The Talking Board

by Issy Brooke

“Possibly. The fire will take a little while to light. There is something blocking the chimney.”

  “Maybe one of your doves got away.”

  “Don’t joke,” he said quietly as he began to rattle around with pots and pans. “It could be poor Bonny, up there.”

  While he got on with preparing a rudimentary and hopefully edible breakfast, Marianne paced the workshop.

  “What is your plan?” he asked.

  “I have in mind an awful lot of burglary,” she confessed.

  “Because you are not in enough trouble already?”

  “We need to unearth Mrs Newman out of that house. She is the only key to saving Tobias. And consequently clearing my name.”

  “How does that clear your name?”

  “Well, it probably doesn’t,” she said. “But it makes enough of a good name for me, that it might overshadow the bad. And you know, I think there may be a positive in all of this. Now I am out of Woodfurlong, Mrs Davenport has no reason to continue residing there and plaguing the staff. She has taught Phoebe household management, she has pared down the number of servants by at least one, and she has ejected me. I am concerned for my father but she surely cannot force him out, too. Price and Phoebe must step in on his behalf.”

  “And once she has left, you can go back?”

  “I don’t want to return until I have covered myself in glory and solved this case. Then I can go back in triumph and not as a slatternly floozy with no morals and low standards.”

  “Because if people think you are carrying on with me, that shows your low standards?” Simeon said. “Oh, I am sorry for how it turned out.”

  “I know, you said. Repeatedly. But we must move on,” Marianne said as decisively as possible.

  “On to this housebreaking plan of yours.”

  “Well,” she said. “The first place I need to access is not so much a house of residence...”

  IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT. She had spent the day preparing and taking little naps, practising her lock-picking and running through the order of planned events. Now she was about to do it. She was accompanied by Simeon, who was a quivering ball of terror and panic, but he was hiding it fairly well and trying to seem strong for her sake.

  He had been sent out earlier that day to perform a specific task down Albemarle Street. She needed one pane of glass to be broken in the sash window near the door. It would not be large enough for them to crawl through, but that did not matter. It just needed to be broken. It had taken a lot to persuade him to go out and throw the stone. In the end, she had used the money that she still had in her possession from Jack, and told Simeon to pay a street urchin to perform the necessary vandalism. He came home almost silent, and she felt bad for asking him to do it, but it would make their evening escapade a lot easier.

  Albemarle Street was quiet. Who wanted to browse along the art galleries and auction houses at this time of night? Over the road, theatre-goers left their palaces of entertainment and hailed cabs and carriages. Men stalked the streets and painted women cooed to them from corners. Policemen walked their set beats, and young boys and girls slipped from shadow to shadow, looking for food, or money, or chances, or just somewhere safe to sleep for a few cold hours.

  She was dressed in an odd combination of clothes. She had not dared to go back to Woodfurlong to gather up any of her things, not yet. She would have to, soon. She had sent a message to her father assuring him that she was fine and unharmed, but she had not received a reply. If Mrs Davenport had intercepted it, then Marianne felt a surge of violent action coming on. She squashed that thought. Not even Mrs Davenport was that cruel. So she still wore her fine gown from the dinner party, but with a long dark cloak from the supply that Simeon had kept in a cupboard. When he had been performing on stage, he had been assisted by a variety of women. From that same stock, she had borrowed some soft-soled shoes to change into, and a dark cloth to wrap around her hair. A hat would be too easily knocked off and she could not risk her hair tumbling down.

  From some distance away, she could see that the broken pane of glass had been replaced with a rectangle of wood as a temporary measure. It would not have mattered if it had been glass, because the putty would have been fresh enough to let them pull the pane out safely. The wood was just as easily removed. There was quarter-moon moulding holding the wood in place, with a scattering of thin panel pins, and they were easily prised out. She worked slowly, stopping to listen. There would surely be a night-watchman within, and she had chosen the window far away from any desks and offices deliberately.

  The gap was large enough for her head but nothing more. That did not matter. She poked her head in cautiously. There was a faint light far at the end of the entrance hall, showing a glow from around a corner. She turned to look at the window frame. She’d noted the alarm system on her previous visit, and now she could have a better look at it.

  She grinned. It wasn’t a modern one. This was one of Pope or Holmes’s original inventions from back in the fifties. There would be no telegraphic communication to alert anyone of the window opening. All she had to do was concentrate on keeping the circuit open so that the bell on this window would not ring. Each door and window had its own little system, its own battery, and its own electro-magnet.

  It was rather ingenious and so simple. If the sash window was raised, a piece of foil on the window edge would slide over two metal contacts and complete the circuit. The flow of current would trigger the electro-magnet to exert its mysterious force on a spring-loaded armature and that would strike the bell, bringing the night-watchman out to investigate.

  Ideally, they would have built that system right into the wooden frame of the sash mechanism but that was a lot of effort, and hard to maintain. So it was a clumsy affair tacked on to the side of the window. She followed the wire and found the gap. She had a very thin slice of polished bone that Simeon used in his tricks. She knew that it would not conduct electricity and she hoped that the window would still move, sliding over the wafer-thin hard surface. She pushed it into place, and it wedged firmly. Then she withdrew her head and listened for any footsteps.

  Nothing.

  Steadily, silently, Marianne and Simeon pressed thin wooden wedges beneath the lower edge of the sash window. Metal would have been easier but she didn’t want to risk touching any wires. They had to angle the points down and then lever upwards, very slowly. The window rose a touch and then touched the thin bone strip. It stopped.

  She breathed in, breathed out, counted to three and nodded to Simeon. They increased the pressure. It jammed, shuddered, and then – with a tiny cracking sound – continued upwards.

  No bell sounded.

  They lifted the sash only as far as they needed to be able to wriggle in. Simeon propped it with a block of wood. Again they waited to see if they had made too much noise.

  The watchman, wherever he was in the building, was not alerted to their presence. She tapped Simeon on the shoulder, and slipped into the hushed, cathedral-like reception area of the auction house. He waited outside.

  She had to discover two things. One was where the night-watchman habitually placed himself, which she assumed was in the direction of the pale light, and two was where the notebook would be kept. She assumed it would be with the jewels, and therefore the jewels would be locked in a box or safe of some kind. Therefore there had to be an inventory system. Rather than open boxes at random, she went straight to the main desk and began to search through the ledgers. She pulled them to the floor and crouched down, hidden by the wooden desk, keeping her ears strained for the sound of anyone approaching. She fumbled for her lucifers and lit a candle to read by.

  The first ledger was a record of transactions. She put it quietly to one side and turned to the next, and the next. Finally she found what she was looking for. The paper rustled under her fingers and she moved as slowly and silently as possibly, hunting down the list of “assets received” until she spotted Miss Dorothea Newman recorded in the “original owner” column.

>   Footsteps approached. She licked her fingers and pinched out the candle stub, cupping her hand over the wick as it smoked. She stopped moving and almost stopped breathing, staying hunched down in the space between the stools and the desk.

  The man passed by without even slowing or pausing, and a door closed at the far end of the hall.

  She resumed her scrutiny of the ledger with the candle freshly lit. There was a code next to the description of the items and it was easy to understand that “R1B27” was going to be room one, box twenty-seven. She carefully replaced the ledgers and slid out into the hall. She glanced in the direction that the watchman had gone. The door was closed. The pale light had disappeared.

  So she passed through to the display rooms at the rear, and spotted what she had overlooked on her first visit: numbered side-rooms. She found room one, and had picked the lock within a minute.

  Thank goodness for the hours of practise she’d put in that day, while Simeon had been out breaking windows.

  She stepped into the small room and pulled the door closed behind her. There were no windows to the main display area, and the room itself was small and dark, lit by a skylight which of course showed nothing. She wedged the stub of a candle on the central circular table and squinted into the dancing shadows. The walls were lined with small boxes. So, she guessed, the other rooms held larger items, sculptures, paintings. Room one was for small things. Now she needed a large dose of luck.

  She found box number twenty-seven marked by a brass nameplate. She pulled it out and it slid easily, being made of polished wood resting on a wooden shelf, and it seemed light. She carried it to the candle and examined the lock.

  It was complicated.

  She was not going to be able to pick it; she knew it even as soon as she started to probe into it. She could spend the night here and get nowhere. She straightened up and thought deeply. Could she break into it? Not without a great deal of noise.

  So she would have to take it with her.

  The idea filled her with dread. She only wanted the notebook, not the jewels. Somehow, stealing actual jewellery felt like a step too far. But she vowed that she would return them and perhaps even manage to do that secretly. There was a chance that no one would ever know what she had done here.

  Oh well, she told herself, faking confidence. In for a penny, in for a pound. She used one of her lock-picking tools to unscrew the nameplate and she went to the far end of the shelves and found a blank, empty box. This one was shabby and scuffed, and there was a mark where the original nameplate had been removed. She screwed the small rectangle into place and put the empty box in the gap where the original had been. It would not stand up to scrutiny but it was less eye-catching than a gap.

  She extinguished the candle, waited for the top of it to harden slightly, and shoved the squidgy lump into her bag of tools. With the box under her arm, and her bag in her hand, she only had one hand free. She took a deep breath, cracked open the door, waited and listened, and finally, heart thumping, slithered out through the display hall, through the main reception room, and back to the window.

  Simeon’s face was a pale white oval with huge terrified eyes. She passed him the box and her bag, and he dumped them on the street while she slithered through the crack. They pulled out the block of wood and carefully lowered the sash. She removed the bone shard, nearly dropping it which made her heart thud, and then they replaced the wood in the window.

  The only thing that they could not do was hammer the thin nails back in.

  They did their best to push the panel pins into the previous holes, using the wooden block to add pressure. It was an unsatisfactory job but they could not hang about. With every moment, they risked discovery. Simeon had not seen any policemen which meant it was growing more and more likely that one would pass on their regular beat.

  They picked up their items, and fled.

  Twenty-two

  “I cannot keep taking your bed,” she said, once they were back in his rooms.

  Simeon waved her objection away. “I am not going to sleep tonight. After everything that has happened, I feel too full of ... something. Electricity, maybe! I will work, instead.”

  “You must sleep! Do not make yourself ill on my account.”

  “Oh, no. It’s on my own account. I slept heavily last night and my dreams were troubling. I think that tonight, I will fight the demons while I am awake. It is easier that way.”

  “No, Simeon...”

  “Hush,” he said. All his earlier panic and fear had dissipated, at least on the surface. She marvelled at his ability to oscillate so wildly between states. Now he appeared to be his old self once more. “We have spoken about what we might need to make. Leave the notebook with me. I will read it, and see what I might conjure up for you. Now we have the jewellery too, it changes the possibilities. Meanwhile, you rest. I will sleep tomorrow, in the daylight, when they cannot get me.”

  She didn’t ask who “they” were. It was probably for the best. She was dog-tired, weary in every heavy limb, and her body obeyed his order to sleep even if her soul and mind protested.

  THE SECRET WAS REVEALED.

  Marianne had only slept for five hours and she woke while it was still dark outside. She could hear snoring from the other room. So much for Simeon’s plan to work all night, then. She rose and washed in some cold water, left out from the previous day, and wrapped a cloak around the long linen shift that was doing double-duty as a nightshirt. The workshop rooms were terribly cold and she put her fur-lined boots on. She held the cloak tightly around her body and slipped through to the other room. Simeon was full dressed and sprawled in an armchair, asleep. The notebook was on a table next to him, by a low-burning lamp threatening to go out. She adjusted the wick, and took both the lamp and the book to a window overlooking the street where at least some of the gas light was filtering through the grimy glass. She made herself comfortable and plunged into the strange, mad world of the Newman family.

  The notebook started as the journal of Mrs Newman.

  But Marianne had to backtrack as, after a few pages, she realised this was not the Mrs Newman that she had met. The dates were wrong and she referred to her husband, Mr Arthur Newman. She knew that the Mrs Louisa Newman that she was searching for was married to a man called Cecil. And then she saw that name, and realised she was reading the occasional diary and record-book of Cecil’s mother. That would be the current Mrs Louisa Newman’s mother-in-law.

  Cecil’s mother turned out to be Mrs Eglantine Newman, and she lived in Rosedene with her husband Arthur, and Arthur’s spinster sister – the late Dorothea Newman. And a child was born: Cecil.

  Mrs Eglantine Newman only wrote about large events in her life. This was no journal of the minutiae of everyday life. Marianne was grateful for that. She hadn’t wanted to wade through fifty years of what they had had for dinner, and who had said what to whom, and so on.

  There was another Mr Newman, the brother of Arthur and Dorothea. He went off to make his fortune, married, had a son called William, who went and had his own family. She put that out of her mind as irrelevant but she was soon flipping back the pages again to try to join the dots.

  Because she had reached the point where Cecil had come of age, and married Louisa, bringing it almost up to date.

  And goodness, but his parents did not agree with the match one bit. Marianne was surprised the paper had not burst into flames, such was the scorn of Eglantine Newman about her son and his proposed bride. But he was in love, and would not be gainsaid, and off they went in secret to be wed.

  Oh dear.

  And then came the mention of something unusual: “Arthur will not let the Newman Set pass to down to Cecil and his trollop. He is quite, quite sure that Cecil is dead to us now. As for me, there is still time. If he will drop that woman, then all can be as it ought to have been...”

  But there seemed to be no chance of that. Determined to make his own name, Cecil and Louisa Newman went to America. The loss of her so
n overseas seemed to have caused a change of heart in his mother. Now her tone began to soften.

  “The Newman Set is supposed to go now to William and his wife, and she is a good woman, and their son Tobias young and strong. But if Cecil would only come back to us... I am stalling Arthur. I must put him off...”

  Eventually Eglantine acted. She recorded that “I sent word to Cecil in deepest secrecy. Oh, Arthur cannot know how much my heart breaks for my son. I am afraid he is in dreadful poverty. If he can come back to England, he can find the Set in the place he loved to play as a child. Many hours he spent exploring the secret compartments of that bed. He will know what I mean if I simply say it is in his childhood castle of dreams.”

  Then a thick black line was drawn under the text, and the handwriting changed. It became small, crabby and hard to read. Marianne was squinting at it in the growing dawn light when Simeon woke up.

  He coughed and sniffed and said, from his nest in the armchair, “Have you got to the secret cabinet in the bed part?”

  “Yes, I’ve just read that. But who is the second author of this journal?”

  “Oho – keep going. No, I’ll tell you. It’s Dorothea Newman.”

  “Ah. And she is writing this recently, even in the past year. Yes, she mentions Tobias coming to stay. And the arrival of Mrs Louisa Newman! Oh, she is not happy about her.”

  “She uses terrible language for an old lady.”

  “She was old enough to say whatever she pleased.” Marianne read on while Simeon set about brewing some coffee. Right at the end, Dorothea recorded her intentions. “So the Newman Set must be sold on behalf of the boy and the boy alone. He misses school. And she will never have them. Never.”

  That was it. But they knew the rest.

  Marianne stretched and stood up. “Why, then, does Mrs Newman remain in that house?”

  “It is obvious.”

  Marianne nodded, though she was facing away from him and looking out of the window. “Indeed. She has never read this book. She does not know it exists. She does not know that the jewels, the Newman Set, have been removed. She knows that they exist and she knows they ought to have passed to Cecil when they were married. Her husband must have told her all that. She must have seen the note that Cecil’s mother sent to him – telling him they were hidden. But not where. And Cecil died before he could explain the cryptic family secret – his place of childhood dreams, his castle. To a small boy, that ancient bed would have been another country.”