The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway (The St. Croix Chronicles) (4 page)

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 what 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.

The lanterns were brighter near this station, the oil kept plentiful and the panes in each glass lamp cleaned daily to provide ongoing illumination. It afforded me much opportunity to watch them what passed, to hear the tangled threads of conversation.

I saw many jovial faces, but more tired. It seemed to me as if there were many who were children, both older and younger than I, whose faces were black and hands rubbed raw. I saw twisted limbs, severe enough to force a care but not so mangled as to halt a working day or refuse a wage.

More than a few displayed sores and lesions around the mouth, a hint of phossy from the match factories.

And still they worked, still they rose every day and took what pay they could. A pang of anger struck, and beside it, one of guilt. For I had been a child working upon the street, risking life and limb beneath the circus tents, all for whatever coin I could. I had been there, and I had been freed.

I sighed. To think that I might consider the cost of that escape to be too high, that I should fret beneath the gilded bars of the life I’d been pinioned into, even as I studied the working men and women who would toil harder than I ever would again. It was, I think, the first time I really felt out of place everywhere. I was no heiress by raising, and no kinchin cove by birth. Born wealthy, raised poor, a criminal long before I was ever a lady.

I was no more a part of London’s streets than I was a part of my mother’s Society. A deucedly lonely position, were I to let it haunt me.

I wouldn’t. Where the wealthy could not reach and the impoverished did not aspire, I would flit in between. A collector between two worlds. Aye, it would suit right enough.

Mind, I would be woefully dishonest if I did not admit to briefly pondering the temptation of a pocket or two. Yet just as quickly, I discarded the notion.

I had already exercised my luck there, it would take something much fleshier than a workingman’s fogle to get me to try another draw.

Such as a familiar face.

Particularly a familiar face with no name.

He stood on the pedestrian walk just down the street, the opposite side of the station’s entry. Though working class folk streamed between him and I, it was no trouble to recognize him. He was too fine for his own good, and that dark skin only gleamed in fresh opposition to the gray togs he clad himself in. His greatcoat was pale gray, showing only a hint of discoloration from the fog. His trousers were darker charcoal striped by narrow bands of dove gray, his shoes unseen from my vantage point and his animation emphatic.

The light above his dapper bowler framed him in a corona. I leaned against my shadowed wall, squinting as the devil-fog strummed a watery sheen across my straining eyes, and struggled to make out the face of the man he spoke to.

His was not a face I recognized.

The man was broader than his handsome companion, not quite as fine in face or figure, yet of a sturdy, respectable mold. His bore the features of a man who may be considered trustworthy.

His clothing bespoke the same carelessness with which money was spent. Perhaps more so, for the tailoring was fitter, the colors peeking from beneath his great coat bolder, and the top hat he wore jauntily was decorated by a flash of gold at the band.

He was taller than his companion, and unlike the other man, he wore no fog preventatives to keep the sting away. His eyes were heavy-lidded as if he were already soused at near half-past-seven, or simply too filled with the ennui of the terribly elite to truly consider the world about him.

He reeked of wealth, and my filcher fingers twitched.

Perhaps this, then, was the handsome man’s employer. He seemed a lord, at first blush.

If so, he was a strange sort, to be outfitting his servant in the same finery he wore himself.

Even stranger was that they were both below the drift, and one without the fog protectives I expected from a gentleman.

They split as I watched, coughing absently into my gloved hands. The man in the bowler seemed to make for the station entry. The other, his top hat perched just so, had turned in my direction.

Divided, and for what?

I was not so foolish as to consider this a mere coincidence. Which would I follow?

I pulled the brim of my cap down low, affecting a lean I’d learned from loiterers of a far better class than I; just another street boy taking refuge from the crowds. Or, as was more often the case, giving the crowds a refuge from emptied pockets.

The gentleman came closer, and from under the brim of my hat, I saw that he bore facial hair of a brown shade, trimmed neatly about his mouth and chin. It was reddish in the street lights, a glint of it here and there. He walked with a swagger that seemed to indicate he cared less than a toss for those who might be walking with him—or behind him, for purposes malicious or otherwise. His trousers were pressed, his greatcoat in a deeply fashionable navy and worn with that particular brand of carelessness that only the toffs I’d seen above could successfully affect.

Most assuredly a gentry cove, then, or at least a wealthy sort from above. Yet why was he not affected by this accursed fog in the same way as I?

“Strangeway!”

The call came from behind him. I strangled on a choke, and when I was forced to bend double to clear my throat of my own surprise, turned to face the wall lest my reaction earn suspicion.

It didn’t seem to. The man had turned when I risked a glance.

Whatever words had been exchanged, I’d missed it. I heard a laugh, and a drawled, “You worry overmuch, Smoot.” The accent bore a lilt, a rounded one, the kind that suggested he’d spent more years in Ireland than England.

The other’s was a dialect both shorter in tone and flatter in enunciation. An American, affecting that drawl they seemed to delight in keeping among civilized folk.

“You don’t worry enough,” came Smoot’s rejoinder. “Be on that train, or so help me...” The threat was left unspoken, though I could not be sure if it was a serious one.

“I wouldn’t leave you to fend for yourself,” promised Mr. Strangeway, who turned away, adjusting his coat. “Not that you could say the same, you pirate.”

“I heard that!”

As did I.

Mr. Strangeway’s chuckle was informally unconcerned, and I suspected Mr. Smoot had been meant to hear it. I was forced to re-evaluate my initial impression, for they did not operate as one might expect a lord and servant. Instead, to my astonishment, they seemed equals. Friends, no less.

And co-conspirators of something that sounded rather like a plan.

But a plan for what?

So it was that I stumbled across the quarry of my first-ever collection, a man who was both everything I had expected and somehow not at all what he seemed. For what reason had Mr. Strangeway appeared at the site of a Fenian threat, as carried by a collector in metal armor?

He passed the alley mouth, but not without remarking upon my presence. “Clap your jaw,” he said, doffing his cap, “there’s a fine lad.”

I could only stare, forcing my mouth closed, as he strode away. It was a full minute before I summoned enough presence of mind to follow.