Chapter 28
Chapter
As expected, a solid eight hours of repose had a restorative effect.
I said nothing to J. J. of our discovery of the previous night—largely because she was not to be found.
I looked into the Bavarian folly before retiring and found her snoring loudly enough to wake the dead.
In the morning, she had risen before I woke, and it was clear she had availed herself of the Roman bathhouse, disappearing before I arrived.
There were telltale traces of her occupation of the little temple.
She had helped herself to my things, leaving behind a cake of luxurious French soap to dissolve into a puddle and my towel crumpled and damp.
But even my imperfect ablutions could not quell my rising spirits.
Stoker and I were agreed that Seward Johnson must play a villain’s part in this little drama, but I could not see him as the director of the play.
That would require a surer hand, a greater imagination.
I had no evidence for my suspicions; I could call it only intuition.
And without evidence to support it, there was little point in raising the possibility, but I was suddenly uncomfortable with the notion of keeping our adventure from Mornaday any longer than necessary.
I breakfasted alone to the sounds of Stoker hard at work in his curtained workspace, loud sea chanties punctuated with banging and the occasional profanity.
His mood was as buoyant as mine, it seemed, and when J.
J. finally appeared, Mornaday hard upon her heels, we had each put in a solid morning’s work at our respective tasks.
Given our activities the night before, I was not best pleased to see Mornaday, and from Stoker’s expression, I gathered I was not alone.
“We didn’t expect you,” Stoker told him flatly.
“I need to be kept abreast of any developments,” Mornaday replied loftily.
We mounted the winding stair to the snuggery, J. J. carrying the little male Galápagos tortoise which seemed to have adopted her. Huxley the bulldog, who does not as a rule care for Testudines, gave it a sniff and then turned his back to stalk away on his little bandy-legs, clearly aggrieved.
“I am sorry about Huxley, but this fellow will keep following me about,” J. J. said, settling her newfound friend onto a cushion beside her. She pulled a handful of lettuce from her pocket and began to feed him little titbits as we talked.
I cleared my throat and began, addressing my remarks to no one in particular, but careful not to look Mornaday in the eye. “Stoker and I paid a visit to Horace Von Hilsing last night to see if we could discover a forwarding address, a place to direct our queries about the Mortlake Jewel.”
“Von Hilsing is dead,” Stoker said abruptly. “Poisoned. We believe it was arsenic, administered over a period of time in several small doses considering the fact that the poison was present in Von Hilsing’s fingernail, which I confirmed via the Marsh test.”
Mornaday’s mouth gaped as Stoker finished. He closed it and it gaped again. I turned to Stoker. “You ought to have broken it more gently. He looks rather like a landed carp struggling to breathe.”
“He looks like something,” Stoker agreed.
J. J. shoved an entire pocketful of lettuce at the tortoise and brought out her notebook. She licked the tip of her pencil and began to write furiously.
“You…wait now, I am still trying to understand,” Mornaday began. “You went to Von Hilsing’s house and…what? Broke in? Is that the first of your crimes?”
“The first of many,” I told him. “I should add that we did damage a piece of rather nice stained glass to gain entry. But that is the limit of the physical destruction we committed.”
“Oh, good. I am so glad,” he said, his brows lowering. “I should have hated if you mussed the carpets.”
“Do not be churlish,” I remonstrated. “We did you a service, Mornaday. We went where you cannot, and we discovered what you would never have—namely, Horace Von Hilsing, dead in his bed.”
“Dead in his bed!” Mornaday stuffed a fist into his mouth as his complexion purpled.
He withdrew it a moment later, forcing the words through gritted teeth.
“You went upstairs. To the bedroom of the fourth-richest man in the world. An American, no less. It will be a diplomatic incident. They will blame me.” He thrust his hands into his hair, clutching hard.
“Don’t do that,” I urged. “It is terribly damaging to the follicles, you know, and you really haven’t enough hair to spare.
” He made a strangled noise in his throat and calmed himself with a visible effort.
I went on. “In due course, you can be the one to present the case to your superiors, but surely your first priority is to apprehend the murderer and hand him over to justice as a fait accompli.”
Mornaday skewered me with a look. “What the devil do you mean?”
“When Stoker and I first called upon Seward Johnson, there were packed cases in the house in Steel Square—” I broke off, casting my mind back to the moment we entered the darkened hall the previous night, the vast, empty echo of the place.
Stoker picked up the thread of the narrative. “Johnson told us the cases were for Von Hilsing, but when he told us that, Von Hilsing must have already been dead upstairs.”
“The cases are now absent,” I added. “They must have been Johnson’s and not Von Hilsing’s at all. His departure must be imminent! Mornaday, you will want to check all of the steamship offices and train stations.”
His eyes goggled. “All of them? For a passenger named Johnson?”
I shrugged. “There is little point in attempting to find him in his present circumstances. If he is clever, and I suspect he is, he has moved into some middling sort of genteel hotel until it is time to board his ship. That will be your last chance to apprehend him.”
Mornaday swore a streak of profanity so fluent it would have done Stoker proud. He left, slamming the door of the Belvedere behind him for good measure.
“He is inordinately out of sorts,” J. J. observed.
“Because he has only the slenderest of threads and it is up to him to pluck it,” I replied.
* * *
As soon as Mornaday departed, Stoker removed himself to his work, taking refuge in his secret project whilst I set to cleaning a recently acquired tray of albino specimens of Cyaniris semiargus.
It was painstaking and delicate work, requiring perfectly focused attention and the better part of the day.
J. J. had taken herself off to parts unknown, and Stoker was still hard at work on his mysterious trophy when I finished.
I longed for company, but he had made it quite clear that interruptions would not be welcome, as his efforts had reached a critical juncture.
With J. J. still absent and Stoker unavailable, I decided to pay a visit to my favourite place of respite, the Hippolyta Club.
What inspiration I drew from within its walls!
The moment my gaze fell upon the brass plaque outside the door bearing its blazing motto—alis volat propriis—my spirits rose.
I greeted the porter, Hetty, at the front desk, pausing a moment to exchange a bit of informative discussion with her.
(A lesser person might call this gossip, but Hetty and I were interested only in the accomplishments of fellow members and spent practically no time at all discussing a proposed member who had been discovered in the broom cupboard with one of the maids.)
I took myself upstairs to the smoking room and, mindful that I had missed luncheon entirely, enjoyed a plate of sandwiches and a pot of tea.
Refreshed, I settled in with a violet cigarette and a glass of whisky as I read through the latest issue of the club journal, Hippolyta Speaks.
There were the usual notes on recent expeditions, biographical sketches of featured members, essays on the rights of women, and appeals for support for ongoing projects.
My favourite feature was to be found on the back page, the exchanges of private messages, usually in some form of intriguing code.
To reach it, I had to flick through the advertisements, everything from cold creams to fishing reels—all that a lady explorer might require.
Just as I paged past an advertisement for steamships, I saw it, a single word that demanded my attention because I had so recently seen it on the scrap of paper in the house in Steel Square.
Greville.
* * *
Throwing down the journal, I drained my whisky, stubbed out my fragrant cigarette, and made my way out to the street, where I quickly hailed a cab.
I ought to have called at the Belvedere for Stoker, but impatience burnt within me.
The leads in this investigation had been maddeningly opaque, and here at last was a clue that required immediate attention.
I was straining at the lead like a bloodhound on the scent of a fox.
I instructed the driver to carry me to the offices of the Belleville steamship line.
While not as luxurious as the Cunard or White Star ships, the Belleville liners offered very comfortable accommodations, if their advertisements in the newspapers were to be believed.
It was a little flourish of theirs that every ship under their flag bore a name ending in “-ville,” a conceit of the founder of the line, Sir Emory Belleville.
And that was why a single word found on a mere scrap of paper had led me to this moment.
Greville. It was a name that might have meant anything, jotted on the spur of the moment as an aide-mémoire.
I had connected it to nothing whatsoever until I had seen the advertisement, a discreet notice of the launching of a new flagship, the HMS Belleville, and listed below, all of her sister ships.
Tucked neatly halfway down the alphabetical group—the HMS Greville.
It was a slender thing, this certainty of mine, but the closer we drew to the offices of the Belleville Line, the stronger it grew.
I leapt out of the cab as I tossed a coin to the cabman.
Inside the Belleville offices, the air was stuffy thanks to the windows, tightly shut against any fresh air, and the press of people.
Dozens were there, purchasing tickets, inquiring about passage, and generally making nuisances of themselves.
The clerks looked harried and hurried, so I waited, counting slowly to a hundred in Cantonese, then again in Farsi, and again in Arabic.
I had nearly resorted to counting in French when at last a young man of depressed countenance beckoned me to his window.
“Yes, madam?” He had the animation and charm of an incontinent basset hound, but I smiled sadly at him from under my lashes.
“Good afternoon,” I said in a low, confiding voice. “I wish to inquire about passage on the Greville.”
“She is nearly full. The only available berths are in steerage,” he said in dull monotone.
“I do not wish to travel,” I amended hastily. “I wish to see the passenger list.”
He stirred a little at this, looking livelier. “Madam, that is not—”
“My husband, I believe, has booked passage on the Greville. She sets sail tomorrow, does she not?”
“Yes, but—”
“He did not secure passage for me,” I said in a tone of wounded dignity. “I think he means to abandon me. And our children.”
“Children?” A flicker of pity kindled in his gaze.
“All seven of them.”
“Seven! I can hardly blame him,” he muttered. “It is against—”
“I beg you,” I said, laying a hand to his sleeve.
“Please. If he leaves, the children will starve. Even little Peter. He has a bad leg, you know. And baby Millicent has the whooping cough. And the staggers.” I do not say that I fluttered my lashes pleadingly, but the astute reader may assume it.
Perhaps it was this, or perhaps it was the thought of the seven ailing children who would surely starve without their feckless papa, but the clerk sighed.
“I think you will find the staggers is an ailment confined to cattle, madam,” he informed me.
I began to protest, but he raised a hand in surrender.
“It is against the rules, but I cannot begin to care,” he said, shoving a ledger towards me.
“You may have one minute to peruse as I step away to make a cup of tea. When I return, the ledger will be closed and you will have gone, agreed?”
“Agreed.” I fairly snatched the ledger from him, running my finger down the passenger list. Halfway down the page, I saw it. Seward Johnson, travelling in a first-class cabin on the next crossing from Southampton to New York with stops in Ireland and Nova Scotia.
“Excelsior!” I whispered in exultation. “I have you now, you blackguard.” But before I could enjoy my triumph properly, I saw the next name on the list.
And that changed everything.