A Study in Silks tba-1

by Emma Jane Holloway

  She slipped out the side door of the house, moving as silently as she could. Some of the servants had run into the garden, but none had gone far. There was someone out there shooting people. Without one of the men of the house leading the charge, who would put themselves in harm’s way? Me, apparently. No one else is looking for clues.

  The garden was bathed in the eerie glow of a full moon. The gold-tinged gaslights that lined the street didn’t cast their beams that far. Evelina shivered in the cool night. She didn’t see anyone moving in the yard. Were they already gone?

  Memories stole over her—of the garden party, of sitting with Imogen looking at the gold and gems in the tiny silk bag. Too much had happened in the last handful of days. People were dead. She prayed her uncle wouldn’t be next, the victim of a fevered wound.

  She struggled not to let her thoughts go further than that, but they did. If the father of Grace Child’s baby was Lord Bancroft, that gave him a very close link to the victim. But that wasn’t what bothered her, because plenty of men slept with their maids and then tossed them into the street when they grew round with child. It would play badly during a political campaign, but it was a scandal most men could survive, though it might cause a few cold silences at the dinner table. And no doubt Lord B had appetites like any man.

  What bothered her was that Lord Bancroft, as far as she knew, would have been more likely to seek out a sophisticated woman for his pleasures. What would a serving girl, however pretty, have to offer? It was the gold that complicated things. As her uncle had pointed out, Grace had probably been waiting for someone when she had been killed. And Lord Bancroft had fallen asleep in the study. If she was right, he was the one who was to receive the gold.

  She had desperately wanted to protect the Roth family. She still did. But what if Lord Bancroft was guilty—maybe not of murder, but of some other crime? Her uncle’s unerring instincts had already ripped the matter open like a surgeon exposing an infected wound. He could be brutal, but he was very rarely wrong. And so someone had shot him.

  A shaking deep in her gut found its way to her limbs in a long, horrified shudder. She had been strong inside the dining room, wishing herself to be as steady as Imogen, as cool as her uncle. Now it would be too easy to sit down and wail like a scalded cat.

  Which accomplished exactly nothing. She clenched her jaw and forced herself to think rationally, one step at a time. There was a sundial surrounded by a clump of low bushes that sat a stone’s throw from the side of the house. It was the only possible cover. From there, the shooter could have seen straight into the dining room window.

  “Evelina.”

  She turned to see Tobias coming from the front of the house. “What are you doing out here?”

  The moonlight silvered his hair. He’d taken off his tie, so the open collar of his shirt showed the strong muscles of his throat. She felt his heat as he drew closer, tantalizing in the cold air.

  He put his hand on her arm. There was no mistaking the affection in his touch. “You’re cold.”

  “I came to look for evidence,” she said.

  “Oh.” He looked around, as if expecting to see a smoking gun on the grass. He smelled like whisky. “I’m sorry about what father said. I went to try to talk to him. He’s passed out in his study. There’s no point tonight.” His voice was so tight it sounded painful. “But I will. I promise you that.”

  “My uncle …”

  He leaned close. “I know. Terrible.”

  “The police …”

  Tobias made a resigned motion, but he sounded strained. “I’ll send word to Inspector Lestrade. I just wish that they didn’t need to see Father this way. It will do his career no good.”

  There was a bit of irony, given how Bancroft had tried to conceal Grace’s death. She bit her lip, holding the words back. “I’ve sent for my uncle’s friend Dr. Watson.”

  “That makes sense.” Tobias’s tone eased. “But Evelina, forget what Father said about Grace’s baby. Don’t tell anyone, for Mother’s sake. It’s just too hard for her. And don’t tell Lestrade. That would just make things look bad, and it doesn’t prove anything.”

  His fingers brushed her cheek, coaxing. She looked away, too confused to answer.

  “Please.” Gently, he turned her face back so that she looked into his eyes. “Do this for me. For Imogen.”

  “All right,” she said, her heart winning over reason. He brushed his lips to her forehead gently, but she still felt miserable.

  The ground had shifted between them. The dizzying happiness had been sullied. She wanted to argue, to rage, to plead the last hours away until they were back to that brief second where everything looked possible. But not even magic could do that.

  She tried to gather her wits. “We should check the grounds for clues so I can get back to Uncle Sherlock.” Though she wondered, if she did find traces of the shooter, whether it would be anything she could take to Lestrade.

  Tobias studied her for a moment, but then his face relaxed. “Lead the way, my pretty detective.”

  Evelina nodded, desperate to trust the affection in his eyes.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  WITCH TRIAL ENDS IN GUILTY VERDICT

  Actress Eleanor Reynolds was found guilty of use of magic and, with unexpected lenience, sentenced to an indefinite term as a guest of Her Majesty’s Scientific Laboratories. Sir Philip Amory, who represented Mrs. Reynolds, had no comment. Illegal betting on the outcome of the trial was reported to be fierce.

  —The Bugle

  QUALITY OF MERCY STRAINED, SAYS FOREIGN CRITIC

  The opinions of our peers from other nations is always instructive. Pietro Costanzo, Conte del’Arco and learned commentator on the Continental judiciary, has been in London during the arrest and trial of the celebrated dramatic actress Mrs. Eleanor Reynolds. His official observations of the one-day trial are as yet unwritten, but in conversation his opinion is nothing short of scathing. “The charges are based solely on a trunk of props left in her house after her company’s last production of Macbeth. That, and witness testimony from a hostile neighbor. Where are the fruits of her crimes? Where are her accomplices? Where are her motives? And how can citizens of any other nation confidently do business with an empire that disregards the basic rule of law?” In this writer’s opinion, it is unfortunate that the spirit of the trial did not heed the actress’s last play, The Merchant of Venice, which contains the Bard’s famous lines on mercy and justice. Sentencing was carried out immediately, and in a surprise move that smacks more of medical curiosity than mercy, Mrs. Reynolds has been sent to Her Majesty’s Scientific Laboratories. Farewell, dear Nellie, we do not expect to see you again.

  —The London Prattler

  London, April 14, 1888

  HILLIARD HOUSE

  2 p.m. Saturday

  Evelina was slumped over her desk, her head in her hand. Her stomach felt queasy, as if she had eaten a bucket of grease, but it was actually a constant, barely manageable case of nerves. She needed sleep. She needed to not be worrying about Uncle Sherlock, who was lying in a bedroom down the hall. She needed to lose herself in a problem so she would stop thinking about the fact that one or both of them had narrowly escaped death.

  Helen. The cube repeated it, interrupting Evelina’s thoughts yet again. Helenhelenhelen.

  She was cradling the cube in her lap like a cat. It seemed happy there, as if physical contact was necessary to the metal thing. Mouse and Bird were playing tag on the bed, getting tangled in the pillows and coverlets. The window was open to the garden, the cool morning fresh and sunny. It would have been idyllic except for the constables roaming through the garden, trampling any available clues.

  With an effort, she dragged her attention back to the coded letter. Every time she had attempted a solution, she’d given up in despair. This time looked to be no more successful. She had her uncle’s pamphlet open on the desk, the letter, and a piece of notepaper in front of her. In the middle of the desk, she’d pulled ou
t her copy of the coded message with spaces below it for the key.

  Helenhelenhelen.

  She patted the cube absently.

  HELEN.

  She paused, thoughts bumping together to make a new combination. She got up, setting the cube on her dresser, and opened her wardrobe. With one thing and another, she hadn’t yet sent the silk dress she’d worn at the dinner party to be cleaned. She rifled through the clothes until she saw the familiar rose-colored fabric. A search of its pockets produced what she wanted. She returned to the desk with the card that had spit out of the longcase clock. She had put it into her pocket when she’d been helping Nick back to her room after Dr. Magnus had left.

  It was the one other cipher that she’d seen recently. She studied the card and compared it to the note from the gold, but that was a pointless exercise. Perhaps her uncle might have seen similarities and differences, but they both looked like a jumble of letters to her. But what had Magnus said? The cipher from the clock was one that both he and Bancroft knew.

  So she could point to two people who knew a cipher. A twinge of satisfaction brought a half smile to her lips.

  Helen, the cube repeated.

  Evelina furrowed her brow, inching the problem forward a degree. She didn’t know what the deva in the cube could perceive, or whether it was more or less than Mouse and Bird because they could understand the cube no better than she could. But for the moment, she would assume it had a similar range of perceptions. Therefore, if the people writing the ciphered message had been in the warehouse, and the cube was in the warehouse, it could easily have seen or heard them use the key. That opened up possibilities.

  “Helen,” she murmured.

  The whole idea of Helen as divine truth was something of a hobbyhorse of Magnus’s. In addition, the cube kept calling her by that name. It might have been the cube’s way of trying to help.

  While it was unlikely that a mysterious metal box possessed by an ancient spirit would give her the key to a coded message, not much that had happened in the past week could be construed as terribly logical. There was nothing to lose by trying, so she wrote in Helen as the key.

  The typical way of decoding these ciphers was to find the letters of the cipher text at the top of the table and the letters of the key along the left-hand side. Where that row and column met in the table would spell out the solution. Evelina followed this method for a while and simply got more nonsense. She was ready to give up in disgust, but there was one last trick to try. Uncle Sherlock’s book pointed out that sometimes those positions were reversed, and the key to the code was found in the columns, and the letters of the message itself along the rows, so she tried that.

  She found H at the top of the table, ran her finger down to J and left to C. She wrote C in the first block of the solution. Then she dithered a bit around the fact that E led to another E, but finally settled on the fact the solution letter was A. Then it was L to Y to N. She started to get excited by five letters in, tingly by the time she was halfway through, and almost dizzy when she got to the end.

  “Cannot copy chest please advise,” she said aloud, and then said it again. “Cannot copy chest. Please advise.” Copy? That opened up more questions—many, many more.

  She picked up the cube, staring at it. “Are you Athena’s Casket?” she asked.

  She felt it pondering the statement, struggling with how to make itself understood. Inspired now, she set down the cube and returned to her desk and quickly decoded the message on the clock’s card. It read, “Beware the untruth.” She made an impatient noise. That was about as specific as a fairground fortune-teller. One couldn’t throw a dinner bun in London without hitting a liar.

  There was a frantic knocking on the bedroom door. Mouse and Bird dove into the bed cushions. Alarmed, Evelina shuffled away her papers and all but tossed the cube into her wardrobe before she unlocked the bedroom door.

  Imogen rushed in, her face streaked with tears. “Evelina, have you read the newspapers?”

  A rush of fear made Evelina clutch at her friend’s arms, pulling her close. “No, what’s happened?”

  Imogen thrust a copy of the Prattler at her. “Read this.”

  Before she did anything else, she drew Imogen inside and made her sit on the bed. The girl was shaking. Mouse and Bird emerged from the cushions, curious to see what was going on. Evelina turned her desk chair around and sat, reading the article about Mrs. Reynolds’ trial and conviction. “Somehow I knew how this was how it would go. Hardly anyone accused of magic is ever acquitted.”

  “But she’s innocent!” Imogen cried. “I overheard. At the Westlakes’ ball. Mrs. Reynolds is an illegitimate cousin to the duchess!”

  “Hush!” Evelina waved urgently. “Keep your voice down!”

  Imogen put a hand over her mouth, realizing what she had done. When she spoke again, it was more quietly. “I was with Bucky when I overheard. The Gold King had been trying to help her, but he was warning her to stop. He said nothing was going to save Nellie Reynolds and it would just drag the duchess down if anyone found out she was helping.”

  “He was probably right.” A cynical part of Evelina thought Jasper Keating could save or condemn anyone he pleased and was just pulling the duchess’s strings, but dwelling on that would only upset Imogen more.

  Her friend was crying in earnest now, her slender shoulders shaking with distress. “We knew she was innocent and we didn’t say anything! Surely we could have done something. Why didn’t we?”

  Evelina closed her eyes for a moment, feeling a pang of regret. She moved onto the bed, sliding her arm around Imogen’s shoulders. She didn’t speak. There wasn’t a lot she could say.

  “Why?” Imogen whispered harshly. “Why is it so hard to object if something is unjust? Why isn’t the duchess allowed to support her cousin? She’s a duchess, for pity’s sake. People should listen to her.”

  But the old aristocracy’s sun was setting, and a ducal coronet didn’t mean as much as it had in their grandparents’ day. The steam barons dominated the Empire now. It wasn’t as if Imogen didn’t know the facts, but these last few days would have been the first time she’d felt the full measure of her helplessness. “I’m sorry,” Evelina whispered. “How did you and Bucky hear this?”

  Imogen bit her lip. “It was an accident. He said not to do anything, and to keep it all a secret because we should never have overheard. He promised to talk to me about it later.”

  “He gave you good advice.”

  “I thought somehow we’d find a way to prove her innocent—figure it out the way your uncle does. If Nellie Reynolds did nothing wrong, we should have been able to show that to a judge.”

  “It’s very hard to prove a negative.”

  “I know,” Imogen said bitterly. “In the moment it seemed a heroic idea. When I think about it now, it sounds incredibly naive.”

  Evelina winced, thinking Imogen sounded very much like she had at the start of her so-called investigation of Grace Child’s murder. “Bucky is no fool and you read the papers, Imogen. Barely a month goes by without the trial of some magic user. If the steam barons keep everyone afraid of magic, no one will try to use it against them. And the betting just keeps the public appetite sharp.”

  “I know,” Imogen said miserably. “I overheard Father tell Mother that he unexpectedly won a great deal of money on Nellie Reynolds’ trial. Enough to pay for my Season. He laughed.”

  Evelina felt sick as Imogen turned even paler. How was any girl supposed to feel about her parties and dresses, knowing they were paid for like that?

  “Worst of all, I haven’t been able to talk to Bucky.” Imogen turned her silvery eyes on Evelina. They were bright with tears. “There was no opportunity to decide what we could or couldn’t do, so our chance slipped away.”

  Evelina pondered that, trying to catch up to the fact that Imogen’s heart was readying itself for more than a battle of wits with her brother’s best friend. “Where is Bucky?”

  Imogen p
ulled out a dainty kerchief and mopped her nose. “Papa heard that I turned down Stanford Whitlock. He’s furious. Now, if I want to go anywhere without him or Mama on my heels, I’m going to have to climb out a window.”

  That made no sense. “But the Penners have plenty of money, and Bucky is a hundred times more capable than Whitlock. Surely they can see that.”

  “Whatever the Penners have, the Whitlocks have more. His father owns a bank. And Stanford isn’t the only prospect on Father’s list. The Westlakes’ son has a title. Buckingham Penner is very much a second choice by those standards.”

  Evelina cursed under her breath. “This isn’t fair.”

  Imogen’s eyes filled with tears. “I won’t marry someone I don’t like, much less love. I won’t.” Lord B probably had no idea how stubborn his daughter really was. They were in for a storm. “This is all my fault! I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t want to believe it!”

  Evelina was bewildered. “What do you mean?”

  “There is something going on between my father and Keating’s cousin, Harriman. I overheard them at the dinner party.” Imogen closed her eyes, as if recalling the scene. “Harriman said he’d done exactly as Papa instructed, no more and no less. That he had returned the crates to the warehouse and informed Mr. Keating of their arrival. And then he went on to say that whoever said there was a missing article was quite mistaken. Does that make any sense at all?”

  Evelina had gone numb. “A bit.”

  Imogen had known this for days. A feeling of betrayal swamped Evelina for a moment, but it didn’t stay. What daughter would want to believe her father was at the core of a crime? She couldn’t blame her friend.

  But Imogen looked hollow with grief. “If I’d said something, maybe this would all be over by now. Maybe your uncle wouldn’t have been shot.”