A Victorian Lady's Guide to Killing Gods and Monsters [ONC 2023]

Chapter II: Menacing truths must not be revealed unless necessary

London, April 4th, 1852.

"I am home!" Hattie shouted at the empty house. No one answered, not even the voice. Her mother might have gone to Her Majesty's Theatre to try her luck at auditions.

She left her wet parasol at the entrance and went upstairs. She could not stop remembering her father when she was at home.

Well, remembering the idea of her father. She had never met him. The only things he knew were, on one hand, that he was rich. On the other hand, he had bought that house for her mother so that she could get to auditions easily.

Mistress Belen Rayburn-because, even if she was as single as a newborn, she was not going to let people think of her as a woman of the night who had the misfortune of having a daughter-was acting at Her Majesty's Theatre when she met Hattie's father. Those four months were, as she had said, the happiest of her life, even though she was still pretty young to declare that.

She had once been a beauty, yes, but she was no Laura Addison in acting. In simple words, she was pathetic. Although her lack of talent was an immovable fact, it had been on the first night of performances of a new play when Mistress Rayburn and Hattie's father had met.

The play itself had been a commercial failure. It told the myth of Atalanta, a Greek heroine, and how Aphrodite made her fall in love with an imbecile. At least that was the conclusion Hattie had drawn, as her mother simply embellished all her stories with flourishes. She was unreliable.

Because of this memory, the fruit of their love-Miss Rayburn-was called Atalanta. The name was too old-fashioned, so she preferred to be called Hattie.

She went upstairs to get her walking dress off. No sound emerged from the second floor. Not even the cat that wandered between these four walls, Azul, meowed to welcome her.

After the voice incident, the silence was terrifying. She waited.

A cough.

Her mother was at home. Hattie glanced into her room through the ajar door. Belen Rayburn was lying on her bed, coughing violently. Her fragile body was shaking because of the fever. Her eyes, once black as the smoke that came out of the factories, were gray with cataracts, lost in the horizon of her thoughts.

"Mother?" Hattie asked. "What has happened to you? I left three hours ago, and you were okay."

"Atalanta, dear, you know I have not been the same since that bloody plague."

She coughed once again. Tuberculosis had weakened her years ago, but she had recovered well. Why was this happening now?

"What happened to you?" Hattie asked again.

"I will be fine in a couple of days, there is nothing to worry about. I am just not up to dick today. How was the service? Was Mr. Flynn too boring?"

Hattie gritted her teeth. Yes, Father Flynn was known all across London because of his extremely long sermons, yet that was not the highlight of the girl's morning.