A Study in Ashes (11 page)

“I was looking for you. I heard rumors that my son graced this humble abode. I could scarce credit such a miraculous event.” Bancroft’s expression was hard. “I imagine you were just trying out my chair for size. After all, someday this will all be yours.” He swept his arm around the room.

“I don’t want your chair.”

“No? It comes with a seat in the House of Lords. Those cushions are even better.”

Tobias swore under his breath. “Why are we arguing?”

“I’m not. I’m trying to have a conversation. You don’t make it easy.”

Tobias sat back in the disputed chair. “About what?”

“It was the Scarlet King kicking up a fuss downstairs. Is he the one poking holes in Big Ben? He seemed to relish provoking your employer.”

That was an interesting tidbit, and Tobias filed it away. “I don’t know who was behind the attack, and Keating refuses to speculate. He has no desire to rush about with guns blazing and troops scouring the streets.”

Lord Bancroft digested that. “Interesting. And wise.”

“How so?”

“No point in showing his strength.”

“I think it has more to do with the disturbance just before the attack. I was there; the mood on the streets is dangerous. Someone put a crowd of rioters into motion, but the public was eager enough to join in once there was a fight.”

“That’s my point. He’s right to hold back. Whoever did this is trying to draw Keating out, to assess what forces he has at his disposal. They did much the same thing last year with that bomb in Baker Street. It didn’t work that time, so now they’re going for bigger game.”

The bomb had been the Blue King’s work, but Tobias doubted King Coal was behind this attack. His maker had been Dr. Magnus, and the sorcerer had burned up last November aboard the
Wyvern
. And as far as Tobias could tell, there was nothing magical about the brass mosquito.

“Speaking of Baker Street,” his father mused, “is there any plan of calling Holmes in on this?”

“Not yet. I have an airship the size of a small carriage, and the best clues will be in its engines.”

Lord Bancroft, who knew his way around a toolbox, nodded. “If anyone can decipher it, you will.”

Tobias was almost startled. “Was that a compliment?”

Lord Bancroft’s eyes almost twinkled. “You’re an idiot about many things, but I’ve never doubted your talent with machines.”

Before Tobias could reply, he heard the thud of feet pounding up the stairs. Tobias and his father exchanged a look, confusion mirrored between them. No one, gentry or servants,
clomped about like farm boys in Hilliard House. It simply wasn’t done.

“Who’s that?” Tobias asked, his suspicion forgotten—at least for the moment.

“Damned if I know,” Bancroft replied.

There was a pause followed by the sound of smashing china. Bancroft spun and was in the hall in seconds, with Tobias right behind him. Bancroft held up his hand for silence. Both men listened, Tobias holding his breath.

Heavy feet thundered on the stairs that led up to the bedrooms. The bedrooms? Alarm tightened his entire body. Closing his hands into fists, Tobias strode quickly toward the sound. “Call the footmen,” he told his father. They would all be downstairs with the guests.

Surprisingly, Lord Bancroft turned to obey without argument, and Tobias mounted the steps alone. He’d barely gone a dozen feet before he heard loud, drunken laughter. Shards of white and blue china littered the stairs—the remains of a tall vase that had been one of his mother’s favorites. Then Tobias bounded up the stairs two at a time.

He saw at once what was going on. Two young men—tall, mustachioed, sporting types—were reeling from wall to wall. And they were engaged in fisticuffs. One swung at his friend, staggering forward, but the other was too tipsy to dodge away in time. Flesh hit flesh with a resounding crack and both collapsed into the wall, knocking over a delicate étagère holding a collection of ferns. They began to giggle with the sloppy, high-pitched hiccups of the extremely drunk.

Tobias surged forward, grabbing the nearest one by the collar and dragging him toward the stairs. “Steady on!” said the man stumbling beside him. “No way to treat a guest.”

“Hospitality has its limits.” Tobias heaved him faster, rather enjoying himself.

“Don’t you know who we are, laddie?” the man protested.

Tobias growled in reply. The man and his friend were dressed in evening clothes, but both wore a puff of red silk in the breast pocket of their tailcoats. It marked them as men in the service of the Scarlet King. “I don’t bloody care.”

He heard the feet of the other man behind him, building up momentum like a rusty engine. Tobias sidestepped in plenty of time, releasing his hold on his prisoner. One crashed into the other, and they both tumbled down the steps, narrowly missing the clock and all but landing in the arms of the footmen coming up the staircase. Since footmen were generally hired for their healthy physique, they grabbed the men with ease. The younger of the two looked up, inquiry in his wide brown eyes.

“Do something with those two, will you?” Tobias said wearily.

“Aye, sir,” the lad said, heaving his charge upright. “Right away, sir.”

“And call one of the maids to clean up. There’s a bit of a mess.”

Lord Bancroft, standing at the bottom of the steps, looked like he’d swallowed a mouthful of vinegar. He led the footmen and their burdens toward the door, no doubt to put a favorable mask on events, or perhaps to spout a few lines to any roaming newspapermen. The brief moment of father-son cooperation was at an end.

Still twitching with energy, Tobias turned and went back up the stairs, pausing to set the étagère to rights and rescue what plants he could. He scraped dirt back into the pots, covering over the straggling roots of the ferns. It was a servant’s job, but he couldn’t stand to wait for someone else to repair the damage. A low fury thrummed through him, setting every sense on alert. It wasn’t just the broken vase or spilled dirt that set his skin prickling, but the disrespect. The minions of the steam barons seemed to feel the world was theirs—even the private places of their host’s family home. And whatever Bucky had said, Tobias never counted himself as one of the steam barons’ insufferable hangers-on. Tobias’s set had never been angels, but they knew to take their bad behavior to a brothel or a private club.

He’d barely finished the thought when he heard the creak of a floorboard. He rose, turning and flicking dirt from his fingers. Imogen’s bedchamber, as always, showed a light under the door. She had always suffered nightmares and, at
Lady Bancroft’s orders, her daughter was never left alone in the dark.

The creak came again, and Tobias wheeled around. The sound hadn’t come from Imogen’s room but from the stairs behind him. William Reading was watching him with his head cocked to one side, his lips in a sly curve, and a large brass bird clutching his wrist.

POPPY WAS GETTING
bored again. Guests were crowding back to the party now that the crisis of the firebird was past, and there seemed to be twice as many people as before. The talk was mostly about the attack on Westminster. Poppy had heard all that already in the past few days—even the wilder theories. The rest of the chat was about politics in general. It was a subject she couldn’t care less about—or at least never had—but a sense of self-preservation had forced her to pay more attention lately.

As she understood it, there were two main groups of citizens in the Empire. There were the steam barons who made up the Steam Council, and then there was the rest. A few nobles still wielded a lot of power, but everyone up to and including the queen herself had lost ground to the barons. Poppy had learned a lot about that from her own family. Lord Bancroft had done something that displeased Jasper Keating—she’d never learned exactly what—and that hadn’t sorted itself out until Tobias married Alice and went to work for Keating Utility. Unfortunately, Tobias had wanted to marry someone else—Imogen’s best friend, Evelina Cooper. Her brother hadn’t been quite right since.

The problem was that people talked about politics but nobody ever
did
anything—about the barons, or the poor, or the crime, or even how uncomfortable they were in fashionable clothes. People were too busy fussing about what everyone else thought, and her mother was trying to make Poppy just like the rest—a good and dutiful girl. It made her want to kick something over.

She wondered if whoever had driven that ship into the Clock Tower had felt that way. A tiny part of her admired
that kind of initiative and, after all, no one had actually been hurt, right?

She’d made it to the food, arranged as a buffet on one side of the room. It was just light fare, meant for grazing rather than as a full meal. That would come later and be served with the proper pomp in the dining room.

Footmen guarded the table, though they occasionally glanced around at the ceiling, presumably looking for flaming birds of prey. Beside them stood a steam samovar that automatically dispensed tea with lemon or milk at the touch of a button. Poppy eyeballed the savories, arranged temptingly on silver platters. Snowy damask linens draped the table, giving it the appearance of an altar.
All hail the temple of luxury
. Too bad her stays were too tight to eat a thing.

And then she spotted a lone figure dressed in black, standing near the end of the table. He must have arrived late, because she hadn’t seen him before this, but she knew the man at once—Sherlock Holmes, the detective. It was likely he was there at Keating’s request—the Gold King liked to show off those he considered his extended entourage.

Intrigued, she watched him from the corner of her eye.
This
was a man who did things, whether people thanked him for it or not. He didn’t let mysteries fester like something nasty left under the table for the dogs, and he didn’t give up on people in trouble. When Evelina Cooper had disappeared, he’d kept looking for months until she was found wounded in the East End. Of course, Evelina was his niece.

Just as Imogen was her sister. There was no giving up on people you loved. Still, Poppy felt a rush of trepidation, like something cold trickling down her back. She cast another glance in Holmes’s direction. He was tall, thin, and austere looking, all lean angles. Dark hair swept back from a widow’s peak; a hooked nose emerged like a blade from sharply marked brows. He looked like a man with no tolerance for trivialities.

If only she wasn’t wearing pink frills! It was bad enough being fifteen without looking like a raspberry trifle.
Never mind. There is no time like the present
. That was her motto. Or at least it was now.

Poppy took a gulp of air to stifle the butterflies in her stomach and approached the foremost detective in London. She affected a stroll, refusing to creep or cringe or, worse yet, bound toward him like an eager puppy.

“Mr. Holmes, I presume,” she said, trying to sound like her mother.

He turned toward her. His eyes were gray—not the stormy gray of her brother’s, or the dove-gray of Imogen’s, but the gray she imagined for Antarctic ice. For the merest second, Poppy quailed—but it didn’t last. With her, fear seldom did.

“You are Evelina’s uncle,” she said.

There was no obvious change in the man, but the corner of his mouth quirked, as if some of that ice had thawed. “And you, I believe, are Miss Poppy Roth.”

She liked the fact that he used Poppy and not Penelope. That meant he knew something about her. “I am. And I would like to engage your services.”

She had half expected him to laugh then, but his face grew utterly serious. “What is the case, Miss Roth?”

Her pulse was pounding, and the wretched stays were stealing her breath. She suddenly realized this was why so many women fainted all the time—they were being strangled by their underthings. “I require someone to look into the circumstances of my sister’s illness.”

The detective’s eyebrows drew together. “I understand that the underlying ailment is of long standing. Since childhood, in fact. I assume you are referring to her condition since her kidnapping.”

He would have heard all that from his friend Dr. Watson, who had been consulted on the case. “That’s true. She’s been sick before but never like this. Dr. Magnus kidnapped her, and she fainted when his ship plummeted from the sky. It stands to reason that there is a connection. The last words she spoke were ‘Surely I killed you’—or something to that effect. Tobias couldn’t remember exactly.”

Holmes gave her a quizzical look. “I haven’t heard that last part before now.”

“No one has. I don’t think Tobias told anyone else. He
can’t quite believe that Im would say something like that. She’s usually more, um, conciliatory.”

“Ah.” Holmes lifted a hand, beckoning her to follow him away from the table and into a quieter corner of the room. “That one detail changes things utterly. Tell me everything, Miss Roth, from the beginning.”

She tried to decide if he was just humoring her, but the grave expression in his eyes argued against it. Well, there was nothing she could lose by giving him the facts.

“These are the things I know for certain.” Poppy forced herself to stand still, for all she wanted to wring her hands or dig her toe into the carpet. The detective’s intense gaze was making her nervous. “Imogen eloped that day. She meant to run away with Bucky Penner, but on the way Dr. Magnus kidnapped her and took her to his ship.”

“And then your brother took her back to the
Helios
, and the battle followed.”

Poppy nodded. She had seen the fight from the upstairs window, her pulse pounding so hard she thought she could taste her own blood. Poppy’s voice snagged on the next words. “Imogen should be dead by now. The doctors cannot understand why she still lives.”

A silence fell between them, the detective letting her swallow down a wave of pain that threatened tears.

“I understand there was history between Dr. Magnus and your father,” Holmes said.

“They were friends,” Poppy replied. “But that all stopped around the time I was in leading strings. I don’t think they saw each other again until Dr. Magnus came to London a year and a half ago. Tobias knows the whole story. I was too little to remember.”