A Study in Darkness (7 page)

Holmes looked critically at Jones. “We’ll need a cab. The closer to the back entrance the better.”

“I have a Steamer around the corner,” the Schoolmaster replied. He turned to Evelina, touching the brim of his hat. “If you’ll excuse us, miss.”

She nodded mutely and turned to her uncle. “I was planning to have my trunk delivered from the station …”

“Oh, by all means,” he said with a flap of his hand. “Mrs. Hudson has your room ready. When she’s back from her quest for constables, perhaps you could ask her to sweep up and call the glazier. In the meantime, some letters have arrived for you. Invitations and whatnot. I’m sure they will keep you occupied until I return.”

FEELING SUDDENLY LOST, EVELINA WATCHED HER UNCLE
and the Schoolmaster carry Jones out the study door with as much ceremony as if he were a sack of spuds. She had been sucked into the action the moment she had set foot in 221B Baker Street, but had just as suddenly been cut adrift. Hesitantly, she set the gun on the dining table.

Evelina didn’t want to sip tea and read letters. Questions needed answering, and there was danger afoot. Besides, after spending the summer with Grandmamma Holmes in Devonshire, the last thing she wanted was one more minute of being polite and quiet.
Come now. Don’t be greedy. One explosion should be enough for any afternoon
.

Evelina heard a door open and close downstairs. The back door; the men leaving. With a wave of an inexpressible emotion—maybe loss, maybe relief—she realized that she was alone in the slightly smoking silence of her uncle’s residence. As the tension drained out of her, she released a sigh and looked around.
What a mess
.

Evelina looked out the window one last time. The crowd had finally wandered away, and there was still no sign of Mrs. Hudson. At loose ends, Evelina picked up the broom she had used on Jones’s head and pushed the debris littering the floor into a pile. The dining table, though still on its feet, had been swept clean by the path of destruction. She recognized pieces
of Mrs. Hudson’s good Blue Willow china and felt a pang of regret. She bent down to gather some of the scattered papers, careful not to cut herself on the shards of crockery.

The
Times
was splayed across the floor, the charred pages crumbling as she picked them up. Without intending to read, her eyes flicked over the words that were still legible, as if their fragility made them somehow more important. It was the previous day’s edition.

And then the paper, and the story of the dead woman, turned to ash. “Thirty-nine stab wounds,” Evelina murmured to herself, then dropped the crumbling paper onto the pile of debris. It was a horrible image, but her thoughts slid away quickly. After a bomb and a gun and those manacles that seemed to have a life of their own, she couldn’t absorb anything that wasn’t relevant to her immediate problems. She still had to decide how far she dared to push her uncle for information on Mycroft’s activities. And Jones had mentioned Baskerville. She’d heard the name before, but couldn’t remember where.

Then she saw a scattering of envelopes and bent to scoop them up. A few were singed, but most were merely sooty. These must have been the letters Holmes had referred to. She turned them over, reading the addresses. Most were to Holmes, and a few to Dr. Watson—even if he wasn’t currently residing at Baker Street. Two of them were for her—one from the Ladies’ College of London, where she had plans to apply, despite what her grandmother thought proper. She admired the elegant crest on the envelope, and even the feel of
the thick bond paper filled her with eagerness. College was everything she wanted, and she hoped Holmes could convince Grandmamma to let her attend.

The other letter was small and square, the envelope a pale pink sealed with green wax. With a tingle of pleasure, she recognized the graceful handwriting of her closest friend, the Honorable Miss Imogen Roth. Then Evelina frowned. After the debacle last April, Evelina had been sent away from Hilliard House, the Roth’s London address, and Imogen had been forbidden to write.

About four months ago, Imogen’s father, Lord Bancroft, had been part of a forgery scheme that had robbed Jasper Keating, the steam baron known as the Gold King, of a fortune in antique artifacts. Holmes had uncovered the elaborate crime with Evelina’s help. Sadly, while Keating had been pleased and the scandal had been kept out of the papers, the affair had still made her very unpopular with Lord B—so much so that she’d left London until things cooled down.

And I never heard from Tobias again
. Evelina had done her best not to think about Imogen’s older brother since—not that she had succeeded. That hadn’t been the sort of scene one got over in a few short months.

Now here she was, with the square pink envelope in her hand. She almost preferred bombs and shadow governments to this bit of feminine paper that would surely slip past her defenses, no matter what news it held. Friendship, she’d learned, was a perilous vulnerability—all the more potent when that love held deep and strong. Imogen was the school friend with whom she had shared everything from skinned knees and sums to their first real ball. On top of that, Evelina had been practically part of the Roth family for her entire adolescence. She longed to be welcomed back into that fold. For far too long, it had been the only family she’d known—and she’d lost it all last April. It had been like being orphaned all over again—and being a grown woman was no protection from that kind of pain.

So why was Imogen allowed to write her now?
Something new has happened
. A little nervously, Evelina broke the seal and unfolded the letter.

It was a fair question, since Evelina was returning to London at a time of year when everyone else had left for the country. She had only come back now to advance her college scheme and—to be utterly truthful—because she longed to be away from her grandmother for a little while. Otherwise, there was little to do in London in August—at least for the fashionable.

High Society gathered in the early spring for the Season—which hit its full stride around Easter, when the debutantes were presented to the queen—and dispersed once the weather grew hot. Right now, the fashionable set was in the North, since August 12 was the official start of the shooting season and the sport was considered superior in or near Scotland—which explained the next few paragraphs of Imogen’s letter.

Evelina stopped reading, a bitter taste flooding her mouth. She knew that Jasper Keating had more money than Midas, so a hunting estate wasn’t a surprising purchase—but his guest list was. The smart part of her knew it shouldn’t have
been, but her idealistic side wanted to deny the twisting calculations that had made Lord Bancroft his admiring house-guest. However amiably they behaved in public, Jasper Keating was Lord Bancroft’s bitter adversary—after all, it was his treasure that Lord B had been stealing. Keating must have felt secure in the price he’d made Bancroft pay for his deception, if he had the scheming viscount under his roof.

And it had been a steep price indeed—Lord Bancroft had more or less given Keating his only son and heir. Tobias was a talented inventor, just the sort of genius Keating needed in his steam-driven empire, and Tobias had stepped into the breach to save his family’s honor. It was a decision Evelina had to applaud, and yet she hated it down to her boot heels. Tobias had only just started to become his own man when circumstance had snatched his freedom away, robbing him of the opportunity to forge his own future. Suddenly shivery, Evelina returned to the letter, dreading what she would read next.

Evelina’s breath caught, an ache catching under her ribs.
So Alice is there, too
. She had liked Jasper Keating’s red-haired daughter when they first met. Alice was every bit as
smart as her father, but there was one insurmountable thing that kept her from ever becoming a friend.

Evelina had been on the brink of an engagement with Tobias but, as part of the bargain Tobias had made to save his family, he would be marrying Keating’s daughter instead. Grandmamma Holmes had found the betrothal announcement in the papers barely six weeks after Evelina left London.

The only mercy was that she and Tobias had kept their growing affection relatively private. She didn’t think Alice had ever been aware of it, and there had been no public gossip to endure. But still, even now Evelina’s cheeks burned with emotion—though she could not name it precisely. Shame? Anger? Chagrin? The smoldering ash of desire? She would never recover from the wrench of that parting. To say the very least, it had not gone well. She had to blink away the memory before she could finish the page.

Weak with disbelief, Evelina dropped to her knees on the charred carpet, barely noticing the last few sentences. Pain shot up her leg when she landed on a shard of glass, but she ignored it. She stared at the page, reading it over again to be sure she wasn’t mistaken about the one word that stood out from the rest.
September?
That was next month. It was one thing to know that she’d lost Tobias, quite another to know that tragedy would be irrevocable so soon.

He loves me, not her
. After all that had happened between them, her certainty seemed illogical, but she knew Tobias—
perhaps better than he understood himself. Evelina knew the way his face lit up when his heart was moved—when the man emerged from behind the contradictory and complex mask he’d built. Tobias did not love easily, and he’d never looked at Alice in that unguarded, joyous way he had when his heart was open. That look was how Evelina had known he’d loved her, and that his denial of that love had been an act.

With dawning horror, Evelina glared at the letter, trying to read it a third time but too agitated to make sense of the words. Was everything that had sustained her nothing but a lie?

The wedding had originally been set for next spring, and buried as she was in Devonshire, she’d heard nothing of this change of plan. Yet a September wedding tore her belief in their star-crossed love to shreds. Among the fashionable, engagements of a year or more were increasingly common. According to the sticklers, anything less cast doubt on the propriety of a marriage, and especially on the purity of the bride. Keating and Bancroft—both intensely conscious of public opinion—would carefully avoid anything that might give rise to comment. So what had happened?