“Lord Akeldama thinks the London mastermind of your Kingair plot was a Woolsey Pack member.”
“Does he, by George?”
“Now, stay calm, my dear. Think logically. I know that is difficult for you. But wouldn’t someone like Channing take—”
Lord Maccon shook his head. “No, not Channing. He would never—”
“But Lord Akeldama said that the previous Alpha was not right in the head. Couldn’t that have had something to do with it? If he ordered Channing to—”
Lord Maccon’s voice was sharp. “No. But Lord Woolsey himself? That is an idea. Much as I hate to admit it. The man was mad, my dear. Utterly mad. It can happen that way, especially to Alphas when we get too old. There’s a reason, you know, that we werewolves fight amongst ourselves. I mean aside from the etiquette of the duel. Especially Alphas. We shouldn’t be allowed to live forever—we go all funny in the brain. Or that’s what the howlers sing of. Vampires do, too, if you ask me. I mean, you only have to look at Lord Akeldama to realize he’s?.?.?.?but I digress.”
His wife reminded him of where they were in the conversation. “Lord Woolsey, you were saying?”
Lord Maccon looked down at their joined hands. “It can take on many forms, the madness—sometimes quite harmless little esoteric inclinations and sometimes not. Lord Woolsey, as I understand it, became deviant. Even brutal in his”—he paused, looking for the right word that might not shock even his indomitable wife—“tastes.”
Alexia contemplated this. Conall was an aggressive lover, demanding, although he could be quite gentle. Of course, with her, he had no real teeth to do damage beyond a nibble or two. But there had been one or two times, early on in their courtship, when she had wondered if he might not actually think of her as food. She had also read overmuch of her father’s journals.
“You mean, conjugally violent?”
“Not precisely, but from what I have been told, he was inclined to derive pleasure from sadistic activities.” Lord Maccon actually blushed. He could do that while touching her. Alexia found it little-boy endearing. With the fingers of her free hand, she stroked through his thick dark hair.
“Gracious. And how did the pack manage to keep such a thing secret?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. Such proclivities are not confined to werewolves alone. There are even brothels that—”
Alexia held up a hand. “No, thank you, my dear. I should prefer not to know any additional details.”
“Of course, my love, of course.”
“I am glad you killed him.”
Lord Maccon nodded, letting go of his wife’s hand, then standing and turning away, lost to his memories. He fiddled with a little cluster of daguerreotypes arranged on the mantelpiece. That quick, feral quality was back to his movements, a supernatural facet of his werewolf self. “As am I, wife, as am I. I have killed many people in my day, for queen and country, for pack and challenge; rarely do I get to say I am proud of that part of my afterlife. He was a brute, and I was fortunate indeed that I was just strong enough to see him eliminated, and he was just mad enough to make bad choices during the passion of battle. He allowed himself to enjoy it too much.”
Lord Maccon’s head suddenly cocked—supernatural hearing making out some new sound that Alexia could not discern.
“There is someone at the door.” He put down the image he had been toying with and turned to face the entrance, crossing his arms.
His wife picked up her parasol.
* * *
The ghost was confused. She spent a good deal of her time confused these nights. She was also alone. Everyone had gone, to the very last, so that she floated in her madness, losing her afterlife into silence and aether. Threads of her true self were drifting away. And there was no friendly face to sit with her while she died a second time.
She remembered that there was something unfinished. Was it her life?
She remembered there was something she still needed to do. Was it die?
She remembered that there was something wrong. She had tried to fix it, hadn’t she? What should she care for the living?
Wrong, it was all wrong. She was wrong. And soon she wouldn’t be. That was wrong, too.
CHAPTER NINE
In Which the Past Complicates the Present
A knock came at the back parlor door, and Floote stuck his debonair head around the side. “Madame Lefoux to see you, madam.”
Lady Maccon placed her parasol carefully to one side, pretending her husband had not just given her due warning. “Ah, yes, show her into the front parlor, would you, please, Floote? I’ll be in shortly. We simply can’t have company in this room yet—it’s not decent.”
“Very good, madam.”
Alexia turned back to her husband, beckoning with one hand to get him to come help her stand. He did, bracing himself.
“Oomph,” she said, attaining her feet. “Very well, I shall add Lord Woolsey to our ever-growing list of suspects who are now dead and thus useless. Death can be jolly well inconvenient, if you ask me. We can’t possibly prove his involvement.”
“Or what bearing it might have on this new threat to the queen.” The earl placed a casual arm about his wife, assistance couched in a more Alexia-acceptable act of affection. Nearly a year of marriage and he was finally learning.
“True, true.” His wife leaned against him.
Another knock sounded at the back parlor door.
“What now!” growled Lord Maccon.
Professor Lyall’s sandy head popped in this time. “You’re wanted, my lord, on a matter of pack business.”
“Oh, very well.” The earl helped his wife waddle down the hallway. He abandoned her at the door to the front parlor and then followed his Beta out into the night.
“Hat, my lord,” came Professor Lyall’s mild rebuke, a disembodied voice from the darkness.
Conall came back inside, scooped a convenient top hat off of the hall stand, and disappeared outside again.
Alexia paused at the door to the front parlor. Floote had left it slightly ajar, and she overheard conversation drifting from within, Madame Lefoux’s mellow voice and that of another, clear and erudite, confident with age and authority.
“Mr. Tarabotti had significant romantic success. I often wondered if the soulless weren’t dangerously attractive to those with too much soul. You, for example, probably have excess. You like her, don’t you?”
“Oh, really, Mr. Floote, why this sudden interest in my romantic inclinations?”
Lady Maccon started at that. She might have recognized Floote’s voice, of course, except that she had never heard him string so many words together at once. It must be admitted, she had privately doubted his ability to formulate a complete sentence. Or at least his willingness to do so.
“Be careful, madam.” The butler’s voice was stiff with rebuke.
Alexia flushed slightly at the very idea of her staff taking such a tone with a guest!
“Is it my care you are concerned with or Alexia’s?” Madame Lefoux seemed well able to withstand such a grave breach in domestic protocol.
“Both.”
“Very well. Now, would you be so kind as to check up on Her Highness? I am in a bit of a rush and the evening isn’t getting any longer.”
At this juncture, Lady Maccon made a great blundering noise and entered the room.
Floote, unflappable, backed away from his intimate proximity to the French inventor as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
“Madame Lefoux, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company? I seem to have just left you.” Alexia made her way laboriously across the room.
“I have that information you were looking for. About the teapots.” The inventor handed over a sheaf of old parchment paper, yellowed about the edges, thick and ridged, marked by hand and the assistance of a straight edge into some sort of ledger. “It’s in my aunt’s code, which I am certain you could decipher if you wished. But essentially it indicates that she had only one order for the teapot invention that year, but it was a big one. It didn’t come through any suspicious channels. That’s the intriguing part. It was a government order, out of London, with funds originating in the Bureau of Unnatural Registry.”
Lady Maccon’s mouth opened slightly, then snapped shut. “Ivy’s Agent Doom was at BUR?” She sighed. “Well, I suppose that puts Lord Woolsey to the top of my suspect list. He would have held my husband’s position at the time.”
Floote, in the act of shutting the door behind himself, paused on the threshold. “Lord Woolsey, madam?”
Alexia looked at him, all big-eyed and innocuous. “Yes. I’m beginning to think he must have had a hand in the Kingair assassination attempt.”
Madame Lefoux looked entirely uninterested at this. Her present concerns must be outweighing any curiosity over the past. “I do hope the information will be of some use, Alexia. When you’re finished, could I please have those records back? I like to keep these things in proper order. You understand, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“And now, I hate to be so abrupt, but I must get back to it.”
“Of course, of course. Do try to get some rest, please, Genevieve?”
“I’ll rest when the souls do,” quipped the inventor with a shrug. Then she left the room, only to return a moment later. “Have you seen my top hat?”
“The gray one out in the hall?” Lady Maccon’s stomach fell in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with the child.
“Yes.”
“I believe my husband may have accidentally absconded with it. Was it special?”
“Only in that it was my favorite hat. I can’t imagine it fit him. Must be several sizes too small.”
Lady Maccon closed her eyes at the very idea. “Oh, he must look quite a picture. I do apologize, Genevieve. He is so very bad about these things. I’ll have it sent over as soon as he returns.”
“Oh, no trouble. I do, after all, own a hat shop.” The inventor flashed a dimpled smile, and Alexia felt a strange bump of pleasure at the sight. It had been so long since Genevieve had smiled fully.
Floote saw the Frenchwoman to the door, but before he could even attempt to resume his regular duties, Lady Maccon called him back into her presence.
“Floote, a moment of your time.”
Floote came to stand before her, wary. His face, as always, was impassive, but Alexia had learned over the years to watch the set of his shoulders for clues as to his real feelings.
“Floote, I wouldn’t wish to be an eavesdropper, not on my friends or my staff—that is, by rights, your provenance. However, I couldn’t help but overhear some bit of your conversation with Madame Lefoux before I entered this room. Really, I didn’t know you had it in you. Several sentences in a row. And some of them quite sharp.”
“Madam?” The shoulders twitched.
Floote really didn’t have much of a sense of humor, poor man. Lady Maccon stopped teasing him and moved on to the meat of the matter. “You were discussing my father, weren’t you?”