by C. J. Archer
I started from the most recent entry, two days ago and worked backwards. I wasn’t expecting to find a name I recognized so when I saw it, my heart skipped a beat.
“Look at this,” I said to Duke who was still inspecting the carpets. Willie had joined Matt and Cyclops out the back. I showed him the ledger, pointing to the name.
“Lady Coyle! What was Hope doing here?”
“Ordering a rug, of course. Four, in fact.”
He squinted and leaned closer to the page. “Is that a mark next to each order?”
I bent my head, but the light was quite poor. “See if the others are finished with the lamp.”
He returned a moment later carrying the lamp with Matt, Cyclops and Willie in tow. He held the lamp closer to the ledger. “It’s an asterisk.”
I flipped back another page. “Here’s another order with an asterisk. Good lord!”
Matt leaned over my shoulder. “What is it?”
“Professor Nash ordered a rug from Mr. Pyke just before Christmas.” I tapped my finger on the entry. “And there’s an asterisk placed beside the order too.”
“It wasn’t a very big rug.”
I looked further back through the ledger and although there were a few more entries with asterisks, I didn’t recognize the customers’ names. “It must refer to those carpets where Mr. Pyke used his magic.”
“Makes sense,” Willie said. “Hope would know he was a magician through Coyle, and Nash knew…how?”
“Through the magic grapevine,” I said with a shrug. “He has several contacts, so if he was in the market for a new rug, he must have asked around. That doesn’t mean he’s a suspect, but the Coyles are.”
“Why?” Matt asked.
“Well, because…” In truth, I couldn’t think of a reason why they should be suspects and not Professor Nash. “If nothing else, it proves Lord Coyle knew Mr. Pyke was a magician. When Hope suggested she needed a new carpet, her husband would have advised her to come here and get the best.” I closed the ledger and returned it to the desk then showed them the invoices. “Most of those are outstanding. Mr. Pyke owed a lot of money to his suppliers.”
“That explains why he went to the newspapers,” Matt said.
“And gave them his name,” Duke added. “Free advertising. He hoped it would bring more customers here.”
Mr. Pyke must have noticed how the wealthy were receptive to buying magical goods after Oscar’s book was published. He would have hoped to turn that interest to his own advantage, and what better way to advertise his status as a wool magician than through a newspaper that was circulated widely throughout the city.
But he was also risking expulsion from his guild. According to Catherine, they had revoked his membership, but it wasn’t clear if that happened as a result of the article or happened before he spoke to the journalist.
“Did you find anything useful in the workshop?” I asked.
Matt sat on the edge of the desk. “Nothing. But what stands out to me is the lack of any signs of a struggle. There’s no blood or scratches, nothing overturned. Everything appears to be in its place, as if he tidied up at the end of the day and was about to head home.”
If nothing else, it narrowed down the time of his disappearance. It must have happened after he locked up for the day and before he got home. “We should find out what route he usually took between work and his house. Perhaps someone saw him being bundled into a carriage.”
It was a chilling thought. My nerves were so frayed by it, that I jumped when the front door suddenly opened. I wasn’t the only one.
Willie drew her gun. “Halt! Don’t move or I’ll shoot.”
The elderly fellow put up his hands. “Blimey, don’t do that! Take what you want, I won’t stop you, but I don’t think you’ll find any money on the premises.”
Matt put a hand to the barrel of Willie’s gun and pushed it down. “Put it away.”
“He might be trying to kill you!”
“I swear, I’m not going to kill no one!” the man cried. “I saw some movement in here and thought I better look. Mr. Pyke, the owner, would have wanted me to. But I’ll pretend I never saw you. Carry on thieving.” He backed out.
“Wait!” Matt said. “We’re not thieving, we’re investigating Mr. Pyke’s disappearance.”
The man reappeared around the door again. “Oh. Then why is he pointing a gun at me?”
“I’m a she, and I was just being careful,” Willie said.
He touched the brim of his cap. “Sorry, ma’am, didn’t notice your…um…”
“Please come inside,” I said, rising. “My name is India Glass. This is my husband and these are our associates.”
He shook the hands of all the men, bobbed his head at me, and looked Willie up and down. He must be contemplating what sort of greeting to give her. “My name’s Marr. I have a leather goods store next door.”
His arrival would save us a visit. The less wandering around we did outside, in the open, the better. “Mrs. Pyke asked us to help locate her husband,” I said. “He has disappeared.”
Mr. Marr removed his cap and scratched his bald head. He was a small elderly man with a slight stoop and white whiskers. He wore a leather apron over his clothes and leather gloves of good quality. “So Mrs. Pyke told me this morning when she came here first thing looking for him. She knocked on my door before I opened and asked me when I’d last seen him.”
“And when did you last see him?” Matt asked.
“Yesterday. He locked up at five.”
“Is that the usual time he leaves?”
“Aye. Five o’clock every day, like clockwork. He likes to be home in time for an early supper at five thirty.”
“Does he walk home?” I asked.
Mr. Marr nodded.
“Did you see him go?”
Another nod. “I was standing in the doorway as I often do at that time, to say good evening to my neighbors. It’s just a friendly way to end the day, and many who don’t live above their shops leave at that time. Me, I live upstairs so I don’t close until five-thirty.”
“How did he seem?”
He frowned in thought. “Now that you mention it, he was distracted. He’s always cheerful, always asks how my day has been. But yesterday he only waved after I called out goodnight.”
“And then?” Matt asked.
“And then he went on his way.”
“Alone?”
“Aye, and he walked off in the same direction as always, down Courser Street.”
That confirmed our theory that he wasn’t kidnapped from here, if he was kidnapped at all. “Did Mr. Pyke have a, er, particular friend he might have stayed with last night?” Even as I asked the question, I could hear Aunt Letitia’s voice in my head admonishing me. Asking a man if his acquaintance had a lover was terribly vulgar, in anyone’s book.
Mr. Marr tucked his hands into his apron pocket and hunched his shoulders. “No, ma’am. He was devoted to Mrs. Pyke.”
“Mrs. Pyke said her husband had a visitor yesterday at lunchtime,” Matt said. “She saw the carriage leave but not who was in it. She claimed Mr. Pyke was not himself after that encounter. Did you see who it was?”
“No, sir. He gets ladies coming here from time to time in their carriages to look at his carpets. It’s not unusual.”
“Do you know if he has ever had an encounter with a gentleman or lady that has left him worried?”
Mr. Marr stroked his whiskers. “There was one encounter with a fellow, but he wasn’t a gen’leman. The day before yesterday, it was. I remember it because I could hear the man shouting so I came in to see if Mr. Pyke was all right. The man left, thankfully. Don’t know what the two of us would have done if he kept on. He was a big fellow and I’m not as young as I used to be.”
“What were they arguing about?”
“Magic.”
A sense of dread settled like lead in my stomach. “Go on.”
“Seems like everyone in the whole city has read
that book with the orange cover. Everyone’s talking about it and speculating about who might be a magician and who ain’t. It never occurred to me that Mr. Pyke is one, but I haven’t looked at his rugs lately.” He gazed around the shop at the carpets before focusing on me again. “The fellow accused Mr. Pyke of being a magician, and told him he was cheating and taking customers away from honest rug makers like himself.”
“Did Mr. Pyke say who he was?” Matt asked.
“No, but I reckon you only have to go to the wool guild and describe the fellow. He was real distinctive. Young, tall and solid.” He angled his chin toward Cyclops. “A Goliath, like your friend there, but with ginger hair.”
We thanked him and he bobbed his head and left.
Willie returned her gun to the waistband of her trousers. “We’ll go to the wool guild and find this fellow. It’s got to be him.”
Duke disagreed. “We have to follow the same route Pyke walked last night after he left here. Someone might have seen something.”
“Walking through the streets is too dangerous for Matt,” Cyclops pointed out. “You and Willie can do that. Matt, India and me will go on to the guild.”
“Do I get a say in this?” Matt asked.
“No,” Cyclops, Duke and Willie said.
“Of course you do,” I said. “Go on. What would you like to say?”
Matt strode to the door, catching everyone unawares. We raced after him. “I think it’s a good plan.”
I smiled to myself.
With Matt safely ensconced in the carriage, Willie asked Woodall for the quickest route to Mr. Pyke’s house via Courser Street, then Cyclops asked Woodall if he knew where to find the wool guild. Our coachman was better than a map. According to the man himself, he knew the streets of London better than he knew his own face.
We set off a few moments later leaving Duke and Willie to walk. I peered through the rear window for the entirety of the journey and breathed a sigh of relief when we reached the guild hall. We had not been followed.
According to the sign etched in stone above the lintel, the building belonged to the Worshipful Company of Woolmen. The coat of arms depicted a wool pack on a red shield crested with a gold spinning wheel. The colors had faded and part of the motto had come off completely, but Matt managed to translate the Latin as Wool is our Hope.
It was a reminder of how ancient these guilds were. The building looked as though it had stood for hundreds of years. Its solid stonework and elaborate carvings of spinning wheels spoke of wealth, but that wealth must have been from years past. Today, the windows were dark with soot, one had been boarded over, and the building itself was modest compared to its neighbors. Where once it would have been the grandest structure on the street, it was now the smallest, dwarfed by a bank on one side and a theater on the other.
But it wasn’t just the building that was old, it was the entire concept. Why did a craftsman need to belong to a guild? What was the point? If it was to regulate the industry, then we now had laws to ensure a customer got what they paid for. Where the law failed, the reputation of the cheating tradesman was denounced in the media.
From what I knew of the Watchmaker’s Guild, my father paid an annual fee to belong and that gave him a license to trade, but it didn’t protect him if a customer refused to pay. Nor did it protect him if he had a dispute with suppliers, or was having financial difficulty. Guild members rallied around a member’s family when he died, but friends and family did that too. It was an outdated and somewhat meaningless institution for the modern craftsman.
Our knock was answered by an elderly porter wearing a cap and tweed livery that looked more suited to a hunting party in the country than city living, but at least it would be warm. I wondered if the guild outfitted him with a lighter livery to wear in summer.
He smiled amiably through his wiry gray whiskers. “Good morning. How may I assist?”
Aware of how exposed Matt was on the porch, I strode inside without being invited. Matt followed, and I shut the door myself. Cyclops remained on watch outside. “We are Mr. and Mrs. Gaskell,” I said, using the name of one of my favorite authors. We’d decided on the false names in the carriage. India Glass was like poison in the guilds these days. Whenever we called on a guild, we’d discovered Mr. Abercrombie had beaten us and used his influence as a former guild master to blacken my name.
The porter, an elderly, stooped man, had pursed his lips over a set of false teeth too large for his mouth as we pushed past him, and he continued to regard us as uninvited interlopers. “How may I help you?” he asked stiffly.
It was time to turn on the sweetness to make up for our rude entry. “Forgive us for barging in like this, it’s just that I’m so thrilled to finally see the inside of the famous London home of the Worshipful Company of Woolmen.” I gazed up at the ceiling with its blackened beams that were no higher than Matt’s head.
“My wife is the daughter of a rug maker from Bristol,” Matt explained. “We’re visiting friends in London and she begged me to come here.”
The porter beamed, his stiffness thawed by our praise. “How delightful.”
“I heard so much about this place from my father. Not that he was a member here, of course,” I added, in case he asked for my maiden name. “He was a member of the Bristol branch of the guild. But he came here once and told me what a wonderful building it was, so full of company history.”
The porter puffed out his chest a little and he took on a professional air. “It was built in sixteen-oh-nine, but the company itself goes back much further. Indeed, we’re one of the oldest livery companies in the city.”
“Oh, I know. So much history.”
“Would you care to look through our library? We have a fine collection of books about wool, of course, but also antique spinning wheels, looms and rug making tools. The finest in the country.”
Matt must have sensed my hesitation. He put his hand on my lower back and said, “We’d love to.” So much for getting the information we needed and leaving immediately.
The porter led us along the corridor past walls lined with woolen tapestries, our footfalls deadened by faded carpets with frayed edges. Why did they not replace them? Tradition, I supposed. That desire to keep things as they always have been, sometimes to the detriment of improvement.
Matt and I spent ten minutes studying the objects in the collection and reading the accompanying cards while listening to the porter tell us about the history of the guild and its members, who were a mix of merchants, rug makers, spinners, and weavers, clothiers and tailors specializing in woolen garments.
When a suitable time had passed, I asked him for the name of a tall, solid fellow with ginger hair. “My father asked me to look in on him, but I’m so dreadful with names.” I touched my forehead. “My husband suggested we come here and ask if you knew of such a fellow.”
“I do indeed. His name is Fuller. James Fuller.” He winked and smiled. When Matt and I gave him a blank look, he added, “In the old days, wool was cleaned and thickened by a process called fulling. The modern name of Fuller means that family’s origins can be traced back to the wool trade. So James Fuller hasn’t fallen far from the tree, so to speak.”
Most magicians could trace their family tree through the same single trade, and while it wasn’t unusual for the artless to be able to as well, it was less common. Could Mr. Fuller be a magician? If so, why did he argue with Mr. Pyke, accusing him of having an advantage by using his magic on his rugs?
“Fuller was here just yesterday, as it happens,” the porter went on.
“Did he look well?” I asked.
“As fine a figure as always. Nothing wrong with his lungs either. I could hear him bellowing all the way down here, and he was on the second floor in the master’s office with the door closed.”
“That doesn’t sound good. Is he often an argumentative fellow? Only, I don’t want to turn up on his doorstep if he’s something of a bully.”
“Nothing like that. He’s
not a bully, although he does have a temper. It doesn’t snap often, but when it does it’s like a bomb going off. I assure you, it takes a lot to rile him. You’ll be fine, Mrs. Gaskell. I’m sure he’ll welcome you and Mr. Gaskell into his home.”
“Just so that I know, what set him off yesterday? I’d hate for it to be the same thing that I want to see him about.”
He glanced toward the door then leaned forward and whispered. “Magic.”
I waited but he didn’t elaborate, not even when I prompted him.
Matt knew how to get an answer from him, however. “No doubt Mr. Fuller wanted the guild master to revoke the memberships of those members who are known magicians. It’s happening all over London, so I hear. It won’t be long until the discontent spreads to Bristol and other cities.”
“A handful of members have been expelled already.” The porter sighed. “Why can’t everyone just get along? We’re all in the wool trade. We need to take care of one another, not destroy.” He gave me a grim smile. “But that’s a debate for another day. Rest assured, ma’am, as long as you don’t mention magic in Mr. Fuller’s presence, you’ll find him a friendly giant of a fellow. And his wife is a delight.”
He told us where to find Mr. Fuller’s rug shop. It was a mere two streets away from Mr. Pyke’s. We drove back the way we’d come and collected Willie and Duke. Unfortunately they had nothing to report.
“Only one person saw him,” Willie said. “A woman who was bringing in her washing says he walks past at the same time every night and she saw him last night too. She always nods at him and he nods back. She said he looked fine but distracted, like he didn’t really notice her and was just nodding as a matter of course.”
That was similar to what the neighbor told us.
“We kept asking everyone we came across,” Duke went on. “No one else saw him, and some said that was strange because they always see him going home that way. So we reckon he was kidnapped between the point where he saw the woman hanging out her washing and his home.”
