Dreaming Spies (45 page)

Wednesday morning, the Earl of Darley and Charlotte, Lady Darley (quite alive and filled with imperious fury) were formally charged with a long list of crimes. The four intervening days, I later learned, had seen a whirlwind of consternation as far up as the Palace: how could one conduct the trial of a peer charged with blackmail, and not make public the specifics of the evidence?

But Ambrose hung tough. Haruki had either been lucky, or chosen the point of her wedge with great care. Probably both.

I added that to the list of questions I intended to ask her.

Finally, on Wednesday afternoon, the post brought notification from the prison that we would be permitted a half-hour of visitation on Thursday morning, to speak with prisoner Haruki Sato.

Holmes had been in London, adding his weight to the prosecution, but he caught a late train back to Oxford. He had questions of his own.

I woke that night, for no discernable reason. Some tiny noise …

I slipped out of bed and went down the stairs.

Moonlight came through the sitting room windows. The book that Holmes had pulled from Lady Darley’s Bible was sitting openly on my desk, as it had been since Friday.
All those books
, I reflected. Bashō’s poems, the Bard’s plays, a countess’s empty Bible. And now this one, a lovely fake with a history of its own. I slid it from its case and turned back the front cover.

The document I had left sitting inside it was gone.

In its place was a folded square of the paper from my desk. As I picked it up, a few tiny spots of brightness fluttered out. I switched on the desk lamp to see: three cherry blossoms, perfect and white against the dark wood. On the page were two English sentences in her trim writing, followed by three rows of descending Japanese characters, then the poem’s English translation:

My very first word of you warned that I should take great care, because you and your husband were English shinobi. If in the future the Sato family may be of any service to you, I would consider it a sign that you forgive my betrayal of your friendship
.

In a castle keep

The prisoner sees the moon
.

Freedom lies just … there
.

For the first time in days, I felt my face relax into a smile. I returned the blossoms to the paper, the paper to the book, and the book into the slip-case young Mr Bourke had so ingeniously crafted. I checked the doors and windows—locked, all of them—then went back upstairs. No need to rise early; no cause to brood over an assassination of Darleys, or to agonise over how we might prise a friend out of the English justice system. Upon her noble face there would be
no note how dread an army hath enrounded her;
in the background no war-engines, no awareness of gallows in a courtyard below.

“What was it?” My house: my right to investigate untoward noises. But that did not mean Sherlock Holmes slept through them.

I climbed back into my warm bed and pulled the blankets up around my ears.

“Nothing, my dear Holmes. Nothing more than a little touch of Haruki in the night.”

For Barbara Peters and Rob Rosenwald:
travelling companions in the Empire, and beyond

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For the ladies (and gents) of the Capitola Book Café, for twenty-one years of Laurie King celebrations: my thanks are laid at your feet.

My love to Linda Allen, the agent who got me here.

Thanks are also due, a thousand times over, to the people who make up Penguin Random House. They make my books stronger, less nonsensical, more beautiful—and available, to people like you who might want to read them. Special thanks to Kate Miciak, Libby McGuire, Jennifer Hershey, Kim Hovey, Scott Shannon, Sharon Propson, Kelly Chian, Carlos Beltrán—and welcome, Julia Maguire. I owe you guys everything.

To Mr Masashi Okamoto and the staff of Japan’s excellent Nara Hotel, who took in three very lost travellers and made them welcome.

With thanks to Michelle Geissbuhler, and her alter ego “Wilma Roland,” for joining in the fun during the 2013 spring campaign.

To Commodore Everette Hoard of the
Queen Mary
, Long Beach, who answered many odd questions about cruise liners.

To Evelyn Thompson, for setting this foreigner straight on matters Japanese, and Jean Lukens, ever ready to put pen to paper for the sake of illustrating Laurie King.

To Liz McCarthy of the Bodleian Library, with thanks for the archival boxes, and apologies for the misdeeds of certain characters herein.

And just to be clear: no books were stolen from Bodley in the making of this book, just as no misdeeds have ever been known to happen in Tokyo’s peerless Imperial Hotel, in any of its manifestations.

Clearly, any errors that remain in the book were despite the best efforts of these good people.

N
OVELS BY
L
AURIE
R. K
ING

MARY RUSSELL NOVELS
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
A Monstrous Regiment of Women
A Letter of Mary
The Moor
O Jerusalem
Justice Hall
The Game
Locked Rooms
The Language of Bees
The God of the Hive
Beekeeping for Beginners: A Short Story
Pirate King
Garment of Shadows
Dreaming Spies

STUYVESANT & GREY NOVELS
Touchstone
The Bones of Paris

KATE MARTINELLI NOVELS
A Grave Talent
To Play the Fool
With Child
Night Work
The Art of Detection

AND

A Darker Place
Folly
Keeping Watch
Califia’s Daughters
(as Leigh Richards)

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

L
AURIE
R. K
ING
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of fourteen Mary Russell mysteries, the Stuyvesant & Grey historical mysteries, and five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, as well as the acclaimed novels
A Darker Place
,
Folly
, and
Keeping Watch
. She lives in Northern California.

www.laurierking.com
Facebook.com/LaurieRKing
@LaurieRKing