The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne

by Elsa Hart

  Enclosed in stone, she reached as high as she could and ran her hands over ledges and crevices, not minding the tickle of spiders against her skin. Each rumble of thunder was louder than the one before. Meacan urged her to hurry. Just as she was beginning to feel foolish, Cecily’s fingertips touched metal. Awkwardly, because the sword was heavy and difficult to manipulate in the confined space, she freed it and brought it out to where Meacan waited. They had only moments to marvel at the jeweled hilt and the blade etched with vines and flowers before a sudden clap of thunder startled Cecily so much that she dropped the sword with a clatter to the ground.

  Dark patches spread across the floor around them as the rain became a downpour and soaked the stone. Cecily retrieved the sword. She could barely see Meacan in front of her as they fled down the stairs. A false step sent Cecily tumbling. As she struck the ground a white flash of agony filled her vision. Meacan was beside her in an instant, helping her up. But as soon as Cecily put weight on her right ankle, she crumpled.

  They tried again. Meacan supported Cecily on her right side, and they used the sword as a cane for her left. It was no use. Progress was impossible. They hobbled back the short distance they had gone and found a place for Cecily to huddle under a stone doorframe. Meacan pressed a kiss to her cheek and disappeared, the rain closing around her running form like a curtain. Cecily was left alone. Each flash of lightning turned the walls around her white, and she felt she was trapped in a ghostly realm. She drew her knees to her chest and waited in miserable anticipation for the next onslaught. The sky presented all the visages of death that her frightened child’s mind could conjure.

  It was like this that her father, Meacan’s father, and two of the servants found her. She was taken up into adult arms and carried back to the house. By the time they arrived, she was reduced to mortified weeping. Her last memory of the day was of the visiting nobleman demanding to know how his best dress sword, which he’d last seen when he had wrapped it in velvet in his own home and tucked it into his trunk, had come to be covered in mud and in the possession of two undisciplined girls.

  Lying in the guest bedroom of the Mayne house twenty-five years later, Cecily recalled the aftermath of the event. To everyone’s relief, her injury had been minor. The terror of the day had long since faded, and on another night, Cecily might have smiled at the thought of how Meacan had hoped to cheer her grieving friend by arranging an adventure for her. How she must have labored over the project, crafting her riddles, counterfeiting signs of age upon the sheet of paper, liberating the oblivious nobleman of his sword, and making the journey to the castle alone at dawn to conceal the prize. It had emerged during Meacan’s pale-faced confession that the plan had come to her when she discovered the sword during a covert exploration of the nobleman’s room. She had meant to reveal the truth to Cecily as soon as their quest was complete, and return it to its place before anyone knew it was missing.

  Cecily knew why the memory had returned tonight as she drifted in and out of sleep, and why it made her uneasy. However good Meacan’s intentions had been, on that day she had demonstrated a reckless disregard not only for rules, but for reality, that had brought them both perilously close to real harm. Today, real harm had been done. Cecily wanted to believe that Meacan was still the same well-meaning girl she had known, but she could not dismiss the possibility that while Meacan’s waywardness had remained with her through adulthood, her goodness had not.

  And yet what possible connection could Meacan have to the evil that had been done in the house? Whatever Meacan was hiding was surely her own business, and nothing to do with the murder. The circumstances of Sir Barnaby’s death seemed clear enough. Strange, yes, that the quiet curator who had demonstrated no inclination toward violence should kill his employer. Strange that Sir Barnaby had abandoned his guests so suddenly. Strange that Otto Helm had disappeared.

  Sleep eluded Cecily and she rose. She was relieved that she had thought to set her own tinderbox on the dresser by the bed. Even with fatigued fingers she had no difficulty lighting a candle. The flame drew breath. The light through the jaw of a shark on the wall cast a yawning, distended ring of shadow teeth on the ceiling that moved as if she was seeing it through water.

  Cecily’s awareness of the shadow drew her gaze to the spiderlike shape cast by her own fingers on the wooden surface of the dresser. The image of the bloody handprint on Sir Barnaby’s desk intruded on her thoughts. She realized that something about that print had bothered her, and it had not only been the image it conjured of a dying man. It was something else. Something about its shape. She spread her own hand flat. The question that had been flickering in the back of her mind flared brighter.

  The answer to the question was in Sir Barnaby’s study. She knew she should wait until morning. But the long hours of night stretched in front of her, and before she could stop herself she was retrieving her wrap from where she had draped it over a chair. Its frayed edge caught on the edge of a sea urchin. She freed it. The wool had a familiar, comforting fragrance of the dried lavender she kept in her trunk. She covered her candle with a lantern and stepped out of the room.

  The pale face of the clock on the landing told her the time was quarter to three. There was no light under Meacan’s door, and no sound from within. Cecily started down the staircase, her toe searching carefully for each step before she lowered herself onto it. Every creak seemed loud to her ears, and she had to remind herself that she was not doing anything wrong.

  She reached the landing of the ground floor and entered the Serpent Room. The desk at which Otto Helm had been working was still surrounded by the snakes that had not been put away. She could just see their looped and coiled forms in the light of her lantern. Serpentine spines wound like curving ladders up the wall. Her apprehension mounted as she passed through the connecting door into the other house.

  The study door was open. The last time she had seen the room, Sir Barnaby’s body had been in it, and though it was no longer there, she skirted the place where it had lain. Her light did not reach the corners of the room. A vision rose unbidden before her of Sir Barnaby standing just out of sight, watching her from within the darkness, hidden among his possessions. She steadied herself and held the lantern before her as if it could ward away waiting ghosts.

  The handprint was no longer wet and glistening, but it was still visible on the desk. The line that cut down the center of the palm was as crisp and clearly defined as it had been in her memory. She brought her own hand down to hover over the print. A rush of gratification swept through her. She had been right. For the shape to have been halved so cleanly, a surface other than the desk must have received its other half. There had been a sheet of paper there when the bloodied hand had struck.

  Where, then, was the bloodstained page? Cecily was certain it had not been on the desk earlier that day. She riffled through the papers piled at the corner, then got to her hands and knees and examined the floor. Slowly, she sat back on her heels. The house was silent. The light of her lantern was reflected in the mirrors, crystals, and glass-eyed birds arranged around her in the dark. It was a long moment before she acknowledged the truth of what she had come to the room to confirm. In the final moments of Sir Barnaby’s life, there had been a document on the desk. That document had disappeared.

  CHAPTER 8

  Dawn entered Sir Barnaby Mayne’s house slowly, gray and tattered from its journey through the nets of cloud and smoke that covered London. Dingy light crept over scuffed floors and climbed the faces of cabinets. From the recesses of shelves, red labels began to emerge like bright rose petals scattered over yellowed bones, bronze statuettes, and the pearlescent interiors of shells.

  Cecily was accustomed to dressing alone, though she had employed maids at various times during her travels. She wore stays that laced in the front, and could manipulate with ease the pins and ties that were required to hold even the simplest dresses in place. In Smyrna, her appearance-conscious husband had dictated much of her ward
robe. A close adherent of fashion, he had presented her with ostentatious petticoats, hairpieces that increased her height by a foot, and gowns of patterned silk with long trains. Cecily was not puritanical, but she was practical. She liked dresses in which it was possible to ascend a roadside berm in search of a glimpsed tree or stoop on a path to harvest an unfamiliar herb. She had brought back to England only the clothes she had selected herself, which, while elegant, were comfortable, durable, and easy to clean. That morning, she put on the same purple-gray linen gown she had worn the day before, and went downstairs.

  She was craving fresh air. Though she knew she would not find it outside on a misty, soot-dense London morning, she nevertheless left the house through a door in the Serpent Room and entered the garden, an enclosed rectangle that extended from the rear of the residence.

  It was clear that Sir Barnaby had not been among the collectors who treated their gardens as extensions of their collections, filling them with rarities and challenging skilled gardeners like Meacan’s father to keep them alive in London soil. Preferring to devote his attention to his shelves, he had settled for a courtyard that was merely fashionable. Neat boxwoods separated graveled paths from flower beds filled with silvery germander, marigolds, pinks, and lilies. A soot-stained statue of Athena posed dutifully on a central pedestal. There was a humble greenhouse, a modest assortment of potted kitchen herbs, and a carriage house set into the far wall. The whole space seemed to be looking up at the residence with faint resentment, as a child might look at a sibling it knows is preferred.

  The exception to this otherwise unremarkable display was the tree in the far left corner. Its dark green leaves had a waxy sheen, and heavy white flowers rested like birds at the ends of its slender branches. Cecily knew it was the sweetbay because Sir Barnaby, proud of the specimen that was one of only four growing in London, had published several essays about it in the Transactions, all of which she had read with interest. She followed the gravel paths until she was enveloped by the tree’s spiced lemon sweetness.

  A stone bench dusted with pencil shavings testified to Meacan’s presence there on the previous day. Cecily’s attention moved from the bench to the back wall, where she saw a door half hidden by a curtain of privet. This, she surmised, must be the door through which Alice Fordyce had arrived, and through which Dinley had made his escape. She went to it, stopping on the way to glance inside the carriage house. It came as no surprise that Sir Barnaby had not used the space to keep a carriage, but to store exceptionally large and unwieldy collection items. Bronze and marble sculptures stared out from the cobwebbed gloom, in company with colossal bones. A golden face and bands of hieroglyphs gleamed from a painted coffin.

  The wall of the garden was high and crowned with shards of glass to deter thieves. Cecily unbolted the door and looked out. To her left and right, a narrow road pitted with puddles extended along the garden walls of the adjacent properties. Across the road, a dreary field stretched away from her. The mist that blanketed it was fetid and stagnant, as if it had been there a long time. Within it loomed the gnarled and twisted shapes of trees. She heard the faint buzz of flies.

  “Lady Kay!” The cry came from behind her. John was gesturing from the now-open door of Sir Barnaby’s study. “Come back to the house!” he called. “It isn’t safe out on the road!”

  Once he was assured that she was coming back, John disappeared back into the study. Cecily reached it in time to see him finish rolling up the burgundy rug. Grunting with the effort, he dragged it into the corner behind the book wheel. Thomasin stood ready with a mop, which she submerged into a sloshing bucket as soon as the rug was out of the way. Martha was observing the other two in a posture of command.

  The housekeeper was a woman of about fifty who appeared to possess the same physical strength as her husband compacted into a much smaller form. Her slender bones were armored by sinew visible in taut cords at her neck and forearms. In one hand she held the knife that had killed Sir Barnaby, in the other a damp cloth discolored by rusty stains. “You had best not step inside, Lady Kay,” she said. “The floor isn’t clean yet.”

  Cecily remained obediently on the veranda. John skirted the spreading arc of Thomasin’s mop to join her. “I hope you’ll forgive my calling to you so roughly,” he said, nodding over Cecily’s shoulder toward the back of the garden. “They call that place the dueler’s field. Stay more than a few days in this house and you’ll surely hear a pistol shot from it or the strike of steel at dawn. But there’s more bad business there than just dueling, especially when the mist sits heavy on it.”

  “I am grateful to you for the warning,” Cecily reassured him. “It did seem a forbidding place. Have you seen Mrs. Barlow?”

  “She has gone out,” said John. “We hear the two of you are old acquaintances.”

  Cecily nodded. “We haven’t seen each other in many years. Has she—” Cecily considered her words. “Has she got on well here?”

  “Oh yes,” said John. “Mrs. Barlow has been very good company. Until yesterday, this house was as happy as I’ve ever seen it.”

  “Mrs. Barlow isn’t careful enough with the objects,” muttered Martha. “Smudging them with fingerprints, leaving them out after she’s finished making her drawings, putting them back too near the edges of shelves. Someone employed here should know better.” Martha, still holding the knife, was now alternating her attention between it and the shelves. There was a hint of uncertainty in her look.

  “Did it come from the collection?” asked Cecily, indicating the weapon.

  Martha frowned. “I dust the room every two weeks and I’ve never seen it before,” she said. “And it doesn’t have a label. The master was very diligent about labels.”

  Cecily’s eyes dropped to the blade. “May I see it?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Martha handed the weapon to her. To Cecily’s eye, its appearance would have been malevolent even if it wasn’t associated with murder. Its hilt was a branch of white wood that had been polished, but left in its natural, twisting shape. It was capped by a silver pommel set with three glittering black gemstones. The iron blade was etched with markings almost too faint to see. If they came from a language, it was not one Cecily recognized.

  “Thomasin!” The cry came from Martha. Thomasin had inadvertently knocked a bird from a shelf behind her with the handle of her mop. It had toppled to the floor, where water was quickly soaking its tufted blue feathers. Martha snatched up the bird and cradled it, daubing at the moisture with a corner of her apron. Then she delicately separated the feathers and blew on them. She returned the bird to its place. “This is why he never let the new maids do the dusting,” she said.

  Thomasin slapped her mop loudly over the floor. “And what do you think will matter most to Lady Mayne? Having the room clean of her husband’s blood or keeping some old birds dry?”

  “This has nothing to do with Lady Mayne,” said Martha. “And you’ll be out of the house if I hear such insolence from you again.”

  “You aren’t the mistress here,” Thomasin shot back. “And make no doubt of it, I’ll be gone from this place the moment I find a position that suits me.”

  Martha’s look could have frozen a pond on a summer’s day. “You will treat the collection as if the master himself were in the room. Do you understand?”

  “If you have no more need of me here, Martha,” said John, cautiously interrupting. “I’ll just fix Lady Kay something to eat and start preparing a noon meal.”

  Martha gave them both a nod of dismissal. She held out her hand for the knife. Cecily gave it to her. After a moment’s deliberation, Martha returned it to the shelf where Carlyle had set it. Rather than cross the wet floor, John led Cecily along the veranda and down into the kitchen from the outside. “Martha didn’t intend any rudeness to you, Lady Kay,” he said as he stoked the fire. “I hope you don’t see it that way. She’s been employed by Sir Barnaby longer than any of us, since before she and I were married. He trained her to ca
re for the collection more than he ever taught her to serve ladies such as yourself. Now, do you take breakfast? Cup of ale? Toast and butter? I’ve some anchovies and cheese if you like. It will be goose pie and salad at midday.”

  Cecily accepted the ale and toast, which were soon set before her. While she ate, John worked with gusto, cleaning and chopping vegetables and herbs spread in fragrant bunches across the sturdy central table. “Is Lady Mayne expected soon?” she asked.

  He nodded as he used a cloth to absorb moisture from a bowl of lettuce. “This afternoon, assuming she’s in a fit state for the journey, poor woman. The estate’s a mere two hours away.”

  “Does she come to London often?”

  “Oh no,” John replied. “Not above three or four times in the past fifteen years that I recall. But many of the fruits and vegetables for Sir Barnaby’s table are delivered from the estate, and I will say she keeps a fine garden. Just this month we’ve had alexanders for pottage, elderflower, parsnips, lettuce and rocket, celery, shallots, onions also, and artichokes. Do you care for artichokes?”

  “I enjoyed them in Venice,” Cecily replied.

  John looked interested. “Yes? And how were they served there?”

  Cecily considered for a moment. “I believe they were broiled.”

  “That’s common,” said John. “I myself am of the opinion that they should be served raw. A good oil over them, not too strong. Vinegar, salt, and pepper. Though it’s hard to say that’s better than an artichoke fried in butter with parsley. You can preserve them, too, dried or pickled, though if dried you must keep the leaves from touching.”