Death by Silver

by Melissa Scott

  Ned found that he couldn’t entirely blame him. “Was there some particular point of contention?” He was acutely aware of Miss Frost’s presence in the room, and Freddie’s eyes slid sideways to her for a moment as well.

  “The usual threats. He’d cut me off or have me locked up so I couldn’t go on disgracing the family by having interests other than banking. If it had come to anything dire, I’d have gone to friends – I’ve enough friends who’d put me up for a while if I were hard up.”

  Ned bit his tongue not to say that he imagined so. It wasn’t Freddie’s fault that he reminded Ned sharply of some of Julian’s less tolerable friends at Oxford.

  “I’ve a little money of my own,” Freddie said. “Left to me by my dear old aunt, who was a fraction less horrid than the rest of the family. I can’t say that I’d have been happy to be disinherited, if it had come to a complete break, but Victor and Reggie would have made over some fair portion to me. Mater would have made sure of that.”

  “For what it’s worth, I believe you,” Ned said. “But I can’t make Victor recant his confession, and he’s determined not to as long as the case remains unsolved.”

  “Stubborn old ass.” Freddie hesitated. “I know you have every reason to detest him. Yes, I do know that – I kept my eyes open in school, for my health. But he kept me from being battered about too much, and more than once at home he took the blame for something I’d done, and took the beating, too. I looked up to him, heaven help me.” He shrugged, an affected careless gesture that wasn’t entirely convincing. “We’re not exactly friendly anymore. But he’s not all bad.”

  “I hope not,” Ned said, and was surprised to find that he meant it. “I’ll do what I can to find evidence enough to persuade him to recant. It can’t be easy for the family having him in Holloway.”

  “I should think not. Although Alice is being surprisingly sensible about it all. She’s a better woman than he deserves. And at least Mater has Ellis to rely on, for what he’s worth. I imagine they’ll be married as soon as she’s out of mourning.”

  Further reassuring platitudes evaporated from Ned’s mind abruptly. “Your mother and Mr Ellis?”

  “I can’t fathom her taste, but apparently he pursued her when they were both young, as many aeons ago as that must have been. To no effect, but he’s been hanging about her for years. It used to drive the pater wild, but of course there couldn’t be any harm in it, not with Ellis being a man of the cloth. All perfectly respectable.”

  “Perfectly,” Ned said, his thoughts racing. “I’m afraid I have an appointment in a few minutes, Mr Nevett. But I promise you I’ll do what I can.”

  “I suppose I ought to go and see him,” Freddie said. “Is it very awful though? I’ve never been in a prison.”

  “It’s a bit grim. But it would be the decent thing to do.”

  “I suppose,” Freddie said, although Ned wasn’t sure whether he’d bring himself to do it or not. “I appreciate it, Mathey.”

  “If you have another client this morning, it’s news to me,” Miss Frost said when Freddie had gone.

  “And to me,” Ned said. “I’m going to talk to Lynes.”

  Julian paced his sitting room, the dinner tray picked over and discarded on the table, where the Urtica mordax slowly extended tendrils in its direction. Bolster had lost Annie Makins, and just when it was beginning to look as though there was some connection between her husband’s murder and Nevett’s. If in fact there had been a burglary, what would be its purpose? Presumably to distract the police from seeing the enchantment, and to put the blame on a burglar surprised at his work. And it would have worked, too, if the candlestick hadn’t remained by the body. If the burglar had taken it along with the rest of the silver, there wouldn’t have been much to show that curse had been used – the police surgeon would have needed to be far more astute than Carruthers had ever been even to think to look, and any traces would have faded as rigor set in. And that meant someone in the house had indeed left the back gate open – Sarah Doyle, almost certainly, and that must have been what frightened her into running away. Whether or not anyone had actually threatened her, she had known she was implicated in Nevett’s death. But how had she been persuaded to help in the first place? Bolster said the mission’s inmates were all thoroughly cowed, afraid to put a foot wrong for fear of disappointing Mr Ellis. But of course that was it: if Ellis had told her to leave the gate open, she would have done it without question, and only later seen what she’d done.

  “Damn the man,” he said aloud, and leaned against the window frame. Ellis hadn’t killed Sarah Doyle, not directly, but he’d been as responsible for her death as though he’d pushed her in front of the horses himself. And Annie Makins was somewhere in the East End, on her own and vulnerable. “Damn and blast him to hell.”

  The post had arrived half a dozen times already, but there had been nothing for him. Even so, he saw the postman approaching from the end of the street, and his breath caught. Surely there would be something from Bolster by now, or maybe from Ned, if he’d been able to get the information they needed from Miss Frost. He couldn’t shake the feeling that time was slipping away, that he was missing some important chance, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what it was.

  He heard the postman arrive, Mina’s voice faint in the hall as she accepted the letters. He listened for her footsteps on the stairs, snatched the door open as soon as she knocked. She gave a little gasp of surprise, but handed over the bundle of letters. He sorted through them immediately, not bothering to close the door, and his shoulders slumped as he saw what he had. Bills, his usual professional correspondence, but nothing from Bolster, or even from Ned. “Damn the man,” he muttered again, and Mina blinked nervously.

  “Sir?”

  Julian forced a smile. “Never mind, Mina, I wasn’t – I’m expecting a letter today, but it isn’t here.”

  “Oh, I’ll keep an eye out, sir.”

  “Thank you.” Julian shut the door and tossed the bundle of letters onto his desk, starting to pace again. Part of him wanted to head out into the streets himself, but he knew perfectly well that Bolster would do a better job. Perhaps there was something he could do metaphysically – dowse for Mrs Makins, or use some other scrying technique, but even as the idea formed, he rejected it. He had nothing with which to create a correspondence, no link beyond the two shillings she had paid him, and those had been handled by so many people that they were next to useless. He swore again, glaring blindly at the window, and there was a knock at the door.

  He leaped to open it, to find Mina with her hand raised to knock again.

  “Oh, sir, you startled me!”

  Julian controlled himself, seeing the folded paper in her hand. “I’m sorry, Mina. Is that for me?”

  “Yes, sir.” She held out the paper, a sheet from a cheap tablet, the sort used in poorer schools, folded in quarters and soft with much handling. “A boy came to the kitchen door with this, said it was for you.”

  “Is he still there?”

  Mina shook her head. “No, sir. That’s what’s really odd. He didn’t even stay to earn a penny.”

  Bolster, Julian thought. He said, “If he comes back, give him this from me.” He fished in his pocket, came up with a pair of sixpences. “And keep the other for yourself.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, and bobbed a curtsy.

  Julian closed the door and hastily unfolded the note. Not Bolster, definitely not his handwriting, and not writing that Julian recognized. The words were printed with a blunt pencil, the lines thick and clumsy, the hand of a man who didn’t write often. Or a woman.

  Mr Lynes I am in terrible trouble. Please meet me at No. 4 Josiah Street by the Gas Works. I am staying there under the name Shanley. Come alone and for God’s sake don’t tell Bolster. Annie Makins.

  Julian stared at it for a long moment, then cleared a space on the table and pinned the corners with an inkwell and the salt shaker. He reached into his desk for his wa
nd, and sketched a sigil, looking for underlying enchantments. There was no response, but he worked his way through the full series, curbing his impatience, until he was satisfied that the note carried no hidden curse. He drew a second series of signs, a sigil intended to reveal whether the writer had signed her own name, and the response flickered blue around the letters of Mrs Makins’s name: she had written it, all right.

  But not, he thought, of her own free will. There were no good ways of testing that by enchantment, at least not without the sort of physical correspondences that he still lacked, but it really wasn’t necessary. Annie Makins would never have contacted him first, and she would never have told him not to contact Bolster.

  A trap, then – and he could guess who’d set it – but not something that could be ignored. If Mrs Makins was the bait in a trap, and the trap was never sprung, the bait would simply be discarded. He couldn’t let that happen.

  He went to his desk, scratched out a note to Ned, telling him that Mrs Makins was found and to come at once, then shouted down the stairs for young Digby. If he was home, he would get the message to Ned at the Commons even faster than a telegram would reach him. He held his breath, listening for an answer, allowed himself a sigh of relief as he heard young Digby scrambling toward him.

  “Take this to Mr Mathey at the Commons,” he said, and held out the note and sixpence. “Tell him it’s urgent. There’s a florin in it for you if he’d here within the hour.”

  “I’ll fetch him, sir,” young Digby said, and hurried down the stairs, overleaping the last three treads entirely. Julian bit back the impulse to tell him not to break his neck, and closed his door again. Now there was nothing to do but wait, and he hated waiting.

  He pulled out his set of London insurance maps, turned to the pages that showed the gas works, and found Josiah Street after a brief search. It was a cul-de-sac that ran along the northern edge of the gas works; the map showed no connection to the filthy waters of the Grand Union Canal, but he was willing to bet that there was unmarked access, ideal for disposing of a body. The houses were shown as wooden tenements, labeled as rental property, except for a brick building on the corner of Harford Street that was the local pub: a typical and not very salubrious neighborhood. They could probably count on no one interfering in a fight, but by the same token, no one was going to call the police, either. For a moment, he considered warning Bolster, but rejected the idea. There was too much chance that Ellis would have people watching him as well.

  There was a knock at the door, and he looked up sharply at young Digby’s voice. “Please, Mr Lynes, it’s Mr Mathey.”

  Julian shot to his feet, and hauled the door open, relief filling him. “Mathey. Thank God.” He fished in his pocket, tossed a florin to young Digby. “Well done.”

  “Thank you, sir,” young Digby said, and Julian shut the door behind Ned, who frowned at him.

  “I was coming to you with news, but – what is it?”

  “Annie Makins is in trouble,” Julian said, and pointed to the note still spread out on the table.

  Ned shed his hat and went to read it, straightened shaking his head. “Without a doubt it’s a trap.”

  “Of course it is,” Julian said. “But she did write the note, and therefore she really is in terrible trouble.”

  “Unless they’ve disposed of her already,” Ned said, unhappily.

  Julian winced. “I don’t think they will have,” he said. “They’ll need her to lure me into striking distance – they have to assume I’m going to be too cautious to come in without seeing she’s there.”

  “That does make sense,” Ned said. “So what do we do?”

  “We go after her,” Julian answered. He stopped. “What was your news?”

  “Ellis wants to marry Louisa Nevett,” Ned said. “Freddie Nevett showed up at the Commons to tell me Victor was protecting him –”

  “Yes, we knew that,” Julian said.

  “Freddie didn’t know it,” Ned pointed out. “And in the course of the conversation, he said he expected they’d marry as soon as his mother was out of blacks. Which puts rather a different face on things, I thought.”

  “It does,” Julian said. If Ellis wanted to marry Louisa – and if she reciprocated the feeling, which seemed likely enough, given the clergyman’s constant presence – a divorce would have destroyed that possibility completely. “Do you think they’re having an affair already?”

  Ned shrugged. “Freddie says not, but he based that on Ellis being too respectable.”

  Julian grinned in spite of himself. “I can’t say I find that conclusive. But that can wait. We need to deal with Mrs Makins now.”

  “What did you have in mind?” Ned asked.

  Julian looked back at the fire map, trying to imagine the streets around the gas works. “We have to go,” he said. “But I’m damned if I see what to do once we get there.”

  “I need to change clothes,” Ned said. “I can’t go into Stepney looking like this. And then – we’ll figure it out.”

  “Yes,” Julian said, unaccountably relieved. He reached into his desk for the revolver he kept there, checked the cylinder, and lowered the hammer again on the empty chamber. Ned nodded approval, and Julian caught up his weighted stick. “Let’s go.”

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  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ned changed clothes as quickly as he could while Julian paced Ned’s bedroom. “Once we get into the house, it’ll be easy for them to get the better of us,” Ned said, shrugging on his oldest coat and trading his top hat for a sporting cap.

  “They won’t let her come out into the street. I do have the pistol, at least.”

  “That’s a help. Only…” Ned hesitated, and then decided that at the moment realism was more important than tact. “Do you actually know how to shoot?”

  “I’ve practiced. A bit. Shooting at a target.”

  “Did you hit the target?”

  “Some of the time. I don’t keep it to shoot at people.”

  Ned had to ask. “Whatever do you keep it for, then?”

  “For threatening people with,” Julian said, as if that should be obvious. “That’s all I’ve ever needed to do.”

  “Well, suppose we go in and you threaten them with it.”

  “It lacks the element of surprise,” Julian said.

  In the adventure novels they’d both read as boys, the heroes would have kicked the door down, stormed in with pistols in hand, and tied up the cowering villains at once, winning a kiss from the pretty girl rescued from deadly peril. It was possible real life wouldn’t play out quite as neatly. “Suppose I sneak in the back while you go in the front,” Ned said. “Ellis can’t have sent an entire army. Probably just one or two men. I’ll jump one of them by way of creating a distraction, and then you can threaten them with your pistol.”

  “That ought to work,” Julian said, with more confidence than Ned felt.

  The cul-de-sac was patched with mud, its ramshackle houses overshadowed by the looming bulk of the gas works. The odor that hung in the air was nauseating, enough so that Ned felt it a wonder anyone could eat their meals in the surrounding houses, but he supposed it made rooms there cheap to rent. The pub was crowded despite the oppressive stench, and the street busy enough that no one paid them any attention as they stood at the corner, eying the house Annie’s note had named. There was nothing to distinguish it from any of the other in the row.

  “You go around the back, then,” Julian said. “I’ll give you two minutes to get in before I go.”

  “Generous of you,” Ned said. “Suppose the servants’ entrance is locked?”

  “Why should it be?”

  “Because there’s a woman being kept prisoner inside the house?”

  “Pick the lock, then.”

  “How would I do that?”

  Julian shook his head. “We really must further your education. All right, we’ll both go round to the back, I’ll make sure you can get in, and then I’ll come around to the f
ront.”

  It seemed risky, but better than being left unable to open the door while Julian walked into a trap. “Let’s go.”

  There was a narrow walk between the back of the row and the curved tower of the gas holder, not so much an alley as a path. They had to pass a gas works watchman at his post, but he paid them no mind, apparently used to the residents taking the short cut behind the row. Ned held up a hand to stop Julian, and sketched an enchantment in the air, deepening the shadows behind Number 4.

  Julian nodded appreciation and followed him through the shadows to the back door of the row house. He could still move silently as a cat, Ned noted, one more of the skills they’d learned at Toms’ coming in handy for them both now. Ned glanced up at the windows above, and then stealthily reached out and tried the door.

  He turned to Julian, frowning. Locked, he mouthed.

  Julian crouched, looking at the lock with focused concentration. He was fishing in his pocket when movement at the window above, a man’s form silhouetted against patched curtains, caught Ned’s eye. He caught Julian’s arm and pointed upward.

  Julian made a face. He pointed at Ned’s wand questioningly, and Ned shook his head. The enchantment threw them into artificially deep shadow, but it didn’t confer invisibility. If they stayed here fiddling with the door, they’d surely be seen.

  More than that, there were too many figures moving behind the windows; with the alley darkened, the lights within showed at least half a dozen people behind the drawn curtains, maybe more. Too many to easily overpower. He gestured that they should retreat, and after a moment’s reluctance Julian followed him back to the corner.

  “Too many,” Ned said. “Damn it, has Ellis got that many villains working for him?”

  “More likely one of his men has friends here,” Julian said. “But you’re right, it’s too many. We need some kind of distraction.” He looked up at the gas holder with an alarming speculative gleam in his eye.