The Missing: The Curious Cases of Will Winchester and the Black Cross Read online

  All the adults towered above me. The muffled echo of life tickled my ears like Della’s lacy jumper tickled my knees. I ran through the billiards room, around the butler’s hip. No knapsack and lamps in the vestibule, no; just velvet drapes, damask furniture, gleaming floors. The pale girl in the white dress, peeking from upstairs. Come on, Della, I’ll count to ten … I bumbled up the main stairwell and across the balcony. I knew I shouldn’t hide in the servants’ stairwell because my father had told me innumerable times and so had the governess. Don’t play there, it’s dangerous! The world was so bright. Quite welcoming. Was it really this different, seeing through a child’s eyes? Had I viewed the world this way, once?

  I hid behind the short baluster in the corner. I waited. Someone coming. Got you! I jumped out to scare the girl in white, but there was a maid in the way. I tripped. I lost my footing and the world spun around me, spun violently, spun clockwise, counterclockwise, twisted to and fro like the staircase turning up, up, up to the top of the house where maid after maid poked their heads out over the railing screeching for me. And there she was, the girl, staring down from around the last maid’s shoulder. Miss Dellaaa!

  The first snap of the neck jolted me out of the trance sick and shocked.

  Breathless, disoriented, I grabbed O’Brien—when had he rushed to my side? Ah, to keep me from tumbling down the stairs, myself.

  “She was playing with Deborah,” I gasped.

  Young wrote frantically. Quinn lumbered up the stairs to us. “Winchester,” he said, voice gravelly. “Deborah died much before Adelaide.”

  “I know that!” I was shaking, frantic, all my nerves alight. “Deborah’s ghost, Quinn. They played together. They were playing when Della fell.” I shook loose of O’Brien and pounded down the main stairs, back into the vestibule.

  Charlie and Colette, back at home. The little wraith in my Knight’s Hall room. But Della and Deborah were not mine like those three were. Perhaps it was unfair of me to care in a requisite sort of way—my curse, my responsibility. But someone had to care for the Triviat girls as I cared for my ghosts, even if I … didn’t, not truly. Even if I did simply out of principle, and as a hypocrite.

  “Where did they go?” I pressed, choking the words out through the dizziness. It made me a bit queasy. The vision’s lingering feelings were distorted and stuck like waking from a too-vivid dream. “The girls! Where did they go? Della’s mother left because she didn’t realise it was her own daughter haunting her, just longing for her love, I’d bet, and—do you think she moves the portrait of herself because she hopes they’ll realise it’s her?”

  Clement whirled around and dashed over, throwing Della’s portrait down from the wall. Without a word, he whipped out a folding knife, with which he tore into the paper backing like a dog on the hunt. I jumped, eyes widening.

  “Aha!” he cried. With the paper shredded away, he plucked from the back corner of the portrait a small ribbon-bound chunk of dead dark hair.

  I couldn’t miss the sudden sharpness in the dark. The girls were back. They watched. Intently.

  Miss Jessica rummaged so hard in O’Brien’s knapsack, she almost knocked him over, pulling out a leather bag and little flask like the ones O’Brien had tossed at Clement over Kitty’s rotted coffin. She gave them to Clement, who struck a match. The lock of hair went up in slow, hungry flames until the fire nipped at his fingers. He let go. Before the smouldering hair even hit the floor, it had all burned away, just sparks and pungent-smelling embers dancing in the dark as Clement muttered that same little banishment rite from the night in the Bethnal Green churchyard, crossing himself once, twice, thrice.

  “Amen,” he finished.

  A small gust swept through the hall, cradling a distant, high-pitched shriek as it streamed through from every corner. Knocked all the portraits around, tugged at the drapes and blew out our lights until it dissolved into a flurry of writhing black shadows over the painting on the floor. Clement staggered back, cursing below his breath.

  And then it all just … stopped.

  Slowly, quietly, the Assistants moved to collect our things. Clement sent Cain and Miss Jessica to retrieve the bells from around the house.

  Della Triviat was gone and something in me locked up. It was a strange feeling, like the gears inside that kept running every man—or woman—just suddenly jolted to a halt.

  “We’re lucky I thought to check the portrait,” Clement declared. “Leave it to a lonely, grieving man to keep a lock of his dead daughter’s hair in a painting.”

  Purging banishes the spirit completely, O’Brien had said before.

  Completely.

  A pall of guilt sank over me. I was so accustomed to the presence of the Missing. And now, suddenly, they could just … disappear forever.

  My breath hitched. “Must we have done that?” I pressed. Clement looked over, taken aback, as I started towards him swiftly. But Quinn snagged me by the elbow to stop me, easily enough.

  “Well, yes,” Clement said, unperturbed by the fact that we had just banished a little ghost still full of feeling. “That was the whole point of our being here, Winchester.”

  Feeling quite panicked for some reason, I demanded, “How can you be so bloody insensitive, Clement? Della wasn’t like Kitty! She was conscious of everything and you didn’t feel what she felt. I did. Now we’ve destroyed the last lingering piece of her without … ”

  Clement’s eyes flashed. “Without what, Winchester? Taking tea together?”

  “We didn’t even discuss it as a team—”

  “This is how we work a case.”

  “You called a ghost a leftover soul,” I said. “And now there’s nothing left of her. Yet you don’t even seem to care!”

  Clement froze, like a form carved from granite as he cut me a new sort of look. Chagrined, but shaken, as if I’d reminded him of something and he did not appreciate it.

  Jaw tightening, he said, “Lord Triviat wanted it gone.”

  “But it was his daughter. It was the only part of her that was left, and where is she now?”

  “Gone! Gone, gone, gone, what the devil don’t you understand about that? She’s bloody gone, Winchester!” Clement’s temper pitched, fuming and informal, as did the volume of his words. Bells rang somewhere upstairs where Cain and Miss Jessica had been sent to collect them. “You act as though we’ve killed someone. She’s already dead. It was a bloody ghost.”

  “Yes, all right,” I said, hackles raised. I hadn’t felt this stormy inside since that afternoon in my father’s library, when I’d brought up the Cross. “The girls are dead, but they’d been like us once. Feeling, breathing, thinking, living, and Della still thought and felt, even as a spirit.”

  “You’re all bent out of shape because they were intelligents, aren’t you?” Clement scoffed. “Because they felt like something more than what they are. Listen, the mild possession’s still fading. You’ll stop feeling the spirit’s memories soon enough—”

  “Lord Triviat loved her!” My chest ached, something twisting and twisting inside it like my voice seemed to twist in my throat. “Do you know what some would give for their father’s love?”

  Clement’s damning glance silenced me. He stormed my way through the shivering lamplight. Quinn held out a hand to halt him in his hostility, but he stopped with a scrape against the floor just before Quinn’s arm. I held his glare with my own as calmly as I could, mouth bitten into a firm line.

  “I don’t doubt he loves her still,” Clement husked. “But he does not wish to be haunted. How would you feel to have the remnants of a loved one, there, beside you, but losing them and losing them again—no longer yours, no longer alive, not even at rest? How is that fair to a man, to the little dead thing that still feels and thinks? Closing the case is my duty, which is what we have done. Triviat requested the spirit be gone. That’s that, and you’d best take note of it because it’s your duty, as well. I won’t expect any less. Inspection isn’t the place to work out your moral s
tanding.”

  Furious, chastened tears stung coldly at the backs of my eyes and tightened up my throat. I wouldn’t have called it a dilemma of moral standing. I certainly felt relief to know Della was no longer consigned to an incomplete sort of existence, but apparently, I harbored some sense of twisted attachment I’d never before realised, and I felt horrible and selfish for never thinking of the Missing like this until it was possible to get rid of them for good.

  “It’s not closed, though,” I said bitterly as Clement turned away, raking his hands through his hair. “Deborah is still here, too.”

  He stopped, head hung with his hands knotted at the back of it. Thickly, he replied, “Lord Triviat did not request the purging of his sister’s spirit, so yes, as it stands, the present Triviat case is closed. We shall alert him to suspicions regarding a second spiritual presence, but what happens with that is entirely up to him.”

  Bastard. I knew it was wrong to target him for how terrifyingly bewitched I was by something so potentially unconscionable. But I was just angry.

  I cleared my throat, determined to regain composure. I could at least be better at that than him.

  Quinn released my arm. “Don’t push him,” he snapped, not unkindly. And I didn’t. The gripping sense of urgency was dulling down. Clement was right—it was as if the mild possession had left a brief stamp on me. That was disheartening.

  Still, I burned inside.

  From the corner of my eye, I caught Cain watching from the mezzanine, hands full of bells and twine. I wilted, miserably. At least Miss Jessica had not been audience to my making a fool of myself.

  ***

  “What parameter are you?” Miss Jessica inquired as I climbed into the coach after her, just outside the walled lawn of Triviat Manor. Cain followed shortly. The others took a second cab, with our equipment.

  “Ah … second.” I gave a limp shrug. “Not that anyone’s told me what that means.”

  “I’m sure they haven’t.” Miss Jessica sighed. She paused, letting the significance of her charity sink in. “Those with spectral gifts are separated into three parameters in the Cross,” she said, raising her voice over the rumble of the coach across packed dirt and cobbles. “Generally, those designated as ‘first’ have more psychical gifts.”

  “Psychical,” I repeated, brow knotting.

  “For me, mediumship. Men designated as ‘second’ are natural clairvoyants or conduits, such as Kingsley. And yourself.”

  “And how is that different?” I murmured.

  “Clairvoyants observe the spectral realm through a different lens, is how my uncle puts it. Mediums are thrown images and words, in the backs of their minds.” She gestured to her head, speaking softly as though she’d forgotten to be at odds with me. “Clairvoyants see apparitions clearly whereas most usually see shadow figures. And men of the ‘third’ … well, their gifts can’t be limited to any one parameter.”

  I kept my face pressed to the little window and watched London roll by in the sodden nighttime. Small throngs of dolled-up men and women still lingered. Like there, my father and Miss Valérie, in the still-bustling West End looking utterly unconcerned and frivolous per usual as they crowded at a late-night coffee stand, outside a playhouse winding down from a performance, with other Londoners for whom it seemed the luxury of a night out on the town was simple—

  I shot back from the window, eyes wide.

  Miss Jessica and Cain looked to me curiously, each in their separate ways.

  “Whatever’s the matter with you now?” Miss Jessica cocked a brow. “Is the division of spectral parameters so intimidating?”

  “No, I … ” I fumbled the ruffled window curtain closed. “Nothing. I just need sleep, perhaps. I’m sorry.”

  For one terrible, terrifying moment—I could have sworn it true on my life—my father had looked over just in time to watch our coach pass, and might have caught sight of me just as I’d caught sight of him.

  No, couldn’t be. Not possible. Surely it was too dim in our cab, and he was preoccupied. I was being irrational. It had been a long, strenuous evening. If he hadn’t come looking for me by now, he didn’t care to find me. Unless of course he had, but hadn’t looked in the right places yet. And yet again, I could not choose which of those possibilities was the worst.

  The sky hung cold and glum over Portland Place as we returned from the Triviats’. I waited for Cain as everyone checked in with the nighttime secretary. He was the last to wander out into the courtyard, gently closing the big door and huddling into his coat, watching his feet with tired, distracted eyes. He was so mysterious in a dreamy sort of way, like he belonged to a fairy tale or a Classical myth.

  I opened my mouth for his name, but it tangled with the knot in my throat. What was I even to say? I just didn’t want to be alone. My clash with Clement, how the case had ended, seeing my father …

  Cain stopped short at the edge of the humble courtyard and turned half to me with a surprised look like it had taken him a moment to recognise my presence.

  “Could we walk a bit?” I blurted, without even saying hello.

  He blinked a few times, then livened with the perk of a faint smile. “Of course,” he said.

  Grass and stray pebbles on the path crunched underfoot as we wandered the perimeter of the courtyard. The grounds were quiet, serene in that way of the latest hours—or the earliest—when the world felt somehow not real.

  “I’ll be let go,” I finally said as we started our second lap around.

  Cain gently swung his arms even with his hands deep in his pockets. “Let go?”

  “From the Cross.”

  He snorted. I wasn’t sure whether to suffer insult or consternation that he found my fear humorous. But his little scoff became a light laugh, an adult sort of giggle not at all at odds with his soft face.

  “No, you won’t,” he said, grinning at me through the slants of light as we passed by the occasional door lamp. Similar as there was a chance we were, I still felt so very inferior to him with his lovely rings on his lovely gloves and his dapper, perfectly cut overcoat, even gently disheveled from the night’s work as he was.

  “I’m on probation yet,” I insisted. “My behaviour tonight … ”

  Cain stopped, casting me a skeptical look. “Have you met the lead inspector with whom you quarreled? Please, Will. Clement is the last man to report insubordination. It was a mere disagreement. Not his first. Certainly not his last.” He shrugged and strolled on towards the side of the main building that met the brick of the dormitory terrace.

  “Cain,” I said, following him still, “could I ask a favour of which you just can’t assume any impropriety or implications?”

  Cain pursed his mouth to one side like such a preface automatically and mischievously intrigued him. “I never assume,” he teased.

  “May I sleep with you tonight?”

  Pulling the door open, Cain squinted at me as though he didn’t believe that was the real question. Or perhaps reconsidered his eager reception of it. I blushed, fiercely.

  “It’s not as questionable as it sounds, I just don’t want to sleep alone tonight,” I explained, flustered and frustrated by pitiful nervousness. My father and Miss Valérie, my father looking right at the coach, my father … if he had seen me …

  Cain hummed to himself in thought. “Well,” he said around a yawn, “I’ve heard from others that some of ‘those bloody decadent Kingsleys’ do quite a lot of questionable things, so it wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary, right?”

  He flashed me a faint but saucy smile as he moved through the long, narrow parlour to the King’s Hall stairs.

  “It’s fine, Will,” he said, as always so pleasant when he had no reason to be. “I don’t mind at all.” Steep stairs creaking underfoot as he led the way to his lodgings, already stripping off coat and gloves, he murmured, “Clement really shook you, didn’t he? He’s hard like that on people—at least, the ones in whom he invests stock. I promise, he does not was
te time disagreeing with someone if he does not like them.”

  “Pardon?”

  We came to his room. He hung up his things. “He thinks you’re a wunderkind, Will. A socially awkward, completely naïve little wunderkind.”

  I lingered in the doorway, hardly sure what to make of that. I was suspicious. And, frankly, overwhelmed. First Westwood, now Clement?

  “It’s just because I’m young,” I said. “And happened to surprise him that night on Waterloo. Please don’t profess I’m some special thing.”

  Cain’s eyes lingered on me. He nodded idly. “That’s probably true,” he said. “I receive similar treatment at times. Rather cruel, to make us think we’re special, hmm?”

  His room wasn’t much larger than mine, but the cramped handful of posh furnishings made it feel smaller. His family had probably insisted on the four-poster bed, the narrow armoire, the upholstered armchairs below a tall, rich portrait on the wall. Even his desk chair was not the standard, especially not the drapes that matched the Kingsley-crested blue and silver of the bedclothes. On the desk, a lamp with Bohemian pendalogues and an orange waiting to be eaten.

  Cain threw back his blankets. With a tiny shiver for the partially open window, he began changing his clothes and cried gaily, “It’s like we’re brothers! I haven’t had a slumber party since my cousins visited from Cambridgeshire.”

  I glanced away out of courtesy as he changed. Leaving the top two buttons of his fine night-shirt undone, he plopped down at the foot of his bed and pulled his legs up; as he changed into clean socks, tucking the ends of his flannel pants in, his eyes flickered over in another one of his quick, covert glances to the mirror. His gaze was heavy. Then, yawning like a sleepy puppy, he said, “It’s curious, Will.”

  “What’s curious?”

  “You always look as though you run from someone, hide from something.”