Attendence at the Kendal Ball (Part IX)

Kendal Palace, Grosvenor Square, London, Great Britain: January 1886

Sir Thomas Jameson, stood close to Ursula, dark haired, dark eyed, handsome with an erect carriage and trim figure, he looked every inch the experienced and dashing sea captain that he was. The Jamesons had originated in the Isle of Bute, in the Hebrides, Scotland before putting down roots in the County of Barcestshire, England sometime in the 1300s. The Jamesons had become overtime, gentlemen farmers, artisans and county officials over the next five hundred years, they had acquired a baronetcy some three generations back due to service in the American Revolutionary war and quietly become part of the English Gentry.

One of the few things that Sir Thomas and Sir Leo had in common, aside from Ursula, was they were both members of the London Travelers Club and had attended Barchester College. Sir Thomas had studied with an eye to the medical or military profession, and had hopes of becoming either a physician or a surgeon. Family connections had garnered a commission as a midshipman in the Royal Navy and Sir Thomas had entertained hopes of a long and distinguished career. Illness in the form of an extended and nearly fatal bout of fever contracted in India ended his military career after six years. Sir Thomas was forced to retire from active service at the rank of Lieutenant. Family financial constraints had then forced Sir Thomas to turn to the merchant marine to find gainful employment, as a ship's doctor. While not Sir Thomas's first choice, he would have preferred to establish himself in a lucrative London practice, he had made the best of it and gained both experience and a solid professional reputation in the Locke & Key Line. Over time he had become the doctor of choice for the Line's fast passenger ship captains.

In 1882, Doctor Thomas Jameson's world changed forever, a routine passage from Britain to Brazil turned into a bloody disaster when three pirate airships and two privateering surface ships attacked the Liner S.S. Laura, which he was aboard as chief surgeon. In the space of half an hour, Jameson wound up being the only ship's officer still standing unwounded or killed. By dint of hard effort he rallied the crew and passengers and managed not only to retake the liner from it's captors but turn the tables on them, capturing one of the surface ships, while sinking the other pirate ship and blowing two of the airships out of the sky. The surviving pirate airship fled the scene, leaving Jameson in command of the field of action and the spoils so to speak. One Lady Ursula Wraithdale happened to be one of the passengers about the S.S. Laura on this occasion, and in the course of events, the two made considerable impression upon each other. A very lasting impression as events would later show.

Sir Thomas, as he became after the affair, knighted by the order of the Queen, had become something of a celebrity in nautical circles. The Locke & Key Line, had transferred him from the medical branch to the command branch of their service, and from then on placed him in command of a variety of their fast passenger liners. His captaincy of the various Liners had been to date a success and much to his credit. Energetic, charming, capable and an extremely pushy young man, many expected him to rise to the post of senior commodore of the Locke & Key Line within a few years.

Sir Leo expected that once Ursula and Sir Thomas were formally engaged, although he suspected that the two were secretly engaged already that he would be seeing a lot more of both of them together whenever he was in London.

Ursula turned to greet Sir Leo, who moved to stand before her.

Battleships of the French Marine Nationale

Battleship of the German Kaiserliche Marine under way with torpedoboat escort

A Hidden Past (Part III)

Millicent Carmichael followed her fellow investigator swiftly into the hall, jerking him to a sudden and painful stop when she caught up with him. The man seemed momentarily oblivious to both his immediate surroundings and to her all too unladylike steel hard grip on his wrist, his eyes flashing with conflicting emotions as he grappled with whatever vision now had him in it's possession.

"What did you see? Whatever it is has you spooked, Althorpe."

"I... I saw death that walks..." Ebenezer Leighton Althorpe's eyes flickered eerily with luminous witch-fires glowing from their depths, his voice was curiously hushed, laced with deep shock and something rather like fear and yet strangely crisp and detached.

"Do not go cryptic on me, Althorpe. If your vision is important, Sir Nigel needs to know it."

"I am not being cryptic." He retorted with some asperity creeping into his vague but troubled tone. "I am being exact, Josephine Rumbleton, is amoung the dead and yet amoung the living. I saw her past and it terrifies me."

Carmichael looked searchingly into Althorpe's eyes, measuring his agitated expression, she did not like what she was seeing and she understood it even less. Althorpe was typically unflappable in dangerous or strange circumstances, he had a cool, collected calm you could not crack with a pick axe. That customary calm was not in evidence now.

"I... I do not follow you?"

Althorpe nodded absently at the remark and made a serious effort for the first time to pull himself together and give something like a coherent report to his colleague.

"When I looked at her with my mystic sight, her appearance abruptly altered before my eyes. That was not supposed to happen, I was trying a protocol to determine if she possesses any magical ability or hidden items. Suddenly  I was seeing both what she was and what she had been."

"As I watched, her hair shifted... becoming tangled, wild and unkempt. Her skin paled, bruised and in places it rotted while overall her flesh became marked with grime and bloodstains. Her constable's uniform faded away from my sight like smoke and was replaced by more... feminine garments that were as despoiled, bloodied and disheveled as the rest of her rapidly changing appearance."

Althorpe shuddered, ashen faced at the image his excellent memory was again calling forth from his unconscious to his rebelling conscious mind. After a minute he continued, his voice low and strained.

"Her face was the worst of it, her irises had paled from light brown to a ghostly white-grey, her lips and teeth were clotted with blood, while a ragged scar traversed her face from just under her right eye kinking over her nose and angling down her left cheek. She looked a perfect horror and yet... strangely attractive... almost beguiling..." his voice trailed off with the last words, making Carmichael feel like she had abruptly gone deaf.

"Is she some sort of vampire?"

"No, she seems to be or rather at sometime in the past was of the living or walking Dead. A zombie to be precise, rather then one of the vampiric Undead proper."

"When I looked into her eyes, at first they did not appear to notice me. They were vacant, soulless, absolutely blank save for the fact that they were filled with a mindless hunger for the flesh of the Living. Then without warning they shifted and turned upon me. " He paused and swallowed, absolutely chilled by this part of the vision. "You have heard various expressions over the years about gazing into the Abyss?"

Carmichael nodded. She was beginning to get just a little creeped out now, Sir Nigel and his team dealt with some strange and ghastly stuff on a regular basis, but this was definitely out of the ordinary. People did not ever come back from being zombies, even the most accomplished necromancer, skilled in the white or black magics, could not manage it.

"Well, sometimes when you do, the Abyss gazes back at you. There was a terrible will, an intense focus unlike anything I have experienced before, behind those eyes. I am not sure if it was her or that some other power or directing intelligence was looking at me through her."

"Then... it... her... Smiled. She or whatever was looking out of her eyes, knew who and what I was, it was reading me like an open book. Up till then I had merely been scared, now I knew sheer terror. I had to get away from it whatever it was, I broke the mental and mystical link that I had established with her. I could bear no more of it."