The Illusion of Murder

by McCleary, Carol

  A whirl of motion, grunts, and heavy footfalls erupt around me, and I realize someone else has joined the battle.

  I raise my hands to protect my face and curl in a fetal position as feet stamp around me. The fight is suddenly no longer hovering over me and I hear a startled yelp and look up to see two dark forms at the rail, one of them going over. From the shape of the dark figures, it was my almost naked attacker who went overboard.

  It’s too dark to make out anything about the other person except he must be a man and he’s gone, too, down the deck, leaving me there with my head spinning.

  Someone hovers over me again and I let out a startled cry.

  “Are you all right?” the woman asks in English.

  The accent is not British, but continental, French, I think.

  A whiff of perfume comes from a female figure wearing a veil. For a second I think it’s Lady Warton, but the face beneath the veil is close enough for me to realize it isn’t.

  “I … I—” I’m not certain what my condition is. I am still on my back and my head is swimming.

  “What’s going on here?” The shout comes from a few feet away.

  I recognize the voice as that of the first officer.

  Without a word, the woman leaves.

  As I am assisted to my feet by the ship’s officer, I can still smell the woman’s lingering perfume. I’m certain she is the woman in black who also walks the decks at night.

  She left me with a sense of haunting familiarity about her features, one that I can’t put a finger on. For certain, she is not the eccentric Mrs. Winchester, who is much older and dowdier than the woman in black.

  Another certainty is that whoever tried to kill me at Tanis had come back to finish the job.

  Questions bounce around like rubber balls in my sore head.

  Who was my rescuer? Obviously, a man who did not want to stay around to receive my thanks because he wanted to keep his identity a secret. The woman in black did likewise.

  Someone has tried to murder me again. Stowing away and lying in wait took planning. Have I gotten the entire Mahdi movement into a murderous rage against me because of the key in the scarab?

  Maybe destroying that scarab wasn’t such a good idea.

  21

  “Miss Bly, because of your insistence to my first officer that you witnessed a man go overboard, we have done a roll call of all the crew and passengers and everyone is accounted for … everyone.”

  The captain has tight jaws and is not in good humor.

  I was taken to the ship’s infirmary to be checked by the doctor. When the captain came in, I quickly learned that an attack on a passenger aboard the ship is a scandal he eagerly wants to avoid.

  “I told your officer I was attacked by an Egyptian wearing a loincloth.”

  “We have no Egyptians aboard—not even stowaways. And, young woman, the last time I looked, none of the passengers were wearing loincloths.”

  “Which means that whoever attacked me went overboard.”

  The ship’s doctor, who has been puttering in his medicine cabinet to find a salve for my scrapes, says, “We have had incidents in the past where thieves have come up the anchor chain while we were—”

  “We were underway, doctor,” the captain snaps. “There are no thieves aboard the Victoria.”

  “Of course not, captain,” the doctor says.

  “What about the witnesses?” I ask. “The man who came to my aid, the woman who—”

  “No one lays claim to having seen the alleged incident.”

  “Alleged? Are you implying that I made up the attack?”

  “I am merely giving a commonsense interpretation to what you have reported. You sneaked into an area that is off-limits because of hazards, tripped, and banged your head. That much of your story is evident. Your report that a man came at you with a knife and that someone intervened is still under investigation. Your exact statement to my officer is that you blacked out after striking your head and that all you saw around you was a blur of dark figures. Is that an accurate rendition of what you have previously stated?”

  “I did bang my head, but—”

  “Doctor, exactly what injuries did this young woman incur during her trespass in the restricted bow area?”

  “A few bruises and scrapes, a blow to the head—”

  “A blow to the head. The fact that she became disoriented and even blacked out briefly shows it was a pretty severe blow, does it not?”

  “Oh yes, yes, perhaps even a concussion.”

  I could see that I had lost the doctor, not to medicine but to the demands of keeping his job. “The head injury occurred because I was attacked.”

  “My dear,” the ship’s doctor says as he applies ointment to a scrape on my arm, “you took such a nasty fall, I’m afraid your memory is not solid. I won’t be surprised if you have occasional blackouts for the next few days. You’re a very lucky young woman.”

  “Will there be any permanent impairment to her?” the captain asks.

  “No, though she could have a short-term effect. How severe, I can’t say, but I believe with plenty of rest, she should be back to normal in a few days. In the meantime she might still have hallucinations.”

  “Hallucinations!”

  The two men give a start and freeze in place. If Mr. Selous, the great hunter, had heard my retort he would have likened it to the howl of a wounded jungle cat.

  I lock eyes with the captain. “It was a personal attack on me. A planned murder.”

  The captain turns shades of red and purple and appears to be suffering apoplexy. I hope he doesn’t drop dead, if for no other reason than it might delay our passage.

  He gains his composure and turns to the doctor with a meaningful look. “You do recall that we have been warned that this young woman suffers from an overabundance of imagination and paranoia. I suspect that the entire episode is a case of female hysteria generated by a blow to the head. There was no attacker, no gallant rescuer; it was all conjured by the imagination of an impressionable young woman who has read too many penny dreadfuls. Don’t you agree, doctor?”

  “Most definitely. Yes, most definitely.”

  The captain stiffly spins about-face as if he were in a military parade, jerks open the infirmary door, and steps out, pulling it closed in a slam behind him.

  Before the door closes, a mirror on the wall reflects the image of two men standing in the corridor outside the infirmary.

  Lord Warton and Frederick Selous.

  I slip off the examination table to confront the two slanders but am stopped by the doctor who grabs my arm.

  “Miss Bly, you’re aboard a ship. Under the laws of the seas, the captain has exceptional authority over you, powers that can be exercised with little restraint.” He gives me a fatherly smile. “If you cause trouble, he’ll put you ashore at the next port and you will have to complete your race by swimming.”

  22

  My anger turns from hot to cold fury as I head for the stateroom of the woman in black who had hovered over me at the bow. Hot anger is for bursts of temper. When I get an icy chill, my intent is to wreak vengeance and havoc. “Pink,” my mother has said, using my family’s pet name for me, “you are the meanest when you are silently angry.”

  Hysterical female, indeed. Those pompous, ignorant bastards. And I make no apology for my language.

  I can understand the captain’s eagerness to protect the reputation of his ship, though I draw the line when it is done at the expense of both the truth and my reputation.

  I’ll stop short of a confrontation with the captain because the ship’s doctor is right—I could be put off the ship and forfeit the race. But I can’t let an attempt on my life go unanswered or have my credibility trampled. Spotting Selous with Warton outside told me what side he had picked again. War has been declared, the lines drawn, no quarter is to be given.

  I’ll need allies in the battles to come and the woman who came to my aid on the bow is the most likely,
and only, candidate at the moment since the man who threw my attacker overboard will not come forward.

  Although I’m hesitant to call on the woman because she goes to extreme lengths to protect her privacy, I need to know what she saw on the bow.

  Did she see the struggle? If she did, it would rebut the hysterical female accusation the captain has stained my reputation with.

  Puzzlement over the features I’d seen under the veil still gives me pause, one of those thoughts that sits in a back corner of my brain and teases me. Sometimes they’re revealed after a long, solitary walk during which I’m able to concentrate and other times I erupt from sleep in the middle of the night with an answer to the puzzle.

  There’s something about her that strikes a chord, yet I can’t put my finger on it.

  With so much on my mind, and my reputation at stake, I decide a frontal assault is necessary.

  Pausing at the woman’s door, I take a deep breath, and tell myself to relax. Barging in as I did with Selous could alienate her.

  Tapping lightly on the door, I wait for a response. None comes.

  Tapping a little harder, I wait.

  Harder even, a good, strong pound because the woman is probably asleep.

  “Perfectly obvious,” I mutter to the door. The woman is not going to open it.

  Has she been forewarned by the captain that I might pay her a visit? Or is she so intent upon maintaining her privacy, she will not open the door even if the ship is sinking?

  I am tempted to yell that the ship is sinking but stop myself. Causing a panic aboard would only confirm the captain’s opinion of my mental state and get me deposited ashore with my luggage at the next port.

  “All right.” The door is not going to be opened to my knock. That is a given.

  Resisting the temptation to give it a good kick, I turn to leave, but driven by one of those impulses I’m helpless to stop, I turn back to the door and try the handle.

  The knob turns and I push open the door.

  Across the room a woman in a long black negligee is lounging on a plush velvet quilt on the closed hood of a coffin. Beside the casket is a tall golden candelabra, with little globs of wax sliding down the candles like tear drops.

  Lazy smoke curls up from a cigarette held on an ivory holder as she looks up from a magazine and glares at me.

  “How dare you?”

  “I … I—”

  She slips off the coffin lid and comes at me, no doubt to slam the door in my face.

  I stare at her in paralyzed astonishment. It’s not possible. It’s unbelievable. It can’t be.

  “My God … you’re … you’re—”

  She lets out a shriek and grabs me, almost jerking me off my feet as she pulls me into the room and slams the door behind us.

  23

  “I am sorely tempted to leave her behind at Suez City,” the captain says.

  He invited the ship’s doctor, the first officer, Lord Warton, and Frederick Selous to the sitting room of his quarters for brandy, cigars, and a discussion about the young newspaperwoman who had become a nuisance aboard.

  “More’s the pity, but I don’t dare. Her employer, a man named Pulitzer, would lynch me with printer’s ink in his newspapers if I caused her to lose this ridiculous race she’s conducting.”

  “Yet she needs to be reined in,” Lord Warton says.

  “She’s very centered on this incident in Port Said,” the doctor says. “Not that she shouldn’t be. It must have been a terrible trauma also to Lady Warton and yourself, of course.”

  “Quite so. Her ladyship was upset by the incident, but she has not turned it into a cause célèbre to embarrass our country.”

  “Ships sailing in this region do occasionally suffer thieves and stowaways,” the first officer says. “It sounds like she may have had the bad luck to run into one that came aboard when we were anchored.”

  “You didn’t actually see anyone attacking her, did you?” Lord Warton asks.

  “No, but I got there after the man who supposedly came to her aid had fled. It’s strange no one has come forward to take the credit for her.”

  “It certainly wasn’t me,” Lord Warton says. “I would have thrown her overboard.”

  The first officer nods at Frederick Selous. “And it wasn’t you, Mr. Selous; you were playing cards with the captain and me. So who—”

  “It doesn’t matter if someone had assisted her,” Lord Warton says, “we’re dealing with a woman who has not only an imagination, but both an appetite and an outlet for sensationalism. Pulitzer’s newspaper in New York thrives on providing vulgar thrills to its readership.” He takes a long drag off his cigar and blows the smoke in the air. “It’s our duty to ensure that she does not upset the delicate political balance in Egypt by having her take unrelated incidents and create a bloody mess for us.”

  “Hear! Hear!” the captain offers with his raised glass and the others follow suit.

  Lord Warton sucks another drag and again stares up at the ceiling as he slowly blows smoke.

  Selous, quietly observing the man, has concluded that the peer loves the limelight.

  “It goes without saying,” his lordship continues, “that my friends in the Colonial Office would hold the steamship company and its employees responsible if this young woman is permitted to damage our position in regard to the canal.”

  The threat was unnecessary, Selous reflects; the ship’s officers are not only patriots but smart when it comes to protecting their employment. If the shipping line got barred from use of the canal, it would be forced out of business.

  As the discussion rumbles on, Selous savors his brandy, swirling it, sniffing it, to avoid participating in the conversation. Something outside the room, at the bow of the ship precisely, required his attention and he wanted the session to get over with as quickly as possible.

  Listening to Warton speak of his brief service in Morocco as if he had been at the right hand of the foreign secretary himself, Selous has a hard time to keep from smirking.

  Having spent the last two decades mingling with Colonial and Foreign Office personnel, he had heard a bit about Warton and knew infinitely more about Warton’s type—a man who got his job because of whom he knew rather than what he knew.

  Selous, third generation of an immigrant French-Huguenot line Protestant that fled persecution in France, had a different view of the world than the peer. His name, Frederick Courtenay Selous, was not “British” sounding, a fact that got him into more than one fight at school with Warton types who counted their roots back to the Saxons.

  Selous had heard that the first lord in the Warton line had been a wool merchant who bought his title by providing the king an eighty-gun ship of the line.

  No other Warton had worked for a living since.

  Although the situation with the American reporter has made them allies, Selous knows that Warton considers him his social inferior despite Selous’s personal accomplishments, his adventurous spirit, and the fact his family has a long history of success in business and science.

  He had heard that Lord Warton was a slow burn, not one to jump into anything new or radical. With financial problems due to bad management of his estates and being unlucky at cards, he’d gone into government service not for queen and country but because he needed the employment—and the contacts it gave him.

  He had now left public service after a short, undistinguished career and had a reputation of being accessible to business interests that wanted to do business with the government. Some, like Von Reich, were foreigners.

  “Egypt is a tinderbox,” Lord Warton says, “ready to catch afire and fill the Nile with blood. When it does, thousands will die, our own people among them, not to mention that a loss of the Suez Canal would have political and economic ramifications around the world.”

  Lord Warton locks eyes with the captain. “I recommend that any cables Miss Bly gives to the purser to send at our ports of call be reviewed by me to ensure there are no politically
explosive false allegations.”

  The captain looks to the others and back to Warton. “Rather unusual, don’t you think, spying on a passenger’s cables—and censoring them.”

  “Based upon my connection with the government, you can consider the request as an official one.”

  Selous stifles a yawn. The man’s a complete ass.

  “Most business passengers prefer to send their own cables when they reach ports,” the captain says.

  “Well, then, something will have to be done about that, won’t it?”

  “That tactic has already been met with a resounding defeat,” Selous says.

  24

  After the captain’s meeting ends, Selous wanders on deck, smoking a cigar, making his way toward the front of the ship. He waits in the darkness at the bow area, making sure no one is in sight, and then slips under the rope barrier to the area where Nellie was attacked.

  With little light coming from the moon and a thousand nooks and crannies for a small object to hide, finding anything on the deck is not going to be easy, but being a great hunter he has an eye for fine detail—a broken limb in a forest of trees, a single crushed leaf among thousands, the smallest detail can reveal his prey.

  He knows the ship’s officers have inspected the area, but their examination would have amounted to walking to the bow and, short of tripping over a body, finding nothing of interest because they didn’t know how to look.

  Evidence of a struggle on deck is obvious to him: smudges made by the bare feet of one man, the scuff marks made by the shoes of another as two men struggled, their feet trying to gain purchase on the damp deck as they shoved at each other in a fight to the death.

  Using the soles of his shoes, Selous wipes out the marks.

  Reconstructing the fight from the evidence, he finds what he had come to look for; it slid into an opening at the base of a piece of machinery—the crude, wooden-handled dagger the assassin had wielded.