CHAPTER 15
Charlotte turned as Sheffield came out of a side parlor, a wine-colored silk hair ribbon twined in his fingers.
“Lady Cordelia has been here.” He held up the ribbon, its curling tail fluttering in the drafty gloom. “She’s extremely fond of this particular shade of burgundy.”
“It’s not an uncommon color,” pointed out Charlotte. “We mustn’t jump to conclusions—”
“It has her scent,” said Sheffield flatly. He looked down at his hands, the slight movement wreathing his face in shadow.
“There’s other evidence that she and the others have been here recently,” interjected the earl. “And it appears that they left in a hurry.”
“I didn’t warn them, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not, Kit,” replied Wrexford. “I trust that you would have told me if you had.”
Their friend released a pent-up breath. “Thank you for that. I know I’ve been a fool—”
“There’s nothing foolish about friendship and loyalty,” cut in Charlotte. “And until we find out what’s going on, let us try not to assume the worst.”
“The worst?” A mirthless snort. “What other possible explanation can there be?”
Her throat constricted. She wouldn’t insult him with fairie tales.
“As I’ve said before, idle speculation is useless,” announced Wrexford. “Let’s take a closer look at Professor Sudler’s study and then search the outbuildings to see if there’s any tangible clue as to what they’re up to.” He turned on his heel. “Or where they might have gone.”
Ever logical, thought Charlotte. Thank heavens. They mustn’t allow Sheffield to fall into a chasm of blue-deviled brooding.
Sudler’s desk yielded nothing but academic correspondence and page after page of incomprehensible formulas peppered with cryptic notes.
“The man is either a genius,” muttered Sheffield as he thumbed through a notebook, “or stark raving mad.”
“Sometimes the line between the two is razor thin,” observed the earl. He slammed a drawer shut. “I think we’ve seen enough here. Perhaps we’ll have better luck outside.”
They made quick work of a shed, which held only a jumble of garden tools and broken terra-cotta pots, then moved on to the small stable.
The three stalls and the tiny hayloft also told them naught but that a horse and cart had been housed there recently.
The largest of the three structures, however, held a hint of promise.
Its heavy iron-banded door was fastened with a massive padlock.
“Damnation,” said Sheffield. “That’s one of those newfangled German puzzle locks. I doubt you—”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” murmured Wrexford as he once again pulled the steel probe from his boot.
“Tyler and I . . .” Click-click. “Were rather curious as to how these mechanisms worked . . .” Click-click.
“So we did a bit of study on the principles . . .” Click-click.
“And disassembled several models in order to examine—”
The lock’s shank released with a well-oiled snick.
“Ah, excellent.” The earl allowed a grim smile. “Tyler will be delighted to hear that our surmise about the levers working the same way on all models is correct.”
“You really must show me how to do that,” said Charlotte.
“Ha! You find a way to winkle out enough secrets as it is,” said Wrexford dryly. Taking up the lantern he had brought from the stable, he quickly struck a spark to the wick and beckoned them to follow him inside.
The still air had an oddly metallic chill to it, thought Charlotte as she stepped into the darkness. The windows were all tightly shuttered, which seemed to amplify the echo of their steps on the stone floor.
“Have a care,” cautioned the earl as he felt his way forward. “There appears to be some rather large machinery in here.”
She came to a halt on hearing him rustle around. A moment later, one of the shutters came open, revealing . . .
“Merciful heavens.” Charlotte sucked in her breath.
Sheffield, too, was looking around the long and narrow room in wonder as Wrexford pried open several more of the window covers. “It looks like something out of Greek mythology. You know, the workshop of that fellow who served as blacksmith to the immortals of Olympus.”
“Hephaestus,” said the earl. “The god of fire and metalworking.” He picked up a hammer from one of the work counters and tapped it against his palm.
An array of intricate machinery made of iron, steel, and brass—lathes, drill presses, and fanciful assemblies that Charlotte couldn’t begin to name—stretched down the entire length of the building.
On the opposite wall hung a phalanx of hand tools and shelves above a work counter.
“He forged tools and weapons for the other gods,” went on Wrexford. He put down the hammer and plucked a small brass object from a row arrayed atop a piece of felt on the corner of the counter. “The engineering of this is remarkable,” he said after holding it up to the light.
Charlotte moved to a different section of the counter. “Look! There’s a set of mechanical drawings here. And they appear to be duplicates of the ones we found.”
Wrexford came over to examine them. “What the devil are they up to?” he muttered.
“It clearly involves numbers.” She pointed to a large basket sitting on one of the shelves. It was filled with ivory wheels bearing the numerals zero through nine precisely spaced along the outer rim.
Sheffield had wandered off to explore behind the forge. Hearing his grunt of surprise, they rushed to join him.
“Why would Sudler have such a collection of . . . toys?” exclaimed their friend.
“Because,” answered the earl as he approached the display table hidden in the alcove, “they’re not toys. They’re automata.”
“Ah, right,” murmured Sheffield. “That’s the term Hedley used for . . .”
“For complex mechanical devices which are constructed with incredibly precise engineering,” finished Wrexford, “allowing them to perform very sophisticated movements and functions.”
He stepped closer to the collection and wound the key hidden at the back of one of the automata. It was the one mentioned by Hedley . . . the figure of a lady attired in an elegant ball gown, perhaps a foot tall and crafted entirely out of silver.
Charlotte gasped in amazement as the figure began to dance, spinning in circles upon its metal platform as it moved its arms and legs in harmony with the notes coming from a hidden music box beneath the platform.
“That’s magical!” she said once the spring had unwound and the lady had come to a stop.
“An apt description, as Hedley told us it was made by John Merlin.” Wrexford looked up from examining the base of the automaton.
“He also told Kit and me that Sudler has had a passion for automata since his university days. I would guess he’s collected them in order to study their inner workings, which would help with the design for his own devices. ”
“And all this?” Sheffield gestured back at the machinery.
“It takes complex tools to craft complex parts,” answered the earl. “I would guess that Sudler has to make all the pieces himself for his complicated designs.”
“That makes sense.” Charlotte frowned in thought. “However, I can’t help but wonder . . . We’ve seen the plans lying on the counter and all the equipment for fabricating the individual parts. But where is the automaton that he’s building?”
“Perhaps he hasn’t yet started,” said Sheffield. “Or perhaps he took it with him.”
Wrexford remained silent for a moment, his expression turning troubled. “It seems to me there’s an even more pressing question,” he said. “Why does Sudler need Lady Cordelia?”
Charlotte felt a shiver snake down her spine. “Or vice versa,” she whispered.
Sheffield stared at her in dismay. “You think it’s Lady Cordelia who is spearheading a nefarious plot, rather than her brother?”
Charlotte hated to see the warring of hope and despair in his eyes.
But it was becoming increasingly hard to see any other explanation for what was going on.
“Woodbridge isn’t nearly as clever as his sister,” she pointed out.
“I’m not sure he’s capable of figuring out a complex financial plan to profit from all the money he has apparently borrowed. But . . .”
She paused to compose her thoughts, trying to find the words to express her fears as gently as possible.
Wrexford had no such compunction. “Lady Cordelia has both the brains and the sangfroid to come up with a plan to save her brother from financial ruin. We know that from past experience. And as for profit, you yourself know she has a head for business.”
A tiny throat muscle jumped as Sheffield tightened his jaw.
“Perhaps what’s going on is perfectly legal,” continued the earl. “But when you add up the facts—a murder that connects, however tenuously, to Hoare’s Bank, and the sudden flight of both brother and sister—the answer does seem to indicate that they’re up to no good.”
He paused. “I’m sorry, Kit, but it’s nigh on impossible to imagine that it wasn’t she who came up with the plan.”
Touching a finger to the smoothly sculpted face of the silver dancer, Sheffield then traced the delicate planes of her face. “Much I as wish to disagree, I can’t in good conscience offer any argument.”
The glimmer of the precious metal suddenly stirred a question in Charlotte’s mind.
“Silver,” she said. “Or rather argentum. Have we given any more thought to the clerk’s dying words and what he might have meant?”
Wrexford shook his head. “I can’t begin to hazard a guess. The only metals I see in the workshop are brass, steel, and iron. Until we’re able to speak with Lady Cordelia and her brother—”
“And Professor Sudler,” she interjected. “He’s involved for a reason.”
“Yes, but until we know what that reason is, we’re simply trying to grab at shadows—a mere trick of light.” The earl grimaced. “Naught but thin air that slips through our fingers.”
“So where do we start looking for them?” mused Charlotte.
“If I had any ideas, I would say so,” said Sheffield, a note of defeat shading his voice.
“Wrexford?” she asked.
The earl took a moment to look at the hulking machinery. “I need to think about it. But first, let’s continue looking around and see if there’s anything that might give us a more solid idea of what they’re building.”
They returned to the main work counters and began a methodical search, checking beneath the jumble of canvas coverings and inside the narrow cabinets set against the wall.
“Is this helpful?” asked Charlotte, holding out a box that contained an assembly of minute gears.
Wrexford took a look and shrugged. “Not particularly. Gears are used for a great many purposes, so it doesn’t really tell us anything.” He went back to his section of the counter and resumed his rummaging. “What we need is something that might indicate—”
A low whistle cut short his words as he shifted a large metal storage box and spotted a bulky object cloaked in a heavy oilskin cloth hidden behind it. He pulled off the cover, revealing a complex construction of rods and levers.
“Bring over the lantern, Kit.”
Charlotte and Sheffield gathered around the earl as he took the light and angled it on the mechanical device.
“Look, there’s a small wheel with a handle that must rotate,” noted Sheffield.
Wrexford was already spinning it. They watched in wonder as the gleaming brass rods and levers moved, turning a complex construction of gears, which in turn spun and shifted a procession of the numbered ivory wheels that were attached to the rods.
“Ingenious,” murmured Wrexford. “It looks to be a prototype of how a machine can do complex calculations. I don’t pretend to know exactly how it works, but .
. .” He thought for a long moment. “I recall hearing a lecture on Pascal’s famous adding machine at the Royal Institution, and I saw a model of the device.
It can’t hold a candle to this in terms of sophisticated engineering. ”
“I think it’s becoming clearer why Sudler needs Lady Cordelia,” said Charlotte. “He would require a mathematical genius to complement his engineering genius.”
“However they came together,” said the earl, “it appears they’ve created . . .”
“A monster,” intoned Sheffield.