Vanessa Ives (mirrorsbehind) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-06-13 22:31:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !penny dreadful(s), *log, dracula, mina murray, vanessa ives |
log: vanessa i, dracula, mina m
Who: Vanessa Ives, Mina Murray, Dracula
What: Discovering a body.
Where: The house next door to the Murray's.
When: Immediately following the discovery of the body.
Warnings/Rating: None.
Vanessa was in her room when the hue and cry was raised from next door, and something in her sickened and slithered, something made her feel ill. All was not right, even without the shouting.
A few minutes later, and she was out on the street, her shoulders shrouded in a shawl of gray-blue. Light poured from the doorway of the house next door, which she knew to be the site of a gathering neither of the women of ill-repute in the Murray house had been cordially invited to. Thankfully, this did not trouble her. She had long ago released her attachment to invitations, and her grip on caring for her own reputation was loosening each day. It was difficult for her to stand at a party, hold a glass of wine, and pretend to mind that she was whispered about. The things she had seen made her fear for her soul. To that, what was the threat of talk?
Still, she knew what the wrong kind of gossip could bring to a woman. She knew the sting of the hose in the asylum, chained and half-drowning. She knew the pain of the brand on her back. Oh, if such society butterflies could see her bare skin, as they imagined, titillated and scandalized, when they spoke of her. If they could undress her, pull off her clothing as they pulled away her poise, and see what lay beneath the silk.
But some part of her still minded, strange as it was. Parties had been the finest part of the year when she was a girl, and she had dreamed of participating in the season, just as they all had. She liked to flit from conversation to conversation, to incline her head to a man's shoulder, to laugh. She was wistful for those nights of dancing, nostalgic. So while she did not care for the approval of their neighbors, she heard the pleasure they took in each other's company, the loud talk, the mirth spilling out of windows. It crawled in through the gap in her chest and it squatted, a new and ugly resident. Regret, bitterness, scorn.
These thoughts and feelings were tumbling through her as she slipped into the gathering. It was thankfully early enough in the evening that she had not yet undressed, and while she did not wear the evening finery of the party's invited attendees, she did not draw attention to herself as she slipped through their midst.
Snatches of panicked conversation reached her ear. "- in the courtyard. Poor woman, no man here will own her, even the carriage boys say they never did see her -"
The crowd was thickest out in said courtyard, but the visitors were slowly being pushed back inside by a pair of strapping young gentlemen. As they made a show of their bravery around the corpse for the young ladies, they did not notice a pale woman slide out a different doorway, and cross through the night air toward the corpse.
A young man with a fine blond beard and dressed to enjoy the evening was standing guard over the corpse. He stepped out and took her by the arm when she approached. "Please," she said, tongue catching, eyes pleading. "I may know her. I must see her closer to be sure of it."
The man let go, reluctantly. "Thank you," she murmured, gray eyes grateful for his kindness. He turned to push back yet another gawping visitor, and she knelt beside the body, taking its hand reverently in both of her own.
It was warm, and her wrist was flexible. Not dead long, then.
Interesting.
The woman was dark of hair and wore a shade of burgundy that would not have been out of place in Vanessa's own wardrobe. And, here, inside her coat - a velvet bag. She opened the mouth of it and tipped the rectangular shape inside into her hand. Half a deck of tarot cards within slid, haphazard, into her waiting fingers.
They could not have been more cheaply made. The ink from the designs on the face of the card bled through to the backs, and did that not entirely defeat the purpose?
Atop the pack was a business card. Josephine, it called the woman at her feet. It called her occupation Fortune Teller, and gave an address a good way from the fashionable home of the Murrays and their neighbors. The place on the card was down by Ratcliffe highway, and not far from a rather dangerous rookery, if she remembered correctly. More research would be needed. The business card disappeared into her sleeve.
Brow furrowed, she tucked the tarot cards into the pouch and placed the pouch back where she'd found it. The man who had been standing guard was busy comforting a woman weeping just inside the doorway to the house, and he did not see the businesslike way in which the young lady he had allowed through was handling the corpse.
Vanessa did not fear the dead. There were many worse things, things to fear more. Corpses could not kill you, or strangle your hopes. She had been attending funeral masses and looking at bodies and thinking of what followed death since she was old enough to understand speech, and in the past few years she had seen mountains of bloody corpses, dreamed of every death there was to dream of, seen while waking the kind of death one dared not think on. A corpse could not make her afraid.
The blood at Josephine's neck was splashed and dripping haphazardly over her pale skin. Not a clean death, surely. And so pale - exsanguination? Strangest, there was no easily visible wound that would have poured out the blood, though there was a bruise at the base of her neck, and irritation of some kind, shiny and pink.
Something about the shade of Josephine's dress struck her, however, and did not connect. If this woman was a fortune teller who lived down by a rookery, what was she doing at a soiree like this one without invitation or a bill of employment? No one here knew her, so she had not been hired to entertain. And how had she come by her fine clothes? Her fine - and as she looked closer - ill fitting clothes?
She made a show of leaning over the body to inspect the woman's face, as if still unsure she recognized her. This allowed time for a surreptitious flip of her jacket. Just inside the back was a label for a clothier she did not recognize. She would not forget the name, and it left her with something else to research further.
Near the door, the man who had allowed her through was speaking to a small boy. Apparently he was part of the household staff, son of the cook. As Vanessa ran her thumb over the brooch pinned to the woman's chest, the boy insisted, "It were a little 'un, sir. I saw 'im come through. Little thing, a boy, wearin' a cloak, like. 'e was gone when I came back with the master."
Josephine's fingers, still clasped in Vanessa's own, were clean. No blood, no broken fingernails, no bruising. No fighting off her attacker, then. Her face was clean of marks from being struck, and there was no blood in her hair, so she had not been induced to accept her death by a blow to the head. Her hair, though, was odd, now that she looked at it more closely. It seemed to have been pulled from its pins. Half was coiled under her body, and the other half was still clinging to its original shape, disheveled and frayed.
Any moment now, the man behind her would swing his attention back. That brooch on the woman's chest, why did it strike Vanessa so? It was the quality of it that was strange. Just as the clothes were too bright and fine and ill-fitting to have always belonged to this corpse, so too was the brooch. It was a lovely thing, a hundred years old on its own, the shape of a bird finely worked in gold, set with seed pearls, turqouise, and a gray-white diamond for its eye.
One last piece, then, to her puzzle. She brushed her hand across the victim's chest, feigning as if she were straightening her coat, and she palmed the brooch. She'd learned that trick as a girl stealing sweets from the kitchen, and it did still come in handy, on occasion.
Vanessa stood, and she dropped the brooch into the folds of her coat. There. A jeweler could be sought out, and if the woman had any living relatives, she could ensure such a fine piece reached them. If she did not take it, it would be gone well before Josephine reached police custody, that she could be sure of.
The guardian of the body, whom she now assumed to be a member of the family who owned the house, tapped her on the shoulder. He was obviously awaiting the arrival of the authorities, who would come at any moment. She straightened and smoothed the folds from her skirt, wiping at her eye. The gallant gentleman offered her a handkerchief. "Thank you," she murmured, and swiped away the wetness she had forced to gather at her lashes.
"Do you know her?" asked the gentleman.
"I do not believe so," she said, with a sigh. "I thought she was a maidservant of my youth. A silly fantasy, I suppose. I cannot explain it, except that the shock at sighting a...a body that looked so like her -"
"Sir," offered the small boy, still peeping through the doorway. "Do y'not know that is the whore from the other house on the square?"
Someone dragged the boy back into the house by the scruff of his neck, and the good sir went very pale indeed. Vanessa thought of the woman lying between them, and of the dance card hanging from her wrist, empty all the way down. It was that she would remember most distinctly later. How sad, to go to a party with people who would not care to invite you, and to go in a borrowed dress, with an empty card. Dances with no one, and then a spectacle that every invited parvenu craned to see.