The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway

by Karina Cooper

  “Why?” I studied the tea with a sudden pang of hunger. I hadn’t considered a snack, but the pastries upon the plate looked all too appetizing.

  “During your mother’s time,” she said, surprising me with her ready answer, “the Strangeway name was one of wealth and mystique. Unfortunately, the family squandered all they had. If the Strangeway son is returned, he is only one more impoverished Irish immigrant, I’m afraid. Far flung from his family of old.”

  “Is he sniffing about for an heiress, then?”

  “Cherry St. Croix!”

  I paused, cake halfway to my mouth, and realized all at once what I’d said. This time, I shoved the cake in my mouth to ensure I wouldn’t lapse into a fit of humor. The sound I made was apologetic. Barely.

  Fanny worked hard to undo the marks of the street. I hadn’t quite softened all the corners, but I would learn. In time.

  As Fanny droned on and on, about this soiree or that lesson, this appointment or that function, I worked it over in my thoughts.

  So, I had been right. Mr. J. F. Strangeway was, in fact, a wastrel—a good-for-nothing, likely a fortune-seeker.

  No wonder the keeper of the bounty desired to call in the debts owed. A man like Mr. Strangeway could not possibly expect to repay such a fortune without a marriage, and no decent family would marry a man whose name had fallen so far.

  Such was the crux of it; the bitter pill which those who fall from grace must suffer.

  So, then, why did he continue to fritter his time in the stews?

  It made no sense, but then, men were prone to nonsensical things. A bought woman and a chancy game were often all a man needed to soothe the day.

  Men as him were ripe for a charmed picking.

  It seemed an eternity until Fanny departed, somber and quiet. Out of deference for the occasion, I forced myself to read peacefully for a quarter of an hour. Booth came into the parlor, my requested tea tray balanced easily in his hands, deposited his burden upon the lacquered table, and left again.

  The instant I heard the door close—the moment I heard the rhythmic step-thunk-step of my one-legged butler clear the hall—I flung the tome to the patterned settee and ran, skirts in hand, up the stairs. The noise was akin to a stampede, or so the shout from my surprised housekeeper suggested, but I ignored it.

  I shut my boudoir tight, found the letter, and unfolded it. The coin I’d expected slid from the corner, to thunk heavily against the Oriental rug that kept the worst of the drafts away during London’s wet winters.

  The note was succinct.

  There is no progress. Your allotted time is wasted. They took our own, now we’ll take theirs. Sullivan’s orders stand Tuesday.

  The hand that printed this was not fine, but it was boldly lettered, punctuated by numbers and another name.

  730Praed.

  Cramped together as it was, I could only just make out the name of the street north of the remnants of Hyde Park. An address, perhaps? A location? Praed Street was, of course, a commonly traversed one, placed square within Paddington and near enough to St. Mary’s Hospital to be an easy jaunt.

  Yet Paddington, for all its proximity to a hospital, was not a place to step lightly. By night, I was sure it would be filled to the brim with cutpurses, ruffians, abram men and their ilk. By day, it would be just as busy, for its setting practically in the center of all would guarantee traffic of the pedestrian and horse-drawn kind.

  There was no other name than Sullivan’s attached to the strange missive, and though I had expected something pertaining to the identity of my rival, I had not expected a warning.

  It sounded a threat.

  Was Sullivan the collector? Was he something else? I knew of no Sullivans ensconced above the drift, yet that meant little enough. I did not much care to spend my time memorizing the names of the lords and ladies I had no love for, and the gossip columns were dry, boring stuff for reading. What I retained there could have been contained in a thimble.

  I knelt, sweeping aside the layers of my dress to fish the copper piece out from under the vanity it had rolled beneath. The size of it surprised me; a full nail’s width larger than any of Her Majesty’s currencies and a bit heavier, beside.

  I held the imprinted copper to the light, squinting as I sat back on my bed. The paper crinkled as I turned the piece this way and that. The indentation had been all but ground away, as if worn time and time again by some action of rubbing.

  There were letters. An I, I think. An R and an H, and the remnants of an S. A hole bored in the top marred the rest.

  A pendant, then; not a coin as such.

  Though a B was visible at the right side, most of the facing had been smoothed away on the left, leaving me with what looked to be some kind of masted sky ship, much like those that comprised Her Majesty’s Navy. Its aft was rounded, a cloud of what I took for steam lopsided from the wear.

  What kind of clue was this?

  My hands, each holding coin and parchment, lowered to the pool of pale blue my day dress had become on the neatly tucked bedclothes. I stared at nothing in particular for a while, then gave up on nothing and briefly considered the glint of light upon the remnants of ruby red liquid within its crystal glass.

  It winked at me, a subtle fascination, while the words I’d stolen filtered through my rapidly chattering brain.

  No progress had been given to what? Allotted time? Was the collector to achieve a goal? A collection, perhaps. Yet was it not strange for a collector to communicate direct with the purse?

  I didn’t know. I had no real experience to draw upon.

  With as large a purse as Mr. Strangeway’s, I wouldn’t risk the attempt to ask any other collectors I might be able to find. I could not be sure that they’d be trustworthy.

  730Praed.

  What if it were a time? Half past seven. Somewhere on Praed? Was the coin a symbol, then? A token of...secrecy? A clue of location?

  I couldn’t very well wander on down and wait for the solution to fall into my lap. I hadn’t yet replaced my own common sense with that of Fanny’s voice, but even as rebellious as I was, I knew that a girl from above the drift could not simply visit below like it were nothing to worry over.

  But what was to happen upon Praed Street?

  Chapter Five

  Tucking the paper into my sleeve, I left my boudoir, scowling fiercely over the quandary. I flipped the coin in one hand as I walked, an idle gesture reminiscent of the game shakers in Monsieur Marceaux’s tents, and briefly considered the old trick of flipping it edge to edge across my knuckles.

  I didn’t. I’d never been quick enough to master the showmanship of it, and with my luck, I’d tumble headlong down the stairs as I tried. Instead, I only flipped it into the air, caught it with every step. As I passed the carved lion newels at the foot of the stairs, I paused.

  The medallion hit my palm. I curled my fingers around it tightly.

  This was the key to it all, I was certain of it; an instinct that would serve me well in this profession. When, of course, I had developed the ability to translate what it was that it said to me.

  Step-thunk. Step. Booth’s awkward pace slowed just to my right. “Are you quite done with your tea in the study, miss?” Mild reproach. I’d left my untouched tea to go cold.

  “Yes, please.” I tilted my head, blowing an errant curl from my cheek, and captured the head of the silently roaring lion to lean away from it like an anchor. “Booth, I’ve a question.”

  “Of course.” If he worried for my balance, he made no noise about it. Fanny would have scolded.

  “Have you ever visited Praed Street?”

  He shifted. I heard the click of his ornately filigreed prosthetic as it touched the floor. “That I have.”

  “Is there anything of note nearby?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  I allowed my weight to swing me around the newel, a rustle of crisp blue linen and the frothy underpinnings of the crinoline I still occasionally tripped over. For that
reason, I kept my hand atop the lion’s gaping roar as I stepped off the final stair and into the hall my butler occupied.

  He carried a silver platter beneath his arm, tucked neatly without rumpling the crisp black uniform he so prided himself upon. Although some might consider it unruly, his full head of white hair—as leonine a mane as the lion beside me could wish for—matched the impressive sideburns at his jaw.

  Others might find the stump of his missing leg much more peculiar, but for me, he was and always would be simply Booth. Losing a leg in service to Her Majesty conspired to give my butler the air of savage nobility—a fact that earned him my undying devotion, for he was a gentleman pirate in those young eyes and forever would be.

  He was always gloved, impeccably groomed, and his gray eyes never laughed at me, or sparked in irritation. Now, they regarded me as seriously as if I’d asked no more strange a question than the nature of the weather.

  “‘Twas something I read,” I replied airily, with all the hauteur of a lady. Or, rather, how I assumed such a lady might behave. “Do you know what may be happening about half past seven somewhere on Praed? Or perhaps within Paddington?”

  His full white eyebrows beetled. “Seven-thirty?” With his free hand, he reached into his waistcoat and withdrew a small silver pocket watch, polished to perfection. It was similar to the brass one I’d nicked years ago, but much finer, and in greater repair. “I don’t seem to recall any events planned, not with Hallowe’en already tomorrow.”

  I blinked at him in silent dismay. Hallowe’en. I’d all but forgotten. In the two years I’d lived in this, my new home, we had never observed the event as Society enjoyed it, no matter how I begged and pleaded to go to Balmoral Castle for the celebrations.

  Like as not the only event I’d ever truly wanted to experience alongside the Society who most days treated me as one might a bothersome rash. It would be years before I would be so fortunate.

  “Bugger,” I muttered.

  He cleared his throat. “Was there something you required, young miss? Shall I attend to an errand for you?”

  I waved that away, gathering my skirts in my free hand so that I could better stalk back to the parlor and the book I had abandoned. “No need,” I assured him, albeit grumpy for it. Had I missed whatever time, whatever place, and with whatever conspirators?

  Bloody bells and damn this collection to perdition.

  Booth watched me pass in the hall, a particularly patient mien written upon his otherwise studiously decorous expression. It cracked only a fraction when I whirled, skirts fisted in my free hand.

  “Do you know the name Strangeway?” I demanded.

  “Strangeway?” His deep baritone smoothed once more to propriety. “I can’t say that I do, miss.”

  “What of Sullivan?”

  His brow furrowed. “No, miss.”

  “Have you ever seen this before?” I held out my palm, ungloved because I had not quite gotten used to the intricacies that demanded a lady keep her gloves on nearly all the time. I always left them lying about.

  Booth, to his estimable credit, did not behave in any way different than the custom. Though his eyebrows raised, he obediently studied the coin lying on my bare palm. Then, with a deferential, “May I?” he took the medallion gently between one white-gloved thumb and forefinger.

  I waited in barely concealed impatience while he studied the facing, turning it beneath the oil lamps lit to combat the day’s fading light. Late October often turned darker early in London’s autumnal blight, which demanded that Booth maintain the lamps often.

  Finally, while I fidgeted, his serious gaze turned again to me. “Might I inquire as to where the young miss acquired this?”

  I was not so brash that I didn’t realize an answer would be required. Much as I liked the man, I knew that it was not wholly me he answered to. I was sure, even then, that Booth and his wife wrote Mr. Ashmore letters weekly as to the behaviors of their charge.

  “I purchased it for almost nothing in one of the Chelsea market stalls,” I replied airily, referencing the street vendors that occasionally tempted the crowd with this bit of oddity or that. “It seemed old.”

  Not terribly old, but it wouldn’t do to tip my hand too far to my butler.

  His smile was indulgent. “Perhaps no more than twenty years old, I’m afraid,” he said, and bless him, it did sound apologetic. “This is a mark of the Fenian Brotherhood.”

  Somewhere in the vast recesses of the mental abyss I reserved for unimportant information, a bell dimly tolled.

  “What is that, then?”

  “Irish-American agitators,” Booth said, and frowned most gravely. “It’s a fine enough keepsake, young miss, but it wouldn’t do to be caught with it. They’ve created for England a difficult enough mess without including an innocent bit of metal to the affair.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Agitators, you say.” When he held the coin out again, I took it, but I did not know what, exactly, to do with it.

  I supported any man’s right to live as he chose, but as Booth—sensing dismissal in my vacant study of the piece—made his excuses, the haunting bit of information I sought climbed from my memory.

  The Fenian Brotherhood, wanted men who had only this past year set explosives at The Times newspaper offices and at Whitehall. The details had been rife with speculation, but over and again, the Fenian Brotherhood and their ilk were painted as coarse, misinformed men seeking to tear down British rule. Americans and Irish combined by immigrant breeding, the worst of the lot.

  All at once, what I had in my possession coalesced into a reality I was not prepared to handle; a truth that my fifteen year old self refused to acknowledge.

  I had expected the armored collector’s pockets to yield a clue. I did not, however, expect that clue would lead to a suggestion of treason. The Fenian Brotherhood was not the sort of organization content to gather in a pub and raise glasses to the cause—whatever their cause at whatever the time. Wanted by Her Majesty’s constabularies, and just as fiercely by Scotland Yard, the members of this Brotherhood were dangerous, amoral advocates of violence, mayhem, and bore no small amount of patriotic pluck.

  A dodgy mix, under any circumstances, and one that would place me in more danger than I could have ever hoped for—I had not yet learned to fear that which was greater than myself, and would not learn this survival instinct for some time to come.

  I could swoop down upon whatever dastardly plans they had, find Mr. Strangeway and thwart their efforts all in one go. What honors I would achieve then! What heroism I could display.

  Not even Fanny could argue with me, then.

  I was fortunate, or so I thought. My first collection—the collection whose purse had left me with such high hopes—was not a matter of debt, after all. Strangeway may have been my quarry, but my motives had suddenly been forced to alter.

  Debt or no debt, this had become a matter of life and death. It was very clear to me that a threat had been made, and its place of accounting to be somewhere on Praed Street.

  What, then, was I to do about it?

  Chapter Six

  Not even a full twenty-four hours into my newly minted profession, and I was already breaking my self-made rules.

  Clipping off to Praed Street by day—darkening as it was—carried with it innumerable risks. I am much more aware of them now, however, for at that age, I truly thought myself invincible. The only scars I bore were ones acquired early in my youth, and my outlook was bright.

  I made my secretive and disguised way across Chelsea, risking servant’s eyes in London via the properly discreet routes reserved for those who should rarely be seen by them what employed them. Even clad in my butler’s altered trappings, I was not the sort one expected to find above the drift. I hired a gondola with pilfered coin filched from a particularly finely cloaked bevy of maids, and arrived just outside Paddington Station.

  The road was plenty busy, as horse and carts jockeyed for position beside hackneys carrying them wh
at had the coin to avoid walking. In groups and alone, with the lights lit up and down the street, the noise was deafening, and the stench of the coal-spoiled fog acrid and harsh enough as to have me coughing straight away.

  More than that, I noticed many eyes upon us as the gondola—with its tail of pipes spouting blue in spent aether—eased to the street. I slipped out, having already paid and eager to shed the inquiring gondolier, and promptly found myself adrift in a sea of curiosity.

  Nothing so easy as a knot of admirers or an obvious wall of eyes. These things can be made to go away, should one know the trick. No, this was different—the bane of a pickpocket’s existence. A general wash of awareness, where them what pass a buzman are aware that he is there, and aware that he is dissimilar to them.

  Curiosity in a crowd can often go bent, and so I sauntered, jaunty street boy that I mimicked, toward the nearest alley mouth, just by Paddington Station where the railcars waited.

  Once out of sight, I would quickly go out of mind. Though I arrived in a gondola—not a mistake I would ever make again, and what foolishness it was to trade time for conspicuousness—I did not bear the look of a toff, and so only the most hard-up of footpads would dare a follow in hopes of a lucky strike.

  When none came after five whole minutes, counted by the ticking of my worn brass pocket watch, I deemed myself in the clear.

  The time was twenty minutes after seven.

  Grimy faces and work-scarred hands buttoned down beneath patched and threadbare coats and gloves marked the bulk of the pedestrians who passed the open fan of the alley I squatted in. Many were going home for supper, for the schedule of them living below was not at all the schedule I would keep as a Society miss. Supper for them was only dinner for those above, and supper to be had much later while these poor folk found their beds in promise of dawn’s early light.