“The jewels, young Sitt. Diamonds and other gems, bought by the English baron who was lost in his airship. He had them here to decide which to buy, and left before sending them back. The jewel merchant is not paid, and now he knows the baron is not coming back, he is angry. The hotel is not paid for the baron’s rooms, and is angry. The lady who was supposed to pay has said she will not pay. Not for the baron’s rooms, nor the baron’s parties, nor the jewels.” He scratched one ear where his fez had rubbed it. “She is angry too, I think.”
“This lady who was to pay, was she staying at the hotel?” Could the tea gossips have had it so wrong, and the widow was supporting the baron instead of vice versa?
“No, young Sitt. That lady is far away in England. She has only the man at the bank to speak for her. The baron had papers to let him take money from the bank.”
Not the widow, but another woman, in England, ensnared by the dashing adventurer. Maddie elicited the name of the bank and handed over a few modest coins, already mentally composing her next headline. Large-living baron bilks lonely lady? If someone could be brought to reveal her name, CJ could surely find the woman for a quote.
As she returned to her room along the quiet, second-class corridor, with its boring British box-shape and the message track with absolutely no ornamentation to disguise its brassy utility, Maddie once more pondered her new byline. It had to look good in 10-point type. Ah, well, she could remain “Our Cairo Correspondent” for one more article.
No portrait, though, not ever. Under the new deal, her parents could withhold her allowance if she were recognized while doing something so outrageous as earning a living. The allowance had paid her way to Egypt and, until the coin began to trickle in from fashion columns, had provided her shelter, her food, and the endless supply of white gloves that gave her dubious profession an air of respectability. If it stopped, her savings would barely get her back to England at the end of the current assignment, and CJ would not offer another post if the project lost her father’s grudging favour. Nobody willingly offended a Steamlord, especially over a family matter.
She stepped into her utilitarian bedchamber and told TD, “Tomorrow I will wear my best suit and the hat with the ribbons that hide you best. We will infiltrate the bank, and then the jeweler. You must record any conversation at the first, and collect images at the second. A pictorial record of pilfered jewels will catch CJ’s fancy no end.”
Setting her notebook on the desk in preparation for an article on Indian-style parasols for Spring, she flipped up the lid on the inkwell and prepared to dip her pen. She paused, and thoughtfully rested her index finger on a faintly shiny bit of the carved walnut surround. One push and she would have her old visiting card back from the secret drawer. The Honourable Madeleine Main-Bearing, daughter of the Marquis of Main-Bearing, could command assistance from any official in the British Empire, and some beyond it. A mere bank manager would be as butter in the sun before that card. But there were only five, and if she carried them, she would be tempted to use them to smooth her path. Showing one would be tantamount to admitting she could not, in fact, make her way in the world alone. She would not admit that. Not yet. She pulled her finger away, picked up the pen, and began to write.
Chapter Two
WITHIN A VERY few minutes of walking into the bank, Maddie found herself returned to the street outside. The sun warmed a face positively chilled by polite refusals. On pretext of adjusting her hat, she touched TD’s beak to stop him recording. The words spoken inside that edifice were not a shining example of investigative journalism anyway. She would have to do better, or resort to her family visiting card after all. Ah, well, the jewel merchant was only a street away, housed not in the medina in the street of the jewelers, but on a thoroughfare catering to Europeans. She would not approach him head-on.
In the jeweler’s modern shop, after a rapid assessment of Maddie’s two-year-old suit, a minor functionary came forward and asked, in impeccable English, how he might assist her.
“I do hope you can,” she said. “My cousin is passing through Cairo soon, after his tour of the archaeological sites, and asked me to look for jewels suitable for his fiancée back in England. He saw something purchased by his old schoolmate, Baron Bodmin, which he thought came from here. Do you have pieces that might interest him?” She watched the gears turn as the minion made the calculations: a gentleman of means, acquainted with an absconding baron but not claiming him as friend, who could afford a winter’s tour in Egypt and wanted a gift suitable for an English woman of similar social standing. He bowed slightly and began to draw out velvet-lined trays.
“The baron, as I recall, was partial to the Nefertiti line, made by our finest smiths in honour of that most beloved consort.” He expanded upon the jewels as he lifted them one by one from their trays: how the baron had chosen this style of golden brooch fixed with lapis and onyx, in the shape of the long-dead queen’s official profile. Also a necklace like this one, mimicking the Nefertiti collar’s bright hues in sapphires and diamonds.
Maddie reached up to hold her hat as she bent over the trays, and made many admiring noises. When the minion had worked his way through the collection she asked, for her cover story, to see a few pieces not related to Nefertiti, and came away almost certain that TD had captured images of very similar pieces to the missing jewels. She hurried back to the hotel, past the ladies gossiping on the terrace, and set the little bird on the desk next to the inkwell. If the widow in herself was not memorable, perhaps her jewels would help track her down. They would indubitably add allure to a newspaper article about her.
After a luncheon at which the same speculations were heard from the same ladies about the baron and the widow, Maddie started upstairs intending to compose an article about the missing jewels. Should she include the baron’s financial finagling, or would that be risking a suit for libel? Best to inform CJ separately and let him decide. She made a mental note to seek out legal opinions on what constituted libel. This was never a problem when all she wrote was fashion commentary, but an investigative journalist needed to know what was fit to print.
Lady HH’s pink niece caught up to her as she left the ascender. Huffing a bit from hurrying up the stairs in a ridiculously tight pink-and-cream corset, the niece leaned against the flocked wallpaper to regain her breath, and beckoned Maddie closer.
Maddie could not recall immediately which of the nieces this was. They both had the family last name, after all. “Do you require aid, er, Miss?”
“Clarice.” Pink sucked in as deep a breath as her corset would allow. “My cousin is Nancy. Not that I expect you to remember, when you meet so many people in your work. Although you mentioned my Indian muslin hat trimmings particularly back in January. It was in a Cornwall Cog & Goggles column.”
“Ah.” Maddie nodded as if she remembered. “And you would like to bring a new trim to my attention?”
Pink—er, Clarice—shook her golden curls and looked toward the ascender. “I haven’t much time before Nancy comes looking for me.”
“Oh.” Maddie glanced around the deserted corridor. “Would you care to step into my chamber?”
“Please!” Clarice followed her to the less exalted wing of the hotel. In the room she gazed around at the sturdy furniture without comment and seated herself at the little table only when invited to do so. Maddie sat in the other straight-backed chair and opened her sequined notebook.
“You wanted to tell me something? About the mysterious, er, widow?”
Clarice bit her lip. “Could you tell me something first?”
“If I may.” That was sufficiently vague, allowing Maddie to withhold information for any number of reasons.
“Is it true that Baron Bodmin’s nephew, Sir Ambrose Peacock, is coming here? To Cairo?”
“It was mentioned in the aethernet news from London. Overland, so he won’t arrive for several days at best.”
The pink niece sighed. “I hoped you might have heard from your newspaper source
s whether he is truly coming, for he cannot send me another message unless Colonel Muster comes back to Egypt.”
“Colonel Muster, that friend of the baron’s? What has he to do with Sir Ambrose?”
Clarice looked down at her hands. “The colonel brought me holiday greetings from Sir Ambrose at Christmas.” The obvious question was why the baron’s nephew was sending messages by an intermediary, but that was nothing to Maddie.
“If I hear anything particular about the nephew, I will tell you.” Ignoring the girl’s sigh, she set out Tweetle-D’s images of the jeweled collar and the Nefertiti brooch. “Do you remember the jewels the mysterious widow was wearing? Were they like these?”
“Oh, yes, very like,” said Clarice, after a glance. “Colonel Muster was very put out about the baron buying them.”
“Your aunt did not wish Colonel Muster discussed yesterday?”
“Aunt disapproved of my talking aside with an older gentleman. Even a war hero like the colonel. She said the family would never allow me to throw myself away on a penniless ex-officer with tarnished medals. I did not quite understand what she meant, for his medals looked well-polished to me. But I could not say so, for he only took me aside to hand over a note and a little gift.” Clarice’s pink cheeks grew rosier. “From Sir Ambrose, that is. I dared not mention him to Aunt when she asked what the colonel wanted.”
An illicit attachment to the baron’s nephew? When had it developed? “Sir Ambrose must have left Egypt before I arrived.”
“Oh, he did not come to Egypt at all. He hoped to when Father sent me here, but his uncle, the baron, would not pay his passage. He paid for the colonel to come out, and that funny professor who visited him over Christmas. So why not his own nephew and only heir?”
To that grievance there seemed no satisfactory answer. Maddie tried to draw Clarice back to exactly what the colonel had said of the widow, but the girl could not be swayed until she had told of her first meeting with Sir Ambrose at the British Museum, and their subsequent snatched moments, hand-pressings, and sweet compliments, finally finishing with her father’s outrage when her little romance came to light. “He said horrible things about dear Ambrose’s motives, and sent me all the way to Aunt in Egypt, where I am to remain until the start of the London Season. So you see, I could scarce mention dear Sir Ambrose to Aunt when she asked what Colonel Muster wanted, because he was bringing me news of the man I was forbidden to see.”
“Yes, I quite comprehend,” said Maddie, suppressing an eye-roll. Clarice’s tale was exactly the silly debutante chatter she had abandoned along with her old life. Two years made a vast difference in the preoccupations of a gently-raised girl. Especially when that two years was filled, as Maddie’s had been, with far-ranging adventures and a vastly wider array of acquaintances than a peer’s daughter would ever meet under normal circumstances.
“As soon as the baron is declared dead,” Clarice continued, “Sir Ambrose will inherit his uncle’s estate in Cornwall. I’m sure Father will let me speak to him then. But he hasn’t yet approached Father and Aunt won’t budge without Father’s word. You must see how frustrating that is.”
Having dodged her own family’s plans for a suitable match, Maddie felt a pang of sympathy for the girl. Suppressing it, she asked for the third time, “And the colonel told you something about the widow?”
“Well, he knew for a fact there was no officer in that regiment by the name she claimed was her husband’s.”
That much Maddie had already learned. “Is that all?”
Clarice nodded, then shook her head. “Oh, and she snooped around the aerodrome trying to get aboard the baron’s airship, before she was ever introduced to him. The baron took it to indicate she was interested in airships and adventures, and was even more besotted with her.”
That was the sum of Clarice’s knowledge. Easing the girl out of the room took a few minutes more, and a faithful promise never to divulge to Aunt or Papa that Sir Ambrose had sent her a billet-doux and a Christmas gift all the way to Cairo, while he was still poor and ineligible.
“Well, TD,” said Maddie as she closed the door, “what has my initial investigation wrought? Only that the baron had a lady investor, whose money he spent lavishly, as well as a poor nephew in England, a mysterious mistress in Cairo, and, oh, yes, his two friends who were here at Christmas. Colonel Muster and that professor. What do I know about them?”
As she settled for her pre-prandial rest, Maddie let her mind drift back to the British Christmas festivities.
She had reached Cairo in mid-December, stepping off the Nile steamship’s gangplank to the exotic wail of Egyptian reed flutes. After a time, she recognized the tune the street musicians strove toward: O Tannenbaum. It had been a chilly, overland journey through the winter rains from England to Venice by train, and then on a steamship from Venice. An airship would have arrived in half the time and been considerably more comfortable, but even a second-class air passage cost twice as much as surface travel.
At Shepheard’s Hotel, she’d faced less risk of recognition than she’d feared for her first time back amongst the society she’d fled two years earlier. No more that delicate blossom of English girlhood, her facial features all but eclipsed by the rat-padded, over-curled coiffeur in the signature bronze locks of the Main-Bearings. The hair had been the first thing to go, the bottom half hacked off in a Euston Station powder room and the rest painted a hasty brown, scraped into a practical chignon. Her fair skin was weather-kissed now in a way that would seriously distress her mother, but back then she had merely wiped away the expensive cosmetics to have a face as commonplace as any working girl’s. She could also rely upon the nobility’s notorious inability to see the faces of the lower classes. Nobody who mattered recognized the dainty daughter of a peer behind the ink-splashed notebook of a hard-working lady journalist, because they were not looking for one.
Arriving in the heart of Cairo, Maddie found the December air not warmer than an English summer day, but so dry it stuck in her throat, and scented exotically, although not always pleasantly, with spices and sweating humans. An open space along the river was crowded with cargo, camels, and harried officials. She followed her porter and her trunk past a line of self-propelling carriages and traversed a wide avenue filled with carts and camels. Beggars dogged her for a few steps before abandoning her for travelers more ostentatiously dressed.
They came almost at once to Shepheard’s English Hotel. The multi-story stone building with its boxy windows and iron railings would not have looked out of place in London. In Egypt it was a monstrous imposition over the low brick buildings and wooden lattices built by the native population. The porter hauled the trunk up shallow, stone steps. Maddie followed, conscious of the dust on her clothing as immaculately turned-out coffee drinkers on Shepheard’s famous terrace openly stared at her. Inside, the lobby was a vast Moorish fantasyland. Its walls were pierced by tall, pointed arches of coloured limestone. Pilasters, niches, and faux lintels rose to the elaborately corniced ceiling. Her trunk was taken over by an automaton painted to look like an English footman, and she was escorted upstairs by a British matron in a widow’s cap, whose pinched look told all the world her opinion of young ladies who traveled alone.
The dining room she saw that first luncheon was another Moorish vastness, with tile decorating the walls, arches, and niches. Immense columns called to mind lithographs of ancient temples. These columns, however, were painted in bright hues no aquatint artist could hope to reproduce. How could she tear her eyes from this magnificence to make notes on the quite ordinary lace and muslin fashions on the ladies present? But record fashion she must if she wished to earn her way, and so she took notes while giving her fictional biography to the gossipy English ladies at her table, and hearing all of theirs at quite tedious length.
Seasonal festivities began the very next day with an air-land parade, a custom borrowed from the grand parades in London and New York City. She followed the other guests up to the rooftop
patio, where chairs had been arranged for them along the parapet, with a good view of the sky above and the street below. Parasols blossomed over all the ladies, even those with hats larger than a tea tray. Maddie, unable to hold a parasol while recording notes by hand, had opted for her widest hat, trimmed with metallic ribbon in which TD could pass for mere ornamentation while recording images for later transmission to London. She took a chair slightly back from the first rank and jotted brief impressions of typical English attire as adapted to the hot, dry, climate of the desert city.
Very little adaptation, was her first observation: several layers were worn by both ladies and gentlemen, jackets over waistcoats over shirts with long sleeves, tight cuffs, and high necks. Already uncomfortably warm in her thinnest summer garments from England, she foresaw that her small store of money must be further depleted by the purchase of less restrictive clothing.
The first strains of a marching band drifted up on the arid breeze. A Highland regiment came swinging along the street just as it would at home, except for the dust that rose up from fifty sets of pounding feet and rolled in an ochre wave over the hotel terrace. Now the wisdom of watching from the rooftop was plain. In London, in December, dust was never a problem.
In London, the parade would be enlivened by airships carrying burghers of the City’s guilds, floating along in the first traffic tier above the street, their slender gondolas brightly disguised as scarlet sleighs, gilded carriages, and gift-wrapped boxes. Here a string of dusty military scout-ships took their place, sand-blasted hulls and rigging strung with Union Jack bunting. The airships were followed by the Cairo Police precision heli-cycle team, whose flying was far from precise. Never would a formation flying team back home allow their group banner to sag between cycles, much less droop low enough to brush a camel’s head, as the Cairene police team managed to do almost at the steps of Shepheard’s.
Maddie Hatter and the Deadly Diamond Page 2