Chapter 6
Present Day
I unlocked Mr. Stoke’s office door and entered, pulling off my gloves and unpinning my hat as I adjusted to the dark.
Papers rustled beneath my feet, and the world froze.
The offices were a disaster. Books had been torn off the shelves, the desk emptied, and the grandfather clock smashed. My desk was fully overturned and papers had been scattered into the foyer where I now stood, interspersed with keys from my brutalized typewriter.
The only thing intact—or almost intact, rather—was a cup of coffee I had made Mr. Stoke before I left last night. It sat right where I had set it on his desk, the papers around it stained in scallops of brown where the liquid had overflowed.
I rushed in and jerked the curtains back, the scrape of rings nearly lost in the thunder of blood in my ears. Two terrors beset me—that the flood of light would illuminate Mr. Stoke’s body, and that the safe would be open and ransacked.
Light spilled across the carnage. Blood—no, a broken inkwell. A body—no, a toppled chair. A further snowfall of papers. The bookcase still stood against the wall, though its books had been hurled about the room.
A figure unfolded from the shadows. He was in his thirties, dressed in a three-piece suit of fine grey tweed, with a bowler hat and respectable moustache.
I lunged for Mr. Stoke’s desk, jerking out the drawer where he stowed an emergency pistol. The drawer was empty, save for a scattering of thumbtacks, which unhelpfully stabbed my scrabbling hand. I cursed and jerked back bleeding fingers.
“Miss Fleet, I presume?”
I looked up the length of a long-barrelled pistol. The make was familiar to me—I could not remember the name, but Lewis carried one similar.
The intruder’s narrow chin drifted slightly to one side. In his other hand, he held up the small revolver that should have been in the drawer, then returned it to his pocket. “There is no need for violence. I am here on behalf of Lord Stillwell. Where is the artifact?”
“Mr. Stoke handed it over last night.” Now that my initial shock had passed, I was more indignant than afraid. It was all I could do not to look at the bookshelf with my money, my hard-won freedom, supposedly in the safe on the other side.
The stranger eyed me, as if he expected I might burst into hysterics at any moment. I almost wished I would—a normal secretary might, I imagined. The more in control he felt, the less guarded he would be.
But I was too distracted to be properly afraid. When I held his gaze, he stepped back into a broad stance and clasped one hand on his opposite wrist, gun pointed to the floor.
“Let us begin again. My name is James Wake, and I am here on behalf of Lord Stillwell. Your employer, upon meeting with me last night, failed to produce the artifact he was contracted to recover. He said he would do so this morning, but”—he gestured meaningfully around—“he did not show.”
I slowly straightened, pulse thrumming against my collar. So, the box had been taken from the safe—it was the only explanation I could think of, just then. And now Mr. Stoke and I were facing the consequences of Pretoria’s theft.
For it had to have been Pretoria. The timing, her habits—it all lined up. And for Mr. Stoke, perhaps the consequences had already been dire.
Silently, vehemently, I cursed my sister.
“Are you injured, Miss Fleet?” Mr. Wake prompted, his gaze lingering on a few small cuts from the riot that paste and powder had not been able to conceal. His eyes were grey, cool and stony.
“I was caught in the Communion Square bombing,” I said. “Where is Mr. Stoke?”
“As I said, he did not show,” Mr. Wake replied, his thoughts inscrutable. I was not sure he had blinked since the conversation began. “Fled, I presume. Either evading the repercussions for his negligence in losing the item, or perhaps with it? Did he, unwisely, field other offers for its recovery?”
I shook my head firmly. “No. No, he would not do that. Mr. Stoke is a good and dependable man.”
“You may not know your employer as well as you believe.”
“Granted, but you know him a good deal less.”
His eyebrows twitched up at that. He changed tack. “You did not seem surprised when I told you the artifact is missing.”
“Well, obviously something is amiss.” I waved at the ransacked room. “Let me be frank. There is no use in suspecting me. I had nothing to do with either disappearance, and my chief concerns are finding Mr. Stoke and the artifact.”
And getting my money, a practical voice in the back of my mind whispered.
A knock sounded on the main door. Both Mr. Wake and I went quiet, the ensuing silence so loud it rang in my ears. Or perhaps that was the lingering effects of explosions the night before.
There was a second knock, then a third. At last, the visitor departed and a shadow passed across the window.
As soon as they were gone Mr. Wake, pistol in hand, moved to tug the curtains closed.
A faux twilight rippled across the room, thickening the shadows and making my threads prickle. I resisted the urge to tug up my collar and brush at my temples, to check for traitorous threads.
“Did you discover nothing of use in your pillaging?” I inquired, gesturing again to the room.
Mr. Wake, half his face dimly illuminated now, gave me a wry look. “You could have the decency to be some what afraid of me, Miss Fleet. I’ve lain in wait for you for several hours, and I do have a gun.”
I held one hand into a sliver of light. There, it trembled slightly.
“Satisfied?” I asked. Without waiting for him to answer I went on. “I would make a better ally than victim, Mr. Wake.”
“Somehow, I believe you. However.” He raised the pistol again, and the thin congeniality we had mustered fell away.
“Here’s the situation, Miss Fleet. We—you and I—serve someone, someone who has our loyalty.
But yours is misplaced. I can only conclude that your Mr. Stoke has fled the city, with or without a very valuable artifact belonging to a very powerful man.
I am left with nothing to show my employer except a secretary with the personality of an aged mule. ”
As insulted as I was, my breathing was beginning to shallow, my head starting to cloud. All of a sudden, I recalled the tightness around Mr. Stoke’s eyes yesterday as he sent me home, as he spoke of getting out of the city.
What if I had misread him? What if that had not been sadness on his face, but guilt? And what if, as I had plotted to abandon him, he had already been on the path to abandoning me?
The whys—those I could not answer yet—but the sting of betrayal remained.
“I do not know what happened,” I said, sounding as troubled as I felt. “I assure you, I do not. But I will find it for you. Consider this… situation… only a small delay in delivery.”
Mr. Wake nodded slowly, considering my request. He settled his weight into his heels in easy confidence. “Very well. Meet me here this evening, and we will discuss what you’ve managed to uncover. I am sure I need not warn you about involving the police or higher authorities.”
I huffed. “They would hardly be helpful.”
“Indeed.” Mr. Wake looked amused, again. He pushed the brim of his hat back with the mouth of his pistol and smiled at me. “I will see you this evening. Good day, Miss Fleet.”
He departed without looking back. The door closed behind him, leaving me transfixed in the half light as I waited for his footsteps to fade and his shadow to pass the window, beyond the curtain.
That was when the shaking took over. It rushed down my limbs and through my belly like a winter chill, turning my guts to water.
I started for the bookcase, but my legs would not move. I bent forward, pressing my face into my hands and dragging air into my lungs. One breath. Two. Three.
I should run. I should ignore all of this and go into hiding. I could stow away on a ship, start again in another city, and buy my new identity in another few years. Lewis would forgive the setback, would he not?
But the thought of so much wasted time and effort was crushing. And if Pretoria was involved and Mr. Stoke endangered, I could not walk away, however much I wanted to. I would regret it forever.
I gathered myself. I locked the front door and closed the curtains fully.
I did not bother to light a candle, taking the time to let my Entwined eyes adjust to a sepia world of shadow and texture as familiar to me as the light of the sun—the sight of the nocturnal classes of Entwined.
I unfastened the top button of my collar so I felt a little less strangled.
Then, flexing my hands, I drew a deep, steadying breath and rested one finger on the cold cup of coffee on Mr. Stoke’s desk.
Ottilie Fleet might be an over whelmed secretary, without family or friends in a city divided by prejudice and violence, but that identity was giving way. And the woman beneath, the elusive Entwined Adept soon to leave Harrow to build a life?
She had work to do.