christmas when we had a roasted goose,” Elspeth said. Genevieve nodded her assent in silence.
In years past, Elspeth had tried to conjure a little Christmas for their bolt hole, a way to keep spirits up and mark the passing of the year, even if it was simply recollections of happier times.
But Genevieve had little heart for the season—and none at all this year.
Truly a bleak midwinter, she thought, remembering the scrap of poem she had read from a book propped open in a bookseller’s window the year before.
Would she ever find hope for Christmas again?
Wooden heels on stone announced their visitor. “You’ll never guess,” Winnie announced, rounding the corner without preamble.
“All right.” Elspeth folded her hands in her lap.
“Well?” Winnie demanded, hands on her hips.
“You just said we’d never guess,” Sparrow pointed out in her chirping voice.
“Someone tried to kill the new master again last eve. And what does he do about it? Nothing!” Winnie threw out a frustrated hand that nearly clipped Elspeth on the head. “Honestly. I think the conspirators might have the right of it. He’s of no use at all.”
“I wouldn’t say that very loud if I were you,” Genevieve said, with a warning look at her. “All the assassins who have come for him have been summarily dispatched.”
Winnie sniffed. “How is he any better than what we had? I don’t want to live in this hovel forever,” she grumbled.
“If the bully boys at the Mayfair entrances would let me use them, then I could lure a few wealthy men into a dark alley and come out with pounds in my pockets for new dresses. This is last year’s fashion!
” She stared in disgust at the dress she wore.
Genevieve glanced down at her badly dyed dress that had been made to accommodate a crinoline and didn’t say anything.
“You ought to do the same,” Winnie said pointedly to Sparrow.
“You could use your talent to make any man in the street empty his pockets to you.” Sparrow had begun to develop a basic persuasive talent.
So far, she had only managed to coax the guards into looking the other way when she returned later than she ought.
“That would be stealing.” Sparrow’s mouth twisted and a hand snuck towards the pocket where she kept her small, brass crucifix.
Even small sins smote her desperately because she could no longer go to confession.
Genevieve had once gently suggested that drinking blood was not all that different than the Eucharist, and the look of horror Sparrow had given her had closed her mouth.
“You don’t understand. You’re Protestant,” Sparrow had insisted, tears in her voice.
Genevieve had conceded that she didn’t and had apologized, turning to keeping Sparrow’s mind occupied and not turning inward to brood.
She modified her mental note to Stockings and something else? For Sparrow.
“Your soul is to perdition, anyway.” Winnie sniffed.
“Winnifred,” Genevieve said warningly as Elspeth patted Sparrow’s shoulder.
“What? Why not? The gent is planning to pay for what he thinks he’s taking you down an alley for, anyway. Why not dip your hands in his pockets while you take a drink from him? But if that’s too extreme, maybe you should charge for that childminding, Genevieve.”
“I do.” Genevieve set her bonnet on her head and tied the frayed ribbon under her chin.
“Pennies,” Winnie said scornfully.
“Charging more would take food from the babies’ mouths, when their mothers can barely afford what they pay me now.” Genevieve got to her feet. “Speaking of, they will be expecting me.”
“You think you’re special because you can get out without a problem.” Winnie’s face soured.
“No. I think that if this is my talent, that I have the responsibility to use it for others.”