The Transference Engine (18 page)

Chapter Seventeen

“M
ISSUS,” MICKEY WHISPERED
from behind me. He sounded hesitant. “There be a messenger at the kitchen door. Won't talk to no one but you. I told him you was busy, but he insisted.”

“You do not trust him?” I asked, gathering my senses so that I might stand without pitching forward into the remnants of Inspector Witherspoon's tea.

“Nay, Missus. Seen him before I 'ave. That night I acted your lady's maid. He come to the salon.” He paused over the word alien to his uneducated life. But he got the essence if not the proper pronunciation. “Came late with one of the gentlemen he did. Hung back, keeping to the shadow and never truly showing his face.”

“And does he reveal his countenance now?”

Mickey had to think about my words. I watched understanding dawn in his eyes. “Barely, Missus. Won't come in, stays on the back stoop, half turned away from the light coming down the outside stair.”

I checked the amount of light coming in through the café windows. Still full daylight at a time of year when sunset came very late. Time meant little to the sun. From the scarcity of customers, I suspected the early afternoon when we frequently had a lull in business. The clock that would verify this needed winding, something I would have to do since none of the others were tall enough to reach it. “If you did not see him clearly before, or now, how did you recognize him?”

“I know people and I know how they hide behind changing shoulders and neck, different clothes and hat. It's him. And I seen 'im afore, dressed as 'e is now.”

“Who did he come with to the salon?”

Mickey shrugged and backed away. “Not one of the toffs I usually watch about town. Not seen him before that night or since.”

“Very well, I will take the message from this person.”

I had to unlatch and open the kitchen door. During business, we left it open for deliveries and taking trash up to the dustbin in the back courtyard. Mickey
really
did not trust the messenger if he locked the door. On the back stoop, a short, wiry man stood with his back to me. He cradled his right wrist within his left hand as if it hurt. Or had little strength. Considering the paleness of his skin below the wrist and the withered skin, I suspected that even though it hurt, he had little use of the limb.

Mickey had said once or twice that he'd seen a beggar with a withered hand. That he should recognize him as one of the extra men at my salon made me nervous. I'd seen no one recently with a withered arm. But I had seen a man who never removed his gloves, both at the salon and at the opera, in the company of Lord Ruthven.

“You have a message for me?”

“Man from Oxford said to give it to you. Said you'd thank me for the delivery,” he mumbled. He used his good left hand to fumble inside his ratty greatcoat that had seen better days when the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo. Eventually he found a folded page much besmudged with dirt from his hands . . . and elsewhere. Or did the new filth cover old stains?

I didn't trust anything anymore.

“Said you'd thank me.” He held the document protectively against his chest.

Quickly I assessed his need against the value of his offering. “A farthing when I know that the note is from the man who claims to have signed it.” I wasn't about to be fooled again by unlikely messengers delivering notes I half-expected.

For the first time, he lifted his face and his eyes to look at me directly. His mouth opened slightly in surprise, revealing broken and blackened teeth that distorted the shape of his lips.

I knew those eyes. I knew I'd seen him before.

“The farthing will do,” he said, returning his gaze and his countenance to the ground once more.

I snatched the letter before he could hide it again, replaced it with the tiny coin, then slammed the door in his face. The snick of the locks engaging did not reassure me that he'd leave and not return.

Madame,

Please accept my apologies for not thanking you in person for partaking of your excellent hospitality. I find I must return to Oxford forthwith and consult with my colleagues.

Respectfully yours,

Dr. Jeremy Badenough,
Professor of Ancient Studies

Studiously polite and correct, as expected. Despite the neatness and precision of the document, Oxford dons were notorious for their illegible scrawling signatures. This letter matched the norm.

But I had a sample of Jeremy's handwriting. I dashed up to my study and dug his previous note about the inaccuracy of the translation of the volume I now thought of as “The Book.”

As I remembered, even in haste, Jeremy was incapable of anything but a neat signature. Part of his need to make certain the reader knew who he was and his qualifications.

I did not believe he had penned this note. Not only was the signature different, the formation of his letters was at the wrong slant and the “R” lacked a peculiar loop at top left and bottom right.

“Damnation! I should not have dismissed the messenger so readily.” I needed to know who had sent him. And where he'd met the sender.

The withered hand could be encased in a padded leather glove. Lord Ruthven's aide had reached for a wineglass with his left hand. The unnamed servant (more than a footman, or valet, less than an equal or favorite companion) had hung back and kept his gloved hands behind him while Ruthven and Drew practically panted and drooled over the scene depicting death and hell for Don Giovanni. He'd maintained a passive face, betraying neither disgust nor enjoyment of Lord Ruthven's reaction.

If he were the trusted companion of a lord with an adequate wardrobe, why had he disguised himself as a beggar?

So I would not recognize him, or connect him to his master.

A small and wiry man who, except for the damaged hand, might have been quite nimble and acrobatic. Like the kidnapper I'd confronted that first day in Lady Ada's household; the person in black who had scampered over the roof despite the broken wrist I'd inflicted upon him.

I presumed him male. I'd been wrong before. But who . . . ?

“Damnation, who is he working for?” Lord Byron, I'd assumed at the time. Now, Lord Ruthven. Was
he
the connection between the two sources of necromancy that now haunted London?

And was he behind the kidnapping of several girls? Other than Toby, all of the missing people I'd heard about had been young girls, guttersnipes, shop girls, and now a noble offspring.

I needed more information. The kind of information I'd likely find only on the streets. Beggars with missing limbs and injuries were quite common. A beggar with a withered hand would not attract much notice. A well-dressed man with a withered hand, even if he did wear a black leather glove to hide it, would be noticed.

Was I dealing with one man or two? Who was he?

I needed information and I knew how to get it.

“Mickey, summon the troops!”

Nothing. My army of listeners had heard absolutely nothing. No rumors and no reports of more missing girls, highborn or low.

And no word from Drew.

I started into the downward spiral of gloom and doom. So I did what I always did when I could not make a decision or find a course of action to get me the information I needed. I baked.

Emily became quite disgruntled that I sent her upstairs to help run the café. I needed my kitchen to myself.

And then Mickey came crashing down the stairs late in the afternoon three days later. “Look who we found!” he chortled. He clung tightly to the arm of a young blonde woman with a new bonnet slightly askew and wisps of hair creeping forward around her face. A familiar and welcome face.

“Jane!” I grasped her by both upper arms, heedless of the flour I strewed in my wake and upon her, and dragged her down the last three steps into the kitchen. Off-center her bonnet might be, but it was new, chip straw with lovely crimson velvet roses and blue ribbons sewn to the brim at the crown. Her summer gown of blue and red with a short coat of blue with red lapels—similar to the uniform of the Bow Street Runners—was much finer than her shop girl salary could purchase.

Hastily I grabbed her left hand, not at all startled to find a wedding ring on her fourth finger. A slim gold band suitable for the wife of an up-and-coming barrister.

“So he made an honest woman of you,” I said evenly, belying the warring relief and disappointment that she had eloped without a word to me, or either of her flatmates.

“Yes, Missus,” she said quietly. She looked all around the kitchen, noticing the changes we'd made in the last week. “We took the new train to Gretna Green.”

I humphed. “A proper wedding, I hope, and not just a declaration in front of the local blacksmith.” The Scots had a rather loose definition of marriage, and all a couple had to do was declare themselves husband and wife before witnesses. Even my Romany friends made more of a ceremony and ritual binding than that.

Of course in the wild Highlands with more sheep than people and settlements few and far between, a couple might have to wait a year or more for an itinerant priest to reach them, so a simple declaration made sense. Unfortunately, couples from all over the island, not just Scotland, in a hurry to marry used the system to bypass church regulations.

“We found a church and a proper clergyman, if you can call the Presbyters proper priests,” Jane said, lifting her chin in righteous determination. She tidied her bonnet, retied the ribbons and tucked escaping tendrils behind her ears, restoring her dignity with her proper grooming.

“Do you know how worried we were about you?” I asked, angry now that I'd assured myself of her well-being and her virtue.

“But why? We were only gone a few days.”

“More than a week while girls are being abducted off the streets nearly every night, including Violet and the daughter of a baron. We feared for your life, and your soul, as well as your virtue.”

“I'm sorry, Missus. We had no time to prepare. My Freddy's da said we had to stop keeping company until Freddy passed the bar, and Freddy wouldn't hear of it. So he proposed right then and there, and his da went storming off threatening to throw him out on the street. He . . . he accused me of only wanting his money and not loving him. When I do love him. I really and truly do.” She looked right and left rather frantically, as if needing us to believe her. As if she needed our approval to convince herself her emotions were real.

“We had to leave. We couldn't wait.” Jane fished in her reticule for a hankie to dab her eyes.

Her tears looked genuine.

Emily gave me a sidelong glance that told me she didn't believe a word of it. “His father,” she mouthed. “He approved.” Then she deliberately took up my rolling pin and rolled out the pastry dough I had just abandoned, removing herself from the conversation.

Maybe the father had a change of heart. Maybe Freddy lied.

“Wait a moment,” Jane looked up, clear-eyed and without the blotchy skin that follows copious tears. “You said Violet is missing? But I saw her the morning that Freddy and I left. She was boarding a train for Devon. We were headed north and had no time to talk to her.”

“Devon? Why would she go to Devon? She said she needed to visit her mother in Southwark on her half day.” Without thinking, I headed upstairs to my office. I knew I had a map. In fact, I had a detailed map of southern England dating back to Roman times, and others covering many eras including modern times. I had not returned the tome to the library.

I loved maps. They held more information than most people thought to look for.

Jane and Mickey trailed after me.

“Toby's gone, too,” Mickey whispered to Jane, none too subtly. “Went missing the same day.”

“Devon. What's in Devon besides the best cream in the world?” I opened the atlas to the first map of the southern coastline.

“The end of the railway line,” Jane offered.