The Formula for Murder

by Carol McCleary

  Her immaturity and inexperience in dealing with men in a romantic vein would have made her easy prey for Lacroix.

  Not being able to resist the temptation, I ask a question I know will only feed his ego when he refuses to answer.

  “What did you mean when you spoke of vampires?”

  “It’ll shock you down to your pretty little toes, love, but that’ll have to wait until you and I get to know each other better.”

  “She’s not going to get to know you any better,” Wells says, hotly. “She may trust you to travel with us, but I don’t. I’m wiring Lord Winsworth and will warn him to call off his dog or he can join you in jail.”

  Archer lets out a ho-ho-ho laugh as he blows cigar smoke in Wells’s face.

  “I don’t think your demand to Lord Winsworth will have much weight coming from one of his servants who’s been bobbing his wife.”

  Wells turns a deep red and Archer leans forward to further impale him.

  “His lordship found those love letters you sent off to his wife, thankin’ her for the money and babbling like another lovesick puppy about how much you enjoyed those pleasurable moments with her. If his wife had been bedding down with a gentleman, it wouldn’t have been so disgusting, but to know she laid with a domestic—”

  “Shut up!” I snap at Archer. “One more word out of you and I will call the constable.”

  Wells is rigid and almost purple. I’m sure he’s about to attack the much stronger man, not only getting a beating in return, but ruining our entire mission. “Please,” I whisper to him, “please don’t strike out at him, that’s what he wants. He’s baiting you. Please, for me and for Lady Winsworth and for that little girl, go up to the room.”

  He rises slowly, never taking his eyes off of Archer, his fists clenched. I am in awful suspense because I’m certain he is ready to leap on the man.

  “Don’t,” I warn Archer as he takes the cigar out of his mouth to make another crack.

  Wells slowly walks away, stiffly, but with dignity.

  As soon as Wells disappears up the stairs, I turn to the thug. “Mr. Archer, I do hope that after this is all over, you will visit me in New York.”

  He gives me a smirking leer. “You like a man who handles himself, don’t you?”

  “Actually, I think what you did to my friend was disgusting. The reason I’d like to have you visit is because there’s a bare-knuckles champ I want to have knock all your teeth out.”

  I get up and smooth my dress. “We’ll leave here after breakfast in the morning. We’re taking the ten o’clock train to Exeter. Once we reach Exeter, I’ll tell you the next phase.”

  He eyes me with suspicion. “If you’re planning to take a train, why’d you load up a carriage?”

  “To haul to the station. I didn’t want to take the time to buy supplies in Exeter where the police might be interested in us. We’ll rent another carriage there for the next leg.”

  “We’re going back to Linleigh-in-the-moor. That artist told you more than you’re letting on.”

  “That artist told us more than I’m willing to tell you. And you know more than you’re telling me. So we both have our secrets. When I feel that you’ve been fair with us, I will share more with you.”

  His features twist into a mean sneer. “You had better be careful. I don’t mind a bit of wordplay back and forth, but I expect results. If I don’t get them from you, you’re not going back home as pretty as you came.” He smirks. “You can let that boyfriend of yours know that the next time he faces me, I’ll cut off his balls and have them fried for dinner.”

  Even though I am trembling with anger and disgust, I control my voice. “See you at nine in the morning? Or should we make our way to the station separately in case Lacroix’s people are looking for us?”

  He chews on that for a moment. “Separately.” He jabs his cigar at me. “But don’t think you can lose me. I’ve caught up with you before and if I have to do it again, I won’t be my gentle self.”

  “I’m trembling with fear.”

  With a stiff back and head held high, I head for the steps, not giving him one ounce of satisfaction that he has frightened me, which he might have, just a little. What he has really done is anger me and I hope I’ve shown that.

  My heart is heavy for Wells. He has been stripped of his dignity and his secret life. Even worse for a proud man, it was in front of a woman. How devastated he must be feeling right now. I wish I had someplace else to go. He needs time and privacy to sort his emotions. And he definitely doesn’t need to see me.

  Never have I seen a friend more defeated than when Archer maliciously slashed with what appears to be the awful truth. The domestic class? A servant? That is mind boggling, since he is both a teacher and a scientific researcher.

  England has a very structured society, based upon money and blood. The more the money, or the bluer the blood, the more doors are opened. The same is true in America, but to a much lesser degree—there it’s mostly just a question of the size of one’s bank account.

  Hopefully my news to Wells that we will not be seeing Archer’s face again will cheer him up.

  Despite what I said to Archer, I have no intention of being around in the morning to take the Exeter train.

  50

  Wells is standing at the window, staring out when I enter. He has taken off his coat, collar, and top shirt to prepare for bed. He doesn’t turn to look at me and I know he is hiding his embarrassment about the revelations Archer spit out so viciously.

  Quietly I close the door behind me and go to him, putting my hand on his arm and turning him to me. His features are grave, with a grim set. Like most men, he considers it a weakness to reveal his hurt.

  I caress his cheek with my fingers and brush his lips with mine. His lips open as I press mine against him and we melt together in a long, warm kiss.

  Embedded female instincts make me break away.

  “I find you to be a strange man in wonderful ways, Herbert George Wells. You are the most intelligent man I have ever sparred with.”

  “Ah … so you will love me for my mind, but…”

  “I do admire you for your fine mind … but if I am to love you, it will be because I sense that beneath the intellect is great passion, not just for life but for me.”

  I look away, trying to organize my thoughts, for what I am about to say is against all I’ve been taught. It’s been a struggle, but I’ve come to realize I am a woman who has desires and needs and yet I don’t want to get married, at least not right now. However, I am not always able to lock away my feelings or desires. Nor do I want to.

  “I have to give you fair warning,” I tell him. “I have fought long and hard to find a path in this world. I will never give up my freedom for a man—any man. The love I give today will still be in me tomorrow, but my body will be an ocean away.”

  “I expect nothing less from you, Miss Nellie Bly.”

  He turns to look out the window to give me privacy as I remove my jacket and my blouse. I don’t sleep in my outer clothes because they would become horribly wrinkled, but my underclothes are significantly modest, the type a woman would not be embarrassed for her father and brothers to see her in. He speaks to the window as I undress.

  “Society has such ridged rules and laws that inhibit people from advancing and being what they want to be. As a woman, you cannot vote, or be equal to a man in work and love. I, as a man, am enslaved into a position in life because I was born into it. An accident of birth, like a king, except the benefits are a bit less.”

  As he’s talking I have my back to him as I hang my clothes and brush them out.

  “What did you and Archer talk about after I left?”

  “We played cat and mouse about what information he was to give for what I gave in return. It ended up a stalemate. I asked him about his vampire remark and got the expected evasiveness.”

  He turns back around. “We can hope that one of those vampires he keeps talking about will bite him.” />
  “He obviously knows, but it makes no difference. He is so instinctively dishonest and deceitful, no matter what we can’t rely upon anything he tells us.”

  “You realize that when we find Lacroix, the greatest danger will be a knife in our backs by Archer. He’s not going to want to share the credit.”

  “From what I’ve seen of the man, before turning Lacroix over to his employer, Archer will have a bidding war to see who will pay him the most.”

  He leans back against the wall and stares at me. Not impolitely, or with lust, but with tenderness.

  “I thought about Archer making a deal with Lacroix, too.” I make busy with the clothes, fighting my feelings, resisting the fiery urge I feel in my entire body. “Dealing with him will be a lost cause no matter how we go about it.”

  Once again, I turn my back to him wondering how am I going to handle this.

  “You are an incredible woman, Nellie Bly.”

  “Thank you…” is all I can barely say.

  I feel his warm breath behind me on my neck and my will power vanishes.

  “I am going to make love to you, Nellie.”

  “I know.”

  51

  Archer ordered his third double shot of whiskey at the inn’s bar. He was feeling good after the conversation with the reporter and her teacher companion. In the morning, he’d get off a wire to his employer and tell his lordship that he was making great progress and that he needed the pump primed with more money.

  His nibs won’t be satisfied with Archer’s bare statement, of course. For some reason that delighted Archer and he chuckled to himself. No trust left in this world, and he could testify to that. He ceremonially saluted his whiskey to no one but himself and slugged it down. The booze was spreading good cheer in his mind and body.

  He had needed something to tell Winsworth that would impress him enough to loosen the notoriously tight grip the baronet kept on his hoard of South African gold. Now he could claim he was closing in on Lacroix, but he knew Winsworth would wire back and want details—ones that Archer didn’t have yet, but was sure were in the bag.

  “Another?” the bartender asked Archer.

  “Keep them coming.”

  Archer mulled over the conversation he had had with the two amateur detectives. That was how he thought of them, himself being a professional who once carried a badge. That American reporter is a dandy, to be sure. She trusted no one. Smart girl, but too smart for her own good. This gave him another chuckle. He had to admit, she was a good judge of his character.

  She hadn’t revealed much, but neither had he, though he had whetted her appetite for information with his remark about vampires. He was confident that they were onto where Lacroix was hiding out. The laboratory had been the key all along. Now he had to get the information out of her … better yet, wait until they have Lacroix cornered and then he can take care of business all around.

  Lord Winsworth knew a lab existed in Dartmoor because his late missus had told him there was one. Fortunately for Archer’s own pocketbook, she hadn’t told her husband where in Dartmoor, making it necessary for him to hire Archer.

  He jerked down the whiskey and tapped the glass on the bar to signal for another. He was feeling good. Too bad the inn didn’t have any women for hire.

  “Ah…” He got it. He knew what he would prime the pump with to get more quid out of his lordship. He’ll tell Winsworth that a child had suffered the same fate as his wife.

  He mulled over how he would code the wire to his employer to convey Lacroix killed a kid, too, without raising Cain at the telegraph office.

  He wondered why a man with as much gold as the baronet was so stingy about spending it. One thing was for certain, once he uncovered Lacroix’s secret place, Lord Winsworth would be giving him plenty more money, a fistful—before he revealed the location. That thought drew a deep sinister laugh from Archer.

  He’d gotten no instructions from his employer as to exactly what the plan was once Lacroix had been located. Winsworth knew as well as he did that there was no real evidence to tie a crime around the doctor’s neck. Maybe with time and money, Winsworth could pull it off, but the baronet didn’t strike him as a patient man.

  Finding a way to get an even bigger wad out of the situation had been brewing within Archer ever since he found the diary. That would require taking another step forward after finding Lacroix.

  He had asked Winsworth what the game would be once he collared Lacroix and the man had stared at him for a moment and then said, “We’ll deal with that at the right time and place.”

  The correct place and time for Archer was one in which he got paid even more than he had been promised.

  If Lacroix suffered an “accident” rather than being dragged into a slow and uncertain justice from the courts, Archer had a feeling that his pot would become much, much bigger. Winsworth was the kind of mine owner who wasn’t afraid to call in strike breakers to crack a few heads, and was willing to have a union leader pulled out of his home in the middle of the night and hanged.

  Of course, the other side of the coin was to see what Lacroix had to offer in order to make a getaway.

  Archer was about to tap for another whiskey when a man slipped up next to him and said, “Let me get this one.”

  The man tapped the counter twice with his own empty glass. He was about thirty, with a heavy build.

  “My thanks.” If this stranger wanted to get him a drink, fine with Archer. He bought many a drink for other pub patrons when he was in the chips.

  “I could tell you are a fellow Londoner just by the way you’re dressed,” the man said. “Thought we might chat. Hard to pick up a conversation with these local yokels, don’t ya think?”

  The innkeeper walked by, pleased that the two men were drinking whiskey rather than cheap ale. He took them to be a couple of salesmen from the city, Bristol or London, probably.

  Odd, though, he thought. The one who had just bellied up to the bar next to the other man was wearing a type of shoe he’d never seen before. Might even be boots, it was hard to tell because the upper part was hidden under the man’s pant leg.

  The pointed toes of the footwear is what threw him off. It made the boots look uncomfortable.

  52

  We lay together, Wells on his back, my head on his chest. I feel more relaxed, more focused, than I did when I arrived back in our room after verbally dueling with Archer.

  I have been running, mentally and almost physically, basically from the second I learned of Hailey’s death. Shortly before that I had been racing breathlessly around the world to beat a “record” that existed only in the imagination of Jules Verne. My body and mind have been in high gear for … well, since I got my job with Pulitzer at The World.

  A thought comes to me—the woman at the spa in Bath showing me how they help women release their “female hysteria” and how important it is. So this is the end result. I can’t help but smile.

  “I’m sorry,” Wells whispers.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t punch that ass in the jaw. He would have finished me off proper, but not before I got in one or two.”

  “And for certain the innkeeper would have called the constable and we would be in jail right now or out in the streets without a room. Either way, you were right in leaving. Besides, we needed to string him along and find out what he knows. He baited us again with that vampire thing. I am just sorry he tried to insult you.”

  “The worst part about his probes is that it was all true. My parents are domestics and they once worked at the Winsworth estate. Lady Winsworth took an interest in me. I—I came to be fond of her.”

  “You loved her?”

  “I loved her for what she was, a kind, generous, and intelligent woman. She was beautiful in mind and soul. I was, am, infinitely grateful for her help and support. Her husband is a tyrant, who cares nothing for her except as a display piece in his collection of art and fine furnishings.”
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  “Winsworth’s extremely rich, which I imagine for her made up for a great many of his shortcomings.”

  “He was a mining engineer who struck it rich, as much from luck as skill, as those things usually are. He bought himself a title and now thinks of himself as the cock of the walk. He’s insufferable to be around. He doesn’t talk to people, he talks down to them. My parents didn’t stay long in their service because he constantly yelled. The last straw was when he went into a fit of rage over a maid breaking a vase and threw a broken piece at her as she was trying to clean it up.”

  I have a hunch that part of Wells’s feelings toward Lady Winsworth were in the vein of a knight in shining armor. I could tell he is being evasive about his relationship with the woman and being the person I am, I want to know.

  “Were you lovers?”

  “We—we found comfort in each other’s arms. Just once. She had come to me after her husband slapped her for some transgression or another, so she said. I imagined he was just in a bad mood and took it out on her. He had a habit of doing that. I had suffered an injury and was emotionally distraught over life, over the struggle to be something more than the draper’s apprentice that I was headed for. It was my dear mother’s wish that I become one. ‘A much better position in life than hers,’ she constantly told my bothers and me. I saw it as a life of servitude.”

  He kisses me on the forehead. “I did write her some letters that gushed with passion and gratitude. I’m not a hopeless romantic, but I see nothing wrong in showing emotions. May I remind you that you are a bird that will fly off to your next story or your next adventure. Well, in a sense I’m no different. I do not believe I will ever give my love to a single woman for all time. I find that unhealthy and stressful. Just as I would imagine it would be for a woman. I am polygamous, like that religious sect in Utah Conan Doyle wrote about in his first Sherlock Holmes book. I believe in free love, not love that is smothering.”

  This is a conversation I don’t want to partake in, at least not right now after I’ve just finished making love with the man. All I know is that I am a woman who has been raised in a very strict society—especially for women. It’s hard for me to grasp his free love theory. But I do know that I am not polygamous. I don’t believe in sharing. It’s just not for me and I feel it’s a disrespectful way to treat your mate. If Wells is fine with it, that’s his choice, and I just hope he finds a woman who has similar feelings.