A Study in Silks (14 page)

So he betrayed her instead, making her love him and then sending her into danger. That was what men like him—the deal-makers and throne-shakers—did.

Bancroft felt a harsh sting at the back of his eyes. He had felt oddly calm, looking at her body and hearing the news she was with child—possibly—probably—his. If he’d ever needed proof that his soul was dead after a career spent in intrigue, that was it.

The pity of it was, dead or alive, she would have been useless. Women with babies were too preoccupied for his kind of work—unless you took the child from them to focus their concentration. And, while by-blows were inconvenient for a man like him, servant girls with bastard babies were ruined for anything at all. At the very least, he would have had to pension her off, another millstone around his financial neck. He should be thankful to be spared that much.

But he didn’t feel spared. Shadows were gathering around him, dank and dark sins rising up from their carefully concealed graves.

He poured himself another whisky. He would make this one last, because he must stay alert. Not like last night, after he had come home from the theater. He remembered breaking into a cold sweat when he saw Magnus there, sinister as
a demon with one cloven foot outside the conjurer’s circle. He remembered sending the grooms to move his trunks from the attic, praying that Magnus would have forgotten their existence. He remembered his first drink, and his third. But there was a blank period, before Bigelow woke him in the library. If he’d indulged less—well, Grace wouldn’t have been waiting for him to come and get the envelope when someone had killed her for it. He couldn’t even recall how he got to the library, or if he’d spoken to anyone along the way.

Could he have … no.
I’ve never killed an innocent
. He’d simply killed innocence along the way.

I’m sorry, Grace
. Bancroft turned away from the window, unable to bear the sight of the fresh, green spring.
Somehow, I miscalculated
. That’s how he would have to think of her death, to shrink it to something he could manage. A miscalculation.

He tossed the whisky down his throat.

Where had the sums and averages of risk and probability failed? Where had he gone wrong? He’d told Tobias there was no danger to the family. If he’d had to place a bet, he’d say that had been a lie. But he knew better than to run. Enemies hid everywhere, waiting for weaklings to lose their nerve. Then they pounced, their teeth in your neck.

Bancroft lifted his glass to the tiger’s head, giving it a facetious salute. He kept the snarling thing as a reminder to show no fear.

When you ran, that’s when the predators got you.

JASPER KEATING, THE STEAM BARON KNOWN TO MANY AS
the Gold King, snapped the newspaper shut. He was not a betting man, but long ago the Steam Council had agreed that given their considerable influence, it would be unseemly for them to wager on trials of magic users. That
might be seen as a coercion of justice. Nevertheless, it was irritating, because whoever bet against the actress was on to a sure thing.

There wasn’t a pulpit, a judge’s bench, an editorial column, or a respectable dinner table where the voice of authority would not deplore the use of supernatural powers. Through careful cultivation and steady pressure, the industrial machine had seen to that. The only power in the land came from their fires. So why, when he was one of the handful of men who ruled the Empire, did he feel so uncertain?

Keating tossed the paper onto the seat beside him. He was not a man who suffered from nerves. Yet, rolling across Marylebone Road toward Baker Street in his very expensive carriage, he experienced a flutter in his stomach that had nothing to do with the breakfast he had just eaten. No, Keating was an abstemious man untroubled by such mundane foes as sausages. There were two things bothering him.

First was the prospect of having to ask assistance from that consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes—an individual well known for his independence. Being one’s own man was a trait unwelcome in this day and age of allegiances and bargaining. But what could Keating do? Holmes was uniquely qualified to solve an urgent difficulty. And that was the second thing upsetting his stomach—the task itself. Just the fact that Keating was going to the Baker Street address rather than commanding Holmes to come to him said much about how profoundly Keating needed that brilliance at his beck and call. He hoped that a little condescension would be worth his while in the end.

The equipage slowed, the steady
clop-clop
of hooves breaking rhythm to shuffle to a halt. Bits jangled; horses blew. Keating could have had one of the new steam-powered vehicles for getting about, but he preferred flaunting the hallmarks of gentility his forefathers would have understood—and hopefully choked on, given that the sententious old bastards had expected him to come to nothing. Therefore, in Keating’s eyes, anything less than his matched bays would be unforgivably short on elegance.

The carriage door opened and the footman folded down
the steps. Keating gathered his hat and walking stick and emerged into the slightly misty April day. He gave a nod to the servant, who stepped smartly forward to knock at the door. Keating’s informants said Holmes lived in the first-floor rooms with the bay window overlooking the street. A landlady lived at street level. A fairly typical arrangement.

He took a moment to look around. A steam cycle whirred by, kicking up dust. A Disconnected house stood a few doors down, a sign on the gate advertising it for sale. Some rough boys had stopped to gawk at the carriage, but the groom was shooing them off. Uninterested, Keating kept a cool gaze moving over the street and its inhabitants.

Ah, this was more pleasing. Workmen from Keating Utilities were changing the globes of the streetlamps from red to gold. He’d just recently pushed the boundaries of his territory north, taking this street, among others, from the Scarlet King.

The mechanics of such a takeover were simple: central power plants had been adopted in London, and individual homes and businesses were now hooked up to their lines. Gaslight and steam heat were supplied by one or another of the utility companies, depending on which company served that street or square. Unhooking the pipes from one trunk line and reconnecting them to another was just a matter of valves and couplings and perhaps some excavation. And so, where Baker Street had once run off the Scarlet lines, now it ran off the Gold.

But the politics that made it happen were fierce—a matter of bribes, threats, and backroom deals. There would, no doubt, be repercussions for this maneuver, but that was a difficulty for another day. One didn’t wrest possession of an empire from one’s rivals with nothing but gentle persuasion.

The thought acted like a switch in his mind, and suddenly he was irked anew by his role of supplicant. What was he doing, standing in the street like a beggar? A wave of pique rushed through him, flushing his skin until the fine wool of his coat itched abominably. Keating wrestled with his top button, setting his jaw. The footman had sent his card up to the Great Detective, so what was Keating waiting for? Word
that the man was receiving visitors? He was the Gold King. No one dared to turn him from the door.

But that unthinkable event might happen. A middle-aged woman—no doubt the landlady—was standing at the threshold talking to the footman and shaking her head regretfully. Bitter bile caught in the back of Keating’s throat. This was insufferable.

With a barely polite nod, he marched up the walk and pushed past her into 221B Baker Street. Without pausing, he spotted the staircase and mounted the steps to the rooms above.

“Sir!” the woman bustled after him with a rustle of heavily starched petticoats. “Sir, Mr. Holmes is still at his breakfast!”

Keating was already at the top of the stairs, his impatience mounting with her every word. “I’m sure the man can eat his toast and listen at the same time.”

“But Mr. Holmes …”

“Do you know who I am?” he thundered.

That took her aback, a glisten of fear filling her eyes. “But sir!”

Silly, twittering creature
. He relented. “I’ll be sure to tell Mr. Holmes you’re not to blame for my intrusion.” And Keating pushed open the door to Holmes’s room.

His first impression was one of chaos. He looked from left to right, quickly cataloguing what he saw. In one corner stood a table littered with scientific equipment of some kind, racks of glass bottles hinting at research of a chemical nature. Next to that was a desk where no paper had ever been neatly squared. It looked more like a badger had been at the stack of papers, books, and empty plates piled there. Keating could not repress a shudder at the mess.

Straight ahead was a fireplace with a large bear skin before it. The skin was flanked by a settee and pipe rack on one side and a basket chair on the other. On the Baker Street side of the room was a table and chairs. The table was set with a breakfast redolent of kippers. One chair was occupied by a tall, angular man with an ascetic air and lean face.

“Holmes, I presume?” Keating said. “I am Jasper Keating.”

“Indeed you are,” said Holmes absently. “Might I offer you tea? Breakfast? Mrs. Hudson’s scones are quite delightful.” The man barely looked up from the copy of the newspaper he was perusing, instead awarding Keating an indifferent glance.

Stung, Keating narrowed his eyes. “I come in the character of a client, not a breakfast guest.”

Holmes at last lifted his eyes from the very same article on Nellie Reynolds that Keating had been reading in the carriage. His brow furrowed. “I apologize for the informal reception, but I had no intention of seeing anyone for at least another hour.”

“And I had no intention of waiting.”

Holmes compressed his lips with displeasure, but a beat later a mask of politeness visibly slid over his features. It was somehow more demeaning than outright rudeness. “I take it you have a matter to discuss which you consider to be an emergency?”

“So it is.”

“I should sincerely hope it is nothing less, since you have trampled my housekeeper and interrupted my meal.” Holmes flipped his napkin from his lap and dropped it to the table. The gesture held all the irritation Keating felt.

Keating gripped his walking stick more tightly, banking his temper.
I must tread carefully if I want his help
.

“May I take your coat, sir?” The landlady was hovering uncertainly at the door, looking as if she preferred to bolt.

Annoyed at being caught wrong-footed, Keating shed his coat and hat and handed them to her, along with his walking stick, lest he be tempted to teach Holmes some manners. The woman gave a curtsey and left.

Holmes had risen from the table and crossed to the basket chair by the fireplace. With a sigh, he subsided into the chair with a graceful collapsing of his long limbs. With one hand, he indicated the settee with an airy wave. “Please be seated, Mr. Keating, and tell me how I may serve you.”

Keating sat, suspicious of Holmes’s heavy-lidded regard.
Annoyance prickled whenever the detective’s gaze flicked to Keating’s face, but in the end it didn’t matter. Holmes was listening. The Gold King had power even with this contemptuous bounder, and that was all that mattered if he wanted this matter of Athena’s Casket resolved.

But how did he explain the theft of the casket, which he had learned of only this morning, without actually explaining the item itself? It was a risk. Holmes was intelligent. He might find out more than Keating wanted him to know.
Don’t be daft. Keep it to the facts he will understand. No one would believe the rest, anyway
.

“I have an interest in archaeology,” Keating began.

“As did your father before you,” Holmes countered.

Keating frowned. “I heard that you perform an amusing parlor trick, telling a man all about himself using seemingly insignificant details.”

Holmes stretched out his legs, crossing his ankles, and made a steeple of his fingers. He looked utterly at home and relaxed. It was annoying.

“I can,” he said with barely concealed smugness, “but it is your ring that gives you away. It is etched with a likeness of the Acropolis, and it is of an age that suggests you did not purchase it yourself, but rather someone from the previous generation. Your father, I understand, was a bishop in Yorkshire, and therefore well educated. It was not an enormous leap of logic that the ring would be his.”