A Study in Silks tba-1

by Emma Jane Holloway

  “He has an exceptional talent for mechanics, as well as the ideal family connections. His father, in particular, has access to Society. That is part of what I need. But I am also curious about Miss Cooper. I saw something of hers, an invention that quite took my breath away.”

  Nick froze inside, but he refused to let the least twitch cross his face. “She’s barely out of school.” Relieved, he heard his voice was even, not showing the alarm he felt at the thought of Evie in this dark stranger’s crosshairs.

  “She is the girl you climbed the wall of Hilliard House to see, is she not? Old enough for stolen kisses?”

  Nick turned away from Magnus, pretending to examine one of the contraptions perched on the stacks of moldering tomes. This one looked suspiciously like a miniature still, but there was no way he would ever drink the greenish liquid in the tiny flask beneath the mile of tubing.

  By the time he turned back, Nick had prepared his lie. “No, sir, I’m rather more interested in Tobias Roth’s sister. The fair-haired girl.”

  Dr. Magnus gave a sly smile, as if he were playing along with the lie. “Ah, so the golden-haired beauty likes a bit of rough, does she?”

  Nick shrugged. “She is pretty and has money.”

  “And who can fail to appreciate such straightforward charms?”

  Nick wandered idly down the length of the table. He wanted to put distance between himself and Magnus before his worry for Evelina showed on his face.

  Halfway down, a set of plans was unfurled from a clockwork scroll. He’d seen such scroll devices before. Lengths of specially prepared silk were used like paper and could be wound down to cases no larger than a pocketbook. He leaned closer to see what the plans were for.

  He caught his breath. The design was a cutaway drawing of an airship so graceful Nick thought it might float off the page. The detail was so fine, he could almost imagine walking the deck. Looking away was almost physically painful.

  Magnus kept talking, his chin resting in his hand. “I would like very much to know everything about Evelina Cooper. I want to know what she’s capable of.”

  “In what way?” Nick struggled to keep his voice casual.

  “Every way possible. I want to know every detail about the girl, no matter how trivial.” The words came out not as a statement, but as a command.

  Nick looked up sharply. “Why would I?”

  The doctor’s voice grew sly. “Shall I tell the fair-haired girl that you are secretly in love with Miss Cooper? It was Miss Cooper’s window you climbed from that night, was it not?”

  Nick didn’t answer. He didn’t know how Magnus knew that, or what invention of Evie’s he had seen, or what he intended to do with the information he wanted Nick to find. All he knew was that the man was a threat.

  Magnus lifted one brow. “Or perhaps I should simply tell the world that Miss Cooper entertains Gypsy showmen in her bedchambers.”

  Shame burned so hot that Nick flinched. His desire to see Evie had trapped them both. “How would ruining her serve your purpose?”

  “And how would it serve yours, I wonder? Would it bring her within your reach?” Magnus rose, tossing a handful of silver onto the table. “There is an advance on your wages, Nicholas No-Name. Are you going to play the cad or the truehearted knight?”

  Nick stared at the silver as if it would burn him with its touch. His fingers curled, aching to grab one of those huge books and smash the doctor’s sneering face. There was no choice here. He could spy on Evie and betray her to Magnus, or refuse his silver and ruin her future. I could refuse. I could have her then. But that was a lie. She would never thank him for sending her back to Ploughman’s, and there was no hope of keeping it a secret. Sooner or later she would find out what Nick had done. They had never been able to hide the truth from one another.

  He forced his hands to relax, joint by joint. There had to be a way to outwit Magnus. He couldn’t afford pride. Not right then. He would plan, first. He was a hawk, and would carefully select his moment to strike. You owe me one, Evie. He scooped up the silver and made a show of counting it.

  Magnus’s lip curled in disdain as Nick fondled the coin. “There will be more if you bring me something I can use.”

  “For what?”

  “That is not your concern. You wouldn’t understand even if I took the time to explain.”

  It was one insult too much. For a second, Nick’s vision went white with fury, and his fingers clenched around the coins, trembling with the urge to throw them in Magnus’s face. Evelina might not want him in the way that he had hoped, but she was his—friend, sweetheart, the closest thing he had to a sister. And no refusal of hers could stop him loving her in every way a man might love a woman. Nick might have had little more than the clothes he stood in, but he had loyalty.

  If Nick had entertained any ideas about walking away from Evie, they were gone. She still needed him. He forced his face into a nonchalant mask. “Whatever you say, sir.”

  “See what you can have to me in the next few days. There is a dinner party at Lord Bancroft’s that I shall be attending. I would like to go equipped with as much information as possible.”

  Nick gave a mocking little bow. “Very good, sir.”

  “Now get out of my house.”

  Nick glanced around, memorizing everything he could, before sauntering for the door. Magnus did not realize it, but he had just declared war.

  Chapter Nineteen

  London, April 8, 1888

  WEST END, LONDON

  10 p.m. Sunday

  Bancroft left his usual club—the Apollonius near Grosvenor—at his usual time and strolled into the clammy spring night. As always, the warmth and comfort of the smoking room clung for half a block, dissipating slowly under the plucking fingers of the breeze. The only difference between this night and any other was that instead of turning left to go to the theater—the excuse Bancroft gave for dismissing his carriage—he turned right and went to find out what Harriman wanted.

  For once, he had waved away the offer of liquid refreshment. He wanted a clear head to aim the Enfield revolver that sat comfortably beneath his coat. Tension sparked in his blood, both exhilarating and frightening. There was something about the prospect of danger that took a decade off a man’s age.

  Bancroft’s thoughts paused as a scatter of raindrops drummed on his hat. He opened his umbrella, angling it against the breeze. Showers had come and gone all day, the pavement barely drying before the sky grew dark again. Now the rain flashed across the golden globes of the Keating Utilities gaslights—bright needles that disappeared into the dark. The air had that heavy feel that promised fog before the night grew much older. Bancroft quickened his step.

  If tonight’s trip was to retrieve his last share of the gold, this was likely to be his only visit to Harriman’s lair. That meant he had to absorb every detail, catalogue every nuance of the operation he saw. Harriman, despite the boldness he showed by participating in this scheme, lacked experience. And Bancroft knew from his own past mistakes one didn’t end an enterprise like this with a toast and a fare-thee-well. There were always an astonishing number of details to tidy up, beginning with the servants who knew—literally or figuratively—where the bodies were buried.

  Grace would have been just such a loose end. He tried to imagine her face, but all he could remember was her body when he’d taken her in his private dressing room, her white limbs draped languidly across the red velvet of the chair. Her hair had smelled of Cook’s baking bread, and for a week afterward his dinner rolls had carried an erotic thrill.

  Bancroft turned a corner, hiding his face with his umbrella as he passed a crowd of young officers. Here and there dark shapes lurked in doorways and voices called softly from upstairs windows, enticing him to linger awhile. Bancroft walked on, doing his best to appear a busy man with things to do when he really wanted to stop and forget the cold and rain and memories. There was no room for weakness now.

  Does my situation make me so vulnerabl
e that I must do what Harriman says? Before he even finished the thought, he knew he wouldn’t like the answer. Yes. The twin devils of Need and Greed made him hungry enough to risk all for success. His family, his career, and his private schemes demanded it. Without those, there was no Bancroft—and he wanted that name to mean something. Talk was flying about a coup against the steam barons, a plot that went all the way to the throne and that was organized under the code name of Baskerville. A shadow government was being hand selected, and a place at that table was everything that he had been scheming for. He wanted in, and that would never happen if he were perceived as vulnerable.

  And God knew, he needed to make a move if he were going to survive Keating’s wrath. The steam baron had hit him hard by cutting him off from the network of pipes and valves that ran like life-giving veins beneath the London streets. No steam or gas meant cold and darkness—and, more important, invisibility.

  So far Keating’s official fiction about a faulty gas line had held, half disguising the truth like a sheet covering a corpse. Everyone knew Bancroft was on notice, but so far the clubs were still open to him, and the merchants who sold meat and vegetables still delivered to his kitchen on time. At a word from Keating, though, the period of grace would end, and he would be finished. Without the ubiquitous blaze of light around Hilliard House, he was marked as beyond the pale, no better than the beggars hiding in the alleys—and his dreams of a political career would be utterly obliterated.

  He had to fight back—against Keating, against the barons, against everything that stood between him and his future—and if that meant playing Harriman’s games tonight, so be it. And there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do to achieve his ends. As an ambassador, Bancroft had sat down to dinner with men who had slaughtered villages for sport and bartered their virgin daughters for a strip of barren land. He had always been willing to face the unthinkable if that meant getting the right result.

  Bancroft stopped, having reached the end of the civilized portion of his journey. And I am about to enter the underworld. The mouth of the alley was a narrow crevasse between two buildings off Bond Street—one the first in a row of shops, the other the offices of an insurance broker. Behind the respectable facades was a seemingly uneventful string of small warehouses and other utilitarian structures. Those needing access could enter by a large gate kept locked at night by a watchman, or this small gap between the buildings.

  Bancroft folded his umbrella, which was too wide to fit through the entrance. Then he felt for the hilt of his gun, listening to the street noise and trying to pick out stealthy footfalls or the whisper of drawn blades. After another heartbeat of procrastination, he angled sideways and slid between the buildings, careful not to brush against the sooty bricks.

  After a dozen steps, the alley widened until it was almost a small street on its own. Unlike most of London, it was eerily empty. And, it was very dark. Confident that he was out of sight of the main road now, he pulled a brass tube from his coat pocket and twisted it, then waited as chemicals mixed and a faint green glow began to radiate from the glass window in the side of the tube. When it was bright enough to see, he began walking again, scanning every shadow and niche. He could hear distant hammering, a man and a woman hurling heated words, and far away, someone squeezing out a sad tune on a concertina. But those noises were distant. In the alley itself, his only company was the sound of his own feet. Grace walked here, along these very same cobbles. The thought unnerved him more than he cared to admit. Was she frightened?

  The warehouse he wanted was on the right. The front was guarded by a large automaton—he could just make out the hulking shadow—so his instructions were to circle the warehouse and knock on the rear window. He rounded the corner, picking his way carefully through weeds and refuse, and then rapped on the dirty glass with the ebony handle of his umbrella.

  A smear of light flared, as if someone had moved a light closer to the glass. For a brief instant, he saw the pale outline of a face, and then it disappeared again. In another moment, a lock rattled and a narrow door opened a few feet away.

  “You’re punctual,” said Harriman as Bancroft entered. The man had stripped off his jacket and rolled up the fine white sleeves of his shirt. The silver buttons of his waistcoat glinted in the wavering light of the old oil lamp he held.

  “I see no point in delay.” Bancroft looked around. A mop and bucket leaned against the wall close to where they stood. The rest of the warehouse was a cavernous jumble of packing crates, a few workbenches, and inky shadows. His gaze traveled back to the bucket. “I smell blood.”

  “I was just cleaning it up,” Harriman said with a shrug, hooking the lamp over a nail in the raw planks of the wall. “Unfortunately, the wood is old and thirsty and the stain is impossible to get out of the grain. I’ll scatter some sawdust from the crates to hide it.”

  An uneasy tingle crept up Bancroft’s spine, making him scan the warehouse a second time. Suddenly, everything looked a good deal more sinister, especially Harriman. “Whose blood is that?”

  “Big Han was taking care of some details. I told him to keep it in the underground, but he let things get messy.” Harriman picked up a rag and wiped his hands. “Then I was left with the unfortunate task of mopping up.”

  Big Han was the mountainous foreman Harriman had hired to look after the craftsmen who did the actual work. Bancroft had met him but once, and that was enough to last a lifetime.

  “Is details your word for loose ends?” Bancroft asked. Perhaps he had underestimated Keating’s weakling cousin.

  “Loose ends,” Harriman laughed uneasily. “If you like. We couldn’t risk them talking. I debated, you know, wondering how far I really had to go. There aren’t that many Chinamen in London to speak up if one of their own went missing. Still fewer officials who would care if they did. That’s why we used them.”

  Used. Not are using. Bancroft didn’t need a slide rule to figure out which way Harriman’s decision had gone. The twelve workers had died. It wasn’t just Grace anymore, but thirteen souls who had perished to buy his gold. A wash of dizzy nausea swamped Bancroft, but he let it pass through him. He’d had years of practice at this sort of thing. “All the workers were unknowns? There won’t be family pounding on the door?”

  “No. The Chinese here are a transient group. Sailors—here one day and gone the next. Many of these were fresh off the boat. No one to recognize their handiwork, even if there was something in the replica pieces to recognize.”

  “But surely master goldsmiths cannot be that common amid a population of sailors?”

  “I’m not sure how Big Han found them. He has contacts that stretch back to Canton. But in any event, we only had two masters. The rest were ’prentices and laborers plucked off the ships.”

  Bancroft’s mind raced, looking for weaknesses in the plan. “All the workers are gone? All twelve?”

  “As Han put it, he fed them to Mother Tyburn tonight. In pieces.” Harriman threw the rag onto a pile of debris stacked against the wall. “Come. I will show you.”

  “Is this something I really need to see?” Bancroft asked warily.

  “If you want your gold,” Harriman answered. “If I had to mop up blood all night, the least you can do is take a look at the pit I’ve been suffering with for all these months.”

  Bancroft bristled. Harriman had been the workhorse while he had been the instigator of the plan. That had been the deal, and the man had no grounds for resentment. But all too often, that wasn’t how things worked—especially now that Bancroft was having difficulties with Harriman’s powerful cousin. It was far more expedient to appease Harriman than to try to put him in his place, so Bancroft made himself nod. “If you wish.”

  Harriman gave a derisive laugh. “Good of you, Your Lordship.”

  He kicked aside a pile of sawdust, exposing an iron ring in the floor at least three hand spans across. It clattered as he gripped it and then, with a grunt, he heaved a trapdoor open. There was a light on below, becau
se a faint yellow wash illuminated a crude flight of wooden steps. Bancroft caught a dank waft of sewer stench. It stinks as badly as the rest of this.

  Harriman watched him closely. “You have no taste for what lies below the surface?”

  “Are you trying to be metaphorical, Harriman?” Bancroft growled. “Leave it to poets.”

  The man had the gall to smirk. “I’ll go first.”

  Harriman’s footsteps echoed on the stairs. Bancroft followed, one hand on his pistol, the other holding a handkerchief to his nose against the acrid smell. “Does this lead right to the banks of an underground sewer?”

  “Not quite. That’s some ways off.”

  “I hear water.”

  Harriman reached the bottom and turned. “We’re near the Tyburn down here, or that’s what the locals say.”

  Now Bancroft could see the basement clearly. It seemed to wander far beyond the confines of the warehouse—less part of the warehouse than a cavern under the street. There were proper walls on two sides of the space, but ahead of the stairs and to the right, the space seemed to wander on forever. It looked as if the street might have been raised at some point, covering over older levels, or perhaps man had simply added to nature’s plan for underground caves. The ceiling was rough stone, higher in some places than others. “I had no idea this was down here.”

  “London is full of surprises.”

  And some of them are nasty. Bancroft reached the bottom of the stairs and froze. Now he could see what Harriman had referred to as the pit. It occupied the space directly under the warehouse. Here the ceiling was high, showing the wooden supports of the building above, and lighting was in place. Gas lines ran along the wall and supplied a small generator. A series of workbenches made a loose square. A forge, equipment for electroplating, a kiln, and a plethora of other tools neatly lined the work area and hung from the rafters above. Had it been upstairs in bright sunlight, it was the sort of workshop Bancroft might have used himself in long-ago days. But that was not what caught his attention. It was the row of cages that ran along two sides of the room. They were the source of the stink—the combined odors of unwashed humanity, airless quarters, night soil, and despair.