Chapter Five
I t was the following Thursday, and hot. The iron girders that roofed Paddington Station shimmered in the heat that rose from the engines and beat down from the cloudless sky, more like August than April. Clouds of steam belched and rolled across the platforms. Metal screeched, porters bellowed, horns blared, and Stephen Day sprinted down a platform, dodging crowds of full-skirted ladies and the importunities of railway officials.
“Mr. Day!” yelled Merrick from the first-class carriages, waving, and Stephen ducked under a protesting guard’s arm, threw his bag into the carriage, and made it onto the train a full four seconds before the wheels began to turn.
He slammed the door and collapsed onto a seat, trying not to suck in breath too noisily.
“You cut that fine,” remarked Crane. “This is a surprise, I must say.” He was wearing a superbly cut light-grey suit that matched the grey of his eyes, and looked cool and patrician and unruffled, as befitted a man who owned a sizeable part of Gloucestershire and could afford people to carry his bags. Stephen had run from Baker Street. He knew his face was glowing and sweat-damp.
“I got held up.” He was horribly uncomfortable, and he was not going to stand on ceremony. “Is there nobody else in here?”
“As you see. ”
“Then if you don’t mind...”
Crane inclined his head. Stephen stripped off his gloves and his shabby coat with relief, grateful that no ladies were present. He slung his bag onto a luggage rack and sank back into a well-upholstered seat.
On the other row of seats, Merrick and Crane looked at him, and at each other.
“Busy morning, was it?” said Crane at last. “Or a long night?”
“The latter, running into the former. Some business to take care of.”
“So I see. Merrick, get a pot of coffee lined up for Mr. Day, strong, and on your way, tell the guard we’re reserving this whole carriage to the end of the line. Encourage him not to come in. Get the blinds on your way out.”
“My lord,” said Merrick woodenly, pulling the blinds on the compartment door and letting himself out.
“Is there a reason you’re making this a private compartment?” Stephen enquired warily.
“Yes. Is there a reason your sleeve is soaked in blood?”
“What? Where? Oh bother .” Stephen contorted himself to look at his left elbow. “Blast.”
“It looks to the untutored eye as though you have been leaning in a puddle of blood,” said Crane. “Quite a large puddle.”
“I dare say it does.”
“Because...?”
“I can’t talk about my business. I’m sure you understand.”
“But since you’re now about my business, Mr. Day, I’d like to know whose blood you’re wearing. Within the bounds of discretion. For my own peace of mind.”
Stephen gave him a narrow-eyed look. “It was a cat. And bleeding it wasn’t my idea, I can assure you.” He stifled a yawn.
There was a subdued knock and Merrick entered bearing a tray.
“Another small miracle, thank you.” Crane nodded towards Stephen. “It’s cat’s blood, in case you were wondering. ”
“Course it is.” Merrick manipulated cups and coffeepot deftly. “There you are, sir, that’ll set you up. You won’t be disturbed, my lord. Do you need me?”
“No, carry on,” said Crane. Merrick responded in Chinese and there was a brief staccato exchange before he withdrew again.
Stephen sipped his coffee, watching Crane over the cup’s brim. “What was that?”
“I reminded him not to fleece the fireman too badly. He’s a devil with a pack of cards. Why are you here, Mr. Day? We were expecting Mr. Fairley.”
“Yes, I know. I, ah...I got your lawyer’s letter.”
The stiff cream vellum envelope, wildly incongruous as it lay on his doormat with the cheap stationery and the bills. The letter it held, from Crane’s lawyers, who were not Griffin and Welsh. The written, notarised statement from Humphrey Griffin, stating how he had forced Allan Day to sign the documents that had ruined him, laying out the lies, detailing the persecution to which he had been subjected, all on the orders of Quentin, Lord Crane. The list of names to whom copies of that notarised statement were being sent, on the orders of Lucien, Lord Crane. The dry request that Stephen should supply names and addresses of any parties to whom further copies should be sent.
He had opened an envelope and found in it his father’s long-lost reputation. And he had cried, kneeling in the hallway, for the first time in years.
“How did you get Griffin to admit all that, Lord Crane?” he asked now, leaning forward. “It’s an admission of perjury as well as utterly disgraceful conduct. Why did he agree to write it?”
“I am in the process of nailing Mr. Humphrey Griffin to the wall so thoroughly that future generations will mistake him for a tapestry. Currently, he is under the impression that his cooperation may incline me not to press for a lengthy prison sentence for embezzlement, malpractice, extortion, and perjury. ”
“Will it?”
Crane smiled, not pleasantly. “No. But it scarcely matters. When I have finished with him, Mr. Griffin will be begging for an extra ten years in gaol, just to have walls between himself and me.”
“Oh,” said Stephen. “Good.”
Crane frowned. “I hope you’re not here because of that. You owe me nothing.”
“No. I know.”
“So I ask again, Mr. Day, why are you here?”
“I’m here because I should be,” Stephen said. “It was rather childish of me to walk away in the first place. I dealt with the jack, so I have a feeling for the maker, and I know the Lychdale area. It’s obvious I should handle this.”
Crane was looking at him with a raised brow. “It must have become obvious fairly recently, since Mr. Fairley introduced himself as your replacement yesterday.”
“Ah.” Stephen gave an internal curse. “You met him.”
“I did, yes. I can’t honestly say he inspired me with confidence in the matter of murder, although I’m sure that if I wanted a practitioner that I could take to all the best society parties and be sure of his many close acquaintances...”
Stephen shut his eyes. “Yes, he does, um, feel the importance of birth and breeding quite strongly.”
“Frankly, I thought he was an oleaginous prick. I assume he has hidden talents.”
“I’m sure he does,” Stephen said, without conviction.
Even after the miraculous letter had arrived, he had not wanted to do this. If Hector and Quentin Vaudrey had been murdered, they should have justice, but it could be at someone else’s hands. Then he had learned that the hands would be Fairley’s, a soft self-indulgent parlour magician whose only qualification was his social connection, and Stephen’s vow had stuck in his throat like a fistful of brambles .
It had nothing to do with the mental image of Crane’s long-fingered hands and lean, muscular, tattooed body, or the laugh lines around those lazy, perceptive grey eyes. Those irritatingly persistent memories gave him the strongest possible reason to stay away. No, it was as simple as it always was: justice had to be done. And since he had no authority to select the practitioner to do it, he had to do the job himself or stay out of the whole business.
Crane was looking at him curiously. “So why did you send that obsequious twit in the first place?”
“I didn’t,” said Stephen, slightly too honestly. “He, ah, he proposed himself. Feeling an earl would require a practitioner of birth and breeding.” Stephen’s talents outstripped Fairley’s to an almost embarrassing degree, but he was the son of a provincial nobody who had died destitute; Fairley was the son of a baronet. Taking the job back had led to a heated exchange. He quoted, woodenly, “Nobility has a certain je ne sais quoi that demands the presence of a gentleman, not a hireling.”
The eighth Earl Crane lifted an aristocratic brow. “In my case, the je ne sais quoi includes four years as a smuggler, two death sentences, and a decade as a Shanghai Joe, a dockfront trader. I hope you feel suitably elevated.”
Stephen tried to confront all of this at once. “Two death sentences? Really? I mean, you look very well, considering.”
Crane grinned. “One was in absentia. One wasn’t, and I spent three days in a condemned cell. I can’t recommend the experience.”
“And—did you say a smuggler ?”
“That was what the death sentences were for.”
“What did you smuggle?” Stephen demanded, then caught himself. “Sorry, it’s none of my business.”
“Not at all,” Crane said politely. “Silks and tea, mostly. Medicines, on occasion. And we ran the guns for an uprising against a particularly noxious tax farmer, but that was a favour to a friend, really. ”
“That’s very...” Stephen couldn’t think what it was. It occurred to him that if the man didn’t wear such staggeringly expensive suits, the tanned, mocking face and tattoos would make him look exactly like someone’s overheated fantasy of a smuggler in the exotic East. “Did your father know?”
“No idea.” Crane didn’t sound concerned. “He put me on a boat to China when I was seventeen, expressing the hope I’d die out there, and that was the last I ever heard from him. We didn’t get on, you know.”
“Yes. I heard.”
Crane shrugged. “He always disliked me, and I gave him plenty to dislike. He sent me off with no post, no acquaintances, no facility with the language, and no money, and I would undoubtedly have been dead within a year without Merrick, but as it happened, nothing could have suited me so well as Shanghai. It was five thousand miles away from Hector. So to answer your question as far as possible, I lived under my own name in China, I didn’t do so with any subtlety, and while I never communicated with him again, someone else doubtless did. In all honesty, I stopped caring a very long time ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Stephen said, unable to stop himself.
“What for?”
That your father was a swine. That my father’s dead. That you’re a Vaudrey. He grabbed for something that didn’t sound like pity. “I made the assumption you were like him. Them. That was unfair.”
“Understandable. A lot of people down in Lychdale make that assumption. Including, presumably, the jack’s maker.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Indeed. And I remain of the opinion that if this maker did remove my brother from the world, I’d rather shake his hand than press charges.”
“You might feel that,” Stephen said. “And if he had shot him, I might agree with you. But if it was the jack, your brother and father were tortured to death, slowly, over months. And that kind of cruelty tends to be...habit-forming. ”
Crane’s eyebrows shot up. “You think the maker does this sort of thing regularly?”
Stephen chose his words with care. “They did a very cruel thing very competently, which suggests that they may have done such things before, or that they may find it easy to do such things again. In any case, it is not acceptable to continue down this path unchecked.”
“I see. Well, you’re the expert. I’ll leave it to your judgement.”
Stephen gave a tired half smile. “Yes. People generally do.”
IT WAS A SLOW TRAIN and a hot day, and Day fell asleep well before they reached Lychdale. Merrick returned while Crane was contemplating the unconscious shaman.
He looked very young, sleep smoothing out the worry lines round his eyes. He also looked very small and very thin. He resembled a schoolboy, not a magician or a protector.
“That bloke needs a few square meals,” Merrick observed. “And a new suit. And about a week in bed.”
“I was thinking along those lines myself,” Crane said.
“I bet you were.”
“Shut up. I’ve no idea how he can be that poor. Twenty guineas for a night’s work, and another thirty for this excursion. But that suit’s threadbare.”
“Blood under his nails, as well, right in. Wasn’t just leaning on it.”
“Yes, I noticed that. What do you think?”
“Same as you, I reckon.”
“Ye-es. The question is, is he up to the job?”
Merrick made a face. “Don’t ask me. I got no idea what he can do, and no idea what the job is anyway. The last time I knew this much fuck all, we was on a boat to China.”
“And now we’re going back to Piper,” said Crane. “And on the whole, I’d rather be in Shanghai.”