After a moment he gave a grunt and reached as far as his arm would stretch, hooking the handle of the umbrella around something. He crabbed backward, collecting a fair amount of dust and cobweb, pulling a small portmanteau with him.
I dove after it, although I cannot imagine why. Did I think I would find scissors and a glue pot secreted inside? Actually, I rather liked the idea of Renard as villain. I had always found him distasteful, and the notion of dismissing him without either pay or character was wildly appealing.
The portmanteau was locked, but it was a moment’s work to find the key, hanging on a hook behind the mirror over his washstand. Aquinas stepped back and allowed me to fit the key myself. It turned easily and I threw back the lid, feeling a surge of profound disappointment. There were only books, old ones by the look of them, with moldy, crumbling covers and the choking smell of dust and mildew.
Aquinas lifted one out and opened it. We stared at the illustration for a long moment.
“Well, I suppose that explains where Henry managed to find such filth,” I said finally.
Aquinas nodded thoughtfully. “Renard must strip the pages and sell them to him, perhaps to others as well.”
I picked up another book, noting the French title and the owner’s coat of arms embossed on the leather cover.
“Are they valuable, do you think?”
Aquinas made a little moue. “Perhaps. There are collectors—a comte I once served in Paris, for example. They would pay rather a lot for a volume such as this from an illustrious library. But to cut the pictures and sell them alone, either he is eager for the money—too eager to find a dealer, or he does not recognize the value.”
“I do not think Renard is the sort who would overlook the possible value of anything,” I said slowly. “Where do you think he got them?”
“France,” he said firmly. “He probably worked for this gentleman, or his family, and took them when he left. One would think he took them because they were easy to steal, easy to sell off—a few pictures whenever he wanted a little money.”
“But why pretend to us that he was French?”
Aquinas smiled at me, a little sadly. “Because there is a prejudice about French servants, a notion that they are superior to Italians, even better than English ones. Better pay to pretend you are French.”
“But that is ludicrous. If he were a good valet, it would not have mattered to Edward if he were a Chinaman.”
“To Sir Edward, no. But there are others to whom it matters very much.”
“Nonsense. All that matters is that one does a good job and can speak the language well enough to be understood. I should not care if my staff were Albanians.”
“You are different, my lady.” I must have looked doubtful, because he went on. “Do you remember the dinner here, a few weeks before Sir Edward’s death? You hosted Lady Thorncroft? Yes, well, as I was bringing in the roast, I clearly heard her ask if you counted the silver after I had polished it to make certain it was all still there.”
I looked away, squirming a little. “I had hoped you did not hear that.”
“But I did, and I heard your ladyship’s reply. I do not think you will be invited again to Thorncroft Hall, by the way.”
I looked up at him, and his eyes were twinkling in his sad face. “Well, what else could I say to her? She was insulting and rude.”
“She only said what many other guests at Grey House have thought. How can you trust your valuables to an Italian?”
I closed the book and put it back into the portmanteau.
“I do not know why everyone persists in thinking of you as Italian, you are half English. You don’t even have an accent. Most of the time,” I amended, thinking of the rare fits of anger that rendered him incapable of communicating except in passionate Italian.
“Come, I want to get out of this room and wash my hands,” I said. He shoved the portmanteau into its hiding place and replaced the umbrella.
At the door, I paused. “Aquinas, has Mr. Brisbane ever said anything to you? Ever made any sort of remark about the fact that you are not English?”
Aquinas smiled. “Yes, my lady. The first time he called at Grey House, when I showed him to the door. He told me how much he admired Italian acrobats and asked me if I had ever seen the Giobertis perform in Milan.”
I stared at him, openmouthed in astonishment. His smile widened.
“I know, my lady. That was precisely the reaction I had to him. A very remarkable gentleman, Mr. Brisbane.”
“Remarkable indeed, Aquinas.”
By three o’clock, we were tired and dusty and had turned up almost nothing. No diaries with heartfelt, murderous confessions, no glue pots except where they belonged. And I had found no poison in my surreptitious searches when Aquinas’ back was turned. We had tiptoed past Simon’s room, although I had given the room a cursory glance the night before. It was not entirely impossible that the culprit had hidden something away in Simon’s room, Brisbane had warned me. It was almost as neat a solution as hiding something in mine, and he had instructed me to take note of anything that might seem out of the ordinary. I had peered into corners under the guise of looking for an earring I had dropped, but I found nothing and Simon had begun to look at me peculiarly. It was on the tip of my tongue to take him into my confidence, as well, but in the end I decided against it. Brisbane would be annoyed enough that I had told Aquinas as much as I had; explaining that Simon also knew would leave him apoplectic.
Aquinas brought Simon’s luncheon tray while I prodded the skirting boards outside his room. They proved sound, and Aquinas joined me shortly to finish our search. To my relief, my own rooms turned up nothing. It was irrational, really, I knew that there was nothing there. But it made me feel immeasurably better, and I decided that I would tell Brisbane I had enlisted Aquinas to act as an impartial observer during my search of my own things. He would not believe it for a minute, but I thought it sounded very professional.
The public rooms on the main floor took very little time. They had been furnished by Edward in his favorite Empire style—all cleanly designed and uncluttered. No hiding places among all those bare legs and stripped floors. That left only the belowstairs—kitchens, offices and the private rooms I had not yet searched. The kitchens were pristine, with perfectly ordered utensils and graduated copper pots ranged on hooks. There was not a fork out of place, and I was not surprised. Cook was more ferocious than any battlefield general; no one would have dared leave her kitchen until every last saucer was stowed in its place.
The laundry was marginally less tidy. It was under Cook’s nominal authority, but it was Magda’s actual responsibility. She had left a cake of soap melting in a puddle of water and a brass can of water standing nearly in the doorway, so awkwardly placed that I nearly fell over it. I muttered, shoving it aside with my foot. The rest of the room yielded nothing, no cupboards or trunks where something suspicious might be lurking. There was only the bucket under the window where I had left Val’s shirt several nights before. I moved toward it, surprised to find the water again reddened, as if someone had stuffed something bloody into it.
And they had, I realized, peering into the bucket. I asked Aquinas for a stick and he found me a bit of long, thin pipe that Magda used to stir the boiler. I levered it under the water and heaved. A lump of sodden linen tumbled to the floor with a splash.
Aquinas was on top of it before I could stop him. He was not so fastidious as I. He unfolded the dripping garment with his hands. It was a man’s shirt, as I had known it would be, stained streakily across the cuffs with blood. There was a handkerchief this time as well—a woman’s, from the look of the pansies embroidered garishly in the corner.
I stared at the bloody, soaking mess, wondering how I could have been stupid enough to believe Val’s story about a fight at the opera. He was a medical student, not permitted to practice. It was apparent that he had found somewhere to continue his studies, somewhere he could not speak of, somewhere that would provid
e him access to people who were profoundly in need of his attentions, I thought as I fingered the handkerchief. It was slashed in places, the edges of the cheap cotton curling back on themselves like the petals of a gruesome flower.
I shoved the handkerchief back into the shirt and rolled the bundle back into the gory bucket.
“This has nothing to do with what we are about. I will deal with it myself,” I told Aquinas firmly.
He said nothing but simply threw fresh water onto the pinkened puddle and took up a mop, swabbing at it until it was gone.
But it lingered in our minds, and I knew we were both thinking of it as we made our way to Cook’s room. There the mood lightened. We both smiled at her harmless indulgence in cherry brandy and fashion magazines. But even as we neatly tucked her bottles back under the bed, I found myself wondering about Magda. As the laundress, she could hardly have overlooked Val’s bloody shirts. I had rinsed the first bloody one clean for him, but I had little doubt now that there had been others. He had not bothered to rinse this one, and yet he had to know she would see it. Did he pay for her silence? This possibility worried me. Val never had much money. Father’s allowance was generous, but Val was, too, always giving money to causes he deemed worthy and friends who were not. I found myself rushing to search Magda’s room. I felt certain that I would find something there that tied her to my brother, and I was very much afraid of what that might be.
But even I never expected that it would be arsenic.
THE TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER
My duty pricks me on to utter that
Which else no worldly good should draw from me.
—William Shakespeare
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Of course I was not certain that it was arsenic when I found it. I was not even certain that it was anything of importance. But I suspected.
And when I looked at the little box of grey powder, I felt sick. I had wanted so badly to give Magda a chance. Aunt Hermia had warned against it. She had never been as warm in her acceptance of Gypsies as Father had, and she was eloquent on the folly of bringing one into the house.
“You won’t have a stick of furniture left by the time she’s done with you,” she had warned me. “She’ll sell it all from under you. And you’ll not get a proper day’s work from her, either.” Privately, I rather agreed with Aunt Hermia. I knew Magda too well to expect she would settle easily to life inside four walls. I had a somewhat higher opinion of her honesty, and indeed in the time with us nothing more significant than a teaspoon had gone missing. But Magda had not fit in happily with the staff, preferring to keep to herself, occasionally engaging in violent, shrieking quarrels with one of the maids, which usually ended with the maid stalking off with a stellar reference and a handsome pay packet from me, and another trip to the domestic agency for Aquinas.
But I could not turn her out, any more than I could explain to Aunt Hermia why I had taken her in. Why Magda had turned to me in her time of trouble, rather than Father, or someone else with the authority to help her, I could not imagine. She had, though, and I could no more abandon her than I could neglect any other responsibility. Father may have been a bit slapdash in the raising of his children, but he managed to instill in us the essentials, and duty was one of them. We were charged with taking care of those to whom our money and our blood made us superior, and it was an obligation we neglected at our peril. When Magda had come to me, cast out and penniless, I had not wanted to give her a place at Grey House, but I had no choice in the matter. She was in need and had asked for my help.
I had given her cold refuge, I thought as I looked around the little room. It was bare as an anchorite’s cell, and I felt a stab of anger, not at Magda, but at myself. She was like Morag, a creature without a home, but I had given her little more than four walls to call her own. The room was uncarpeted, furnished only with a narrow bed and a single hard chair. Her meager possessions were divided between a carpetbag and a discarded, crumbling old hat box. There was not even a proper curtain at the window. I looked at those four dull grey walls and the cold stone floor and the cheerless window, and I realized then what a prison it must have seemed to her, a Gypsy woman with rolling moors and tumbling rivers in her blood. She had roamed freely with her people before coming to me, winding from one corner of the kingdom to another. From Kentish summers making hay to the foggy winter London campgrounds, she had spent her entire life out in the fresh air, sleeping in a low tent, and later a painted caravan. Now she was confined to pavements and coal dust, as unnatural a being as the raven locked in Val’s room.
I pocketed the box and turned to Aquinas.
“There is nothing else here. I do not think we need search Diggory’s quarters. He has no access to the house.”
Aquinas nodded solemnly. “I think there is more at hand here than anonymous notes, my lady,” he ventured, without a hint of reproach.
“Yes,” I said. I hesitated, then squared my shoulders. I had trusted Aquinas this far. It seemed pointless and insulting not to tell him the rest. “Mr. Brisbane suspects, as do I, that Sir Edward may have died by poison.”
“I thought as much,” he said blandly.
I blinked like a hare. “I beg your pardon?”
“In Italy such things are more common, even in France it is so. It is not unheard of for an unhappy wife or husband to remove the cause of their sorrow. Or for a young nephew to help a rich and elderly uncle along to his grave for the sake of his inheritance. And it is not impossible that a man with poor health would take his own life rather than linger on in pain.”
I stared at him, remembering suddenly what Simon had told me about his own intentions. Why had it never occurred to me that Edward might have done the same?
But I patted the tiny box of mortality in my pocket and I knew better. Edward had been genuinely terrified of the anonymous notes, according to Brisbane. A man bent on self-destruction would not have been so troubled by them. Besides, if Edward had engineered his own death, he would not have left the means secreted away in some innocent person’s room to cast suspicion where it did not belong.
“I shall have to deliver this to Mr. Brisbane. I think sooner rather than later.”
Aquinas withdrew, leaving me alone in Magda’s room. I sat for a long moment, trying to put things together in my mind, but nothing seemed to fit. Every thought I had seemed to end with a question mark. What was Val about and how much did Magda know of it? Did she have cause to harm Edward? And would she? Had she?
I shook myself finally and prepared to call upon Brisbane. I had questions, to be sure. And perhaps he had answers.
I should have thought that I would have felt rather smug handing over my little box. Instead I felt only miserable. I was implicating a woman I had known since childhood, a woman I trusted, after a fashion. I was putting her fate into the hands of a man I knew very little about. I still did not know the cause of his terrible headaches, but knowing the cures he had sampled did not reassure me. Everyone I knew had taken opium in some form, but I had never met anyone who had dosed themselves with absinthe. It had left me wildly curious and a little wary. Of course, this was largely due to the fact that I had recently sat up late, reading the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by guttering lamplight. I did not seriously believe that Brisbane had somehow caused his own suffering through scientific experiments gone horribly wrong, but it was enough to make me look at him closely as he surveyed the contents of the little box.
Suddenly, he surged up out of his seat. He went to the long table under the shuttered windows where his scientific equipment was arrayed. I followed, watching as he spooned a small sample of the powder into a little crucible. He lit it and a strong, garlicky aroma filled the air.
He turned to me, his eyes lambent with a sort of savage satisfaction.
“I shall send it along to Mordecai to be fully analyzed, but this test indicates arsenic.”
I felt my heart sink a little at the words. There were plenty of good reasons for posse
ssing arsenic, but Magda had none of them. I knew she did not use it for cosmetic purposes, nor did she kill rats. Brisbane, of course, was sensing my thoughts.
“There is only one reason to have arsenic in this quantity and in this concentration,” he said flatly. “She has poisoned someone, or at least intended to.”
“You do not know that,” I argued feebly. “Doctor Bent has not even finished his report on what may have induced the symptoms Edward suffered.”
The black eyes narrowed unflinchingly. “Then can you explain why a Gypsy laundress in your employ keeps enough arsenic to fell a battalion tucked in her spare petticoat?”
“You do not know that is arsenic!” I returned, angry. I do not know why I was enraged, only that I was. He was so eager to believe the worst of her. Perhaps I was angry with myself because I could think of no proper defense for her. Or perhaps I was angry with him for demanding one.
Brisbane folded his arms over his chest, his shirtsleeves brilliant white against the dark wool of his waistcoat. I had called without sending ahead—rather foolhardy in light of how I found him the last time I did such a thing—and found him reading quietly by the fire. He had seemed pleased enough to see me, and delighted when I told him what I had brought. But I had felt every inch a traitor.
“My lady, I know what that is, even if you do not. I will send it to Mordecai simply to confirm my own analysis. Now, sit down and tell me everything you know about Magda.”
Miserable and defeated, I did as I was bid. He rang for tea and I took a cup and a biscuit from Monk simply for something to do with my hands. Monk was careful not to make eye contact with me, and I wondered if he regretted the intimacies he had shared during my last call. He left quickly, and Brisbane did not wait for me to finish my tea before launching into his interrogation.
“How long have you known Magda?” The notebook was on the table at his side, but he did not open it.
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