A Study in Silks (21 page)

And suddenly the uncomfortable tension between them was back, the scant few inches between them humming like an unresolved chord.
Very glad
. What did that mean? More flirtation? An honest desire for conversation? Or nothing at all?

Her discomfort must have shown, because he pulled away with a ghost of a laugh. She couldn’t tell if it was aimed at him or her. “Oh, Evelina, you make this so hard.”

Stung, she felt a moment of numbness before shame flared under her skin. She drew herself up, her hand instinctively closing around the handle of the pliers. Something to defend herself—not that anything could protect her from this kind of danger. “What do you want from me?”

His expression was unreadable. She searched his face, finding a jumble of emotions as confused as her own. “I don’t want anything from you,” he replied. “That would be too finite a request.”

Tobias rose, a languid, lazy movement that didn’t go with the troubled set of his mouth. He paused a moment, his hands braced on the table, and leaned over. The sun slanted across his face, gilding his hair and turning his features to a mask of highlights and shadow.

Then, suddenly, he moved. He did it so fast, she didn’t have the wits to duck. Or maybe she guessed what was coming and didn’t want to.

He kissed her at the corner of her mouth. Not full on the lips. Not hard, or long, but gently, almost chastely. But all at once, it was not quite chaste. His mouth was warm and softer than she had expected.

Shock gave way to desire. Evelina’s breath caught almost painfully, her own lips parting in surprise. She looked up at him, feeling her eyes grow wide. Her body turned toward him, as if a magnet were pulling her into another kiss, but he was already out of reach.

Her reaction must have been what he wanted. He backed away from the table, a knowing look in his eye. “Have a pleasant afternoon.”

With that, he spun, his jacket swinging with him, and sauntered out the door, the sound of his footfalls lazy against the carpet. They dared her to say something, to stop him from leaving the room.

Furious, confused, wanting, all Evelina could manage was a strangled noise deep in her throat. Part of her wanted to rage that she was not to be trifled with like some chit fresh from school. Except she was. She wasn’t as ignorant as most of the Society misses, but she was hardly a sophisticate, either. Tobias, with his mistresses and his clubs, was far beyond her.

What did he want? If he was simply scratching an itch, he could do that anywhere and with a far more accomplished woman. There was at least one other layer to his game.

Evelina looked down at the mess of half-fixed jewelry on the table. The gleaming clockwork sat to one side, tucked neatly in its box, not quite belonging with the rest. Just like her, neither project was anywhere near complete.

She braced her elbows on the table and covered her face with her hands.
Above all, do not attempt to engage dangerous men in flirtatious conversation
.

Well, Uncle Sherlock hadn’t said anything about kissing them.

BANCROFT SAT SLUMPED
behind his desk. With the garden party looming, he was trying to write a birthday letter to his wife, something he’d done every year in the early decades of their marriage. It was the sort of thing women liked—soft protestations of devotion—and something he hadn’t attended to in the last dozen years. He loved Adele, he supposed, as well as most men did their wives of nearly thirty years. Habit supplied what passion could not. Perhaps, with all the upset in the house, he missed that warmth a little.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t made it past the opening lines and had more or less given up. His mind was scrambling. The trunks he had ordered removed from the attics had not been delivered to their destination. There was no sign of the footmen or their cart, either.

Who even knew about the automatons? Bancroft had been careful. He’d let all of the Austrian servants go when he returned to England, hiring new domestics with no knowledge of his past. That left the family. Poppy had been a babe in arms when he locked the hideous things away. The other two children would remember them, though Imogen had seen more of them than Tobias. The dolls had first been built to amuse Bancroft’s sickly twin girls.

He shuddered, filtering the memories like a terrified child trying to look and cover its eyes at the same time. Imogen had lived. Anna had not. But his children would not know the full history of the automatons. Not even his wife knew their real secret—only Dr. Magnus. And he’d seen Magnus at the opera last night.

Bancroft had offered the police a reward if the trunks were returned unopened. That had been a mistake, sure to arouse curiosity, but he had been drinking when he made the offer. He knew alcohol made him take chances, but somehow that didn’t make him stop craving the taste. And the specter of Dr. Magnus made him even thirstier.

Now it was a waiting game. Why was Magnus in town? Would he try to use the automatons against Bancroft? Would Magnus even come at all, or did he have schemes afoot that had nothing to do with the Roth family?

There was a knock at the study door. Bancroft started, the skim of liquid left in his glass sloshing up the side. Annoyance clenched his shoulders. “Enter.”

Bigelow pushed open the door with an apologetic cough and extended a tray upon which rested a plain calling card of indifferent quality. “There is a Mr. Harriman to see you, sir.”

Could this day grow worse?
Bancroft snatched the card from the salver and read it, misgivings building like thunderclouds.

John Harriman, Esquire

Warehouse and Shipping
Bond Street, London

Damnation
. The only thing he could do was see the man and get rid of him as unobtrusively as possible. “Show him in.”

Bigelow vanished. Bancroft rose, put the whisky glass back on the tray and resumed his seat behind the desk. When the door opened a second time, the man who came in had much the same features as his older cousin, Jasper Keating, but in him they were expressed in a pale, watered-down way—his hair graying brown instead of white, his mouth a bit weaker, his nose a shade too long. Harriman had one redeeming feature. As Keating’s cousin, he expected to share in the man’s amazing wealth rather than to content himself with a modest position in the firm. Ergo, despite the family connection, he hated the Gold King and was quite prepared to rob him blind. That had made him easy clay for Bancroft to mold.

Without waiting for an invitation, Harriman dropped into the chair opposite Bancroft’s desk. “I must speak with you.”

“Apparently. Why do you need to do it here? You could have sent a note.” They had a perfectly good cipher to use.

“Word travels fast among servants. I heard about what happened.”

About Grace
. Bancroft’s stomach cramped with hatred, loathing this coward who barely had the nerve to deal with his own workers. Mind you, he had hired some terrifying characters. Could it have been Harriman’s thug of a foreman who had followed Grace home and killed her for the gold? When Bancroft had approached Harriman at his club, he hadn’t bothered to instruct the man whose services to engage—after all, it was Harriman who had worked around the docks for years, not Bancroft—but maybe he should have managed him a little more closely. “Go on, then. Say what you have to say.”

Harriman shot a nervous glance at the door, as if he expected half of Scotland Yard to come crashing through the door. “I sent a note with—uh, her. Along with—what else she was carrying.”

“The police searched her body and found nothing.” One more time, he felt the sting of the loss like something physical.
He’d been counting on the treasure Grace carried—not just to bolster the family fortunes, but because there were irons in the fire besides Harter Engines, and everything required cash.

“Then she was robbed.” It was an obvious statement, but an almost crafty look crossed Harriman’s features. It was gone too swiftly for Bancroft to give it much study, but something about it put him on alert.

“Was it the note that brought you here? A question you need answered?” Thank the gods they used an unbreakable cipher.

Harriman looked at the door again, clearly anxious. “The note hardly matters now. There are larger problems if proof of what we’ve done is in the hands of a killer.”

“I hardly think a thief and murderer will turn
us
in to the police,” Bancroft said dryly.

The man gave him an irritated look. Where Keating’s eyes were almost amber, his were hazel and too small for his head. “The gallery is opening soon. We need to finish up our enterprise, and quickly.”

Bancroft’s fingers twitched, as if grasping for all the gold he’d hoped to extract from Keating’s vaunted archaeological treasures. He’d needed to recruit four others besides himself and Harriman to put the plan in motion. Simple and elegant though the plan had been, when the wealth was split among so many, the proceeds hadn’t gone nearly as far as he’d hoped. “Are we done so soon?”

“You always knew it was time-limited.”

Heat flooded up Bancroft’s neck. “Of course I did. I arranged everything.” Each of the six partners had received four payments so far—each lot a bar of gold and some gemstones. Nothing so unusual that it couldn’t be taken to a bank and used as collateral or sold as old family treasures. “How many artifacts are left to process?”

“The last few crates came in two days ago.” They’d been expecting them, but hadn’t known what they contained. “Two were just pottery, but one was jewelry and plate.”

“Did you determine why they weren’t shipped with the rest?” Bancroft asked.

Harriman gave a slight shrug. “I suppose the sender didn’t have them packed up in time. They came by a different boat.”

Bancroft supposed that could be true. Schliemann’s treasures were shipped directly from Rhodes to Harriman’s warehouse, where he was unpacking the crates and readying the contents for Keating’s new gallery. The direct shipping route had been arranged to prevent loss, theft, or accident, and it did—right up until the priceless artifacts reached Harriman’s hands.

“At any rate, I was the only one there when they arrived,” Harriman added. “I never told Jasper that they came. In fact, I made a point of saying that they hadn’t.”

“Why the hell did you do that?” Bancroft frowned. “That’s not how I planned this would work.”

“I’d read Schliemann’s letters about what was supposed to be coming.” The crafty look was back. “It sounded like he might have saved the best for last.”

Bancroft studied Harriman suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

“One or two really large pieces. The crates were so late, I wasn’t sure we’d have time to make copies, so I thought if they were lost, who would be the wiser? If everyone thought the crates were lost, we could just keep the contents. So I hid them underneath the warehouse.”

A sick feeling swamped Bancroft’s entire body. He closed his eyes a moment, summoning patience. “If something valuable goes missing, people tend to look for it. That’s a danger to us. If we supply copies, there is a reasonable chance they won’t look, at least not right away. That means less danger.”

“So what are you implying?” Harriman asked, a touch belligerent.

“I’m implying that you should get the workers to process these last crates immediately. If there is something that they cannot finish in time, we should simply leave it alone.” Bancroft’s tone was growing sharper. He sucked in a deep breath, forcing himself not to bang Harriman’s head on the desk.

“Do you mean that I should tell Keating the last crates have arrived?”

“In a word, yes. We can’t afford to have him looking high and low for his missing pots.” Bancroft leaned back in his chair, doing his best to look relaxed and in control. “Will there be time to do your business before Keating wants these new arrivals for his gallery opening?”

Harriman shrugged, looking sulky. “For some of the items. I’ll start the workers on them right away.”

“Now is not the moment to get careless.” The forgeries had to be meticulous, and for that Harriman had hired the finest company of Chinese metal workers. One or two were master goldsmiths who directed the others, but each one was highly skilled at some aspect of the work. They were excellent, obedient, and had been made available to work full-time on the project.

First, the craftsmen made casts of the solid gold and silver pieces Schliemann had unearthed from the dusty Greek soil and re-created them in copper. Then a thin layer of the original metal was applied over the copper using some sort of wizardry involving electricity and cyanide. Gems were replaced with glass. Bancroft didn’t understand every last detail, but when the job was done, only an observant eye could tell the real object and its twin apart. Since Keating never saw the two together—and was not nearly the expert he thought he was—the deception was seamless. The Gold King became the Gold Plate King.

Then the originals were melted down and divided among Harriman, Bancroft, and four other investors who had bankrolled the scheme. The return on investment was staggering. Unfortunately, this particular golden goose had a short life span.

Harriman folded his arms defensively. “But I didn’t come here to speak of the schedule.”

There was a surliness in his tone that made Bancroft clench his teeth. “Then why are you here?”

“To speak frankly.”

“About what?”

Fear flickered behind Harriman’s eyes. The man dropped
his voice so low he was barely audible. “To put it bluntly, your girl is gone. This isn’t the time to break in a new courier. I need you to come and get the final payment yourself.”

“You came today. Why not bring it to me?”

“No. I chanced it once. That might be interpreted as a social call by anyone watching. After what happened to the kitchen maid, I’ll not risk it again.”

“That’s nonsense.”

Harriman’s gaze grew furtive. “You’re in disfavor with my cousin. I can’t afford to be seen seeking your company. This time, I need you to do what I say.”

Bancroft bridled, but held his tongue. On some level he knew that Harriman, always the last and least of their pack of villains, was enjoying the moment. Finally, he had the power to give the orders. It was bitter, but it was medicine Bancroft knew how to swallow if it meant bringing the forgery scheme to a problem-free close. He would lie low and wait for his moment. “When do you want me to come?”