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  advance praise for

  YELLOW JESSAMINE

  “Starling’s tale is rich, unsettling, and bleakly beautiful— like the poison garden at its heart, both lovely and deadly.” — Kate Alice Marshall, author of Rules for Vanishing and I Am Still Alive

  “Atmospheric and gothicly dark—Caitlin Starling weaves a tale with deep roots that unfurls in unexpected and chilling ways. There’s no subject she can’t tackle and make her own, and I’ll be first in line for everything she puts out there.” — Laurel Hightower, author of Whispers in the Dark

  “A steely apothecary and her loyal assistant are stalked by the rhizomes of paranormal menace. If Daphne du Maurier had pushed into fantasy, you might get something as good as this claustrophobic, Gothic-tinged story.” — C.S. Malerich, author of The Factory Witches of Lowell

  “This story of witchery and death unfurls itself one petal at a time until you will be happy to lay yourself amongst its whispering tendrils and just breathe it in.” — Jordan Shiveley, Dread Singles

  “Yellow Jessamine is rife with desire and bitter with revenge, all of it cloaked in shadows. A creepy read perfect for a stormy night.” — Lara Elena Donnelly, author of the Amberlough Dossier

  “A dark delicacy about poisonous women, mercantile espionage, and the slow rot of guilt. The twists and turns will wrap around your heart tighter than ivy around a decaying manor.” — S.T. Gibson, author of Robbergirl

  Neon Hemlock Press

  www.neonhemlock.com

  @neonhemlock

  © 2020 Caitlin Starling

  Yellow Jessamine

  Caitlin Starling

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  This novella is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Illustration by Robin Ha

  Interior Illustration by Karla Yvette

  Cover Design by dave ring

  ISBN-13: 978-1-952086-08-3

  Caitlin Starling

  YELLOW JESSAMINE

  Neon Hemlock Press

  the 2020 neon hemlock novella series

  Yellow Jessamine

  by Caitlin Starling

  To those harboring the weight of self-blame: may you bury it.

  Out in the harbor, the ship’s masts burned. The fires had caught on the sails and tarred ropes first, then spread, taking root on the deck itself. From this distance, there was no sound, no heat. There was only the glinting of flame against the dark sheet of the water below, and five bodies standing on a balcony to mark its passing.

  “A shame,” one of the watchers said, packing his pipe with an idle hand. “But at least it wasn’t one of the grain shipments, eh?”

  The owner of the ship did not respond, eyes fixed only on the conflagration of two months of his income.

  “We must hope,” said Lady Evelyn Perdanu, the only woman among their number, small and slight and draped in mourning black, “that your Orrery does not bring plague back with it as well, Mr. Danforth.”

  The pipe-packer paled, almost imperceptibly in the dim light. “It certainly will not. My men—”

  “Your men run a dismal ship, thanks to your stinginess,” the owner of the burning ship snapped. “And if it took my men, whom I keep generously supplied with clean water despite the mounting expense—”

  “Gentlemen,” said the assembly’s oldest member, Weyland Sing. His grey hair was cut into a soft, short wave atop his head and the lines creasing his dark skin spoke to years at sea before his current wealth and comfort. “We must also consider the possibility that this is not a sickness of common provenance. There may be another hand at work.”

  Evelyn watched him closely through the confines of her long veil. At night, with few lanterns set to light their balcony, it was hard to make out the sharper lines of facial features, but she could discern the set of every man’s shoulders well enough. Nobody spoke, because nobody wanted to acknowledge what they all knew, had all known for five years now.

  Delphinium was dying. The city was as good as dead. Even if The Orrery returned with its grain and its salted fish and its citrus, it would only stave off the inevitable. The military coup that had shattered the Cenanthe Empire had also cut off the capital from all but the closest of its farmland. Naval officers still patrolled the great sea beyond the harbor where once Delphinium had taken in riches beyond imagining, but now they were just as likely to torch a ship as to escort it.

  Or to poison its crew, perhaps. Delphinium had been left to rot, as the last old bones of the government refused to capitulate. Around them, in client cities and far-flung colonies, the empire continued under its new masters, prospering. But from her perch on the balcony, Evelyn could only smell the stench of decay, the sickly-sweet deliquescence of pride, of money, of men.

  She turned her attention back out to the burning ship, now a column of flame.

  “My lady,” Danforth said, at her elbow, hesitant but arrogant as he always was. “What word did your sailors aboard The Verity bring when they docked this afternoon?”

  “Nothing of note,” she said, wishing he would leave her be. She should never have spoken. Often, the men forgot that she was there. She was only a wealthy wraith of a woman, unmarked, respected only in the way that small boys respected the monsters lurking beneath their beds at night. All of them would have preferred her gone, but her company owned too many ships, and her coffers were the second richest of all assembled. She was invited as a matter of duty.

  “They saw military ships at least once a week on their voyage, just as all of our ships have. Do you have reason to expect different?” She looked over at Danforth, with his thick sideburns, his rakishly combed hair, his fine waistcoat.

  “Of course not,” he said, jaw tight. Her eyes slid off of him easily, and she turned from them all and passed back into the club room.

  She heard them follow, polished shoes cushioned by a plush rug, bought from Irula’s markets in the far west but made by Novuran hands up in the scattered mountain villages. They’d lost their berths in Irula two years ago. There would be no more fine rugs, not of this pattern, not of this make.

  They were losing so much, but now that the burning ship was out of sight, the men arranged themselves about the room, fashionably at ease. Evelyn took up her customary position across from the sideboard, by the windows, where she would be forgotten for as long as she remained silent, and set apart when she did not. Mr. Urston, owner of the plagued clipper, still looked pinched and thin; he alone remained near her, gazing at the dark blankness of the glass.

  “The only good thing to come out of all of this,” Mr. Sing said, pouring himself and Urston a brandy, “is that there are no more tariffs.”

  There were no more tariffs because there would soon be no more money at all. Ship trade was the only thing keeping the wheezing lungs of Delphinium’s finances breathing. The workshops were running low in raw materials and far-flung customers, the warehouses only receiving in new goods once every few weeks.

  And yet it was enough for the next week, the next month, the next year if they were lucky; they would continue on pretending that everything would be fine. This group spoke around death, avoiding it assiduously. And so they would not see when at last it ca
me for them.

  She considered giving another easily-ignored warning, then abandoned the notion and moved to the door. “Gentlemen,” she said, softly. “I will see you next week.”

  She left to half-hearted acknowledgments, descending a finely-hewn set of stairs nestled along the side of the restaurant that the club office sat atop of. Even six months ago, she would have heard the soft roar of conversation through the wooden paneling, but tonight the restaurant was quiet. Not empty, not yet, but growing thin and patchwork.

  The other merchant lords avoided death, but Evelyn knew its contours and its character intimately, marking its creeping progress day by day. It had been her sole companion since she was a girl of seven, her mother gasping for breath, scrabbling for her hand, dying. A few years later, she lost her father. Then her brothers. She lost her whole household, until she was the only one left standing before the edifice of her father’s business, draped in her black veil and her high-necked mourning dress, alone and called to the seat of power. Death had borne her out of the quiet servitude of girls and into trade deals, warehouses, a web of connections and strength.

  “Ma’am?” came a voice from the bottom landing of the steps. Evelyn slowed her descent, fingers twisted in her heavy skirts. The boy who handled the coats was missing, replaced by a girl maybe sixteen years old, her face scarred on her left cheek with pockmarks. She looked healthy, though, round-hipped and broad-faced. She also looked terrified.

  Ah. The supplicant. It was rare that girls came to her from the working masses; this one was Violetta’s doing. Evelyn descended the last few steps, coming abreast of the girl and peering into her eyes.

  The girl recoiled. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t mean—” “You are certain this is what you want?” Evelyn asked. The girl was shaking, hard enough that her shoulders moved, that her dark hair piled on top of her head shivered in the lamplight.

  “I... that is...” Evelyn gestured impatiently, and the girl handed over Evelyn’s heavy, oil-coated cloak, and with it the small case Evelyn had brought with her. It wasn’t a fashionable thing, but inside it was cunningly divided into a warren of small chambers. Evelyn opened the clasp and drew out the small vial containing the boiled pulp of white bryony root.

  The girl stared at it. Evelyn glanced up the staircase, but none of the men had yet emerged. They wouldn’t, not for at least another hour. Her departure always had the same effect as the ladies of the house repairing to another room after a dinner party. The brandy would flow more heavily, the tobacco clouds grow larger overhead. They would tell themselves they deserved to relax, now that she was gone.

  She didn’t mind that part of it. Tobacco was a noxious weed. Evelyn leaned in, pressing the vial into the girl’s hand. “It will not be pleasant.”

  “Real plague isn’t pleasant,” the girl responded, voice wavering. “It will be convincing enough? They’ll send me to one of the border hospitals?”

  And from there to escape, no doubt. A bold plan, if a foolish one. She was just as likely to sicken for real inside those fetid buildings. “Take no more than two droplets every twelve hours, less if your body reacts strongly. You will need the rest periods. It will be very bitter, and is caustic to the skin, so make sure to take it with as much water as you can stand.”

  Evelyn waited for the girl to ask for more: more help, advice on how best to smuggle it into the hospital, on what to do if she took too much.

  Instead, she reached for the small coin purse hidden in the folds of her skirt.

  Evelyn stepped back. “No need,” she said. “Just be gone from this place. You do this to yourself. I had no hand in it.”

  “Of course, ma’am.” The girl curtsied. Evelyn closed up her case, drew her cloak over her shoulders, and stepped out of the building.

  Her assistant, Violetta Fusain, waited in the high-wheeled carriage parked down at the corner. The footman opened up the carriage door for Evelyn, and provided the block to step up. She took her seat across from her white-clad attendant, so different from herself, but with no less quickness in her lowered eyes.

  Violetta’s pale hair was drawn back from her cherubic face. She looked like a delicate doll, except for the sharpness of her gaze.

  The door shut behind her. “I have met with your girl,” Evelyn said. “It is done. I have delivered her poison.”

  Violetta frowned at that. “Poison? She asked for medicine.”

  “A medicine that sickens is poison. And she will be lucky if she does not die from it, but she seemed determined.”

  Violetta grimaced, but did not argue. The carriage pulled out into the street, passing by the first turning towards home and instead rattling down the hillside, toward the harbor below.

  Something had happened, then. “The Verity?”

  “Has encountered a problem, my lady.”

  “A plaguing problem?” She thought of burning masts, great beacons of blazing failure upon the water. She could afford to lose a ship, but not her reputation. But when she searched Violetta’s face for pain or frustration, she found neither.

  Instead, she found fear. “No, my lady,” Violetta said. “Something else entirely.”

  The ship rolled gently below her feet, wood creaking on all sides. With the sun long set, there were no calling gulls to hear, and on the first night in dock, there were few sailors aboard. She was left with only the wash of the water and the drum of the rain that had started up halfway to the harbor.

  “Should we call for a doctor, my lady?” the captain asked. Evelyn looked down into the staring eyes of the first mate of The Verity. Behind her, Violetta lifted the small oil lantern she carried a few inches higher. The light danced across the man’s pupils, but nothing in his face responded in the slightest. His eyes did not narrow, his jaw did not twitch.

  And yet he breathed. “How long has he been like this?” Evelyn asked, mind racing. She had heard of catatonias before, but none like this man’s. There was no limb rigidity, no rictus grin; nor was there any torpor, no deep and unceasing slumber. It was as if the soul of him had simply winked out, leaving an otherwise normal husk of a man who breathed, whose heart beat, but who could not move.

  A fly landed on the man’s iris. He did not blink.

  “Barely an hour, my lady,” said Luc Reynolds, her ship’s captain. “I was with him at the pub when it came over him.”

  “How many others?” He hesitated, then said, “Five, my lady. That we know of. Not everybody has been located yet, not the men who went home to their families or other embraces. If you understand me.”

  “I understand you, Captain,” she said, looking away from the living corpse at last. Reynolds had his hat in his hand, and he looked scared.

  She had never seen him look scared before. “The others are in the brig. Shall I fetch a doctor, my lady?” “Not yet,” she said. “Find everybody. Find anybody else in this state. If I am going to tell the magistrates that my ship has brought an unknown illness onto Delphinium’s soil, then I will have it quarantined before I do so.” Internally, she was cursing, pacing furiously, rending her hair. Outwardly, she was almost as still as the sailor beside her.

  “Of course, my lady,” Reynolds said, glancing between her and Violetta. “I...suppose it’s best to tell you now, that before I met him at the pub, he went I don’t know where.”

  Worse and worse. The unknown number in whorehouses now were bad enough. “And the other five?”

  “The same. They scattered to the winds.” It was almost normal, almost expected, but the timing was off. For the first mate and the others to have gone to their business and come back to the pub so quickly, they must have left immediately after the crews began unloading cargo. The other five sailors had shirked work, and the first mate had barely been better. Understandable, except that meant they abandoned their brothers, the men they had sailed with for months. More than that, it had meant risking the loss of drink, paid for by the officers. It wasn’t like them.

  The look upon Captain Reynold’s fa
ce said that he agreed with her.

  “Something rotten,” he offered, softly. “It looks like witchcraft.”

  Evelyn lifted one pale hand, waving off the suggestion. The last witches had been tried centuries ago, and it was her understanding that the Judiciary would have preferred the entire subject disappear into obscurity, a dark blot on their history. After all, the witches slaughtered had been mostly women, mostly widows, mostly orphans. Women alone were always a threat, but to call it magic was...uncivilized.

  Better to give them a quiet corner to call their own and move on. Delphinium had certainly benefited from doing as much for her.

  “What should we do with him?”

  Evelyn thought back to her pay ledgers.

  “He is unmarried.”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  “And the others?”

  “Two are without a wife.”

  “Kill those two, along with him.” The captain went very still, and behind her, she heard Violetta gasp. Her fingers itched, the old scars tightening. She was no stranger to death, but perhaps one to ordering it. They certainly seemed to think it fit her ill.

  “My lady—” Violetta began. Evelyn turned and fixed her with a calm look. “We must assume this is some sort of plague. The three unmarried men have nobody to miss them, and so it makes the most sense to end their illness swiftly, to prevent its spread. The others... we may preserve them for the doctors, I suppose.”

  “I am not at sea,” Reynolds said, finally finding his voice, his gaze fixed on her as if he could not bear to look at his first mate. “My authority doesn’t extend this far. The Judiciary—”

  “Killed fifty-seven men today aboard Constance because of plague. They will understand. The other three, keep them in the brig. Set a guard. Then go down the roster and locate every man who served aboard, and find out if we have lost them, as well. Once you have taken the measure of our problem, then you might call the doctors.”