A Study in Darkness (37 page)

She didn’t argue. Evelina had quickly realized most of Magnus’s lessons consisted of him putting her in the best position to discover things for herself, and that suited her perfectly. Her talents wanted to grow almost of their own accord—all he needed to do was point them toward opportunity, and even the past few days of instruction had made a
difference. She had to admit, however grudgingly, that he was a good teacher.

Evelina raised the wand, sending her consciousness down her arm and through the slim piece of wood. She instantly understood that someone had charmed it and used it many, many times. When her powers reached the wand, it was like sliding in stockings across a polished floor—she zipped forward, her energy faster, and launched outward into the world with her perceptions wide open. In fact, the wand must have enhanced her ability to read the energies in the air, because she got far more information than she ever had before.

She was aware of herself, and of the dark lodestone of Magnus’s strong magic, but she was far more interested in the wider city. London was a seething mass of energy, surging and writhing like something coming to a boil. Each person walking the streets shed a little of his life force as he hurried from club to home, or factory to doss-house, or the nursery to the kitchen. Concern and laughter, love and anger all rose off them like steam from a kettle. The cloud of it hung over the city, thick as London’s famous fogs. It was the city’s collective, invisible life, huge and not a little daunting. Uncertain, she drew back.

“You will never learn unless you touch it,” Magnus said. “Trust your strength.”

So she plunged into it, and she recognized much. The gaiety of the theater district, the pride and strife of the Parliament, and the eager, forward energy of the counting houses and shipyards. And running through it all like a ribbon of rot was the despair of the poor. Evelina jerked away from that, afraid to let it touch her any more than it had. Then, for a moment, she let herself drift, experiencing the vibration of all the life. It seemed to fall in veils around her, and though it wasn’t a visual thing, it felt like there were colors to the waves of life that came from here or there. It wasn’t the same thing as a deva’s energy—it was much more diffuse—but she wondered if it could be spooled up like honey or spun like fleece, somehow concentrating it into a form that a spellcaster could use.

And then she remembered that Magnus had told her to move the wand about. It took Evelina a moment to remember where her arm was, but then she began to inch it in a slow arc. The effect was like moving the lens of a spyglass. She could see the energy rising from a park, or the river, or a night market. And then there was something hideous. “What’s that?” she whispered.

“A fire in a workhouse.” Magnus’s voice was utterly neutral, simply stating a fact.

But it was like nothing she had ever seen. Sheets of twisted energy leapt up, struggling in the jaws of a cleansing blast. Destruction was a palpable force, almost an entity with its own conscious will. It snapped over the scene like a flag in a gale, buffeting everything else away. There was death there, swarming over the scene. Lives sizzled to nothingness like rain on hot iron—but then those lives escaped, free and wild, floating into the void like mist.

Evelina was appalled, but fascinated. This was a view she’d never seen, and she felt herself drifting closer, wanting to witness just one more detail, then another, of the compelling play of forces. Part of her wanted to hang back, thinking she didn’t belong there, thinking she might be hurt by those mad, snapping flames. But she was supposed to trust her strength, and this was as good a time as any to start.

“I will catch you if you fall,” Magnus assured her.

And so she kept going, drawing closer and closer. She could feel the frantic energy of those trying to help, but the weight of destruction pushed down harder, an invisible force that crushed every stroke for good. Evelina could feel those many lost lives floating up like a vapor. If she had lungs on this plane, she might have simply breathed them in. Instead, she reached forward, feeling them spangle like stars against her soul. They slid around her, smooth and slippery, leaving trails of vibration that tickled. The touch of them was delicious, every nerve in her body electric as they brushed her. Each one left her a little more exhilarated, a little more alive herself for the time that they touched. And maybe she did somehow absorb them, because a wave of heady drunkenness made her swoon.

Magnus caught her as she began to swoon and eased her into the armchair. “Easy now,” he said. “That’s a lot of excitement for a first journey.”

Evelina opened her eyes, staring up at him in stunned wonder that was followed quickly by a sense of having done something terribly wrong. “Blood and thunder,” she muttered. She rarely used strong language, but nothing short of a curse would do. “You said I couldn’t do that.”

“Pardon me?”

“Those lives were at the point of dissolution, the very stuff of death magic.”

“Indeed,” said Magnus with an enigmatic smile. “Did you dislike the taste so very much?”

“No,” she said, and burst into tears.

COLD, WET RAIN HAD SOAKED THE DOCKS, LEAVING THE
brickwork dark with moisture and the air heavy with moist, ripe smells. The warehouses facing the river seemed to squint under the arched brows of their windows, peering down at the unforgiving gray of the Thames. Ragged children watched the steam-driven vehicle as it chugged past, running alongside for a few steps, then giving up and gaping after it with eyes too old for their faces. Decrepit men drifted into doorways like yesterday’s newspaper, some old, some injured, some simply at a loss. A handful of charity workers moved among them, bringing food enough to keep them alive for another day. A few hundred yards down the way, a ship was in and men swarmed over the gangplank, moving off crates and barrels with single-minded efficiency. Gulls swooped overhead, mewling as they scouted for opportunities.

Sherlock Holmes watched it all out the window of the Steamer, grateful that he’d finally given Keating’s Yellowbacks the slip. They were good, but not as good as he was. He’d switched places with the man who’d come in to fix the plasterwork after the bomb, using his talent for disguise to slip out under their noses. Mrs. Hudson would keep the man fed until they could repeat the switch.

The freedom was almost intoxicating, and he drank in the
views of London, however squalid, with the thirst of someone wandering out of the desert. There were barrowmen and ragpickers, whores and mummers. Ragged children sang to heartbroken charity workers while accomplices cut their purses. Holmes identified the thieves the way others watched birds, cataloguing species and plumage. He’d left anything of value back in Baker Street—that was merely good sense. He was destined to pay a call on the Blue King that afternoon, and would be lucky to leave with his internal organs, to say nothing of his pocket change.

Unfortunately, the Tower Hamlets had already swallowed up something far more important than anything he possessed. If Tobias Roth was correct, Evelina was here, caught in one of Jasper Keating’s games—and as anxious as he was about the Blue King, he was far more concerned about his niece. She was the only thing that guaranteed he would return to his cage in Baker Street—if he defied Keating too openly, the cost to Evelina, once she was found, might be too great.

He recalled the words of her note:
It is best that I go to some place where I am unknown, and where my shame cannot follow me. Please, do not look for me, for this is the bosom of your enemies. Know that I will do my best to earn a blameless life in hopes of redemption in the eyes of the All Powerful
. This was indeed the bosom of his enemies—or one of his enemies, at any rate—and, if he was reading the note correctly, she was here on Keating’s orders for what was probably a trifling transgression.

But why had she been gone so long? It had been nearly a month since she had left Maggor’s Close. He had been absorbed in Baskerville business and hadn’t really noticed anything was wrong until her letter had arrived—and then nothing else mattered.
Why the devil didn’t she come to me? Surely she didn’t think explaining why she left would stop me from coming to find her?

He braced himself on the seat as the vehicle jogged over a pothole, the rough springs threatening to dislodge every tooth in his head. The Schoolmaster, seated next to him in the backseat, didn’t seem to mind it. But then he never
seemed to mind anything, and had readily agreed to help locate Evelina.

Frustration burned in Holmes’s chest—not an uncommon feeling when dealing with his niece. She was too much like him—proud, impatient, self-contained, and convinced she knew what was best for the people around her. There was a reason young ladies should be locked in towers until they were twenty-one. He’d thought she was sensible, but apparently his detective skills did not extend to predicting the whims of precocious nieces.

Frustration bled into fear, making Holmes tighten his grip on his sword cane.
And where do I begin to look for her? I solve insoluble problems, I piece together the most profound and complex puzzles, and this certainly qualifies to be among them. But do I have the time to sift through this ocean of people, looking for just one girl? Or will I be too late? Or when faced with the impossible, do I attempt the unthinkable?

“I half expected a strike by now,” the Schoolmaster said, breaking into Holmes’s worries. His eyes were hard to read behind the green-tinted spectacles, but his mouth was a hard line. “There are radicals among the dockworkers. I wonder that they haven’t taken a stand.”

“I don’t think that will happen until something changes,” Holmes replied, keeping every trace of anxiety out of his voice. Much of his authority came from his impenetrable sangfroid, and he needed that power now more than ever.

“Not after the match girls, you mean,” replied the Schoolmaster.

“Indeed.” Almost seven hundred had gone on strike from the factory in July. Two hundred of those had vanished in the space of a week. The rest had gone back to work without further complaint.

“Is that what’s going to happen?” the Schoolmaster asked, one corner of his mouth turning up. “We open the cage, let all the pigeons fly free, and they crap on our shoes?”

Holmes felt a twist of resignation. “If, by that tortured metaphor, you are asking if a populace liberated from the stranglehold of the Steam Council is going to be fractious, unmanageable, and appallingly ungrateful, then I would say
yes. The point of a rebellion is that they are free to be that way.”

“You’re hardly a utopian.”

The idiocy of the statement was like a slap. Helpless anger flashed up, hot as an exploding airship. Holmes smacked the tip of his cane on the floor of the Steamer. “My niece has been missing for weeks. In the past three days, I have questioned train officials, cab drivers, hoteliers, fellow passengers, and the agents of the Gold King lurking at my heels every moment of the day as to her whereabouts. The ignorance, indifference, and general stupidity of our fellow citizens are appalling beyond measure. Where in that is utopia?”

Another pothole jerked the vehicle so hard that their rumps left the seats. “Are we there yet?” snapped Holmes.

The Schoolmaster flashed him a grin. “Missing your horseflesh, are you?”

“I’m missing several vertebrae.”

The Schoolmaster ordered the driver to stop and then paid the man after they got out. Holmes stood next to the Steamer’s back wheel, which was a good five feet in diameter. The front wheels were slightly smaller, giving the appearance that the vehicle was crouching, its tall, crooked exhaust pipe reaching into the air like a squirrel’s tail. The Steamer chugged away, belching gouts of coal dust and steam. “Mine’s faster,” the Schoolmaster said, adjusting his scarf. “Better pressure, better output.”

“And I’m sure yours toasts tea buns as well,” Holmes said icily. “Shall we get on with this?”

They started weaving their way through the mass of humanity clogging the dockside. The Schoolmaster shrugged his long coat tighter around him. With his low-crowned hat, muffler, and hair in need of a barber, he looked like one of the artists lurking in the local garrets. “Are you sure you want to do this? You know the Blue King tried to kill you. Elias Jones, the bomb, and all that. There is a reason Jasper Keating has you under lock and key. You’re in danger.”

“Jasper Keating never does anything for one reason. I may be in danger, but he wants something from me besides my well-being. As for Elias Jones, according to our friends
at Loch Ness, he confessed to working for both the Blue and Gold Kings. We must split the credit between the two barons for that escapade.”

“You’re just as dead, whichever one pulls the trigger. Just because King Coal sends you a note to drop by, that doesn’t mean you should answer.”