“This just came for you, Miss Cooper. A grim-looking gentleman he was, but he was nicely dressed. He just left it, and said he would call some other time.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Hudson.” Evelina took the letter, and continued on.
Exhaustion dragged at her feet, and she was infinitely glad to see the small, tidy room the landlady had prepared for her. Mouse and Bird were chasing each other over the dressing table in a complicated game of tag, bickering as they scampered over the soap and towels her hostess had left out. They had both volunteered to go with her to her grandmother’s. Earth devas rarely traveled, and they were eager to see a new part of the world.
She took a closer look at the envelope. It was fine cream paper addressed in a bold, sweeping hand. Miss Evelina Cooper. The red wax seal was marked with a plain circle. Curious to see who had sent it—she’d only been at Baker Street for a half hour, so who knew she was there?—she broke the wax and unfolded the note. It was dated that day.
Miss Cooper,
The Divine gave birth to Wisdom and gave Her the name Helen. He sent Her to comfort His creatures, and give them succor in their ignorance and pain. She dwells in the body of woman, the perfect soul incarnate in beauty. I have sought Her for millenia, even attempted to make Her with my own hands. Have I finally found Her in you?
As I suspected, your natural talents are unsurpassed. There will come a time when you want answers, when the mysteries shall be mysteries no more. Then I shall find you and teach you the vast universe of what there is to do and know and imagine, my luminous Evelina.
Dr. Symeon Magnus
She dropped the note back to the dressing table as if it were red-hot. “Impossible,” she said aloud. He was dead. Nick had seen him die.
“What is it?”
Evelina whirled around. Imogen was in the doorway, a plaintive look on her face.
Evelina was suddenly disoriented. “How did you get here?”
“For you, I climbed out a window and caught a cab. I’m not helpless, you know. You left without saying good-bye.” Imogen’s gaze went to the paper in her hand. “What’s impossible?”
Wordlessly, she handed over the note. Imogen read, her hand coming up to cover her mouth as her eyes got wider and wider. “Dear Lord in Heaven. How is it possible he lived?”
“There are all kinds of death magic, and he’s a sorcerer. Or this is just a vicious joke.”
Without warning, Imogen flung her arms around Evelina in a fierce embrace. “Oh, don’t go.”
Evelina squeezed her eyes shut, forcing back another wave of tears. “I have to.”
Imogen held her tight, her shoulders starting to shake with grief. “You’ll leave me behind.”
Evelina swallowed hard. “No I won’t. I stick like tar, you’ll see.”
Then Imogen started to cry in earnest, her words crumbling at the edges. “If you go, that means we’re at the end. My parents will marry me off to someone horrible and you’ll go to school and I’ll never see you. I’ve already lost one sister. My family is going mad. I don’t want to lose you, too.”
Evelina buried her face in Imogen’s golden hair, hurting for her friend. Hurting for herself.
A young woman had been seduced and killed, and the killers still roamed free. The two young men she loved had proven innocent of that crime, but were guilty nonetheless—and she had played a part in their fall. And now the dead were sending her letters, tempting her more than she cared to say. Evelina might have been dismissed from Hilliard House, but she wasn’t walking away from anything.
“This isn’t the end,” she whispered to Imogen. “Not by a long shot.”
Excerpt from A Study in Darkness
The door to 221B Baker Street opened and a body hurtled over the threshold, causing Evelina Cooper to skitter backward. The body landed with a wheeze on the hot sidewalk, arms and legs sprawling.
In her haste to back up, Evelina stepped into the street itself and narrowly avoided collision with a speeding steam cycle. With a silent curse, she caught her balance against the wrought-iron post of a gaslight, wondering what sort of a mood her uncle was in. Projectile clients were never a good sign.
The man on the sidewalk moaned. One hand groped awkwardly, as if seeking any solid object to cling to, and fastened on her right foot in its gray kid boot. As the only weapon Evelina had was her parasol, she swiped at the importunate fingers, delivering a smart tap with the furl of pale pink silk.
“Sir, unhand my toes.” She frowned. That hadn’t sounded quite right.
The man didn’t move, instead emitting another groan. She studied him for a moment, the August sun warm against her shoulders. His limbs appeared to bend in the usual places and no blood was pooling around the prone body, but he lay perfectly still. Delicately, she pushed his fingers away with the ivory tip of her parasol and wondered whether she should send for Dr. Watson. The good doctor had married and moved out of Baker Street, but he always came at once when her uncle required his services—which seemed to be with disturbing regularity.
Evelina’s shoulders hunched. Passers-by were giving her strange looks. As she looked up, a lady with a perambulator crossed the street, obviously avoiding the strange tableau.
“Spare him no sympathy, niece of mine, he is but refuse tossed into the gutter.” The voice came from the doorway. Evelina turned to see Sherlock Holmes glowering out at them. Tall and spare, his black-suited form was an exclamation point in the doorway. The long, lean lines of his face pulled into a frown. He jerked his chin toward the sprawling form. “That individual is engaged in a perfidious plot. I suggest you step away from him at once. Quickly.”
They hadn’t seen each other for months, and one might have expected a hello or a polite enquiry about one’s health—but Evelina knew better than to expect social niceties from Holmes when there was a villain adorning the front walk. “A plot to what end?”
“Come inside and I’ll give you the details.”
“What about him?”
“I’ll call a street sweeper,” Holmes said mordantly.
Evelina caught a glimpse of movement from the fallen man, but her attention didn’t stay on him. Suddenly the house rumbled, and then a cloud of thick black smoke belched from the upstairs study window. There was a female shriek behind Holmes.
“Mrs. Hudson!” Evelina cried, and Holmes turned to check on his landlady.
The man on the ground chose that moment to spring to life. He rolled away from Evelina, coming to his feet in a practiced move. She saw the shape of a gun as his coat swung wide with the motion. Acting on instinct, she thrust the point of her parasol into his spine, the force of the blow splintering the wooden handle of her makeshift weapon. He staggered forward with a grunt, but then he used the momentum to sprint toward the door, drawing the gun as he ran.
Panic bit hard and fast, freezing a cry of outrage deep in her throat. Evelina grabbed for the man, but her fingers just brushed the back of his wool coat. She followed as quickly as a bustle and corset would allow, skirts swinging like a bell, but he was already through the door. She grabbed the frame and hauled herself forward, narrowly avoiding a fall as her heel caught on the sill. She skidded to a stop in the dim light of the front hall. She was alone.
Her uncle had vanished, as had his attacker. Evelina turned slowly, taking in her surroundings. Smoke hung in the air like stinking black breath, but there was no damage she could see. The explosion—for that was surely what had caused the disturbance—had been confined upstairs. And where was Mrs. Hudson?
For a moment the only sound was the clamor of voices outside. A man with a booming voice was explaining that the detective who lived upstairs was a chemist, fond of smelly experiments. An old gent with a wheezy tenor was sure the radicals had struck. No one barged in with offers of help.
“Mrs. Hudson?” she asked in a stage whisper.
“I’m here.” The housekeeper materialized at the door leading to the lower apartments. She was still a handsome woman, straigh
t-backed and neat as a pin, but now her face was ashen. “That man chased your uncle up to his study.”
Evelina edged toward the foot of the stairs. Pausing for a moment, she listened to the sudden, ominous silence. Her brain wanted to lunge forward, but her feet were obstinately glued to the carpet. Evelina didn’t like the fact the armed man had the higher ground and the staircase offered no cover, but there was no alternative—except to do nothing.
A gunshot cracked overhead, echoing ferociously in the tiny front hall. Somewhere on the second floor, a window smashed. Evelina looked up at the sweep of the staircase that led to her uncle’s suite. Feet thundered overhead. Evelina grabbed her parasol more tightly, and then noticed its splintered handle. It drooped like a wilted tulip. She tossed it aside and picked up the no-nonsense broom that Mrs. Hudson had left beside the door.
“You’re not going up there, young lady!” Mrs. Hudson announced, grabbing Evelina’s arm. “I’m fetching the constables.”
The landlady was being perfectly reasonable, but the voices inside Evelina were not. She had lost her parents, and Holmes was the one remaining relative who had shown her any understanding. She wasn’t about to squeal and run away in a flutter of ribbons—and after growing up in a circus, she had more skills than the average debutante. “You go. I’ll do more good here.”
“Miss Cooper!” the landlady protested.
“I’ll be fine.” Evelina heard her voice crack with doubt, but somehow speaking the words broke her stasis. Lifting her skirts in one hand, she took all seventeen stairs in a single, silent rush, the broom poised for action. She crept toward Holmes’s study door, staying close to the wall. The smell of gunpowder was thick enough to make her nose run.
Crack! She heard a bullet hit the plaster on the opposite side of the wall, from within her uncle’s study. It punched through the wall just above her head and dust rained down, tickling her face. Evelina hurried the last few steps to the study entrance, peering around the carved oak of the door frame. A quick glance told her the path to Dr. Watson’s old desk was clear. Watson had always kept his service revolver there. She wondered whether her uncle, who adapted to change with as much ease as rocks learned to fly, had replenished the firearm drawer when the doctor had left.
But the thought went by in an instant, pushed aside by the tableau directly ahead. Holmes knelt on the bearskin rug before the fireplace, facing Evelina. The stranger stood with his back to her, his gun aimed at Holmes’s head. Swirls of black particles sifted through the air, eddying on the warm August breeze and settling on the litter of papers and other debris scattered across the floor. The room—never exactly tidy—was in a terrible state, but she didn’t take the time to thoroughly catalogue the damage. That could wait.
“We were having a conversation before you threw me out,” the man growled at Holmes.
Evelina noticed the accent sounded neither working class nor quite gentry. That made him one of the many in between. These were hard times for men like that, so many trying to scrabble upward while most slid further behind. And that fit with his clothes—tidy, but inexpensive, his shoes in need of patching. In any other circumstances she might have taken him for a clerk or a lesser type of tutor—almost middle aged, non-descript, and the type one would pass without a second look. Of course, that might have been the whole idea.
Holmes said nothing, his entire body as communicative as the fire screen behind him.
“There’s no point in keeping quiet.” The man shifted his grip on the gun, as if his hand was growing tired. At the same time, he was using one foot to move the papers around on the floor, taking quick glances to see what they were. More correspondence had landed on the nearby basket chair, and he picked up a handful, quickly scanning the letters and tossing them aside. Clearly, he was looking for something.
At least that meant he was fully occupied. Silently balanced on the balls of her feet, Evelina eased into the room. She saw a minute tightening of her uncle’s mouth, but he gave no other indication that he saw her.
Now what? She took another glance around the room. Some of the furniture had tipped over in the blast, but other pieces, like the table and desks, were still miraculously upright. Watson’s desk was directly to her right, just past the dining table. If she moved in utter silence, she could open the drawer, grab the gun she hoped was there—and loaded—and shoot the intruder before he shot her or her uncle. If she remained utterly silent and if she were fast enough, her plan might work.
Or she could creep up and knock him unconscious with the broom handle. She might get shot that way, too, but the whole scheme sounded simpler.
“Even if you think your way out of this with that big head of yours,” the man went on while throwing more papers to the floor, “someone else will come. I won’t be your only visitor, I can promise you that. The Steam Council is on to you.”
The Steam Council? That was what the men and women who ruled the great utility companies called themselves. She had met one of these steam barons—Mr. Jasper Keating, the one they called the Gold King after the yellow-tinted globes he used to mark all the gaslights his company supplied. They all indicated their territories like that—the Blue King, the Violet Queen, and the rest. At sunset, the multicolored globes turned London into a patchwork glory of light. It was a beautiful sight, even though it was evidence of the stranglehold the council had on London and all the Empire.
So what did the steam barons want with her uncle? As far as she knew, Holmes was in favor with Keating after he had exposed a forgery scheme that had robbed the Gold King of a fortune in antique artifacts. If they survived the next hour, she would have to ask.
Lifting the broom high, Evelina ghosted forward, walking slowly so that her skirts didn’t rustle.
“Your brother knows who the members of the shadow government are. But he is a hard man to catch outside the walls of his home or club.”
Holmes finally spoke, only the quickness of his words betraying his nerves. “If you believe that I have my brother’s complete confidence, you are sorely mistaken.”
“Putting a hole in your head might draw him out.”
A derisive smirk flickered over Holmes’s face. “I think not.”
Evelina raised the broom high above her head.
“I’ll give it a try anyhow. Unless you want to talk.” The man snatched up a calling card, read the name and flicked it aside. Then he adjusted his aim a fraction, focussing completely on Holmes. “The council has heard the name Baskerville. They’d like to know something about that.”
Holmes lifted his brows slightly. “The steam barons have played you for a fool. Your only function here is to startle me into betraying my hand. It won’t work, and you won’t survive this.”
Evelina struck. There must have been a noise—a whistle of air through the bristles, perhaps—because the man turned at just the wrong moment. Rather than knocking him out, the broom handle glanced off his temple with a hollow crack, sending him stumbling into the basket chair next to the rug.
Then Holmes was on his feet, hammering the man in the jaw with a hard right hook. The gun went spinning away, clattering under the table. The man dove for it, but so did Evelina, using her speed and smaller size to wriggle between the chairs first. For the second time that day, he grabbed her foot, this time trying to use it to drag her out of his way. Then Holmes was on him. That gave her enough time to grab the slick handle of the revolver. It was still warm from his hand.
Evelina kicked the man off and twisted around so that she was on her knees. Holmes hauled the man back and punched him again. This time the man stayed where he fell. Evelina felt a bit ridiculous, crawling out from under the table and trying not to get tangled in her petticoats, but she eventually got to her feet.
She pointed the gun at the writhing man’s belly. “Don’t move,” she said, squeezing the weapon so that it would not shake.
“You bloody hoyden.” The man’s face twisted as red streamed down his lip and chin, bubbling with his
wheezing breaths. “I didn’t plan on killing you when I started, but I can see you’re an apple off the same tree.”
“Confine yourself to answering questions,” she said crisply.
He wiped his nose on his sleeve, staining the fabric crimson. Evelina winced in sympathy—there was little doubt Holmes had broken the man’s nose—but she kept the muzzle of the revolver squarely aimed. His eyes, red-rimmed and blurred with pain, were still bright with anger.
Holmes, with the air of one who is about to put out the trash, strode briskly toward them. He bent and, quickly and efficiently, searched the man for other weapons. He found a knife, a pocketbook—which he examined, taking out several papers and looking them over—a small flask—which he opened and sniffed—and a ticket stub from a music hall. Holmes set the items aside and took the gun from her. And however little she liked the idea of holding a man at gunpoint, Evelina felt oddly bereft as she surrendered it. A primitive instinct had already marked the intruder as her prey.
“My dear,” Holmes said, “would you please reassure the crowd outside that nothing is amiss?”
She suddenly became aware of the hubbub in the street. “What shall I tell them?”
“Whatever you like, but if you see a scruffy young lad named Wiggins, would you ask him to call for, um, just to call for our mutual friend?”
Evelina stared for a moment but knew better than to ask for details. Gingerly, she picked her way across the blasted room. Shards of glass framed the view of the brown brick building across Baker Street, with its neat white sashes and bay windows. Mrs. Hudson’s lace curtains lay in shreds.
Carefully, she put her head out the hole in the shattered pane. There was a crowd gathered below, their upturned faces all wearing identical looks of bald curiosity. Someone in the street shouted a halloo, and Evelina waved. “Nothing to worry about. Just an accident with the kettle. No need to concern yourself.”
A boy of about twelve, wearing ill-fitting clothes and ragged shoes, cupped his hands around his mouth to yell up at her. “That musta been some cuppa!”
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