Gilded Lily (8 page)

“Good heavens, no. That's not in my brief. Wet work is—” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “It's killing people. I don't kill people. I'm the one who forgets he's carrying a pistol, remember?”

“Wet. Oh, I see. It's meant to be a clever euphemism for bloodletting. That's appalling. Like something schoolboys would say.”

“We were all schoolboys once,” Barnabas pointed out. “Well,
you
weren't, obviously. But the men who thought up these names for things were. Your father wasn't talking about me. I suppose you have only my word on that, but I was brought on to gather and relay information, not kill anyone. So he must have been talking about Phineas. How many S-Gs can there be? And why would he lie to me, after telling me as much as he already had? Perhaps it's just another cover story! What else did he say?”

“It's difficult to recall everything. I had no context for it, you understand. But something about it being impractical to replace him. And lying is second nature for Father. He might well have done it as a reflex.”

Eliza had been right, Barnabas was sure of it. The more he considered it, the more he thought the opium addiction
must
be a cover. When Eliza saw Phineas he had been embedded in Orm's employ, and for whatever reason he was still under cover. Was he still pretending to work for Orm, or Orm's successor? Was he indeed in London, or were the sightings Barnabas had heard about in error? Wishful thinking on the part of some well-meaning friends? Barnabas wanted to go to Murcheson that instant, to demand the truth. But revealing what he knew would mean revealing how he'd learned it, and everything else in that chain of implication. He was trapped by ridiculous circumstance.

“I have a thought, my lord; would you like to hear it?”

“I don't suppose I have a choice.”

“Again, sir, you have all sorts of choices. I'm choosing to take you into my confidence. You might find it more convenient to allow this, rather than attempting to follow me blind later this evening. But the decision is entirely yours.”

He wanted to take his frustration out on something or somebody, but there was no appropriate outlet for that here. “Fine. Out with it.”

“Manners, please!”

“I do beg your pardon, Miss Murcheson. Kindly proceed to enlighten me regarding your thoughts.”

She gestured toward the road, allowing him to negotiate a merger with the general traffic before speaking. “We saw something that might interest my father greatly. A submersible, possibly a smuggler, carrying secret technology only the military should possess. And you think you may know who's behind it, except that the obvious suspect is in prison on another continent. So.”

“So?”

“I don't want to thumb my nose at my father per se, but I wouldn't mind seeming more valuable in his eyes. It might afford me more freedom to do what I like, if I can bring back something of use to him. Information. A name, perhaps. And you might be forgiven many transgressions if you helped deliver that name.”

He fingered the reins, contemplating the notion. Cushion the inevitable blow of his failure by achieving some intervening success to trump it? The idea was probably insane. Miss Murcheson was probably insane. But really, at this point Barnabas had little left to lose.

“I find your thought not entirely without merit.”

“Excellent. Do you know, my lord, I think I'm beginning to enjoy our courtship.”

Despite himself, despite everything, he smiled. “I do what I can, Miss Murcheson. I do what I can.”

 • • • 

A
NOTHER BOAT HAD
been lost in the night, and half a dozen men along with it. They'd been at the signal buoy again, edging on no-man's-land at the estuary mouth, and the rumor on the docks confirmed Rollo's worst fears. Mrs. Hill, God rest her soul, had been telling the truth. A late-returning trawler had spotted the monster pulling the boat down, glowing tentacles as long as the masthead Robson was tall, and now every ship in the port was buzzing with talk of the giant killer squid. Some were even trying to link the squid to the earthquake, heaping nightmare upon nightmare.

Rollo had slept through the quake, so he wasn't sure he believed in it. Even the deaths didn't make it real to him. They weren't his men, and buildings collapsed all the time. But he believed in some creature with unholy tentacles and a vicious temper when it came to flashing lights. That was the key, he'd decided. The underwater lamps they'd been testing to signal to the submersibles must have attracted the hellish squid, and it had lashed out at the nearest moving object. Tom Hill had escaped the beast—although he hadn't escaped Edwin, who found him in an opium den a few days later and dispatched him with a minimum of fuss—but the larger boat hadn't. The squid was escalating its hostilities.

“Or it were a different one,” his pet cartologist Robson suggested, as they breakfasted on buns and studied a map of the channel. “Bigger and meaner. Maybe Tom's squid 'as a vengeful mother. A kraken, like.”

Maybe so. Robson had spent years serving on merchant ships before coming to work for Rollo, and he'd seen many strange things in his travels. He'd never seen a kraken, though, he'd had to admit.

Rollo stared at the pattern of pins on the map and absently fingered the enameled gold poppy on his lapel. His new talisman, all the way from the California Dominion, courtesy of a lad who had worked for the Lord of Gold himself but managed to escape the authorities' sweep of Orm's employees. An airship pilot, or so he claimed, who also knew his way around a submersible. A useful type, this lad Finn. Young, to know all he did, and suspiciously posh in accent and manner. He reminded Rollo of himself at that age, and Rollo suspected they shared a certain type of history—the history of grasping bastard brothers who hadn't quite come to terms with the limitations of birth on the wrong side of the aristocratic blanket. But he'd have been wrong to accept those limitations himself, so perhaps this Finn was too. After all, who ran things now that Baron Orm was moldering in jail? Belowstairs maid Alice Furneval's boy, not the son of the late dowager baroness. Rollo, the lad who'd been lucky to receive acknowledgment from his sire, and grudging time with his half brother's tutor.

His brother had always shown an interest in botany and horticulture, and he'd adopted the poppy as his motif even as a young man. Finn could have brought no surer proof that he came from Orm's employ. The boy reported that before his arrest, the Lord of Gold had a different golden poppy ornament for every day of the week, each with its hidden cache of snuff and its even more cleverly hidden blade. This particular one had been for Tuesdays, apparently. But Rollo had worn it every day since acquiring it from Finn two months prior. It was a source of strength, a symbol of his ascendancy.

The map in front of him had changed dramatically over the course of those same two months, donning an array of color-coded pins and lines that stood for all sorts of hard-won knowledge. The givens, such as the boundaries of the military's blockade and the position of various ports within and without that zone, were marked in white. But now there were green flags standing for the “safe” routes the military allowed approved traders like the British East India Company, and a network of blue to indicate the various regular submersible patrols they'd ferreted out with the help of the new hydrophone array. Orange flags with times penned on, showing the windows of opportunity for travel to avoid those patrols.

This afternoon, however, Robson was focused on the red pins, and Rollo nodded as the man added a new point of interest. “Our lad Billy Walthrop confirmed it this morning. The Navy's seismograph failed 'em again. His cousin in Le Havre sent him a message with reports from three different clients. All officers. The alarm in Atlantis Station didn't trip until the quake had already started. They had to shuffle the crew out on subs, no time for the tunnel. Which means none of the sensors to the west of the base are functioning anymore.”

“Or so we surmise,” Rollo countered. “We're basing our deductions on the word of an expatriate whore with a side business in illicitly gotten opium, after all.”

“Aye. But Billy says she's a good girl, for all that.”

“I've told you before, we need a new source. I don't like relying on a whore; they're not dependable. My mother was a whore, after all, and she sold me to my father when I was still in swaddling clothes. I know whereof I speak.”

Robson frowned at him. “I thought she were a scullery maid?”

Grinding his teeth, Rollo pointed toward the newest red pin. “Flashing lights, Robson. We've been assuming for months that the Royal Navy's fancy geological equipment has suffered sabotage from one of our competitors. Or from the French. But their seismic sensors use some sort of flashing light signal, correct? I think I know who their saboteur is.”

“Oh, aye?”

“Aye, as you say. Aye indeed. The squid, Robson.”

After a moment of incomprehension, the light dawned on Robson's broad face. “It's going for the lights! It's probably yanked them all clean out o' the bedrock.”

“They've been doing all that good work, and we've certainly reaped the benefit. Sooner or later the Navy will have to abandon the station or risk being flooded if a big enough quake occurs and they've no advance warning. No station means more difficulty refueling and deploying their damn submersibles. They'll have to rethink their entire blockade strategy.”

“Beggin' your pardon, sir, you don't seem best pleased about it.”

Rollo flicked at one gilded petal of the lapel poppy, triggering a minute tray to slide out with a handy pinch of snuff. “I would be, if the damn sea monster hadn't taken two of my own boats by now. I can't risk the creature going for any of my submersibles, can I?” He took the snuff with a slightly indelicate snort. “They'd flood the whole channel with opium, for one thing. I've two large shipments ready to send, and a batch of the new Afghani product to receive next week. Enough to worry about with the Navy and the British East India Company's investigators looking out for the stuff. I don't need to add dangerous boat-eating squid into the equation. If I have to choose between the sabotage continuing and my shipments continuing, I choose the shipments.”

“What, then, sir?”

Tensing his upper lip against the urge to sneeze, Rollo gestured toward the array of red pins that fanned out on the map over the western inlet to the channel. “The hydrophonic array has proven successful against the military's submersibles. It has let us avoid our hunters. Now it's time we put it to use on other prey.”

T
WO DAYS HAD
passed since their very proper-seeming turn through the park. Freddie didn't like to admit she'd enjoyed the time spent with Barnabas, especially given the circumstances driving them together. But she had no trouble acknowledging her amusement now, in this new setting she'd dragged him to. Her own adopted turf, where she was comfortable but poor Smith-Grenville was decidedly not.

“Don't know about the new lad,” Mr. Armintrout whispered as she tightened the final nuts on his steam dog and prepared to fire it up. “Seems a bit at sea. Old to be starting at this too.”

She bit back a smile and cut her eyes toward Barnabas, who was attempting a casual crouch on the other side of the dog's wheel enclosure. Even in coarse-woven trousers and a miserably patched jacket, hunkered over a pile of machinery with a grease smear on his cheek, Smith-Grenville managed to look like he belonged in a drawing room. Or any place populated by gentle folk, which definitely didn't include butchers, fishmongers, or the like. His posture alone gave him away as a product of public schools, she thought. But to anyone who didn't know, he just seemed supremely uncomfortable.

“Just nervous, I expect. He'll learn. How's business been, Mr. A?”

“Can't complain. No thanks to you. You're a hard man to get hold of, Fred Merchant.”

“I wouldn't want to make it too easy for my adoring public to find me. All right, would you care to do the honors?” She pointed to the flint trigger on the coal hopper.

Armintrout gave the lever a practiced jerk, raining sparks down on the coal and kindling until the wood caught fire. Within a few minutes, the water in the dog's belly was heating nicely and it began its endless journey on the spit wheel.

Scattered applause filtered into the shop from the crowd assembled outside the window. Small boys and layabouts, mostly, who'd strolled by and stayed to see the steam dog go back into action because they had no place else to be. Freddie spotted a few familiar faces as well, potentially useful faces. Armintrout's shop was close enough to the docklands, and his clientele was rough enough, that he knew all sorts of people and facts. Getting him to discuss them was another matter, of course.

“'Ow much, then?” he demanded when she straightened to admire the restored dog's smooth action. “Mind you, I had to wait those two days more with no word.”

“I came back,” Freddie reminded him. She slotted her equipment neatly back into her broad tool belt. “It's working now, better than ever. Drawing a pretty crowd too.”

“Aye. I suppose. What cost to me, though?”

Deflecting his enquiry, she scanned the faces beyond the window. The onlookers were beginning to disperse, only a few of the younger boys remaining with their faces pressed to the glass to watch the spectacle and slaver over the slowly roasting haunch on the spit. “You strike me as a man of knowledge and discretion, Mr. Armintrout.”

The butcher wiped his hands on his bloody apron, cocking his head at her. “I might be.”

“For the right price?”

Armintrout glanced from Freddie to Barnabas, then out the window. “Not here.” He stalked off to the shop's back door, jerking his head for her to follow. “And not him. Just you.”

“No problem at all. Barney will just tidy up while we talk. Won't you, Barney?”

She smirked at Smith-Grenville's glare and followed the portly butcher into the back room of the shop, where the floor was stained red and the stench greeted her like a malevolent entity. “I need something other than meat, as you may have surmised.” She might well never eat meat again, in fact, after encountering it in this state. In the shop's front half, neatly trussed clean carcasses hung in tidy rows for display. Here, where the meat was not yet dressed, the less palatable part of the business was all too clearly visible.

“Surmised?”
The big man lifted his eyebrows. “'Ow you do talk, Fred. Should I
surmise
you want a good or a service?”

The partially butchered carcass of a pig occupied a bloodstained table in the center of the room, an invitation to flies from miles around. The smell turned Fred's stomach, and she regretted letting Armintrout dictate the location of their discussion. Too late to turn away now, though. The butcher had been in trade here for nearly forty years, and if anyone was selling anything near the docks he knew about it.

“A good. A very bad good, and it isn't for me, I assure you.”

“For a friend. I see.”

“A friend of a friend. I don't want to buy, I just want to know who's selling.”

“You still 'aven't told me what.” Although they were alone in the room, he'd dropped his voice.

Fred did him one better and mouthed the word so there would be no risk of eavesdropping. “Opium. Not in a den. The actual supplier.”

“No,” he said too quickly. “No, I don't know nothing about that.”

“Emblem of a golden poppy.”

“I most definitely don't know about
him
. You don't want to either, Fred. Not if you value that neck o' yours.” Armintrout moved to a workbench in one corner of the gory meat parlor and began sharpening a cleaver, working the grindstone's pedal with his foot. Not as a threat, Freddie gathered, but simply for something to do because he was anxious. She'd struck a nerve.

“I could disassemble the dog. Or worse yet, leave it like I found it.”

“Aye, you could do that. Shop did well enough before it, it'll do well enough without, I expect.”

Armintrout's apprentice, a boy half Freddie's size and probably less than half her age, scurried into the room and stopped upon seeing his employer in deep discussion with the tinker. The butcher nodded toward a side of beef hanging on a hook, and the lad retrieved it and staggered away with it to leave them alone again. The meat had appeared to outweigh the apprentice, and Freddie had no idea how the youngster managed. But he was one of the lucky ones, she knew, with the prospect of gainful future employment and a roof over his head. How many fishmongers' apprentices and children were starving on the street today because her father had inadvertently robbed them of their livelihood? How many might be killed if there was a terrible earthquake and the person who might have warned them failed to do so?

“Or I could maintain the device free of charge for the rest of its useful life. That must be worth something.”

He turned, lifted the cleaver and brought it down with a crack on a handy gobbet of what appeared to be organ meat, testing the edge. The blade sank into the scarred wood of the table, embedding bits of gore even deeper in the surface. “If you ain't buying, why do you need to know?”

“I told you. For a friend of a friend. Somebody who may be in trouble.” It wasn't exactly a lie. If Phineas Smith-Grenville was involved with the illegal opium trade, whether as a spy or not, he was potentially in a great deal of trouble. And Lord Smith-Grenville might not be quite a friend, but explaining the actual relationship even to herself seemed impossible.

Armintrout sighed over his knife and bits of meat, his wide shoulders slumping. “Free service on anything in the shop that breaks and you know how to fix.”

“Fine. Give me something. A name, a location.”

“I will. But know who you're dealing with, Fred. My cousin Tom turned up missing a week or so ago. They found him in an opium den, strangled. His wife had gone looking for him and she never came back. Not all of her, at least. Neighbor heard some cats fighting in the 'ouse, had a look and found the lady's head sitting on the kitchen table. No body. Just the head. Cats were having their supper.”

Freddie suffered a wave of nausea that had nothing to do with the gruesome setting. “How is that relevant to my question?”

“
Relevant.
Another one o' them words, Fred. With those words, and those questions, I wonder 'oo you are sometimes, I really do.”

“I'm nobody.”

“You sound too much like somebody. All right, my cousin, he called himself a fisherman. He worked on boats, but he weren't no fisherman. Worked for this fellow Rollo Furneval.” He rattled off a street direction to one of the most distant and least savory docks outside London, far down the estuary, nearly to the channel itself. “It's on a deep-water dock, fronts on the free zone where the big ships come through, so I sometimes go there to pick up specialty items. On ice from Europa, costs the earth, so I haven't had cause to go lately 'cause nobody can afford to buy that stuff now. It's always half empty down there these days. But I doubt anything's changed much aside from that. You won't miss the warehouses. All behind a fence, and the biggest has a giant yellow flower painted on the side, with extra gold leaf 'round the edges to make it stand out. But that place is guarded like the crown jewels were in it. Nobody gets in. Not even cargo ships. Only occasional steam cars.”

“But it's a warehouse,” Freddie protested. “There must be goods going back and forth.”

Armintrout shrugged. “Said too much already. Get your nobody apprentice and go, Fred. I'll get word to you through Dan Pinkerton the next time I need you. Don't ask for me otherwise.”

 • • • 

B
ARNABAS HATED THE
surroundings but found the risk entirely acceptable for the reward of getting to follow around Freddie Murcheson while she was wearing trousers. Although her tinker's costume was designed to obscure her female figure, not flatter it, most of the obfuscation was accomplished by extra padding in the front, under the waistcoat. She hadn't thought to mask the rear view. He knew he should be shocked at himself for looking in the first place, much less appreciating what he saw, but his character was evidently lacking.

“You might want to look in the back and make sure I've put all the tools away properly,” he suggested quite shamelessly once Freddie had joined him on the seat of the idling pony trap. As he'd known she would, she twisted and leaned over the seat, giving him an excellent perspective on the curve of her hip and buttock as her jacket rode up.

“It all looks fine,” she confirmed. “You're a terrible apprentice, however.”

“I'm too old to be an apprentice,” he reminded her. It had been his primary objection to the day's cover story to begin with. It had allowed them to venture forth without waiting for Dan Pinkerton to be off duty, however, so he'd donned the costume and done his best. “And you're no master. What did you learn from the butcher?”

Barnabas had been all in favor of heading straight to an opium den and questioning whoever seemed in charge. He didn't know much, but he knew that Murcheson had lied to him and he must now reevaluate all he had heard and discover the facts for himself. At the very least, if the part about the opium had been true in any way, he might be able to find out if Phineas had frequented any of the local dens. Or he might rule it out.

Freddie had been the one to point out that they didn't care about the opium dens or what happened along the chain of suppliers. Finding the operation that bore Orm's logo was still the best lead to Phineas, as well as to the saboteurs. What they needed to learn was where a smuggling operation with cargos requiring large submersibles might be headquartered. And they didn't want to tip their hand while finding this out.

All that might be true, but Barnabas wasn't sure he trusted the butcher any more than he trusted some random drug trafficker.

“A name. Rollo Furneval. And a possible location.”

“You sound dubious.” He didn't think it seemed right, Freddie being the anxious one.

Freddie eased the cart into motion. “It sounds as though the location might not help us much. Armintrout said it's a warehouse but it doesn't seem to be used as a staging area for cargo. Which makes one wonder what it
is
used for, but as we're specifically looking for evidence to tie this man Furneval to either the illegal opium trade or the submersible sensor array or both, it doesn't sound like the warehouse will help us much.”

“Are you driving back into Belgravia? Dressed like this?”

She chuckled. “Of course. We're paying a visit to my friend Lady Sophronia in Wilton Crescent. She helps me get tidied up when I've someplace to be in the evenings and I've spent my days gathering grease.”

“Lady Sophronia? Not Sophronia Wallingford?” The name flew out of his past with the force of a body blow from a cricket bat. He hadn't heard it in three years.

“Yes. You know her?”

Did he know her? Not half as well as he'd once thought. Depending on whom one asked, Sophie Howard Wallingford was a martyr or a gold digger, a devoted wife or a heartless deceiver. And apparently a friend in need to Fred Merchant when he wanted to transform back into Frédérique Murcheson in time to appear properly groomed for the soiree her father was throwing that evening. Assuming, of course, that Rutherford Murcheson returned from his undersea journey in time to host his own party. As of that morning, he'd still been mysteriously absent from the house.