That was it, then. If the explosive release only just trapped behind my nose hadn’t earned me a demand to come out, I had to be alone.
I made my way down the narrow closet, wincing with each scrape of shelf from backside to nape, and finally reached the floor with a grateful sigh. Gingerly, I pushed open the door, blinking to find the lamp once more where I’d left it.
Another sneeze seized me, and this time I muffled it in my hands. I wiped at my watering eyes, grimacing. That had been a close thing.
I turned, reached for where I’d left The New Law of Fluids and found only tilted books beside a pushed aside bookend.
I bit back a rude word.
My thieved tome was gone.
But it couldn’t have gotten far. I darted out of the office, scanned the empty lecture hall, the still-closed window. Hurriedly, I sprinted out of the naturo-philosophy wing, eyes sharp for any sign of motion; ears straining to hear even the faintest step that wasn’t my own.
Nothing.
I spilled from the University College entry, dragging the back of one arm over my nose—not nearly so itchy now that I’d left the room—and glowered at the fog painted in sickly yellow from the lit cupola.
As I pounded one fist into my open hand, my skin prickled. Warning, sharp and clear as a bell. Alarmed, I turned; only I saw nothing, heard nothing from the silent edifice of the college’s Corinthian columns.
Yet as I kicked at the fog and muttered a handful of terse uncivilities, I could not shake the sensation of being watched. Measured.
And possibly, I thought angrily as I stalked away from the grounds with only a handful of notes to show for it, found entirely lacking.
My options were dwindling, and I had only my fool idiocy to blame for it. As my high energy and simmering irritation fueled my stride into the Philosopher’s Square, I considered what choices I had left.
Things I knew: Whoever was in that office wanted that book. And, potentially, the notes I’d stolen beforehand. Why?
An alchemist? What for? What did this book tell the reader, aside from what I assumed to be a collection of inane and illogical recipes for gold making and immortality shaping?
Whatever that book held, it was worth the lives of at least two professors.
Or was I reaching for a solution too pat?
Was MacGillycuddy involved in this charade or was he simply a victim of circumstance?
Was Professor Johannes Lambkin a suicide at all?
Dear me, this particular train had gone off the rails rather spectacularly. I strode through the Square, turning up the collar of my sack coat against the damp. The cold bit deeply, though the air was not as frozen as could be expected above the drift that protected it somewhat.
I could be grateful for small favors.
I was nearing the center of the Square—a place dominated by a courtyard long since left to molder—when the idea struck me from nowhere at all.
Where would I find a copy? I’d asked.
The dean’s assistant had shrugged. A bookshop? A scholar?
I stopped mid-step, turned abruptly and picked my way to the west.
I knew a man. A bookseller. I’d once run a bounty for him—timeworn books, stolen by a filching cove with more debt than sense. The old shopkeeper had been pleasant enough when I’d returned his belongings.
This had been, oh, what? A year ago? No, longer. Summertime. I remembered the putrid smell of the River Thames reaching all the way across the city.
If he hadn’t closed shop, then I’d find him just on the edge of the Square. It was late, but this was a crisis.
And I was impatient.
I found the neat row of shops, side by side with nary a crack between them. The road in front of each had once been a sweetly maintained lane with gas lamps lining the way for students and professors and scholars and more. I imagined it had been a bustling place, filled with shopkeepers taking delight in their wares; of purchases made by the ounce and the pound, by the flagon and the stack. Books, quills, charts, odds and ends.
Now, in the dark and the damp, it looked a dreary place to be. The night tore any warmth from the row of derelict edifices, leaving them rather reminiscent of skeletal teeth in a lurid grimace.
Not the kind of place I’d expect to find a bookshop, but perhaps that was part of its charm.
The door I required was the third from the left, marked by a single lantern hanging from an iron post. The brave little flame within it struggled mightily from its iron confines—a beacon to my yellow-tinged sight, but sadly weaker than the fog it guttered in.
Only the faded stains of rusted numbers remained over the lintel. Yet it wasn’t the bright windows in the first floor that told me my quarry was in reach, but the light flickering from behind drawn shades in the story above.
Mr. Augustine Pettigrew never went to his bed with a lantern still on. The risk this posed to his precious books far outweighed the comfort of a light in the dark, and as I recalled, he’d only ever had the one fireproof brazier.
I glanced over my shoulder as I approached the shop’s front door. No sign hung where chains used to offer one; the row of storefronts had fallen on difficult times, obviously. The street in either direction was silent, only visible for a few feet when the fog shifted.
Yet I still squinted at shapes in the mist. The fine hairs on my neck and arms had not settled during my chilled jaunt across the square, and I could not help but think it was not all the wet October air.
Of course, paranoia would only serve me well as long as I did not let it overcome my sensibilities.
Shaking off the ghosts in the smoke, I hammered on Mr. Pettigrew’s door. The sound echoed like a drumbeat, tossed this way and that before vanishing into the hungry dark. I waited.
Too much noise, and I’d earn the attention of others in the row. Not my intent.
It was a full minute before I heard a shuffled step inside, counted in my own heartbeat as I half turned and kept a wary eye on the roiling coal-laden cloud behind me. Iron caught, clanged faintly as a latch was lifted, and the door opened a scant few inches. Light spilled from the crack, incandescent and near blinding after my nighttime foray. “It’s a late night for guests,” whispered a frail voice.
I turned back, my smile hidden behind my respirator. “Mr. Pettigrew? Collector’s business, sir.”
The light shifted, lowered, and I could just make out the bulbous edge of a nose near pressed to the gaping door. One eye, once green and now turned milky with age, searched me. A grunt, a sigh. “Best you come in from the damp, then,” he said, turning away from the door and leaving it to swing slowly wide in his wake.
I stepped in, and it was as if I’d found a miracle in the cold depths of London below.
Mr. Pettigrew’s establishment, once called something unrecalled but now only referred to as, “old Gus’s shop,” among those enlightened enough to know of it at all, was a haven of sorts. Shelves lined the full of the downstairs, books filling each near to overflowing and some stacked upon others where there was room. New bindings, old bindings, some no more than sheaves of paper wrapped in cloth. Comfortable armchairs, worn near to the stuffing, beckoned a weary soul to take ease by the brazier.
The warmth did not only keep out the drafts, it kept the room inside toasty and dry for the books. The last I’d come by, it’d been warm enough and cozy for a cup with the old man.
Mr. Pettigrew did not age as well as the books he loved. Nearly stooped double, he was frail of build, with long, thin arms and a rail-slight chest that occasionally gave over to a wheezing cough. He wore a faded purple dressing gown—which didn’t scandalize me at all, despite Society’s claims to the contrary—and a nightcap perched atop his mottled, sparsely furred head.
He shuffled to one of the chairs slowly, his gait hampered by his years. “Close the door, then,” he called, his voice a thin memory of the robust man he must have been once.
I obeyed, locking out the creeping damp, and stripped the protective
s from my face. “I apologize for the lateness of my visit,” I said politely, because Mr. Pettigrew was a kind man.
A shrewd one, even in his advanced age, but nevertheless kind.
A gnarled, heavily veined hand waved at me, then plucked the folded nightcap from his head. “Come, girl, sit. Tell me what you’re searching this time. Not for me, I hope?”
“No, Mr. Pettigrew, I am not here for you,” I reassured him. I approached the armchair across from him, its upholstery a rich, lovely shade of red reminiscent of Fanny’s ball gown. The wood was scarred and scuffed, its arms bearing witness to many a comfortable visit.
Beside it, shedding heat as I sank to the chair in grateful reprieve, the brazier shone spotless and brassy. Small by design, yet fitted with bolted copper and brass pipes, the stovelike mechanism took coal through its grinning grate and pumped the excess smoke up through the pipe in the ceiling and out. The grate was bolted in place, not a single ember could fall from within, and the heavy piece proof against accidental falling or knocking over.
It was a fine bit of engineering, certainly.
I held my hands to the warmth, but my gaze remained fixed on my host. “Are you well?”
His eyes vanished behind a web of crinkled lines as he grinned a yellow-toothed grin. Amusement, snapping as brilliantly as the fire within the brazier. “I am old, girl. That I still live is a matter of courtesy from the Almighty.”
“Come now, you aren’t so old as to be digging your own grave just yet,” I countered lightly, unable to keep my smile from tugging at my lips.
His long, spindly hands folded over his patched dressing gown. “We are both so much older than we used to be,” he said, cryptic and discerning all at once.
And not wrong. I inclined my head. “I am delighted to find you well.”
“And awake, no doubt.”
“I apologize—”
One finger rose from his entwined hands. “You speak like a toff and behave like a collector. Pick one, girl, or you’ll forget which is what.” It was on the tip of my tongue to apologize yet again, but I sealed my lips as his faded, rheumy eyes crinkled once more. “As for me, not a worry. I sleep less and less as the days go by. I’d offer you tea, but I know you won’t take it, and I don’t drink it much no more.”
Nothing would mark me as obviously from London high as the way I took my tea. Fanny had done an excellent service in my training.
“No,” I agreed. “Mr. Pettigrew—”
“Gus, then,” he corrected me with a dry, whispery laugh. “That’s what they call me when they come by now and again. ‘Checkin’ up on ol’ Gus,’ ” he mimicked.
“Gus, then.” It cost me nothing to use his name, and the old man likely didn’t get as much company as he liked. I shifted on my chair, eyes flitting to the shelves. “I search for a book.”
“Ah.” A parched sound. “Which, exactly?”
“Mr. Humphry Ditton’s The New Law of Fluids. Do you know of it?”
Mr. Pettigrew rested his head back on the chair, the thin cords of his throat and sharp Adam’s apple thrust into stark relief beneath his wrinkled, fragile skin. “Early seventeen hundreds, unless I am mistaken. Not the entirety of the title, either.”
I twitched a grin. “You are correct. I can’t remember all of it.”
“The New Law of Fluids,” he whispered slowly, “or, a Discourse concerning the Ascent of Liquids in exact Geometrical Figures, between two nearly contiguous Surfaces.” He shook his head, rasped a chuckle. “It has been a long time since I’ve seen a copy.”
My face fell. “Oh. So you don’t have it?”
“No, girl, I’m afraid not.” His gaze remained on me, not to the shelves I’d have expected if he were telling a lie. The firelight turned the watery depths of his eyes to something glinting and unreadable, but his frail frame remained at ease, fingers linked, slippered feet crossed.
I read no falsehood here, and my heart sank. “Well, it was worth finding out for certain. I apologize for taking your time.”
I placed both hands upon the arms of my chair to rise, but he lifted his head and asked baldly, “What are you after, then?”
I hesitated.
His smile faded, and he leaned forward carefully, his bald pate cherry red in the light. But the eyes beneath his still-bushy white eyebrows did not drop from mine. “You’re on business, then,” he rasped. “Fine, fine. I don’t have that book, but I have many. Tell me your need and I’ll direct you to a book just as good, if not a counter argument to the contents.”
I reached into my coat, withdrew the sheaf of papers I’d stolen. “I am not sure exactly what it is I’m looking for,” I confessed, abashed at his raised eyebrows. “Whatever is in Mr. Ditton’s book directly correlates with the information on these pages.”
“Ah. Let me see.” He patted his pockets with trembling fingers for a long moment, searching for the spectacles he finally found in a stitched pocket. He placed them over his nose, beckoned impatiently.
I rose, crossed the narrow divide and offered the sheaf to him.
“My glass,” he said as he took them. “Fetch it.”
Glass? I looked about me, found no snifters or any sign of such drinking. Then, on the narrow counter that doubled as desk and shop cashier’s station, I saw a large magnifying glass.
Spectacles and a glass. The poor man.
I collected it, running my gloved fingers along its use-polished haft. A lovely piece, solid brass around the perfectly maintained glass.
I returned it to Mr. Pettigrew’s searching grasp and waited, shifting from foot to foot in my sudden impatience.
He took his time; perhaps it was his faded sight, perhaps instead the complex symbols drawn on each page. The handwriting was the same as the notation in the notes I’d left back home, neat enough but cramped, and strung together as if full words were too much trouble to take the time to write out.
After a few agonizingly long minutes, I understood that I would not get an immediate answer. I left Mr. Pettigrew’s side to walk instead along the shelves, allowing my fingers to trail over the books within.
It was, I could admit, a guilty pleasure to be surrounded by so many books. Mr. Ashmore’s study—once my father’s—was fine enough. I’d spent many an hour hidden beneath the large desk, reading the things Fanny hadn’t yet given up on forbidding me from.
I loved books, even as I loved the similar way opium had of transporting a mind elsewhere. Both habits had formed from a desire to escape; my advanced age at the time of learning my letters meant simply that I devoured more books when I’d finally realized what magical things I’d missed in reading.
Papers rustled softly as Mr. Pettigrew shuffled through them at a snail’s pace. Finally, as I wandered back to the chair and braced one hand upon it—quietly lifting one leg to ease the ache within—he looked up, mouth set in a slanted, thoughtful line. “This,” he said on a sibilant note I translated as deep in thought, “will take some time, my dear. Complex. Not impossible, but certainly complex.”
“What is it?” I asked.
He set down the magnifying glass. It thumped gently. “Before I answer a question much deeper than you know, I must ask you one.” He did not wait for my agreement, raising the papers like proof at a trial. “What is it you seek from this?”
“The author,” I said, not bothering to think too hard on the subject. It was true. “And if the author is a murdered man, then I seek his murderer.”
“Hmm.” The sound became a long exhale. Mr. Pettigrew lowered the papers, his gaze returning to it in the vacant way of a man no longer seeing what was in front of him. Then, suddenly, he nodded. “Very well. Come back in three days’ time. I should have something to show you then.”
Three days. That was a lifetime in the scope of an investigation such as this, but I had precious little else to go on.
“Very well,” I allowed, though I didn’t like it. “Now, what is it? Is it a formula?”
“Clever girl.” He
rose on unsteady limbs, his faded purple dressing gown swishing about his ankles. But he gripped the papers with a surety, an interest, that had seemed less focused when I’d first come in. “Perhaps. I can’t know just from looking, but it seems to me that you have in your possession a working theory.”
“On what?” I asked, bemused. “I don’t recognize those symbols from existing scientific elements.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” he murmured, shuffling by me. Distracted, I realized. I couldn’t hide my smile this time, rueful, though it was. I recognized that level of distraction.
I often did the same.
“This is alchemical theory,” Mr. Pettigrew said.
My smile faded. “Alchemy. You’re sure?”
“Oh, yes. Quite.” He set the papers on the counter, then turned, one hand flat upon them. His weathered, skull-like face split into a grin. “Come, I’ll show you.”
Curious, I approached his side as he spread the papers on the surface of his worn desk. “This,” he pointed out, tapping a triangle with its point down, “is water.”
“Just water?”
“The symbol by itself, yes,” he explained, “but look at this beside it.” Another symbol, three circles arranged in another triangle, with a fourth in the center. “Aether.”
“What?” I scowled at the unfamiliar figures. “That is not. Aether is characterized by the periodic table, not by random etchings.”
His chuckle, reminiscent of the papers he shuffled, was amused. “It is to alchemists, girl. You must recognize the language of those you search for if you hope to find them.”
Bloody bells. I refrained from sneering outright, but I also raised a finger as an idea struck. “Sir, do the letters E and y mean anything to you?”
His brow folded. “Show me.” He gestured to the quill and blotter at his desk.
I took it, turned the paper already there over and sketched the Ey as I remembered it. And then, because I couldn’t not, I added DG and ppt with its double underline. “This,” I said as I placed it in his hand.
Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles Page 16
