Emma Wentworth
Chapter 0.1 — The Long Corridor
In the autumn of 1813, Emma Wentworth was seventeen years old and had never left Tarryford. She and her sister Georgiana attended the Northlake Ball at Northlake Hall as local guests — the daughters of a Wiltshire family with no particular reason to expect the evening would alter the shape of their lives. It did. The portal in the Long Corridor opened onto a dark realm inhabited by Horrors — squat, headless, fur-covered things with fanged mouths on their torsos — and the expedition to close it cost the life of James Bennet, a gentleman poet, who was overtaken and consumed during the retreat while the armed men who stopped to cover the withdrawal were killed alongside him.
Emma survived. She and Georgiana walked out with Marina, Jane, and the weight of what they had witnessed. Lady Honoria Lyndhurst recruited the survivors and brought them to London, to Hartwell House, where six instructors drilled them in the skills the Order of St Aelfric deemed necessary for the work ahead. Emma’s cousin Mr. Horatio Fairborn provided a London household at Gough Square. The girl who had never left Wiltshire was gone. In her place stood someone who had seen the impossible and chosen not to look away.
Chapter 0.5 — The Scandal Beneath the Stage
At Drury Lane in December 1813, the investigators confronted something that had taken root in the theatre itself — a time loop, a mirror that remembered, and the lingering presence of Giles Mercer, the actor whose name would later lead them to the Orphean Society in London. Jane Radcliffe died there, swallowed by the theatre. Emma survived again, but the experience left its mark. A phobia of theatres settled into her nerves — not a rational fear, but the deep flinch of a body that remembers what it felt in a place where the walls breathed and the performance never ended.
The theatre obsession that would define her in the months to come grew from this same root. What terrified her also fascinated her, as though the horror and the art were inseparable, and Emma could not stop returning in her mind to the stage where everything had gone wrong.
Chapter 1 — London: The Orphean Society
The investigation that followed was Emma’s first full field operation with the Order of St Aelfric. Lord Percival Harcourt dispatched the party to find two missing agents — Sir Nathaniel Rooke and Imogen Bellamy — both connected to the Orphean Society at 43 Grosvenor Street. Emma participated in the raids that followed: the sub-basement beneath the Society building, where Augustus mercy-killed the Choir Below — emaciated, eyeless wretches chained to the walls and humming an endless tuneless song — and the desperate two-pronged assault on Stonehenge on the night of June 12th, where Danforth sacrificed bound prisoners on tuning crucifixes while a servant of Yog Sothoth began to form overhead. A young farmer boy, barely more than a child, volunteered from the Salisbury pub and died in the assault. Most of the farmers died.
The investigators rescued Rooke, killed Hume and Danforth, and were formally inducted into the Order. Emma was seventeen and had now witnessed a summoning ritual, a mercy-killing, and the death of innocents who had trusted them. The road south to Lyon beckoned, and the letters recovered from the cult pointed to the Societe Harmonique de l’Aube.
Chapter 2 — Lyon
Lyon was where the campaign broke open and the cost became personal. On the road to the Puyrault estate, the party was ambushed by ciimba — zombie children with their mouths sewn shut. It was Emma’s first encounter with them. Augustus was bitten and fell sick. The bodies were burned in the back garden.
The horrors multiplied. At the masquerade soiree at the Maison du Corbeau, Emma witnessed a Formless Spawn ritual and a child sacrifice in the hidden chamber. The party did not intervene. They left carrying knowledge they could not put down. At the Orphans’ Hospital, she descended into the basement and found Dr. Carreau mid-surgery on a child — inserting steel rods into the boy’s throat, with five other children in cages. Emma shot Carreau. In the chaos that followed, Augustus was killed by a botched first aid roll from Jacob, and Marina, driven into temporary insanity, shot Jacob dead — two allies killed by their own side in minutes. Georgiana took a cleaver to the shoulder.
The final assault on the Silkweavers’ Guild brought the ciimba again. They charged from the darkness beneath the old guild vaults, and this time Emma fled screaming. The second encounter crystallised into a permanent phobia of children — not a choice, but a fracture in something that would not heal. Marina died in the tunnels, detonating herself with lantern oil and gunpowder to destroy the Chakota. Savarin was killed by the veterans’ volley. The Fourviere ritual never happened. Four allies dead in a single chapter.
Emma carried two phobias out of France — theatre and children — and the knowledge that she had killed a man, watched friends die, and kept walking.
Session 1 — Arrival in Vienna
The party arrived at the Linienwall customs gate on the morning of August 3rd. Vienna declared itself in noise, colour, and complication — church bells, military bands, conversations in four languages. Emma secured four thousand gulden from a letter of credit and settled into the palatial suites at Palais Kinsky on Am Hof Square. That evening, Lady Ashworth invited her to her private box at the Burgtheater for Don Giovanni, and Emma accepted, stepping into the social world of the Congress with the ease of someone who had always been comfortable in a room full of strangers.
At the Naturhistorisches Institut, Dr. Falkner told them everything — the vanishing musicians, the sealed anatomical theatre, the Engine. The horror beneath Vienna had a shape now, and Emma heard it described for the first time in a locked room with the curtains drawn.
Session 2 — The Opera and the Dead Man
At the Burgtheater, Lady Ashworth identified the faces that mattered, and among them was Baron von Kaunitz — handsome, cold, and watching from across the theatre. He approached during the intermission, seeking an introduction to Emma. His charm was practised and precise, his interest in her unmistakable. Emma told him the party was staying at Palais Kinsky. It was an honest answer to a direct question, and it handed the Brotherhood of the Open Measure their first solid piece of intelligence about the investigators’ lodgings.
That same night, the Leopoldstadt expedition brought Brenner’s confession — the Engine described in full for the first time, a thirty-foot biomechanical instrument built from living tissue, voices cut from living throats. Emma lost a point of sanity hearing the details. The horror was no longer abstract.
Session 3 — Countess, Salon, and Surveillance
Emma’s honesty continued to serve her. At Countess von Thun’s townhouse, she gave a straight answer when tested — “we’re protecting someone” — and the Countess approved, granting a salon invitation. At the salon itself, Graf Maximilian von Sternberg arrived in full Hussar regalia and made directly for Emma. He took her hand, held it longer than etiquette permitted, and requested a waltz. Emma accepted. They danced in what onlookers described as perfect synchronisation, while Thomas watched with barely contained fury and Varrio had to intervene to prevent an incident. Sternberg returned Emma with a smirk aimed squarely at Thomas. The romantic rivalry that would haunt the Vienna chapter had declared itself.
Kaunitz reappeared that evening, offering to show Emma the Hofburg gardens and noting she was “collecting powerful friends very quickly for tourists.” A calling card with a pressed rose was delivered to Palais Kinsky — proof that Kaunitz had visited in person. Emma was now at the centre of two men’s attention, one a suitor and one a predator, and neither was simple to manage.
Session 4 — Roses, Wits, and Violation
The rivalry escalated. Sternberg sent elaborate red and white roses to Emma, and Thomas responded by drawing his pistol in the middle of the parlour — an act of possessive fury that Charlotte defused by throwing his gunpowder into the fountain. Kaunitz visited Palais Kinsky that afternoon and probed Emma directly, offering an introduction to Fraulein Lindqvist and recommending Beethoven’s Seventh with the weight of a threat.
At the Imperial Reception in the Hofburg’s Redoutensaal, Emma waltzed with Thomas — his grip possessive and tight — and then with Sternberg, the roses hanging between them like an accusation. When Beethoven’s Seventh played, the party heard the shape of the Engine beneath the music, and the beautiful became horrible. The evening ended with the discovery that their rooms had been professionally searched. Marina’s notebook was gone. The occult tomes were gone. And on Emma’s dressing table, a single fresh white rose had been placed without a card — Kaunitz’s signature. I was in your bedroom. The violation was intimate and deliberate, and it struck harder than any knife.
Session 5 — Blood on the Graben
Colonel Moreau was assassinated in broad daylight on the Graben — four assailants, no warning, a knife in the stomach. Varrio escaped wounded. Emma was not at the ambush site, but the absence of two chairs at dinner that evening carried its own weight. The campaign’s first permanent character death landed on the party like a stone.
Emma and Georgiana attended the public student recital at the Vienna Conservatory, where they found Anna near the refreshments — blonde, pretty, nervous. They helped fix her hair, settled her nerves, and befriended her with warmth that was entirely genuine. When Adler appeared and pulled Anna through a side door after her performance, Emma and Georgiana followed to his office. Adler’s charm evaporated in an instant. He half-drew a knife: “I’m afraid I must insist.” They left. Emma had now looked directly into the face of the man who controlled Anna’s fate, and he had shown her exactly what he was.
Session 6 — A Bite in the Dark
The Nightgaunt came at night, crawling down the side of Palais Kinsky face-first, frost crystallising on stone. It shattered Charlotte’s window with its barbed tail and slashed her before she could react. Emma fired her pistol — the bullet bounced off the oily hide. The creature grappled her and began dragging her toward the window, its wings folding around her in a cold, faceless embrace. Thomas grabbed her and hauled her free. And then Emma bit the creature’s neck.
She tore away a chunk of inky, oily flesh and spat it across the room. The Nightgaunt shrieked and dropped her. Adrien drove his sword through the thing and pinned it to the wall, where it dissolved into black goo. The moment was desperate, primal, and audacious — a seventeen-year-old gentlewoman from Wiltshire fighting a creature from beyond the stars with her teeth. It would define her for the rest of the campaign. Thomas maintained an armed vigil outside Emma’s room for the remainder of the night, and in the morning neither of them spoke of what had happened between them in those frantic seconds at the window.
Session 7 — Whispers, Widows, and Wounded Warriors
Katherine Ward arrived on Harcourt’s orders, and the party relocated from Palais Kinsky to the White Ox Inn under assumed names while Brotherhood watchers were shaken through the streets. That afternoon, Emma attended the musical salon at Countess von Thun’s townhouse, where Anna rose to sing and the room changed. Windows vibrated. A wine glass cracked. The bone-deep sensation of something vast and indifferent pressing against the membrane of the world filled every chest. Emma recognised the frequency — it was the Engine’s voice, inverted and complementary, as though Anna were the missing piece the machine had always required.
Afterward, Georgiana saw what Anna’s high collar concealed: dilated pupils unresponsive to light, deep bruising along her throat and jaw, persistent tremors in her hands. Adler materialised and steered Anna away before the conversation could deepen. Emma now understood, with the certainty of someone who had looked into Adler’s eyes at the Conservatory and felt the resonance in Anna’s voice, exactly what was at stake and how little time remained.
Session 8 — The Duel, the Diva, and the Demon
The Grand Masquerade was the evening where everything converged. Emma and Thomas cut across the dance floor toward the refreshments while the intelligence network of the entire campaign operated around them — Katherine mapping service corridors, Georgiana receiving Thurner’s operational packet during a waltz, Varrio charming Countess von Thun so thoroughly she cleared her dance card. Sternberg arrived drunk and demanded a dance from Emma, insulting Thomas’s station in the process. Varrio punched him in the face. Sternberg challenged Varrio to a duel; Thomas took it up with undisguised delight.
When Anna performed, the chandeliers vibrated, champagne rippled, a flute shattered. The party moved the moment the applause erupted. Emma and Georgiana coaxed Anna away from the marble with warmth and charm. Katherine threw her cape over the soprano and she vanished from sight. Adler struck his tuning fork and the stained-glass window exploded inward, sending blue, gold, and crimson shards across the ballroom as two Wachter dropped into the crowd. Emma was at the entrance to the servants’ corridor with Thomas, Anna, and Nell, a second Wachter blocking their only known escape route, when the session ended mid-combat.
Session 9 — The Burning Ball and the Broken Baron
The escape from the Palais Lobkowitz was chaos and fire. Emma smashed a chair through a ballroom window, opening a route onto the port-cochere roof. Thomas leapt through and caught Anna as she jumped too hard, ending up half-hanging off the edge with the singer dangling above the cobblestones. Varrio set a Wachter ablaze with a torch fashioned from a chair leg, a tablecloth, and leaking cognac. Georgiana hamstrung Adler with a single sword stroke, severing both Achilles tendons. Emma rushed forward to seize the command fork from the fallen Adler — and he drove his knife up under her arm.
The wound was deep and serious, sufficient to cross the Major Wound threshold. Nikolai and Sasha crashed into Adler and pummelled him into submission. The party extracted through broken windows and darkened gardens, piling into a carriage that drove hard for Thaliastraße 12 in the Josefstadt. Emma arrived wounded, carried into the parlour bedroom where Thomas refused to leave her side. The evening had cost her blood, but the fork was in the party’s hands, Anna was free, and Adler was bound in the cellar below.
Session 10 — The Fork in the Road
The Engine dreamed back at them that night. Emma stood at the Lainzer Knoll gates and watched Thomas fall — Sternberg’s shot through his chest, Adler kneeling to lift the still-beating heart into a humming brass resonance bowl, Thomas rising hollow-chested with his lips stitched shut in musical notation string, a Nightgaunt folding around her from behind. She woke gasping to find Thomas alive beside her.
Dr Voss stitched and bandaged the knife wound. Emma ignored the twenty-four-hour bed rest advice with polite scepticism. She had already survived a Nightgaunt’s embrace, a knife under the arm, and two years of horrors that would have broken anyone who had less reason to keep standing. The party met Prince Metternich at the Ballhausplatz, presented Adler as a gift, and received a writ of authority that sanctioned the University raid. Vogel was arrested. The occult books were recovered from the Polizeidirektion. Sternberg’s duel was rescheduled to dawn the next morning — pistols, Linienwallgasse — and Thomas must appear.
As the afternoon settled over Vienna, Emma Wentworth remained at Thaliastraße 12, wounded but ambulatory, carrying two phobias and a Major Wound and the knowledge that Caroline Hartley was inside the University where people were fed to a machine. Five days remained until the ritual. The girl from Tarryford who had never left Wiltshire was now a veteran of four chapters, two countries, and horrors that the polite world could not imagine, and she had not yet turned away from any of them.
Session 11 — The Duelling Ground
The Engine dreamed at her again that night. Thomas stood on the duelling ground and Sternberg’s shot punched through his chest. Adler knelt to lift the still-beating heart into a humming brass resonance bowl. Thomas rose hollow-chested with his lips stitched shut in musical notation string. A Nightgaunt folded around Emma from behind. She woke gasping to find Thomas alive beside her at Thaliastraße 12, and the dream left a residue that clung to her skin like frost.
She was resting at the safehouse under Thomas’s watch when Nikolai and Sasha arrived demanding to know what had become of Adler. The news that he had been handed to Prince Metternich landed hard. Later, Georgiana spotted Thomas and Varrio sneaking out in the pre-dawn dark and woke Emma, and Emma knew before anyone told her where they were going. She armed herself and followed. The knife wound under her arm that Dr Voss had stitched two days ago pulled with every step.
Dawn on the tenth came grey and damp outside the Linienwall gates. Two carriages, a surgeon laying out instruments on the running board without being asked, and the man Emma had been refusing to name standing at one end of twenty paces while the man who had pursued her across four sessions of Viennese society stood at the other. The pistols failed. Thomas missed. Sternberg’s flintlock misfired on a wet pan. Varrio crossed the field and talked both seconds into switching to sabres, and Thomas drove his blade into Sternberg’s armpit and chest in a decisive riposte that mirrored the exact wound Emma herself had suffered at the Lobkowitz. Sternberg went to his knees. The surgeon rushed in. His pursuit was over.
Emma pulled Thomas aside afterward. She told him, with a fury that barely concealed her relief, that if he ever did any of this stupid shit again she would shoot him herself, because she did not want to do any of this without him here. Thomas kissed her. She kissed him back. No declaration, no conversation. Just the grey light and the wet grass and his mouth on hers while the seconds looked away. Four sessions of tension, resolved in steel and silence. The girl from Tarryford who had bitten a Nightgaunt’s throat and taken a knife under the arm and carried two phobias through four chapters had found the person she was willing to stand beside.
Session 12 — The War Council
Emma found Georgiana upstairs clutching the tuning fork wrapped in fabric, and the protective fury that surfaced was older than the campaign and deeper than the supernatural. She told her sister to put it away. Not asked. Told. The same voice she had used when Georgiana stayed up too late reading by candlelight in Tarryford, the same instinct that had driven her to lean over a Nightgaunt and bite through its neck. The tuning fork was doing something to Georgiana. It came to her hand in the night, it vibrated when the Engine ran, and Emma could see the change in her sister’s eyes, a growing preoccupation with frequencies and Latin texts and counter-rituals that pulled her further from the woman Emma knew and closer to something Emma could not name.
The reconnaissance report, the mercenary negotiations, the Bauer interrogation, the forbidden texts study: Emma was present for all of it, absorbing the intelligence, watching the plan take shape. At the Heuriger Zum Rebstock, she sat at a table surrounded by Russian soldiers, Sardinian mercenaries, and a Viennese lawyer formalizing a contract for an assault on a university, and the absurdity of the situation competed with its gravity in a way that would have been funny if Caroline Hartley were not locked in a room at the end of a corridor with a machine that made grown men’s teeth ache. Thomas was beside her. The man she had kissed on a duelling ground two mornings ago, the man she had threatened to shoot if he ever did anything so reckless again. Then the Wächter came through the pergola, and Emma Wentworth, who had bitten through a creature’s neck in a nightgown at Palais Kinsky, was on her feet before the burning oil finished spreading.
Session 13 — The Assault
The Wächter at the Heuriger was dealt with in the chaos of fire and knife-throws and pistol shots, and Emma had dived under the table when it came through the pergola, which was the correct thing to do when you are carrying a Major Wound and a half-healed knife hole under your arm and someone else has a better angle on the creature’s eyes. Thomas helped her up after, with the matter-of-fact efficiency that had become its own form of tenderness — the man who had kissed her on a duelling ground two mornings ago now helped her off the flagstones with a steadying hand that lingered a half-second longer than strictly necessary, and Emma allowed it, because some things did not require conversation.
At the safe house, Thomas settled her on the parlor sofa with her feet in his lap and kept watch. It was the quietest hour of the evening, and it would be the last quiet hour for some time. Emma watched the room prepare itself for the assault — the weapons checked, the plans reviewed, the faces of people who understood they were about to go into a building that contained something that could reduce a grown man’s mind to fragments — and thought about the Drury Lane Theatre, about the walls that breathed and the performance that never ended, and what a woman who had survived that and survived a Nightgaunt and survived a knife wound under the arm was expected to feel about descending into a sealed anatomical theatre beneath a university. She felt it. She set it aside. She had been setting it aside since Wiltshire.
In the university’s south wing lobby, Emma said “Hi” to the student guards, and the simplicity of it was its own kind of audacity — a pleasant-faced young woman from Wiltshire addressing Austrian university guards with all the uncomplicated cheer of someone who had wandered in by accident and expected to wander back out — while Andrei and Nikolai moved around them through the shadow. The guards were looking at Emma. They did not look at the Russians. The distraction worked, and Emma knew it would work before she attempted it, because she had always understood that being underestimated in the right moment was a skill as reliable as any other.
Herzfeld’s office held the secret passage behind the bookcase, and it was Emma’s hands that found the mechanism, her weight that swung the panel open onto the dark beyond. She had not been looking for it. She had simply been looking at the room the way she always looked at rooms — with the particular attention of someone who had learned, at seventeen, in a theatre in London, that buildings concealed things, and that the things they concealed were worse than what was visible. The shelf moved. The passage descended. And Emma Wentworth, who feared theatres, who had feared them since Drury Lane and feared them again in Vienna, went in first, because someone had to, and the Major Wound was only a wound, and the theatre below was only a theatre, and she had never yet let the thing she feared most stop her from walking toward it.
Session 14 — The Theatre
The theatre was a theatre. That was the worst of it. The tiered seating, the central stage, the performance space designed so that every eye converged on the thing being done at the centre — the architecture was identical to Drury Lane, to every theatre Emma had feared and been fascinated by since December 1813, except that the audience was the Chorus Dead with their throats flayed open and the performance was the Engine cycling air through human lungs to produce a sound that was not music and not silence but something between the two that pressed against the membrane of the world until the world began to give. Emma looked at it and the theatre phobia and the theatre obsession collapsed into each other like two waves meeting, and what remained was a mania. The music. She could hear the music in the machine, the harmonic structure beneath the horror, and it was beautiful in the way that a fire is beautiful when it is consuming the house you grew up in — undeniable and catastrophic and impossible to look away from.
The temporary insanity settled over her like a veil, and through it the theatre resolved itself not as a horror but as a problem of acoustics. The Engine’s resonance was being sustained by something beyond its own mechanism — amplified, directed, shaped by the wooden and stone baffles that lined the theatre’s upper tier like the reflectors behind stage lanterns. Emma saw them because she had spent her life looking at theatres, because the girl from Tarryford who had been terrified of stages had also spent every spare hour studying their construction, their sight lines, their acoustics. The obsession that had grown from the same root as the phobia delivered its dividend in the worst room she had ever stood in. She pointed at the baffles and shouted for Thomas and Freddy to bring them down.
They did. Thomas threw his weight against the nearest panel and it crashed to the theatre floor. Freddy pushed a second. Each baffle that fell punched a hole in the Engine’s harmonic envelope, and Emma directed the demolition with the focused clarity of someone who understood exactly what she was hearing even as the mania made her want to hear more of it. The music was dying. Each panel that fell took a voice with it, and the Chorus Dead staggered and faltered, and Georgiana’s counter-ritual drove through the gaps like water through cracking stone. The Engine shattered. The music stopped. And Emma stood in the silence that followed with the knife wound still pulling under her arm and the mania draining out of her like water from a cracked vessel, leaving behind an exhaustion so profound it was almost peaceful.
In the courtyard above, the dawn light fell on a party that had survived something none of them would be able to describe to anyone who had not been there. Emma leaned against Thomas and let the weight of his arm settle around her shoulders. Georgiana stood apart, a white streak in her hair that had not been there an hour ago, her left hand catching the light in ways that skin should not. Emma had watched her sister descend into the passage carrying the fork and the cost of using it, and had followed her down because that was what she had always done — followed Georgiana into the dark and refused to let the dark keep either of them. The girl from Tarryford who feared theatres had walked into the worst theatre in the world and read its architecture well enough to help destroy it. The music mania would fade. The Major Wound would heal. The knowledge that she had stood inside a machine made of human bodies and found its weakness by understanding its beauty — that knowledge would not fade, and Emma carried it into the morning with the particular steadiness of someone who has always known that the things she feared and the things she loved were the same thing wearing different faces.
Session 3 — Give Rest
She had known, going into the second night, what the melody meant. The shape of it had arrived at the end of the last watch and had not left her: what The Drowned were pressing through the keel in the dark was what Stavros had been humming since the first morning out of Trieste, and Emma had carried that knowledge through a full day of fair faces and managed calm and the business of keeping seventeen sailors from murdering someone else before nightfall. When dusk came, she took her place on the quarterdeck and opened her mouth, and the song was already there, waiting for her.
Katherine went first — at the sight of the hands on the rail, she broke and fled, and Emma heard it from far away. She was in the music by then. She had entered it the way she entered every room she cared about, which was to say completely, without leaving herself a way back, and the song was structured and true and its intervals were right in the way that intervals in the best music are right, and the dead climbing the sides of La Speranza were information that arrived and went nowhere, like sound behind glass. She sang with everything she had. She sang with her whole attention and none of her intent, and the rite wanted intent, and Georgiana was beside her with her voice cracking against the weight of it — alone, since Emma was not there to share it — and Emma heard that too, and did not reach across the distance, because the distance was the music, and the music was her, and she was not going anywhere. The dead stopped. Georgiana’s voice, wavering and whole and sufficient, brought them to stillness. The last words of the rite left her lips and the corpses turned and descended, and the first gust of wind in three days swept the quarterdeck. Emma kept singing for a moment after it was over. The rite had not passed through her. Georgiana had carried it alone, as she always seemed to carry the things they were supposed to carry together.
Four days of fair sailing followed, and La Speranza delivered them to Alexandria on the morning of September ninth — brown and pale and ancient above a harbour thick with refuse and noise, a smell of dust and animal and cooking fat that was nothing like Europe. The knife wound under Emma’s arm reminded her with every step on the gangplank that it was still there and still unhealed, which was a fact she had been setting aside since Vienna and would need to stop setting aside. At the Locanda del Leone that evening, she sat at dinner while Georgiana passed the lamb and olives and kept her gloves on, and it was not until the candlelight caught the iridescent mark creeping past the edge of the fabric at Georgiana’s wrist that Emma moved — a napkin over the hand before anyone could speak. Across the table, Rosa said nothing, which was its own kind of speech. Thomas was somewhere in the city with Freddy and Nathaniel, and when he came back he was smelling of something fierce and sweet that turned out to be Arak, and he avoided her eye in the particular way that meant he had either done something foolish or something he was not ready to name, and Emma was too tired and the wound was too present and Alexandria was too loud outside the shutters to press it. It was a night for letting things sit. They were good at that, the two of them. Not everything needed to be said before it was ready.
Chapter 4, Session 1 — The Morning After
The phantom music found Emma in the dining room of Palais Kinsky at dawn. She had been waltzing. She did not remember starting, only that the rhythm was there, insistent and irresistible, pulling her through the steps with the authority of a partner who would not be refused. Her wound had reopened, soaking the side of her dress, and she was humming a melody that no one else could hear, and the hotel guests were staring, and Thomas was trailing after her, begging her to sit down. When gentle persuasion failed, he threw money at the string duet until they stopped, then sat beside her and sang. Army drinking songs. “Bestiality’s best, boys! (Shag a Wallaby),” delivered with surprising resonance and depth, until the phantom music lost its grip and Emma agreed to rest. The mania had surfaced for the first time in daylight. The music from the theatre was still in her, lodged somewhere between the obsession and the phobia, and it came out in waltz time when her defences were down.
The doctor restitched her wound without anesthetic while Thomas held her hand and his voice climbed a register every time she squeezed. A mysterious letter bearing a familiar seal arrived, and Emma read it privately and said nothing about its contents when Thomas asked. Sternberg’s apology, or his farewell, or whatever it was. She folded it away. That evening, Thomas slipped out of a fabric shop with a bag stuffed under his jacket and would not meet her eyes, and in Trieste, bright red as his jacket, he presented her with a Kashmiri wool shawl and explained that it might be cold on the ship since she had been hurt, and that was the entirety of his speech. Emma took the shawl. The girl from Tarryford who had bitten a Nightgaunt’s throat and identified acoustic baffles in the worst theatre in the world accepted a gift from a man who could not say what it meant, and whatever it meant she held it.
Six days of mountain roads, then the Adriatic, then La Speranza. At dawn, the hawsers came off the bollards, and the harbour mouth passed on both sides, and then there was only open water stretching ahead, flat and blue and empty. Emma leaned against the railing with Thomas’s shawl over her shoulders and the knife wound pulling beneath it and the music still somewhere inside her, waiting. Six weeks to Calcutta. The mania would come and go. The wound would heal or it would not, and there was no surgeon aboard worth the name. The girl who had never left Wiltshire in 1813 was now watching Europe disappear behind her, carrying two phobias and a Major Wound and a shawl she could not quite name the significance of, heading toward a country none of them had ever seen. The phantom music was patient. It would wait.
Chapter 4, Session 2 — The Becalming
The galley of La Speranza smelled of salt and rancid oil and the particular funk of men who had been at sea long enough to forget what they smelled like to anyone who had not, and Stavros ruled it with the proprietary confidence of a man who considered his kitchen a sovereign territory. Emma went down with Georgiana to win him over, which was the sort of project Emma had always excelled at — a direct approach, a warm smile, and a willingness to make herself useful — and she was making good progress when Stavros began to hum. It was a short thing, cyclical, repetitive in the way that tides are repetitive, each return slightly displaced from the last, and Emma felt her head begin to nod before she was aware it was happening. The humming filled the galley and the galley filled her, and the rhythm found the music mania the way a key finds a lock, and her eyes went glassy and the world contracted to the interval between one beat and the next. Georgiana caught it — she always caught it — and put a hand on Emma’s arm and said her name, and the galley came back: the smell, the oil, the pots, Stavros watching them with cautious curiosity. Emma blinked. She redirected her attention with the speed of someone who had learned to treat the mania as a weather condition, unpredictable but survivable. By the time Katherine joined them, Stavros had been charmed into surrendering the cook-fire, and the three of them made a proper dinner from the party’s own stores, which was the first decent meal La Speranza had produced since Trieste, and everyone ate it with the gratitude of people who had not realized how hungry they were.
On the fourth day she tried walking the deck. The impulse was reasonable — fresh air, sun, the satisfaction of movement after days of the cramped, tilting misery of the cabin — and it was only in retrospect that she understood what she had done. The sailors lost their grip on ropes. Attention drifted from tackle and line to the figure making her way along the rail with a Kashmiri shawl over her shoulders and the particular uncomplicated ease of someone who had not yet been informed she was a navigational hazard, and a dropped line swung and flung a man the full width of the deck before anyone could do anything about it. Captain Zanier arrived with his expression held very carefully in place and explained, with the courtesy of a man who wished to be polite to the paying passengers while also preserving his crew, that perhaps she might find another pastime. Emma allowed that he had a point but proposed an alternative: if walking was disruptive, what about the wheel? She had always wanted to try. Zanier studied her with the look of someone already regretting the next five minutes of his life and agreed, reasoning that the wheel was on the forecastle and the forecastle was away from the rigging. He did not account for the particular combination of Emma Wentworth, a spoke under tension, and the slight miscalibration of force that came from a young woman who had survived a Nightgaunt and a knife wound but had never handled a ship’s wheel. The spoke came away in her hands. She stood holding it. Zanier stood holding the rest of the wheel. For a moment neither of them said anything. Then Emma went below to fetch the carpenter Ivo, at Zanier’s increasingly pointed request, and left the captain on the forecastle with his expression doing something complicated.
The cabin boy’s name was Luka, and he was sixteen years old and had never been to England, and he wanted to know everything about it — the green hills, the grey weather, the improbable density of hedgerows, whether the countryside truly looked the way it did in the novels he had managed to read in translation. Emma sat with him on the coil of rope that served as the unofficial social territory of anyone below officer grade and told him about Wiltshire, and about Tarryford, and about the hills above the house that went green in March and stayed green until the frosts came, and Thomas joined in with tales of military encampments and horses and the particular miseries of a campaign in winter, and Luka listened to both of them with the focused hunger of someone who had decided to memorize everything he heard. Later, one of the older sailors — Nikos, who had a gift for the form and a voice that carried the full weight of Mediterranean superstition — told stories of the sea roads, the deep places, the things that watched from below glassy water. Emma sat with Georgiana and listened, and what she heard was the same story she had heard in Lyon and London and Vienna wearing different clothes: a dark thing at the boundary of the known world, a sound that carried warning, a ritual that men performed with salt and fire and prayer to hold it back, and whether the men were Greek sailors or English parsons or Viennese scholars the essential architecture was identical. Every sailing culture had built the same fence and was keeping the same thing out of their field. The thought settled into Emma with the particular weight of things that one already suspected and did not want confirmed.
On the twelfth day out of Trieste, La Speranza stopped. No storm, no contrary wind — the air simply went out of the sails as though the sea had exhaled and forgotten to breathe back in. The water around them was the wrong colour: flat, luminous green, too bright, not quite natural, the light sitting on it rather than in it. The crew went quiet in the way that seasoned sailors go quiet when something is wrong that they do not have a name for. Then the sound began. It came up through the timbers, through the planking, through the soles of Emma’s shoes — a low moaning that had no obvious source, that seemed to originate in the water itself, resonant and rhythmic and wrong in the way that the Engine had been wrong, in the way that Anna’s voice at Countess von Thun’s salon had been wrong: wrong with the specific wrongness of something constructed rather than occurring. And the music mania — the thing Stavros’s humming had stirred in the galley, the thing the Engine had lodged in her somewhere between the obsession and the phobia, the thing that had surfaced in a Vienna dining room and pulled her through a waltz before Thomas had thought to stop the musicians — the mania rose to meet it. The moaning resolved, inside her before outside her, into something structured: a pattern, a pitch sequence, a phrase that repeated and developed and spoke. Emma heard the meaning of it before she could have explained how she heard the meaning of it, in the same way she had heard the acoustic logic of the anatomical theatre before she could have described the physics. What The Drowned were saying, pressing up through twelve days of water beneath the keel, was note for note, interval for interval, the exact melody Stavros had been humming since the morning they first came down to the galley to win him over. Every morning since Trieste. Since the first day at sea. The blood left her face before she had finished understanding it.
Chapter 4, Session 4 — The Road to Cairo
In the covered lanes of the Alexandria souk, Emma found the bolt of peacock shot silk before she had gone twenty feet — turquoise warp, gold weft, a fabric that answered movement the way water answers wind — and commissioned a dress from it overnight (Emma Egyptian Dress), the sort of extravagance that would once have scandalised the household at Tarryford and now registered as nothing more than a pleasant decision among a dozen others. She bought herself a blue faience scarab, older than Alexander by the seller’s account, and wore it at her throat before the ink was dry on the bill of sale (Blue Faience Scarab Pin). She bought Thomas a St. George in hammered Coptic silver, the saint’s spear driven eternally into the dragon’s neck (Silver St George Necklace), and carried it through the rest of the day’s business like a small, deliberate secret.
She gave it to him that first night in Rashid, on the wooden deck that ran out over the river from the brick house where they lodged, the current moving black and quiet below and no particular ceremony to the moment beyond the two of them and the necklace passing from her hand to his. Thomas turned it over for longer than the object required, his fingers gone suddenly clumsy around something so small, and told her — quietly, without any of his usual bluster — that he had had men behind him his whole career, and men beside him, but never before anything over him, and that he would not take it off. Emma had given him something to wear against a knife he had already put himself in the way of once, on a duelling ground with her name in his mouth, and he had understood the gift for exactly what it was: not decoration but permission, or perhaps obligation. She was allowed to worry about him now, formally, with an object to prove it, and she rather thought he had needed that translated into a form he could hold in his hand.
The necklace joined the scarab as small, matched declarations that they intended to keep watching over each other, and the wound under Emma’s arm — the one Adler had put there at the Palais Lobkowitz, the one that had wept through waltzes and reopened in dining rooms and pulled at her with every step down a gangplank in Alexandria — had, somewhere between Trieste and Rashid, simply begun to close on its own terms, without a surgeon’s needle or a doctor’s insistence, the ordinary slow arithmetic of a young body doing what young bodies do given enough weeks of relative safety. She noticed it the way one notices a headache has gone: not at the moment it happened but sometime afterward, in retrospect, finding the ache absent where she had expected to find it.
The Nile did what Vienna had done, in miniature and without menace. When the wind dropped at midday and the rowers took up their oars, one man called the stroke and the rest answered on the pull — four notes, rising and falling, struck against the hull and carried flat across brown water — and Emma found the rhythm had climbed inside her before she noticed it arriving, the way the phantom music always arrived, without asking permission first. She caught herself humming the chant long after the wind returned and the oars shipped, the melody looping in her without malice, without the dimensional wrongness of the theatre beneath Vienna behind it — only a river work-song that had found a mind already primed to receive rhythm as something closer to command than to pleasure. She let herself have it. There was no harm in this one, or none she could find, and the girl who had bitten a Nightgaunt’s throat and identified acoustic baffles in the worst room in Europe had learned, by now, to tell the difference between a tune that wanted something from her and a tune that simply liked the shape of her attention.