Garrett Investigates (9 page)

“Oh,” said Clemens, “I don’t think you’re going to want to do that, once we’ve had another chance to chat.”

***

Mr. Clemens smelled of black coffee, and Garrett didn’t blame him one bit. He sat in the chair across from the captain’s cleaned-off desk, and she sat behind it, and he said, “I’ll need to be in the wheelhouse when we come into the dock in an hour.”

“You’re not an agent of the crown,” Garrett said.

“Because I’m an anti-imperialist?” he answered. “Some people choose to work for change from the inside. How about if we trade, Doctor Garrett? Questions and answers? If you like, I’ll go first.”

“Can I trust you to be honest?”

“As much as I can trust you.” His eyebrows went up. “So how did you know Miss von Dissen’s name?”

“
Who is Whom
,” she said with a smile. “I assumed the ring was real, and there was a limited number of people she could be.
Are
you an agent of the crown?”

“No, I am not an agent of the crown. I am a sort of…free agent, if you will. But I am on the side of the angels and America, never fear. How did you know Miss von Dissen was…not herself?”

“An evening gown with no gloves?” She shook her hair back. “No woman would make that mistake.”

He winced. “Of course. Even if she were running away from something personally embarrassing. Your question, madam.”

“Who
do
you work for?”

“Robert Cook,” he answered. “Any other tasks I perform are strictly on an amateur—on a
volunteer
basis. But in this matter, I have been acting on behalf of a union of concerned individuals.”

“You work for the Iroquois Nation!”

“That is an unfounded allegation and it’s my turn to ask a question. So our Mr. Sisters was a necromancer, and he smuggled himself aboard in his comatose state while controlling Miss von Dissen. Why not just keep her mobile to the destination, if he was smuggling himself?”

“Because the point was to delay the vessel. Sisters
had
a reservation. He cancelled it so Miss von Dissen could have a berth; the ship was full. He must have originally planned something more personally risky, but the opportunity to use a dead foreign noblewoman—and one who must have personally discommoded him—was too good to pass up. He might even manage to embroil the Bavarian crown in a spy scandal, if all went well.”

“Ah,” said Clemens.

“I am correct in my guess that Mr. Sisters is working for the Prussians?”

His smile was much less tight than she would have expected. “So we believe. It is, of course, a guess.”

“Of course,” Garrett agreed. “But who else would have an interest in preventing a trade deal between Bayern and the Iroquois?”

That made his smile grow broad. “I thought you’d have to use a question for that.”

“I’m tricky,” she said. “I did
ask
a question.”

“So you did. The English?” he asked, then waved it away. “I choose to assume that that was speculation, and not a trade question. If it was, my guess is yours for free. Call it lagniappe. So why delay my boat? What good could twelve hours have done them?”

“Now I am reduced to speculation,” Garrett said. “But it’s possible that there was a Prussian agent on another boat with a juicier offer?”

Clemens’ curls moved softly as he shook his head. “Unlikely.”

“I find your coyness frustrating,” she said. “But I won’t ask you to elaborate. All right, then, it has something to do with something in the hold. Something perishable. Packed in with the ice and the botanical samples. Am I closer?”

Clemens brought his hands together thumb to thumb, inverted them and spread them. A gesture of innocence.

Garrett let it stand. “Of course, if it looked like a Bavarian princess died under curious conditions while on a secret mission to the Iroquois, that alone might be enough to derail the deal. Bayern is unlikely to forgive such carelessness. But she wasn’t even supposed to be on the boat, was she?”

“Is that your question?”

Garrett shrugged. “Explain a few things to me. The book was a recognition symbol, wasn’t it? That’s why your column is tucked into it. Something that would not happen by chance, and so must be recognized if she were to walk through a drawing-room or the lobby of a hotel with such a thing in her hand, perhaps the top of the column protruding. It would give her an obvious and natural reason to speak to you—if she were an appreciator of your humor, and if she approached you with a pen. You were meant to meet her ashore last night, but she never made it to your rendez-vous. Sisters got to her first, while she was still dressed for whatever intrepid young ladies do to entertain themselves in a foreign city.”

Clemens sat back in the chair. “You are…
distressingly
clever.”

“And I suppose he either did not recognize the significance of the column, or didn’t notice it, or thought it might lead to your being suspected.”

“It did,” he said.

“Indeed,” said Garrett. “But it turns out you’re not a murderer after all. Just an agent of a foreign power.”

“I am an American,” he reiterated. His face tightened as he tried to conceal his concern. “And…I helped catch your murderer.”

Garrett stood. She placed her hands flat on the blotter, staring down at Miss von Dissen’s tortoiseshell pen and her copy of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Garrett could not—quite—make herself look at Clemens. “Dammit.”

“What?” he asked.

She lifted the book. She weighed it in her hand, and then she tossed it to him. “Go and sin no more,” she said.

He caught it, pages a-flutter. His column did not slip loose. He stood too, and faced her. “What will happen to Sisters?”

“Oh,” Garrett said. “He’ll hang.”

Chronologically, “Almost True” falls in the middle of the book—but it was the first Abby Irene/New Amsterdam story I ever wrote, and I was still very much feeling my way around the character.

An unsettled hush hung over the New World colony of New Holland in the autumn of 1900. After a winter and a summer of hard drought that had dropped the Hudson fifteen feet before it ever reached thirsty New Amsterdam, the weather turned wild enough to render travel a chore. Even Detective Crown Investigator Garrett might have cancelled her much-anticipated engagement at the Earl of Westchester’s country house if social excuses had not become so rare now, with the colonies on the verge of being drawn into the Empire’s war on France and the rebellion of the southern Iroquois shaman-sorcerers likely to sweep them into another Indian War.

A war on two fronts. It didn’t bear considering. And Garrett had been doing more than
considering
for some time now, because that war’s fruition was all the excuse the secessionists needed to break with the Crown. It was with that Crown that Garrett’s duty lay—through the auspices of Richard, New Amsterdam’s Duke. So she had grown accustomed to sleeping in carriages and eating standing up.

It was a relief to dress her role as Lady Abigail Irene and leave D.C.I. Garrett tucked into her blue velvet carpetbag with her warrant card and her sorcerer’s tools. The prospect of three days away from the city in the company of her Lord the Duke—albeit with the Duchess—had drawn Garrett to the Earl’s estate despite threatening weather. She arrived on Thursday afternoon, due to train schedules and a return from Boston.

Most of the other guests, including Duke Richard, were not scheduled until Friday evening and even at Thursday’s dinner cancellation telegrams were arriving. Which was all to the good, because otherwise she would never have been bored at dinner with only the Earl and his son Roderick to entertain her. She would not have been toying with her wineglass while the wind moaned down the chimney and freezing rain spattered the diamond-paned glass in a dozen tall windows.

She would likely have noticed the cost of the plate and the luxury of the rugs, and she might have wondered if the Earl had more in inherited money than most of those relegated to the colonies. But she would
not
have stared into the leaded crystal goblet and perceived the odd, spiraling way the candlelight from a dozen sconces struck off Coriolis ripples spread across the surface of the wine.

Illegal sorcery, she realized. Weather-witching. Illegal for a reason: a sunny day in Hartford could mean blizzards from Providence to Charleston.

Garrett hadn’t become a Crown Investigator by failing to follow her curiosity. Casting salt in the parlor later, after she thought the household in bed, she realized:
not witching the storm away.
The white crystals fell on the thick Persian carpets in unmistakable outline; Garrett scuffed her evening boot through the pattern, destroying it.
Summoned. Summoned here, with malice aforethought.

But why? To keep me here? To keep someone else away?

She had fetched her carpetbag from her room. As she bent over to fit her tools back into their places, she didn’t hear the rustle of the big man’s clothes as he came across the piled-up carpets and caught her arm. “Lady Abigail,” the Earl’s son said in cultured tones. “May I assist you?”

“Abigail Irene, Lord Roderick,” she corrected, lifting her pointed chin. She had been heart-stoppingly lovely once, long ago and an ocean away, and unafraid to use it. DCI Garrett cultivated finishing-school manners and a nerve of steel. “I don’t believe so. There has been sorcery cast here, and I shall have to open an investigation.”

“Surely that won’t really be necessary.”

“I am the crown’s servant. The Duke and Duchess of New Amsterdam will be here soon, unless their visit is cancelled. It is my duty to protect them, and to investigate crimes of magic.”

She twisted away from him, but he held her stoutly. Garrett was a tall woman, but the Earl’s son could have rested his chin on her head. She could no more break his grip than bend steel.

“I think,” Roderick said, as two of the household’s men came into the room, “that you will be more comfortable as our guest for a little while, Lady Abigail.” He smiled. “And I suspect, as long as you are attending our little party, we can count on the Duke.”

A chill settled into her as she understood the storm, the invitation extended her, the source of the household’s riches. She would not lower herself to futile struggle, so she held quiet while they searched her and took her dusty-blue velvet carpetbag, went quietly when they locked her into a powder room. Sitting on the divan, Garrett contemplated the door hinges, but that would be difficult to manage quietly. And she could hear the occasional creak of the floorboards under thick rugs as a guard paced beyond the door.

Garrett tossed the small retiring-room, cursing under her breath to the sound of the rain. She peeled up the carpets, examined the narrow window—too much of a drop—and rummaged through the drawers in the gilt, mirrored vanity. She contemplated breaking an ornately carven leg off the padded stool in front of it, until a moment later she pounced on something forgotten in a drawer corner. Her captors had failed to realize that a buttonhook could be bent into an effective lockpick. Or weapon.

But then
, Garrett mused as she anointed the possibly-creaky hinges with a greasy hair pomade,
I may be more resourceful than most women are permitted to become. Even here on the outskirts of civilization
.

Garrett crouched down before the inward-opening door. A moment, and she had the lock disengaged. Holding the pins out of the tumblers, she turned the crystal door handle by fractions. Once the bolt slid back, she drew the door open a silent quarter of an inch so the bolt rested against the plate. She removed the buttonhook and checked the straightened point: still adequately sharp. Then, heart squeezing inside her breast, she peered through the keyhole and the tiny crack between the hinges.

Her guard had apparently gotten bored with pacing the hallway and was leaning against the far wall, watching lightning flicker in the darkness. Garrett’s timepiece was in her reticule. She wondered how long remained until dawn. She wondered whether the Duke and Duchess would arrive in the morning or the evening.

She wondered, more personally, how Roderick or more likely his father had known enough to try to use her presence to ensure that the Duke would attend despite the storm.
The set-up must have taken very careful orchestration indeed.

Garrett stood, caught up a towel from the brass rack beside the door to contain the blood in case she did have to stab someone, and kilted her beaded powder-blue skirts tightly so they would not rustle. Holding on to the cold crystal knob to prevent the lock from clicking, wishing her foxfur were an oilcloth, she edged the door open and slipped into the hall.

Don’t turn. Don’t make me kill you
, she thought, aware of her own bravado. Because she couldn’t kill him fast enough to keep it quiet, and if he raised the alarm….

No-one would prevent the Duke from walking into the trap. Whatever its purpose.

The guard didn’t turn, and Garrett reclosed the door in silence, still clutching the straightened buttonhook underhand. Moving crabwise, sure he could hear the pounding of her heart, she scurried down the hall and around the corner, out of sight.

And where is my carpet-bag?
she thought.
I need to make it to the road and stop Richard—stop the Duke’s carriage. Damn it!

She chuckled when she realized exactly where her things would be. The Earl’s son was a sorcerer. How could he resist?

She headed for the servants’ stair.

Roderick snored heavily. She heard him from the hallway. He also left his bedroom door unlocked, and she emerged a few moments later, fur still wound tightly around her throat, triumphantly clutching her carpet-bag.

Moonlight and gaslight glittering off the seed pearls on the yoke of her gown, Garrett slipped back into the stairwell.

***

Dawn found the Detective Crown Investigator crouched in a drainage ditch, rainwater matting her faded blonde hair. She ducked as hoofbeats squelched on the muddy road above.
Abigail Irene,
she thought,
would you ever have come to America if you understood how much squatting in filth would be involved?

Listening carefully, she estimated five horses. When they had passed, she sighed and tugged the edge of her wrap higher, hunkering under the soaked grass of the overhang. The water was up to her ankles and rising, cresting the tops of her boots and turning her evening dress into a weighty encumbrance. Straw and sticks shoaled against her calves.

Garrett opened her velvet carpetbag under the cover of her ruined foxfur, propping it on her knee to keep it out of the rising water. She extracted a short, silver-tipped ebony wand and a double-edged, black-handled dagger with a blade outlined in pure elemental silver. The first one she tucked into the cuff of her glove; the second she slipped into her bodice, where she could get at the hilt with a gesture. The bent buttonhook was already thrust into her waistband.

Shutting the bag, she curled back under the embankment, practicing warding cantrips until the horses should be well past, along with a few subtle spells for good fortune.
When that fails to further amuse you, Abigail Irene, you can always reminisce about dead lovers.

The wait was long and cold. When she thought it might be safe she crept free of the undercut bank and followed the sickly rivulet downhill, hoping it would lead her to the brook that ran along the roadside.

Hours slid by as miserably as the cold rain sliding under her fur and down the back of her neck. She wished she could risk a spell to warm her hands, but she wasn’t the only sorcerer in Westchester and the other one was hunting her. She satisfied herself with tucking her hands into her armpits as she slogged, crouching, through the ditch. Twice along her painful progress, hoofbeats halted her. One fingertip fretting the smooth tip of her wand inside her glove, she willed herself small and still.

She recognized a voice among the second party. “She can’t have got far. An old woman on foot in this mud—we’ll find her.”
Lucky,
she thought, and smiled as she made another sign for it.

Garrett concentrated on her wardings and hidings, mumbling blood-slick words at the back of her throat.
Old woman,
she thought.
If I were so old and craftless as you think, you wouldn’t be out here in this mud trying to find me, Roderick, would you?
A grim glow of satisfaction warmed her.

“Lord Rod…. Captain, I mean, night is coming.”

“And this is significant how, James?” Cool, questioning. As if the rain wasn’t dripping down the back of his neck, too. A white-hot cramp spiked through the hip Garrett had broken in a tumble from a polo pony more than twenty years before. She clamped her teeth on her tongue, losing her place in the litany of hidings. Above, one of the horses stamped.

“There are rumors, Captain….” James fell silent. Garrett grinned, having heard some of those rumors.
Criminals, especially the wealthy ones, never want to believe that their own mistakes are what put them in jail. No, it’s Garrett consorts with demons, Garrett deals in blood sorcery, Garrett’s lovers and partners always seem to messily die….

The grin vanished.
Well, there’s a grain of truth to that last one. But not this time.
The cramp eased, but she didn’t dare take up her whispered litany of sorcery again. If Roderick hadn’t noticed her stopping, he’d notice her starting again. “She’s still out here,” he said over the creak of saddles. “I can smell her magic. And we’re going to have a little conversation, when this night’s work is done, on how she managed to lay hands on her witch’s suitcase again.”

“Lord….”

“Captain,” Roderick corrected. “The Duke’s groom must survive the attack tonight, remember. When we’ve scalped the Duke and Duchess, he has to have seen and heard a company of Mohawk accompanied by French uniforms. Mistakes, and we don’t get our war.”

Tonight.
Garrett stilled her breath, willing the big man to say more.
When? When do the Duke and Duchess arrive?

She had to make the road quickly. Better still would be to intercept the carriage on the highway, but she didn’t think she could make that run in the dark and the rain, across unfamiliar country and clad in soaked and dragging skirts.

She wished she had a weapon, even a fowling piece. Her wand, like a derringer, was useless much beyond ten feet. The knife’s soft edge was never meant for fighting: it was a spellcasting tool.

Cold rain slithered between her shoulder blades, plastering silk to her skin. Garrett stifled a sneeze, listening to the stamp of the horses. If she could get her hands on one, she could tear her ruined dress and ride astride. If only one of the men separated from the others. If only….

“All right,” Roderick said. “We need to head back. She can’t have gotten far, and there’s no way she can make it across country unmounted. If we’re lucky, she’s broken a leg and drowned in a mud puddle.” She heard him spit. “The only thing worse than a plod is a woman plod.”

Harness jingled as the party reined around.

***

Three even wetter and muddier hours later, Garrett worked her way along the hedgerow on the north side of the road. She’d hacked off the bottom two feet of her dress with the silver-edged knife and wadded it into a ditch, and was colder but moving more freely. The low heels on her boots were not helpful, and thorny canes tore her face and arms in the darkness.

She headed east toward the highway, hoping she had come onto the road further away from the manor house than the “French and Mohawks,” and hoping as well that they would have stayed to the flatter south side of the road. She doubted it, the way her luck was running, but the only other option was sitting down in the mud to cry. Limping on a twisted ankle, rain washing the blood from thorn-scratches down her face, Garrett pushed on, her guide the inconstant lightning.