by Elsa Hart
“On the contrary.” Dinley’s voice was unexpectedly firm. “It must be bandaged at once.”
“Oh, but that isn’t necessary,” said Alice. “I have a handkerchief in my pocket that will suffice.”
Dinley was adamant. “I will escort you to the kitchen, Miss Fordyce. John has a good store of salves. We cannot risk infection.”
A crease appeared between Alice’s brows. “I assure you, Mr. Dinley, there is no need.”
Carlyle chimed in. “Do not deprive us of our fair companion, Dinley, I beg you.”
Sir Barnaby concluded the matter. “In this instance, Mr. Dinley is correct. Miss Fordyce, there are objects in my collection more dangerous than they appear. A dead creature may retain its venom, after all, and even I cannot say for certain which ancient weapons may have been dipped in poison to heighten their efficacy.”
Alice, her expression now touched with fear, followed Dinley out of the room. Sir Barnaby spoke after them. “If Inwood is still here, you might consult him.”
When the two had gone, Sir Barnaby lectured the group briefly on the system he employed to maintain his registers, a set of forty volumes bound in matching blue vellum. The depleted tour then proceeded up the staircase to a spacious landing. Like the one outside Cecily’s room, it was furnished with cabinets. The theme of the display was not immediately obvious. In addition to vases, books, corals, and statuettes, the shelves contained bones, stacked and rolled papers and textiles, and several large wooden crates. An odor of salt and moldy straw permeated the space, reminding Cecily of the creaking compartments of a ship at sea.
“It became clear to me,” Sir Barnaby began, “that there is among my guests a fascination with those travelers who have attained a certain degree of notoriety. As I count many such adventurers among my correspondents, I have dedicated this small chamber to their current endeavors.” Sir Barnaby gestured to a section of a shelf. “Here you will find items sent to me by the pirate Samuel Goring.” He gestured to another section. “And here are butterflies and illustrations contributed by that unusual female lepidopterist whose exploits have garnered such attention.”
Cecily’s attention was drawn to an open crate resting on a table. Its battered sides were covered in circular patterns of dried mildew. Bits of bright silk, glazed porcelain, and filigreed metal peeped out from protective wrappings.
“If you are careful, you may handle the items,” said Sir Barnaby.
Carlyle reached over Cecily’s shoulder and pulled a porcelain bowl from the crate. He examined it appreciatively. “This is a color I haven’t seen. It glitters as if there is gold suspended in the glaze.”
Sir Barnaby nodded. “You will also find in that box, among other wonders, a scarlet butterfly very well preserved, and a cow bezoar as large as a hen’s egg. But you have not brought your sketchbook today, Mr. Carlyle.”
Carlyle replaced the bowl. “I’ve lost interest in the activity,” he said with a shrug. “I envy you, Sir Barnaby. The endurance of your passion. Do you never tire of making labels and keeping registers?”
Sir Barnaby frowned. “I consider the maintenance of my shelves a duty to God and to science, not a trifling passion.”
Warbulton joined Carlyle and Cecily at the crate. “Who sent it?” he asked.
“Anthony Holt,” said Sir Barnaby.
“Holt?” Warbulton nodded eagerly. “Oh, I know all about him, of course. Impossible to be one of us and know nothing of Anthony Holt. I’ve attended all the readings of his letters at the Society. Do you have news of his latest exploits? Some tidbit, perhaps, that I might share at the coffeehouses? To what distant shore does he now sail?”
“To those beyond the reckoning of our maps,” said Sir Barnaby. “Anthony Holt is dead.”
“Dead?” Warbulton’s eyes widened.
“Lost at sea,” said Sir Barnaby. “The letter arrived yesterday. It is most unfortunate, as he had promised his next box would contain several items of particular interest to me.”
Cecily looked at her host in surprise. There was no trace of grief in his tone, and she saw none in his expression. A step on the stair announced the return of Walter Dinley. He was alone. Miss Fordyce, he explained, had been more shaken by the incident than she had initially believed herself to be. He had summoned a carriage to return her to her aunt. “And,” he added, proffering a thick folded paper to Sir Barnaby with an unsteady hand, “a courier just came with a message for you.”
Sir Barnaby snatched the letter from Dinley. He tore it open and read silently. When he finished, he folded it, his face intent. “A reply is required,” he announced. Offering no further explanation, he started down the stairs.
“But the tour—” said Dinley.
Sir Barnaby spoke without turning. “Continue it.”
When he had gone, the abandoned guests turned to their new leader, who looked if possible more pale and anxious than he had yet that day. Dinley began a halting and inarticulate itemization of the room, starting with a capricorn beetle sent to Sir Barnaby by a correspondent in Norway. He continued for a few minutes before he stuttered to a halt in the middle of telling them about a barnacle sent from the Isle of Ascension. “I—I should go to the kitchen,” he said. “To check on preparations for supper. Perhaps it would be best if—that is, I am sure Sir Barnaby would not mind if you continued on your own. Or if you wish to return to an item of interest, you could do so. And reconvene when—when Sir Barnaby has finished.”
Cecily, unenthusiastic about the prospect of being left alone with the loquacious Warbulton and the uninspiring Carlyle, inquired where she would find Sir Barnaby’s collection of dried plants.
“The Plant Room,” said Dinley. “It’s—it’s next to my room. Upstairs and through the connecting door.”
Cecily thanked him, and departed. She emerged from the dark stairwell into a furnished garret. The single long room extended the entire length of the house. Gabled windows set into the sloping ceilings offered a view of the street from one end, and a view of the garden from the other. More than half of the space was dedicated to antiquities, the shelves populated by warriors, nymphs, and gods chiseled in marble, cast in bronze, or fired onto the rounded sides of ancient urns.
The remainder of the room offered insight into the labor required to maintain the collection. Rows of empty specimen jars gleamed like bubbles on the floor. On a low table, an assortment of tiny birds waited to be mounted on wooden stands. A half-complete skeleton sat next to a pile of bones. Cecily surveyed the clutter of labels, pencils, quills, papers, and pots of paste and paint. In a corner, tucked beneath the roof and surrounded by crates and towers of books, was a bed. Beside it was a chair with a coat draped over it and a pair of worn boots beneath it.
“So this is how the curator is accommodated,” said Carlyle, who had come up the stairs behind her. “I would hardly call it a room.”
Cecily did not answer. She had located the connecting door to the other house. She glanced at Carlyle and was relieved to see that the antiquities appeared to have captured his attention. The old floorboards creaked loudly under her feet as she entered the Plant Room and closed the door behind her. To the unknowing observer, it would have appeared to be a second library. Certainly it was a library, of a sort. Cecily knew that within the bindings that lined its walls was a vast, dried garden. Here, impossibly, spring flowers bloomed beside autumn ones, and the approach of winter carried no promise of change.
She went first to the volumes set out on the long table at the center of the room. With gentle confidence, she slid her hands between the pages, assessing the fragility of each plant before she turned to the next. Their names were written on each sheet in unwieldy blocks of Latin and English and languages she did not know.
Cecily’s parents had each contributed to her enduring fascination with plants. Her father’s obsession had been with the trees and hedges and flowers that gave shape and permanence to his land. Her mother’s had been with the careful maintenance of an herb gar
den outside the kitchen. Both had pored over books and catalogues of the newest and rarest plants growing in nurseries and apothecary gardens. But neither they nor Cecily had ever seen a collection to rival Sir Barnaby’s.
Her absorption was so complete that when the clocks in the house below announced in a scattered chorus that it was six o’clock, she could hardly believe that a whole hour had passed. She looked regretfully down at the thick whorled flowers of a Phlomis collected in Spain. She would happily have forgone supper and conversation for another hour of acquainting herself with the room, but she had to acknowledge that she was hungry and tired.
She wondered why no one had come in search of her. She had been aware of movement through the house, of the creaking of floors and rumbling of stairs, but no one had passed through the Plant Room. As she descended, she expected to come across one of the other guests. Her sensitive nose picked out pipe smoke, wig powder, and traces of malodorous city mud scraped onto stairs by booted feet.
But she saw no one until she entered the dining room on the ground floor, where she found Inwood and Carlyle deep in conversation. The table that filled the center of the chamber was already laden with dishes. Steam rose from meat pies and fresh baked bread. Boiled eggs bobbed and gleamed in a pool of dark broth. Green salads festooned with fruit and sprinkled with flower petals brought spring color to the darkly savory spread.
The two men were discussing the ongoing war between Sweden and Russia. “… Tsar’s forces have captured the fortress at Nyen,” Carlyle was saying. “I heard he’s going to make it his new capital, which suggests he is confident the victory will endure.”
Inwood answered amiably. “I would not underestimate the Swedes. Their young king continues to show his mettle not only in war, but in government. I’ve heard nothing but praise for his legal reforms.” He noticed Cecily and smiled. “Lady Kay. Have you seen Sir Barnaby?”
“Not since he excused himself from our company,” she replied. “Did the tour never reconvene?”
Carlyle bent to sniff a dish of thick puce-colored soup. He grimaced. “Smells of rotting seaweed. If he insists on impressing us with foreign fare, why not a cask of rare madeira?” He straightened. “In answer to your question, we were all quite abandoned, left to wander alone through Sir Barnaby’s fair Eden.”
“I’ve never known him to neglect a tour,” said Inwood.
“Then let us fetch our erstwhile host,” said Carlyle, his eye on the meat pies. “He cannot intend for us to have a cold supper. His purpose was to answer a letter, was it not? Perhaps he fell asleep in his study.”
The three of them went together to the closed door in the hall opposite the specimen jars. Inwood’s knock was met with silence. “Sir Barnaby,” he said, and knocked again. “Sir Barnaby, are you there?”
“You’ll have to knock louder than that to wake a sleeping man of his age,” said Carlyle. He took a turn to rap on the door. Cecily thought she heard the shuffle of feet inside the room. Inwood turned the brass handle. The door was unlocked and swung open easily. Inwood stepped inside and stopped. Cecily heard his intake of breath, sharp and shocked.
The face of Walter Dinley confronted them, his eyes dark pools of panic in his white face. He stood in the center of the room, a knife gripped in one shaking hand. His knuckles were streaked with rivulets of red. In front of him on the floor, lying on his side so that all they could see was an expanse of black velvet and a tumble of gray curls, was the still form of Sir Barnaby Mayne.
Dinley spoke first. His voice was trembling and unnatural. “I—I killed him! I will no longer—no longer be so—so disrespected. We argued and I killed him! I killed him!”
“Dinley,” said Inwood, his voice hoarse. “Get away.”
Dinley didn’t move. “I killed him,” he said. “I killed him.”
Inwood lunged. Dinley stumbled backward. It seemed to Cecily he would be trapped in the corner of the room, unable to escape unless he could force his way past them into the hall. She didn’t see the other door until he had hurled himself upon it. In an instant he had thrown it open. Clammy air rushed into the room. He fled. The knife fell from his hand, chiming as it hit the stone veranda. It was Carlyle who shoved Cecily aside and went in pursuit, pausing to sweep up the fallen blade. Both men tore across the garden, gravel clattering behind them. Dinley reached the far wall first and disappeared through a door into the alley beyond.
Cecily turned back to the room. Inwood had dropped to his knees beside Sir Barnaby. She watched his fingers move with practiced assurance from the fallen man’s wrist to his lips. The physician’s shoulders slumped. She knew before he spoke that Sir Barnaby Mayne was dead.
CHAPTER 6
From their perches on oaken shelves, stuffed birds stared down at the body of their former owner. Sir Barnaby’s eyes were open, but the ferocious blue fire that had animated them was gone. His wig was askew, exposing a mottled scalp. Bright ruby stains dappled his snowy white scarf. Beneath him was a rug decorated with geometric spirals and jagged diamonds in shades of burgundy and brown that made it look as if it were patterned in channels of blood.
It was Thomasin who summoned the other occupants of the house. The maid appeared at the open door to the hall, looked inquiringly into the room, and began to scream. Her cries drew John and his wife up from the kitchen. The two stayed only long enough for Inwood to tell them what had happened before they left to cry murder from the front steps. Bells began to ring through the parish and shouts to fill its streets.
Meacan, apparently alerted to danger by the tenor of the cries, entered the room clutching a stone axe in one hand and a battered Viking shield in the other. Both objects bore bright red labels. She paused in the doorway to take in the scene, and only lowered the weapon when she saw Cecily. Warbulton arrived last. Unlike Meacan, he seemed not to have perceived any threat within the commotion, but called cheerfully from the stairs to ask whether supper was ready. When he reached the study, he backed into the corner farthest from the body and, upon being told what had occurred, began a steady murmur of incoherent lamentation.
Inwood completed his cursory examination. He gently drew the edges of Sir Barnaby’s shirt closed. “It was the wound to the heart that killed him,” he said. When he looked up, Cecily thought he seemed older, as if he had come near enough to death for it to claim a little of him, too.
“This cannot be,” said Warbulton. “It is impossible. It is too atrocious, too terrible.”
“Dinley?” The single word was uttered in an incredulous tone by Meacan, who had taken up a position by the door, still holding the axe in a loose grip at her side. Her expression was wary, her attention alternating between the room and the dim hallway. “You are certain,” she went on, “that it was Walter Dinley? The same man who apologizes to furniture when he bumps into it? Who can piece together broken seashells for hours without once losing patience? I’ve never even heard him raise his voice, let alone— You say he confessed?”
“His words were unambiguous,” said Inwood. He stood and went to the open door to the garden. He remained there, his back to the room, looking out at the plant beds and paths. Cecily stepped away in deference to his emotion. She was familiar with seeking comfort in the quiet abundance of living leaves and flowers.
Her retreat brought her to the desk positioned against the wall between the two windows. She looked down at the dark wood. It was bare except for a neat pile of papers at one corner, a folded length of black velvet at another, and a sticky gleam of blood stamped in a telltale shape at its center. It was only part of a handprint, but the thumb, two fingers, and cleanly halved palm were unmistakable.
A glance at the body confirmed that Sir Barnaby’s hands were bloodied. In her mind she saw the dying man, still standing, press them to the fatal wound on his chest as if to imprison his escaping life. She saw him stumble and fling out an arm in search of support, his body desperate to deny the inevitability of his fall. She saw the hand come down hard on the smooth wood. A mome
nt of hope, perhaps, as he touched that familiar surface. And then—Cecily tensed her shoulders to repress the shudder that moved up her spine.
The room smelled of old books, tallow, and accumulated smoke. As her shock lessened and she became more aware of her surroundings, Cecily’s keen nose also detected a faint odor of camphor and roses. It was a cramped space, constricted by the wall that divided it from the hallway and by the cabinets that encroached upon its center. Most of these were fitted with doors of solid wood that concealed their contents, but the shelves that were visible contained a vast assortment of objects. Conch shells gaped like open mouths. Furred hides overlapped scaled ones. Turtles and crabs and other small armored creatures alternated with snuffboxes and statuettes. On the mantelpiece, an undulating backbone led Cecily’s gaze along its knobbly path to a row of milky crystal orbs set in ornate stands and a ticking clock encased in ebony.
One corner of the room was occupied by a wooden wheel taller than Cecily by a head. Narrow ledges were spaced evenly around its circumference, each supporting a book held open by a strap. A sturdy cane stool was positioned so that by turning the wheel, a reader sitting on the stool could consult multiple books with ease. A worn Turkey-work chair was positioned near the unlit hearth with a low, cluttered table beside it.
The chatter outside grew louder, heralding Carlyle’s return through the front entrance. Sweat stood in beads on his brow and mud spattered his stockings. The knife was still in his hand. He set it down on a shelf near Warbulton, who drew away, pointing a shaking finger at the bloody blade. “Is that—is that what—”
“I thought I might have need of a weapon if I apprehended him,” said Carlyle, raising an eyebrow at Warbulton’s evident terror. “I wish I could tell you the blood came from the villain.”
Inwood turned from the garden door. “Dinley remains at liberty?”
“For the moment,” said Carlyle as he straightened his wig. “If he’d stayed in the alleys I might have overtaken him, but he found his way to the street.” Carlyle gestured toward the front of the house. “He threw himself into a crowd gathered around some mountebank selling cure-alls. By the time I’d pushed my way through, he’d vanished.”