Mina Wentworth and the Invisible City

by Meljean Brook

  Rhys knew that she found eyewitness testimony unreliable at best, and impossible to procure at its worst. “There are always people out at this time of night. Now that Newberry’s here, I’ll walk the streets around the square and ask if anyone saw it.”

  She looked up from the tracks, studied him as if considering his offer—though by the humor tilting the corners of her eyes, he knew she’d already decided it was impossible. “And what would you do if they obviously had seen something but didn’t want to talk?”

  “Drag them here by the scruff of their necks.”

  Her grin lit her face, twisted straight through his gut. God, what she did to him. If there hadn’t been a dead man on the other side of the garden wall, he’d have taken advantage of the shadows and shagged her against it.

  But he wouldn’t interfere with her work. In the space of a few minutes, he’d seen how brilliant she was at her job, at looking, at seeing. Mina was more than he’d ever deserved, but she was exactly what a good man like Redditch deserved; no investigator would work harder or do better to bring the viscount’s murderer to justice.

  Mina sighed as she started back toward the garden. “This wasn’t how I intended to spend this evening.”

  He hadn’t, either—but they’d get to what he’d intended later. “Neither did Redditch,” he said dryly.

  His reply brought a quick smile to her lips. It was gone by the time they returned through the gate. A head taller than the butler and twice as wide, Newberry stood at the library door with Prescott. Mina waved the constable into the garden, pointing him toward the body before turning back to Rhys.

  “That is all, then. I’ll be speaking with the staff, knocking on doors and asking whether any of the neighbors saw anything, trying to track down Percival Foley, then examining the body at headquarters. I don’t know how late I’ll be.”

  “I’ll wait up for you,” he said.

  She smiled. Her inspector’s flat stare dropped away for a moment, her gaze softening as she looked up at him. After a long, searching glance that he felt over every inch of his skin, her eyes unfocused and a frown marred her brow.

  “What is it?” Whatever concerned her was a concern for him, too.

  “Anne.”

  “You’re worried about her reasons for staying over again?” Rhys guessed, and when she nodded, he asked, “Do you want me to stop by your parents’ house and bring her home?”

  “Yes.” She closed her eyes, gave a short laugh. “But I don’t know if we should. I’m not her mother. I don’t . . . I don’t know how much I can tell her to do.”

  He’d never known a mother or father, so Rhys was the last person to advise her on this. But he couldn’t deny he felt the same. He’d grown as possessive and as protective of the girl as she had.

  “And at least she’s not on the streets,” Mina said, then shook her head. “But if she was, would she think that a problem? She’s lived years without us and done perfectly well.”

  Right or wrong, he knew his feelings on this. “She might have got along perfectly well without us, but she’s ours now.”

  “You would say that. I was doing perfectly well, too, until you came along.”

  And made her his. “And now you aren’t?”

  “Now I am even better, and the thought of getting along without you tears me apart.” Her hand found his, her gaze holding his just as tight. “But Anne’s not used to having a family. Perhaps she doesn’t know that because we care, because we worry, we need more than a gram that says she’s not coming home.”

  Rhys wouldn’t have known that either, but he was learning. “So I’ll stop by their house and take her home.”

  “No. I don’t want her to feel she’s done something wrong. We’ll speak with her tomorrow.” Her fingers squeezed his. “I must work now.”

  He knew. But because she had not let go of his hand yet, because only Newberry was out there to see, he bent his head and kissed her on that beautiful, incredible mouth. “Be safe.”

  It was as close to an order as he could give her, but more like a prayer.

  “I will.”

  Her promise had to be enough, because lurking over her would only drive her away. So he forced himself to walk away, past the blushing constable, and leave Mina to her work.

  Chapter 3

  No one whom Mina and Newberry spoke with saw anything. The giant wheel rolling out of a rich man’s garden, through an alley, and down a well-lit street might as well have been invisible. Mina was not surprised. Everything in this city might as well have been invisible. Everyone was afraid that, eventually, something they said might come back and harm them—especially if it were about something they didn’t understand to begin with.

  But as she and Newberry walked the neighborhood, and not one claimed to have seen it, Mina began to wonder whether there had been nothing to see. Perhaps the wheel had rolled to a nearby home or into the back of a lorry. If someone had opened the gate for the wheel, it was possible that someone had also been waiting to help it quickly escape.

  Wherever the wheel had gone, they were not making any progress finding it near Portman Square. She’d return in the morning with Newberry and knock on more doors, make another round of the streets.

  The corpse collectors arrived to take the viscount back to headquarters. Mina oversaw the loading of the canvas-wrapped body into the wagon before climbing into Newberry’s police cart. Prescott had found Percival Foley’s direction written on the viscount’s recent correspondence, saving Mina the effort of discovering the location of his manufactory.

  “Foley’s in St. Olave, constable,” Mina said as she settled onto the cart’s rattling bench. “Let’s hope that the traffic has cleared or we’ll not see dinner before midnight.”

  The color in the constable’s face deepened to a dark pink against the red of his beard. “St. Olave, sir?”

  Relatively new to London, the constable hadn’t completely gotten his bearings, especially when their work took them across the Thames. It was nothing to blush about—there were many places in the London area that even Mina hadn’t visited—but one of Newberry’s charms was his tendency to redden on a blink.

  “Just over London Bridge, constable,” she said, and grinned when dismay replaced the blush. Crowded with shops, vehicles, and pedestrians, the bridge was a nightmare to pass at the best of times. “Or we can cross at Trahaearn Bridge and drive east, braving the rookeries.”

  Where even an armed constable and inspector might not intimidate the worst of the criminal lot, particularly at night. Many of the slums in Southwark had burned during an outbreak of fires the previous year, but they’d quickly rebuilt, tiny warlords establishing small territories.

  “My flat is en route to Trahaearn Bridge, sir. I suggest that we head in that direction, beg my wife for a bit of something that we can take with us to eat, and drive on to London Bridge.”

  Good man. Mina nodded her agreement and braced herself as the cart jolted forward. They made good time to his small, cozy flat on the second level of a converted mews, where Newberry’s sensible—and very pregnant—wife asked him to cut and wrap hunks of cheese, bread, and salted boiled eggs while she chatted with Mina. Newberry blushed for a record length of time after Temperance checked on his progress and complimented his skillful use of a knife, then again when she laid a farewell kiss on his cheek.

  So sweet. It still surprised Mina that the prudish bounder had ever taken off his clothes long enough to make a baby, and she’d have wagered that he’d been fiery red the entire time.

  Temperance was smiling as they left. Mina couldn’t help but notice how her gaze remained on Newberry until the moment the door closed. Rhys watched her in the same way when she left in the morning—Mina knew, because she always looked back for that final glimpse of him, too. But was it just love? Or more?

  “Does she worry?” Mina wondered, stepping into the cart.

  Newberry looked up over the bonnet, where he’d been re-lighting the cart’s gas lanter
ns and unlocking the tires. “Sir?”

  “Does your wife worry when you’re on the job?”

  “Yes.” The cart’s frame creaked as he took his seat. “Some days worse than others, but she always worries a little.”

  Even though he was a giant of a man—strong, sensible, and armed with opium darts and guns—that wouldn’t matter, she knew. The first week that Newberry had been paired with Mina, shrapnel from an exploding boiler had almost gutted him as they’d chased down a suspect. How could Temperance not worry after that? If it had been Rhys, Mina would have worried, too.

  “Is there anything you do to make it easier for her?”

  “Yes, sir,” Newberry said. “I keep coming home.”

  And Mina would continue returning home to Rhys. She nodded, gestured for Newberry to start for London Bridge. The noise of the cart forced them to shout when they spoke, but Mina didn’t attempt any conversation. She mulled over the viscount’s murder as she ate, reviewing the staff’s statements, looking for inconsistencies in their accounts. She didn’t find any. Hopefully her interview with Foley would give her more to go on.

  The bridge was the usual tangle of vehicles, with urchins darting in front of the cart and forcing them to a stop, peddlers closing in from the side when they did, and the stench of the Thames perfuming it all. Newberry made it over without swearing once—that Mina heard, at any rate. Once past, they waited on the Borough until traffic to the bridge lightened enough for the cart to cross onto Tooley, where Mina had Newberry slow again so that she could study the buildings they passed. Though untouched by the slum fires of the previous year, most were in sorry shape, stone crumbling and boards rotted, almost every window broken. In the dark, the numbers were impossible to read, but a few of the structures were more recognizable than others.

  A peaked roof on the northern side of the street gave Mina her bearings. “There’s the old church! Turn right up here.”

  A rutted lane led up Church Yard Alley. A few lights flickered in the windows of the one-level rows of houses they passed. Men and women sat on doorsteps, sharing opium pipes—most of them laborers in the stockyard meat market, judging by the cleavers and bone saws attached to their arms. A wrinkled woman with a boisterous laugh and her lower legs grafted to a rolling peddler’s cart shouted an offer to exchange her tires for theirs. Mina grinned and shook her head, and as soon as they were past, reminded Newberry to double-lock the wheels when they arrived at Foley’s factory.

  Set in the yard of an old school, the spark-lighter manufactory took up one wing of the building, with a tin-roofed warehouse attached to the far end. Gray smoke rose from columned chimneys. The windows had been boarded over, with slits of light peeking through. Like most factories in the London area, Foley’s laborers worked in two ten-hour shifts, from four in the morning until midnight.

  Inside, the work floor was more brightly lit than most Mina had been in, but just as hot. Tired-eyed women and children sat on benches in front of long tables, mechanically assembling igniter heads to the wick tubes and tossing the finished lighters into crates. Most of the women had stripped down to chemises, clinging and transparent with sweat. At a nearby station, a thin-chested man with hydraulic hammers at his wrists pounded wires flat against a steel table. Sparks flew as metal sheets were cut into thin strips, and a rotten, garlicky odor hung over the room.

  “It’s the phosphorus,” Mina said when she saw Newberry’s hard swallow, and nodded to the far end of the work floor, where women wearing gloves and goggles dipped igniter wires into large vats. Open windows at the back and exhaust fans dissipated most of the fumes, preventing them from reaching combustible levels, but the smell still permeated everything in the factory.

  Though the work never stopped and most of the laborers hadn’t been chatting, a hush seemed to fall over the floor as they noticed Mina. Not just because she’d been in the newssheets, obviously—one woman turned and spit on the floor. Saving the Iron Duke didn’t overcome the taint of her Horde blood in everyone’s eyes, but as long as they weren’t spitting on her, Mina wasn’t interested in fighting that perception tonight.

  She was only interested in a brass wheel, and the reason Foley had left Redditch’s home so abruptly. She looked to the nearest station, where a quartet of women rolled strips of tin into circles. “Where might I find Mr. Foley? Is he here?”

  A young blond with scarred fingers nodded, gesturing with her chin without taking her eyes from Mina’s face. “Up that stair. He lives in the old headmaster’s quarters.”

  “Has he been up there all evening?”

  “No, Your Gracious—”

  “Grace,” one of the other women said under her breath.

  “‘Inspector’ will do,” Mina said with a faint smile.

  “He wasn’t here all evening, inspector. He left halfway through our shift and was out until . . .” She shook her head and looked to the others for help. “What time was it?”

  “Half-past eight.” The gray-haired woman’s hands and arms were skeletal prosthetics, made from steel and configured like bones. Instead of using pliers to bend the metal strips, she simply pinched and rolled. “We’d just come off dinner bell and were having a nip outside when his cart came into the yard.”

  Given the time it would take to travel from Westminster to St. Olave in heavy traffic, that was consistent with the butler’s statement that Foley had left Redditch’s at seven-thirty—and it meant that Foley had arrived only fifteen minutes after Redditch had been killed. Even Rhys’s engine-powered two-seater balloon could barely cover the distance in that short time.

  So Foley might have arranged the murder or unlocked the gate, but he hadn’t been in Portman Square when the wheel had entered the garden.

  “Thank you.” Mina started for the stairs, aware that conversation had begun again, quiet and quick over tables and workstations, full of speculation. What had Foley done?

  Nothing, yet. She knocked at the door to his quarters. The bounder who answered was only a bit taller than Mina but probably weighed twice as much, stout and thick with muscle. Dressed in shirtsleeves and trousers, he’d pushed his suspenders from his shoulders and let them hang in loops at the sides of his legs. Short-cropped brown curls were shot through with gray, and lines of exhaustion bracketed his thin mouth.

  Holding the door open, Foley looked at her for a long moment without expression, but he must have been thinking her presence through, searching for a reason. “You’re that Wentworth woman.”

  “Detective Inspector Wentworth, yes. May I speak with you, Mr. Foley?”

  “Yes.” He stepped out onto the stair landing, his gaze searching the work floor below. “In the newssheets, you’re always investigating murders. Is it one of mine?”

  One of his laborers killed, or one of his murders? “May we speak with you inside?”

  Nodding, he turned and led her into the small quarters that served as residence and office. A single chair sat in front of a desk. On the surface, a ledger lay open, the ink in the columns fresh. She’d interrupted him in the middle of work, then. A small amount of amber liquor remained in a glass beside the adding machine, and Mina spotted the bottle on the shelf—new, imported from the New World. Too expensive for most manufactory owners.

  At the desk, Foley pulled up his suspenders and reached for the jacket hanging on the back of his chair. “Is it one of my workers?” he asked again.

  “I am not aware of any death involving your employees, Mr. Foley. We understand that you had dinner with Lord Redditch tonight.”

  He frowned a little, sat. His gaze landed on the liquor bottle. “I did.”

  “Was that a gift from his lordship?”

  “Yes. Or you might call it a bribe, maybe.”

  “For what?”

  Bitterness laced his reply. “His attempt to persuade me not to install automatons.”

  “And you didn’t appreciate his attempt to bribe you?”

  “I was appreciative enough not to leave the bottle th
ere.” He shook his head. “But no, I wasn’t appreciative of what he had to say. He sits in that big house of his, sits on his ideals. He can shove them up his ass.”

  “Did you argue?”

  “You could say that. He tried to make me see reason. I told him what reason was.”

  “What is it?”

  Foley settled back in his chair, laced his fingers over his stomach. “He tells me I’d be doing all of my employees a disservice if I bring in automatons. He says I’ll be putting them out of work, taking food out of their bellies.”

  “Isn’t that true?”

  “Some of them would lose their jobs, yes. I’ll still need hands to load the machines, to wind them. Not all of them will go, but some of them.” His jaw set briefly. “But they would have gone anyway. In the New World, they had problems with phossy jaw. You’ve heard of that?”

  Mina shook her head.

  Newberry said, “I knew a match girl with most of her mouth gone. The phosphorus rots out their jawbones.”

  “That’s right. Go long enough, and it rots their brains, too. It doesn’t affect anyone infected with nanoagents, which is why you haven’t heard of it, Inspector Wentworth. So you’d think we’d have an advantage making spark lighters here instead of in Manhattan City, because the chemicals don’t rot their heads. God knows it’s why I came here six years ago; I couldn’t stand seeing another one go like that.”

  A bounder with a conscience—or a tendency to run from problems? “But you don’t have an advantage?”

  “No. In the past two or three years, a few of the matchmen in Manhattan City and Johannesland have started putting in automated machines. Now their prices are so low that even with the tariffs on the spark lighters coming in from the New World, I can’t compete. Half of my workers will soon be out of a job anyway, while I’m hoping to hang on.”

  “And you told Redditch this?”

  “I did, and he didn’t understand it. Why would he? There’s a man who has never worried about money, about paying his people. But there’s more than that. You had a look at the work floor?”