The Case of the Perilous Palace (The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency, Book 4)

by Jordan Stratford

  “Say it again, Lory,” instructed Ada.

  “It again,” squawked the bird.

  “No, no. Like last time. Anyone unfamiliar in here, snooping about?”

  “Oozmansvo! Denenvuk!” the parrot declared.

  “There,” said Ada, turning to the young maid. “Is that Polish?”

  The maid looked to Baroness Lehzen, who nodded.

  “No, miss,” apologized the maid. “If it is, it’s not Polish I’ve ever heard, and my parents speak it at home. Can’t speak anything else, you see.”

  “Very good,” said the baroness. “Thank you, you are dismissed.”

  “Ma’am, if I may,” said the maid cautiously, “I think it might be Bulgarian.”

  “Bulgarian!” exclaimed Sir John.

  “Bulgarian!” repeated Lory.

  “Do you know anyone who understands Bulgarian?” Ada asked, trying desperately not to roll her eyes.

  “The kitchen boy, miss, if it pleases you,” answered the young maid.

  Baroness Lehzen looked exasperated and put up her hands. Sir John’s expression was blank. If he was guilty, Mary noted, he certainly didn’t look it.

  “Very well,” said the baroness. “Fetch him.”

  It was a few moments before the kitchen boy could be made presentable, and he finally arrived in buckled slippers that were clearly too big for him and a footman’s jacket with the identical problem. It seemed a small mercy that no one had been able to find him a wig.

  “Bulgarian?” Ada asked, without introduction or explanation.

  The boy simply nodded. It was already the strangest day of his life, being summoned so.

  Ada merely pointed to Lory, who chimed in with an “Asmegratoo!”

  “Bulgarian?” Ada repeated.

  “Not Bulgarian,” said the boy. “Croatian.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” sighed the baroness, forgetting herself in frustration.

  “Croatian,” said Ada. “Are you sure?”

  The kitchen boy nodded. Mary thought she could hear Sir John’s eyeballs rolling in his head out of sheer frustration.

  “And is there a chance that you know of anyone in the palace who speaks Croatian?” asked Ada.

  The boy shook his head, then stopped, frozen in a fog of thought. “Laundress” was all he said.

  “The laundress speaks Croatian,” said Ada, making sure.

  “Laundress!” cheered on the parrot. Even the spaniel was bored by now.

  Baroness Lehzen was holding her head in her hands, and Sir John was wondering if he should leave, or figure out what was going on first. Mary took advantage of this confusion to step toward the fireplace, drop a glove, and then lean against the fireplace to pick it up, while snatching a reddish hair from atop the mantel and folding it into her other glove. She dared not look to the others, but gave the tiniest of nods to Ada.

  The scene repeated itself, with the laundress arriving, and insisting that the parrot’s now-familiar utterances were indeed not Croatian but German.

  “But it’s not German,” said Ada, seemingly to herself.

  “Not German,” agreed Drina.

  “This is impostulant,” said Sir John angrily. “I insect that you deporch at once, innumerably. As you can surly see, the princess is business and cannot entertrain you anymore.”

  Drina rose, petting Dash as she did so.

  “I do wish to thank you for that little game,” she said, nodding to Ada and Mary, “and the baroness for orchestrating this instruction. I had no idea how many languages were spoken in this house, and am glad you added this to my tutoring session.”

  “Tutoring,” hrrmed Sir John, wondering if he ought to believe it or not.

  “Tutoring!” yelled Lory, which seemed to settle the matter. Still, Sir John stared at them until there was nothing for it but to leave.

  “Well done, Drina!” whispered Ada on the way past. Mary did her best curtsy of the day, and thought she detected a pleased look on Baroness Lehzen’s face, and a knowing wink from Drina.

  For the second time, the girls found themselves in a magnificent carriage and not going anywhere, though Mary could swear that Ada had given the proper knock on the glass. Her brain was full and heavy, and it was beginning to pull her face down somewhat, particularly her eyebrows. She needed to go home.

  Yet the carriage was not moving. Mary wondered if they had done something wrong. Ada sighed, and knocked again.

  This time, instead of silence, the knock was answered by the door being opened, and one of the footmen presenting a small silver tray, on top of which was a sheet of perfect creamy paper, folded and sealed with red wax. Stamped into the wax seal was a single, elegant letter L.

  Ada accepted it without acknowledging the footman, and Mary didn’t know if this was because Ada assumed they preferred it that way, or if she was just too tired to bother. The door closed as crisply as it was opened, and despite the lack of knock this time, the carriage glided forward.

  “L,” said Ada. “You think it’s from Lory, the parrot?”

  “The L is for Lehzen, I expect,” said Mary.

  Disappointed, Ada held out the letter, twitched her finger in the direction of Mary’s evidence-bearing gloves, and an exchange was made.

  “Oh no,” said Mary, reading.

  “What?” asked Ada, sniffing one glove.

  “It is from Baroness Lehzen. It did not go well. She says she wishes we had been more clandestine, and that Sir John has forbidden us to return.”

  “Mmm,” said Ada absently. “Would have got a better note from the parrot. I suppose that’s my fault.”

  “It’s hardly your fault you didn’t get a note from a parrot.”

  “No,” said Ada. “The forbidden-to-return bit. My fault, I think.”

  “Wait,” said Mary. “There’s something else.”

  And there was. A tiny slice of paper, scarcely longer than a fingernail and not nearly as wide. Mary took it on her fingertip and handed it to Ada.

  “Eagle mid rho,” read Ada.

  “What on earth could that possibly mean?” said Mary, excited.

  “Not sure yet. It’s from Drina, though, I’m sure of it. Baroness Lehzen must have been told to write that note at once, and she snuck this clue in there, right under Sir John’s nose.”

  “This is all a bit cryptic,” lamented Mary. “We’re only guessing about the doll diary, really.”

  “It’s a good guess, though. We’ll just go with it until a better guess comes along.” Ada changed the subject. “This hair,” she said, plucking it from Mary’s glove and looking at it until she turned cross-eyed. “Red, wiry. Like a beard hair. Only a very long one.”

  “I don’t think we saw any red-bearded gentlemen in the palace,” Mary said. “The servants were all clean-shaven. As was Sir John. What about the other glove?”

  Ada turned to the streak of dried mud on Mary’s other glove, pressing it up to her nose and inhaling deeply, as if she were starving and there were a roast turkey in the kitchen ready for the table. Closing her eyes, Ada experimentally stuck her tongue on the grainy debris.

  In her mind’s eye, Ada was no longer in the magnificent silk-and-crystal carriage but in her own room—messy, but with purpose. She imagined her precious jars arranged about her on the floor; she no longer needed to see the labels but imagined sunlight coming up in her room just the same, as each specimen would glint in its own fashion.

  She held both images in her mind: her room with her dirt map mirroring all of London, and the peculiar grey-green mud and salt from Mary’s glove.

  East.

  Shoreditch? No, farther still. Hackney, perhaps, but there was no trace of agate in the grains. River mud. South, then, but where? She imagined scanning her jars.

  Not river mud, she saw
at once. But marsh mud.

  “Stepney,” said Ada suddenly, opening her eyes.

  “I thought you’d fallen asleep!” exclaimed Mary. “Or been poisoned after you licked that muck off my glove.”

  “We are looking,” said Ada precisely, “for a red-bearded man who speaks a guttural language that is neither German, Turkish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, nor Croatian, and has very recently been to Stepney.”

  “I’ve never been there,” said Mary.

  “Neither have I. But I have a very promising jar of marsh mud at home, and I’d like to see where it comes from.”

  Ada opened the door even though the carriage was moving at a steady clip, which Mary considered a tad reckless.

  “I say,” said Ada, swirls of snow blowing into the now-chilly compartment. “How long to take us to Stepney? We’re going to the Isle of Dogs.”

  * * *

  The answer was an entire bum-numbing hour.

  At first, the coach had stopped at Marylebone, despite Ada’s earlier inquiry. But she assured the footmen that the royal coach was meant to take both girls home, and that (insisted Ada) meant Mary’s home as well, which she was pretty sure was farther into East London. And so, not wanting to be rude, the coachman and accompanying footmen bundled their scarves and cloaks higher against the snow, tucking hats lower against the wind, and ventured east.

  Ada had always assumed the marsh to be greenish-grey and vaguely unpleasant, like the small jar of mud Charles had collected for her many weeks earlier. She also expected it to be busy, as she knew of the opening of several new shipyards, foundries, warehouses, and roads into what was now one of the most bustling docks in all the world.

  But today all was quiet, and it was as if the whole island—which was not really an island, more of a swollen thumb stuck into the river—had gone back to bed and been tucked in with a perfect blanket of white snow.

  It was also much larger than Ada expected, with no reasonable way to see everything, and too chilly to leave the carriage and explore. On top of that, Mary found herself getting hungry, and tried her best not to complain.

  “Are you certain your home is nearby?” asked a footman, who had up to that point been silent. But he had knocked on the crystal window, and asked his question.

  “Oh yes,” lied Ada earnestly. “Just round this next bit, I’m quite sure.”

  Mary smiled, though she felt guilty doing so.

  “It’s not really fair, Ada,” said Mary once the footman had gone.

  “What?”

  “They’re outside freezing, and here we are all toasty warm, and we don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

  “Hmm,” hmm’d Ada. She half rose from her seat and knocked on the glass. The carriage came to a gentle halt, and the footman reappeared, waiting patiently while snowflakes settled in his wig and eyebrows.

  “We think you ought to come inside, with us,” said Ada.

  “That wouldn’t be proper, miss,” said the footman uncomfortably.

  “Oh, bother ‘proper.’ You and your friend should come inside at once.”

  Mary nodded encouragement at this idea, but the footman remained unconvinced.

  “We won’t tell anyone,” Mary assured him. “Honestly.”

  The footman clicked his heels together as best as he was able, which wasn’t very, as his silk shoes were by now quite squishy with snow. He excused himself, and after a fair bit of astonished muttering with the other footman, both returned to the coach door, whapped snow off one another’s shoulders, and climbed aboard with a great deal of bowing and apology, leaving only the coachman outside.

  Mary felt bad for him.

  “It’s, um, just around this bendy bit,” said Mary, feeling horrible for lying, yet feeling at the same time slightly better for bringing in the frigid footmen, who were rubbing their hands together for warmth. Rather than their pristine and immaculately put-together selves, the footmen seemed more like ordinary boys, their cheeks red and noses snotty from the cold, with the snow now melting from their wigs and leaving big wet drips on their laps.

  Clearly, the entire situation was for them both awkward and uncomfortable, so they settled into more or less pretending that they were not there at all, which seemed to Mary to be a prudent tactic.

  Mary herself quietly wondered what all this was in aid of, seeing as she and Ada didn’t even set foot out of the carriage. They simply passed ship after ship, warehouse after warehouse, and lot after lot dumped with giant, rusting chains and huge splintered crates, all covered with snow. Distant sounds of hammering and creaking and shouting would now and then make it between the white muffle and the crystal panes. It had been half an hour, and they had looped all the way round the odd thumb of the old marshlands.

  “Very well, then,” said Ada after a long silence. “Home now.”

  The two footmen looked at each other, glanced out at the chill, winced, and nodded to one another. Without bothering to tip their hats at the girls (they were, after all, still pretending they weren’t there), they knocked on the glass and barely waited until the carriage had come to a stop before swinging themselves out the door and resuming their demeanor as proper, disciplined palace footmen.

  The girls could hear the jingling of all the bits between horse and carriage, and they all clopped along together back west, toward Marylebone.

  “I must confess, Ada, I have no idea what all of this was supposed to accomplish,” said Mary, more tired and frustrated than she let on.

  “The Trident, out of Jamaica. The Wallace, from India. The Bonnie Marguerite, from Borneo. The Solace, from Boston in America.”

  “Those are ship names,” said Mary, remembering a few of them.

  “The Cockerel, from Bristol. The Donovan, from Ireland. La Paloma, from Portugal,” Ada continued.

  Mary interrupted. “Well done, Ada! That’s a lot to remember. But how do you know where they’re from?”

  “Flags, sometimes,” said Ada. “But usually they have their home ports painted on the bum.”

  “Stern, Ada. Ships do not have bums.”

  “All the same,” said Ada. “Clues aplenty.”

  “And any one of those ships might have a red-bearded sailor who speaks something that sounds like Hungarian,” mused Mary, disappointed.

  “Or Croatian,” Ada agreed. “But wouldn’t all the sailors from Irish ships be from Ireland, for example?”

  “No, I don’t think so, Ada. Sailors end up on ships from all around the world. I suspect that’s why they become sailors in the first place.”

  “I didn’t know that,” acknowledged Ada. “Makes sense.” She looked out the window to late December’s late afternoon. “Late,” Ada repeated, only not really, as she hadn’t said it aloud the first time. “We’ll have to wait till tomorrow night.”

  “What happens tomorrow night, Ada?”

  “We break into the palace.”

  “Good heavens! How should we ever do that?” Though this was not the first time Mary had heard of this idea, it was the first time she had been horrified at the thought of it. “There are servants everywhere, and we’re specifically forbidden to return. And there are guards, Ada. Actual palace guards. Not like Newgate guards or museum guards, but actual guards with swords and halberds and all manner of whatnot.”

  “Eagle mid rho,” said Ada, as though it were some sort of answer.

  “I don’t know what that means, Ada,” said Mary.

  “Me either,” admitted Ada.

  * * *

  The royal carriage returned to Marylebone.

  It was near supper, and both girls were starving; Mary insisted that she proceed home to help her family with dinner, and Ada insisted that Mary stay and eat something before going home. As usual, Ada was much better at insisting.

  Mary marveled once more how different the grand
house was from her own, yet even in its grandeur, the Byron house had come to be a sort of refuge for her. She knew its house-sounds, though far quieter than those of her apartment in the Polygon. She knew its smells, from the lavender in the linens to the lemon on the banisters. But the dust of books and the smoke of warming fires were exactly the same, and soothed and thawed her here in what had become a second home.

  Anna served them in the library, out of sight of Ada’s grandmother. Ada was already building what appeared to be furniture out of the room’s many volumes. Atop one stack was a small jar of mud, which Ada had fetched just to make sure it was a match for the sample on Mary’s glove. As Anna brought up the tray of hot soup and warm bread, she took the glove away for a brushing.

  “Oh, and Lady Ada, Peebs left this for you,” she said, handing over a letter.

  Ada already had her nose in two books, so without looking up she waved the thing in Mary’s direction. Mary dutifully opened and scanned the letter.

  “Peebs regrets not being here, he says. He has some family business at Field Place.” She put down the letter. “Field Place, where’s that?”

  “Field Place, Worthing, Sussex, forty-nine miles away,” said Ada, again without looking up.

  “Forty-nine miles? It will take him ages in this weather.”

  “Might it be a counterfeit letter?” Ada asked, more out of habit than anything. “We’ve had counterfeit letters before.”

  “Yes, you mentioned that previously. No, Ada, I think it’s a perfectly boring, ordinary letter.”

  “Peebs is boring,” Ada agreed.

  “I don’t think so,” said Mary, feeling bad for him.

  “Not in a bad way,” said Ada. “Just not exciting in a criminal-mastermind kind of way.”

  “True,” said Mary, though wondering if Peebs really did have the makings of a criminal mastermind yet chose not to be one. Looking out at the streetlamps painting the snowflakes briefly gold before they settled, she yawned.

  “Yes, you must,” said Ada.