His mind ran through the possibilities, and settled on the schoolroom, since the children were away, and Agnes — who had so recently left it in considerable distress — would be unlikely to return for quite some time.
Agnes, looking pale and drawn — but also determined — was sitting at her desk. She raised her head when Blackstone entered the room and — with just the tiniest of quakes in her voice — said, “You look surprised to find me here.”
“I am,” Blackstone admitted.
“You wouldn’t be, if you knew me better. My father once said that we should always return to our old battlegrounds, especially the ones on which we were soundly beaten. He said we should do it in order to face our mistakes squarely on — and perhaps learn from them. That’s what I’m doing here now — facing my mistakes.”
“Agnes...” Blackstone began.
She held a hand up to silence him. “I made a fool of myself right here in this very room, didn’t I?” she asked. “And even worse, I showed myself up to be the coward I truly am.”
“I don’t understand.”
Agnes put her hands to her forehead. “How could you, when I’ve lied to you so much?” she asked anguishedly. “I said that we should always be honest with each other, and then immediately began to pretend to you that I was something I was not.”
“I’m still lost,” Blackstone confessed.
“I pretended to be indifferent to the plight of the peasants in the village, but it isn’t true at all. It breaks my heart to see the way they’re forced to live — in such filth, in such poverty — and I’d do anything I possibly could to improve their condition.” She paused, and looked down at her desk. “Or, at least, that’s what I used to tell myself,” she continued, almost in a mumble.
“What’s changed your mind?”
“Peter’s arrest. When I saw him being dragged before the Count, down in the courtyard, the first thing I should have felt was pity for a poor man who’s dedicated his life to helping the muhziks. But it wasn’t pity I felt.”
“No?”
“No! It was fear! Fear for myself I was terrified that the Count would find out I’d been talking to Peter, and that I’d be dismissed from my post. Isn’t that terrible? My fate would be mild in comparison to what awaited Peter, yet it was still myself I thought about. What kind of person am I?”
“I think you’re a person who judges herself too harshly,” Blackstone said, and even as he spoke the words he was wondering: Am I saying that because I wish to comfort her — or because I need to pull her out of this state before I can even begin to use her?
“Poor Peter,” Agnes said.
“You needn’t worry about him,” Blackstone assured her.
“You have no idea what the Count’s like, Sam. You don’t know the kinds of things he does to those weaker than himself — the kinds of things I’ve actually seen him do.”
“Peter has friends.”
“Friends! How do you know? You’ve never met him —and you couldn’t understand him if you did.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Of course I trust you, Sam. I’d trust you with my life.”
And that’s just what you may be doing, Blackstone thought. But aloud, all he said was, “Then trust me on this. Peter will be fine, and no one will ever know you had any connection with him.”
“But if they torture him...”
“They won’t.”
Agnes smiled. “Do you know what you are?” she asked.
“What am I?”
“You’re one of those people who promises that everything will be all right — and somehow usually manages to keep his word.” Agnes squared her shoulders and raised her head. “Well, now that’s out of the way. I’m not worried about Peter, because you’ve told me I shouldn’t be. So let’s return to your problems, shall we. How on earth are we going to find this missing golden egg?”
He had reached a crossroads, Blackstone accepted. Either he trusted Agnes completely or he didn’t trust her at all. Either he told her the truth now, or he would never be able to tell her.
“We’re not looking for a golden egg,” he said. “It wasn’t stolen, because it never actually existed.”
“Was anything stolen?”
“Yes.”
“What was it?”
“A document.”
“A piece of paper!” Agnes asked incredulously. “All this fuss is over a piece of paper?”
“It’s a very important piece of paper.”
“What makes it so important?”
“I don’t know.”
“So how can you be so sure it is important? How can you even know it’s gone missing at all?”
“I trust the man who told me about it.”
Agnes looked at him sceptically. “And who was that man? Was it Sir Roderick?”
“No, not him.”
“Then who?”
It would be a mistake to tell her about Vladimir, he thought. More than a mistake — if she knew the man’s real identity, it might be putting her life more in danger than it already was.
“The Count has confided in me,” he said. But he was thinking that not only was that a lie for a moment, but that there was not even the remotest possibility that circumstances could ever change to eventually make it something closer to the truth.
It had never been considered necessary to tell him what was missing, because he’d never been expected to recover it. His job had been to find the thief, and then hand him over to the Count — who no doubt had a hundred unpleasant ways of making the man reveal his hiding place.
And what if the Count did find out that he knew it was actually a document which had been stolen? The fable of the golden egg had been created because even knowledge of the document’s existence was a top-secret matter. So would the Count ever allow him to go back to England, with that knowledge in his head? Of course not! He would have to be killed. And so would Agnes!
“You mustn’t tell the Count you know that I know about the document,” he said urgently.
“Very well,” Agnes agreed.
She was so trusting! So very, very trusting! It almost broke his heart.
Agnes had begun to slowly pace the room. “This is a big estate,” she said thoughtfully. “A huge estate. Looking for a piece of paper here would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“I know,” Blackstone agreed.
By lighting the fire, Vladimir had contrived to make the thief lead him to the document, instead of searching for the document himself. It had been a good idea, but it hadn’t worked, because the thief’s nerve had held. Yet that nerve must have become a little frayed in the process, and if it were possible to put the same kind of pressure on the man again...
“If only we had a golden egg,” he said wistfully.
“You want a Faberge golden egg?” Agnes asked, incredulously.
“Not a Faberge egg, just an egg I could pass off as one.”
“I think I could get my hands on something that might serve,” Agnes said.
“You could?” Blackstone asked excitedly.
“Yes. But what would be the point? I thought you said there was no such thing as the golden egg.”
“There isn’t,” Blackstone agreed. ‘But as long as most of the people in this house think there is, there might as well be.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The workshops, which were located on the ground floor of the house, came as a revelation to Blackstone. He had already known they were there, of course, but it was seeing the extent of them which took his breath away. They ran under the entire East Wing and seemed to employ nearly a score of craftsmen. There were carpenters and French polishers, iron-smiths and painters, all bent over their work-benches, completely engrossed in their tasks.
Agnes laughed at his obvious perplexity. “This isn’t London, you know, Sam,” she said. “Look at where we are. It’s not a question of deciding whether it’s to Harrods or Fortnum and Mason’s that we’ll take a shor
t carriage ride. The nearest equivalent we have to those stores is in St Petersburg, and even then it’s not that equivalent.”
“Even so...” Blackstone began.
“Besides, this is the way the Russian aristocracy have always done things. And there is a certain cachet, don’t you think, in having things made for you, rather than buying them off even the most expensive shelves?”
“Suppose so,” Blackstone agreed.
They had passed through the main workshops, and reached a small one at the end. Through the open door Blackstone could see a tiny, shrivelled man, sitting precariously on a high stool and examining something through a huge magnifying glass.
“His name’s Yuri,” Agnes said softly. “No one knows exactly how old he really is, but the general feeling is that he must be at least ninety.”
“Ninety!” Blackstone echoed.
“In his time, he was the best jewel-maker in Russia. The only reason he is here now is because he was born in these parts, and this is where he has decided he wants to die.”
“He may once have been a great jeweller, but the older we get, the more our skills slip away from us,” Blackstone said sceptically. “Are you sure he’s still up to the job?”
“When the Countess needs her most precious jewels repairing, she doesn’t send them away to Faberge, as she so easily could. Instead, she has them brought down to Yuri,” Agnes said. “Does that answer your question?”
“Yes,” Blackstone admitted. “I think it does.”
Agnes tapped lightly on the door, then stepped inside. When the old man turned round to face her, Agnes lightly rubbed the top of his bald head with her hand, then planted a kiss on his forehead.
“Everyone else treats him with such solemn respect,” she said to Blackstone. “I think he rather likes it that I don’t.”
“Tell him what we want,” Blackstone instructed her.
Agnes spoke for three or four minutes, and the old jewel-maker listened to her in complete silence. It was only when she was finished that he spoke a few words in reply.
“He wants to know how good it has to be,” Agnes said.
“As good as he can make it,” Blackstone said.
Agnes snorted. “He is a master craftsman. If he makes the best egg he could, it will be absolutely perfect. If he makes the best egg he could, it would fool even the experts at Faberge itself.”
“Well, then...”
“But it would also take him months to complete the work. Perhaps even years.”
“What can he do in a couple of days?” Blackstone asked. A twinkle came into the old man’s watery eyes as he answered the question, and Agnes laughed out loud. “What did he say?” Blackstone wanted to know.
“He said that in two days he could produce an egg which would fool you completely...”
“That’s all I want.”
“...but would not convince a man with any discrimination or taste even for a split second.” Agnes paused. “He likes you, you know. That’s why he’s being so rude to you.”
“Ask him if he could produce an egg in two days which would fool a man of discrimination and taste from a distance,” he said.
Yes, the old man agreed, he could do that.
Another long exchange followed in Russian.
“He wants to know whether or not you will be providing the gold,” Agnes translated.
“And what did you say?”
“I asked him if he really thought that a man who is wearing one of the Count’s cast-off suits would have access to so much gold. He agreed that it was unlikely, so now he wants to know where the gold is coming from.”
“Couldn’t he use a cheaper metal?”
“He’s a true artist. To ask him to work with a cheaper metal would be an insult. Besides, even if I could persuade him, it wouldn’t do any good. The people upstairs wouldn’t be fooled by an egg made of an inferior metal for a moment — not even if they were looking at it from the other end of a very long ballroom.”
“Then we can’t do it,” Blackstone said gloomily.
“Of course we can.”
“But where will we get the gold from?”
“From Yuri. A jeweller of his skill cannot work with gold for fifty years without some of it sticking to his hands. He’ll be perfectly willing to supply his own gold, as long as he’s certain of getting it back.”
“Did he say that?”
“Naturally not. What he did say was that it will be completely impossible for him to lay his hands on so much gold. But he didn’t mean it. It’s just part of the negotiation.”
Agnes returned to her conversation with the old man. Blackstone, though he did not understand a single of word of Russian, could still tell that the balance of it was swinging back and forth. Twice Agnes stroked the old man’s head, and once she gently twisted his ear. On three separate occasions she looked as if she were about to walk away, but Yuri did not seem as if he were seriously concerned she would carry out the threat.
Finally, the old man lifted his hands up and cupped them on his scrawny chest. Agnes shook her head firmly. A pleading note came into Yuri’s cracked voice. Agnes shook her head again. A third appeal from him brought the same reaction from Agnes, but after she had finished shaking her head, she spoke to Yuri in a very soft — almost seductive — voice. The moment the words had sunk in, the old man nodded happily.
“We can go,” Agnes said to Blackstone.
“You’ve struck a deal?”
“We’ve struck a deal. It will be ready in two days — or possibly earlier now he has the incentive to work hard.”
They left the workshop, and stepped out into the bright autumn sunshine of the courtyard.
“How much money did he want?” Blackstone asked.
Agnes laughed. “Money!” she repeated. “What good is money to an old man like him? He hasn’t left the Big House for the last ten years, and there’s nothing to buy here.”
“So what did you offer him?”
“Not as much as he wanted.”
“Not as much of what as he wanted?”
“A gentleman would never think of forcing me to answer that question,” Agnes said.
She was trying to sound prim and proper, but was so obviously amused by the whole situation that she was finding it impossible.
“A gentleman would never do most of the things I do,” Blackstone said, catching her amusement, though he was still unsure what there was to be amused about. “Tell me.”
“Very well,” Agnes said. “He wanted to play with my bosoms for an hour. I told him the excitement would very probably kill him, so he said he would settle for half an hour. When I turned him down again, he said that five minutes would probably be enough. I said that even five minutes would be too much of a strain, but if he worked hard — and I was pleased with the work he’d done — then I might think about showing him my bosoms.”
“And will you?” Blackstone asked, not sure whether he was still as amused as she was, or simply scandalized.
“Will I what?’ Agnes asked innocently.
“Will you show him your bosoms?”
“As I told Yuri himself, I’ll certainly think about it,” Agnes said mischievously.
Chapter Twenty-Six
They made love twice before they went to sleep in eachother’s arms, once more in the middle of the night, and a fourth time while the early morning sun was streaming in through the bedroom window. For Blackstone it was like a reawakening. When he had lost Hannah, he had lost a part of himself, too, and only now, with Agnes, did he begin to hope that he would find it again.
They had breakfast in the schoolroom — where Agnes had made him that first cup of truly English tea, where he had questioned her about her relationship with Peter, and from which she had fled in tears. All that seemed so distant now. He felt as if he had known Agnes for ever — as if she had always been a part of his life.
The knock on the schoolroom door reminded Blackstone that there was another world outside. The message
the liveried servant had come to deliver only confirmed it.
“Leon says that your boss is having his breakfast on the East Wing terrace, and that he wants to see you immediately,” Agnes told him, when she’d spoken to the servant. “Do you think it could be something important?”
Blackstone nodded grimly. “Yes, I do.”
“You’ve gone so pale,” Agnes said, worriedly. “What is it you think he might say to you?”
“I think he might be about to give me my marching orders,” Blackstone replied.
There were two ways he could handle this next meeting, Blackstone told himself, as he left the schoolroom and made his way towards the West Wing terrace. The first way was to lie — to tell Sir Roderick that he had been quite right all along, that the arsonist was no more than an ignorant peasant who hadn’t spoken a word of English, and the whole thing had been a waste of time. And how would the Assistant Commissioner react to that? Probably by invoking the threat he’d made when he’d agreed to set up the meeting. Probably by ordering Blackstone to return to England immediately.
The second way — and Blackstone shuddered even at the thought of it — was to tell his superior the truth. To explain that Vladimir was a member of the Okhrana, that there had never been a golden egg, but there was a document. And he would have to go even further than that — he would have to lay out before Sir Roderick his plan to make a fool of the Count.
So he was not so much trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea as trapped between the self-righteous anger and the total panic of the bloody fool he found himself working for.
He had still not made up his mind which of the two lines to take when he opened the French doors and stepped out on to the terrace where Sir Roderick was taking his breakfast.
Even from a distance, the Assistant Commissioner looked distracted by the letter spread out on the table in front of him, and he positively jumped when Blackstone coughed discreetly to announce his arrival.
“Ah, Inspector Blackstone,” Sir Roderick said. “What can I do for you?”
“You sent for me, sir.”
“I suppose I did,” Sir Roderick admitted, vaguely. “You know, Blackstone, this has been a very rum business right from the start. I’ve never really understood why they insisted on sending you here with me when there were half a dozen inspectors with considerably more finesse who I could have called on.” He paused for a moment. “No offence intended.”
Blackstone and the House of Secrets (The Blackstone Detective series Book 3) Page 18
