Chapter Two

“So it’s true. Clara, I can’t believe it! I didn’t think you’d really go through with this.”

The whisper came from the direction of the workroom door and spun Clara where she stood. Georgina Jackson’s horrified face peeked around the door, her dark eyes wide as those of a child on Christmas morning.

Clara relaxed just a hair. “Come in and shut the door. Where are the children?”

“In their beds. At least that’s where they’re supposed to be. You know what they are.”

The “children” consisted of a parcel of ragamuffin street urchins that had come to Clara by one route or another and now lived under her protection. The first had arrived when Clara’s father was still alive. The child was a bootblack from the same abusive household where Georgina had once served—hell on earth, Georgina always called it, the household of a Justice, no less.

“I wouldn’t leave a diseased rat to suffer there,” Georgina had declared when she found Jimmie weeping on a street corner with livid weals across his cheek.

Clara’s father had agreed. The others had come piecemeal, and all with that kind man’s approval. Anson Allen had been, above all else, a kind man. But now his protection had ended, and only Clara’s ingenuity, determination, and talent stood between the children and ruin.

That didn’t mean she wanted any of her charges to see what went on in this room.

Georgina tiptoed to her side. Clara, herself not a tall woman, always felt a giantess beside her diminutive friend. Deprivation in youth would do that to a person.

“Sweet merciful Jesus,” Georgina exclaimed. “Ruella told me on her way out she’d brought you what you’d been seeking, but—he’s a big one, ain’t he?”

“He is that.”

“Where’d she get him?”

“Off a makeshift gallows, fresh. No putrification yet.”

“Who is he?”

Clara shrugged. The man came with no name, and once she resurrected him he wouldn’t remember who he’d been—at least, that had been her experience with animals. Even Mollie hadn’t known her but had learned her affection all over again. Of course it might be different with a human.

“So dangerous,” Georgina whispered. “Sure you can handle it? What if he’s angry when he—er—wakes up?”

“He should be a clean slate, only knowing what I tell him.”

“I’m not sure about this, Clara. Maybe you should have Ruella cart him to the graveyard now, while it’s still dark out.”

“And then what? I need a husband at once, if I am to meet the terms of my grandfather’s endowment and keep a roof over all our heads.”

She referred to Randolph Van Hamelin, not her father’s sire but her mother’s. The old man, still alive at ninety-nine, held the strings of the only purse in Clara’s family that contained any money. Even this grand house—lately fallen to far less than grand—had come via Clara’s mother, as well as any monies to maintain it.

Randolph Van Hamelin had not approved of his daughter’s determination to marry the young doctor Anson Allen. Even though she was his fourth daughter of seven and well down on his list of potentially advantageous matches, he had his sights set higher than a struggling physician who had clawed his way up from the gutter, as Grandfather put it. But Clara’s mother, Penelope, had been a forceful young woman, not unlike Clara herself. And when she came up carrying Anson’s child, she got her way. The scandal had been legendary, at the time.

That child had not survived infancy, nor had the next two who came along. A punishment for disobedience, so Randolph declared. Clara alone had thrived, and that only because her mother had brought her back to life on the birthing couch, having discovered her own talent in her refusal to lose another child.

So Clara had in essence died and come back again.

I know how you’ll feel, she silently told the man now lying before her. Of course, an infant had little to forget, so it hadn’t mattered much. And of course, being but a toddler four years later, she hadn’t been able to return the favor when her mother died of a seizure in her father’s arms.

Father had always blamed himself. “What sort of doctor am I,” he asked more than once, “who couldn’t save the woman he loved?”

From that day sixteen years ago, Grandfather Van Hamelin had done his best to drive his son-in-law from the house and into ruin. Under the terms of the entailment, however, any child of Penelope’s was entitled to live here until the age of twenty-one. After that, in order to hold the property she must be wed.

And Clara would turn twenty-one in less than a week, which meant if she didn’t want those who were dependent on her tossed out on their ears, she must conform with the edict as soon as possible.

So why not just find a proper husband—one still breathing? Someone off the street, perhaps, a dockworker or a ruffian who would provide her the pleasure of shocking her grandfather’s sensibilities? The answer was that Clara had no wish to answer to such a man, or any man. This fellow would know—would be—only what she told him, her own creation.

“If you wish to stay and help me,” she told Georgina softly, “then stay. If you don’t, then leave now. I’m ready to begin.”

Georgina gave her a searching look. “I’ll stay. But what if it goes badly?”

“It won’t.”

“Are you sure he’s strapped down well enough?”

“Yes. Ruella did that job before she left. Flip on the steam generator for me, will you?”

The room needed to be warm—she had learned that during past experiments. It helped if the subject awakened in an environment that was moist and heated, akin to the womb. And the breath of life was more easily received by warmed flesh.

Georgina walked to the corner and switched on the generator, which came awake with a rumble as the boiler lit. Immediately the familiar clatter started, the gurgle as water began drawing through the system. Once it got going, the system thudded like a heartbeat. Appropriate somehow—that would be the first thing her subject heard when he awoke. If he awoke.

Still obviously uneasy, Georgina rejoined Clara at the table. “You know you’re going to have to touch him.”

“I’ve already touched him. Ruella and I stripped and washed him down.”

“You’re going to have to kiss him.”

“It isn’t a kiss. It’s a resurrection.”

“You’re mad, Miss Clara. Stark raving.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Wasn’t it why she could allow no one—other than these lost waifs and misfits who already surrounded her—into her life? How could she expect an ordinary, sane man to accept the woman she was? Either she created her own husband, or she took none at all.

The room had warmed quickly. Now clouds of steam billowed and surrounded the table, lending an unreality to this thing she undertook. It blurred the edges of her vision and her reason.

Did she do the right thing?

She did the only possible thing.

She rested her fingertips lightly against the corpse’s chest and closed her eyes. He no longer felt cold, but he did feel quite dead. She’d learned the difference over these many months. Against all the distractions she quieted her mind and reached for the power within.

It slept much the way the man’s flesh did, resting in oblivion. Like a separate entity within her, it mellowed and simmered until she called upon it, when it flared to life, bringing life.

She whispered a prayer now in her mind, none learned in any church but one that seemed to have passed down with the power itself—for protection, for rightness, for the one she sought to raise. She did not know him but she would, in the most intimate way possible.

She let the power grow and flare and burgeon inside her because she would need a great quantity of it, more than ever before. When it threatened to overspill her like hot water in a steaming kettle, she opened her eyes.

Everything looked different. The room had disappeared behind the billows of steam, and the light took on a golden hue. She could sense but not see Georgina beside her. Golden radiance seeped through the tips of her fingers, which still rested against the man’s chest.

She felt full; she felt ready. She drew a deep breath—deep, deep, deeper than ever before—leaned down, and placed her mouth upon that of the corpse.

His lips, like the rest of him, no longer felt cold. His mouth lay open slightly, but she sensed nothing in him—no breath, no life. Yet her lips seemed to fuse to his and warm them further; a curious thing.

In the past she had breathed life into the mouths of lambs, cats, dogs—even chickens. Never, never a fellow human. Instantly she knew this felt different, but the life force filled her now, rampant and overwhelming. She could do nothing but breathe it into him.

She exhaled, an impossibly long breath that flowed over his tongue, down his throat, and into his lungs. She continued breathing—not air now but life itself—her eyes pressed tight shut so she couldn’t see.

His lips twitched beneath hers, just the faintest movement, and her heart leaped painfully. By God—or by Satan—it was working!

At this point she usually stopped and let the subject regain itself. Yet this time the life just kept flowing out of her until she wondered if she might not lose herself, pour all of what she was into him through this portal where their mouths fused. She felt his lips move more strongly beneath hers and the resurrection, unexpectedly, turned into a kiss.

She had already flowed her power into him. Now she thrust her tongue into his mouth as well, searching for something in him, some response or essence that should not exist. Her saliva passed into his mouth, and he twitched violently on the table as he tasted her.

And still Clara could not end the kiss. Helpless now and held fast, she stroked his tongue with hers and he answered, responding with a vigor that shook her to her toes. His tongue parried hers, danced, and then thrust into her mouth in turn, where he tasted her, searched her, drank deeply once more.

At that moment, conviction blossomed in Clara’s mind: she was not sure who he was, even what he was, but he was hers.