Chapter Nine #2
“So, um.” Sam tucked her curls behind her ear. “Where are we going, that we had to sneak out in the middle of the night?”
“Breaking into Mr. Enfield’s apartments,” Hel said.
“What,” Sam said flatly. She looked back up at her window, but there was no going back. Her biceps weren’t having it. Nor could she go back in through the front door—not without explaining what she’d done to Van Helsing.
“We need to uncover what Mr. Enfield was so desperate to tell Lord Lusk.” Hel cocked her head. “Why, what did you think we were doing?”
“What did I—” Sam squeaked, before she drew in a deep breath. Hel had invited her not for a romantic tryst, but for a little breaking and entering. “You can’t just break into people’s houses!” Not with Sam in her frothy, diaphanous nightgown!
Hel frowned. “How else are we supposed to go through his things?”
She had a point, to Sam’s chagrin. They were there undercover. Which meant there was no one they could flash their papers to and get access to crime scenes. They would have to do this the, shall we say, unofficial way.
“Yes, well,” Sam said as she followed Hel into the abruptly unromantic night, “next time, be sure to put whatever illegal activities you have planned in the note.”
“Why?” Hel frowned. “What would that change?”
“My clothes, for one thing!” Sam said. Her expectations for another. “I stand out far too much.”
Hel looked at her sidelong. “You’d stand out anywhere.” Sam, it turned out, couldn’t flush anymore. Her cheeks were all flushed out.
So much for sleep.
The extent of Sam’s distraction was such that it took her several minutes before she realized they were going in circles around Saint Stephen’s Green.
“Are you certain this is the right way?” Sam asked, quickening her pace.
“Yes,” Hel said, keeping her head down. The streets were eerily still, the only people they passed were officers of the law patrolling for people breaking curfew and those hiding from them: a family hurrying into the night with all their things in a wheelbarrow; a man huddled in an alley.
Sam and Hel ducked into the shadows, too, when the officers passed, Sam wishing she’d worn anything but her sea-foam and heels.
“I only ask,” Sam said when the last set of officers had gone by, “because we seem to be going in circles.”
Hel slid her a sidelong glance. “See that man over there?”
“Where?” Sam said, following her gaze, for she’d thought them alone.
“Too low,” Hel murmured. Sam looked up and saw the glint of glass on a rooftop. A man with a spyglass. Or a rifle. Heat pricked the back of her neck. “There’s another lingering two streets back. It would seem Detective Lynch doesn’t entirely trust us. We need to lose them first.”
Sam felt a chill—how hadn’t she noticed? She ought to have known he’d be spying on Hel. Detective Lynch thought Hel was responsible for her father’s crimes. In those circumstances, Sam would spy on Hel too.
It took nearly half an hour before Hel was satisfied, and turned, leading them at last toward the Merrion Square gardens.
There, in a Georgian townhouse of red brick devoured by ivy, was Mr. Enfield’s last known residence.
The door was exquisite: powder blue with brass fittings, surrounded by windows with starlike designs.
A white iron streetlamp stood guard outside, delicate as spun sugar.
With a deftness born of long practice, Hel slipped lockpicks into her fingers—bent bits of metal that looked almost like dental instruments.
“Let me know if someone’s coming,” Hel said. Sam nodded and turned, scanning the shadows for signs of motion. Hel’s instruments had barely scraped the lock when she frowned. “Someone’s already been here.”
She pushed; the door creaked open into a darkened house.
“Do you think they’re still inside?” Sam asked, a flutter of panic working through her.
Hel unholstered her revolver. “Wait here.” She eased inside.
For a moment, Sam could have sworn the darkness swallowed her, sworn black vines lashed out like the tongues of some monstrous beast, leaving her with nothing but horrible, wet ripping sounds; and the next, it was simply an empty doorway and Sam standing alone in the streetlight. She let out a shuddering breath.
Van Helsing’s jibe about her screams teased her thoughts. Sam thought she ought to get more credit for all the times she didn’t scream. If he had to see what she saw, she doubted he’d be able to stop.
At least having a vision meant they were likely on the right track, even if it hadn’t told her anything of use. The song unfurled in her thoughts like a lullaby. You could know more, it whispered. You could know all.
Hel’s pale face appeared at the door, and Sam shoved the song down.
“We’re too late,” Hel said. “Whoever it was, they’re gone.”
Relief and disappointment warred in Sam’s heart. “You think they had something to do with Mr. Enfield’s murder?”
“I think they had something to hide,” Hel said, and this time when she went inside, Sam followed.
The remnants of a fire smoldered in the fireplace—the embers cracking, the shadows making monsters of the chairs and the coat on its hook.
By its inconstant light, it was immediately apparent that Mr. Enfield had a thing for taxidermy.
Not bears and stags, as you might expect amongst the leisure class, but squirrels and rats and the odd pigeon.
It was also apparent that the house had been ransacked, the cabinet tossed over, glass glistering on the cold marble floor, the bellies of the taxidermized animals sliced open, their stuffing yanked out.
Sam bent to pick up one of the sadder-looking squirrels, its tail threadbare and one of its arms gone wrong. With the stuffing removed, there was a little hollow within it, just big enough to hide something.
“Whatever it was they were looking for, it was small,” she said.
“Something written.” Hel was over by the desk, whose every drawer and secret compartment had been found and left gaping, correspondence scattered. It looked indecent somehow, and Sam felt oddly embarrassed, as if her witnessing the state of it was somehow wrong. “A letter perhaps, or . . .”
“Paper!” Sam gasped. The fireplace. Why else would a thief bother to start a fire? Dashing over and falling to her knees in the ash strewn before the hearth, she searched the heart of the flames until she saw it: the curl of what she’d taken for a piece of newspaper used to start the fire.
Sam reached in and immediately regretted it.
She cried out, but still managed to grasp the charred remnants of . . . a letter.
The words were too hard to make out in the dancing shadows, the brittle paper curled and blacked around the edges.
She dropped it, hissing, holding a hand pinked with ill-thought-out ideas.
Hel picked it up. It was strange, Sam noticed, as Hel held it to the light.
The words—they looked almost as if they’d been burned into the paper.
“It’s addressed to Lord Lusk,” Hel said.
And above his name, there was the corner of that sigil she’d seen on Mr. Enfield’s forehead in her vision: the entangled crescent moons with the full moon between them, like a selenic eye. It had to mean something. Even if she didn’t know what.
“Do you think it’s why Mr. Enfield was murdered?” Sam said.
Hel frowned, checking the back. “Possibly.”
Whatever it was, it was important enough to break into his apartments. Important enough to burn.
But before she could bend down to examine the ashes, Hel’s eyes widened and she pivoted, forcing Sam hard against the wall, a hand clapping over her mouth before she could scream.
The paper drifted to the ground as Sam’s heart galloped in her chest. Hel held Sam’s eyes as a shadow passed over the streetlight outside, accompanied by the soft scuff of shoes on cobblestones.
There was someone out there, and whoever it was, they were trying to be quiet.
Cold coursed through her. Detective Lynch’s men. It must be. But her mind raced with other possibilities: Whoever had ransacked Mr. Enfield’s home. Van Helsing. The eyes and ears of the Moriartys.
After an age, the shadow passed. Sam was abruptly aware of the heat of Hel’s body pressed against hers in her frothy, flimsy nightgown. She tilted her head back, her lips parting against the other woman’s palm. “Hel—”
Hel jerked back, leaving Sam cold.
“Come on,” Hel said, the hand that had been over Sam’s mouth spasming into a fist. “There’s one more thing we need to do before we return.”
Sam swallowed her questions, uncertain she’d be able to speak without her feelings leaking out around the edges.
Walking too swiftly for conversation, Hel led Sam off the well-lit boulevards of Merrion Square, with their ornate doors and spun-sugar streetlamps, and down avenues drenched in shadow.
The cobblestones, which were always uneven, were buckled and pocked.
Lines of laundry swayed between the buildings overhead, and the houses, while still Georgian, stood with their doors gaping.
It was strange how close this crumbling part of town was to the promenades of the gilded set, and yet, how far apart. Sam glanced into one of the open doors and saw dozens of eyes gleaming back at her. She startled violently.
Cats, Sam told herself as one yowled. It was only cats.
“You know, I used to live here,” Hel said, her breath clouding the air.
“Here?” Sam said. Somehow, she’d imagined life as a Moriarty to be more . . . decadent. “With . . . your father?”
“After,” Hel said, looking away. “Between the factories and the landlords, no one had time to worry about my last name here.”
Sam remembered hearing something similar in England, when Spring-Heeled Jack had been terrorizing East London.
In West London, horrified socialites had gossiped ghoulishly about the corpses of the poor women from East End, found mutilated in the streets.
In East London, the women marched in the streets—not against Jack, but against the match factories, who killed far more of their number than dear old Jack.
Strangely, the wealthy hadn’t been particularly keen on helping with that problem.
They stopped in front of a ragged brick building with long, weatherworn boards holding up one side of it. The apartment next door appeared to have tumbled down entirely, the stones blackened and charred.
“They said it was an accident,” Hel said, kneeling by the rubble. “A gas leak. A terrible tragedy, but no one’s fault. But the doors were chained from the outside—no one could get out—and when I combed through the ashes, I found a single black feather waiting for me.”
Cold breathed down her spine. Sam should tell Hel about the feather she’d found in her scone, about the one she’d pulled from her throat.
“Hel—” Sam said, her heart cracking.
“You asked me who I was,” Hel interrupted her. “This is who I am.”
She will be alone, Ruari had said, without allies or lovers or friends, until the day she comes home.
Father will make sure of it. This must be where that had all started.
Why Hel didn’t fight what others said about her when they blamed her for her father’s crimes.
Because she believed them. It didn’t matter how clever, how resourceful, how dogged she was in fighting back—to Hel, she would always be the girl whose curse destroyed everything she touched.
And now, unless they caught her father, his shadow would devour her whole.
“This isn’t who you are.” She couldn’t tell Hel about the feathers. Not when it would only make things worse. “This is what was done to you.”
“It wasn’t done to me,” Hel said, as if that would have been preferable.
“We’re going to stop him,” Sam said.
“I know,” Hel said. But she wouldn’t look at Sam.
There was something else—something she wasn’t saying.
Sam could feel it, like a splinter beneath her skin.
If it were anyone else, Sam would have picked at it.
But Hel, Sam knew, was of a more feline nature.
When she trusted you enough to show you her belly, it didn’t mean she wanted you to touch it. It meant she trusted you not to.
Besides, Sam thought guiltily, Hel wasn’t the only one with secrets.
It appeared that the reason for their detour wasn’t strictly social.
Hel knelt at the edge of the building, wiggling one of the bricks loose from the ragged wall where it had joined the other.
There was a handful of envelopes and coins behind it.
Pulling an envelope from her suit jacket, Hel added it to the others and wriggled the brick back into place.
“What was that?” Sam asked, shivering a little in her flimsy nightgown.
“A donation,” Hel said, dusting her hands on her suit pants.
She glanced up at a cracked window, where an older woman was looking down at them steadily, smoking her pipe.
Sam wondered how many other places Hel left donations—how many of her father’s victims she tried to make good for.
“Come on. We don’t have much time before I have to relieve Van Helsing. ”