The Great Game (Royal Sorceress) (11 page)

The stairs seemed reassuringly solid, even though half of the carpeting had been removed and the rest had ugly marks from where dozens of policemen had tramped up and down. At the top, two doors had been forced open by the policemen, revealing rooms so dusty that it was clear that no one had been inside them for months, if not years. The pieces of furniture in the opened rooms were covered with cloths, providing some protection against the ravages of time. Somehow, Gwen doubted that they would still be in good condition anyway.

“Sir Travis saw no need to use the rooms,” Lord Mycroft explained. “They were closed off, one by one.”

He stopped outside a larger room and peered inside. “Lestrade,” he said, by way of greeting. “I trust that the crime scene remains undisturbed?”

“Yes, Your Lordship,” Lestrade said. He looked understandably nervous; the last time aristocrats had started to die, he hadn’t managed to catch the killer either. But then, he wouldn’t have
wanted
to catch a Master Magician without some heavy magical support. “Sir Travis is lying right where he fell.”

Gwen braced herself as she stepped into the room. Few people in London would have been comfortable allowing a woman to look at dead bodies; she still remembered the incredulous looks the policemen had thrown at her and Master Thomas when they’d thought they couldn’t be seen. Now, part of her was used to seeing corpses... London had been littered with bodies by the time the Swing was over. And it was part of her job.

Sir Travis looked to have been decent, she decided. He was surprisingly pale for a man who had been in India and Turkey, but that might not have been surprising. A Sensitive would prefer to avoid the sun where possible. He was clearly healthy, wearing a thin nightshirt and trousers that would have allowed him to host meetings without bothering to get properly dressed. There were some people – Lady Mary, for example – who would have complained about such informality, but a Sensitive could be counted upon to know his friends.

“That’s the cause of death,” Lestrade said, pointing to the back of Sir Travis’s head. Blood matted his hair, revealing a nasty crack in his skull. Even a Healer couldn’t have saved someone whose skull had been caved in. Death, Gwen suspected, would have been effectively instant. “Can you sense anything from the wound?”

Gwen gritted her teeth and knelt down beside the body. Carefully, she opened her senses, bracing herself for a rush of memories and impressions burned onto the world by the trauma of Sir Travis’s death. Instead, there was nothing...

... apart from an alarmingly familiar scent.

“Wolfbane,” she said. “Someone wanted to block a werewolf’s nose.”

“Yes,” Lestrade said. “Anything else?”

Gwen hesitated. “No,” she said, finally. There should have been
something
, unless Sir Travis had been taken completely by surprise. But if that were the case, how could someone have sneaked up on a Sensitive? “I take it that he couldn’t have committed suicide.”

Lestrade gave her an odd look. “Suicides normally shoot themselves, or stab themselves, or take poison, or jump off bridges,” he said. “I don’t see how he could have killed himself in such a manner.”

Gwen stood upright and looked around. There were no signs of a struggle, apart from a broken object – a vase, she guessed, as there were several other intact vases in the room – that had been flung against the wall. Could it have been the murder weapon? She walked over and picked up one of the pieces, only to discover that it was almost eggshell-thin. It would have shattered on a person’s skull, without inflicting any real damage.

“I shall leave you to your task, Lady Gwen,” Lord Mycroft said. He looked over at Lestrade. “See to it that she gets all the help and support that she requires.”

“Of course, Your Lordship,” Lestrade said. “But we have already arrested a suspect.”

Gwen blinked. “A suspect?”

“The one other person in the house when Sir Travis met his untimely end,” Lestrade said. “His maid. She is currently in the kitchen, being interrogated...”

“I think I should talk to her,” Gwen said, shortly.

“A good idea,” Lord Mycroft said. “I shall see you in Whitehall, Lady Gwen.”

He bowed and left the room, twisting slightly so he could pass through the door. Gwen watched him go, then looked back at Lestrade. She could understand why he’d arrested the maid, but how could someone have harboured murderous intentions for so long and yet remained undetected by her master? A Sensitive would know better than to treat a servant as part of the furniture...

“Take me to her,” Gwen ordered.

Lestrade bowed and led her out of the room.

Chapter Nine

S
ir Travis’s mother died just after the Swing,” Lestrade said, as they made their way down to the kitchen. “The maid was left in the house all alone until Sir Travis returns from India – and he dies bare weeks later. I don’t think that was a coincidence.”

Gwen scowled, keeping her thoughts to herself. Lestrade was as tenacious as a bulldog, which wasn’t always a good thing. When he came up with a theory that fitted the facts, he rarely gave up on it easily, to the point where he twisted or ignored later facts so he could keep his original theory. She had to admit that two deaths in the same house looked suspicious, but it didn’t necessarily follow that the maid was a murderess.

“Maybe,” she said, finally. “How did Sir Travis’s mother die?”

“Cold, the doctor claimed,” Lestrade said. “She did have a hard life – plenty of family heirlooms had to be sold off to provide for her son. And many of their cousins called her a traitor.”

Gwen nodded. Every aristocratic family with a high opinion of itself – which was almost all of them – prided itself on passing houses, land, paintings, jewels and worthless tat picked up overseas down to its distant descendents. There were aristocratic families, having trouble making ends meet, that could have solved their problems by selling off some of their family collections. But that wasn’t the done thing in Polite Society. Sir Travis’s mother would have been accused of throwing away her son’s heritage, even though she would have had no choice. It wasn’t as if his relatives had helped her when she needed it.

She glanced over at Lestrade and asked a question. “There was only one maid?”

“I don’t think they could have afforded to keep others,” Lestrade said.

Gwen blinked in surprise. Sir Travis’s family had been poorer than she realised, if only because house help was
cheap
. Gwen’s mother had never had any difficulty hiring servants, even though they’d heard rumours about Gwen herself. A regular aristocratic family would have a small army of servants, ranging from cooks to coachmen. You weren’t anyone in society unless you had a horse and carriage of your very own.

She scowled as Lestrade led her into the kitchen. It was smaller than she’d expected, smaller than the one she remembered from back home – and clearly not designed for feeding more than a handful of guests. A gas stove sat in the middle of the room, flanked by two tables and a free-standing set of shelves loaded with cooking tools. Gwen had never really cooked anything in her life – her mother had been outraged, the sole time she’d asked if she could learn to cook – and she didn’t recognise half of the tools. At the far end of the room, there was a giant fireplace that looked large enough to roast a whole cow. It was so barren that she realised that it hadn’t been used for years.

The maid was seated in the middle of the room, her hands cuffed behind her back. She was a tiny thing, wearing a white dress that had clearly seen better days – and contrasted oddly with her dark skin. Gwen had seen coloured men before, but the maid was the blackest person she had ever seen. The whites of her eyes stood out against her face, which appeared to be bruised where someone had hit her, perhaps more than once. And she couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old.

Gwen met her eyes... and saw nothing, but outright terror. She found it impossible to believe that this frail girl could be a murderer, or that she could have got the better of Sir Travis, who had been a strong man as well as a Sensitive. And yet... what was she doing here? There had been a craze, some years ago, for black butlers, but the girl was clearly no butler...

“She was taken off a slaver when she was a child by the Royal Navy,” Lestrade said. “The Captain was one of Lord Nelson’s former officers – and you know Lord Nelson’s position on slavery. She was taken back to Britain, trained as a domestic and eventually sent to work for Lady Mortimer. It was the best they could have done for her.”

“Right,” Gwen said. She couldn’t help noticing the girl staring at her when she heard Gwen’s unmistakably feminine voice. “Take your men out of here and leave us alone.”

Lestrade gave her an odd look, but nodded and started to bark orders to his men. One of them seemed concerned about leaving Gwen with a potential murderess; the other pointed out that the girl was cuffed – and besides, Gwen had powerful magic to defend herself. Gwen watched them go, then knelt down beside the girl and studied her face. Up close, it was clear that the policemen had been beating her to try to force a confession. And, because of the colour of her skin, no one would complain.

Lord Nelson had beaten the Barbary Pirates, who’d raided British shipping and sold British citizens into slavery, by personally leading the invasion of Tripoli. Afterwards, he’d joined the antislavery campaign, pointing out that slavery was the lifeblood of Britain’s North African enemies – and anything that hampered slavery worked in Britain’s favour. The slaveholders in the British Empire did not agree... and even a man as famous as Lord Nelson could only get so far. If the Royal Navy hadn’t been so stubborn about the right of a Captain to do whatever he pleased on his ship, the Captain who’d liberated the maid might have been in serious trouble.

“Hello,” Gwen said, as lightly as she could. “My name is Gwen. What’s your name?”

“Polly,” the maid said. Her voice was surprisingly upper-class, which surprised Gwen until she realised that the only person Polly would have talked to for years was Lady Mortimer. “I didn’t kill him!”

“I didn’t say you did,” Gwen said. She
hated
watching women cry, even though Polly had more reason than most. “Take a deep breath and calm down.”

A powerful Sensitive wouldn’t have needed to compel anything. He would have known if someone was trying to lie to him. But Gwen didn’t have anything like the skill Sir Travis must have shown. Carefully, hating herself, she laced her voice with Charm.

“I need you to tell me the truth,” she said, softly. It was always difficult to tell just how much effect Charm had on its intended target, but Polly – who would have been trained to follow orders – should be vulnerable to the magic. “Did you kill Sir Travis?”

“
No
,” Polly snapped. She pulled at the handcuffs, futilely. “I didn’t kill him!”

“I believe you,” Gwen said. There was no hint that Polly was resisting the Charm, let alone that she was aware of its existence. Shaking her head, Gwen stood up, walked around the chair and used magic to unlock the handcuffs. “I need you to answer some questions.”

Polly stood up and started to rub at her wrists. The handcuffs had been on so tightly, Gwen realised, that her wrists had started to swell. Making a mental note to ensure that the two policemen were disciplined, she helped Polly to another – more comfortable – chair and found her a glass of water. The maid didn’t seem inclined to run, but then she had nowhere to go. She probably knew next to nothing about London, let alone where she could hide if slave-hunters came after her.

“All right,” Gwen said, squatting next to her, “what happened last night?”

Polly looked at her, through tear-filled eyes, and began to explain.

“The Master – Sir Travis – often had late-night meetings with some of his friends,” she said, softly. “Some of them were secret; I wasn’t supposed to know about them. I didn’t know why he was so worried about me...”

Gwen could guess. In Turkey, or any other foreign country, the servants were not always trustworthy. The host country often used them to spy, even though it was technically illegal and could be relied upon to cause a diplomatic incident if they were caught at it. David had grumbled about diplomats who forget that simple fact when he’d moved from business to government service. English servants could be trusted; foreign servants tended to have two sets of masters.

“He was very apologetic about it,” she added, “but he’d lock me in my room whenever he had such visitors. I didn’t really mind that much; there was always something to do in the house, but if I was locked up I couldn’t actually do it... last night, he had several visitors coming to see him. He locked me up as soon as the sun started to set.”

She gave Gwen a half-shy, half-amused grin. “I still knew who had come to see him,” she added. “He didn’t keep
that
much from me.”

Gwen resisted the temptation to roll her eyes. Servants saw
so
much more than their masters and mistresses ever realised. And to think that Lady Mary had wondered how rumours of her devil-child kept getting out into Polite Society.

“But he normally came to unlock the door after he’d finished,” Polly continued. “Instead, when I fell asleep, the door was still locked. I woke up in the morning and discovered that he
hadn’t
unlocked the door. And I had to make him his breakfast. I picked the lock and sneaked upstairs to see if he was still awake. Instead, I found his body and... and I called the Police. And they blamed
me
.”

“He would have known that you picked the lock,” Gwen pointed out, mildly. “Why didn’t you just stay there?”

“The Master was always demanding a very early breakfast,” Polly explained. “I was supposed to bring it to him in bed, every day.”

“My brother was much the same,” Gwen admitted. She wondered if Laura had cured David of demanding his breakfast in bed, before deciding that it wasn’t something she wanted to think about. “The Police came and then...?”

“The rat-like man ordered me arrested,” Polly said. She rubbed the bruise on her cheek. “And they just kept shouting at me...”