A Study in Darkness (55 page)

You don’t have the stomach to look at her unhappy face,
you mean
. Bancroft knew Keating loved his daughter, but not as much as he loved owning Tobias’s genius. His idiot son had already introduced efficiencies to the Gold King’s steam-generating plants that doubled their profitability. Who could have guessed the boy had it in him? And that poor Alice’s happiness was expendable in the face of so much earnings potential? Bancroft was actually starting to feel protective of the girl.

“I’ll see to it she gets her jewels,” he said. “I’m sure having them back will brighten her day.”

“I’m sure it will,” Keating said with yet another of those narrow-eyed looks. The man was going to develop a squint.

Bancroft ushered him out of the study, then closed and locked the door behind him. Then he was finally free to do what he’d been aching to for the last half hour. He all but ran to the fireplace and reached inside. The key was gone. Without that, he couldn’t even see what was missing from his box under the floor.

Fury crawled over his skin, down his throat, through his belly.
Who took it?
He backed out of the chimney, breathing hard, his vision blurred with panic.
Try again
. He reached inside and up, feeling for the chink in the stone where he kept the key. The hole was there, but nothing else. Thinking it might have dropped, he scanned the grate, but it had been recently swept. No key there, either.

He stood, breathing hard and working his hands as if to grab control of his racing heart. But all his fists clenched was thin air.
So either someone swept it up and put it out in the ash bin, or someone stole it
.

But when had he seen it last? Bancroft tried to tame his thoughts. Just last night, he’d gone into the box to dip into his secret supply of gold. With Magnus in town, he’d wanted to enhance his collection of specialty weapons. Protecting himself from the unkillable would take more than a common revolver—but a purchase like that was best kept un-traceable, so he’d bypassed his usual man of business.

But that narrowed the range of possibilities. The thief had to have broken in between last night and now. He needed to
find out who’d been in there that day.
Could it have been Magnus?

Bancroft ran for the door, rattled his way through it, and bolted down the hall bellowing for the butler. Someone in the house had to know who’d been there. He’d find out if he had to hire some inquisitors of his own.

BY THE TIME THE SUN WAS FADING, ALICE WISHED WITH ALL
her heart that she’d never agreed to snoop in Lord Bancroft’s study. After they’d fled the wardrobe and made it safely to the corridor, they’d split up, retreating to their own rooms like shamefaced children. Unnerved, Alice couldn’t shake the conversation she’d overheard. She’d understood little of it, but echoes of it went around and around in her mind, ominous as the great black rooks that had clustered around Maggor’s Close. She’d always known her father’s business had tendrils in much more than gas and coal. She knew he was ruthless. But this had hinted at so much more darkness that she barely recognized the man who had cared for her all her life.

Cared for, until he’d traded her happiness for a son he wanted more. In the end, diving into the German letters was an act of self-preservation. Anything to focus her reeling mind.

And then, with a rising nausea born of horror, she wished she hadn’t done that, either. She read them through, pacing back and forth across the bedchamber, as if walking would help her concentrate. At first, she thought her German was at fault, that she didn’t understand what she read. But when she finally accepted the words on the page, she wasn’t sure what to do.

She had to tell Tobias. It wasn’t so easy when they barely spoke and when he would all but run from the room when she appeared. But after what she’d read, Alice was in no mood for any more games. Her best option was to ambush him in his own chamber. So she was sitting on the edge of
Tobias’s bed when he came into his room that evening, the papers spread out on her knees.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, a look almost like fear on his face.

“I’m not here to take advantage of you,” she snapped, and then regretted it. “I have something you’re going to want to see.”

His gaze fell on the stack of correspondence. “That’s in High German.”

“It is. You’ve been looking for the history of your father’s automatons,” she began.

“How do you know that?” he asked, his voice growing hard. “I didn’t ask you to involve yourself.”

“One would have to be deaf, the way you’re carrying on about it.”

He had that expression again, that deliberate absence of emotion that said exactly how afraid and angry he was. It gave his handsome face the look of a petulant Apollo about to turn her into a less troublesome object—a lampshade, perhaps, or a potted geranium.

“It’s none of your business!” he growled.

“But this is.” She waved the papers. “I think this is what you want to know. Read the top page.” She thrust them into his hand before he could back away. “These were in your father’s safe under the floor in his office. I broke in and took them.”

He gave her a dumbfounded look that had just a hint of admiration. “You did?”

“I got bored.” But she could see the questions coming. She waved her fingers at the papers. “Just read these before you worry about how I got them. There will be time enough for conversation afterward.”

He stared at her another long moment, then turned his attention to the page. Then—as she’d hoped—her petty crimes didn’t seem to matter anymore. “Dear God, these are from Magnus.”

There were so many questions she wanted to ask, the words cramming into her throat with choking intensity, but she let him read. As she watched, the wall he’d pulled around himself
faded, a crease forming between his brows. She saw his shoulders sag, and then he sat on the stool at the end of the bed, turning the paper over with trembling fingers.

Alice wanted to reach out and touch his shoulder, but she couldn’t summon the courage to offer sympathy. And he read the next letter, and the next, his face growing paler with every page. There was nothing she could say that would blunt the shock.

When he finally finished, he sat motionless, his head bent. “Now I know why he’s such a miserable bastard. He can never make up for what he did.”

“Imogen needs to know,” Alice said quietly.

“Fetch her,” he said dully. “Father is in his study. Meet me there.”

Alice went without argument.

T
OBIAS TOOK THE
time to read the letters through again before he rose from the stool and went down the stairs to his father’s study. The clock on the landing spit out a card as he walked past, but he left it lying on the floor. Evelina had broken the code to the cipher, but he couldn’t afford to think about her, and he didn’t want to hear anything one of Magnus’s creations might have to say.

He pushed the door open to find his father sitting behind his desk, his hands jammed into his thick, iron-gray hair. Tobias strode across the room and slapped the letters down before Lord Bancroft had more than lifted his head. “You’re going to explain all this to Imogen because
she
of all people shouldn’t have to learn the truth from Dr. Magnus. What did you do? Keep these as proof he is a sorcerer? Or as a reminder of how low you sank?”

“Always be thrifty with evidence, even if you can’t use it right away.” Bancroft’s hand slid over the letters, his eyes icy slits. “What in all the black hells gives you the right to steal from me and then demand I explain myself? You’ve surrendered the moral high ground these days.”

“I might begin to understand you, but I don’t forgive you,”
Tobias said, his jaw so tight it was hard to push out the words.

“I didn’t ask for absolution.”

“You will, now or later.”

“Are you a prophet now, boy?”

Tobias heard movement behind him, and he stepped back from the desk. Alice was walking toward them, a resolute set to her face, as if she meant to kick them both in the shins. Imogen trailed after, an uncertain frown clouding her eyes.

Alice stopped at the edge of Lord Bancroft’s desk and set the key on his blotter. “I believe this is yours.”

“You took it?” her father-in-law asked incredulously.

She hesitated for a heartbeat and then lifted her chin. “Guilty as charged.”

“You little snake!” Bancroft leaned across the desk, as if he meant to leap over it. Tobias grabbed his wife’s arm, pulling her back. Alice stiffened. And then he realized it was the first time he’d touched her since their wedding. He dropped his hand as if she’d burned him.

“What’s going on?” Imogen asked nervously.

Bancroft’s face was growing red, the veins in his neck bulging at the collar. “How dare you creep into my study and put your thieving fingers all over my things? Are you spying for your father, little girl?”

Tobias could not stop himself from turning to face her. He’d been wondering the same thing. “Alice?”

“No!” she snapped. “This is your family’s affair. And I know what my father would do with what’s written there. I’m married to your son, Lord Bancroft, and what happens to him happens to me. There is no good ending for any of us if I open my mouth.”

“What are you talking about?” Imogen cried, her voice shrill with frustration. “Will someone please tell me what is going on?”

“Will you?” Tobias demanded of his father. “She’s the one who needs to know.”

Bancroft fell back into his chair. “And if I don’t? Are you going to pick up a gun like you did the last time I failed to
live up to your ideals?” He sounded nonchalant, but his eyes were haunted.

Tobias’s jaw ached with tension. “For God’s sake, just do the right thing for once.”

Alice sat down in one of the chairs and crossed her arms, as if she planned to wait out Bancroft’s stubbornness. Imogen followed suit, though she looked like she’d prefer to bolt for the door. Tobias remained standing. A silence fell, as if no one wanted to be the first to start the avalanche that would bury whatever remained of their family bond.

“Who was this Dr. Magnus?” Alice demanded. “I know Father despised the man, but little else.”

Bancroft sat perfectly still, as if weighing the situation and calculating odds. Tobias could almost hear his brain whirring like the longcase clock, checking barometric pressure and the phases of the moon to see which way his advantage lay. But there was no way out—Tobias and Alice already knew the truth. The only thing that was left was to give his version of events.

For once, Tobias had his father cold. And, true to form, Bancroft settled back, looking as if he’d meant to play raconteur all along.

“Magnus was my friend when I was young. We met in Austria,” Bancroft began conversationally. “I was very interested in mechanics, and so was he, although it might be said that I was the technician and he was the theorist.”

His father sounded distant, almost as if he were talking of strangers. “Magnus was capable enough with tools—he built that longcase clock on the second-floor landing—but didn’t have the patience to undertake the detailed project he wanted most to explore. He wished to create life-size automatons that went far beyond anything created before. This was the project that drew us together, for I relished such mechanical work.”

And then his expression sagged, the urbane mask slipping an inch. “What I did not know at the time was that he was also an accomplished sorcerer.”

“Sorcerer?” Alice exclaimed, her voice a squeak.

“A sorcerer,” Tobias repeated, remembering all too well
the horrors of the doctor’s project.
Serafina
. She still haunted his nightmares.

Bancroft gave his son an ironic nod. “At this time, we were a young family. Poppy was a baby, Imogen and Anna were about five, and you, Tobias, were ten. I was happy, a man with a healthy career and many friends. But then the twins fell ill.”

Tobias could sense his father slipping into memories. At once, he seemed both more guarded and less, keeping his face turned from all three of them. He picked up a pen from his desk, turning it over and over in his hands.

“I remember the automatons,” Imogen offered, her voice cracking with apprehension. “You made them to keep Anna and I amused when we were sick. They walked and danced and one could sweep with a broom.”

“They were crude by today’s standards, but I was proud of them back then,” Bancroft admitted. “And Magnus kept making them do more and more. At first I found it amusing, but your mother became frightened. Magic is not illegal in Austria, but even so the living dolls made her uncomfortable.”

“So you tried to put them away but then Magnus asked for money,” Imogen offered. “Tobias told me that much.”

“But there’s a part in between,” Tobias said grimly, putting his hand on his sister’s shoulder for reassurance. It was the only thing he could do, letting her know she wasn’t alone.

Bancroft’s face went utterly blank, as if he had suddenly left his body. “There
is
more.”

The words held more menace than all of Bancroft’s bluster. The room seemed to grow cold with it, the wind rattling the windows drowning out any familiar noises from the street. It felt like the room, with them in it, was the whole world.