1
Elizabeth Navenby was known for three things: needlework, talking to the dead, and an ill temper at the best of times.
These were not the best of times. Seasickness had taken rough shears to the edges of that temper. And being subjected to well-meaning jabber about the stateroom’s furnishings, and how the handkerchief-waving crowds lining the New York docks as the Lyric pulled away looked exactly like a flock of doves—didn’t she agree?—had hardly helped.
So Elizabeth had ordered the talkative Miss Blyth, who had truly disgusting amounts of energy for a girl her age, off to explore the ship.
“Finally,” said Elizabeth to the empty interior of the cabin. “I could do with some quiet.”
It was not truly quiet. But the buzz of the ship’s engines was no more difficult to ignore than the normal noise of a Manhattan afternoon. And the stateroom’s furnishings, now that she turned her attention to them, were … adequately luxurious. If rather modern. Green glass lamps like mildewed snowdrops hung from the brass arms of the chandelier. The chairs were upholstered in a paler green. Dorian’s cage sat upon a low bureau whose drawers had inlaid patterns of tulips with long, looping stems.
“I suppose you’d approve of that, Flora,” said Elizabeth. “You always did like your outdoors to decorate your indoors.”
Another wave of nausea was joined by a dull ache like something had taken her knee between blunt-toothed jaws. Elizabeth had serviceable dry-land knees. They weren’t used to exerting themselves to steady a body against the sea.
She wobbled to sit in the nearest chair and cradled a warmth-spell. The yellow light of it shimmered dimly, reflected in the polished wood of the bureau, then vanished as she applied the magic to her knee. Heat seeped into her bedevilled old joint.
“And I won’t hear a word about how I should be using a stick,” she said.
One of the senior stewards had descended simperingly upon them as soon as they set foot off the gangplank. She’d suspected him of wanting to make calf’s eyes at Miss Blyth, but instead he’d given Elizabeth some damned condescending twaddle about how difficult the crossing could be for the elderly and infirm, and how the White Star Line prided itself on its little comforts for first-class passengers, and if she had any need of extra pillows—some warm broth or ginger tea to soothe her stomach—a walking stick—
At which point Elizabeth had called him an imposing busybody and strode past, leaving Miss Blyth making apologies in her wake. Pointless. Men would never learn to behave if you apologised at them.
“Infirm!” she muttered now. “The cheek.”
“Cheek,” said Dorian.
Though it sounded more like cheat, which Elizabeth had taught him to say after she caught that boring old fart Hudson Renner trying to wear wooden rings at her poker table. There was no excuse for using illusions at a civilised gambling party, no matter how much of your fortune you’d frittered away on investments that anyone could have told you were foolhardy bordering on idiotic.
Elizabeth creaked to her feet. Her knee felt better. Her stomach did not.
“I simply didn’t expect to be making voyages in this stage of my life. Though I will allow”—grudgingly—“the last time I crossed the Atlantic, I remember the seasickness being even worse.”
The last time had been in the other direction, when she and her husband left England behind in search of a different life in America. That ship had been far smaller. Nothing like this enormous liner.
Elizabeth snorted in reminiscence. “Poor Ralph. He spent the first day rubbing my back and emptying basins before I was well enough to remember that I had packed one of Sera’s stomach-calming tonics, and that dried chamomile from your garden—”
Grief’s jaws were not blunt of tooth. They snapped shut like a poacher’s trap.
Elizabeth stood with her hand clenched around her silver locket and kept painfully behind her teeth the urge to curse the dead for dying. She wanted to hurl magic at those green lamps for the pleasure of watching something shatter. Memory plagued her, gutted her, snarled at her heels. Flora had wrapped magic like gossamer around her chamomile as it grew. She’d whispered to it until even the flowers’ subtle scent on the edge of a breeze was a soporific charm, like fingers laid on the eyelids.
Slowly Elizabeth’s grip on the locket loosened. She checked her palm, as if she might have pressed the pattern of sunflowers into her skin.
Surely the size of this pain was out of proportion to all reason. She and Flora had spent the latter halves of their lives on different continents. They were old enough that death might well be expected to come knocking.
None of that made any difference to the way Elizabeth had been scooped out, left desolate and raging, when Miss Blyth had first shifted her feet on the carpet and blurted out the news of Flora’s death.
Their age made it worse. It was absurd. Elizabeth was too old to go around avenging murders.
She would do it anyway, of course. Even if her bones felt too brittle to hold the anger that drove her forward.
“I know, I know,” she muttered. “As long as I’ve life, I can choose what to do with it.”
Elizabeth Navenby talked to the dead not in the general, but in the particular.
More than that, she had talked to her particular dead person since long before the descriptor applied. Ever since leaving England, she’d talked as if Flora Sutton were there—as if the locket linked them in more ways than the metaphorical. As if they’d found a way to overcome the limitations of magic at vast distances, and any words she spoke would truly be carried back across the ocean and into Flora’s ears.
She’d refrained in front of Miss Blyth. Her tongue felt crammed full of things that had been building up unsaid. Now that she could let them out in peace, the weightiest ones were rolling forward.
“I thought I would know the exact moment,” said Elizabeth Navenby to her absent dead. “I truly did. I thought—oh, I’d sit up in bed with my heart aflutter. Be stopped in the street by a moment of dread. No—I had to be told to my face, months after you were in the ground. Had to sit there gaping like a fish, and realise that even after—even—nobody thought I might appreciate a damned telegram—”
Another surge of angry grief. As if sensing it, Dorian gave a long croak of a sigh.
No. The wretched bird was not empathetic, merely passive-aggressive; he resorted to the pathos of croaking as a hint that he wanted attention. Or lunch.
Copyright © 2022 by Freya Marske
