Dead Handsome Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Praise for Laura Strickland

  Dead Handsome

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  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.

  Praise for Laura Strickland

  “The world building is phenomenal.”

  ~Daysie W. at My Book Addiction and More

  ~*~

  “Laura Strickland creates a world that not only draws you in, but she incorporates it…seamlessly. …the kind of book that keeps you awake well into the wee hours, and sighing with satisfaction when you've finished the very last page.”

  ~Nicole McCaffrey, author

  ~*~

  “As I read I became so involved with the story, I found it difficult to put down the book. …Definitely …an author to watch.”

  ~Dandelion at Long & Short Reviews

  Dead Handsome

  by

  Laura Strickland

  A Buffalo Steampunk Adventure

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Dead Handsome

  COPYRIGHT © 2015 by Laura Strickland

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Diana Carlile

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Fantasy Rose Edition, 2015

  Print ISBN 978-1-62830-764-1

  Digital ISBN 978-1-62830-765-8

  A Buffalo Steampunk Adventure

  Published in the United States of America

  Chapter One

  Buffalo, New York, the Niagara Frontier

  November 1880

  “He’s dead fresh,” Ruella said, and slung the man’s corpse onto Clara’s worktable. “Cut down from the gallows not an hour ago. That’s what you said you wanted, innit, miss? One that was fresh, fit, and in good health when he died?”

  In theory, it was. However, Clara Marian Allen, faced suddenly with the concrete evidence of her request in the form of a strapping and soaking-wet dead man, discovered theory did not always correlate completely with reality.

  “Why is he so wet?”

  “Raining outside, innit?” Ruella had been in Buffalo for almost ten years, but her speech retained the flavor of her birthplace, London’s East End—just one of her colorful attributes. She growled, “I had to get him ’ere in a barrow through the streets. Covered him up like a load of manure in case someone saw me, but nobody did.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Sure as pudding after Sunday dinner.”

  Clara strove to pull her gaze from the dead man sprawled on the table, and failed. He looked so large. A hulking fellow he must have been in life, and alive was how he still looked: sleeping, perhaps, or drunk and unconscious. She thought of the dark maze of streets and alleys between her house on Virginia Street and the county jail at the foot of Delaware, from whence Ruella had dragged her prize, and drew a hard breath. By God, what had she started?

  “And you say nobody knows he’s dead?”

  “Only those what murdered him—those at the jail—and few enough they let in on their crimes. This is the third one since August. Dragged him out into the jail yard and forced him up on their makeshift gallows, didn’t they? Hanged him proper.”

  Clara cast Ruella an uneasy glance. A former cook in Clara’s household, Ruella had been constrained to go out to work when the family fortunes declined, and now held sway over the prison kitchens. “Why was he arrested?”

  Ruella twitched, her version of a shrug. “Why are any of them arrested? Thieving, brawling—who knows?”

  Who, indeed. In the Buffalo of 1880, there might be a thousand reasons. The city, a rough and tumble place, included both mansions like that occupied by Clara’s wealthy grandfather and hovels on the waterfront. Clara’s house, with its now-reduced means, teetered somewhere between.

  “Thought you’d be pleased,” Ruella huffed. “You said you were desperate and needed one of these soon.”

  “So I did.”

  Both women continued staring at the corpse.

  “I figured I’d better grab him while I had the opportunity.”

  “You did well, Ruella, very well. How long was he strung up, do you know?” A purely practical question rather than a morbid one. Clara couldn’t use him if he had too much damage at the cellular level.

>   Ruella shook her head. “Just long enough for him to kick his last. Nobody stood around watching, with the rain pelting down. Took him a while to die—thrashed about a good deal. That’s how I knew he’d suit you, mistress. You said you couldn’t use one with a broken neck, and the ones who snap their necks in the drop die right quick.”

  Poor bastard, Clara thought with dispassion. Ruella was right; the fortunate ones broke their necks. Choking slowly was no way to die.

  “Dead handsome he is, too,” Ruella put in.

  The remark, completely out of character, made Clara withdraw her gaze from the corpse for the first time and eye her companion in surprise. Strapping at nearly six feet tall, and muscled like a wrestler, Ruella could not be called a fanciful woman. But she stood now with her head tipped to one side, regarding the man on the table intently.

  “That,” Clara said dryly, “is not a consideration.”

  “Isn’t it? I thought, seeing what you intends to do with him—”

  “His health matters, and to a lesser extent his age. And the degree of corruption.”

  Ruella waved a beefy hand. “He’s not rotted yet. Far too soon. A few hours ago he was up and walking around.”

  And a few hours hence, he would be again—if all went according to plan. “I’m very grateful, Ruella. You’re sure no one saw you?”

  “No one.”

  “Who cut him down?”

  “Tim Jeffers, the prison sexton. I had to bribe him. Five cents, and a bottle.”

  “You’re certain he won’t tell?”

  “I’m sure. He was already half drunk when he turned up—probably why he did a rubbish job with the noose, and this poor bloke suffered for it—and won’t remember anything after he finishes that tot of gin.”

  “Didn’t he think it strange you wanted the corpse?”

  “All he was thinking about was the bottle.” Ruella stole a look at her former mistress. “You sure about this? Know what you’re doing?”

  Clara drew a breath. “Yes.”

  “Want me to stay and help?”

  A tempting offer. Clara could definitely use Ruella’s brawn when it came to shifting the fellow around. But she shook her head. “Georgina will assist me, as always.”

  “That little slip of a thing?”

  “We’ll manage, thank you.”

  “What if he’s stroppy when he wakes up?”

  “Don’t worry about that. We’ll strap him down first.”

  “Well, and that’s sure to improve his temper when he comes to! What a night—hanged, choked, dragged through Buffalo in a barrow, and then he wakes up tied down. Maybe I should stay.”

  “Well, then, help me strip him before you go. Those clothes he’s wearing will have to be burned. They’re no doubt full of pestilence from the jail.”

  Swiftly Clara stepped forward and laid her hands on the corpse for the first time. He felt chilly from the cold November rain, but only as might anyone who’d just come in. With quick, careful touches she examined the abrasions on his throat where the noose had bit deep. Ruella was right; his neck remained whole—a fortunate thing. A snapped neck would have rendered him useless.

  And Ruella was right about one other thing, as well. He must have been a handsome brute in life. Even now, lying like an effigy on a coffin, he had a kind of rascally attractiveness. Dark hair, almost black, waved back from a broad and noble forehead. His features, strongly made and elegant, were emphasized by a prow of a nose, and two deep lines that might have been dimples bracketed his lips. His eyes—decently closed—showed twin fans of black lashes. Color still mottled his cheeks, along with residual swelling, products of the strangulation he’d endured, but that would fade. Cleaned up, he would make a passable gentleman.

  He had some Spanish blood, perhaps, or possibly Welsh. Neither would nullify the backstory she’d prepared for him.

  “Yes, Ruella,” she murmured, “you’ve done well, indeed. Let’s get to work.”

  The next few minutes proved awkward and difficult. Clara had never before handled a corpse this size, or this male. She quickly became grateful for Ruella’s brute strength as well as impressed by the musculature of her prize. He must have been a laborer, to be so fit. Well-developed muscles marked his chest, along with an interesting pattern of dark hair, and he had shoulders like a bull. Callouses roughened both hands, and his nails were filthy, but that might well have been from being in the cells.

  Clara was daunted—even more so when his trousers came off. Ruella stood back, then, with a grunt.

  “Well!” she exclaimed, precisely as if she couldn’t help herself. “Ain’t he pretty?”

  He was, inescapably. But Clara didn’t partake in this exercise for the sake of enjoyment or titillation. With a dangerous experiment, and a desperate one, she could not allow herself to be distracted.

  She requested of Ruella, “Help me wash him down before you go.”

  Ruella rolled up her sleeves, revealing forearms nearly as well-muscled as those of the corpse. “I have to confess I don’t half want to stay, now. Don’t know when I’ve got my hands on such a fine piece of male, even if he is dead.”

  Clara knew she certainly never had. Granted, her upbringing at her father’s hands had been unconventional, to say the least. Her father, himself a physician, had not hesitated to develop her talents once he discovered them. Not another young woman of twenty in all New York State had done the things Clara had, but none of those things extended to encounters with the opposite sex.

  Indeed, Clara thought wryly now, the only way she had of procuring herself a husband was to snag one freshly dead.

  She defied all the standards of the day, even to her appearance. She had long ago lopped off her tawny locks, considering them an annoyance, and she went clad in a practical manner for the work she did in plain linen shirts, men’s trousers, and a leather corset. Her eyes, as her father had frequently remarked, were unusual, a shade of greenish gray that fairly defied description. As might be expected of one who had the power to raise the dead.

  Of course, she’d never before attempted to raise a creature of this size—or this sentience. The first had been her own dog, Mollie, and that an act born of pure love. Since then, she’d practiced on rabbits, chickens, and on one horrific occasion a Christmas goose that had returned to life and run, headless, around the dining room. Two serving girls had passed out.

  The power, as her father had also been quick to assure her, was hereditary among the women of her line and went straight back to an ancestress with Native American blood.

  “You are your ancestresses, in essence,” she could still hear him say. “Do not ever forget that, whilst those who have bought into this society which surrounds us try to make you feel a misfit.”

  But a misfit she was. And her father was gone, dead these eight months, and with him any protection he lent. His body, riddled with disease, had been too frail and too ruined for her to bring him back.

  She blinked now as the dead man’s handsome face blurred before her eyes. No time for weakness.

  “They say,” Ruella observed in her rough growl, “these fellows grow a right hard prong whilst they’re hanging. A stiffy, if you know what I mean. No evidence of it now, more’s the pity. I can’t deny I wouldn’t mind—”

  Clara bent a fierce look on her companion. “Ruella! That is a shocking observation.”

  “Just honest,” Ruella puffed.

  “Never mind, now. Help me wash him and strap him down.”

  “With pleasure. I’ll just take the bottom half, shall I?”

  Clara increased the intensity of her glare. “I think I had better do that, don’t you? Since he’s meant to be my husband.”

  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 wid
e 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.”