Blackstone and the House of Secrets (The Blackstone Detective series Book 3)

by Sally Spencer

  He forced himself not to display his growing excitement. Two coaches. The fat man Demitri had talked about was almost definitely the Prince of Wales, but before he went any further it would be best to make sure.

  “What makes Demitri refer to the second coach he saw as the ‘bird’ coach?” he asked.

  The Russian shook his head in wonder that anyone could be so stupid as to need to ask, then sketched out his answer in the air, as he spoke.

  “He calls it the ‘bird’ coach because it had a painting of three feathers on the side of it,’”Agnes said.

  The Prince of Wales’s feathers! His bloody crest!

  “And what about the first coach?” Blackstone asked. “Was there anything painted on the side of that?”

  Demitri shook his head, then shook it again, as if to contradict himself.

  “Why does he seem so confused?” Blackstone asked.

  “Because he thinks that there had been something painted on it — perhaps more feathers — but it had been over-painted entirely in black, so that only the vaguest outline could be seen,” Agnes explained.

  It was still possible that the big coach — the one which came through first — had been carrying the Prince’s luggage, Blackstone cautioned himself. Perhaps the Prince had borrowed it from the Count, and — since he was using it as his own — had had the Count’s crest blacked out.

  “Ask him if the first coach was some kind of baggage coach,” he said to Agnes.

  “No, it was not,” Demitri replied.

  How could he be so sure of that? Blackstone wondered. He could be sure for several reasons. The first was that the coaches had been some time apart.

  “How long apart?”

  “As long as it would take an old man with a sack on his back to walk to the Big House.”

  Roughly half an hour, Blackstone calculated. The second reason was the big coach had at least fifty soldiers escorting it, Demitri said — and what in the world could be so valuable that it needed so many men to guard it?

  “Is there a third reason?’ Blackstone asked.

  Yes, there was a third reason, Demitri answered. Though the blind had been down, he had clearly seen a man peeping from around the corner of it.

  What kind of man? Blackstone wanted to know. Young or old? Large or small? Foreign or Russian?

  He had only caught the briefest of glances of the man, Demitri said, surreptitiously filling his glass from the bottle. It was impossible to say anything about his age or his size, but if he were a gambling man, he would be willing to wager that the passenger was a Russian.

  Blackstone was not convinced. Demitri would say anything to ensure that the vodka kept flowing, he thought. But he did believe that there had been two coaches — if only because he didn’t think that the peasant was bright enough to have made that up. Which meant that the Captain had definitely lied when he’d said that the Prince of Wales and his party had been the only ones allowed to leave the house. Someone else had fled even earlier — someone who had had his crest hastily painted out to avoid being recognized. But who could that be?

  “Ask him if he knows any of the dvorianstvo who attended the party,” Blackstone said.

  “They were very important people,” Demitri replied. “And rich. Almost as rich as the Little Father.”

  “Who’s the Little Father?” Blackstone asked when Agnes had translated. “The Count?”

  Agnes laughed. “No,” she said. “The peasants call the Count ‘Father’ when they’re talking to him, but for them there’s only one ‘Little Father’.”

  “And who’s he?”

  “The Tsar himself, of course. They’ve never actually seen him, you must understand — he’s not one for touring the country, as Catherine the Great did — but despite that, they feel they know him as well as they know the members of their own family.”

  “Because of what they’ve been told about him?”

  “Because of what they’ve made up about him. The Tsar, according to the peasants in this village — and according to millions of other peasants in thousands of other villages — really cares about his muhziks, and it is only the landowners they actually come into contact with who make their lives a misery. They believe that he knows them all personally, and if one of them were to go to his hut — which is, of course, much, much grander than any of their huts — he would greet the visitor by name, and invite him inside for a glass of kvass, which, no doubt, the Empress herself would be delighted to serve to them.” She saw the expression on Blackstone’s face, and said, “You find that strange?”

  “I find it incredible,” Blackstone admitted.

  “But true,” Agnes said firmly. “These are simple people, Sam, much simpler than agricultural labourers back in England, and if you don’t understand that, you will never understand them.”

  They were getting away from the point of the questioning, Blackstone realized. “Does Demitri know the names of any of the people who attended the party?” he asked.

  Demitri did not, though, as if to compensate for a lack of knowledge in this particular field, he put forward the theory that some of the guests might have been even richer than the Little Father.

  “I think you’ve got out of him everything that you’re likely to get,” Agnes said.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Blackstone agreed.

  “Well, then, there’s no point in staying in this stinking hovel any longer than we have to.”

  Agnes turned, and said a few words to Demitri. A look of deep sorrow came over the peasant’s face, and he gazed down at the vodka bottle which was standing on the table. Agnes repeated what she had just said. Demitri picked up the bottle, and clutched it tightly to his body.

  For perhaps half a minute the two stood facing each other aggressively — the powerful peasant towering over the governess — then Agnes repeated herself a second time.

  Slowly, as if it were costing him a great deal of both mental and physical anguish, Demitri wrenched the bottle away from his body, and handed it over to Agnes.

  Once they were out on the street again, Blackstone said, “I thought things were going to turn violent in there.”

  “Did you?” Agnes asked, as if the remark were of absolutely no interest to her.

  “Indeed I did,” Blackstone told her. “I saw myself having to defend you against him, and I didn’t fancy my chances of winning.”

  “False modesty again,” Agnes said lightly. “Demitri might be strong, but he’s no fighter — at least, not in the way you are.”

  “How are we different?”

  “He is not surprised if he loses. It is just the way of things, as far as he is concerned. You, on the other hand, always expect to win.”

  She was a remarkable woman, Blackstone thought. Perhaps even as remarkable as his beloved Hannah.

  “I still think you should have left him the bottle,” he said. “After all, he did try to help us as much as he was able.”

  “If I had left it, he would have taken that as a sign of weakness,” Agnes said. “And the next time we wanted to bargain with him, it would have been all the more difficult.”

  “You’re a hard woman, Agnes,” Blackstone said, only half-joking.

  “I’ll tell you another old Russian saying,” the governess replied. “It’s this: ‘Another man’s tears are only water.’ Can you work out for yourself what that means, Sam?”

  “That you have to be hard, because it’s a hard world we live in?” Blackstone guessed.

  “Exactly,” Agnes agreed. “And living in Russia is harder than living almost anywhere else.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  They walked back up the drive towards the Big House, close enough to touch each other, yet rarely doing so —and then only by accident. Ahead of them, the upper storeys of the house were ablaze with light, and from one of the salons came the sound of music and laughter.

  “A party!” Agnes said. “And tomorrow there will be another, and another the day after that. An endless s
tring of frivolous encounters which will end only with the grave.”

  Blackstone laughed, though perhaps a little uneasily. “You sound as if you disapprove,” he said.

  “I do disapprove,” Agnes replied. “I’m a lowland Scot, and we lowland Scots understand that life is a serious business. You have to work at it, Sam, and there’s little time left over for self-indulgence.”

  “And that’s your philosophy, is it?”

  “Indeed it is. If you’re bad at something, you must make an effort to improve. If you’re good at it, you should strive to be even better. That’s what I believe — and that’s why I’m such a good governess.”

  Blackstone was becoming uncomfortable. He was normally a serious man himself, but alone with this intriguing woman in the darkness of the Russian night, he wanted to forget that for just a short while — wanted, perhaps, to be as frivolous as the people upstairs.

  “I’m sure you’re a good governess — and no doubt a very frightening one!” he said, almost teasingly.

  “You’d do well to believe it,” Agnes told him, still serious.

  The woman was having a strange and unsettling effect on him, he thought, and wondered why that might be. Though she was by no means ugly — or even merely plain — she certainly couldn’t be described as beautiful. And though she was witty when she wanted to be, her wit was no greater than that of many other women he had known in his life. So what the hell was it about her that was making him react as he did? What was that special quality which she seemed to have?

  He couldn’t put his finger on it, however much he tried, but he didn’t need to pin it down to know that he would feel a tiny pang of sadness when they reached the house and went their separate ways.

  They arrived at the impressive main door. Blackstone wondered whether he should kiss her lightly on the cheek, or merely shake her hand and thank her for her help. But his body had already decided he should do neither, and he felt his legs move him some distance away from her.

  “Where are you going?” Agnes asked.

  Blackstone pointed to a spot further down the building. “The servants’ entrance,” he said.

  “The servants’ entrance,” Agnes repeated thoughtfully. “Will you answer one question for me, Sam?”

  “If I can,” Blackstone promised.

  “You’re as good as any of the people in this house, Sam. No, I’d go further than that — you’re far better than most of them.”

  Blackstone smiled. “That’s not really any kind of question at all, now is it?” he asked.

  “Perhaps not, but you can certainly read a question into it, should you choose to,” Agnes countered.

  “Are you asking me if I’ve ever thought it might be nice to go in through the front door for a change?”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s not important which door you walk through,” Blackstone said, growing serious, even though he didn’t want to.

  “Then what is important?”

  “The only thing that really matters is how you walk through it — whether or not you’re your own man on both sides of it.”

  “It’s easy to say that — words come cheap — but you’ll never really know whether it’s true or not until passing through one door is as normal to you as passing through any other,” Agnes said.

  “Then I will never know,” he said, “not unless the world turns itself upside down.”

  “We could turn it upside down — at least for one night,” Agnes said, reaching for the bell-pull.

  “And what would be the point in doing that?”

  “What would be the point in not doing it?”

  A liveried footman answered the door. Agnes addressed him in Russian, and he gave her a small bow, then moved to the side. Agnes stepped into the magnificent hallway as if she’d been born to it. She did not specifically ask Blackstone to follow her — but he did anyway.

  They were in Agnes’s bedroom. Blackstone was sitting on the only chair — were they doomed to perpetually meet in rooms where there was only one chair? — and Agnes was perched on the edge of a bed which seemed so large that her body could have got quite lost in it.

  The Inspector looked around the room. It was not, he assumed, as luxuriously furnished as the rooms the family used themselves, but it was still the most opulent place he’d ever been invited into as a guest.

  As Agnes poured them two glasses of vodka from the bottle she’d wrenched away from the reluctant Demitri, Blackstone focused his attention on the impressive row of medals which hung in a large frame on the wall.

  “Are those your father’s medals?” he asked, as the governess handed him his glass.

  “Yes, they are.”

  “He must have been a very brave man,” Blackstone said. He expected her to be pleased by the remark, but instead she seemed to be vaguely dissatisfied.

  “Finish it,” she said.

  “Finish what?”

  “Your thought.”

  “How do you know I didn’t?”

  “I just do.”

  Blackstone swallowed slightly. “To have earned so many medals, he must have been a very brave man, as I said before — or else he must have been a very foolhardy one.”

  Agnes nodded, satisfied. “We should always be honest with each other, you and I, Sam,” she said.

  “So which kind of man was he?”

  “A little of both, I suspect. Like all good soldiers are. Like I’m sure you were yourself.”

  “You admired him.”

  “I worshipped him. I wanted to be just like him when I grew up. Then, when I was around five or six years old, I started to realize that — as a girl — I never could be. And it broke my heart.”

  “But you got over it.”

  “Not really,” Agnes said. “There are times when I regret not having gone to university, and times when I regret not having married. But I always regret that I could never become a soldier.”

  “You could still marry,” Blackstone said.

  Agnes shook her head. “I don’t think so. The time for that has passed. I have other things to absorb me now.”

  He wanted to tell her that she was wasted as a governess out in this Russian wasteland — that there were so many other things that she could do if she threw in the cards that life had dealt her and went off in search of an entirely new deck.

  He wanted to say it — but he didn’t. Because what he didn’t want was for her to hate him — and he was afraid that if she was not brave enough to follow his advice, that was exactly what she would do.

  Agnes stood up, and walked over to the window. She stood looking out into the darkness, then turned and crossed the room to the door.

  It was almost as if she were parading herself before him, Blackstone thought, but even as the idea was passing through his mind, he was beginning to condemn it as unworthy.

  Something seemed to be absorbing Agnes’s attention, he noted, and shifting his head slightly, he could see it was the keyhole — or rather the key protruding from the keyhole — on which her gaze was fixed.

  Half a minute passed, and her gaze never faltered.

  He found himself wondering what it was she saw when she looked at the key. Was it, to her, merely a piece of metal, cunningly fashioned to fit perfectly into a lock? Or had it suddenly become something more significant? Had this commonplace object taken on a new meaning for this woman who, half an hour earlier, had told him that he would never know what it felt like to walk through a new door until he had tried it for himself?

  Another minute passed.

  “Is anything the matter?” Blackstone heard himself ask.

  A tremble ran visibly through Agnes’s whole body. Then she squared her shoulders, reached forward with her right hand, and turned the key in the lock. The click seemed as loud — and as significant — as a gunshot. Agnes stayed where she was for a moment longer, then turned around to face him.

  “We both of us know why we’re here in this room, don’t we, Sam?” she asked.


  “Do we?” Blackstone responded.

  She looked deep into his eyes. “Honesty, Sam,” she said. “We must always be honest with each other.”

  Blackstone met her gaze. “Yes, we both know why we’re here in this room,” he agreed.

  Agnes nodded — and then she began to slowly unbutton her blouse.

  *

  It was the sunlight streaming in through the window that Blackstone became aware of first. It played on his eyelids with something between a sting and a tickle, as it urged him to open them and face a new day.

  The sounds came next — birds chirping happily, several men’s shouted exchanges somewhere below, the click-clacking of horses’ iron-shod hooves on cobblestones. The world was calling to him, but he was not ready to answer that call quite yet. He let his hand grope blindly to the part of the bed where Agnes should have been lying — and found it empty.

  Had it all been nothing more than a dream, then? he wondered. When he did finally open his eyes, would he find that he was not in Agnes’s bedroom at all, but instead in the cupboard of a room that the Count deemed worthy of his status as a servant?

  Perhaps it went even further back than that. Perhaps the whole Russian expedition had been a dream: the fight on the train merely the result of eating too richly immediately before going to bed; Agnes no more than a product of his own imagination — born out of his desire to fill the yawning gap in his life which Hannah had left.

  Yet if any of that were so, he was prepared to swear he was still asleep, because the bed he was lying on was far more comfortable than any he could ever remember calling his own.

  With a sigh he opened his eyes, and looked around him. Yes, he was in Agnes’s room, but of Agnes herself, there was no sign at all.

  His wandering eyes fell on a note, written in immaculate copper-plate script and propped up on the night-table, where he was bound to see it.

  We can’t all lie abed all morning, Inspector! Some of us have tasks we must be going about!

  What time was it? he wondered. He glanced out of the window at the sun which had been teasing him earlier. Eight o’clock, or a little after, he decided.