The Viscount Who Loved Me
The Viscount Who Loved Me
In May 1814 the investigators came to Bath for a wedding. Marina and Charlotte Thorne — the latter newly joined, Juel’s character after Jane’s death at Drury Lane — had both been asked to stand as bridesmaids to Harriet Palmer, and Marina’s brother Robert Garrick was among the groomsmen; Emma and Georgiana attended with them, and Gus came as the Order’s quiet presence. On a bright Tuesday, Harriet Palmer became Viscountess Huntley in a lavish ceremony at Bath Abbey. It was there that Charlotte — an archaeologist who published her work under the discreet fiction that a man had written it — was cornered by an overenthusiastic middle-aged admirer who recognised her as its true author, quite undoing the anonymity she had gone to some trouble to preserve.
The marriage did not survive the night. In the small hours after the wedding, Viscount Huntley died in the honeymoon suite, leaving behind only his shrivelled heart in a pool of green ichor — the working of a curse that had waited for the wedding to close its hand. Worse followed in the daylight: the valet who took up the Viscount’s body and effects, meaning to entomb the heart in the family crypt, was intercepted and murdered by a man named Francis Fable, who stole the heart away and hid it in a Bath church. Fable had his own design — he had found the bones of a Siren beneath the city and meant, at the coming new moon, to bind the entity to his will.
Into this the investigators were drawn by Harriet’s desperate appeals for help. One of the night’s more colourful gambits sent Emma and Georgiana to the York House Tavern to find the surviving groomsmen — Robert Garrick, the wounded Lieutenant Oliver Hawksley, and Sir Lionel Peregrine — and to press Marina’s brother Robert into pretending to be the groom, so that a scrutinised, grieving Harriet could slip free of the house. The request landed in the taproom like a dropped tankard: “We need you to pretend to be the groom.”
Searching the Huntley house for the truth of the curse, they turned up deep scratch marks and a concealed sheet of paper behind a desk, and, in a book of local legend, a picture of the Siren — the shape of the thing that had waited beneath Bath. Marina managed to fall clean out of a window while examining the scratches. Somewhere in these days they met Francis Fable in a bar, where Gus questioned him closely; by the end of the conversation Fable had persuaded them he meant to work a ritual to stop the Siren, and they agreed to go with him to the church.
Their inquiries also took them beneath the river, to the cave where the Siren’s bones lay. It was there, diving in that black subterranean water, that two things happened at once: Georgiana acquired the second of her lasting phobias — a deep, permanent revulsion toward fish that has never left her — and Marina’s nerve broke entirely. In the grip of terror she became convinced Augustus was attacking her, and stabbed him badly before anyone could stop her. Gus survived the wound; he would not fall until Lyon.
The truth came apart in the church. As the ritual proceeded and the Siren’s statue began to stir, the party understood — too late — that Fable had lied to them: he was not banishing the Siren but summoning it. The rest is hazier in the telling, a scramble of POW rolls as the waking thing pressed on their minds, and then a turn to violence as they moved to stop Fable before he could finish. It got bloody. But they prevailed — Fable was stopped, the rite broken, and the Siren left unbound beneath Bath.
Through all of it ran the lighter thread of Lieutenant Oliver Hawksley — red-haired, wounded, melancholic, and pointedly Scottish — among the wedding guests, with whom Georgiana found herself in conversation with a warmth she had not expected. Afterward the party recovered from Bath and turned toward London, where the Order’s next assignment — the Orphean Society, and the first real sight of the Aeternum Choir — was waiting for them.