“The Lady Hastings may have refused my invitation today, but she’s already given her consent to the marriage. I had her reply last week. We are engaged, sweet Leonora. I am engaged to a lovely, sad little mutemouth of a girl, and all London loves me for the charity of it.”
“I have written to her. I have t-told her everything!”
His eyes narrowed. “That is quite enough on the subject now, Miss Somerville. You begin to bore me.”
“Oh, my poor head! I am dreadfully unwell.” Christabel lurched into us, digging her fingers into my arm until I yelped. “Miss Somerville, I beg you, come to the ladies’ salon at once and help me douse my temples.” Without waiting for Mr. Thornfax’s leave she dragged me on a weaving path among the tables.
We found the salon through the lobby, tucked beside the cloakroom. Christa rounded on me the moment the door closed behind us. “Are you truly so stupid as to accuse the Lord Rosbury of being a criminal?”
“You d-don’t know what he’s done,” I said.
“Of course I don’t know, and neither should you. It isn’t your concern. You’re to be his wife, not his solicitor.”
“Would … would you have me live b-beyond the law?”
Christa’s eyes narrowed as she advanced on me, swaying slightly. “I don’t give a fig where you live so long as it isn’t at Hastings House.”
I blinked, taken aback by the poison in her tone.
My sister put a hand on a chair back to steady herself. She tilted her head and regarded me a moment. Then she laughed. “How fitting if Thornfax should turn out to be a cad.”
“I d-don’t understand.”
“Did you think I would forget, little sister?” she snapped. “Do you think five years is enough to cure heartbreak, to soothe the pain of happiness utterly destroyed?”
“You mean Mr. Clayton?” I said. “Christa, that marriage would have been ruinous for you.”
“Oh, how skilled you are at parroting the Lady Hastings when it suits you!” she spat.
I gasped. I hadn’t realized I’d switched into Aunt Emma’s voice.
“Yes, indeed. Mimic appointed herself judge and jury over my lover, and I lost him. What gave you the right? I wonder. Who were you to decide my happiness?”
It was the most she’d ever said to me about her old beau. I’d hoped that, after all this time, I had been forgiven for Mr. Clayton. Clearly I was wrong. Tears leaked from my eyes.
She straightened and patted her hands over her bodice where it flared at her hips. “Well, I will not judge Mr. Thornfax, and so you shall have him, like it or not. Even if it means your absolute ruin.” She cast me a smug look. “Perhaps especially if it means your ruin!”
“You don’t m-mean that,” I whispered.
Christabel smiled. “No one cares about you, Leonora. You may think yourself the axis round which the world turns, but you will find yourself quite forgotten once married.”
“Christa. Have m-mercy.”
“Mimic has no mercy,” she retorted. She dug her handker-chief from her sleeve, tossed it at me, and watched, hands on hips, while I dabbed at my eyes.
She whispered, “It is perfect if he is a cad. It is exactly what you deserve.” Then she turned and flounced from the room.
NINETEEN
Istood many minutes before the gilded mirrors in the salon trying to compose myself. The hard fact of it was that my sister was right: Mimic had no mercy. I’d shown no mercy to George Clayton on the night our aunt had come to Holybourne to meet Christabel’s suitor and we were all seated in the parlour.
“Coombs has taken a man’s bollocks for less than what you owe him!” Mimic had blurted, out of the blue. It was a deep male voice, rough and disdainful.
I could hear the voice even now, alone at the mirrors in the ladies’ salon. I could still recite Mimic’s whole speech, even after five years—the whole conversation I’d heard while eavesdropping on Mr. Clayton and his friends in the barn. The fact that I was only twelve when I said the words and had no idea what they meant had done nothing to alter the devastating results of Mimic’s performance that night.
“You had better sew things up with this country chit and get that pretty fortune of hers back to London, and fast. Your flat’s already been ransacked, you know. And that whore you favour, Sissy Gordon—”
“Stop!” poor Mr. Clayton had begged me then. He’d fallen to one knee in front of me, right there in the parlour at Holybourne, with Christa tugging frantically at his arm.
“—Coombs’s men have beaten her within an inch of her life for lying to cover your tracks.”
Shaking off my sister Mr. Clayton lunged forward to grab hold of my slipper. “Please, Miss Leonora, no! You—you don’t understand. Please stop.”
“You will take your hand off my niece,” Aunt Emmaline ordered.
Mr. Clayton released me and jumped to his feet. “My good Lady Hastings, I can explain—”
“You will not explain,” Aunt Emma interrupted him, all quiet menace. “You will gather your coat at once and you will not return to this house. Nor will you attempt to contact Miss Somerville again.”
Christabel had wailed and flung herself at our aunt. “Wait, wait, please!” she’d pleaded. “He’s done nothing wrong. He was framed, you see. He has told me everything. He’s been honest with me from the start!”
“Whoring and gambling? Debts and deceptions?” Aunt Emma snapped at her. “I doubt he’s given you the whole story, foolish girl.”
“It isn’t true! She’s lying,” Christa shrieked. “Mimic is lying to you!”
But Mr. Clayton had already fled the room. Over the sound of my sister’s sobbing we heard him away at the stables, calling for his horse, and none of us ever saw George Clayton again.
When two of Mr. Thornfax’s guests came into the salon to re-pin their hair, I forced myself to receive their tipsy congratulations politely before fleeing the room.
Passing back through the lobby I heard angry voices and turned to see someone struggling to get past the doorman. My heart hammered hard at the sight of that white, pinched face and disordered hair.
“Tom!”
Surprised, the doorman released him as I approached.
“Tom, you m-mustn’t be here!” I tried to steer him back to the entrance, but he shook me off.
“No, Leo, you won’t stop me. He has gone too far this time. He must be called out.” Tom’s voice was strained with fury; his whole body trembled.
“P-please, no.” The discovery of Mr. Thornfax’s watch case had already signed Tom’s death warrant. The man would be only too happy to have the excuse of a public assault. I grabbed Tom’s arm, not caring who might see us, and held his face with both hands, trying to force him to look at me. “W-wait. Listen!”
But he shoved past me—“I am sorry, milady. I am sorry for it all”—and strode toward the hall, clearly intent on confronting Mr. Thornfax.
“Thomas Rampling, leave off at once! That door is suicide for you, and you know it will not bring Daisy back to life.” Even as I spoke I sagged with relief; Mimic had struck upon the Lady Hastings at her most forbidding, and Tom paused and turned.
“You will give us privacy,” I snapped, and the hovering doorman scuttled from our sight. I seized Tom’s wrist and dragged him to the cloakroom vestibule.
“You know, then? You know he’s murdered Daisy?” he whispered, white as ash.
Abruptly Mimic abandoned me again. I could only nod.
The horrified grief in Tom’s eyes frightened me and set my tears to flowing again. I clutched his shoulders. My face went up to his and I kissed him deeply, desperately, as if trying to breathe back into him the life I saw drained from his face.
Tom pushed me away. He heaved a dry, retching sob, and another—awful sounds, like drowning. He wheeled round, pushed open the service door, stumbled outside to the gutter, and vomited there.
“Everything I’ve done.” He choked, head down and gripping his thighs for balance. “Everyth
ing I’ve tried—in the end I’ve made it all worse. In the end I am just like him.”
I rubbed his back and began to protest, but he interrupted me: “What are you doing out here? He’ll search for you, milady. You need to go back inside.”
“I won’t. I c-can’t go back—I can’t m-marry him, T-Tom!”
Putting a hand to the bricks for support, Tom wiped his mouth. Then he straightened and, almost unconsciously, he tugged his collar and vest straight and smoothed his hands over his coat. Catching himself up, ordering himself, putting himself to rights. It was as if the violent upset of the past few moments had never happened. His face became smooth, remote, and expressionless.
“I’ve brought something for you,” he said, and opened his satchel and took out a soft leather pouch. Inside, wrapped in a soft cloth, was the music box I’d so admired at his grandmother’s flat.
I touched the beak of one crystal bird, stroked the other’s back. The fact that he’d brought it with him suggested he hadn’t planned on returning home. “Did you set out to flee, or to c-confront the L-Lord Rosbury?” I wondered.
“Both, I think. I don’t know. The police found his watch case in the wreck.” Tom’s mouth twisted. “I was there. I watched the inspector receive it from his sergeant and polish it like a penny on his sleeve.”
“The p-police found it? Then w-why h-haven’t they arrested him?”
“The inspector returned the watch to him in person and apologized for interrupting his tea.” Tom gave a bitter shrug. “No one will ever believe ill of Francis Thornfax. The man is utterly immune. And now he knows I betrayed him.”
“There will be more violence. There will be more p-poor ch-children—you can’t r-run away now!” Even as I said it I flushed with shame for accusing him of cowardice, especially when the accusation was a cover for my own rising panic at the thought of not seeing Tom Rampling again.
He cupped my elbow, a brief, soft stroke of his fingertips on my arm. “They told me Daisy would be the last, at least. And when I heard the inspector wish the Lord Rosbury luck next month with his anti-opium bill in Parliament, I finally knew why.”
“I d-don’t understand.” My tears had begun again.
“Dewhurst’s new drug is a highly concentrated form of opium. It is expensive to produce, and no one will want to buy it so long as other opiates are available. Thornfax, meanwhile, has narrowed his fleet to a single ship, a smaller and faster vessel than any of her competitors, and lined with concealed cargo-holds.”
“I defy any wharf-hound to discover my Heroine’s secrets!” Mimic cut in, so that I copied Mr. Thornfax’s arch tones.
Tom gave a grim smile. “Exactly. ’Tis the perfect monopoly: Thornfax smuggling the opium into a dry market, Dewhurst selling it to ‘patients’ gone mad with yearning for it. All they needed was a British government convinced that opium was ruining society.”
“The B-Black Glove.”
“Yes. A fiction, of course. But the newspapers have swallowed the story whole, and so the public believes that London shall continue to be terrorized by gang violence until our streets are freed of the drug entirely.”
I had an odd mental image, suddenly, of Archie and his fellow journalists as noisy jays flocking at the scene of the train derailment, flitting from corpse to corpse, picking bits of news-story from the wreck to feather their nests. I shuddered. I was glad my cousin had not invented the Black Glove—how devious of Mr. Thornfax to suggest such a thing to Aunt Emma that day we lunched with her!—but it was likely that Archie’s news-stories had nonetheless furthered Mr. Thornfax’s cause. “You must go s-straight to the p-police,” I told Tom. “Someone m-must believe you.”
“There’s no proof. Just the word of a lord against the word of a lockpick.”
A lockpick and a mad girl, I thought. He was right. We had more deaths and more violence on our hands now, and still we were no further ahead than before the train explosion.
Tom touched my arm again. “Milady, if I’m not going to challenge Rosbury I must take my leave.”
“No!” I said. My mind was made up before I realized what I was considering. “W-wait here. Two minutes.” I turned and slipped through the door before he could reply.
I would never find my things, I thought, as I surveyed the forest of garments in the cloakroom. But I could not bring myself to leave the music box, so I slipped it into the pocket of a gentleman’s greatcoat and pulled the coat on over my dress. I removed Mr. Thornfax’s necklace to the pocket as well, and I wound a lady’s fringed shawl over my head. Coins for fare, I remembered, and groped among the hanging coats until I heard the telltale jangle from a pocket.
“Milady,” said Tom, as I flew out the door again, but I brushed straight past and led him at a trot through the twilit mews and out into Whitehall Yard. He caught my sleeve again. “Miss Somerville, stop! This is—”
“Call me Leo,” I told him. I was breathless but calm. “Or Luck, if you p-prefer. Not Miss and not Milady. Not any-m-more.” I saw a cab ahead and hastened to hail it.
Tom cupped my face in his hands. “Leo. You cannot come away with me.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it; he sounded so strict and courtly in the gaslight. “I am not c-coming away with you. You are coming with m-me.”
“Where?”
I took advantage of his surprise to climb into the hansom, and he followed. “To find proof,” I told him.
TWENTY
At dusk the wharf buildings became great blotters sipping ink from the street. Night engulfed their lower stories but couldn’t yet reach the rooflines that leapt into the indigo sky.
Tom moved as naturally in darkness as in daylight. He unlocked the warehouse and led me, swiftly and silently, through the black maze of storage to the secret interior door. In the laboratory he lit a lantern and held it aloft. Then he cursed. He plucked something from the counter, opened a cabinet beneath, and cursed again.
“W-what is it?” I bent to look, but he caught my waist to hold me back. On the shelf was a small glass jar filled with a pale yellow syrup.
“You wanted proof ? Here it is, then.” He opened his palm and showed me a short copper cylinder with a wax seal. A length of cotton wicking was coiled round it. “This is a blast cap, packed with fulminate of mercury. When it meets a spark it burns in an instant, hot as lightning.
“And that”—he pointed to the jar of syrup, one arm still protectively across my torso—“is enough nitroglycerin to send half the city up in flames. Thornfax lost an entire ship last year to a single ounce.” He shook his head in disgust. “How easily I was gulled into believing they were finished with this!”
“This is what D-Daisy carried on the t-train?”
Tom nodded grimly. “Watts mixes it with clay to make it more stable, but it’s still unpredictable as hell.” He set the lantern on a hook and gingerly closed the cupboard door. “My greatest fear was that it would find a spark from somewhere other than my ignition device before Daisy was safely away. The fear was misplaced, of course. It was Thornfax I should have feared all along.”
I looked round the lab. The low light flickered across the marble and steel surfaces, illuminating the rows of apothecary bottles like votives in a cathedral. Except for the jar of syrup concealed in the cabinet, the room was perfectly orderly and benign. And couldn’t there be a plausible explanation even for the explosive oil? Nitroglycerin was being tested as a treatment for heart patients, after all; I’d heard Daniel discussing it with his colleagues. Tom was wrong, I thought. What we’d discovered was no proof—at least none that would incriminate Mr. Thornfax.
“Records,” I said. “Where is Dr. D-Dewhurst’s journal?”
Wary of the explosive, Tom had me stand in the doorway while he made a search. The medical diary was gone, and there were no other papers or records in the room.
“Mr. Thornfax’s d-desk,” I remembered. “The drawers!”
I held the lantern while Tom took out his wallet of picks and crouche
d over the lock. It took nearly fifteen minutes of careful effort, and then we found only duty bills, sales slips, and banknotes. The fact that Mr. Thornfax was importing opium and profiting enormously at the Mincing Lane auctions was not in dispute, however. We needed something more, something to tie him directly to the explosions.
Tom opened the second drawer more quickly. I marvelled, watching him probe with the picks, at how his deft fingers had learned, and were now remembering, the delicate mechanism of the lock.
In this drawer was a box of fresh stationery. I knew at once what it was, and my hand trembled as I lifted the top sheet of paper. White, with a fine black border. A tiny black glove-print at the top.
Tom’s eyes widened, and he returned my smile. “Ah, Miss Luck,” he said. “Clever girl.”
“Mr. Rampling. Just the man I hoped to see tonight!” Mr. Thornfax’s voice came from directly behind us. And behind him, their rumbling voices echoing in the dark warehouse, were Watts and Curtis.
Tom planted himself in front of me. I shut the drawer with my hip and crammed the sheet of paper into my coat pocket next to the music box. Then I turned to face my fiancé.
Mr. Thornfax’s face registered only the briefest flicker of surprise as he recognized me. He smiled, showing his white teeth. “Miss Somerville. What an amazing coincidence! I spent the last hour making excuses for your abrupt disappearance from our engagement party. And not ten minutes ago I had the most heated discussion with your brother-in-law. The good Dr. Dewhurst was under the impression that I’d spirited you off for some malevolent purpose and kept demanding to know where I was keeping you.”
He sounded so cordial and genteel that, when he held out his hand to me, my fright and shock moved me automatically to take it. Tom squared his stance to block me from stepping forward.
“Of course,” Mr. Thornfax went on, as though Tom weren’t present, “I assured him with blameless conscience that I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.”
With a single stride he closed the distance between us. Before I saw Mr. Thornfax lift his fist he’d already hit Tom—a hard punch to the jaw that sent Tom’s body thudding sideways into the panelled wall.
Mad Miss Mimic Page 16
