by P. N. Elrod
A deep and distant clarion sounded, carrying through the walls. Tolling from Westminster, Big Ben gave the hour to anyone within hearing: two o’clock. The short winter daylight would be gone altogether by the time she finished writing that report. She did not care for the idea of a coach trip after dark, either. Best to postpone one and expedite the other.
Alex had her plans sorted by the time she returned to her office.
* * *
Sexton was gone, along with Mr. Brook, which was disappointing, but Heather Fagan remained, still playing with her new toy. She’d removed a flat spool that trailed a black ribbon halfway across the office to the window. Alex knew the ribbon held some import in the printing operation.
“Problem?” she asked.
“Just seeing how it works,” Heather replied. “I should have ordered extra ribbons. It will be a bother when this one wears out of ink.” Much of that substance had transferred to Heather’s fingers, so it wouldn’t be long. “I might be able to roll another ribbon in if I can find similar-size ones made here.”
Alex’s desk was as she’d left it, but now her father’s walking stick lay on it. She’d not left it there. The carpetbag with her damp clothes was in the corner out of the way. “Where did Mr. Brook get to?”
“Off to the bog, I expect. Not that he said it in so many words, but I got a bit of anxiousness from him.”
Alex had attended to that necessity on her way back.
“And Mr. Sexton?”
“Who knows? He was unsettled, but not showing it much—rather the way you are now. Peeled your skin, did our Mrs. Woodwake?”
“It wasn’t so bad, just a report.”
“That you can’t talk about.”
“That I can’t talk about.”
“Well—rot on it. There’s too many secrets in this place. Everyone wants to know why we’re here and those at the top aren’t sharing. Much more of this waiting and there will be a mutiny.”
Alex debated ordering a pot of tea. The interview with Woodwake, the day’s harrowing events, and lack of sleep were catching her up. She was about to ring for one of the pages when her attention caught on the walking stick’s sliver trim: a detail that should not have been there.
An extra band had been added; indistinguishable in style from the original work, it stood out to her eye. There had to be a reason for her father to make such a change.
She found her gloves and pulled them on, not wanting another emotional jar, and picked it up. A swift and firm twist caused the stick to separate into two parts. The additional band hid the seam. The upper portion was hollowed out, and within the cavity was a scrap of paper rolled tight to fit. She coaxed it free with a letter opener.
“What’s that? A calling card?” Heather asked.
“Apparently.” Alex fitted the two cane parts together again.
“Clever place to hide things. I’ve an uncle with a stick that serves as a sort of elongated brandy flask. He likes to think no one knows about it.”
On one side of the card was a name in the delicate cursive script favored by the finer printing shops, Rosalind Veltre, on the other, in pencil, 25 Grosvenor Sq. 8:30—“Masters Impart.” The writing was not her father’s.
Alex forgot about tea, slipped the stick under the papers, and made her way to the file rooms. The main room was long and narrow; a line of card drawers took up the center and banks of files lined the walls. All of Alex’s investigation reports were here, along with all the others conducted by her colleagues. The service was a great one for keeping detailed records.
She opened the card drawer for “V” and with considerable satisfaction found one for Mrs. Rosalind Veltre, her name neatly printed at the top and under it the numbers to indicate which file report contained her information.
The lack of content in the file sheaf was a disappointment:
ROSALIND VELTRE, b. 1851, London. Res. 3 Hill Street, Mayfair, London.
Widow of Thurman Veltre, Esq. 1840–1875, burst appendix, interred Highgate Cemetery.
Began attending séances 1876, approx. Favored those held by “Madam Szakaly.” See file #M272.
Member of the Ætheric Society, 1877, approx. Attends public lectures and private parties.
Attached to the page, a clipping from The Times proved to be Mr. Veltre’s obituary. He had been a solicitor with Veltre, Veltre and Caldershot and was survived by a number of relatives.
Mrs. Veltre would have to be well off to afford such a fashionable resting place for her husband and thus be of interest to the Ætherics. It was clear how the lady’s path had taken her to them. Bereaved widows were bread and dripping for thousands of mediums plying their trade throughout England. The Psychical Fraud Section was always busy.
Should Woodwake be correct that the private parties were some form of debauch, then was Veltre a hapless victim gulled into acceptance or a willing participant? Alex had no illusions about her sex being passive when it came to certain activities of the body. Women were just as easily tempted by the demands and desires of the flesh as men.
But this was pure speculation. It was a capital mistake to weave possibilities out of imaginings, not facts, and there were few of those as yet. Rosalind Veltre was a cipher. Why had Father been interested in her? What if she had not been helping him? What if she had aided in bringing about his murder?
There was but one certain way to discover that.
Alex made note of the address, shut the file drawer, and held the briefest of inner debates about mentioning this to Woodwake.
Not in the humor she’s in.
Woodwake would send someone else to question Rosalind Veltre and see to it Alex was physically hauled away to Pendlebury House.
No, thank you.
Alex had places to go first.
* * *
Mr. Brook was in her office again, combed and shaved, wearing a proper suit with a well-cut frock coat and polished boots, and carrying a top hat. Alex stopped in the doorway, taken aback by the transformation. He looked the gentleman and stood when he saw her.
“Miss Pendlebury.”
“Mr. Brook. Heading home?”
He showed puzzlement.
“You’ve been on duty since last night,” she reminded.
“So have you.”
She took her cloak from a peg behind her desk and settled it on her shoulders. Her reticule was where she’d left it, heavy with the pistol inside. “I’m about to leave. Mrs. Woodwake ordered me back to Pendlebury House.”
“Then I’ll escort you.”
That wouldn’t do. She wanted a driver who wouldn’t question her detours. “Most kind, but I don’t think—”
“Alex!” Heather spoke from behind her typing machine. More parts had been liberated from it. Her face was smudged with ink, her hands black as a coal miner’s. “Mr. Brook would like the pleasure of escorting you home. He would be greatly disappointed if you denied him such a small boon.”
Brook cleared his throat. “Uh-hm, that is to say…”
Alex felt herself flush pink, possibly a florid red at the implications behind that boon. They’d been talking about her. Heather, a forward young lady, was much given to speaking her mind, however socially awkward it might prove. She possessed a hearty disdain for consequences.
But I do not want a gentleman caller! Certainly not now.
Heather arched one eyebrow and fixed her with a glare. Alex instantly recognized the threat. Heather had picked up on her swoop of panic and would inform Brook about it unless—
“Thank you, Mr. Brook. I would welcome a little quiet company.” There, a conditional compromise. He could not possibly expect more, given the circumstances.
Brook fetched Alex’s carpetbag. “What’s happened to the walking stick? I left it propped against the wall.”
“You left it on the desk,” said Heather, whose attention was back on the machine. “Alex was fiddling with it.”
“But I—” He bit off the rest, looking uncomfortable.
&n
bsp; Another precognitive occurrence?
“Interesting,” said Alex, echoing Woodwake’s assessment.
“Not to me,” he muttered.
If he hadn’t left it there, she’d not have found the calling card, not as quickly anyway.
“What a deuced inconvenience,” he added as they went downstairs.
“I feel the same way about my so-called gift,” she said.
“But you have control of yours. The devilry about mine is not being aware of it.”
“Manifested early, did it?”
“No. Last year I took a knock with a polo mallet, fell off the horse, and haven’t been the same since. That is, I recovered in body, but this … it started just afterward.”
“Unusual. Most people are born to it, but a few are made.”
“I’d like it unmade. More than once I’ve thought of giving myself another clout to see if it would cure me, but I might wake up and be even worse off.”
“It takes time to adjust.”
“So I’ve been told.”
He did not seem in the right mood to suggest that with training he might learn to control the ability. Another day would suit better.
Mrs. George still commanded the reception area, which was crowded with people demanding to know when they were to be allowed to leave.
“It’s been hours,” complained someone at the back.
“And it may be hours more,” she said with the weariness that comes from repetition. “Until then, make yourselves useful and do something else besides this botheration.”
Alex took the lead, going around rather than through them—and stopped dead.
Sybil, minus her caretaker, stood with her back to the front entry. Pale face consumed by an unsettling grin, she put a finger to her lips. “Pie hole shut,” she whispered.
A number of thoughts on how to deal with the situation galloped through Alex’s head. She fell back on instinct and nodded. “Ears open, head down?”
“Yessssss!” Sybil responded, mad eyes bright. She stepped back, bumped against the doors, and walked out, backward.
Unlike the incident in the dining hall, no one seemed to have noticed her presence.
Alex followed, half terrified, half fascinated. She wanted to bolt, she really did. The woman continued to walk backward, negotiating a step down to the sidewalk as though she could see it. She continued along, heading toward the street. Alex rushed to catch her up.
“I’m sure it’s much too cold,” she called out. “You’ve forgotten your coat.”
“Haven’t got one. They keep me like a hothouse orchid, but I want to have a walk. This is fresh!” she declared, stretching her arms. She’d stopped inches short of a low stone balustrade that served to separate the Service’s entrance from the public sidewalk.
Brook looked to Alex for some hint of what was needed, but she was at a loss. Getting Sybil inside seemed the thing to do, but how to accomplish that did not suggest itself. The woman was in the throes of an unsettling giddiness. That could change in a blink. Reason and respect might work.
“You’ll be able to stay out longer with a coat. I know where we can borrow one.”
“What color? Oh, never mind. I like this!” She turned slowly in place. “Yes! What’s next to the blackness, traveler’s daughter. You were clever to suggest that. Can’t look for long or it will know. I saw what’s reflected in one mirror, just-just-just the one.”
“What did you see?”
“Not enough, of course. It’s never enough or it’s too much, each a tiny bit different and all bad. You told him how it is.” She pointed at Brook.
“I should like to hear more,” he said. “Over a cup of tea?”
“Whiskey’s better. The traveler’s daughter will need some soon.” She looked past him toward a muffled and cloaked man strolling their way from the south.
Alex started, wishful hope making her think it was Fingate for an instant, but this man was taller with a different gait. He gave them no notice and turned for the entry, not in a hurry, but not wasting time, yet another member of the Service called in on the holiday.
“Bad news,” said Sybil. “Very bad news.”
From the pocket of her dress she removed a small pistol and, showing no hesitation, shot the man squarely in the back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
In Which the Law Is Violated. Several Times.
The weapon made a businesslike snapping sound, like dry wood breaking. His momentum took him a few unsteady steps, then he toppled and lay twitching.
Alex gasped in horrified shock and froze, training forgotten.
Brook surged forward and took the weapon from Sybil. It proved to be a single-shot Derringer and God knows how the woman had gotten it. Weapons were kept in Service offices, but locked up.
The man’s cloak had flapped wide when he fell. Grasped in his right hand was the gleaming shape of a strange-looking pistol with a long thin barrel and a bulky tube above the trigger.
“Head down,” Sybil intoned.
Gaping at what must be a smaller version of one of those deadly air rifles, Alex felt blank lunacy seize her. She responded: “Ears open?”
“No. Head. Down. They’re here.” Sybil abruptly dropped flat.
Brook grabbed Alex. For the second time within four and twenty hours, she experienced the shock of a man throwing himself over her body.
The air whooped from her lungs, curtailing immediate protest. She struggled to move, but he had her pinned, face to the cold walkway. A scant foot from her nose she saw a piece of the pavement the size of a shilling vanish in a tiny cracking explosion. There had been no sound of a shot, but the ricochet was distinct enough.
Air gun.
Bloody hell.
They were behind the questionable cover of the knee-high balustrade, which was better than nothing, but bullets began smacking into the barrier like horizontal hail.
“Back inside,” said Brook. “I’ll cover.” He shifted from her, rolling once and pulling a revolver from his coat pocket. Between themselves and the doors lay thirty feet of open space. It might as well have been thirty miles.
“You’ve five shots and that Bulldog is only good at close range,” Alex said. She got her own revolver, a breakfront Webley, from her reticule. “Where are they?”
“Can’t tell, no sound, no muzzle flash or smoke.” He flinched as a bullet whizzed overhead, shattering a glass panel in one of the entry doors. Someone ventured to look out. Brook bellowed a warning. Another bullet followed, breaking more glass, and whoever was inside ducked away with a curse.
A pause came in the hail strikes; Alex risked peering between the fat columns supporting the top of the barrier. Amazingly, people strolled along Parliament Street unaware. Carriages rolled past, carrying revelers. She heard drunken laughter and song. When a hansom heading north cleared the entrance to Downing Street across the way, a bullet winged off the pavement. She sighted along the barrel of her Webley, waiting for the shooter to show himself around the corner.
A shot pocked the stone barrier above her head.
“Two of them,” she said. “The near corner of Downing and to the right, behind that tree.”
Sybil added, somewhat muffled: “Head. Down.”
“It’s impossible,” said Brook. “We can’t shoot back with the street so busy.”
“We use that. They hold fire when something’s in the way. Wait until both are obscured and run.”
“Head down, down, downdowndown,” Sybil insisted, peevish.
“Or perhaps not.”
“What?” he asked.
“She wants us to stay here. She can see the future, perhaps—”
“Miss Pendlebury, I have little confidence in that.”
“Fell off the horse and haven’t been the same since,” Sybil told him in a scolding tone.
“Then again…”
“Hallo out there!” called someone from the building. One of the doors was open a crack.
Alex forced herself to keep
low. “Mrs. George! We’re being shot at!”
“We worked that out, dearie. Help’s on the way!”
Brook yelled the probable location of the shooters.
“I’ll pass the word,” she said. “Mind you, there’s—”
They missed the rest when a number of bullets slammed into the remaining glass panels, shattering them. Mrs. George squawked and removed herself from the area.
More than two were engaged in the assault now. Where the devil were they?
Alex’s heart gave a leap of hope when she saw three men threading through the trees from the Richmond Terrace end of the building … until she realized they weren’t Service, but wearing hooded cloaks, carrying their peculiar weapons at the ready. She suspected the rifles were not as accurate as their noisier percussive cousins and that closer range was needed. She and her companions had no cover from that direction.
But from her angle the three were apart from passersby. Alex brought her Webley around, sighted, and fired at the closest man, who strode forward boldly, his rifle up and aimed right at her.
She’d missed, but he stopped in his tracks, apparently surprised at a show of deadly resistance. That made her second shot easier, and she did not flinch. He dropped, and his two companions faltered in their forward progress, staring at him.
Brook’s short-barrel Bulldog gave a loud, sharp bark for its size. He also missed, but the noise had a discouraging influence; they began backing away.
Alex sighted on one of them, but a different pistol above and to the side spoke first. He staggered, giving a surprised grunt before falling. Several upper-floor windows in the Service building were open, and people fired from them.
The third fellow coolly raised his weapon. No sound came from it, nor was there any sign of recoil. The only way to tell if it fired was when a bullet struck. She shot at him, but he seemed unconcerned, perhaps counting on distance and her shaking hand to keep him safe.
It was a poor choice. Her next shot brought him down.