A Study in Silks (63 page)

“And?”

“The steam barons have interests in several countries abroad, Bohemia among them. They found this woman, Irene Adler, and attempted to coerce her into advancing the barons’ interests with Bohemia by every means at her disposal. She knew that if she agreed, none of the parties involved would come out of it unscathed.”

Evelina was intrigued. She’d heard oblique mentions of Irene Adler before, and her uncle fell silent every time Dr. Watson mentioned the name. “What happened?”

“She requested my help. I gave it.”

“And the steam barons?”

Holmes swung his walking stick almost jauntily. “I had
best stay well away from the Scarlet King for some time to come. He accused me of belonging to something called the Baskerville conspiracy. Imagine that.”

It wasn’t easy, because Holmes rarely worked well with others—which was usually what a conspiracy required. Nevertheless, Evelina filed the name in her mind. Knowing her uncle, he might have let the name slip for a reason. One never knew, but it would be useless to pepper him with questions until he was ready to talk.

They walked a moment in silence, letting a few chugging steam cycles pass. On the skyline, hydrogen balloons bobbed like colorful birds in the late-afternoon light. Keating Industries was experimenting with aboveground telegraph, stringing wires through the sky in anticipation of skyborne dirigible communication stations. But so far, birds and weather were proving a nuisance.

She cast a quick glance at her uncle. He sometimes stirred up chaos in his wake the way a maid stirred dust kittens with her broom, but people turned to him to bring order, to restore society to its norm. For once, she wondered at what cost that order came. As she’d notice before, he looked wrung out, the bones of his face stark beneath pale skin. “You’ve been working too hard.”

“I’m sure Watson will write all about it,” he said derisively.

She let it go. If he didn’t choose to elaborate, pushing was a waste of energy. There was no point in arguing with a man who considered food and sleep an impediment to intellectual exercise. “I’m glad you came.”

He gave a quick smile that was almost a grimace. “Then let us get down to business. In the matter of this murdered serving girl, tell me again everything you remember, skipping nothing.”

Evelina flinched. “I thought you were working a case for the Gold King.”

He looked surprised—something she didn’t see often. “You are living in a house filled with danger. Do you honestly think I would ignore that, now that Lestrade has seen fit to enlighten me?”

“Keating is not a man who likes to be put off.”

“So evidenced by the many unhappy letters he has written this past week. Never mind, I will deal with Jasper Keating in due course. His mystery is nothing more than a matter of lost and found. Now, tell me what you know.”

She did, every tiny detail she could remember. The recital was almost therapeutic. Here was no complicated morass of emotion, no wrestling with decisions or choices. Everything was just cold, hard fact. Her job was to be a conduit, not an interpreter.

He absorbed her monologue with half-closed lids: Grace’s death, the gold and emeralds, the automatons, the grooms, the clue that had led her to the warehouse, Lord Bancroft’s conversation with Dr. Magnus, and Magnus’s description of the underground living quarters, and finally, his death. She mentioned nothing of her own use of magic or the true nature of the automatons.

“Fascinating,” he said after she had finished. “Athena’s Casket seems quite the desired object. Keating came to see me about recovering it. It appears my case and yours overlap.”

My case
. Evelina felt almost breathless. It was silly and juvenile, but the fact he had not scoffed at her fumbling investigation thrilled her. “That seems to argue the casket is not in his possession.”

“Magnus thought Keating had it, Keating believed it stolen, and Bancroft was caught in the middle. All the aspects of a
commedia dell’arte
farce, which tells me we are missing a player.”

She looked at him in fascination. This was why he was the great detective. “We are? How do you know?”

“Find the holes in our story, and you will see the passage of our mystery player.”

“How?” She squinted up at the sun, guessing the time. She wished he’d come earlier, because this conversation could take hours. She would scream if this chance to work through the clues was cut short.

“What don’t we know?” He clasped his hands behind his back, assuming a professorial air.

“Who killed the Chinese?”

“And?”

“Where the casket is.”
Unless I have it?
But she couldn’t explain that the reason she suspected it was because the cube talked to her.

He nodded. “Good. And?”

“Why Grace was carrying gold, or who her killer was, if we believe Magnus was not the killer himself. He admitted to stealing the automatons as a threat to Bancroft.”

“Did you ever see him carry a knife?”

Ah, good point, pardon the pun
. “No. I don’t know what kind of guns or knives Magnus favored.” He was a sorcerer, but that was a piece of information her uncle would most likely question—and that was a road she wasn’t ready to take. Not yet, at least. “We don’t know most things, in fact.”

Holmes shook his head, seeming almost irritated. “Not true. But you are missing several points: the voices you heard, or who was in the hallway, or who was the father of the poor girl’s child.”

Evelina laughed unhappily. “Just a few details.”

“Any luck with the cipher?”

“Sadly, no.” She felt utterly defeated.

“No matter. Believe it or not, you’ve done a passable job of assembling information. All that remains is to arrange it properly. I see the passage of not one, but two unknown parties.”

They had circumnavigated Beaulieu Square and were back in the gardens of Hilliard House. They stopped outside the door where Tobias had met Grace Child the night she died. Holmes crouched to search the grass, pulling out a magnifying lens to check every blade. Evelina stared down at him, a little incredulous.

“What are you looking for?”

“There is some interesting cigarette ash.”

Now there was an oxymoron. “There must have been fifty people at the garden party. At least half were men, and half of those smoked. There is no shortage of ash, interesting or otherwise. And it has been a week since the murder.”

Holmes rose, dusting his knees. “You are correct, sometimes
ash is simply ash. I never know until I look. And I’ll have you know, most find that performance impressive.”

Evelina raised an eyebrow.

“However,” he said, putting away his glass, “let us return to the sequence of events for the moment. Grace Child was waiting outside until the young Mr. Roth let her inside shortly after half past twelve. Then she is discovered dead at approximately one o’clock.”

“Yes.”

“She had a candle, you say, that had dripped a quantity of wax on the floor?”

“Yes, where she dropped it.”

He raised a finger. “Why was she standing with a candle in the cloakroom? She wouldn’t have had one unless she went and got it once she was inside. Why didn’t she simply go to bed?”

Understanding dawned. “She was waiting for someone. A few minutes, in fact, if that much wax melted.”

Sherlock nodded. “Who was she waiting for? There are three possible candidates: an inmate of the house, the unknown who passed you in the hallway at twelve forty-five, or whoever was talking outside at eleven o’clock. The first is the most likely to have met with the girl. There is a good chance the second was her killer.”

“They aren’t the same person?”

“There is the fact that she still had the gold. I believe the person she meant to meet failed to show. Perhaps, while waiting, she surprised someone else.”

Evelina’s blood flared with excitement. “Of course! Magnus meant to steal the automatons! Could that have been him prowling the halls that night?”

Holmes shrugged. “Perhaps, and maybe more than perhaps. It will be easy enough to reconstruct events.”

“Then where do we start?”

He looked up at Hilliard House. “With dinner. I believe I smell an excellent leg of lamb, and perhaps it is high time I exchanged pleasantries with the other players in our little game.”

HIS FATHER STARED AT HIM IN OPEN-MOUTHED SHOCK, A
look Tobias hadn’t seen on the pater before. It made him yearn to back out the study door, the way one would retreat from a savage dog.

“What’s this I hear about Holmes?” Bancroft rose from behind his desk, his snarl matching the stuffed tiger head on the wall above. “Here? Under my roof?”

The sun slanted low through the study window, glinting off the brass adornments on the desk. It gave the setting an extra dramatic flare, as if the place was about to catch fire. Maybe it was. “Mother just invited him to dinner.”

Bancroft sat back down abruptly, as if he had suddenly run out of steam. “All I asked of you was to distract the Cooper girl.”

“I apologize for not proving the cad you wish me to be.”

His father gave him a withering look.

Tobias found his apprehension warping into annoyance. “What do you think Holmes is going to find?”

“None of your affair.”

Something inside Tobias broke, letting loose a flood of anger. There was only so much contempt he could swallow. “None of my affair, and yet you feel compelled to lob one dark hint after another in my direction, somehow insinuating that it’s my duty to help you cover it up.”

His father sat straight, eyes flaring with anger. “What did you say?”

“What is this dark secret? I bloody well know it’s all to do with the automatons.” Tobias leaned across the desk, drunk on the sensation of finally speaking his mind. “I know, because
Magnus had a puppet, a vile creation. Yours are nowhere near as pretty as his toy, but they shared a stink of evil. Even I can tell that much, and I know nothing of magic.”

He fell back into his seat. The talk of automatons sickened him. His inner sight was veiled by the image of Serafina’s breast rising and falling in a mockery of human sleep. It had imprinted itself like a stain, a blot that he had to look through to perceive the world. The only time it faded was when he was with Evelina.

Stiffly, his face a hard mask, Bancroft opened a box sitting on his desk. It was about the size of a loaf of bread, a fragrant wood covered in a latticework of silver. The lid folded away, revealing a double row of scalpel-sharp steel knives attached to a frame. He pulled a lever and the entire box telescoped up so that the blades sat on top of a box about two feet tall. “Be very careful what you say next. There are some parts of our family history that are best not probed.”

Tobias swallowed hard as his father picked up a piece of correspondence from a stack at his elbow. Lord Bancroft held the letter above the knives and pushed a button on the contraption. The knives began a slashing frenzy, sucking the paper into their elegant, glinting maw and cutting it to bits.

Chopitty-choppity-choppity
. And the letter was in scraps no larger than the nail of Tobias’s smallest finger. Someone’s secrets gone forever. Or maybe there was a not-so-subtle message there, in those shiny bright knives.

His father’s head was darkly silhouetted by the sunset beyond. He could believe his father capable of cutting off his allowance, but he had never considered that the man might feed his heir to the MacDonald’s Patented Correspondence Destruction Unit.

Chopitty-choppity-choppity
went a second page.

Tobias was tired of this game. “Bugger that.”

His father looked shocked, but then vaguely approving. “I’ll tell you this much. Those automatons represent the worst passage of my life.”

It was as personal a statement as his father had ever made.
Tobias hoped it wasn’t the prelude to feeding him to the office equipment. “Why? And what do they have to do with Dr. Magnus?”

He didn’t expect an answer, but the question deserved to be asked. Bancroft’s hand trembled, and he sacrificed another piece of crested bond, letting his fingers come dangerously close to the blades. Tobias’s stomach swirled.

“They are the means by which Magnus secured his hooks into the fabric of this family.” The intensity in his father’s voice shook him almost more than the flashing knives.

“He’s dead now,” Tobias said gently. He suddenly wondered if his father had orchestrated the murder.

“I won’t believe that until I see his heart stop beating.”

“What did Magnus do to you?”

“He dabbled in the darkest of magics.”

“I know.” Folk tales said magic was risky. The law called it treason. Tobias called it evil, plain and simple. He’d seen it looking back at him out of that demon’s blue glass eyes.

Sometime in the night—obviously before he was blasted to smithereens—Magnus must have retrieved her. When Tobias went back to the workshop this morning, with oil and a match to try burning her one more time, Serafina and her trunk were gone. She was still out there, somewhere, disassembled and waiting to feed on her next caretaker.

“Tell me about the dolls that Magnus stole from you.”