Aether Rising

Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen

Cobb Townhouse, 12 March 1871

When Louisa arrived in the breakfast room, she found her stepfather already seated at the head of the table with a cup of coffee in front of him and his nose buried in the paper. Without looking up, he said, “Good morning, Louisa. How did you sleep?”

She analyzed his tone and what she could see of him—he didn’t look tense, but then, he rarely did. She wanted to gloat that she hadn’t fallen for the trap he and Paul Farrell had set for her, but between the odd visit from the automaton—which she wasn’t sure had happened or if she’d dreamt it—and the other strange dreams she’d had, she didn’t have the energy for gloating. Especially if she needed to play the part of dutiful daughter at the rally.

So she only said, “Fine,” and helped herself to a soft-boiled egg and some toast. She sat at the foot of the table, which had been set for her, and a maid appeared to pour her some coffee.

Unlike many women, Louisa drank her coffee black, but she couldn’t say why. Had her mother done so? She’d often wondered, but when she tried to reach back into memory, she recalled her mother drinking coffee, but not how she took it.

“Parnaby, may I ask you a question?”

He looked up. “Maybe. I’m busy right now. Is it a short one?”

“Yes.” She watched his eyebrows for signs that they would draw together in disapproval, which would bleed into the rest of the day. “It’s about my mother.”

“A short one, then.”

“How did she take her coffee?”

One of his eyebrows went down, but the other one raised, and he looked up as if searching his own memory. “Black, I think. Like you.”

“Do you know why?”

“Yes. You were poor before I married her, and she couldn’t afford cream and sugar. Now can I get back to my reading? This blasted weather may interfere with our plans. Can’t get people excited about light if they don’t have heat.”

“Yes, thank you.” Louisa frowned at her egg. Why couldn’t she remember more of life with her mother before Cobb? Sure, he’d married her mother when Louisa was seven, but most people had memories from childhood, didn’t they? She dared not ask another question, at least not that morning, but she wondered why she hadn’t been more curious.

She took a deep breath and felt the locket press between her breasts, almost like the anchor on one of her father’s ships. Perhaps she hadn’t thought about the past because she didn’t have anything to prompt her to do so. Or had she lied to herself that it wasn’t important because this was her life, and she was comfortable.

“Hurry up, Louisa,” Cobb told her. “Stop daydreaming and eat. We have a busy day.”

Beforehand, she would have meekly done what he asked right away, but this time she lifted her chin and looked directly at him. He studied her with a quizzical expression.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“I was going to ask you the same.” He lowered the paper. “Remember our conversation yesterday. As long as you’re useful, I won’t ship you off to a convent or marry you off right away. Need I remind you? You owe everything you are to me.”

“I am well aware of that.” Louisa lowered her eyes. “I will be finished in ten minutes.”

“Make it five.” He stood, dropped the paper on the table, and left.

Louisa’s hands shook so badly she couldn’t crack the eggshell on the first try. Or the second. Every tap of her spoon made her want to hit the egg harder until she reduced it to crushed pieces, but she contained herself. She was Louisa Cobb now, but she had once been someone else, and she meant to find out who.

When Claire opened her eyes to the room she’d slept in as a girl and young woman, she thought she dreamed. She often came back here in her mind’s nocturnal wanderings, and at first she felt relief because it meant she wouldn’t have a true nightmare—those always occurred in the asylum in Paris. Then the events of the previous day came back to her, and she bit back a scream of frustration. How could she be back here, back in the power of her Aunt Eliza?

The clock on the fireplace mantel showed it was seven o’clock, and she pulled the blanket over her head. She’d fallen right back into the pattern of the household—rise at seven, breakfast at eight. She twisted the ring around her finger and hoped Chadwick was all right. She played back through the scene on the train in her mind, wondering if she could have done something different to save them both. But she knew that if she and Chadwick had stayed apart on the train, Eliza would still have figured out a way to capture Claire and send Chadwick away. Her aunt hadn’t been at the fort visiting Bryce, so Claire knew Eliza’s objective had been her. But for what purpose?

A soft tap on the door made Claire emerge.

“Come in?”

Calla poked her head around the door. In spite of the very late hour they’d arrived, the girl’s eyes sparkled and lacked the dark circles of exhaustion Claire knew she sported.

“Are you ready for me to help you dress, Miss?”

“Yes, thank you.” Claire peeled herself from the bed, and Calla helped her to put on undergarments and then a dress from her previous life that fit loosely—life at Fort Daniels had provided Claire with more fresh air, exercise, and excitement than she’d realized. She probably could have gone without the corset, which Calla had to lace tightly. After Calla had fixed her hair in a simple but elegant updo, Claire looked at herself in the mirror. Even with her glasses, she looked more like Claire McPhee, daughter of Melanie and Allen McPhee, than Doctor Claire McPhee, neuroticist and war hero. The light blue day dress set off her eyes, and she fingered the lace at the collar. She hadn’t worn lace since leaving Boston the last time, and it felt like shackles, not a luxury.

It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real…Claire chanted the three words in her head until they lost their meaning and became a collection of nonsense syllables. Then she switched to Wake up, wake up, wake up…But that, too disintegrated under the reality of walking through the upper hall of her childhood home, then down the stairs and into the kitchen, where her mother stood at the counter.

“Mama?” Claire asked. Could this thin, pale woman be all that was left of the robust Melanie McPhee, who had defied her own family to marry a tinkerer?

Melanie turned from the steaming coffee-making device with a smile.

“Oh, Claire, is that you?” She stepped toward Claire but stumbled and caught herself on the back of a chair with hands that looked more like claws. She blinked, her mouth and cheeks a vague echo of the dazzling smile that had won Allan McPhee all those years previously, and which Claire missed most of all about her mother.

“Forgive me,” Melanie said. “I’m clumsy these days.” She balled one hand into a fist and pressed it to the base of her spine.

“Is it your back still?” Claire asked. She joined her mother behind the kitchen table and noticed that Melanie’s pupils didn’t change size. In fact, they were such tiny pinpricks, they gave her mother the appearance of a strange being.

“Yes. I wanted to be awake when you came down.” Melanie massaged her back with one hand and took Claire’s arm with the other.

“How much of that stuff are you taking?” Claire gestured to a bottle labeled as “Doctor Lewis’s Tonic” on the shelf. She guessed it had a fair amount of opium in it.

“A teaspoon here and there when the pain gets too bad.” Melanie’s thin shoulders barely moved her dress when she shrugged. She took mincing steps like an old woman. Well, an older woman than she was, Claire amended. Eliza, who was Melanie’s senior by a good ten years, seemed younger.

“You need to be careful. No one knows what’s in those things, and their ‘proprietary blends’ could contain ingredients that are harmful.”

Melanie waved away Claire’s concerns. “How was your trip, dear?”

Claire wanted to say something like, “Fine except for my fiancé being ripped from my side and my being kidnapped,” but she knew Melanie had to live with Eliza due to Melanie’s frail health. Would her mother even remember this conversation? Still, Claire didn’t want to upset her.

“Rough,” was all Claire would say. The journey between kitchen and dining room felt like an expedition, but finally they arrived, and she sat her mother at the table. “Here, let me fix you a plate.”

“I always worry about you traveling after that horrible accident.” Melanie twisted her napkin in her hands. “You never know when someone walks out the door if it will be their last time.”

Claire nodded, biting back the tears that stung the back of her throat at the painful reminder of Chad’s uncertain fate. She couldn’t help but glance at her parents’ wedding picture, which a friend had painted for them, over the mantle. They sat stern-faced like most portraits of the day, but the artist had captured her father’s twinkling eyes and her mother’s serenity. Claire knew her father was dead, although Melanie and Eliza had tried to hide the fact when Claire returned from Europe due to her “fragile state of mind,” or so Eliza had said. It was hard to believe someone was “off on some diplomatic matter” when one had seen and spoken with his spirit, but she wasn’t going to mention that, either, although she wished she could.

As a neuroticist, Claire understood how the mind could play cruel tricks on the body. She wondered if Melanie’s back pain could be a result of the rumors of Allen having killed himself due to self-blame for the accident that had caused Claire’s hysteria and the physical scars that still wound over her hands.

“Claire?” Melanie’s soft voice brought Claire back to the present.

“Not awake yet, I suppose,” Claire said and turned from the sideboard. She almost dropped her plate when she saw the shadowy form of her father standing beside her mother, his hand on her shoulder.

“Is something wrong?” Melanie asked. “You’ve gone pale.”

“N-no, not at all.” Another lie, but Claire had to say something so she wouldn’t blurt out something unladylike at the ghost who had appeared and then abandoned her at Fort Daniels. He vanished, and Claire asked, “Eggs?”

“Just toast. If I have too much in my stomach, the tonic won’t work.”

“But if you don’t eat, you won’t heal,” Claire argued. “And you can’t survive on just bread and butter.”

“I’ll add jam, don’t worry. Don’t argue with me, Claire.” Melanie put her hands under the table, but not before Claire noticed them shaking.

Claire would have continued to protest, but Eliza swept into the room. Claire sent a cross look in her direction before turning back to the food. Does the woman never enter a room normally?

“Good morning, lovelies,” Eliza chirped. “Claire, I trust you’re well-rested.”

“As much as one could expect.” Claire turned and handed Melanie her toast across the table, then fixed herself a plate as quickly as she could. “I’ll be eating breakfast in my rooms. I feel a sudden headache coming on.”

“Right, and we mustn’t strain you, dear. We wouldn’t want a recurrence of your hysteria,” Eliza replied without missing a moment.

“Oh, yes. Do go lie down, Claire,” Melanie said. “I don’t want you to become ill again.”

“That is highly unlikely.” But Claire paused. Was there some advantage to her playing up a possible relapse? She mentally gave herself a shake—she didn’t need to risk ending up in another asylum, and she needed to make herself as credible as possible. Surely there was someone in Boston who would believe her.

“Yes, you need to rest up,” Eliza told her. “Louisa Cobb is coming for tea. I thought it would be good for you to have someone your own age to talk to.”

Meaning someone you approve of and who already thinks me insane.

“Very well.” Claire left, but as she walked into the hall, she overheard Eliza say, “Melanie, dear, you’re shaking. Have you had your medicine yet this morning? I’ll fetch it for you.”

Claire almost turned to challenge her aunt but decided to wait, as much as it concerned her. Encountering the ghost of Allen McPhee in the hall looking anxiously toward the dining room didn’t help, but Claire brushed past him and ignored the chill when he reached for her.

“If you really want to help,” she whispered at him over her shoulder, “figure out some way to rescue Chad, then Patrick, and then me. Otherwise, just leave me the hell alone.”

Louisa stood in the front hall and waited for the driver to bring the steamcoach around and for her stepfather to appear. Dressed warmly in anticipation of being outside, she would have perspired had she not had the sensation of being watched from the upper hallway. But every time she glanced over her shoulder, she found the space above to be empty, at least what she could see of it.

Heavy footsteps startled her, and she whirled around to see Paul Farrell descending the stairs. He looked as disheveled as she felt, his normally smart appearance rumpled and wrinkled. He carried his hat in one hand, and his beard badly needed a trim.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “I thought I told you to go away.”

“Trying to get your father to stop this madness.” He straightened his monocle, but it immediately skewed again, making him look even more ridiculous.

“What madness? He’s bringing gaslight to an area that needs it.”

Farrell had reached the bottom step and looked down on her pityingly. “Silly child, is that what you think he wants to do?”

“Of course. I know his reasons are not likely entirely altruistic, and this will help his business ventures, but I feel it’s best to do what we can for the poor and destitute.”

“And what about you? What are you getting out of this?”

Before Louisa could answer, her stepfather’s voice boomed from upstairs, “Begone, Farrell, until you return to your senses.”

Louisa looked up to see Cobb standing at the top of the stairs, his face red and his eyebrows dipped into the position of most displeasure.

“I know what you’re up to,” Farrell said and pointed with one trembling finger. “We know what you’re doing. Don’t think you’ll get far with these plans.”

“You’ve gone aether-mad.” Cobb descended one step. “Now leave before I have my guards remove you.”

The inventor glanced at Louisa, and she moved out of his reach lest he do something desperate. He turned on his heel and walked out of the front door, which he slammed behind him.

She winced at the noise and accompanying blast of cold air. Had the temperature dropped even more? The light through the diamond panes flanking the door showed gray, and the shadows outside them danced with the wind.

“Smart girl, moving out of his way,” Cobb said when he reached the bottom of the stairs. “I suspect he carried a knife with him.”

“What did he mean?”

Cobb shrugged. “I need to speak with the men before we go. Wait here.” He walked into the back hallway, presumably to find the men in the back kitchen, where they would be having breakfast before they brought the carriage around.

While she waited, drumming her gloved fingers on the end of the banister, Louisa pondered Farrell’s question as to how Parnaby’s plan benefitted her. She knew the obvious answer, the one she counted on everyone thinking—to still appear to be a dutiful daughter. But then there was the other possibility, that she would have the chance to discover more about her family, the one that had receded into the fog of memory.

It was the opposite of a fairy tale. Instead of a commoner finding out she was a princess, she was an American princess finding out she had common blood, which would allow her to be with her prince. Or the tinkerer. If he would still have her.

Now she wished she had gone with Farrell the night before. If he and Cobb disagreed on something to the point Cobb would fire him, then the inventor likely wouldn’t have cooperated in trying to trap Louisa in a situation that would send her to the convent.

That’s it. After the rally, I’m going to see Patrick. Well, after I find the woman who left the address for me.

With that decided, she walked to the front door to listen for the sound of the steamcoach’s arrival.