Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Zephyra took a step backward, but she already knew she was trapped.
Maxham took his time, moving forward with the slow steps of a beast of prey. He reached a hand out toward her, almost as if he were going to pat her head or cup her cheek.
She slapped his hand away. The sound seemed to echo against the stone surrounding her.
His smile had been gentle, but as she struck him, it hardened. His eyes gleamed in the candlelight in a way that made her swallow convulsively.
Maxham paused in his advance, and for a frantic moment, she wondered if she could slip around him and escape up the stairs.
Perhaps he hesitated deliberately at that moment, to allow her the hope of escape, so that he could crush it mercilessly.
His hand reached out again, this time faster than she could see, and she felt the tips of his fingers digging into the skin of her forehead and temple, his pinky pushing painfully into her cheekbone.
Earlier this evening, she had been glad when the Citadel allowed her to leave Maxham’s house alone. Anyone following her could be easily misled, and she had been desperate to avoid being alone with Maxham.
If it were simply the two of them, she knew that he would try this.
Bianca never told her that Maxham had any special abilities, but from stories Zephyra heard over the years, she suspected. She didn’t know if Bianca suspected also, but if so, she’d had no intention of telling her sister.
Zephyra didn’t know why. Perhaps Bianca hadn’t known. Or perhaps she had, but speaking the truth aloud had seemed too ridiculous.
But Zephyra believed that her sister had wanted to protect her from Maxham, even if her own suspicions were preposterous. Bianca told Zephyra that she would hide things from the Citadel by giving them to others to secret away for her so that she herself would not have the knowledge.
At first, Zephyra had not understood why she had done so, and why Bianca had stressed that she did not possess the knowledge herself. But then she heard from her sister other tales of Maxham, and she thought she understood.
It was because Maxham could somehow steal those thoughts from people’s minds.
From what Bianca had related about him, Maxham tried to keep this a secret from the others in the Citadel and would always deny he had any other special talents. But Zephyra heard small stories about the times when Bianca had observed Maxham unawares.
At first, Zephyra had not understood why her sister would convey such meaningless observations to her, but after her sister died, she understood better. There was one story that she told Zephyra three separate times, each time pretending that she had forgotten she had told her already.
Bianca had left town—she had flatly refused to allow Zephyra to accompany her—and when she returned, she related the tale of how she had happened upon Maxham when he was in a room with a young man. Bianca had referred to the man as an “experiment,” which Zephyra had not understood.
Her sister had hidden outside the door, watching Maxham from afar.
He likely knew she was there, but he didn’t realize that she could clearly see him reflected in the window, illuminated by a lone candle.
Zephyra also suspected that Bianca’s eyesight was better than the others, although she certainly did not tell the rest of the Citadel about that fact.
Even in the dimness, Bianca could pick out Maxham’s form and see him kneeling in front of the young man, his hand touching the boy’s face.
The young man had been hit in the head as a child, and he had the mannerisms of a young child.
Because of this, Ward had allowed him into his laboratory at times, utilizing him as a pageboy.
But the young man had also been clumsy, and Ward had relegated him for use in his experiments after he had broken a vial of the Blood Nectar.
Maxham was cooing to the boy, “Tell me what you saw Dr. Ward doing in his laboratory.”
The boy was rocking back and forth where he sat on the floor, singing a nursery rhyme to himself. “Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool …”
Even though the room was quite dark, Bianca could see the frustration in Maxham’s face. “Remember being in Dr. Ward’s laboratory. Look at him as he works at his table. Look and see what he is doing.”
The boy stopped singing. In the silence, Bianca had been able to see Maxham begin to smile.
But then the boy began singing again, and he scowled. With sharp movements, he withdrew his hand from the boy’s face and abruptly stood up.
After Bianca died, Zephyra had had time to think about her sister’s stories, and that one in particular. And she thought she understood what Bianca had been trying to teach her.
So as she felt Maxham’s fingers on her skin, she began to sing the same nursery rhyme. “Baa, baa, black sheep …”
Zephyra thought perhaps she would feel some sort of pain. There was always pain involved when someone took something from her, and she did not think it would be any different in this instance.
But perhaps because of the nursery rhyme—or perhaps because what Maxham was doing was not naturally a painful sort of thing—she felt nothing.
Her mind flickered briefly to Bianca’s face, beautiful and sharp and wicked.
And then it was gone, and all that filled her head were the words of the nursery rhyme.
“Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full …”
Maxham’s pale eyes were directly in front of hers, and they blazed with white fire. His hand trembled against her skull, and he grimaced as if the contact was burning him. He gave a grunt of exertion.
With a flash, she suddenly saw Bianca’s old leather notebooks—or at least one of them, this one with a cover of dark brown leather, cracked at the edges. She had seen it many times in her sister’s hands, but she had never opened it, for her sister had never allowed it to be out of her sight.
Zephyra lustily sang the next stanza of the nursery rhyme. “One for the master, and one for the dame …”
Maxham squeezed his eyes shut, his entire face folded into a mask of agony.
Then he ripped his fingers away from her face, breathing as heavily as if he had run up several flights of stairs. He glared at her balefully.
Her singing dwindled, but she continued humming the tune as she stared back at him.
Then Maxham suddenly straightened, his face relaxing once again into a kind mask as if he had not just tried to reach his grimy fingers into the sanctuary of her thoughts. “An interesting trick,” he said, his voice mild. “I had not realized Bianca had been able to see me that evening.”
Zephyra didn’t want Maxham to know that Bianca had had better eyesight than the rest of them, so she answered, “You were reflected in the window. Quite careless of you.”
He nodded sagely. “Yes, that was quite careless of me.” Maxham reached for the satchel she held.
She drew it closer to her body and took a step back, but then he gave her an admonishing look. With a sigh, she handed the bag to him.
He opened it and dug through the clothing at the top, and finally his fingers found what he sought. With a crinkling of paper, he pulled out the pages of Bianca’s notes.
She expected to see elation on his face as he glanced down at the pages, but instead he frowned. He drew closer to her candle to see better in the light.
“Take care!” she snapped. “You’ll burn them.”
But even in the brighter light, he still continued frowning. He paged through them one after another, then flipped through them again, merely glancing at each sheet.
“Whatever is the matter?” She regretted the words as soon as she said them—they were too refined. If Maxham had suspected she was part of noble society, he could have no more doubts.
But he didn’t seem to notice. “These are simply notes,” he muttered.
“What did you expect them to be?” she asked impatiently.
He looked up at her, as if only then remembering that she was there. He gave her a gentle, sad smile, which caused her heart to start racing rather than reassuring her. “I am afraid, my dear Zephyra, that our relationship is at an end.”
Before she could even blink in reaction to his words, his hand was around her throat.
She slapped at his wrist, which was hard like a bar of iron, even as her throat was suddenly awash with pain. “Why?” she croaked.
“I have no need for these little scribbles.” Maxham dropped the pages onto the ground. “We have Bianca’s notebooks. I merely wished to see them. There was a remote chance that they held the key to the code Bianca used in her notebooks.”
Code? Bianca had used a code? Zephyra realized she shouldn’t have been surprised. It was something her sister would do. “I might … know the … key.”
The fingers loosened, although she realized that he could have snapped her neck in mere seconds if he had wished. She began to suspect he had attacked her merely to frighten her, to force her to reveal her secret.
“And how would you know her key?” he asked.
His hand was still around her throat, but he was no longer squeezing as tightly, and she could speak, although through some pain. “She was my sister. Of course I would know her key.”
It was not true. Bianca would never have revealed such a thing to her. But Maxham didn’t know that.
“And what would be the key?”
She clawed again at his wrist. “Do you really think I would tell you when you are threatening to kill me?”
He hesitated, then he released her neck. She stood and panted, her fingers massaging the bruised skin. She would need to wear a fichu to hide it from her father.
“As you might imagine, Zephyra, I cannot trust you,” Maxham said.
“I can hardly trust you,” she shot back. “You will kill me as soon as I reveal it to you.”
“So I cannot trust you, and you cannot tell me. Perhaps we are at a stand.”
Except that Zephyra knew that was not true. She had seen the flash of irritation in his eyes. She knew that he—that the Citadel—needed the key to Bianca’s notebooks, and at that moment, Zephyra was the only means they possessed of finding it. “Let me see the notebooks,” she said.
He studied her for a moment, unsmiling and silent.
“I could hardly know what sort of key she would use if I don’t see it,” she said, exasperated.
“Give us Bianca’s seeds, and I might consider it.”
“Show me the notebooks, or you will receive nothing,” she retorted.
He sighed. “The seeds will not save you, Zephyra. While I have no doubt Ward wants them, you and I both know that he would merely waste them, and Jack is not as clever a botanist as Jadis or even Bianca. He would likely waste them as well.” Maxham tilted his head.
“Or he might eat the seeds, simply out of spite toward Ward.”
Zephyra nearly laughed. From what she had heard about Jack, that was precisely what he would do.
“Come.” Maxham gestured toward her. “I shall take you to the notebooks.”
She hesitated for nearly a minute, uncertain if she could trust him. All the while, Maxham stood there, patiently waiting.
Zephyra finally decided that if he had wished to kill her, he could have done it earlier instead of releasing her. She bent down and picked up the pages that he had dropped, glancing over them surreptitiously.
Had Bianca indicated the key to her notebooks in any of these pages? She had memorized the contents, but she thought over them once again. With a sinking heart, she realized her sister had left no hint as to the code or the key.
“Give me my satchel,” she demanded.
Without hesitating, Maxham handed the bag over to her. She stuffed the pages inside, and then he turned and led the way out of the crypt.
Maxham must have slunk past the resurrectionists when he was following Zephyra, for they were still outside the church, just loading a body onto their wooden cart.
Zephyra turned her eyes away from the corpse’s bruising and pustules—a prostitute, she guessed, with the unmistakable marks of smallpox.
Maxham strode out of the church boldly, his gaze flickering unconcerned over the four grave robbers on the other side of the pit.
One of the men withdrew a knife from his pocket, brandishing it in the light of the shielded lantern.
Maxham’s face hardened as he stared at the man for long seconds.
Finally, the grave robber took a step back, raising his open hand and sheathing the knife with the other. His fellows, seeing his surrender, also seemed to shrink back inside themselves.
And so, with a single look, Maxham had cowed four resurrectionists.
Zephyra grit her teeth in frustration, but she silently followed him as he walked past the pauper’s grave and exited the churchyard.