“You found nothing of him?” I asked him.
“No, Miss.”
“Then the man is likely several miles onto the moors by now. I will come upstairs and see what can be seen.” I stood, glad of something to do. “Mrs. Cooper, lock the door behind me, just in case, and see that Mary has a place to lie down, or that she gets to her mother’s, would you?” I saw Mary cross her arms at this, frowning at the table.
“Don’t go for long, little niece,” my uncle called, eyes on the watch. “Not for long! We are not sleepy, but it is the wrong time for kitchens. The wrong time. I can wait in the wrong time without my niece for twenty, and then we must be back in the right place for the right time. I can only wait for twenty.”
“Of course, Uncle.” I leaned close to Mrs. Cooper. “If the watch is repaired before I return, there is a broken clock on the top shelf of the sideboard.”
Mrs. Cooper nodded unhappily, her round face like a worried dumpling. Water came unexpectedly to my eyes. “Don’t worry, Aunt Bit,” I said. “I’ll be gone fifteen minutes, no more.”
I kissed her wrinkled cheek before I went out the door.
Matthew waited for me in the kitchen corridor, hat in hands, brow troubled, his great weight shifting from foot to foot, making the floorboards squeak. He would not meet my eyes. “Miss,” he said slowly, “I’m thinking there’s no need of you going up. There’s really …”
“Did Mr. Cooper allow Dr. Pruitt to finish his examination?” Dr. Pruitt was brought to Stranwyne’s village nearly six months ago, a decent, highly trained, rather progressive physician, who had unfortunately lost his reputation the same day a prominent patient lost his life. Mr. Cooper had been in high dudgeon ever since.
“Yes, Miss. Dr. Pruitt says he was gone before he hit the floor, most likely. And Mr. Cooper agrees with him, for what that’s worth. But I do think there’s no need for you to be …”
My stony look must have quelled this last observation, which would no doubt have expressed reservations about a young lady going voluntarily into the presence of death. Even if she had been present when it happened. Matthew’s mouth formed a straight line, his gaze fixed on a place somewhere about ten feet behind my left ear. Or, I thought suddenly, perhaps it was the nightgown. I pulled the blue dressing gown tighter as we started down the corridor.
“And have you found where John George has gotten to?” I had some particular words planned for the man I had assigned to stand guard in my corridor.
When Matthew remained silent, I looked up. His face informed me of the truth before his voice could. Shock stilled my feet, and then an abrupt conflagration of fury had me setting a brisk pace down the hall.
“How?” I asked him.
Matthew jogged to catch up. “His throat was cut, Miss.”
I climbed the stone stairs that led to my wing of the house, to what had always been my inner sanctum. “Where was he?”
“In the chapel, Miss.”
I reached the top of the stairs, the smell of burnt carpet wafting down the corridor, horror, indignation, fury, and sadness all at war inside me. I had liked John George. Had trusted him. What had he been doing in the chapel? Had he followed Uncle Tully? The clock room was adjoining, only one door away. I thought of how close I had been to my lifeless friend when finding my uncle. I thought of how close those two masked devils had been to my uncle when they poured that friend’s life onto the chapel floor. How dare they? I threw open the door to the smoldering workshop, letting it bang hard against the wall.
The room flickered with candle glow. Dr. Pruitt and Mr. Cooper were crouched over the inert body, their two heads coming up to frown at my entrance, the shadowy, metallic body parts of my uncle’s inventions glinting randomly in the light. I marched up to the thing lying on the carpet. Now that the candles were lit, I could see the man’s mask was no more than a sack of dyed linen, crude holes cut for the eyes. I reached down and tugged at the cloth, jerking the lifeless head in a way that made Mr. Cooper wince. And when the mask came away, I saw gray-brown hair, skin paling beneath unshaven stubble, open eyes of a nondescript color. A complete stranger to me. The knife he had held at my throat lay on the carpet a few feet away. The blade was bloodstained, more blood than could have possibly been my own.
I ransacked the man’s pockets, ignoring the tut of Mr. Cooper, and found one surprisingly clean and unmarked handkerchief, a shilling, two francs, and one pence, and a crumpled sheet of paper. I stood and smoothed the paper, holding it to the light, studying the penned squares and lines that took me several moments to recognize as a rough plan of Stranwyne Keep. The position of my corridor was marked with an X.
I turned away without a word, the crude map in my hand, and walked out the door to the hallway. I leaned against the corridor wall, well away from the workshop’s light spill, and allowed the guilt to settle down on me, like snowflakes of iron, falling one by one, each adding their weight to my shoulders. The north wind came up, the ripping breeze that was as much a part of Stranwyne Keep as my Uncle Tully, and an unnatural, resonant wail began, the trogwynd, rising around the walls of the house, drowning out the low talk of the men in the workshop. I used its noise to move silently along the corridor, down the stairs, and out of my wing of the house.
Light showed from beneath the kitchen door, where my uncle was chattering, but I moved quickly past it, slipping instead into another door a little farther down the hall. There was no gaslight here, and I felt for the candle and matches I kept on the table. The matches were an extravagance, but I didn’t want to bring a light in here with me; I didn’t want anyone to know I came. The match struck, sizzling, and the plainest room in Stranwyne leapt into visibility. It was little more than a closet, a bed neat and unslept-in, the hooks for the clothes empty, a set of carving tools abandoned on a worktable. But Lane had wanted his room this way, small and with no fuss.
I sat on the edge of the bed and closed my eyes, blocking out the candlelight, breathing against the weight that sat on me. Lane’s smell was here, though only just. It was one of the reasons I knew Mr. Wickersham’s letter six weeks ago could not have been true, why I had thrown the paper on the coals and watched the ink burn. How could Lane be gone from the world — like the dead man upstairs and John George — and his scent still be in this room? The deepest part of me, a place that had nothing to do with logic, screamed that it could not be, that it was not possible, that therefore Lane must be somewhere.
I had nearly three minutes before I was late for my uncle, and therefore two minutes to let my tears flow, and to wonder if I could ever be the little niece that knew what we should do and when. Lane Moreau would have let me come in here to cry if I needed to, I knew that. I just didn’t know why he had not come back to me.
Mr. Babcock leaned back in his chair as I finished my recitation, the buttons of his waistcoat straining. It was the second dawn since the Frenchman had died in my uncle’s workshop, and the sun had only just crested the moors. But I had been prepared for one of Mr. Babcock’s infamous early arrivals, the natural result of putting himself on a train as soon as my express could have arrived in his London offices. The story I told him had been clear and succinct, my manner calm, expression collected. In other words, I was an utter sham. I held my hands in my lap, watching the shrewd eyes of the Tulman family solicitor hood themselves into a familiar expression of deep contemplation. My gaze moved from Mr. Babcock to the settee, where I found Mr. Wickersham coolly regarding me.
Mr. Wickersham appeared exactly as he had the last time he’d dropped unexpectedly into my morning room, even down to the nameless companion who sat beside him, scribbling our words into a notebook. If it was not the same scribbling man, then it was another of the breed, showing the similar traits of too much ink and too little sun. But Mr. Wickersham was of a different variety, more farmhand than gentleman of vague position in the British government, with large, rough hands and a manner to match. A lump of coal broke in the fireplace, glittering, the nameless man’s pe
n scratched across the paper, and I challenged Mr. Wickersham’s gaze with growing dislike each passing second.
“Well, this is bad, my dear. Very bad,” said Mr. Babcock eventually. I could not disagree with him. He drummed three fingers on his round belly. “I must say that I considered Mr. Wickersham’s warnings last month to perhaps be a bit overcautious. But now I am inclined to believe that we have not been near cautious enough.”
“I put men at the doors and in the corridor,” I said, the weeping of John George’s widow still fresh in my mind. “But my uncle will wander. Perhaps with a man at —”
“Tosh, Miss Tulman,” Mr. Wickersham broke in. “This house is a sieve, and you know it.”
My gaze went back to the settee. He was right, of course. I had seen the scratches on my lock, made by a thin tool used to turn my key from the outside, and we had also found where the two men had entered, a broken window in a lower storeroom, two floors and a dozen rooms away from any ears that could have detected the shattering glass. A house as vast and empty as Stranwyne Keep had to be vulnerable, but how I hated Mr. Wickersham for saying so. There was one empty room in Stranwyne for which I blamed him entirely.
I caught a glimpse of Mr. Babcock’s eyes, now unhooded, lifted to my face and perceiving my anger. “Katharine, my child, there is common purpose here. We would do well to remember it.”
I took his gentle admonishment and focused my attention on the matter at hand. “Mr. Wickersham, obviously you believe my uncle is not safe at Stranwyne. If we —”
“Do you not believe it yourself, Miss Tulman?”
“We would value your opinion on how to make him so, I’m sure,” I replied, my voice crackling with ice. Mr. Babcock sighed while Mr. Wickersham eyed me from behind his bushy mustache.
“Miss Tulman, a child of only marginal intelligence could enter this house without being seen, and we are not dealing with children or stupidity.” He held out a hand and the scratching of the pen instantly stopped, the nameless man’s eyes seeking a portion of the carpet and remaining there, as if he were one of my uncle’s clockwork machines that had suddenly wound down. I looked in surprise from the man back to Mr. Wickersham, who was leaning forward in his chair.
“England is at war in the Crimea, Miss Tulman, and with France as our ally against the Russian tsar. The —”
“We do get the newspapers at Stranwyne, Mr. Wickersham,” I said, unable to help myself. The man was schooling me like a child. He smiled at my rudeness.
“What you perhaps do not know, Miss Tulman, is that the alliance between England and France is an uneasy one, one that will likely continue to be uneasy, no matter who wins this war or which country controls what in the Ottoman Empire. And the war does not go well. The Royal Navy has suffered a defeat at the hand of the Russians, a defeat so humiliating that the admiral in command shot himself in the hold of his own ship rather than face his government.” I grimaced, but Mr. Wickersham took no notice. “It is the strength of our navies that will decide whether England or France is the supreme power in Europe. And the emperor has built ironclad batteries, floating arsenals impregnable to cannon that can bombard a shoreline, and ironclad ships powered by steam are not far behind them. These French ships will be fast and impervious to our weapons. They will be unstoppable, Miss Tulman.”
“You seem rather certain of these doings by the Emperor Napoléon,” I cut in. “Just where has all this information come from, Mr. Wickersham? From Lane Moreau, by any chance?”
“I will say to you again, Miss Tulman, that the late Mr. Moreau’s doings in France had nothing to do with me or the British government.”
Liar, I thought.
Mr. Wickersham leaned even farther toward me in his chair, the move almost a threat. “The only information I have of Mr. Moreau, Miss Tulman, is the notification of his demise six weeks ago.”
If I could have flayed the man alive with my eyes, I would have. “Then perhaps you could provide me with this document, Mr. Wickersham? Or a certificate of death?” Mr. Babcock sighed heavily from his chair.
“I have no obligation to provide you with anything, young woman. But let us stick to the pertinent facts, shall we? We believe that guncotton is currently being manufactured by the French, the same explosive the man you knew as Ben Aldridge was testing for use in your uncle’s mechanical fish. We …”
Instantly my mind went to my uncle’s fish, swimming in a sleek metallic streak beneath the surface of the water, never sinking, never floating, holding its depth for reasons only Uncle Tully could fathom. To him the fish had been a “toy,” no different than the peacock that walked or his humanlike machines that played games or musical instruments. It was Ben Aldridge who had seen the great monetary advantage of handing France my uncle’s fish filled with a powerful explosive. I felt a moment of grim happiness that Ben was dead. Then I realized Mr. Wickersham was still speaking and that his thoughts had been following my own.
“… that your uncle’s fish would become an exploding weapon that could sink the fastest, most unsinkable ship clad in iron. If the Emperor Napoléon acquires this weapon first, then the race to naval supremacy is over. France will rule the seas and, inevitably, will rule Britain. The emperor knows this well; the fact that two French-speaking men entered your house to take Mr. Tulman tells us so, and it tells us that the time for perfecting this crucial weapon grows short. But I also believe the attempt to take Mr. Tulman means that the French cannot make their version of his mechanical fish work.”
I stared at Mr. Wickersham. Mr. Babcock’s fingers drummed. “But how could the French even begin to make their own version?” I replied. “The only models of my uncle’s fish were destroyed. And only Ben Aldridge had discovered how the device worked — if he even had — and he is long dead. There is no one to demonstrate, no model to refer —”
“Hence the difficulties, I’m sure!” Mr. Wickersham interrupted. “You know that we have long believed that Mr. Aldridge — or Mr. Arceneaux, to use his true name — had an accomplice, a contact on the French side. I believe that enough was known about the workings of the fish to attempt the creation of another, and that the attempt does not go well. It has not gone well for the British, and I am certain we began with more information than Napoléon did.”
Mr. Babcock’s mouth rounded in a silent “ahhh,” as if Mr. Wickersham had spoken something he’d been waiting for, and the little fingers changed to a staccato rhythm.
“Do you mean to say,” I asked, “that you have been trying to make one of Uncle Tully’s fish as well, Mr. Wickersham?”
He smiled amiably. “France may be ahead of us in the race to an ironclad ship, Miss Tulman, but both countries shall certainly have them. It is the side that has the weapon to destroy an ironclad that will own the seas, and that is a prize that both Her Majesty Victoria and the Emperor Napoléon would very much like to reserve for themselves. England and France may march together in the Crimea, but do not forget that the first Napoléon Bonaparte ruled Europe and came close to defeating us. And now his nephew Napoléon the Third has dissolved the French parliament and crowned himself emperor. He is out to recapture the reign and glory of his family, Miss Tulman, make no mistake about that. And I, for one, would not like to see that much power fall back into the hands of a Bonaparte.”
A small silence fell. Mr. Wickersham slapped his knees, and the limp man beside him seemed to wake up, immediately resuming the scratching of his pen. “So I am sure you will understand when I say that we expect your uncle in London as soon as is possible.”
His words hit my mind like a physical slap. “I’m afraid I must have misunderstood you,” I replied. Mr. Wickersham shook his head.
“You are no simpleton, Miss Tulman, and have better sense than to make an enemy of your own government. We will be prepared to collect Mr. Tulman by half past three on the day after tomorrow.”
“But you cannot do that.”
Mr. Wickersham smiled. “And why can we not?”
“Mr. W
ickersham,” I began as if speaking to a particularly slow child, “you do not understand. My uncle will not work or create on your command, no matter how much you might wish him to. If you forcibly remove him to unfamiliar surroundings, he may not even function. I have grave doubts that he would even survive the journey.”
“And yet we cannot risk having him here, where the emperor can so easily snatch him. It would take half a legion of soldiers to secure this estate. We might as well telegraph our intentions to Paris. England is in need of this weapon, Miss Tulman, if only to hold the balance of power, no matter what the consequences. So to London he goes.”
I balled up a piece of skirt in my hand. “So what you are saying, Mr. Wickersham, is that you consider this weapon to be worth more than the life of my uncle. Do I understand you correctly?”
“Katharine, my child,” said Mr. Babcock softly, though there was steel in the little man’s voice. I closed my mouth as he turned to Mr. Wickersham. “Miss Tulman is understandably distressed. I think a time of quiet in her own chamber, for refreshment and reflection, would be necessary for any young lady in her position. Do you not agree, Mr. Wickersham?”
Mr. Wickersham looked hard at the little lawyer and then at me. “You are quite right, I am sure,” he said. He got to his feet, adjusting the position of his jacket sleeves. “But there is one more subject for Miss Tulman’s necessary ‘reflections.’ Her Majesty’s government is well aware that Mr. Tulman has … eccentricities, shall we say, and understands how necessary Miss Tulman’s person is to his health and well-being. Therefore it is not only Mr. Tulman’s presence that is required in London, but that of his niece as well.”
The bushy mustache turned to face me directly. “We shall return at half past three on the day after tomorrow. Please have your affairs in order, Miss Tulman, and do be prepared for an extended stay.” He gave us both a slight bow before he smiled. “And we will be setting a watch on both the road and the river. For Mr. Tulman’s continued safety, of course. A good morning to you both.”
A Spark Unseen Page 2