A Crimson Warning

by Tasha Alexander

  “Emily … I didn’t know where else—” She started to step forward, but collapsed on the floor in a delicate heap.

  Davis, always the master of efficiency, had her upstairs in no time. A maid drew a bath and assisted her in getting cleaned up and into one of my cotton nightgowns. I tried to persuade Lady Glover to lie down, but she refused. Instead, she wanted a wrap to throw over her shoulders and insisted on coming down to the library.

  “I’ve heard too much about your port not to have some,” she said. “You must indulge me, Lady Emily. I’ve been through so much.”

  I knew enough of her to understand arguing would be fruitless, so I ceded to her demands. She draped herself across a settee, accepted a glass, and asked for a cigarette.

  “I don’t have one,” I said. “Tell us what happened.”

  “You haven’t summoned the police yet, have you?” she asked.

  “Only my husband,” I said. “He’s in the midst of investigating another matter.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Don’t worry about that right now,” Ivy said.

  “It’s not to do with my kidnapper, vicious man, that he is?” she asked.

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “But do you think you could identify him?”

  “I will never forget that face,” she said. “Beady eyes and thin little mouth. But I don’t know his name, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “Where was he holding you?” I asked.

  “In the lodge where you saw me. I cannot tell you how it bolstered my spirits to see you coming to save me!”

  “I didn’t realize you could see us,” I said. “I’m only sorry it didn’t work.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest I’d actually seen you,” she said. “But he mentioned you and the duke by name when he told me we had to move.”

  “Did he hurt you?” Ivy asked.

  “He was terrible,” Lady Glover said, lowering her voice. “You can’t imagine.”

  “We must contact your husband at once,” Ivy said.

  “No.” Lady Glover sat up. “I’m angry at him. He took so long paying the ransom.”

  “So far as I know, the kidnapper hadn’t sent instructions,” I said. “Did he say anything about the money when he released you?”

  “No. You misunderstand. I assumed the ransom had been paid,” she said. “I took a little nap this afternoon—being held prisoner is frightfully tedious—and when I woke up, there was no sign of either of my usual guards. On a whim, I tried the door and found it open.”

  “So you just walked out, unscathed?” Ivy asked.

  “Oh, no! It wasn’t so easy,” she said. “At first I thought that’s how it would be. I crept down the stairs—”

  “Where were you?” I asked again.

  “In another lodge in Hyde Park. A much nicer one this time. That’s due to you, Emily. If you hadn’t forced him to move me, I would have been stuck in that awful place the whole time.”

  “But you did have trouble escaping?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Only one of the guards was there, and he’d gone outside. I don’t know why. So I ran out the other door and didn’t look back until I was out of the park. Actually, I didn’t look back then, either.”

  “Was he following you?” Ivy asked. “Could you hear him?”

  “Not that I noticed,” she said. “But one does have to make reasonable assumptions in these situations.”

  “So when did the actual trouble occur?” I asked.

  “I suppose it was more theoretical than actual,” Lady Glover said. “But I was terrified.”

  It was clear she didn’t need a doctor; she’d risen from her faint with indecent speed. And nothing about her story rang true.

  “I don’t believe you, Lady Glover,” I said.

  “What can you possibly mean? How could I have been anything but terrified?” she asked.

  “None of this makes sense—it hasn’t from the beginning. And look at you now: you’re not even upset.”

  “I’m in shock. Once I’ve had a chance to react thoroughly I’m likely to be hysterical. How can you accuse me of—”

  “Don’t,” I said, raising my hand. “I don’t believe any of this.”

  She sat, silent, for some minutes, then let out a long sigh. “Was it that obvious?”

  “No,” Ivy said. “I bought it entirely and it is I who is in a state of shock. Did you really make it up?”

  “I am a master of intrigue, you know,” Lady Glover said.

  “I feel a complete fool,” Ivy said. “I never doubted you. You are quite an actress.” There was a twinge of admiration in her voice.

  “How did you arrange it?” I asked.

  “I hired actors. We staged the kidnapping—it was rather exciting, I must say—and holed up in a lodge I knew to be vacant. A few days of that, though, and I started to get bored. My husband wasn’t responding to any of the ransom instructions—”

  “I don’t think he received any,” I said.

  “He did. My spies saw him read them. He just didn’t want to deal with me.” Tears flashed in her eyes. Part of me felt sorry for her, but the rest knew she was probably acting. “I tried to increase the stakes by having my men drop my sleeve in the park, but that didn’t light a fire under him, either. The whole experience was thoroughly depressing. In the end, I got tired of it and decided to go home. After making a stop here, first.”

  “Why would you do such a thing?” Ivy asked. “I, for one, have been worried sick about you.”

  “I guess I can’t get the stage fully out of my blood,” she said.

  “That’s not a valid reason,” I said.

  “My husband used to dote on me,” she said. “But lately I’d come to realize he didn’t care anymore. I wanted to know if that was the truth. And I found out, didn’t I?”

  “What about the letters?” I asked. “Did you invent those as well?”

  “No, I swear to you I didn’t,” she said. “And I got one more before my abduction.” She pulled it out of her décolletage and handed it to me:

  I am whipp’d and scourg’d with rods,

  Nettled, and stung with pismires, when I hear

  Of this vile politician

  “Henry IV, Part I,” Ivy said. “It’s one of Robert’s favorites.”

  “That’s it,” I said. “I’m going to fetch Colin. And we must send for your husband. Ivy will look after you.

  I took the carriage to the Harrises’ house, but before I’d reached my destination, I saw Colin walking away from it. I called for the driver to stop and waved for my husband’s attention.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  I told him about Lady Glover. “She wasn’t kidnapped any more than I was,” I said. “It looked liked she’d rolled around in the mud to lend herself an air of authenticity. I’ll tell you the rest later. But when I read the last letter she said she’d received from our painter, I wanted to find you at once.”

  “What is it?”

  “We need to revisit those notebooks I found in Mr. Dillman’s house. As quickly as possible. The letter made reference to a vile politician, and the notebooks had all those records of bills before Parliament. I want to study them again.”

  “They’re at Scotland Yard,” he said.

  “You can tell me about Mrs. Harris on the way,” I said.

  “That’s a mess of phenomenal proportion,” he said. “Mr. Harris will be fine, although he’ll have a headache for the foreseeable future. His wife has ledgers full of the most horrific gossip. And she’d made large red Xs by the people whose houses were painted. It’s impossible to tell whether that’s to indicate that she’d already finished with them or whether she was just keeping track of what someone else was doing.”

  “Was every single victim of the paint on her list?” I asked.

  “All but Mr. Dillman,” he said. “But he was the first, and it’s entirely possible she didn’t start her book until after she was finished
with him. And now she’s proven herself capable of violence. There’s one other thing you might find interesting. She kept a record of her correspondence in one of her journals, and was writing to Foster on a regular basis for the past year. The frequency of her letters to him increased, however, about two weeks before Dillman’s death.”

  “Do you think there’s a connection between them?” I asked.

  “It’s possible,” he said. “We’ll have to question Foster before we can reach any firm conclusions. Regardless, she looks to be the guilty party.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Please, take me to Scotland Yard.”

  “We’ll go, first thing in the morning,” he said. “Right now, we need to deal with Lady Glover, who may be facing some very serious charges.”

  “Can we at least pick up the notebooks and bring them home?”

  “You’re relentless, my dear.”

  “Implacable.”

  “I might as well give in?” he asked, leaning in for a kiss.

  “It would be futile to do otherwise.” He kissed me again, this time more thoroughly.

  And then he did as I asked, insisting that I remain in the carriage while he ran inside to fetch the notebooks. I did not object, having found the ride to Scotland Yard some of the most pleasant time I’d spent all season.

  36

  Back at Park Lane, it was difficult to reconcile the wrathful, seething man giving Lady Glover a most severe dressing down with the passionate and attentive gentleman who had escorted me home from Scotland Yard. A shiver of excitement charged through me as I watched him. It was bad of me, no doubt, to admire this side of him, but how could I not? He was a master of his work, and within a quarter of an hour he’d got Lady Glover to confess every detail of what she’d done, down to the names of the men she’d hired to “guard” her.

  “They were actors?” Colin asked.

  “I needed them to be convincing,” she said. “Darling, I’m terribly sorry, you must forgive me.”

  “You will not tell me what I must do,” he said. “Sit up. I’ll not speak to you while you’re making such a terrible attempt to mimic Cabanel’s portrait of Ophelia.”

  I expected a witty reply from her, but she said nothing. She sat up, pulling my dressing gown close around her shoulders.

  “Your husband will be here momentarily,” Colin said. “I suggest you go upstairs and put your own clothes back on. It’s reprehensible that you’re in public rooms in such a state.”

  “My clothes are all wet,” she said.

  “Because you chose to make them that way.”

  “Colin, I could lend her a dress so that she doesn’t—”

  He interrupted me. “She doesn’t need comfort right now, Emily. Lord Glover will take her home in short order and she can wear what she likes once she’s there.” He rang for a maid and directed her to take Lady Glover back upstairs. “I’ve no tolerance for what you’ve done. Not only have we wasted time and resources searching for you, you put my wife and the Duke of Bainbridge in danger when you set your thugs on them.”

  “I told them not to hit either of them too hard,” she said. “You must see I couldn’t let them rescue me all the way. I just wanted them to be able to make a good-sounding report.”

  “What you’ve done is outrageous and despicable,” he said. “Your antics have made it more difficult to find the savage who killed Cordelia Dalton.”

  She nodded, chastened, and followed the maid from the room.

  “I don’t ever want you mad at me,” Ivy said to him. “You’re very fierce.”

  “She’s behaved most appallingly,” Colin said. “Two people are dead, and she’s staged this farce to get attention? It’s outrageous. She’s fortunate I wasn’t harder on her.”

  “Fortunate indeed,” I said. “Now tell Ivy what you learned at the Harrises’.”

  “Mr. Harris is going to be all right. She was rough with him, and he’s banged up, but the doctor felt there’s no need for serious concern.”

  “I imagine he’ll approach marital fidelity with a different view moving forward,” I said.

  “Will Winifred be arrested?” Ivy asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Colin said. “Scotland Yard are searching the house right now. We already know she’s guilty of extortion, and now this. I’m afraid it doesn’t look good for her.”

  “But you can’t think she killed Mr. Dillman,” Ivy said.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “I just can’t believe it, despite what we’ve seen.” Ivy’s shoulders were pulled back, stiff and straight.

  “She may have had an accomplice,” I said. “Which is why we need to look at those notebooks right away, Colin.”

  I took them to the table, spread them out, and opened the one in which I was the most interested—the one that listed parliamentary bills amongst other things. “We know more about Mr. Dillman’s way of thinking since having come to a full understanding of the game he played with Cordelia. Let’s see if he was doing something similar to that with the information in these books.”

  We looked at the numbers and symbols listed next to each bill. I copied out twice each set—numbers and symbols—and gave one to Ivy. Colin and I would use the other.

  “Take a notebook and go through, page by page. We need to find all of these.”

  The meaning of the numbers proved elusive, so elusive that Colin turned to a thick volume of parliamentary records. “They are just votes, Emily. Votes on bills that passed in the last five years.”

  “So why did he pick these in particular?” I asked. “Can you find out more about the bills?”

  “I will,” he said, turning back to the book.

  Ivy let out a little squeal. “I’ve found one of the symbols!” She turned the notebook she’d been studying so that I could see it right side up. A quite competent watercolor of a laurel was on the page, its small, white flowers executed with great precision. Incorporated into the bottom of the image was the symbol, an upside-down triangle, so small one would only notice it buried amongst the green leaves if one was specifically looking for it. Beneath the picture were the words Daphne Alpina and a date, 18 June 1891. The “a” was underlined.

  This spurred us on. Soon we had pictures to go with each of the symbols—and on each of them, something in the accompanying text had been underlined. From the flowers, there were two letters and two numbers. From his drawings of birds, we got thirty letters.

  “The first is easy,” I said. “Between the daphne and the hellebores we have A and E. Given what we already know about Mr. Dillman’s game, it’s reasonable to surmise this should be combined to EA, which is how the catalog numbers for all the items in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan begin.”

  “So the numbers—5 and 9—are the second bit,” Ivy said. “We need EA 59 or EA 95.”

  “And the rest?” Colin asked. “This long string of letters?”

  “It’s the hint,” I said. “He’s put an additional layer of disguise this time. And, given the number of letters, it’s undoubtedly more than just telling us what the object is made of. Cordelia said he sometimes gave her quotes as clues.”

  “So we need to untangle the letters,” Ivy said.

  Colin continued to study the parliamentary record while Ivy and I set to it.

  W D T E D M O B R E N A T M O E I A R R D L H U I D Y F H R

  “Let’s make a list of every word we can find in it,” I said. “And then see if we can string them together in some sort of sensible fashion.”

  “Toady rat in tree,” Ivy said.

  “Sensible, darling,” I said.

  “Hide now or die,” she said. We fell silent.

  Over the course of the next two hours, we’d come up with what seemed an unending list of possible words, almost too many to count.

  “This sounded like a good idea,” I said, after having strung together another phrase that was almost promising.

  Colin came and stood over my shoulder. “I th
ink you’re trying too hard to make it fit the museum,” he said.

  “How goes it with Parliament?” I asked.

  “I’ve found absolutely nothing,” he said. “I think we need to take that list of Dillman’s at face value.”

  “That’s disappointing,” Ivy said.

  “Let’s focus on the words you lot have found instead,” Colin said. “Dream of water?”

  “Yearn for more?” I tapped my pencil on the table. “This is incredibly frustrating. We have lots of nonsense, but nothing that uses all of the letters.”

  “Let me see everything you have,” he said. I passed him our pages of words. He went to his desk and sat down. “The only thing I prefer to word puzzles is chess.”

  “Maybe we should just take the whole list to the museum,” Ivy said. “We’ve narrowed down which galleries to search. Perhaps the clue will become evident once we’ve narrowed down the options with the numbers.”

  “That’s an excellent idea,” I said. “We should be there the minute it opens tomorrow.”

  “I’ve got it,” Colin said, rising from his chair and walking towards us. “It’s obvious, really. Murder thy breath in middle of a word. It’s from Richard III.”

  “I was really hoping for the toady rat,” Ivy said.

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s quite an unusual animal, don’t you think?”

  “Not you, Ivy.”

  “I couldn’t be more certain,” Colin said. “There are plenty of phrases we could string together with these words, many of which sound like they are appropriate. But no one will convince me that a line of Shakespeare is going to coincidentally appear within this list. Toady rat notwithstanding.”

  “But our villain,” Ivy said. “He quotes Shakespeare.”

  “My dear girl,” he said. “Everyone quotes Shakespeare.”

  * * *

  As Colin sketched out his plan for the next morning, Ivy bowed out of coming to the museum. “I’ve tried Robert’s patience enough,” she said. “I think he’d draw the line at my being present when you arrest someone.”

  We promised to give her an update as soon as we were finished at the museum. Once she’d gone home, we retired to our bedroom, where I collapsed, exhausted, on the bed.