Death Below Stairs Read online

  He released me as Lady Cynthia banged back in, brandishing two brand-new yellow-covered Bradshaws. “Got ’em,” she cried, triumphant. “Let’s go to it.”

  • • •

  It was well past midnight when I turned the last page of my section of the timetable and sighed in defeat. Lady Cynthia threw down her pen at the same time, half-dried ink scattering from the pen nib to blotch her page.

  “Damned if I found any matches.” Cynthia hauled herself to her feet, strolled to a long cabinet next to the window, and lifted a decanter. “Need a stiff whisky. How about you, McAdam? Mrs. H.?”

  “No, thank you,” I answered. Although I was not averse to spirits entirely, I was careful about imbibing them.

  “Please,” Daniel said without raising his head.

  Lady Cynthia poured liquid, clinked glasses together, and moved back to the table, balancing glasses in her hands, the whisky decanter tucked under her arm. “Brought you amontillado, Mrs. H. Can’t stand the stuff myself, but Bobby keeps it on hand for visitors.” She plunked a small goblet in front of me that smelled strongly of sherry.

  I didn’t much like the taste of amontillado, but I sipped politely, admitting that its warmth took away my stiffness.

  Daniel at last pushed aside his papers, took the cut-crystal glass of whisky Cynthia shoved at him, and upended the liquid into his mouth.

  He let out a breath and clapped the empty glass to the table. “I conclude,” he said, “that these numbers correspond to no stops at railway stations the length and breadth of England or Scotland.”

  “Bloody hell,” Cynthia exclaimed in dismay. “We’ve done all this for nothing?”

  “Not nothing,” Daniel said. “Eliminating possibilities is always useful.”

  Daniel had dropped his working-class accent. Cynthia gazed at him in frustration mixed with perplexity, but as she opened her mouth to speak, there was a knock on the front door downstairs. A pounding, more like. Cynthia sprang up, but Daniel forestalled her and went down to answer it himself.

  I was not very alarmed about who the visitor might be—earlier, while we’d worked, Daniel had gone down to the street, and I’d heard the younger tones of James floating up from the stairwell. Daniel now returned, followed by Mr. Thanos—whom he’d presumably sent James to fetch—followed by James himself.

  “I told you to go home,” Daniel was growling to his son as they entered.

  “Naw,” James said cheerfully. “More interesting here, innit?” He gave Lady Cynthia and me deferential nods. “Yer ladyship. Ma’am.”

  Mr. Thanos, in his neat suit, his black hair rumpled when he removed his hat, glanced at me in polite acknowledgment. When Lady Cynthia rose from her chair, he halted in astonishment, hat frozen in his hands, his mouth falling open.

  “Good Lord.” He looked her up and down with his very dark eyes as though he could not believe what he was seeing. “Forgive me, but are you a hermaphrodite?”

  Lady Cynthia’s brows climbed. “Cheek. What a thing to ask.”

  Mr. Thanos did not look abashed. “I meant no offense. I’ve never met a hermaphrodite, you see. That is—I don’t believe I have. I might, you know, on a tram or at the British Museum, and never realized. It’s not what one first says in those places, does one? Rather it’s Excuse me, may I take this seat? or The jewels of the Egyptian queen are in the room down this corridor.”

  Lady Cynthia listened in fascination, her lips parting.

  “Don’t terrify the poor lady, Thanos,” Daniel admonished. “Sit down—I need your brain.”

  Mr. Thanos ignored him. “I do beg your pardon,” he said to Lady Cynthia. “My manners are appalling, and McAdam’s are worse—he never makes introductions. Mr. Elgin Thanos, at your service.” He gave her a correct bow.

  Lady Cynthia sent him a brief nod in return. “Cynthia Shires.”

  “Ah,” Elgin said with interest. “The family of the Earls of Clifford. Son deceased, youngest daughter married to Lord Rankin, in whose house McAdam and Mrs. Holloway are making their home at present. You must be the eldest daughter, Lady Cynthia. Very pleased to make your acquaintance, my lady.”

  Cynthia listened in bewilderment that held no anger. “Charmed, I’m sure,” she said when he’d finished. “And to answer your question, no, I am not a hermaphrodite.”

  “Oh.” Elgin looked disappointed. “Pity. I would have liked to learn all about being a hermaphrodite from one who actually practiced such things. One shouldn’t rely on hearsay.”

  “For God’s sake, sit down,” Daniel growled at him. “The British Empire will fall by the time you finish talking. Have a look at this.”

  “I do beg your pardon again, ladies,” Elgin said, including me in his sweeping smile. He landed on a chair beside Daniel, removed his spectacles from his pocket, hooked them on, and studied the papers. “Is that whisky?” he asked, glancing at the decanter. “Is there another glass about?”

  Cynthia herself went to the cabinet to fetch him one.

  Daniel glared at James. “Go home.”

  “Don’t think I will,” James said easily. “Unless her ladyship don’t want me about. Then I’ll wait downstairs for ya.”

  Lady Cynthia seemed much entertained by us all. “Sit,” she said to James, pointing to a chair on her way back to the table. “Don’t get it dirty. Bobby’s landlady is particular.”

  “No worries, yer ladyship.” James dragged a straight-backed chair to the stove, plopping down and sticking his boots as close to the heat as possible. I noticed that the boots were whole and well-made, the stockings sticking out from under his trousers free of rents. James might enjoy roaming the streets, but Daniel at least made sure he had decent clothes to wear.

  During the drama, I had turned once again to the Bradshaw, absently thumbing through it. Advertisements took up a part of the book—the Queen’s Hotel had a page, extolling its many rooms and its proximity to sights in the City of London, proclaiming it fit for both gentlemen and families. There was plenty of information on hotels in London or on the coasts, as well as a few adverts for chemists selling creams for the skin after it had been subjected to the sun at these coastal hotels.

  The main bulk of the book was devoted to the timetables, instructing every British subject as to when they could catch a train that would whisk them to Brighton, Cornwall, Scotland. Or Dover, where they could sail to France and catch other trains there—those routes were covered in Bradshaw’s books on the Continent.

  The sherry must have unstiffened my thoughts as well as my body, because as I gazed at the times copied out in my notebook, I had another idea.

  “We have proved these don’t correspond to scheduled stops,” I said. “What about unscheduled ones?”

  Lady Cynthia sat down, shoving an empty glass across the tabletop to Elgin and opening the whisky decanter. “How can anyone know when an unscheduled stop is to be,” she asked, “if it’s unscheduled?”

  Elgin frowned as he poured whisky, but Daniel caught my eye, understanding.

  “Mr. Davis likes to read out from the paper,” I explained slowly. “He remarked on a story yesterday, that the Queen was traveling again. She goes on her own private train, does she not?” I touched my notebook. “Perhaps, just perhaps, these times mean when her train will be passing stations.”

  17

  The entire room went silent, all eyes on me. I could not know whether my convictions were correct, as I only had a scrap of paper and a wild idea. But I felt it, deep down inside, just as I knew when a fish was off, even though it looked and smelled perfectly innocuous on the fishmonger’s stall. I’d been to plays of the Bard, and remembered a verse chanted by of one of his witches: By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes . . .

  If I was right, the Fenians’ target was not a random train station in Britain but the person of the Queen herself.

  El
gin tossed back his whisky and clattered his glass to the table. “Oh, bloody hell,” he said in a breathless voice. He wiped his mouth, his spectacles making his eyes look inhumanly large.

  “Whew,” James said from his chair by the stove. “If she’s right, Dad—if they’re going after Her Majesty—what a turnup.”

  Daniel said nothing. He gazed across the table at me, but he wasn’t truly seeing me, his friend Kat Holloway, the cook. He was envisioning something beyond me, beyond this room, the entire house.

  He must be imagining, as I did, the train with the Queen aboard, chugging along at its slow pace. Then an explosion ripping through the cars, killing the monarch and the ladies and gentlemen who attended her.

  The entire country would be in an uproar. To avenge her, the prime minister and the cabinet might decide to retaliate against the nation of Ireland itself, and people there—innocents doing nothing but trying to eke out their existence—would lose their lives or be rounded up and terrorized.

  Queen Victoria’s government couldn’t be seen to let the Fenians win. The Fenians would then have to fight back using their secret plots, and more people would die.

  “This cannot happen,” I said.

  It was an obvious thing to state, but I felt the words needed to be voiced.

  “We must make certain it does not,” Daniel said. “The Queen is unlikely to alter her plans—I know this—unless she has proof that the threat is real. Even then, her courtiers will have a hell of a time holding her back. She’s a headstrong woman. Thanos—I need you to tell me what is in those ledgers. Discovering the Queen’s route won’t be easy, but perhaps I could—”

  “I’ll find that out,” Lady Cynthia broke in.

  We turned to her, Daniel the only one not startled. “You can speak to the Queen?” he asked. “Even she might not know the exact times her train will run, or choose to tell you even if she does.”

  “Perhaps not to the Queen herself, but I know plenty of her ladies-in-waiting, and their daughters,” Cynthia said without worry. “They’ll know when she’s going and where, or at least an idea of when. They might not tell you, but they’d tell me.”

  Because she was one of them, I thought. The ladies wouldn’t see the harm in letting such details slip to a friend they’d known all their lives.

  “It is the middle of the night,” I pointed out. “Would you be able to visit a palace this late?”

  Cynthia grinned. “Won’t need to. The ladies don’t attend her all the time—they have weeks off to themselves. They’ll be out at balls and operas and the theatre, like my sister, until dawn. If they don’t already know what the Queen is up to, they can find out for me.” Cynthia leapt to her feet and snatched up her coat and tall hat. “Stay as long as you like—Bobby’s landlady is used to hearing gentlemen up here.”

  Elgin flushed. “Is she? Oh dear.”

  Cynthia’s grin widened. “Smoking, swearing, and looking at naughty photographs. Bobby would shoot a man before she let him touch her. Ta-ta, my friends, I sally forth.”

  She strode out with a vibrant step and was gone.

  “Good Lord,” Elgin said as the door slammed behind her, and he let out a sharp breath. “I believe I’m in love.”

  • • •

  Elgin and Daniel made no move to vacate the rooms and go home. James did depart a few minutes after Cynthia did, and Daniel walked down with him, but whether he convinced the boy to go home, I did not know, and Daniel did not say when he returned.

  I was exhausted from my early morning, my anguished indecision over my friends’ offer to adopt Grace, and then searching the Bradshaws for the answer to the code. But I would not leave. My mad idea that someone plotted to kill the Queen took hold of me and would not loosen, and I could not make myself scuttle meekly home and to bed.

  I did retire to the divan that stretched beneath one of the tall windows. I did not like to lie down in front of gentlemen, so I simply put my feet on an ottoman I’d dragged close and leaned against the cushions. I rested my eyes while Daniel and Elgin began discussing the figures Elgin had pored over in Daniel’s rooms.

  “A beautiful problem,” Elgin said, sounding happy. “Very elegant—like unwrapping layer upon layer of paper to find a lovely gift inside. I ought to thank you for your generosity.”

  “You are welcome,” Daniel said good-naturedly. “What does this gift I’ve given you have to tell us?”

  Elgin’s tone became businesslike. “That these friends of Lord Rankin’s are uncommonly clever. They’ve swooped and dodged all over the place. An ordinary scan of the accounts is unlikely to spot the discrepancies, because even with a careful reading, there aren’t any. But . . .”

  I opened my eyes to see the two men bending their heads together over whatever Elgin had spread on the table. Both men were dark, but Daniel’s hair had streaks of reddish brown, caught by the lamplight, whereas Elgin’s hair was inky black. They murmured to each other, Elgin saying things like credit notes, derivatives, bond swaps, and embezzlement. The last word I at least understood.

  “They set up a company,” Elgin was saying. “Sold themselves plenty of credit notes to make their price go up on the market. Claimed to have this much in profits, this much in loss.” He tapped his pen to the page. “But in truth”—he shuffled papers—“the loss is this much, the funds shunted in secret to the accounts here”—more shuffling—“in a private bank in France. I know this place is a private bank, in spite of its name, because I followed another fellow to the building in Paris that houses it a few years ago, and the bastard tried to kill me.” Elgin pulled off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “Couldn’t prove he did, because he escaped me, so nothing came of it. But that’s where their gold is, mark my words.”

  Daniel pulled the papers toward him. “The only way this kind of fraud could go past Rankin after this much time is if he let it. How does the money return to this country? And to Ireland?”

  “That is another beautiful part,” Elgin said. “Paid out to investors, but only those invited to invest—like a private club. They are legitimate investments, so if these people are investigated, they’ve done nothing wrong. They aren’t taking bribes or passing along money to fund anarchists—they’re collecting on a well-paying scheme. They have several innocent gentlemen involved to make it all look highly respectable.”

  “Gentlemen like the Marquis of Chalminster,” Daniel said. “I saw his name when I collected these papers to give you. But I’m certain his son is the true investor, using his father’s name. Gives himself the sobriquet of Minty.”

  “Bleh,” Elgin made a noise of disgust. “A little tick like that would.”

  Minty, the young man who’d beaten Daniel outside Euston Station, his friends joining with enthusiasm.

  “It will all dry up, of course,” Daniel said. “When I pass all this on, Minty will have to find a new hobby.”

  I had guessed Daniel knew more about Minty than he’d let on. He hadn’t been surprised when he’d read Minty’s name on the card. Again, I could not help wondering whether Daniel had deliberately provoked Minty in order to pick Minty’s pocket, so he’d have an excuse to visit his father, the marquis. If Daniel was investigating a fraudulent scheme the marquis seemed to be a part of—especially one involving Fenians—Daniel’s knowledge of that plus a threat to prosecute Minty for assaulting him might make the marquis bend to Daniel’s wishes. If the marquis truly weren’t a part of it, the man could punish his son, and perhaps Minty would tell all he knew about the fraud and the plots.

  I started to ask Daniel whether that had been the case, but my tongue suddenly felt heavy in my mouth, and I could not move my lips.

  I drifted into darkness, where my daughter laughed and spun away from me, straight toward a railway track that blossomed into flame as I watched. I tried to scream to Grace to run, to flee as fire engulfed us both, but I couldn’t make a sound.


  • • •

  “Kat.”

  I pried open my eyes sometime later to find myself surrounded by golden light, everything hazy. In that haze was Daniel, leaning to me, his voice low.

  “Daniel.” I don’t know whether the word came out of my mouth or remained unspoken. I lifted my hand and rested it on his chest.

  Daniel’s face softened, and the shadows rendered his eyes a very dark blue. I didn’t know which Daniel bent over me, the laborer or the gentleman. But in a dream, it didn’t matter. We weren’t really here, he and I, and I felt free to touch his face, feel the warmth of his unshaved jaw through my thin gloves. Daniel turned his head and pressed a kiss to my palm.

  I was floating, and didn’t notice the seat beneath me or the chill from the window at my back. We remained locked in this place of no time, where I could be Kat and he could be Daniel, nothing of the world intruding.

  “Kat.” His voice slid through my senses, loosening the tightness in my limbs.

  Did love feel like this? I wondered. A quiet happiness, not the giddy, heart-pounding excitement that led to disaster?

  My love for my daughter was still and deep, and ever so strong. It filled me in a way nothing else did. The silent satisfaction I experienced now as Daniel hovered over me, his lips on my glove, was similar, slipping into my life before I was aware enough to stop it.

  “Kat,” he whispered once more. “Time to wake up, love.”

  I was awake. I knew it as soon as he said the words. Daniel was standing over me in truth, holding my hand, pressing light kisses to it, his eyes telling me all.

  I gasped and jumped, but one wild glance showed me that the room was empty. Elgin had gone, and Cynthia had not returned.

  Daniel released me before I could yank my hand from his grasp. His expression held regret, though I wasn’t certain what for.

  I got my feet firmly under me and accepted his help to stand. I was stiff from my awkward position on the divan, but the stiffness wore away quickly as I shook out my skirts and put a hand to my hair.