He drew no closer, unsure if she might yet change her mind and flee. Instead, she approached him with single-minded purpose, hesitating as she came nearer. She might be frightened, but it didn’t stop her from seeking him out. He’d almost smiled. She was still as firm-minded as he remembered.
When she spoke, the cane on which he leaned nearly snapped beneath his tightening fingers. He might not have forgotten her stubbornness, but the cadence of her voice had dimmed in his memory. Soft and sure, it caressed him as surely as if she reached out and stroked him with her hand, bringing back breathless recollections of a lost time. When she raised her veil to better see him, he’d almost dropped to his knees.
Some would say Lenore Kenward was an unremarkable miss of strong intellect and banal looks—the perfect recipe for a blue-stocking spinster. Her brown eyes, dark hair and regular features didn’t conform to fashion’s definition of great beauty. Yet Nathaniel had been struck dumb at first sight of her in her father’s workshop almost a decade earlier, his bewitchment complete as he came to know her mind and character.
Even now, when no one would call him a man any longer, he remained ensorcelled, entranced, and deeply in love with a woman who once rejected his proposal and now thought him dead.
“Do I know you?”
She’d rammed the knife home and twisted it for good measure with the simple question. Nathaniel thought himself no longer capable of emotions beyond the blunt satisfaction in killing resurrectionists or the equally dull grief in his existence. He’d been wrong. Those four words kindled a living fire in the empty places where his soul and heart once resided—a fire of anger and regret.
“I was your friend and your lover,” he wanted to say. “I would have been your husband had you not rejected me.” Instead he uttered none of these things, answering her with a question of his own. Even if she’d truly known him, the Nathaniel of five years ago no longer existed. Only his spirit remained, still bound to earth by unnatural means in an unnatural form.
He almost stopped her from pulling down the veil that hid her eyes and soft mouth—a mouth he’d kissed and tasted many times. He didn’t stop her from leaving. Lenore didn’t belong here with the dead and their keeper.
The undertaker and sextons lingered at the cemetery gates, hesitant to venture any closer but unwilling to leave an open grave uncovered. Nathaniel melted back into the concealing fog, a phantom among other phantoms. Another half hour passed before the second party returned to the grave. Unlike their work on Arthur Kenward’s grave, they carelessly shoveled dirt onto this casket until a loose mound formed. All three looked over their shoulders every other minute until Nathaniel thought they resembled confused pigeons. They would never see him unless he chose to reveal himself a second time, and it amused him to watch their antics.
He was not so amused when they tossed the last shovel of dirt onto the mound, packed their supplies and left Highgate. Neither bricked nor warded with the simplest protection spell, the grave was ripe picking for the body snatchers. Either the family didn’t care enough for their deceased to pay for the additional protections, or the undertaker had pocketed the extra coins for his personal use.
“I shall have visitors tonight,” Nathaniel whispered to himself. “Regrettably, there is no tea.”
Afternoon faded to twilight and then to evening in Highgate, casting crypts and headstones into the silhouettes of a macabre cityscape. London glowed from the contained fire of gas lamps, and Nathaniel watched the HMA Pollux sail the path of her nightly run. She was once his home, her crew his family. Now both were as far out of his reach as the star for which she was named.
Tonight the airship hovered low over the cemetery, her propellers humming a mechanical dirge as steam and aether pumped from her engines. He’d wondered if she might make an appearance tonight to bid farewell to the man who had made her the most formidable dirigible in the fleet.
A cascade of white flowers spilled from the open windows of the control and wing gondolas. They floated to earth, a snow drift of petals and stems settling on Kenward’s grave and the neighboring headstones. A series of flashes from a beacon light—two, two, two and two—and the ship sailed on, rising higher to ride the celestial currents.
Nathaniel beckoned with two fingers, and flower petals near his feet rose from the ground, spiraling into an ivory ribbon that twined around his arm before settling in his palm in a mound of fragrant slips. He held them to his nose and breathed. Rose and lilac, lily and violet. These were from Lenore’s garden. Only the Kenward women grew such lush flowers in the heart of winter.
The screech of metal from the oldest part of the cemetery shattered the quiet. Nathaniel didn’t move, his eyes closed as he savored the heady perfume of white roses and listened to the spectral voices of warning that rose around him.
“They are here. They are here.”
The wrenching iron sound was as familiar to him as birdsong--rails bent to create a gap in the fence enclosing the graveyard. His visitors had finally made their appearance.
Resurrectionists usually traveled in packs of no less than four, and tonight there were a half dozen. The Guardian followed them as they fanned out among the headstones, scuttling over markers, kicking aside carefully laid bouquets and charms. Considering the noise they made and the haphazard destruction they left behind, Nathaniel wondered why they bothered to stay hidden behind crypts and trees.
Emboldened by the lack of guards or a confrontational caretaker, the men’s voices rose from furtive whispers to casual conversation. One pointed to the spot where Lenore’s father rested and the unprotected grave nearby.
“’ere, lads. We got a naked one and one in stays. Easy enough work tonight with two on the dirt and four on the bricks.”
Another chimed in. “The doctor’ll be ‘appy. Two blokes should keep him busy for a fortnight or so.”
“May I suggest a good book instead?”
Nathaniel smirked at the startled shouts and curses that followed his remark. Moonlight glinted on steel, and he neatly dodged the thrown dagger that whistled past his ear and struck the oak behind him with a hard thunk.
“You missed.” He casually circled their little group as they tightened into a defensive cluster.
They’d dressed for an evening of thieving, tool belts slung across their hips, picks on their backs. One man bared yellow, broken teeth at Nathaniel and raised his arm. He clutched one of the new mercurial disrupters for sale on the black market. He aimed it at Nathaniel’s heart, and his cracked grin promised murder.
“We’ll make it three blokes then, mate. I’ll bet Doc Tepes would pay ‘andsomely for a bonekeeper seein’ as ‘ow you’re muckin’ up ‘is business these days.”