The Spiritglass Charade

by Colleen Gleason

  To

  the tireless and creative

  Maura Kye-Casella

  Congratulations on winning the title game!

  Copyright © 2014 by Colleen Gleason.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

  in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Gleason, Colleen, author.

  The spiritglass charade: a Stoker & Holmes novel / Colleen Gleason.

  pages cm.—(A Stoker & Holmes novel ; book 2)

  Summary: In 1889 Evaline Stoker, Mina Holmes, and their time-traveler friend Dylan are asked by the Princess of Wales to find out what happened to Robby Ashton, who may have drowned—but the reappearance of vampires in the heart of London threatens to become a more urgent problem.

  ISBN 978-1-4521-1071-4 (alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-1-4521-3058-3 (ebook)

  1. Vampires—Juvenile fiction. 2. Time travel—Juvenile fiction. 3. Missing persons—Juvenile fiction. 4. Spiritualism—Juvenile fiction. 5. Detective and mystery stories. 6. London (England)—History—19th century—Fiction. [1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Vampires—Fiction. 3. Time travel—Fiction. 4. Missing persons—Fiction. 5. Spiritualism—Fiction. 6. London (England)—History—19th century—Fiction. 7. Great Britain—History—Victoria, 1837-1901—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.G481449Sp 2014

  813.6—dc23

  2013030945

  Book design by Jennifer Tolo Pierce.

  Typeset by Happenstance Type-O-Rama.

  The text is set in a variation of Baskerville, a typeface created by the accomplished engraver and printer John Baskerville, who endlessly labored to refine the quality of his printing process by developing a faster-drying ink and smoother paper. Yet Baskerville’s greatest innovation is the typeface that carries his name. It was one of the earliest fonts to transition away from the old Roman style, popular during the eighteenth century. Baskerville is open and clear, with sharp serifs, contrasting thick and thin strokes, and round characters that sit upright, rather than tilting one way or the other. The typeface is used widely even today.

  Chronicle Books LLC

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  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Spiritglass Charade

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Miss Holmes

  Miss Adler Is Tardy

  I reside in the very modernized London of the fifty-second year of Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s reign. Our Prime Minister is Lord Salisbury, and Parliament is led by the esteemed Lord Cosgrove-Pitt.

  My nation is besotted with science, evolution, and invention. If a device can be conceived, someone somewhere is determined that it should be built (which is the only explanation I have for the unfortunate Hystand’s Mechanized Eyelash-Combe).

  This proliferation of invention and scientific practice is why I found it both amazing and disappointing that no one had yet invented a working time machine. And the reason I felt this disappointment looked up at me with deep blue eyes.

  “Good morning, Dylan,” I said as I closed Miss Irene Adler’s office door behind me.

  Though I’d expected to find the attractive dark-haired woman sitting at a large desk in her Darjeeling-scented chamber, I confess I wasn’t at all disappointed to find the young man instead. In fact, to my chagrin, my cheeks heated and my insides gave a little flutter the instant I saw him.

  Such a base reaction can be excused by the fact that, aside from being charming and kind, Dylan Eckhert was one of the most handsome young men I’d ever seen. Not much older than I, Dylan had thick hair in every shade of blond. It was unstylishly long, falling into his eyes and covering his ears, and winging up a little at the tips. He had a strong square chin and jaw, perfectly straight, white teeth, and a clear blue gaze that turned pleasantly warm when he was happy or amused. Unfortunately, more often than not, that cerulean gaze was tinged with sadness or despair—a condition which I meant to help eradicate.

  If I could help him find a way back home.

  “Hi, Mina.” He was holding a curious device. It was a slender, sleek object, slightly larger than my palm. Silvery and mirrorlike, the rectangular item was capable of making loud, erratic noises, lighting up at unexpected moments, and showing amazingly tiny moving pictures.

  According to Dylan, it was a telephone. And apparently, this sort of mechanism was very common where he came from . . . more than one hundred and twenty years in the future.

  Hence the requirement of a time-traveling machine.

  “I expected Miss Adler to be here,” I said, sitting in one of the chairs on the other side of the desk. “Her message said ten o’clock sharp.” My impatience could be excused, for I had been waiting for nearly a month to be summoned to this chamber again.

  My mentor’s office was deep inside the British Museum, for Irene Adler was, among other things, the current Keeper of Antiquities at the institution. Or, at least, that was what she told curious-minded people. But there was more to her current occupation than simply unpacking and cataloguing long-forgotten treasures from Egypt and the Far East.

  One couldn’t tell it from her work area, however. The chamber wasn’t particularly large, but it was well-organized and elegantly furnished, with a circular table in the center and the large desk at one end. Bookshelves lined the walls and a Tome-Selector had halted in the process of using its slender mechanical fingers to replace—or remove; one couldn’t necessarily tell—a copy of The Domesday Book. A stack of newspapers sat at the corner of the desk, and one of them was mounted in a Proffitt’s Dandy Paper-Peruser.

  Behind Dylan was a credenza, on which I observed a new addition to the chamber: a charming copper teapot. It appeared to be a self-heating one, for it sat on a small cogwork dais from which I heard the emission of soft clicks and whirs.

  Mingled with the scent of Miss Adler’s favorite tea (the aforementioned Darjeeling), as well as a hint of her preferred perfume (gardenia), was also the faint odor of antiquity and even a little mustiness, though my mentor was meticulous about keeping her office dusted and swept. At the moment, the set of tall, narrow windows that looked out onto a small patch of grass on the north side of the Museum were unshuttered. The openings revealed the usual dull, grayish London weather at midmorning, and in the distance, I could see the shiny black spire of the Oligary Building.

  Before Dylan could respond to my query, the door flew open. The pile of newspapers fluttered, the teapot’s top rattled, and I actually felt a breeze announcing the late arrival.

  “Good morning, Mina. Hello, Dylan,” said Miss Evaline Stoker. The energetic young woman was my reluctant partner and occasional companion. Presumably, she’d been summoned as well. I wouldn’t go so far as to call her an intimate friend, but I suppose since I’d saved her from being electrofied and she’d dragged me out of a fire, we’d progressed beyond mere acquaintances. “Miss Adler isn’t here? Where is she?”

  “Dylan was about to tell me before you—er—bounded into the chamber,” I told her, watching as she settled gracefully, but no less quietly or slowly, into a chair across from me.

  Miss Stoker was an attractive woman of seventeen with thick, curling black hair, lively hazel eyes, and perfect features. Unlike myself, she was petite and elegant—and also unlike myself, she was social, capricious, and a member of the peerage.

  And while I, a member of the famous Holmes family (the niece of Sherlock and the daughter of Mycro
ft), was blessed with brilliant deductive and observational skills (not to mention the prominent Holmesian nose), Miss Stoker had been endowed by a very different family legacy. According to legend, she was supposedly a vampire hunter.

  Or at least she would be if there were actually any vampires to hunt.

  “I don’t know where she is,” Dylan replied, picking up his silvery telephone-device again. “Evaline, didn’t you say you knew somewhere I could get electricity?”

  “Dylan.” I glanced at the door, which was still tightly closed.

  “Yeah, I know. Electricity is illegal here. But Evaline said she knew someone who might be able to help me charge my phone.”

  “Right. Yes. I . . . believe I do.” Miss Stoker held out her gloved hand matter-of-factly, but of course I noticed the heightened color in her cheeks. “I’ll take it to—uh—I’ll get it charged for you.”

  He hesitated handing it over, and I was certain I knew why.

  Even though Dylan had accidentally traveled here from London in 2016, somehow that singular device occasionally—very occasionally—was able to connect him back to that time if he stood in a particular area of the Museum. I suspected he was afraid of allowing out of his possession the one thing that might help him return—or at least communicate with—home.

  Dylan had uncertainty written all over his face. “I don’t know if I told you this, but there have been a few times when I’ve been in the room where I first appeared that my cell phone seemed to connect to the Intern—I mean, to my time.”

  “I believe it happened once while I was present.” I found the small mechanism fascinating and yet eerie.

  “Last night, I was down there in that basement room and it connected for a long time. Almost three minutes. I texted—I mean, I sent a message to my parents to let them know I was okay. They’re back home in Illinois, and as far as they know, I’m still at school here in London.”

  He drew in a deep breath, as if to collect his thoughts. “I also had the chance to do some quick research on time travel, to see if there was anything science had discovered from my time that might help. There’s this thing called string theory, which says that space and place are always constant, always the same. But time is different—like strings hanging in one space. So we’re each on a string that hangs or floats or whatever, in our time. It seems like I might have gotten bumped over to your string, which brought me from my time to this time, but kept me in the exact same place.”

  I nodded, understanding the elements of what he was saying (unlike Miss Stoker, whose blank expression indicated how little she comprehended). “And the question is . . . how did you move from your string to ours?”

  “Exactly. If we figure that out, maybe that’s a way to send me back. Scientists in my time say time travel is impossible. But . . . well, here I am. Proof that it isn’t. Unless it’s all just a bad dream.” His expression sobered and the light faded from his eyes. “It has to be some sort of mathematical calculation, I think. That causes a vibration or something that makes the time-string move. . . . I don’t know. I don’t understand much of it. And I know you’re working on it, Mina,” he said earnestly. But that sadness lingered in his eyes.

  I bit my lip. “But perhaps not as hard as I should be. Instead of studying face powders and—”

  “Don’t feel bad.” He reached over to pat my arm. “If the greatest scientists of my time can’t figure it out, I don’t know how you could expect to in only a few weeks. But that’s why this is really important to me, and why I need this thing charged.” He turned to Miss Stoker.

  “I’ll take good care of it. But I can’t let you come with me. It’s too dangerous—not only because it’s in Whitechapel, but also because I have to protect my . . . um. . . .” Her cheeks turned a shade pinker.

  “Your source?” Dylan supplied.

  “Right. My source. I like that word.” Evaline smiled and held out her hand once more. “I’ll protect it with my life. I promise.”

  I had misgivings about Miss Stoker’s ability to keep the device safe, for she’s an impetuous young woman who doesn’t often think before she acts. Not only that, but she had more than once given me the impression she would rather seek out danger than find a more thoughtful, logical, safer way to solve a problem. But I didn’t see how our friend had any choice other than to entrust her with it. After all, the device would no longer be useful to Dylan if he didn’t get more electricity for it. And since the use or generation of that dangerous commodity had been criminalized by the Moseley-Haft Steam Promotion Act, such a source of energy was illicit and highly illegal.

  Just as Dylan allowed the object to slide slowly into Miss Stoker’s palm, the door opened once more. This time, it was the expected, elegantly garbed woman who entered.

  Irene Adler is an attractive American woman of stage talent (mostly song). She is more famously known, at least to myself and my family, as the only woman to ever outsmart Uncle Sherlock. Thus, he calls her the woman.

  To commemorate the occasion, he keeps a picture of her on his mantel—along with several other mementos of previous adventures. The photograph was the only compensation he accepted for the case, which had involved a scandal with the King of Bohemia.

  Miss Adler subsequently married Godfrey Norton, at least according to what was published in the papers. However, during the time I knew her, she was always Miss Adler rather than Mrs. Norton, and she never referred to her husband. I suspected there might have been a divorce . . . or perhaps he never even existed. Regardless, for unknown reasons, the vivacious Miss Adler left the European stage (where she had quite a following) to take on the role of the Keeper of Antiquities for the Museum.

  “My apologies for being late,” Miss Adler said as she swept briskly around to the seat behind the desk. Dylan had vacated the chair as soon as she appeared, and now he stood, leaning against the wall. “One of the cog-carts blew a gasket and stopped traffic in the Strand. And now we are behind schedule.”

  “Do you have a new assignment for us?” Evaline asked before the poor woman had even settled into her seat. I glowered at my counterpart, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Perhaps,” Miss Adler replied, seeming not at all nonplussed by my companion’s impatience. She turned her arm to check the wide-banded wrist-clock she always wore. “But we must leave immediately. It’s later than I thought.” She hadn’t taken a seat at the desk, but instead reached behind it to pull out a small reticule and an umbrella, then marched back around toward the door.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You might join us as well, Dylan.” Miss Adler slung the umbrella’s curled handle over her pristinely gloved wrist and eyed him critically. “You’re dressed well enough to be presented to Her Royal Highness, now that you’ve put on the new clothing I bought you.”

  “Her Royal Highness?” A prickle of interest and excitement swept over me. “Are we going to Marlborough House?”

  During our first meeting, Miss Adler confessed to Evaline and me that, although she was employed by the Museum as prescribed, she was also using her contacts and expertise in Europe to work for Alexandra, the Princess of Wales and daughter-in-law of the Queen, on a variety of tasks related to royal and national security.

  That was how Evaline and I came to be called into service for our country as well. Miss Stoker and I had been approached because of our family legacies, and because we were young women. In short, no one would ever suspect us of working as secret agents for the Crown. Young women, claimed Society’s conventional wisdom, lacked the intelligence or the skills for anything other than marrying and raising children.

  That school of thought was a delicious joke, in my opinion. After all, weren’t England’s two greatest monarchs—Queen Elizabeth and now Queen Victoria—women?

  A faint smile curved Miss Adler’s lips, but I observed weariness and shadow in her normally bright eyes. “Indeed. The Princess of Wales wishes to meet you and Miss Stoker, and I suspect she may have something else ab
out which she wishes to speak to you. And as we have an eleven o’clock appointment, we are in danger of being late, so we must be off. One cannot keep a princess of the realm waiting.”

  “No, of course not.” I rose, aware of a sense of relief and anticipation that Princess Alexandra wanted to see us.

  My first (and only) assignment with Miss Stoker had been thrilling and dangerous—and it had been completed more than a month ago. When neither Evaline nor I were contacted by Miss Adler in the weeks that followed, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the near-disaster that occurred during the Affair of the Clockwork Scarab (as I’d begun to call it) had soured our royal sponsor on the concept of pressing extraordinary young women like us into service. I’d tried to ignore the crushing disappointment—the fear that I’d bungled my first assignment and would be relegated to working alone in my laboratory and poring over books day after day in my father’s silent study.

  Miss Stoker elbowed me as we followed Miss Adler out of the office. “All that worrying for nothing,” she muttered. “We’re going to meet the princess so she can thank us herself.”

  When we left the Museum, we were obliged to employ umbrellas—a not uncommon occurrence in our dreary London. However, today the dampness in the air was hardly more than a drizzle, and I could almost feel my thick chestnut-brown hair begin to tighten and kink beneath my hat like the bric-a-brac that trimmed my gloves. I patted the tight coil at the nape of my neck, hoping it wouldn’t appear too disastrous by the time we arrived at Marlborough House.

  I sat next to Dylan, in the carriage, and he seemed to take up quite a bit more room on the seat than I expected, for he was very close to me, and our arms brushed companionably. If it weren’t for the layers of petticoat beneath my narrow skirt, surely I would have been able to feel heat from the side of his leg pressing against mine. I confess, I didn’t mind his proximity in the least—although when I noticed Miss Stoker watching me with knowing eyes, that dratted flush warmed my cheeks again.

  “London can be so dark and gloomy, even in the middle of the day,” Dylan observed. Despite the drizzle, he’d unlatched the carriage window and nearly had his head poking out the opening as he watched the sights. “It’s like dusk all the time, with the buildings so tall and close together and it being rainy and foggy almost every day. What’s that tall black one over there, with the spikes on top?”