Chapter Twelve. Nothing a Bit of Cake Won’t Fix
CHAPTER TWELVE
Nothing a Bit of Cake Won’t Fix
WHEN I woke the next morning Ruan was gone.
I might have thought his late night visit was a dream itself, if not for the fact that my room smelled vaguely of him.
He must have stayed after I fell back asleep.
The cowardly part of me was glad that he had left, for with him gone I could pour myself entirely into figuring out who killed Julius Harker.
I poured cold water from the pitcher into the cheerful yellow porcelain basin and washed my face, before taking a damp cloth to the rest of my body. Fiachna raised his furry black head from his spot on the foot of the bed and shot me a judgmental look.
“Oh, hush. I know all about what you get up to in Exeter, you little feline lothario.”
Fiachna meowed pointedly.
“‘He who is without sin’ and all that…”
The great black cat purred loudly in acknowledgment that there were quite a few fluffy black kittens scattered around the city. He stretched before hopping off the bed and wriggled through the cracked-open door without even getting his morning scratch behind the ears.
It was early. The sun had not fully risen, and the street outside remained sleepy and quiet. I gathered my purloined evidence from last night’s misadventures at the museum and made my way downstairs.
The rich dark scent of coffee greeted me as Mrs. Penrose pulled a loaf of bread from the oven. “The lad left an hour ago if you’re wondering.” Her back remained to me as she placed the steaming loaf on a nearby wooden board.
“Ruan?”
“Who else would it be sneaking out of your room in the wee hours? I don’t recall you having any other suitors.”
“He’s not a suitor,” I grumbled, glaring at my housekeeper. “Besides, nothing happened.”
Her long gray hair was loosely pinned up at the nape of her neck, a few stray wisps falling from the knot. “Oh, I’m not judging, maid. You know I love the lad as my own—something happening might do the both of you some good.”
I slid past her, grabbing a cup from the highest shelf in the cabinet, and poured my own coffee with feigned disinterest. “He’s returning, I presume.”
“Oh, most certainly. He had something on his mind. He ran straight past me saying he’d be back for supper, he had to go see about a book.”
I let out a startled laugh. Ruan was beginning to sound like Mr. Owen.
Then again, Ruan’s interest in old books was precisely the reason we met in the first place.
“Did he say what book he was after?” I began to lay out my day’s work on the worn tabletop.
Time was short, and the tea-stained ledger was as good a place to start as any.
“No, my lover. He didn’t say much of anything. But who ever does know what he’s after? He’s a dear one, but Ruan Kivell’s always been a bit odd. A good and righteous woman might hope that taking up with you would settle him down, but I’m afraid there’s no hope in that corner.”
I grinned at Mrs. Penrose. “I cannot decide if that’s an insult or a compliment.”
She smiled back, shoving a generous slice of yesterday’s ginger cake at me. “A compliment, my lover. I never said I was a good and righteous woman. Now eat, there’s no problem in this world that a slice of cake can’t fix.”
SEVERAL HOURS AND two pots of coffee later, I was still seated at the kitchen table poring over the letters I’d taken from the museum.
I rolled the borrowed milpreve in my palm, something about the stone’s smooth grain aided my focus.
Had Julius Harker done this too? I frowned, setting one letter down on the table and picking up another.
“Any luck, maid?” Mrs. Penrose asked from the far side of the room. She’d spent most of the morning baking, her fingers sticky with butter and flour as she worked dried cherries into her scone dough.
I dropped the stone on the table. Protect against evil indeed, the rock was little more than a rustic paperweight.
“That was a pretty song you was humming just now.”
I blinked, turning to face her. “I wasn’t humming.”
“Ah but you were, maid. An old melody too. I cannot think I’ve ever heard you hum before. Nor sing for that matter. You must be feeling better. Makes my heart soar to hear you happy.”
I couldn’t bear to tell her she was mistaken.
If anything, I was more adrift than ever before.
I picked up the milpreve again and held it to the light.
“My mother used to sing when she was happy…” I said softly, staring at the stone.
I’d not thought of it in years—perhaps it was the imposter’s presence that brought it back to the forefront of my mind.
“You don’t speak of her much.”
No. I scarcely did, though she was never far from my thoughts, especially with this most recent imposter.
“She would sing to us when we were small—my sister Opal and I. She had the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard.
My father loved to listen to her. I can still recall how he’d lean in the doorway, watching her each night as we fell asleep. ”
Mrs. Penrose gave me a sympathetic glance. “She sounds like a lovely woman.”
“She was. She loved my sister and I more than anything in this world.”
Mrs. Penrose washed her hands in the sink, scrubbing at the dough beneath her nails. “Do you need some help? I am not certain what good I’ll be to you, but perhaps between the two of us we might find something in all that mess you’ve made of my scullery table.”
Blotting the memory of my mother from my mind, I handed the tea-stained ledger to Mrs. Penrose. “You’ve a head for numbers. See if you find anything odd in there, hmm?”
“Shall I fix us a pot of tea while we work?”
She didn’t wait on my response as she set on another kettle before taking the seat across from me, and we set to work.
The sun was hanging low in the sky by the time I finally gave up on the letters.
Over the course of the morning, I’d learned all sorts of useless facts about Julius Harker: He was separated from his wife, who currently lived in Bath with their two grown children.
He also was in possession of a vast collection of Egyptian artifacts—not a surprise as he was exhibiting said artifacts at the time of his murder—and he had an aversion to turnips.
I couldn’t blame him on the final point for I disliked the root vegetable myself.
Beyond that, the sum of my investigation had left me with a pile of various receipts and descriptions of objects that meant nothing. The man’s existence was utterly boring.
“Maid … look at this.” Mrs. Penrose tapped an entry in the ledger with the tip of her pencil. She slid her scratch paper over to me, revealing her notes where she’d quietly been refiguring the calculations in her own exacting hand.
I scooted my chair across the cold floor, half-eaten fruit scone in hand. “What did you find?”
She removed her glasses. “I’m not entirely sure. But see here? Every few days there is a repeating transaction. See this number?”
Forty-seven pounds and six shillings. A year’s wages for some.
She underlined it once, running her finger down her list. “Seven times in total. See here, where three days later precisely half of that figure goes back out. Now to whom or why, I can’t tell. But mind, that’s a great deal of money to be moving about with no explanation for it.”
“A great deal of money indeed, especially for someone with so many creditors. If it was payment on a debt, he’d certainly keep record of that.” I gathered up the correspondence, flipping through the pages, checking for dates to match her entries.
I pulled each letter and lay all seven on the table.
It didn’t take long to spot the pattern—one utterly invisible without the aid of the ledger.
“You see something, don’t you?” Mrs. Penrose’s voice quivered with excitement.
I skimmed the correspondence again, annoyed at myself for missing it in the first place.
Harker been conversing with a fellow at Cambridge tracking down pieces of a missing Napoleonic cache—a collection of artifacts that had been stolen during Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt around the turn of the previous century.
It was something I’d overlooked as Harker’s ill-fated exhibition was purportedly showing off pieces from that same cache.
Many of the pieces had been looted from Egypt and brought to Europe to be on display in fashionable French homes.
From what the letters indicated, the original cache had been slowly broken up and sold off into various private collections over the years.
However, if what I held in my hands were true, Harker had mostly reassembled it, snapping up an ungodly quantity of artifacts for his own private collection.
Far more artifacts than made it into his exhibition.
I blew out an unsteady breath, not certain what to make of what I’d found.
The exhibition the other evening only contained a handful of items—and the only one on the stage that was also mentioned in the letters was the very box he was found in.
But if the letters were to be believed, Harker had recovered hundreds of other artifacts, including a golden racing chariot.
The chariot would have been the star piece for any other collector.
I flipped back through the pages again. In truth, most of the items mentioned in the letters were far more significant than what had been on display.
I’d thought it a rather bare-bones exhibition at the time, but perhaps there was something more behind the omissions.
Had the exhibit been intentional, or an afterthought?
Now that was a question I could not answer. At least not yet.
I ran my hand through my hair, struggling to make sense of it. Where were the remaining artifacts? They certainly hadn’t been on display in the cases at Harker’s museum, and they hadn’t been on the exhibition dais either.
I gathered the pages together, shoving them into the stolen folio before pressing a firm kiss to her forehead.
“You are a genius, Mrs. Penrose. An utter genius.” I grabbed my winter coat and slung my worn leather satchel over my shoulder, determined to find the one person in Oxford who might be able to shed light on the cache.
I checked my watch, snapping it back shut.
If I left now, I might catch Leona at the museum before she left for the day.