CHAPTER 21
“Not so fast, Wrex,” whispered Sheffield. They had entered a cavernous space, and the earl was leading the way, the blade of lantern light flickering over the intricate mechanisms of the machines flanking the center walkway.
“These are precision lathes,” explained Sheffield. “Whatever technical innovations Maitland is crafting here, these machines must be making the components. So it stands to reason that there might be some diagrams left out on the worktables, showing what the devil they are doing.”
“Good thinking, Kit.” Wrexford gave himself a mental kick for missing the connection, reminding himself not to let emotion cloud his judgment. He stopped and allowed the light to probe into the shadows between the lathes.
Sheffield let out a grunt of satisfaction on spotting a trestle table and stool set against the wall. Their hopes, however, proved short-lived. It appeared that Maitland and his supervisors ran a tight ship—none of the worktables yielded anything more substantial than a few errant crumbs of bread.
“The villains are being careful,” observed Wrexford. “I take that as a good sign. Let’s keep looking for Maitland’s office.”
A corridor led from the lathes to the rear of the building. They passed several more work areas—a carpentry shop, a storage room for rope and pulleys—before a last turn brought them face to face with two closed doors. Wrexford tried the one on the right.
Its latch lifted without protest.
“Nothing but lading bills and lists of deliveries,” he muttered after searching through the papers atop the bare-bones wooden desk.
Its drawers were empty, and save for a straight-back chair and pair of open wooden crates shoved up against the wall beneath the lone window, there was nothing else in the room.
Nothing.
And yet he could smell it. Malevolence tainted the air, its sour, sulfurous odor swirling up from the bowels of Hell. Some clue to its source was here, and by God, he was going to find it.
“Sorry if I’ve brought us on a wild goose chase,” apologized Sheffield. “I was sure that we would find—”
“Let’s try the other door.” The candle flame sputtered as Wrexford grabbed the lantern, then flared into a red-gold blaze.
He watched it sway, its color deepening as the shadows flitted across the room.
“Have faith, Kit. Taviot is clever, but we’re tenacious.
” The earl turned for the corridor. “He’ll make a mistake, and then we’ll have him. ”
The door didn’t yield to his touch, which drew a smile. “As A. J. Quill is wont to say, no secret, however well-guarded, is truly safe.” After passing the light to Sheffield, he crouched down and set to work.
“You need to teach me how to pick a lock,” said his friend, observing the subtle probing of the earl’s metal probe.
“The Weasels have been pestering me about that as well,” he replied. “Heaven forfend that I unleash such mayhem and mischief on my own head.”
Sheffield raised his brows. “Are you implying that I would be so childish as to misuse such a skill?” A pause. “Though the thought of gaining access to your wine cellar would be tempting. Riche has been surprisingly stuffy about revealing where he keeps the key.”
A grunt . . . and then a click. “Forget about my brandy. We have more sobering matters to occupy our efforts.”
Like the adjoining room, this one had a small window on the rear wall, and the faint glow of starlight filtering in revealed that they may have found Maitland’s private lair.
Wrexford paused in the doorway to study the room before rushing in. Scientific detachment, he reminded himself. Tiny details mattered.
An oak desk and chair dominated the center of the space.
Several stacks of books surrounded an inkwell and a jar of pens, while a ghostlike glimmer of white atop the dark leather blotter drew his eye to a disorderly sheaf of papers.
A bookcase made from rough-sawn planks was set against the right wall, its shelves filled with an assortment of scientific journals.
To the left was a fireplace, a tiny tendril of smoke curling up from the ashes in the grate.
“Someone was here not long ago,” observed Sheffield. Shifting his stance, he darted a look back into the corridor.
The earl was already moving. “Close the door behind you, then have a look at the bookcase while I examine the desk and its contents.” He took a seat in the chair and started with the books.
The first group was technical treatises on steam engines.
A number of torn scraps of paper protruded from the pages, clearly serving as placeholders.
The second pile was much the same, with a few mathematical texts mixed in.
“What am I looking for?” asked Sheffield as he crouched down to look through the lower shelf.
“I’m not sure. But you’ll know it when you see it,” answered Wrexford. He didn’t bother to check any of the bookmarked pages, sensing that the key to unlocking whatever grand secret lay at the heart of the mysteries within mysteries lay elsewhere.
He hurriedly skimmed the rest of the spines. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Muttering an oath, the earl pulled the lantern closer and started shuffling through the papers.
They were all blank. He was about to move to the drawers when he noticed the small trash pail beneath the desk.
Inside were several crumpled papers, which he fished out and smoothed on the blotter.
At first the sheets appeared to be covered with disjointed scribblings—a few sentences, which were then scratched out and a new thought begun.
But as the scattering of words sunk in, he realized that it was the rough draft of a speech.
Today I shall share a momentous moment in human progress, lost for centuries until now.
That was crossed out with a black slash of the pen.
Today I shall reveal a momentous intellectual achievement, a highlight of human ingenuity in the form of a manuscript, hidden for centuries but now rediscovered by our consortium. ...
He stared in puzzled silence. Did the manuscript really hold some momentous secret?
Or were Maitland and Taviot using it as the distraction that Sheffield had heard them mention—a puff of smoke with which to blind potential investors to the fact that the consortium was merely a clever scheme to defraud them of their money?
“Hell and damnation,” he whispered, after reading the next sentence.
Sheffield shot to his feet. “What?”
Wrexford read it aloud. “With the invaluable insight of the great Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci at our fingertips, we have picked up the torch of his brilliant thinking and used it to make another giant step forward in mastering the world around us.”
“But . . .” Sheffield made a face. “But according to Cordelia, da Vinci’s manuscript shows no great revelation.”
Like Tyler, Cordelia had given up on trying to understand Bernoulli’s book on fluid dynamics after the first few chapters, as she was unfamiliar with that area of science.
And while she and the valet agreed that da Vinci and Bernoulli seemed to have shared a keen interest in moving water, neither of them could see how that translated into a momentous engineering innovation.
“So it would seem,” answered Wrexford. “It’s still unclear whether the consortium is a fraud.
” He carefully folded the paper. “Be that as it may, this draft of a speech proves that Taviot and his co-conspirators stole the da Vinci manuscript, which directly links them to Greeley’s murder.
In the past, Taviot may have been clever enough to elude justice, but this time he’s going to discover that his evil has grave consequences. ”
* * *
“Sorry.” Raven shrugged in apology as he finished peeling off his filthy jacket and letting it fall to the floor. “We were hoping not to wake you.”
“Pffft—surely you don’t think I was sleeping.” Peregrine pushed the door of his adjoining bedchamber all the way open. “In fact, I was . . .” He slipped into the room. “But never mind that for the moment. Did you and m’lady discover anything?”
“Yes and no,” answered Raven. A muck-encrusted boot thumped onto the rug, followed by its mate. “We tracked down a friend of the murdered arsonist, and it turns out that he got a glimpse of the man who paid for the fire to be set. However, he couldn’t give m’lady much of a description.”
“Save for the fact that the varlet had reddish-brown hair with no trace of silver. So it couldn’t have been Lord Taviot,” added Hawk.
“The arsonist’s friend also said the fancy cove who paid for the crime had Satan-dark eyes that made his blood run cold,” mused Raven.
Peregrine’s expression pinched in thought. “I know what he means. There are some people whose gaze feels as though it’s trying to slice through sinew and bone and suck out your soul.”
“Oiy,” agreed Hawk. “When we lived in the slums, we learned to recognize that look and fly away from it like a bat out of Hell.”
The Weasels had confided the truth of their origins to Peregrine—the three of them had sworn an oath of brotherhood, sealed with a knife prick to their fingers and a mingling of their lifeblood.
There was only one family secret that Peregrine didn’t know, and that was because Wrexford and Charlotte had decided that the dangerous truth about her nom de plume was too great a burden to put on the boy.
Peregrine nodded in understanding. “Right. If you watch carefully, you quickly discern how to spot evil and stay away from it.”
“Speaking of evil, we need to have our own council of war.” Now garbed in his nightshirt, Raven kicked his discarded clothing under the bed and sat down on the rug, gesturing for the others to join him.
The single candle flickered as Hawk put its pewter holder down between the three of them. The flame dimmed and then flared back to life, casting a fluttering of light and dark across their faces.