Chapter Thirty-Two #2
Her voice faded as her eyes stared at the date on the headstone. It couldn’t be.
“The exact date your father died,” Tobias said, finishing her sentence as he looked at her in surprise.
“But how can that be?” Jack couldn’t understand it. The baron’s son died on the same day as her father? The chance of such a thing being a coincidence was remote, to say the least.
“It was reported that you and your father both died in that fire,” Tobias said.
“I always assumed that it was my father’s second apprentice, Tommy Smith, who died that night alongside my father.” Then it dawned on Jack… “Oh, my goodness… Could it be that Tommy was in fact Thomas Clorren, the baron’s son?”
But surely, if it had been he, then Tommy would have hated her father…
he would have hated Jack for providing the testimony that had convicted his father and sent him to a lunatic asylum for the rest of his life.
The memory she had of her father’s relatively new apprentice had been of an introverted young man who had been desperate to learn all he could about magic, and who’d been very diligent in doing so too.
“Do you know much about this Tommy Smith?”
“Not a great deal, as he kept to himself. Originally, my father had no intention of taking on a second apprentice, having already taken on Caleb. But when Tommy approached him after a show, maybe about six months before the fire, he begged my father to take him on. He was rather desperate, as I recall, even going so far as to perform some very impressive card tricks, showing an inherit skill with magic that Caleb seemed to lack.”
She could still picture the impressed look in her father’s eyes, a look she’d always craved to see when she’d performed her tricks for him.
“I think Tommy’s natural talent for magic intrigued my father, given he was a little disappointed in Caleb’s somewhat slow progress after a year of training.
When Tommy told my father he was happy not to be paid, as he was obsessed with learning all he could of magic, my father’s interested was piqued.
Plus, a free pair of hands for any performance was always welcome.
He agreed to train Tommy as his second apprentice, contrary to Caleb’s objections. ”
The night of her father’s death came back to her in horrifying clarity.
He’d been arguing with someone, and when Jack had tried to leave her father’s dressing room to go see what was happening, a man in a cloak had come rushing down the hall from the stage area, smoke beginning to billow from behind him.
He’d rushed over to her and grabbed her, then shoved her in the dressing room before slamming the door shut and locking her in.
Jack hadn’t had her lockpicking set on her to get out of the room, and she’d banged and banged on the door, hoping someone would hear. Then the smoke had started pouring in from underneath the door, like an insidious ghost, stalking her and starting to choke her with its fumes.
She’d started to panic, but then she’d heard a voice yelling from behind the door, telling her to stand back.
Several resounding bangs had sounded against the door until it had swung open, and a young police officer had appeared.
Tobias. He’d grabbed her and told her to close her eyes and hold her breath, and then he’d picked her up and thrown her over his shoulder and rushed out through the burning theater.
He’d made sure she was safe, and then she’d begged him to go back into the burning building to save her father.
She took in a big breath, trying to blink away the memories and return to the present. “I’m sorry you were hurt going back in to try to save my father. I never should have asked you to do that.”
“I would have done it, anyway, knowing others were in there, possibly still alive.
And she knew without a doubt, he would have too.
“What you did was extraordinary. All the other police, except for the one who went in after you, were all content to stand outside watching as the Metropolitan Fire Brigade battled to put out the flames. In any event, when word spread that everyone inside had perished, I was distraught… I ran and ran, and then I ran some more. I didn’t even know where I was going; my thoughts were so consumed with my father’s death. ”
“It wasn’t your fault, Jack.”
“I know that logically, but a part of me still feels guilty that I survived.” She shook her head, desperately trying to forget those feelings.
“In any event, when I saw the papers reporting that it was myself and my father who perished in the flames, I thought it was a good time to disappear and pretend that Jack Maguire had died that night. I assumed, though, that the other death had to have been Tommy who died, given I’d seen Caleb escape from the building that night, and it had just been the four of us in there.
Well, apart from the man who’d locked me in the dressing room. ”
“Do you remember what he looked like?”
She shook her head. “No, he was wearing a cloak that covered most of his face, so I have no idea who he could have been.” In her dreams, it was a monster’s face she saw under the cloak. “For all I know, it could have even been anyone.”
“The investigation file said that only one body was found,” Tobias said, rubbing his chin, his eyes glancing over the horizon.
“Then why did the papers report that my father and I had both died?”
“The building was so badly damaged, with rubble everywhere, that it couldn’t properly be searched at the time.
Your father’s body was found the next day after the fire, but I believe the investigator thought you had perished too, given no one had seen you after the fire.
” Tobias sighed. “Obviously, when the rubble from the building was cleared a few months later, no one even thought about looking for a second body.”
“If there was no second body found, then Tommy could have survived…”
“Could he have been the man in the cloak who locked you in the room?”
“Perhaps?” She tried to remember the eyes under the cloak.
They’d looked mad and feverish, but had they been Tommy’s?
She wasn’t sure. But if Tommy was Thomas Clorren, then he was most likely the man she’d heard arguing with her father.
And even more likely to have been the one to set the fire that had killed him.
She glanced over at Thomas Clorren’s headstone.
With the baron’s death, a part of her had hoped this whole nightmare from her past would be over.
Wishful thinking, it seemed. “Do you think Thomas was Tommy and that it’s likely he’s still alive? ”
“I’ll be able to confirm that with the General Register Office once we return to London.
” Tobias’s eyes followed Jack’s back to the headstone.
“Perhaps you weren’t the only one to use the fire to disappear that night.
How else would Lady Denton have even known he’d died, let alone that specific date he died on?
The only logical explanation is that Tommy Smith was Thomas Clorren and he did survive and fake his death too.
Most likely even convincing Lady Denton to go along with pretending he was dead. ”
For a moment, Jack stood there trying to sift through all she’d seen and heard on the night of her father’s death.
The loud voices arguing, the man in the cloak…
Could it have been the young man she’d known as Tommy?
Someone who had purposefully convinced her father he’d been there to learn about magic but had instead been there to hurt him? To revenge his father, even?
“The fire was exactly five years to the day of my mother’s death… I’d always thought it a very cruel trick of fate to play, but it seems like it was no trick at all, rather a deliberate plan.”
“Most likely,” Tobias agreed. “If this Tommy Smith was Thomas Clorren, then what better way to seek revenge on you and your father than to kill you both on the five-year anniversary of your mother’s death…? The very day his father had been arrested, and his own life had changed so irrevocably.”
“If that’s the case, then he’s most likely the Coffin Conjurer, isn’t he?”
Tobias again nodded. “Yes, Jack, I think there’s a very good chance that that’s exactly who he is. The real question though is: who else is he pretending to be?”