CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT #2
They will kill you.
”
He edged a small step forward, pitching his voice low and coaxing.
“But we are your family.
You are a de Clare, in blood and bone, just as much as you are one of them.
Come home to us, come home
with us, and let us take care of you.”
I gave him a slow smile.
“That was masterfully done, Mr. de Clare.
I marvel afresh at the Celtic propensity for persuasion.
But you have not persuaded me,” I finished with a cool glance.
“I would be no safer with you than I would be in Sir Hugo’s clutches.
Tell me, which one of my cousins have you decided shall have me in marriage to breed you a male heir of your own blood?”
I asked, nodding towards his compatriots.
He bridled.
“Now, hold yourself, there is no call—”
I held up a hand.
“You are changeable as a weathercock.
I know exactly what you want me for, and it is not to play Happy Families, so spare us the sentimental rubbish.
You want a figurehead for your revolution.
Well, I shall not play the puppet for you or anyone.
I might not approve of everything this Government does,” I added with a reproachful look at Sir Hugo, “but I would rather be a private citizen here than a queen anywhere else.”
“Spoken like a loyal subject of Her Majesty,” Sir Hugo put in silkily.
“But I am afraid that will not allay the threat you present.
Miss Speedwell, you must see that I have no choice.
Irish mob or not,” he said, flicking a distasteful look at my uncle, “I must take you into custody.”
“I understand your predicament, Sir Hugo.
You are not working at your own behest, are you?
You must have anticipated my misguided uncle would come with reinforcements.
And yet you mustered only a dozen men.
That seems either monstrously na?ve or very secretive.
I am guessing the latter.
I think my uncle has the right of it—someone else is pulling your strings, and you cannot risk taking too many men from their regular duties at Scotland Yard or the story would be made public.
So your master works behind the scenes—an adviser to the royal family, I surmise.
Someone accustomed to using force to get his way, someone ruthless and entirely devoted to the family.
If he weren’t already cold in his grave, I would have suspected that wretched Scotsman, Brown.
But there is someone.
And he is playing the tune to which you dance.”
Sir Hugo did not care for my characterization of himself as puppet.
He gave me a thin smile.
“You are even more clever than Inspector Mornaday’s report indicated.
But your deductions are irrelevant.
Whoever has taken an interest in you has the interests of the Crown at heart, and those interests must be paramount.”
“I agree,” I said calmly.
“I
quite agree that the Crown must not be permitted to be threatened or even embarrassed, particularly not now, when the eyes of the world are upon the queen as she celebrates her Jubilee.
It would be unthinkable.”
“I am glad you are prepared to be reasonable,” he remarked.
“The question is, are you?”
Once more I raised the packet.
“These are all the papers that are pertinent to my identity.
In this packet is my parents’ marriage certificate—a certificate whose witnesses are now all dead.
In this packet is the registration of my birth, also witnessed by a man who is dead.
Every single person who had direct knowledge of the circumstances of my birth and could give testimony under oath to my parentage is deceased.”
“All except your father,” Edmund de Clare pointed out.
“And I think we may expect his lips to be sealed upon the matter.”
I turned to Sir Hugo.
“Everything that represents the danger I am to the Crown is in this packet.”
Deliberately, I lifted my arm higher and held his gaze for an instant before I dropped it into the flames.
My uncle dashed forward, but before he could reach the cauldron, Stoker, on cue and according to plan, threw in a bottle of formaldehyde, shattering the glass and causing the flames to blaze upward, nearly licking the ceiling as a ball of fire roared out of the cauldron.
“You needn’t bother yourself,” I told my uncle.
“That was formaldehyde, the most flammable substance in this place.
The papers were destroyed the moment it touched them.”
De Clare’s face went utterly blank as the shock of his loss settled upon him.
In that instant, reason deserted him.
He went for Stoker, his hands at Stoker’s throat.
The surprise of the attack had caught Stoker off guard and bowled him over onto his back, my uncle throttling him as they went down heavily.
Stoker drove one knee upward into my uncle’s chest, sending him flying backward through the air and squarely against the cauldron.
My uncle dangled a moment above the flames, flailing wildly.
Stoker made a grab at him, catching de Clare’s waistcoat in his fist and pulling him from danger, but it was too late.
The trailing tails of his coat dragged through the fire, igniting instantly.
Stoker released him and de Clare staggered back against the cauldron.
He pushed himself free unsteadily, the fire a ghoulish nimbus as he staggered towards the windows.
His progress was jerky, like that of an automaton whose clockworks have begun to fail.
He stopped and started, careering from table to shelves, grasping at anything in his path—furniture, mounted animals, teetering stacks of books.
I like to think it was horror that paralyzed Sir Hugo, for he was closest and might have stopped my uncle and smothered the flames.
But he stood motionless, watching, mouth agape, along with the rest of us, as Edmund de Clare flung himself out the window and into the fetid green waters of the Thames.
We heard the splash as he entered the water, and then a terrible silence.
Before Sir Hugo or Mornaday could stop them, the rest of the Irish seized their chance, bolting out the window after Edmund and diving straight into the river.
But the escape of the miscreants was the least of our worries.
Edmund’s frantic stagger through the workshop had set piles of papers and tanned skins alight, and the flames raced along, seizing specimens and books and newspapers in their greedy grip.
Stoker turned to me.
“Get out, now!
The whole place is going up!”
The Wardian cases began to explode from the heat, shattering glass and chemicals over everything, the specimens dying a second death as the sawdust within them—saturated in flammable solutions—ignited with a fury.
Stoker shoved me at Mornaday and the detective responded, wrapping his arms about me to hurry me from the burning building, with Sir Hugo hard upon our heels.
We reached the pavement outside to find the neighbors emerging from their lodgings, faces either aghast or avid with interest as they realized the warehouse was on fire.
I gulped in deep drafts of the smoky air as I did a swift inventory of my person.
Appendages and hair were unscorched, although my costume was a little the worse for wear, streaked with soot and singed a little at the hem where my skirt had brushed a burning stack of natural history journals on the way out.
I turned to Stoker, when I realized he was not beside me.
I whirled to see him making his way back into the burning building.
“Stoker!”
I shouted.
“What are you doing?”
He gave me one last look.
“I am going back for my bloody dog!”
Terror gripped my throat as Mornaday and Sir Hugo thrust me further into the crisp, clear evening air, where we were attended by Sir Hugo’s men.
They were dressed in plain clothes, not the proper uniforms of police officers, but they were obedient to Sir Hugo, bringing blankets and nips of whiskey from pocket flasks and asking repeatedly if they should attempt to summon the fire brigade.
Sir Hugo instructed them against it.
He watched in perfect composure as the building burned, his lips pressed together in an expression of detached satisfaction.
I could understand why.
This was a preferable solution to the problem of Edmund de Clare.
A trial for the baron’s murder would have meant publicity.
This way, Edmund de Clare would vanish into the waters of the Thames, and his plot would disappear with him.
Whether his claim of having a host of men waiting outside had been a prevarication or the truth, we would never know.
No one came forward, and in other circumstances I would have been amused to think that Edmund de Clare had bluffed the head of Scotland Yard.
I knew precisely how to puncture Sir Hugo’s sangfroid.
“You are content to let Stoker’s home burn?”
I asked, not troubling to conceal the acid in my tone.
“There are greater considerations afoot,” he replied with maddening calm.
He had a neat little beard of the sort that Stuart kings used to wear, and he stroked it, no doubt in satisfaction.
I gave him a grim smile.
“Yes, well, mind you have your men trawl that section of the Thames for Edmund de Clare’s body, although they shan’t find it.
It’s rather shallow just there.
I daresay he managed to get away quite handily.”
To my enormous pleasure, Sir Hugo blinked.
“Shallow?”
“Deep enough to prevent him from sustaining further injury from the jump, but not so deep as to present any real danger of drowning is my guess,” I elaborated.
“He has a boat, you know.
And while he may not be the cleverest of criminal masterminds, a man with even rudimentary common sense would have taken the precaution of arranging his means of leaving our little rendezvous tonight.
What better route than the river?
You did not expect it, I daresay.
And with Silent John and those other two ruffians to aid him, I suspect he is already halfway down the Thames.”
Behind him, Mornaday hid his smile behind a hand at his superior’s discomfiture.
Sir Hugo’s nostrils flared slightly.
It was an elegant nose and he used it to good effect.
“My dear Miss Speedwell, I hardly think—”
“I’m only surprised Inspector Mornaday did not tell you all about it.”
“You knew he had a boat?”
Sir Hugo whirled on Mornaday and fixed him with a cold eye that promised retribution of the most painful sort.
I turned away.
As much as it would please me to see Mornaday get his comeuppance, I could no longer hide my concern for Stoker’s fate.
He had been in that burning building far too long.
I kept my eyes fixed upon the door, watching the smoke billow forth and the hellish flames grow higher and higher.
I heard the riverside wall give way, bricks and beams tumbling into the Thames just where my uncle had gone in, and another woman might have prayed.
But I could not.
I looked down at my hands and saw crescents of blood, the relics of my fingernails digging into my palms.
My focus narrowed onto the smoke that rolled and hissed like a living thing, and then it parted a moment, and a figure emerged.
It was Stoker, a little the worse for wear, but cradling a yawning Huxley, who was snuffling about in search of a sausage.
My knees threatened to give way.
“Fool,” I muttered.
Stoker shrugged.
“He is family.”
The undercover police officers kept the peace, pushing the avid spectators back as the fire burned itself out.
Because the warehouse was detached, no other businesses or lodgings were put in danger, and in due course, Sir Hugo permitted the fire brigade to be summoned to finish off the job.
I turned to see Mornaday looking distinctly cowed after his upbraiding and Sir Hugo staring at me in something like disbelief.
I had the feeling that very few people ever surprised him.
“That was your only chance to claim a throne,” he said.
“That was never what I wanted.”
I pulled the blanket closer about my shoulders.
“I think we can agree that I am no longer a threat?
To the Crown or to your master?”
He hesitated.
“In spite of my better judgment, I will do my best to be persuasive upon the point to the parties most concerned.
We will speak again tomorrow.
I will send word of the time,” he said, dismissing me with a flick of the finger.
It was then I realized instinctively that Sir Hugo had always known my whereabouts.
Whatever games he played, they were deep ones, and I wondered precisely how far his tentacles could reach.
Whilst Sir Hugo was directing his men, Stoker and Huxley and I slipped away.
“He said he wants to see us again.
You left without giving him our direction.
He shan’t like that,” Stoker noted as we trudged through the darkening streets on weary feet.
“He will know where to find us,” was my only reply.