by Anna Castle
They scuffled downstairs to the kitchen, lighting their way with a candlestick. Moriarty had never ventured into this region of the house before. They rummaged in cupboards and found a chunk of almond cake, slices of cold ham, a jar of quince preserves, and a wedge of cheese. Angelina, tottering on a tall stool, discovered a bottle of Rhenish wine on a high shelf. She squealed with delight and toppled into Moriarty’s arms with her prize. The door to the scullery opened a crack, then closed again with a soft thump.
The housemaid? Ah, well. No help for it now.
* * *
“You’ll marry me, of course.”
“I’ll what?”
Moriarty raised himself on one elbow. He studied her sleep-rumpled face in the early morning light as if seeing her for the first time. Everything about her was new. “That’s not quite the answer I was hoping for, my dearest.”
“Why should I marry you? I’m very happy as an independent woman, you know.”
“I beg to differ. You’ve been forced to turn to a life of crime and barely escaped being thrown into prison, only to be kidnapped by a pair of ruthless scoundrels. You escaped by the skin of your teeth only to —”
“Find myself in bed with a man who refuses to answer a simple question.”
Moriarty kissed the little curl on her temple. He worshipped that curl. “You should marry me because without you my life can never again have meaning. You are more beautiful than the arrangement of binomial coefficients in Pascal’s triangle. You mean more to me than Euclid’s postulates of plane geometry.”
She frowned. He loved it when she frowned. She licked her rosy lips and said, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It’s the highest praise I have to offer.” He kissed those lips lightly, reverentially. “If my future happiness has no meaning for you, you heartless wench, there is another reason. If you marry me, I can shield you from Reginald Benton. The full force of the law will be on our side. I’m not rich, but neither am I destitute. I could earn more if I tried. I would for you; I would do anything for you. I love you. That is now the fundamental axiom of my life.”
She met his sober gaze with equal gravity. “I believe you, dearest. And please believe me when I tell you that I love you too. Far more than those postulates, whatever they are. But I’m an actress, James. An unemployed one. You’re a vicar’s son and a university professor. I’m beneath you.”
He grinned at her. “Not every time. Although I do like it that way.”
She laughed her lilting, musical laugh. The sound made him feel like capering around the room naked with a jangling tambourine. He quickly resolved never to utter that thought aloud because she would certainly make him to do it.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “You’re the son of a vicar, an educated man. I’m the daughter of — well, not quite the opposite of a vicar, but close. What will your family think?”
“My family is of no relevance.”
“What about your friends?”
“If I had any, they would love you as much as I do.”
“It takes weeks to get a license. We may well have to leave England before then.”
“Not if the vicar is flexible. We’ll ask Mrs. Peacock. There must be a church around here somewhere.”
* * *
Leaving Angelina tucked snugly in his bed, Moriarty sat at his breakfast table, wearing his dressing gown over his shirt and trousers, as usual, hoping to present a semblance of normalcy. Given the evidence of the kitchen raid, he fully expected to receive notice to remove himself to other lodgings.
Mrs. Peacock delivered his breakfast tray at the usual time, lingering in her usual way with her hand on her hip, exchanging the usual pleasantries before handing him his newspaper. Nothing was said about missing slices of ham or bottle of wine. It wasn’t until the door had closed behind her that he noticed two cups and saucers on his tray beside two covered dishes of bacon and eggs.
* * *
“I need clothes.” Angelina slathered marmalade thickly on her toast. She was absolutely ravenous. “I can’t go out in my burglar garb in broad daylight.”
“Good,” Moriarty said. “You’re safer inside.”
And weren’t we feeling pleased with ourselves this morning! Though she had to admit her professor had earned a certain amount of smugness.
“First,” he said, “we must pay a call on the nearest vicar. I believe I have enough ready money to make the requisite payments.”
She chewed and swallowed her toast, then took the last piece in the rack. She answered while layering on the marmalade. “In the first place, James, while I love you with all my heart and soul, I have not yet agreed to marry you. I care for you too much to allow you to rush into a foolish liaison, even with me. And we do have more pressing concerns. Reginald and his loathsome father will be looking for me by now. If they think to consult that odious Mr. Holmes, they could be knocking on our door any minute. Need I remind you that the authorities still suspect me of murder? You’re not completely clear and free either. We must leave London. We must think of somewhere to go, book passage, and pack our bags.”
James transferred the last slice of bacon to her plate. “I’m afraid I can’t go anywhere, darling. I have a job. I’ll send a message saying I’m ill today, but that won’t serve for long. We’ll need my income, you know. You won’t be collecting any more stolen plate to pay your dressmaker. Furthermore, I refuse to be driven from my home by a pack of scoundrels, peers or no. And I am not afraid of Sherlock Holmes.”
He divided the rest of the tea evenly into their two cups. “What we need, my dearest, is leverage. Something to stop these villains once and for all. They’re little more than a gang of thieves; there must be evidence of actionable crimes in those books.” He gestured toward the account books stacked beside the sofa.
“Oh my stars! The books!” Angelina leapt to her feet and dashed into the bedroom. She returned in a trice, waving a ribbon-tied packet of papers and a green account book. “I forgot all about these.” She bent and kissed Moriarty full on the lips. “And you should take that as a compliment.”
He smiled complacently, then took the papers. “What are these?”
“Lady Rochford saw Mark Ramsay hide these behind a painting in Canbury Park.”
“Ramsay?” Moriarty set the letters on the table and opened the book. His eyes shifted rapidly as he scanned the first few pages.
She loved watching him like this, his mind racing, absorbing information at telegraph speed. He was a brilliant man, a distinguished scholar. Also a law-abiding Englishman who supplied his simple tastes by performing useful work. He knew where he belonged in the world.
She was an actress, both on and off the stage. She’d come from nothing and traveled everywhere. She never looked more than a few weeks ahead and her tastes were anything but simple. How long could she play the wife of a patent examiner? A month, perhaps? Would they even survive the honeymoon?
It would be glorious while it lasted. Maybe that was enough.
James turned a page and murmured, “Oh my stars!” She suppressed a giggle. After a minute, he grinned at her, shaking the letter in his hand. “Angelina, my dearest love, I do believe we’ve got it.” He rose, kissed her on the cheek, and walked to the hearth to ring the bell for his landlady.
* * *
“It’s what we think it is, isn’t it, Mrs. Peacock?” Angelina had dressed in her boy’s garb since it was all she had. The landlady graciously failed to notice. She’d taken one look at Ramsay’s account book and rung for more tea.
“Two pots, Mary. And keep the kettle on the hob.” Mary cleared away the breakfast dishes so they could spread the papers out on the table in the bow window.
“It is indeed, Mrs. Gould. I knew there was something odd about Lord Nettlefield’s accounts. The entries were made in large blocks, covering many days at a time. Look.” She showed them a page. “The ink is the same color — exactly the same shade, I mean. Usually there’s a bit of differenc
e from day to day. And the lines slope at the same angle, as if they’d all been written at the same time.”
“Yes, I see it,” Angelina said. “The words are more tightly spaced as well, as if they were being copied from another source.”
“And now we have the source. And doesn’t it tell a different story!” Mrs. Peacock regarded the green account book with a professional eye. “He’s very good, this Mr. Ramsay. The difference in amounts is always plausible, not too great, and not too regular. It appears he’s been making deposits at a bank in Jersey.”
“Preparing an escape route,” Angelina said. “Once he had enough, he could simply disappear.”
“The little crook steals from the big crook,” Mrs. Peacock said. “A risky business, I should think, cheating men such as these. He’s been playing a dangerous game.”
“He knew what he was about. He prepared an insurance policy for himself.” Moriarty had been leaning back in his chair, studying the contents of the ribbon-tied packet. Now he laid out several sheets of paper in a row. He pointed at each one as he described it. “This is the prospectus for the Naples Improvement Company, formed in 1882 by our friend Oscar Teaberry. The plan was to clear some ugly slums and build a bright new shopping center. Look at the names on the front sheet: Nettlefield, Carling, Hainstone, Oxwich. Teaberry’s favorite collaborators.”
Mrs. Peacock sniffed. “Why change a winning team?”
“Someone wanted to change it,” Angelina said. “Two of those men are dead.”
They traded dark looks across the table.
“These swindles must lie behind the murders,” Moriarty said. He tapped another sheet of paper. “We’ll find our murderer here, among the victims — the investors. The front-sheeters did their job. Look at all these names.” He flipped through three sheets pinned together at the top. “All victims of a perfectly legal form of robbery.” He tapped a set of newspaper clippings. “Here are articles from The Economist, The Edinburgh Review, and other journals. They hailed the Naples company as a model of international cooperation. Then it collapsed after clearing only a few blocks. They threw people out of their homes without erecting a single new structure.”
Mrs. Peacock took one of the articles and read the first line of one aloud. “Director Oscar Teaberry blamed the wayward policies of the Italian government for the obstruction of the project.”
“Convenient, wasn’t it?” Moriarty scoffed. “Ramsay told us that was Teaberry’s favorite method: start a company, puff it up until he’s filled his coffers, then find an excuse to collapse the thing without refunding a penny. All the money with none of the work.”
“How is that not a crime?” Angelina demanded. “It’s like selling tickets to a play you never mean to perform. But when my shows were canceled, we had to refund the whole box. People stood outside the ticket office and clamored for it!”
“What if the theater were in Italy and the box office only a postal box?” Mrs. Peacock said. “Their clamors would go unheard.”
Moriarty scanned another articles. He read faster than anyone Angelina had ever seen. “Here. Teaberry claimed that no refunds could be made because all initial investments were spent on the project. Fees for permits, payments to the subcontractors who demolished the slums, that sort of thing.”
He read further, his lip curled in disgust. “The company was investigated when it collapsed because so many shareholders were ruined. They lost their life savings on something they thought had the imprimatur of the government, implied by the presence of well-known peers on the front sheet and by carefully worded statements to the press. The investigating committee found no evidence of indictable criminal acts, however, so no charges were ever brought. Now we have that evidence.”
He waved a sheaf of pages of different sizes. “These are letters, correspondence among Nettlefield, Teaberry, and a Signor Ferrara, a Neapolitan government official. One of them explicitly states that forty-five thousand pounds were delivered to Ferrara as payment for smoothing the company’s path through the Italian government.”
“Is that illegal?” Angelina sat forward, looking from one to the other of her experts. “Enough to threaten Teaberry?”
“Oh yes, my dear,” Mrs. Peacock said. “He’ll be facing months in jail as well as a substantial fine.” She gazed out the windows, then snapped her fingers. “Naples Improvement Company. I’m sure I’ve seen that name in one of the other —” She hopped up from the table and dashed out the door without finishing her sentence.
“She’s a marvel, isn’t she?” Moriarty took Angelina’s hand and kissed it. “I couldn’t have gotten through these books without her. We can send it all to Sir Julian Kidwelly now. He’ll know how to use it to maximum effect.”
Angelina withdrew her hand, shaking her head vehemently. “We can’t expose their swindle, James. That would defeat our whole purpose.”
“I thought that was our purpose. To put these scoundrels in jail.”
“To threaten them with jail, threaten only. Have you forgotten why we stole all this trash in the first place? We’re fighting for my brother’s life. We have to trade these letters for Sebastian’s, or he can never be free.”
“But then these monsters will escape prosecution!”
“Well, yes, darling. That can’t be helped. It was the original plan. Once the authorities get them, they’re worthless.”
Mrs. Peacock returned with several books in her arms. “Teaberry should have kept a closer eye on his board. Some of these also have entries for the Naples Improvement Company. Their profits were the other shareholders’ losses. Pounds, shillings, and pence. We’ve got them, Professor.” Her eyes shone with victory. “Shall I send for Scotland Yard?”
Moriarty looked at Angelina. She met his gaze with a stony glare. He sighed and nodded and turned an apologetic face to his landlady. “I’m afraid there’s a little hitch.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Moriarty still held out hope for evidence he could use against Lord Nettlefield and his vicious offspring. They had threatened and frightened his lady love, and that could not go unpunished. So he continued to study the account books, sitting at the table in the bow window and drinking tea while Angelina sent reassurances to Lady Lucy and Peg. The latter sent a decent suit of clothes in return.
Dressing to go out was a lengthier process than he’d anticipated and required his assistance at critical junctures. He didn’t mind, but he could see that expert help would be required for a more ambitious costume. If this Peg were to be part of their household, they would definitely need bigger lodgings. A tiny drumbeat of worry began somewhere under all the joy. How could a patent officer support a woman who needed her own ladies’ maid?
A question for another day. At last, Angelina emerged fully attired in a trim lavender walking suit, ready for this day’s battle. Moriarty rang for the maid to summon a cab to carry them to the city to claim their victory.
In the anteroom of Teaberry’s private office, they found a secretary bustling about with beads of sweat on his forehead, opening drawers and shuffling papers, muttering under his breath. He scowled at the sight of them and moved to block their path to the office door.
Angelina waved him away as she strode past, the heels of her short boots resounding on the polished floor. “He’ll want to see us.”
They found Oscar Teaberry behind his desk, loading sheaves of paper into a large valise. “I regret to say I haven’t time for a meeting today, Professor, Mrs. Gould. You’ve caught me on my way out of town. I’ve decided to take my wife to the Alps for the remainder of the summer. The city’s getting too hot for my comfort.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Moriarty grinned at Angelina. “We’re about to make it hotter.”
The secretary burst in. “I can’t find them anywhere, Mr. Teaberry. I’ve looked in every drawer and pigeonhole, but I know exactly where I put them and they’re gone.”
“Could these be what you’re looking for?” Angelina waved the packet of ribbon
-tied letters. She pretended to read the inscription for the first time. “They’re addressed to a Signor Ferrara of Napoli. Ring any bells?”
The secretary stepped toward her with his arm extended to snatch the letters. Moriarty barred his way. “Your services are not required here.”
Teaberry, eyes locked on Angelina, tilted his head toward the door to dismiss him. “Put the files back and lock them up tight. Then you can go. Take a week at the seaside. Hang it all! Take a month.”
The secretary’s eyes narrowed, but he obeyed.
“Give me those letters.” Teaberry held out his hand, palm up.
“Ha!” Angelina tossed her head. “Not until I get what I want.”
“A lady would never make such a demand.”
“Good fing I’m not a lady then, innit?” She sounded as Cockney as a costermonger’s wife.
She stood a few feet from Teaberry’s desk, back erect, chin up, one hand on her hip, the other holding the ribbon-tied packet. Her amber eyes danced with zest for the challenge. Moriarty admired her right down to her kidskin-covered fingertips.
Teaberry sucked the fringe of his moustache. He looked at Moriarty, who smiled blandly, signaling that he was only playing a supporting role. Teaberry twitched his lips and turned back to Angelina. She waited, now slapping the letters lightly against the palm of her left hand. “How much do you want?” he asked.
“Not as much as you paid Signor Ferrara. We’ll take half that amount: an even twenty thousand pounds.”
Moriarty nearly flinched in surprise. They hadn’t discussed this. They’d come for her brother’s letters, not money. If she overplayed it, they’d lose the whole gamble.
“Cash, naturally,” Angelina added. “Now, if you please. I’m sure you have it ready for your holiday. And I want my brother’s letters as well.”
