Imperfection #3
“The frozen boys always are,” says Miss Cottingsly.
She rolls Charles’s body over onto his back, then bends to hook her arm around his chest and hoist him up onto her shoulders, holding him as easily as a sack of flour.
She either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that he’s leaking blood onto her shirt.
“Did he find what you were looking for?”
“No,” says Asphodel mulishly. “He said no one had the answers we needed.”
“Chin up, Delly. It was a clean kill. He didn’t suffer, and now your uncle will have something to keep him occupied until the thaw.”
Asphodel sighs again as she turns away from the sight of her suitor slung across the housekeeper’s shoulders.
She feels so full of sighing that she might as well be the winter wind incarnate, even though she knows there’s no such easy path for her.
Even though she understands her own humanity.
“And it’s always best to buy his patience when it’s available for sale. ”
“Clever girl,” says Miss Cottingsly appropriately. She starts across the yard.
Asphodel follows after, hurrying until she’s walking ahead of the other woman, as befits the lady of the house. Manners, after all, must be observed.
If John Baker is surprised by the speed with which Asphodel returns from her morning walk, he manages to conceal it quickly.
He’s less successful at concealing his shock when Miss Cottingsly appears with a dead man slung across her shoulders, barely two feet behind the remarkably calm teenage girl.
He rises with unseemly haste, pursuing them down the hall.
He reaches the kitchen door just as Asphodel pulls it open, her head half-turned toward her shoulder as she continues saying something to the housekeeper. “—and find him. Please wait here until I do. I want to explain.”
“Explain what, my dearest darling niece?” asks John, and is gratified when she jumps, letting out a small, squeaky shout of surprise. He looks at her calmly, waiting for her to compose herself.
Miss Cottingsly bustles inside, the dead man he saw through the window still across her shoulders.
He’s wearing an unseasonal dove-gray suit, and there’s a spreading bloodstain on the back, making it more than obvious how he died.
John frowns, sharply, eyes darting over the body and dismissing it as irrelevant to the situation.
Which seems slightly ridiculous, because the entire situation is about the corpse right now.
“Uncle, I—” begins Asphodel.
He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I’ll ask the questions and you’ll answer them, do you understand? Nod if you understand.”
Asphodel nods.
“Who was this man?”
“The potential Winter I told you about. His name is Charles Booker,” she says, trying not to wince at the past tense buried in her uncle’s question.
“He’s the son of a fur trader from Maine.
Relatively well off, enough so that his parents intended he should enter society to seek a wife, but not so wealthy as to be quickly or easily missed.
He has a tendency to wander off when he’s supposed to be looking after his father’s interests.
Anyone who expected to see him today will take his absence as a sign of distraction, rather than foul play. ”
“How do you know him?”
“I met him at Grace’s garden party at the end of the summer. You were there.”
“Yes, I was.” John frowns, casting his mind back to that day.
As always, he spent most of the gathering watching Asphodel closely, keeping track of the people she spoke to as well as the ones who seemed to take too close of an interest in her.
Their family relationship means he doesn’t have Father Clemence’s social issues: it’s right and reasonable for a man to take in his own niece, and there’s nothing salacious about it.
But it does mean that protecting her virtue is one of his primary concerns at almost all times.
Slowly, he says, “You spoke to the usual array of young ladies, and a few newer ones who’ve only recently joined the social set. But I don’t recall any young gentlemen catching your attention. Was the boy working as one of the servers?”
“Perish the thought.” Asphodel wrinkles her nose.
“He was in the rolling chair parked near the fence. He was a charming conversationalist. His parents had sent him to the city to stay with a business partner of his father’s while he recovered from a summer illness.
It had left him weakened and all but comatose until the weather began to turn. ”
John’s eyes widen minutely as he realizes what she’s alluding to. “Is that how you knew he was a candidate for the Winter throne?”
“Indeed,” she says. “The current King shows no signs of stepping aside, but still the season prepares its scions. Charles had the potential to serve the Winter. He was closely tied enough that he sickened when the weather warmed, and was only restored when it cooled again.”
“Asphodel…”
“He was a handsome young man.” She watches as Miss Cottingsly carries him over to the kitchen table and dumps him there. His blood will soak into the wood, but he’s far from the first corpse to be deposited there. “He said sweet things and admired my hair. You never admire my hair.”
“You’re my niece. As long as you’re presentable, I have no cause to admire your hair.”
“He charmed me. I was charmed. I appreciated the opportunity to be charmed. It happens so rarely.” She finally turns back to her uncle.
“He was tied to Winter. Winter is a season, and seasons come with their own weather patterns. I set him to the question of why it never rains in Boston. I told him the truth: that you would give him your blessing to court me in the open if he could find that truth for me. He tried his best, but it seems a scion of Winter is not up to the question. When he failed, as I had known he must, Miss Cottingsly secured him for your use. His parts won’t be as powerful as the Winter King’s would have been, but they should still have their properties.
Perhaps he can help us with the question after all. ”
“Perhaps,” says John, voice turning thoughtful. “He didn’t test your virtue or dishonor you?”
“I’m not compromised if that’s what you’re asking,” snaps Asphodel. “My virginity is intact, and the only kiss he gave me, he offered as he died. I’ll bottle it before lunch. A maiden girl’s first kiss, with a son of the seasons, must be a powerful trinket for your collection, no?”
“Not powerful enough to forgive you meeting with him without telling me.”
Asphodel’s expression melts into dewy-eyed dismay.
She clasps her hands under her chin as she stares at her uncle.
“I only wanted to make you happy,” she says.
“He was willing to do what I asked because he liked me. He didn’t know you, and what he did know—that you were a powerful alchemist, associated with the American Congress—frightened him.
I give you the body of the man I was falling in love with, I offer you my first kiss, and you’d be angry with me for not telling you my plan when your presence would have ruined it?
Uncle, I don’t understand. You say I can’t be an alchemist because I’m a woman.
Now you don’t want me to be a woman either! What can I be?”
“You can be serious for a moment,” he says. “We both know you’re not actually upset right now.”
She drops her hands and her expression at the same time, returning to the cool, assessing look that has become her default. She’s not his daughter, but sometimes he thinks she might as well have been. Sometimes he’s so proud of her that he could burst.
“Better,” he says. “I don’t disapprove of your plan, or of its results.
I do disapprove of you going behind my back and involving my staff with something that could easily have become dangerous.
Do we know if he told anyone about you? If someone will come here looking for him now that he’s gone missing? ”
“Yes, we know, no, he didn’t, and no, no one should come looking for him here.”
“You sound very sure of yourself.”
“I am.”
“Very well, then. Clean yourself up and meet us down in the basement. It seems we have a Winter scion to dismantle. It’s best done while the blood’s still fresh.”
Asphodel actually bounces onto her toes at that, delighted beyond suppressing her response, and rushes over to kiss him on the cheek before she spins and runs for the hall.
John waits until he’s alone with Miss Cottingsly and the corpse, then turns to his housekeeper. “Well?”
“I watched her the whole time,” says Miss Cottingsly.
“She was as careful as she says she was. The girl has a deft hand with deceptions. I might consider putting bars on the windows if I were you. She knows what waits her in two years’ time, when she’s old enough to enter society and thus the market.
You won’t let her be an alchemist, but you’ve left her suited to very little else.
She’ll be trying to find a way to change the future, lest she wind up an alchemist’s wife when she’d rather be the hand that holds the wand. ”
“Alchemy is not wizardry,” he scoffs. “What we do isn’t magic. It’s science. Magic cannot raise the dead, nor make a person from the pieces those same dead leave behind. If I were a wizard, you wouldn’t be here.”
“How gingerly you sidestep my point,” says Miss Cottingsly.
“Yes, you made me, and a clever job you did of it. I can’t remember the women I was, not even in my dreams. But I know you got the idea of me from that Shelley woman’s book.
How can you be so sure women have no gift for alchemy when you made one from another woman’s blueprint? ”
“Shelley was no alchemist,” says John. “She wrote what her husband ordered her to write.”
“She outlived him by thirty years. Don’t you think that if he had been the alchemist, he would have been able to stop himself from drowning?
You see what you want to see, much as this poor boy did.
” She gestures toward the body of Charles Booker.
“It may serve you just as well if you’re not careful. ”
“That’s enough out of you,” he says sharply. “Do your job. Get the corpse to the basement. And never tell me how to raise my niece again.”
“Yes, sir,” she says, and bobs a quick curtsey before she moves to retrieve the body. John Baker rolls up his sleeves and follows her down to the basement, where the work can properly begin. The dissection will serve him best if the body is yet warm when it begins.
There is so much work to be done.