City of Secrets (35 page)

Then the idea struck him. “Of course!”

“Did you say something?” Ponsonby asked, coming up behind him just then.

“I think I’ve just hit on who it is I’m looking for.”

“Well, that’s nice, I’m sure,” Ponsonby said in the tone of a grandmother confronted with a small child’s chemistry experiment. “Who?”

Devin looked over Ponsonby’s shoulder and saw that the prince was occupied with lighting his cigar, but he said just the same, “It’s a long story, which I’ll tell you next time I have time for a cigar with you. Right now I’d best be about my job.”

Ponsonby grasped his sleeve and in a low voice asked, “Is he safe on the train?”

“I think so. I’ll make certain and report back before we get to Baden. That’s a good hour and a half yet, so just keep him occupied in here, if you can.”

He went to take his leave of the prince, who shook his hand and said, “No need to look so gloomy, dear boy. When are you going to take that knighthood I’ve been offering you, by the way? It might cheer you up—impress the ladies, anyway—and that would cheer
me
up!”

Devin smiled and wondered if
Maddie would be impressed by a title; he doubted it, and if he wouldn’t take it for himself, he knew she wouldn’t expect him to do it for her. “Thank you, sir. I’ve no doubt it would, but it might also go to my head, and how would I get anything useful done?”

The prince laughed. “Always have an answer, don’t you. Well, my boy, I’ll keep trying. Be off with you now.”

Devin bowed and let himself out of the carriage and into the main part of the train. There was an empty salon car between the prince’s private carriage and the first sleeping car, then the bar car, the dining car, and another half-dozen salon cars, all first class. He walked through all of these in turn, checking with the attendants as to the whereabouts of the occupants of the sleeping compartments to be sure no one was out of his seat. He wanted to see everyone who was aboard now and to be sure that no one would get on before Oos, the connecting station for Baden, without his knowledge. At Oos, he would have the royal carriage detached and taken to Baden first. The rest of the passengers could wait safely at Oos. But for now every one of them represented a potential danger.

In the third salon car, he found a trio of familiar faces. Daisy Jervis and Laurence Fox were playing cards. Daisy was looking especially pretty in a new pink-and-white summer dress that emphasized her assets while cunningly concealing her defects of figure. She was also, Devin could see over her shoulder, cheating at cards. Lady Jervis sat in the window corner, knitting.

“Mr. Grant!” Laurie saw him first and stood up. “What a jolly surprise! We didn’t know you were on the train, sir.”

“I just got on,” Devin said, shaking his hand. Daisy looked up at him oddly, so he added, “At the last stop, that is to say. How are you, Lady Jervis? Good morning, Daisy.”

“It’s afternoon,” Daisy informed him, “but I daresay the prince keeps you so busy that you lose track of time.”

“Don’t be rude, Elfreda,” her mother said, recognizing the tone if not the provocation.

Devin smiled. “If your daughter imagines she will provoke me into telling her what I have been doing, Lady Jervis, she should know better. May I join you?”

“Yes, certainly, sir,” Laurie said, moving over to let him sit down. Daisy gave Laurie a look that made clear what she thought of his fawning attentions to Devin.

“She cheats at cards, you know,” he told Laurie, getting his revenge.

“Yes, I know,” Laurie said with an exaggerated sigh. “It will no doubt be the ultimate cause of our divorce.”

Devin looked from Laurie to Daisy and back again, waiting for an explanation of this remarkable statement. Finally Daisy, giving up her pretended indignation, giggled, and Lady Jervis informed him with a creaky, but nevertheless satisfied smile, that the young couple had become engaged to be married.

Devin extended his congratulations, admitted candidly that he could not say which of them was getting the better bargain, and offered to toast them in champagne when they reached Baden. This naturally enough reminded Daisy of Maddie, who was asked after, so that it was several minutes before Devin was able to ask Laurie if he might have a word with him in private.

They walked into the next car and found an empty compartment before saying anything, but then Devin sat down, glanced at his watch, and came directly to the point.

“Laurence, do you remember that photograph of Mrs. Malcolm’s husband that you took on the channel packet?”

“I certainly do! I even brought a copy with me. What’s more—”

“Have you by any chance seen anyone on the train who resembles the man in the photograph?”

“Not on the train, no—but look, sir, this is what I started to tell you.” He reached into his pocket and brought out his leather photographic case. He pulled a print out and showed it to Devin. It showed a young man, very like Edward Malcolm, with his arm around Florence Wingate on a ferry in New York harbor, the Statue of Liberty looming over them in the background.

“Where did you get this?”

“It’s a copy. I noticed it at one of Mrs. Wingate’s salons and was struck by the resemblance, so I ... well, I borrowed it to make a copy. I brought it back the same afternoon, and I’m sure she never missed it.”

Devin scowled. He could not be so sure. “How is it that Mrs. Malcolm never noticed it there? She is not unobservant and would surely have taken notice of it had it been displayed with other family likenesses.”

“But that was the odd thing, you see, sir. I had been curious—and a little piqued, I suppose—as to why Mrs. Wingate displayed none of the photographs I took of her. Then I saw that she had no personal photographs at all on display in her suite. Most people have a few, even when they are traveling, of the people closest to them. Their absence puzzled me, so while the violinist was playing, I slipped into the bedroom and had a look around. This photograph was on the dressing table, concealed in back of a picture of Mr. Wingate—the only one in the room. I noticed it because the edges showed around the other photograph, which had been cut badly.”

“Quite the little sneak thief, aren’t you,” Devin said, not without some admiration.

“Yes, sir. I don’t know what came over me.”

Devin laughed. “Who do you suppose this is?”

“Well,” Laurie began, eagerly, leaning forward as if to press his case, “it is
not
Mr. Malcolm, however close the resemblance. I compared the two photographs under a magnifying glass, and the differences became clear—the shape of the nose and forehead, and so on. I would guess it to be some relation of Mrs. Wingate’s—possibly even of Mr. Wingate’s, except that he mentioned once that his wife has a brother—something of a black sheep, one gathers, since she never speaks of him.”

Devin sat back to study the photograph for a moment, but he was satisfied now, and his intuition in the prince’s carriage was confirmed. He knew what he was looking for and almost, indeed, where and when it would happen. He looked at his watch again and said to Laurence, “I will tell you the same thing I told the prince’s secretary not long ago: I thank you, and I owe you an explanation, but it is a long story that will have to wait until a more propitious time.”

“I quite understand, sir.”

“Good. But speaking of explanations, I think I can guess how you won Daisy, but do tell me how you converted her mother. Mrs. Malcolm told me she was on the hunt for a title for the girl.”

“I think I—we—convinced her that I was as likely as anyone to come into a title. She was impressed with my ‘connections,’ you see, for all of which I have photographic evidence, remember. I even offered to present her to the Prince of Wales.”

Devin raised an eyebrow. “Don’t be too rash in your promises, boy. You’re not married yet.”

“Well, you see, sir, I rather hoped you would...”

“Did you, indeed.”

There was a pause while Devin admired the young man’s cheek, and Laurie tried to gauge how far he could push his luck. But then Devin remembered the photos in the prince’s carriage and laughed.

“All right, I’ll see what I can do. But you will have to do me one further favor.”

“Certainly.”

“Take that photograph of Mrs. Wingate’s friend and show it to all the train attendants.  Tell them I asked you to do so and advise them to be on the lookout for the man—no, for both of them. I’ll show the one of Malcolm, since the resemblance is that close, to the prince’s attendants. If anyone has seen any of these people, or anyone resembling either man, come and tell me at once. If you don’t see me in your end of the train, make yourself known to Sir Frederick Ponsonby in the prince’s compartments, and he will take you to me.

“Meanwhile,” he said, standing up, “we have less than an hour before we reach Oos. To work, young Sherlock Holmes!”

It was so peaceful in the little village street, where the taxi had stopped under the lime trees, that Maddie’s mind showed a distracting tendency to wander. When she had arrived in Oos, eight miles from Baden, she had made firm friends with the cabbie by asking his advice about a
Konditorei
where she might buy coffee and a sandwich to eat while she waited for her friend to arrive on the next train, and about a shop where she might buy a valise so that she might accompany him on his journey.

The cabbie, who had relations in the town, was more than happy to show her around, then to wait patiently—with Maddie in the cab and he on top eating the lunch she bought him—across the cobbled street from the train station until the next train arrived.

Maddie had seen no reason to disabuse the man of the notion that she was waiting to meet her lover, particularly if that made him more willing to tolerate spending most of the day in her service. Fortunately, he was not a loquacious sort of person and showed no desire to talk other than to answer her questions courteously, and he ventured no more than the occasional unsolicited comment on the virtues of Oos, particularly when it had to do with his relations or the leather shop he took her to, which was not only the best in the district but belonged to his uncle, to whom of course he was obliged to speak in order to introduce his so-distinguished American lady visitor.

Neither the cabbie nor his uncle questioned her desire not to have the valise wrapped and, further, to have the shavings which maintained its shape for display purposes left in it, the latter doubtless depending on the former to come back later and explain why the American lady made such odd requests. In fact, Maddie had decided to play the part of a departing passenger when the train came in, so as not to draw attention to herself and had therefore purchased the valise to look as if she were leaving on a journey. Getting further into the role, she asked the cabbie to park across the street from the station until the train came in, as if to discreetly hide herself from prying eyes, but also so that she could observe the people entering the station without being seen by them.

But traffic in Oos was sparse at best, and Maddie was hard put not to lose herself in daydreams while gazing through the greenery at the little park down the street, where some children were playing, or at the little café across the greensward, where a pair of old men were smoking and playing cards. None of the noises accompanying these activities reached Maddie in the cab through the occasional jingle of the horse’s harness and the song of birds in the trees alongside.  Every now and then Maddie offered the driver some of her coffee, or he would ask permission to exercise the horse by walking him up the street and back again, remaining in sight of the station the while.

An hour passed thus uneventfully, while Maddie found herself growing strangely calmer rather than apprehensive or alarmed over what might happen when the train arrived. Even earlier that morning, she had been exhilarated rather than frightened when she set out from the hotel determined to do something to help Devin.

Yes, that was it. She was
doing
something, even if for the moment it was only sitting in a cab staring at the scenery. She had not only not been afraid to act, she had not thought twice about doing it, and now that she had time to reflect on it, she wondered if it was indeed more natural to her to take action to solve her dilemmas, or those of people she loved. Perhaps that too had been trained out of her when she was too young to mourn its loss.

“What on earth are you doing, child?”
her mother had said when Maddie, aged eight, had climbed halfway up a tree to rescue a strange kitten, then got stranded there. The kitten had already scampered away by the time Maddie tried to explain her unusual position to a disbelieving Constance.

“Don’t worry your head about that, sweetheart,”
her father said when Maddie, aged eighteen, asked if she might have a checking account and pay her own bills. “I’ll take care of all that sort of thing for you.”

“But lover, it’s just a race meeting,”
Teddy said when Maddie, newly married and bored at home, asked to go along. “You wouldn’t like it at all. I’ll bring you back a souvenir and tell you all about it.”

And so she had simply accepted everyone else’s actions, having been assured—and believing it, because they all loved her—that it was all for her benefit. So she had condoned anything Teddy did, because she did not want to seem ungrateful, or to be a nagging wife, even though she had never been quite blind enough to say to him, “Whatever you want, darling, is all right with me.”

Now she knew, without having thought about it, much less agonized over whether she ought to feel grateful for it, that whatever Devin Grant was doing would be something she could be proud of. And even if she were disobeying him in taking a part, she knew he would feel the same pride about her.

And somehow, she could not imagine Devin Grant being content with a complacent wife.

A new noise, faint and rumbling in the distance, woke her from her reverie. She looked out the window on the station side and saw smoke over the trees beyond it. She got out of the cab on the side of the trees and looked around. No one she had not already observed before had appeared. She asked the driver to wait, but paid him just the same, in case she could not for some reason return to Baden with him.