The Affair of the Mysterious Letter

by Alexis Hall

  Since the Augur Extraordinary did not seem disposed to prevent me, I rose gratefully to my feet. My hands, of course, were still in shackles, a detail that did not appear to concern Ms. Haas. She set her fingers lightly over the locks and whispered a soft invocation, causing the mechanisms to spring merrily open.

  Catching the chains as they fell, she tossed them across the room to Augur Extraordinary Standfast. “I believe these are yours.”

  The Augur Extraordinary left her arms pointedly folded and the manacles clattered to the floor beside her. “Get out.”

  We obliged.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Some Poetry

  I confess I was quite relieved to collect my personal effects from the front desk and depart New Arcadia Yard. My encounter with the Augur Extraordinary had been unpleasant in ways to which I had grown unaccustomed since leaving Ey and had left me a little shaken. On our relatively short journey by hansom to 221b Martyrs Walk, I endeavoured to distract myself by asking Ms. Haas how in the world she had contrived to secure our release from the custody of the Myrmidons.

  “Commander Pennyfeather,” she explained, “is an odious little twerp, but his ambition makes him biddable. A truly staggering number of influential people throughout Khel, Athra, Ven, and beyond have reason to be grateful to me for various services I have rendered them, and the merest implication that one of them might be displeased by my arrest has generally proved enough to bring the man abjectly to heel. If that fails, I can also remind him of the innumerable high-profile cases that my assistance has been instrumental in solving, and that his reputation as a firm-handed, fair-minded, and above all efficacious commander of Myrmidons may at any point depend on his ability to call once more on my assistance.”

  I was somewhat troubled by this revelation, although I was somewhat more troubled by the realisation that I had quite deliberately waited until I was safely out of the hands of the Myrmidons before eliciting it. “I’m not sure being well connected or having been of assistance to the commander in the past should allow one to disregard the law.”

  “Oh, I quite agree. I believe the right to disregard the law is intrinsic and inalienable.”

  “That’s not quite what I meant.”

  “I shall tell you a liberating but terrifying truth, Mr. Wyndham.” Ms. Haas hitched up her skirts and produced from her other intimate garment a book of matches and a packet of Valentino’s Good Rough Shag. “This cosmos which we inhabit is vast and indifferent. Every law, every teaching, and every tenet by which you might choose to live your life is a fiction that exists only so long as those around you agree upon it. In reality, you are entitled only to what you can take, duty bound to do only what you cannot avoid doing, and protected only by what power is in you to protect yourself.”

  “Perhaps you are right, Ms. Haas. I am, after all, well aware that the Creator Himself is believed by experimental theologians to be nothing but a seething mass of mindless energy. But it seems to me there are certain things which, even though they may not be the case, our lives are improved if we behave as though they were.”

  She put her pipe to her lips and lit it. “That, Captain, is why I got us out of prison while you have spent your life in one.”

  “I should perhaps point out,” I pointed out, “that you also got us into prison.”

  “Which”—Ms. Haas grinned unrepentantly—“was still more interesting than anything else you could have planned for the evening.”

  “Was the point of this excursion not to determine whether Mrs. Benamara was the source of the threatening letters that Miss Viola has been receiving? A criterion by which it must be judged to have failed spectacularly.”

  “On the contrary, much as I predicted, it has succeeded perfectly well. Just not by the mechanism I originally intended.”

  “But,” I protested, “we have come no closer to either eliminating or confirming Mrs. Benamara as a suspect.”

  Ms. Haas cast me a mocking look out of the corner of her eye. “Well, of course we have. It couldn’t possibly have been her.”

  To the best of my recollection, Ms. Haas and I had seen all of the same things, spoken to all of the same people, and heard all of the same comments, and I could not for the life of me think of anything that even a mind as remarkable as hers could have pieced together into an irrefutable case for either guilt or innocence. Unless, of course . . . “Was there something in the poems?”

  “Well deduced, Mr. Wyndham. Yes, our dear Yasmine’s latest volume, which goes by the rather obvious title of Bitter Fruit, is a terribly emotional and, I am sure, adequately moving sequence of verses on the various passions, heartaches, tribulations, and disappointments that have characterised the last few years of Mrs. Benamara’s romantic life. The eponymous poem is quite explicitly about Eirene, as are several of the others.”

  “That surely doesn’t mean anything by itself.”

  She inhaled deeply from her pipe. “Not by itself. But several of the other verses speak quite eloquently of the long and difficult process by which she rebuilt her relationship with her husband. And it would seem odd to put such effort into repairing a marriage only to imperil it by stooping to so petty and provable a crime as blackmail, especially when one is married to a lawyer. On top of that, several of the poems that do concern Eirene reveal quite specific details of their relationship that, were I attempting to blackmail somebody, I would withhold specifically for use as a threat. It is, of course, possible that a blackmailer might also choose to publish some of her blackmail material in a widely circulated volume of popular verse, but it seems terribly, terribly improbable.”

  “And also,” I added, “Mrs. Benamara seemed a very gentle and respectable lady, and I find it hard to believe that she could possibly be involved in anything as sordid as this.”

  Ms. Haas answered this very reasonable observation with a groan. “Oh, Wyndham. What are we to do with you?”

  “Perhaps you could try getting me arrested again. You seem to consider that improving.”

  “Well, without that little distraction, the evening would have been a complete wash.”

  It was not becoming, but I saw here the opportunity to score at least a small victory over my companion. “You will admit, then,” I remarked, “that you were wrong to claim that nothing interesting would happen at the gathering we attended?”

  She gave a throaty chuckle. “I own no such thing. We went to a tedious party, with tedious people, and were then arrested by a tedious man who put us in tedious cells and then you, on top of that, had the added tedium of being interrogated by a tedious woman from your tedious country. It was the dullest evening I’ve spent outside my own home in the past five years. And five years ago, I was stranded in a featureless desert.”

  My interview with the Augur Extraordinary had been anything but tedious, but I resolved to put the experience out of mind and to move the conversation in another direction. “You just said”—my voice rose slightly—“our arrest provided a distraction that salvaged the evening.”

  “Do stop being tiresome, Wyndham.”

  Her chuckling became laughter and, with New Arcadia Yard already vanished into the night, I did my best to smile with her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The Manor at Quatreface,

  Part the First

  Despite the excitement of the previous evening we were actually able to arrive home at a comparatively sensible hour, and I was able to get in a good night’s sleep and respectable day’s work before Ms. Haas whisked me away on the next adventure.

  I entered the sitting room to find her—I would say waiting but perhaps it would be better to say occupying the time of my absence—sprawled on the chaise, smoking and reading the latest edition of the Times. She was dressed in a gentleman’s black evening suit of an extremely modern cut that highlighted her figure in a manner that, even accounting for my Eyan sensibilities, seemed to border o
n the indelicate.

  “Ah, Wyndham.” She glanced up from the paper. “What do you make of this matter of the Emir of Bahl’s missing amulet?”

  “A most perplexing crime. I understand that the Myrmidons are quite dumbfounded.”

  “Of course they are. Because they, like you, have made the mistake of assuming that a crime has been committed. The item in question went missing from a room whose doors and windows were all locked and bolted while the emir was visiting the mistress of the Ubiquitous Company of Printers and Typesetters, Ms. Mia Toksvig, with whom he was negotiating the price of ink. If you will refer to that issue”—she pointed imperiously at a carefully discarded magazine—“of the Ladies’ Aspirational Repository, you will note also that Ms. Toksvig recently journeyed to the Kingdom of Utu, from which she returned with a small, and poorly trained, pet monkey. That exact species of primate is renowned for its inquisitive nature and attraction to shiny objects. There were no means by which a human could have entered the room in which the theft took place, but I have been to the guild house of the Ubiquitous Company of Printers and Typesetters and I know for a fact that most of the rooms have small apertures built into the walls for the purposes of ventilation. Through such an opening, a small animal could crawl easily. I have no doubt that the monkey keeps a veritable hoard of stolen treasures in some out-of-the-way place, likely amongst the rafters of that, as I recall, rather old-fashioned building.”

  “Good gracious,” I exclaimed. “If there is even the smallest chance of your conclusions being correct we must tell the authorities at once.”

  She stretched theatrically and made a great show of stifling a yawn. “I’ve already penned a letter to Commander Pennyfeather. Assuming my summary of events is accurate, and I am certain it is, I will, once again, have demonstrated to him the advantages of my being kept at liberty. Undoubtedly, my intervention will irritate the likes of Second Augur Lawson, but that is very much their fault for being terrible at their jobs.”

  I should reiterate that I reproduce Ms. Haas’s deprecating comments about the Myrmidons in the interests of maintaining an accurate record and do not intend for them to be interpreted as representative of my own opinions, or indeed a reflection on the fine employees of that institution, who I have always found to be excellent public servants.

  Before I could reply she cast the paper aside and leapt to her feet with a cry of “Come, Wyndham. Our quarry awaits.”

  “Would that be our quarry the vampiress?”

  Readers who are following this narrative in its serialised edition may have forgotten in the months between the publication of the first instalment and the present that our suspects were as follows: Mr. Charles du Maurier, impresario of the theatrical experience known as Mise en Abyme (whom we eliminated from our enquiries in the light of the shrewd character of his current protégé), Mr. Enoch Reef (who, it transpired, had been engaged in an underworld conflict that would have made it quite impractical for him to waste resources blackmailing civilians), Mrs. Yasmine Benamara (our encounter with whom was detailed in last month’s edition), the Contessa Ilona of Mircalla (a vampire, whom we have yet to meet), and Citizen Icarius Castaigne of the People’s Republic of Carcosa (who will appear in a future escapade).

  To return our focus to the matter at hand, I had asked Ms. Haas to clarify the nature of our next suspect for the simple reason that I was deeply (and, as it turned out, accurately) concerned about the dangers that may await us were we to bait a vampiress in her lair during the hours of darkness. Once Ms. Haas had confirmed that the Contessa was, indeed, our subject and I had articulated these very reservations to her she assuaged my fears in her usual fashion.

  “Oh, don’t be such a wet blanket, Captain. If it reassures you, bring one of the pistols. I believe there are a half dozen silver bullets in that slipper over there. And in one of the decanters you will find water consecrated in the name of several solar deities, including your own peculiar nuclear god.” She paused thoughtfully. “Unless I drank it. I was a little low on mixers the other day.”

  I fetched my cane against the possibility that my wound would inconveniently resurface and availed myself of the offered pistol and ammunition. I would not normally go armed into a respectable part of the city, but when one’s destination is haunted by the living dead one reconsiders the relative merits of propriety and security. Ms. Haas had not, as it happened, consumed the holy water or, at least, I found that one of the decanters contained a liquid that appeared to be water, and which I assumed, therefore, was the reagent to which she had referred. Although, given its proximity to the whiskey, it may have been soda, and, given the overall disarrangement of Ms. Haas’s drinks cabinet and alchemical apparatus, it could also have been a solution of brine, the collected tears of a thousand virgins, or an extremely dilute medical sample. Nevertheless, I decanted it into a hip flask, hoping that, in extremis, I might at least be able to distract or discommode an adversary.

  While I had been thus engaged, Ms. Haas had completed her ensemble with the addition of an opera cloak lined in red silk, a collapsible top hat, and a gold-rimmed monocle.

  “Madam,” I exclaimed, “you surely cannot be intending to confront an unliving tyrant in such impractical garments.”

  She gave me one of her mocking looks. “In case it escaped your attention during our last escapade, I am gifted with the capacity to alter my appearance at will. I can be anyone I wish whenever I wish, one of the perks of which is that I can wear whatever the ——” And here she employed one of the words I prefer not to set before my audience. “. . . I please.”

  It was a fair point, although since she did not, in fact, often change her appearance in order to conceal her inappropriate sartorial choices it sounds, in retrospect, rather like an excuse.

  We bade farewell to Mrs. Hive, whose present body had lost an arm and most of its face, meaning she would soon be obliged to purchase another, and hailed a cab from the end of Martyrs Walk. As we rattled through the cobbled streets of Athra, I enquired further into our strategy.

  “Are you absolutely certain,” I asked, “that this is the best time of day to be going to the home of a vampire?”

  She put a finger pensively to her lips. “It’s what you might call a compromise. If our intent was definitely to slay the Contessa in her sleep we would attempt to come upon her just after dawn or close to noon, when the sunlight would render her weak. By extension of this reasoning, however, if one wishes to visit socially, arriving before sunset is considered spectacularly rude. It’s approximately equivalent to trying to call upon a human while they’re in the bath and you are dressed in a suit of Marvosi body armour and carrying a rifle. Which is to say, rather gauche.”

  “I do follow your reasoning, but what if, for example, she tries to slay us?”

  “Well, that is why we’re not visiting at midnight. And besides”—she patted me on the knee—“I rather hope it won’t come to that. Vampires are rather tricky creatures. On the one hand, they’re immortal, and immortal beings have far less cause to behave rashly than mortal ones. But on the other, they’re also creatures of overwhelming and unbearable passion, a quality that makes them a great deal of fun in some contexts but terrible bores in others.”

  I asked one more question. It was a question I would ask many times over the course of my long acquaintance with the sorceress Shaharazad Haas, never receiving an entirely satisfactory answer. “Is there a plan?”

  “Of course there’s a plan. We go to her house, we have a conversation, we see how things develop from there.”

  “Wasn’t that the plan last time?”

  Ms. Haas brightened. “Yes, and everything worked out wonderfully.”

  We disembarked outside the high stone wall of the Contessa’s estate. The gates were closed but not locked, although rust and decay made them difficult to push open, and the grounds beyond were overgrown and ill lit. Perversely, for we were not a h
undred yards from the road, I could have sworn I heard the howling of wolves in the distance. The house itself was just visible, its turrets and spires casting ominous shadows in the fading sunlight.

  Ms. Haas pressed her fingers to her temples. “Vampires,” she declared, “are the worst. For the price of this pile of weeds and rubble she could live basically anywhere. But, no, no, it has to be a crumbling manse in an obviously haunted wood. I mean, where did she even get barghests?”

  I did not quite share my companion’s jaded attitude to our circumstances. But the chill in the air, the beasts prowling the night, and the threat of some unhallowed abomination descending upon us without warning put me uncannily in mind of my early childhood. Much has improved since those days but, even now, there are still forests in Ey where one does not walk if one wishes to emerge with one’s mind and one’s soul intact.

  We pressed on towards the castle, which took some while for the grounds were extensive and not easily traversed. I was glad of my cane, for my old wound had been playing up lately, and the rough terrain would likely have further aggravated it.

  When at last we arrived, we found the windows lightless; indeed, there was no sign whatsoever of habitation save a scattering of bats circling one of the towers. The front door, which was heavy oak, its knocker gripped in the mouth of some leering imp, swung open soundlessly as we approached.

  “Perhaps,” I remarked, “I’m being overcautious. But does that not look to you rather a lot like a trap?”

  My companion nodded. “Yes, were she observing tradition, and, from the look of this place, the Contessa is nothing if not a traditionalist, she would have met us at the door to give us some assurance of our safety. The fact that she has not implies either that she is not at home or that we are being encouraged to trespass and, thereby, invite reprisals.”