The Dark Enquiry (A Lady Julia Grey Novel)

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  “Exhausted, as you can well imagine,” I responded. “Really, Brisbane, you have the stamina of a domesticated farm animal. You cannot have had more than half an hour’s sleep altogether.”

  He did not reply, but the smile deepened. He had availed himself of the generous breakfast, but I found I wanted only tea and a little toast.

  I chewed slowly, dragging my feet as it were. For half a farthing, I would have retreated to my bed and slept the morning away. But for the first time in our relationship, Brisbane seemed not just reconciled to my involvement in our investigation but eager for it, and I was not about to be left behind.

  I bolted the last of my toast and gulped at my tea, dashing out to find my hat and reticule. Pigeon and Swan were both in attendance as we left the house, and it occurred to me that the closer we drew to a conclusion in this case, the more dangerous it was. The veiled lady had already killed twice, if Mr. Sullivan was to be believed, and she would not scruple to kill again if it meant getting her hands on the letters.

  We reached Mr. Stokes’ shop in good time, and the tailor presented us with the button and an expression of despair.

  “I have discovered nothing of significance,” he said mournfully. “Except that it was most likely made for a woman’s garment. There is a very slight difference in the execution of the design for the ladies of the kaiser’s family in comparison with the gentlemen.”

  “Thank you, Stokes,” Brisbane told him as he pocketed the button. “I am sure that information will be most useful.”

  Stokes preened then, and as we left the shop, I remonstrated gently with Brisbane. “We already had that information.”

  “It never hurts to be doubly certain,” he assured me, “and next to one’s wife, the most important person to keep happy is one’s tailor.”

  I prodded him with my elbow, but he merely smiled and handed me back into the carriage. There had been a lightness to his tone, but as he settled himself, he reached into his pocket to retrieve his smoked spectacles.

  “The headache?” I asked sharply.

  He hesitated. “Only a certain sensitivity to light at present. It’s just the beginning.”

  I felt a cold hand grip my heart. “You ought to have something now to head off the pain before it has a chance to establish itself.” I was firm upon the point for two reasons. The first was that I dreaded to think of what might happen to the investigation if Brisbane were not in full possession of his faculties. I had seen him in the grip of a migraine and the various horrible cures he employed to deflect it. He might well be indisposed for some days as he wrestled with his demons. In that time, the veiled lady could easily find the letters and make her way to Berlin with them, imperiling my brother and indeed the entire government. The second reason was purely personal. I loved him, and it lashed me to see him in agony.

  He gave me a thin smile. “I will be fine.” But his face did not look fine, and as I watched, his eyes widened. He stared out the window of the carriage with unseeing eyes and did not blink. His breathing began to come fast and shallow, and there was a strange rattle in his throat.

  “Brisbane? Brisbane, can you hear me?”

  He made no response. He did not seem to be in pain, but there was some distress, some detachment that frightened me deeply.

  I would have pounded on the roof of the carriage had Monk been with us, and I cursed his absence just when I needed him most. He had more experience than anyone with Brisbane’s odd fits and visions, and I craved his calm demeanour.

  I put my hands to Brisbane’s face, shouting at him. “Brisbane, can you hear me?”

  He did not so much as blink. His concentration was complete. He saw something terrible in his mind, of that I had no doubt. His breathing was even faster now, and the gasping rattle of his inhalations frightened me.

  I had to find a doctor, aid of some sort for him. I touched the handle of the carriage door, but before I could open it, his hand closed around mine, crushing it.

  “Do. Not. Leave. Me.” Each word was a struggle, ground out between jaws that did not move.

  “I will not leave you,” I promised him. “What do you see?”

  His hands went to his throat, tearing at his neckcloth. He wrenched the fabric free, baring his throat, but still the awful gasping continued, as if each breath was a stolen thing and might be his last.

  “Dying,” he rasped.

  And then he pitched forward into my lap, senseless.

  I lifted his head. His eyes had rolled back into his head, and I rummaged in my reticule for a vinaigrette. I had seldom used one myself, but it seemed just the thing to restore Brisbane, and truth be told, I could not think of any other remedy for him. I opened the vial and held it beneath his nose, forcing him to breathe the foul vapours.

  He jerked to his senses, coughing hard. “Are you actually trying to kill me?”

  If I had been standing, my knees would have buckled at the swiftness of his recovery. A moment before, he had been reeling, gasping his last breaths it seemed, and now he pushed away the vinaigrette with great force and levered himself to a sitting position.

  He took in his disarranged clothing and my face, which I have no doubt was white with shock.

  “You had a vision,” I said quietly. I took a discreet sniff of the vinaigrette myself before corking it and replacing it in my reticule.

  “Christ. I am sorry.” He restored his neckcloth and ran a hand through his tumbled hair. “How awful was it?”

  “Not very.”

  “Then why are your hands shaking?”

  I gave up my pretense then and threw myself into his arms. “It was horrible. You were making the most desperately awful noises, like a death rattle.” I drew back and touched his face. “You seem well enough now.”

  “Yes, well, they go as quickly as they come sometimes. I am merely a little tired now.”

  “Do you remember anything of it?”

  He said nothing for a long moment. “Only that I was suffocating. There was nothing but blackness all around me, pressing closer with each breath.”

  His voice was steady, but I noted the waxy pallor that had come over him. I still questioned his use of various substances to keep the visions at bay. Absinthe, poppy syrup, hashish. I had at times had my doubts about all of them. But when I saw him in the grip of his terrible visions, any remedy seemed better than the alternative.

  I insisted upon dosing him with Granny Bones’ willow-bark tonic.

  “God, that’s vile,” Brisbane said, but I noted he seemed a trifle more energetic afterwards, and I corked the bottle and stowed it safely in my reticule. I had made a point of carrying it just on the chance it might be needed, and I felt rather smug at being properly prepared to take care of Brisbane in his time of need.

  In light of his experience, we cut short our outing and returned to the consulting rooms in Chapel Street, where Brisbane read through the post while I fiddled with the tea things, pouring out too many cups and burning the toast.

  After the fourth burnt piece, Brisbane sighed and took over the toasting fork. “What is it?”

  I hesitated. “I just wonder if perhaps you ought to think about giving way to them more often,” I began slowly.

  “This again.” His voice held no note of enquiry, only resignation.

  “Yes, this again. Hear me out. You have these monstrous headaches that torment you beyond endurance. You dose yourself with all manner of nasty things to bear the pain. Now, I understand that the visions themselves are horrifying, but if the headaches are awful enough, as are the remedies, perhaps the answer is to simply endure the visions. At least then you might learn something useful.”

  He stared into the flames as they licked at the edges of the fork. The firelight played over the planes of his face like something out of Hell, and I remembered with a start the first time I read of the abduction of Persephone by the lustful Hades. He had come charging out of Hell itself to drag her down into the depths of the underworld—a fate worse than deat
h, some would say. But my book had been illustrated with a painting of the event and I could see it still. The pale, trembling figure of Persephone, clutched against the broadly muscled chest of her dark lover, one bared arm fast about her, protecting as much as imprisoning. And I had been struck with the notion that Persephone did not seem to mind all that much…

  I wrenched my mind back to Brisbane and the matter at hand, trying very hard to ignore the writhing shadows over his face, casting him now in darkness, now illuminating him like a Renaissance saint.

  “I cannot,” he said, and in those two words was finality.

  I put a hand to his arm. “I do not know if it is because you have pushed the visions aside for so long that now they can no longer be contained, or if it simply that they are growing stronger, but you cannot deny you have been more affected by them in recent weeks than ever before.”

  He said nothing and I pressed on, gently, ever so gently. I talked of my worries for him, my fears for his safety, for his sanity. As I talked, he became very still, his features schooled to immobility. Only his hand moved, twisting and turning the fork, thrusting the bread into the fire until it burnt to bits and the bits dropped into the flames and were consumed.

  At length I paused, waiting for some reaction. And when it came, it rocked me backwards. He surged from the hearth rug where we had been huddled together like children. The first piece of furniture to hand was a chair and he took it up and broke it with a single blow of his hand, reducing it to kindling, which he threw upon the fire.

  “Brisbane!” I said, shocked more than afraid.

  He rounded on me then, clamping his hands at my shoulders and raising me roughly to my feet. “What? Are you afraid I have lost control? Let me discourse for you on the subject of control, wife. It is one I have had cause to think on most carefully these past months. And do you know what I have learned? That it is an illusion. All my life, I have prided myself on it. It has been the one constant in an otherwise precarious existence. No matter what else has befallen me, no matter who has left me, control over myself was my own choice. I staved off the visions because I could. It was all I had.”

  I opened my mouth, but his hands tightened farther still and he went on, his voice low and tight with emotion.

  “Control was all I had and it is deserting me now, do you understand that? I vowed upon our wedding day to protect you and then I allowed myself, stupidly, to promise to involve you in my work. I thought I could do it. I thought I could control my fears for you, my terror that something unspeakable might happen to you, but I cannot, any more than I can control what happens to me when the visions come. I spend my whole life keeping these emotions at bay, forcing them back, and now I find that logic and control, my only real friends in this world, have deserted me. I built my life, my career, upon them, and they have fled when I needed them most.”

  He jerked his head towards the table where I conducted my experiments and gave a short, bitter laugh. “You play with science, and you think, as I once did, that you can reduce things to a formula. You think you can solve me as if I were an algebraic equation,” he accused, and I blushed, thinking of Granny’s admonition.

  “I don’t, not really,” I began, but he raged me to silence.

  “Oh, yes, you do. You think you have only to hit upon the right remedy and I will be fixed, cured of what ails me. But there is no power in Heaven or Hell can mend me. I have spent the whole of my life attempting to understand this affliction, and I will share with you the one thing I have learned—what I am, science has not a name for. I am an anomaly, a mistake, something undone.”

  The anger ebbed from him then, and in the space between us I heard nothing except a small crack that might have been what was left of my heart.

  I slipped my arms out of his grasp and reached to put them about his neck. “Brisbane,” I began.

  He would not hear me. He pulled my arms down, gently this time, and walked to the door.

  “Brisbane,” I said again, this time through tears.

  But he did not stop and he did not look back.

  I waited for him to return, not entirely certain he would. I was heartsick and could not settle to much of anything. I scraped my latest efforts at the black powder into a paste-board box and put it into my reticule, then tidied up after my experiments. I had no inclination to attempt more. I straightened stacks of magazines and plumped cushions, wondering how I could have failed to have guessed at Brisbane’s true feelings. I had taxed him more than once with giving into his visions, but never before had he responded so savagely, and I could not blame him for it. He had carried the weight of self-loathing for a lifetime, and sometimes it was far harder to put a heavy burden down than it was to continue to plod on, mile after mile, one’s back bowed against the weight of it.

  I puttered in the attics, and as I did so, I reminded myself that Brisbane and I had shaken hands upon a wager. I was supposed to be unmasking Madame’s killer myself, and a poor job I was making of it. But my sour mood at the raging scene with Brisbane had not yet abated, and I fretted as I picked up the various bottles and basins and set to work on my photography.

  I tied on my darkroom apron and collected a series of negatives I had not yet developed. I slipped sheets of albumenised paper into wooden frames to put them in contact with the glass negatives. I then slid the whole contraption into the chemical bath, careful not to spill any of the vile liquids onto myself. As ever, the outside world began to slip away as I worked. There was something soothingly repetitive about labouring in my darkroom, and the dark, muffling draperies were curiously womblike. I worked for some time, feeling calmer than I had and even a little easier in my mind that Brisbane and I would find some way of resolving our differences.

  Towards the end of the batch, I printed a particularly charming portrait of Jane the Younger. She was screaming, with her mouth open wide, but the expression of outrage upon her face was so entirely serious that I knew Portia would find it enchanting. I fixed it in a bath of hyposulfite of soda and water, then washed it and pinned it up to dry, well pleased with the work. I turned to the next portrait. This was of Auld Lachy. He had insisted on being photographed with his favourite seashell, the one he liked to carry about as if it were a child. It was ludicrous, of course, and the tea cosy on his head merely added to the absurdity, but something about the shadows upon his face gave him real dignity. There was humour in his gaze, and something otherwordly about his expression. It was a sorcerer’s face, Merlin out of myth. He would be very pleased, and I pinned that one up, as well, promising myself that I would take it to him once I had got it nicely framed. I had no doubt he would hang it in pride of place in his hut.

  I peered into the basin as the next image began to emerge, and I smiled. It was a photograph I had taken of our household staff. They were ranged upon the back steps, with Aquinas standing in the centre, holding a bottle of wine to denote his rank as butler. Next to him, Morag stood, ramrod straight, eyes firmly closed. I had yet to manage one of her where she kept her eyes open, I reminded myself ruefully, although it did not matter in this particular photograph. Pigeon had been captured in the middle of a sneeze, and the Swiss cook had turned her face at the last minute, thoroughly blurring her image during the lengthy exposure.

  Something about that blur attached my interest. I leaned closer, fishing the paper from the basin. I fixed the image, then hung it to dry upon the clothesline that had been pegged up for that purpose. I hurried to develop the next plate. I had taken four in all, and in each of them, the cook had moved, making it impossible to identify her. She was insubstantial as a ghost, and I felt suddenly lightheaded. I sat upon the floor, thinking hard. She had come to us suddenly, just after Madame’s death. She claimed to be Swiss, but German Swiss, and as Brisbane had observed, it was difficult for anyone not a native speaker to detect a regional accent. Was it possible that she was not Swiss, but was in fact, German?

  I cast my mind back feverishly to what I had observed of the veiled lad
y at the séance. Medium height, medium build, heavy veil obscuring her features and her hair. There had been nothing to betray her, not age or colouring or mannerisms. She was a cipher, as any good spy would be, I reflected bitterly. She might be a marchioness or a milkmaid or anything in between. She might even be a cook.

  The more I thought of it, the more I liked the idea. Madame’s German contact would certainly have investigated Bellmont, would have knowledge of his family at her fingertips. She would have known that Brisbane would be drawn into this web of intrigue, and by extention, me. What more natural than to take employment in our home?

  She must have panicked, I reasoned, as soon as Madame had died and the letters had not been found. Her plot hung by a slender thread, and that slender thread was the hope that the letters might be recovered.

  They must have quarrelled, I decided. I thought again of the séance and of the message from a dark lady that Madame had related. Something about patience. She had counselled encouragement and said that all things would come right in the end but that the recipient of the message must be generous. Had that been a thinly cloaked demand for more money? What if Madame had decided to hedge her bets, keeping the letters until all of her demands were met? She might have continually raised her demands, until finally her coconspirator could stand no more and killed her, realising too late that Madame had not left the letters accessible.

  And how best to retrieve the letters? I mused. She would have turned to Brisbane. What better than taking employment in his house, in the servants’ quarters where the gossip flowed like water? She would wait and watch, safe as a fox in her den. There was no need for her to find the letters if we did it first. She had only to be patient and Brisbane and I would do the work for her.

  But then the fire broke out, I remembered. The fire would have been suspicious to her, a telltale sign that someone else was sniffing round for the letters. She had bolted then, giving notice and leaving the house whilst Brisbane and I were in the Gypsy camp, just in time to throw Agathe LeBrun under the wheels of a train. What had passed between them? Agathe and her sister were cut from the same cloth. Had she bluffed the veiled lady into believing that the letters were in her possession? Had she, too, overplayed her hand, and—frustrated and frightened now—the veiled lady had killed her?