A Study in Silks (66 page)

EVELINA WAS SLUMPED OVER HER DESK, HER HEAD IN HER
hand. Her stomach felt queasy, as if she had eaten a bucket of grease, but it was actually a constant, barely manageable case of nerves. She needed sleep. She needed to not be worrying about Uncle Sherlock, who was lying in a bedroom down the hall. She needed to lose herself in a problem so she would stop thinking about the fact that one or both of them had narrowly escaped death.

Helen
. The cube repeated it, interrupting Evelina’s thoughts yet again.
Helenhelenhelen
.

She was cradling the cube in her lap like a cat. It seemed happy there, as if physical contact was necessary to the metal thing. Mouse and Bird were playing tag on the bed, getting tangled in the pillows and coverlets. The window was open to the garden, the cool morning fresh and sunny. It would have been idyllic except for the constables roaming through the garden, trampling any available clues.

With an effort, she dragged her attention back to the coded letter. Every time she had attempted a solution, she’d given up in despair. This time looked to be no more successful. She had her uncle’s pamphlet open on the desk, the letter, and a piece of notepaper in front of her. In the middle of the desk, she’d pulled out her copy of the coded message with spaces below it for the key.

Helenhelenhelen
.

She patted the cube absently.

HELEN
.

She paused, thoughts bumping together to make a new combination. She got up, setting the cube on her dresser, and opened her wardrobe. With one thing and another, she hadn’t yet sent the silk dress she’d worn at the dinner party to be cleaned. She rifled through the clothes until she saw the familiar rose-colored fabric. A search of its pockets produced what she wanted. She returned to the desk with the card that had spit out of the longcase clock. She had put it into her pocket when she’d been helping Nick back to her room after Dr. Magnus had left.

It was the one other cipher that she’d seen recently. She studied the card and compared it to the note from the gold, but that was a pointless exercise. Perhaps her uncle might have seen similarities and differences, but they both looked like a jumble of letters to her. But what had Magnus said? The cipher from the clock was one that both he and Bancroft knew.

So she could point to two people who knew a cipher. A twinge of satisfaction brought a half smile to her lips.

Helen
, the cube repeated.

Evelina furrowed her brow, inching the problem forward a degree. She didn’t know what the deva in the cube could perceive, or whether it was more or less than Mouse and Bird because they could understand the cube no better than she could. But for the moment, she would assume it had a similar range of perceptions. Therefore, if the people writing the ciphered message had been in the warehouse, and the cube was in the warehouse, it could easily have seen or heard them use the key. That opened up possibilities.

“Helen,” she murmured.

The whole idea of Helen as divine truth was something of a hobbyhorse of Magnus’s. In addition, the cube kept calling her by that name. It might have been the cube’s way of trying to help.

While it was unlikely that a mysterious metal box possessed by an ancient spirit would give her the key to a coded
message, not much that had happened in the past week could be construed as terribly logical. There was nothing to lose by trying, so she wrote in “Helen” as the key.

The typical way of decoding these ciphers was to find the letters of the cipher text at the top of the table and the letters of the key along the left-hand side. Where that row and column met in the table would spell out the solution. Evelina followed this method for a while and simply got more nonsense. She was ready to give up in disgust, but there was one last trick to try. Uncle Sherlock’s book pointed out that sometimes those positions were rearranged various ways, and the key to the code could be found in the columns, and the letters of the message itself along the rows, so she tried that.

She found
H
at the top of the table, ran her finger down to
J
and left to
C
. She wrote
C
in the first block of the solution. Then she dithered a bit around the fact that
E
led to another
E
, but finally settled on the fact the solution letter was
A
. Then it was
L
to
Y
to
N
. She started to get excited by five letters in, tingly by the time she was halfway through, and almost dizzy when she got to the end.

“Cannot copy chest please advise,” she said aloud, and then said it again. “Cannot copy chest. Please advise.” Copy? That opened up more questions—many, many more.

She picked up the cube, staring at it. “Are you Athena’s Casket?” she asked.

She felt it pondering the statement, struggling with how to make itself understood. Inspired now, she set down the cube and returned to her desk and quickly decoded the message on the clock’s card. It read, “Beware the untruth.” She
made an impatient noise. That was about as specific as a fairground fortune-teller. One couldn’t throw a dinner bun in London without hitting a liar.

There was a frantic knocking on the bedroom door. Mouse and Bird dove into the bed cushions. Alarmed, Evelina shuffled away her papers and all but tossed the cube into her wardrobe before she unlocked the bedroom door.

Imogen rushed in, her face streaked with tears. “Evelina, have you read the newspapers?”

A rush of fear made Evelina clutch at her friend’s arms, pulling her close. “No, what’s happened?”

Imogen thrust a copy of the
Prattler
at her. “Read this.”

Before she did anything else, she drew Imogen inside and made her sit on the bed. The girl was shaking. Mouse and Bird emerged from the cushions, curious to see what was going on. Evelina turned her desk chair around and sat, reading the article about Mrs. Reynolds’s trial and conviction. “Somehow I knew this was how it would go. Hardly anyone accused of magic is ever acquitted.”

“But she’s innocent!” Imogen cried. “I overheard. At the Westlakes’ ball. Mrs. Reynolds is an illegitimate cousin to the duchess!”

“Hush!” Evelina waved urgently. “Keep your voice down!”

Imogen put a hand over her mouth, realizing what she had done. When she spoke again, it was more quietly. “I was with Bucky when I overheard. The Gold King had been trying to help her, but he was warning her to stop. He said nothing was going to save Nellie Reynolds and it would just drag the duchess down if anyone found out she was helping.”

“He was probably right.” A cynical part of Evelina thought Jasper Keating could save or condemn anyone he pleased and was just pulling the duchess’s strings, but dwelling on that would only upset Imogen more.

Her friend was crying in earnest now, her slender shoulders shaking with distress. “We knew she was innocent and we didn’t say anything! Surely we could have done something. Why didn’t we?”

Evelina closed her eyes for a moment, feeling a pang of regret. She moved onto the bed, sliding her arm around Imogen’s shoulders. She didn’t speak. There wasn’t a lot she could say.

“Why?” Imogen whispered harshly. “Why is it so hard to object if something is unjust? Why isn’t the duchess allowed to support her cousin? She’s a
duchess
, for pity’s sake. People should listen to her.”

But the old aristocracy’s sun was setting, and a ducal coronet didn’t mean as much as it had in their grandparents’ day. The steam barons dominated the Empire now. It wasn’t as if Imogen didn’t know the facts, but these last few days would have been the first time she’d felt the full measure of her helplessness. “I’m sorry,” Evelina whispered. “How did you and Bucky hear this?”

Imogen bit her lip. “It was an accident. He said not to do anything, and to keep it all a secret because we should never have overheard. He promised to talk to me about it later.”

“He gave you good advice.”

“I thought somehow we’d find a way to prove her innocent—figure it out the way your uncle does. If Nellie Reynolds did nothing wrong, we should have been able to show that to a judge.”

“It’s very hard to prove a negative.”

“I know,” Imogen said bitterly. “In the moment it seemed a heroic idea. When I think about it now, it sounds incredibly naive.”

Evelina winced, thinking Imogen sounded very much like she had at the start of her so-called investigation of Grace Child’s murder. “Bucky is no fool and you read the papers, Imogen. Barely a month goes by without the trial of some magic user. If the steam barons keep everyone afraid of magic, no one will try to use it against them. And the betting just keeps the public appetite sharp.”

“I know,” Imogen said miserably. “I overheard Father tell Mother that he unexpectedly won a great deal of money on Nellie Reynolds’s trial. Enough to pay for my Season. He laughed.”

Evelina felt sick as Imogen turned even paler. How was
any girl supposed to feel about her parties and dresses, knowing they were paid for like that?

“Worst of all, I haven’t been able to talk to Bucky.” Imogen turned her silvery eyes on Evelina. They were bright with tears. “There was no opportunity to decide what we could or couldn’t do, so our chance slipped away.”