It occurred to Kendra that the other woman could have committed the murder. She was tall, and appeared strong enough. Staring at Astrid’s formidable beauty, Kendra recalled the stories of shield-maidens—Viking warrior women—and had no difficulty imagining Astrid in that role, striking down her enemies—or cutting out Sir Giles’s tongue and painstakingly painting crosses on his dead, naked flesh.
“It would be helpful if you could tell us where you both were on Wednesday night.” Kendra asked, watching them closely.
Astrid drew herself up to a majestic five feet, ten inches as she regarded Kendra coldly. “We were at home, Miss Donovan.”
“Can your servants confirm that?”
The other woman stared down her nose at her for a long moment. Kendra had never felt more like a peasant in the presence of royalty. Hell, even Lady Atwood hadn’t been able to make her feel this boorish. Kendra felt at a disadvantage sitting, so she set the teacup and saucer aside and stood as well.
“I’m certain they could, but I will not have them quizzed like common criminals,” Astrid said. “My husband did not kill Sir Giles. That is what you are really demanding to know, isn’t it?”
“What is happening here?” David Larson suddenly loomed in the doorway. He shot Kendra an angry look, before hurrying across the room to join his parents at the window. Concern darkened his eyes as he scanned his father’s face. “How are you feeling?”
Bertel raised his hand, waving it in a dismissive gesture. “I’m fine. Do not fuss, boy.”
David spun around to lock eyes on Kendra. “What is this about? I told you that my father is unwell.”
“I’m sorry, but we still need to make inquiries.”
As she looked at the family, Kendra realized they had unintentionally assumed the same positions they’d held in the family portrait. Astrid was standing, but she was flanked by her husband and son in a show of family unity. Evert might not be standing with his family, but Kendra felt that he was still there. Not a ghostly presence, but something stronger, forged in the memories of his loved ones.
Were those loving memories of a dead son and brother now laced with unhealthy rancor and a thirst for revenge? Before and after, she thought suddenly. Before, these people were united as a family, untainted by tragedy. And now, after, they were broken.
Astrid looked at her. “I think we are finished. There is nothing more we have to say about Sir Giles or the Holbrooke family.”
“What about Lord Cross?” Kendra asked, her gaze moving back to David. “Do you know him?”
David’s eyes narrowed. “We were in school together.”
“Friends?”
“No. He was older than me.” He hesitated. “I know my brother gave his life for Lord Cross and Captain Mobray.”
She regarded the family. “Do you have any idea why Lord Cross would have met with Sir Giles on Wednesday night?”
Bertel frowned, but said nothing.
David shook his head, his eyes guarded. “No, but I haven’t seen Eliot Cross since we were boys. We don’t exactly travel in the same social circles,” he added drily.
“What about Captain Mobray? Do you know him?”
“No,” David said, his mouth tight. “I have never met the man, but I have read about him occasionally in the newspapers. He has high political ambitions, I believe.”
Astrid put her hand on David’s arm, linking them together. Her eyes narrowed on Kendra. “We do not know him,” she repeated coldly. “I think we are done with this inquiry, Miss Donovan.” She glanced at the Duke as he rose to his feet. “Your Grace.”
“Thank you for seeing us, Mrs. Larson, Mr. Larson,” said the Duke. “We truly do not wish to cause you more pain. Our only desire is to find out the truth. Sir Giles’s murderer is still out there.”
Astrid moved to the bell-pull. “I shall have Wyman show you out.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Kendra said, and walked with the Duke to the door. When they reached the threshold, she paused, looking back at the family. “One more question. Do you know a formula for invisible ink?”
There was a sharp silence. “We know several formulas for secret ink,” Bertel finally said, frowning heavily. “What of it?”
Kendra studied him, wondering if it was her imagination or if he looked more strained than when he first came in from the garden. She said, “I was just curious. Thank you.”
This time, she allowed the Duke to escort her out of the room.
“Well, that was more distressing than I thought it would be,” the Duke admitted as he sank back against the velvet tufted seat of his town carriage. His eyes were troubled when they met hers. “I am fully cognizant that inquiries must be made, my dear. Murder was done. But it was difficult not to be affected by their pain over the loss of a son, a brother. Didn’t you feel it?”
“Yes. But that pain might have turned one of them into a murderer.”
The Duke said nothing for a long moment, then he sighed heavily. “You are correct, but . . . the poor man. I know what it is to lose a child in such a way. ’Tis a wonder that he didn’t go mad with grief . . .” His voice trailed away, and he looked out the window.
Kendra was surprised to find a lump rising in her own throat as she saw the haunting sadness on the Duke’s face. She remembered when she’d first arrived in the 19th century and had been put to work in the kitchens. She’d been told then how the Duke had gone temporarily mad when he’d lost his wife and child.
Someone had stripped Sir Giles and spent hours marking up his body with invisible ink, before cutting out his tongue.
’Tis a wonder that he didn’t go mad with grief . . .
She replayed the Duke’s words in her mind and thought: Maybe he—or she—did.
26
Kendra inhaled deeply, stretching her arms straight overhead, fingers linked. She exhaled and bent her body sharply to the right. Normally, she did yoga in her bedchamber in the early morning, so she could wear the more loose-fitting shift and stays, with only Molly observing what the maid believed was an odd American practice. But she hadn’t had time to do anything that morning before leaving for the Larsons, and upon returning, she’d spent fifteen minutes updating the slate board and murder book, a file that included her drawings and observations. It was standard law enforcement practice to keep such a book, and she’d started doing so recently to track her work here.
The Duke had left for a lecture at the Natural History Society, where American abolitionist and Quaker Elias Hicks was scheduled to speak. The name rang a distant bell, but Kendra couldn’t place him. She’d declined the Duke’s invitation to join him. The last thing she needed was to be introduced to a fellow American, she thought, forcing her arms and torso to stretch a little further. What if he tried to talk to her about their homeland? Elias Hicks’s America was not her America. They would have very few reference points. Her apartment complex in Virginia was probably some plantation owner’s cotton or tobacco field right now. And she didn’t even want to contemplate the sickening horror of what was happening right now with slavery. Definitely not my America.
She closed her eyes. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Opening her eyes, she slowly drew herself upright, stretching toward the ceiling for the count of three, and then dropped to the left.
She was adjusting to this new life—she was—but she couldn’t stop the panic from tightening her chest whenever there was a possibility of meeting someone who’d once only existed for her in the history books. Part of her still feared that she might say something, do something, to inadvertently change the course of history. But another part of her thought that any meeting would be just plain weird. Better to not develop any connections between herself and these random figures from history. Even if she was now living that history.
Connections . . .
From her sideways stretch, she moved her gaze back to the slate board. She needed to think about the connections.
“Whatever are you doing?”
&
nbsp; Kendra twisted her head around to watch Rebecca and Alec come into the room. A beam of sunlight teased out the fiery highlights in Rebecca’s auburn hair, which had been swept into a topknot, woven with a peach ribbon that matched the color of her simple cotton muslin dress. Alec had clearly been out riding; the hunter green riding jacket was taut across his broad shoulders, his long legs encased in doeskin breeches tucked into black Hessian boots that his valet had most likely spent considerable time buffing into a rich gleam.
“Thinking,” she said, and drew herself upright. She moved her shoulders, gratified that stretching had helped relieve the knots of tension.
Rebecca arched a dubious brow at her. “If you say so. Where’s His Grace?” she asked, moving toward the sideboard, which held a tray with coffee and teapots.
“Natural History Society.”
“Ah.” She lifted a teapot and poured herself a cup. “Papa is attending that as well.”
Alec pulled a scrap of paper from his inside breast pocket. He moved toward Kendra, handing it to her.
“What’s this?” she asked, scanning the note.
“I intercepted a boy delivering a note from Mr. Kelly. Apparently he’s managed to locate the Holbrookes’ disgraced maid, and is hoping to have a word with her.”
“Good. Disgruntled ex-employees are the best source of information.”
“What sort of information do you think the maid will tell Mr. Kelly?” Alec asked.
“I’m hoping she’ll tell him what was happening in the Holbrooke household before she was let go. She was still working there when Sir Giles’s mood reportedly changed.”
“If the maid is disgruntled, can she be trusted to speak the truth?” Rebecca asked. She glanced at Alec. “Sutcliffe, do you want tea or coffee?”
“Coffee, thank you, Becca.”
Kendra shrugged. “People lie for various reasons. Mr. Kelly is a good cop—ah, Bow Street Runner. I trust him to figure out whether she’s credible or not, if she’s got an axe to grind against her former employer and is being less than truthful.” She was only vaguely surprised to realize that she’d spoken the absolute truth. Sam Kelly was a good cop.
She set the scrap of paper aside, and picked up a nearby rag, dampening it with water from the carafe. Slate boards were almost identical to chalkboards with the exception that you needed to use a wet rag to erase whatever was on it.
“What are you doing?” Rebecca asked, handing a steaming cup of coffee to Alec.
“Rearranging things a bit.” She wrote down Sir Giles’s name again. To the right, she jotted down Silas Fitzpatrick’s name, and ran a line connecting the Irishman to the victim. “Okay. We know Fitzpatrick has a motive to kill Sir Giles. But why now?”
Alec took a long sip of coffee, his gaze on the slate board. “Maybe it has less to do with his sister’s death, and more to do with what’s happening at the Liber now. Sir Giles was keeping the coffeehouse under surveillance. Maybe he discovered something incriminating against Fitzpatrick, and Fitzpatrick found out about it and killed him.”
Kendra jiggled the piece of slate. “How’d Fitzpatrick learn about the incriminating evidence?”
“Who says he doesn’t have his own spy network?”
She looked at Alec. “You think Fitzpatrick was spying on Sir Giles?”
He shrugged. “It’s hardly unusual to have both sides spying on each other.”
Really, it wasn’t unlike what was happening in the 21st century. Intelligence and counterintelligence games were the bread and butter of the military and special ops. “You’re right,” she said. “But cutting out the tongue, the invisible ink . . . I don’t know. That doesn’t seem like a political assassination.”
“Why can’t it be both?” Rebecca asked. “If Mr. Fitzpatrick realized that Sir Giles needed to be . . . eliminated, maybe he added his own embellishment as revenge for what happened to his sister.”
Kendra looked at her in surprise. “That’s possible.” And because it was possible, Fitzpatrick’s name stayed on the board. She added another name, and drew a line to Sir Giles. “Gerard Holbrook has obvious reasons to commit patricide. Whether he has the temperament to plan this out, though, I don’t know.”
Rebecca shook her head. “I cannot see it.”
“It stands to reason that Sir Giles would have been troubled by his son’s behavior in recent weeks, and could account for his own mood,” said Alec.
Kendra nodded. “The idea of being sent to India would have been an obvious trigger for Holbrooke. He knows his father’s routine. It wouldn’t take much planning on his part to set up Sir Giles. And just as Fitzpatrick could have embellished, so could Holbrooke. But for Holbrooke, it’s about misdirection. Maybe people could believe a son would commit patricide, but cutting out his tongue, using the invisible ink? That points to someone else, doesn’t it?” She gave Rebecca a look. “You don’t believe Holbrook could have done it for those reasons.”
“Not only those reasons. I am thinking of the man I met yesterday,” Rebecca argued. “He did not strike me as evil. Spoiled, arrogant, but not evil. And he would have to be evil to do what was done to his own father!”
“What does evil look like? I think you know more than most that evil can hide behind a normal face.” She met Rebecca’s eyes, saw the glimmer of awareness, and knew she was remembering the two times she’d personally encountered evil lurking behind normalcy. “Evil is an emotional description,” Kendra continued briskly. “Let’s stick to the facts. Holbrooke had motive. And he lied about his whereabouts the night his father was murdered.”
“He actually didn’t lie—Lady Holbrooke lied when she provided him with an alibi,” Rebecca countered.
“Okay. Lie by omission. He didn’t correct her.”
Kendra moved forward and added Lord Cross’s name, then a new line connecting him to Sir Giles. “The connection between Cross and Sir Giles is a bit more ambiguous.”
Alec said, “Cross sought out Sir Giles before he was murdered, and was seen having a heated discussion with the man. That’s not ambiguous. And he was evasive about their conversation. I certainly didn’t believe his assertion that Sir Giles outbid him on a horse.”
“He’s definitely hiding something,” Kendra agreed. “But does it have anything to do with the murder?” She tapped her chin with the piece of slate as she considered it. “To be honest, he didn’t seem to have the temperament to commit the murder.”
Rebecca lifted a brow in her direction. “Because he doesn’t look evil, perchance?”
Kendra laughed. “Touché. However, I really do mean his temperament. He was visibly nervous, and when he lied, he lied poorly. The unsub we’re dealing with is more cold-blooded and calculating. Someone like his friend, Captain Mobray.” She added the captain’s name to the list, and drew another line. “Mobray’s connection to the victim is even more ambiguous—at least at this stage. He and Sir Giles knew each other. They both worked in government. We need more information about him. Maybe our reporter friend, Mr. Muldoon, can help us there.”
“Why is the captain’s name up there at all if his connection to Sir Giles is so tenuous?” Rebecca asked.
This was where things got tricky, Kendra realized, because she was relying more on instinct than solid facts. “I got the impression that Mobray was rescuing Cross from our interview,” she said slowly.
“Why would he do such a thing?” Rebecca asked.
Instead of answering, Kendra leaned forward and wrote another name on the slate board.
“Evert Larson,” Rebecca read, and looked at Kendra. “How can a man who died two years ago have anything to do with what happened to Sir Giles two nights ago?”
“Connections,” Kendra said softly, and drew a line from Evert to Cross and Mobray, and then from Evert to Sir Giles. “Evert connects the men together.”
Alec said, “And according to my contact, Sir Giles had mentioned Evert’s name recently.”
Kendra added Bertel, David, and Astrid to the slat
e board. “Your contact also said a month ago Sir Giles became upset over something.”
“Unnerved by information he’d received,” Alec clarified.
“And a month ago, Bertel Larson also seemed to have some sort of setback. A malady of some kind. At least that was how it was described. It’s too much of a coincidence.” Kendra shook her head. “I don’t like it.”
“And you think the information has to do with Evert Larson?” Rebecca guessed.
“I don’t know, but Evert is the one person that links everyone together, except for Fitzpatrick. His family, of course, had ties with the Holbrookes that go back years. But their estrangement can be traced to Evert’s death.” She thought of the rage she’d seen in Bertel’s eyes. “Mr. Larson regards Sir Giles’s decision to persuade Evert to become an intelligence agent as a betrayal that led directly to Evert’s death. It may be two years since his son died, but his anger hasn’t abated.” She began pacing. “There needs to be a more recent trigger.”
“The information that Sir Giles learned a month ago,” Alec said.
She nodded and retrieved her coffee cup, then went to the sideboard to replenish it. It was the seventh cup she’d had that morning, but who was counting? “Evert also has a strong link to Cross and Mobray. He died trying to save them. Cross became visibly nervous when we questioned him about Evert. He initially lied about knowing him, even though they were at Eton together. He’s hiding something.”
Rebecca asked, “What?”
“I don’t know. That’s what we need to find out.” She sipped her coffee. “I find it interesting that Cross and Mobray appear to still be friends. They’re from different social circles.”
“They were prisoners together in a French camp. They are the only survivors,” Alec pointed out. “Such experiences have a tendency to forge very strong bonds.”
“True . . . except that’s not what I saw last night.”
Rebecca regarded her. “What did you see?”
“Control,” Kendra said. “Mobray knew who we were, and what we were talking to Cross about. He stopped it. Why?”
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