Sergeant Verity and the Blood Royal (14 page)

'Regrettable, sir,' said Dacre, mournful and sincere. 'But he shall hear of it, sir, from me. Never fear that. Indeed, I have a commission to execute on his behalf in which it is possible you might incur His Highness's obligation.'

'I should be glad to know of it,' said Snowden hopefully.

Dacre looked about him, as though anxious not to be overheard.

'You must know, Mr. Snowden, that in the course of such a tour, with the good-will and the ceremony, many gifts are given and received by His Royal Highness. As he leaves Washington, for Philadelphia, then for New York and Boston, the sealed boxes must accompany him. Tomorrow night they must rest in Philadelphia, the gifts and the presents. In Washington, where we have our Embassy, they were no embarrassment. In Philadelphia, we have nowhere but the Prince's suite at the Continental

Hotel. Truth, sir, there is nowhere the six boxes might lie safer or more convenient for that night than in your own vault. . .'

'Why, Colonel Dempster!' Snowden regarded Dacre with that faint, smiling disparagement which might have indicated that Dacre should either have known better than to ask, or should not have hesitated to put the request.

'It is an imposition, sir,' said Dacre humbly, 'aw -imposition, damme.'

'No!' Snowden shook his head, 'No imposition whatever, sir!'

'You must make whatever restrictions are usual, sir,' said Dacre firmly. 'You are not to be put to inconvenience in the matter. His Royal Highness is positive as to that. For my part, it is only to see the boxes delivered to you under seal tomorrow morning, and to obtain them from you again on the morning after.'

'Name your wish, sir!' said Snowden earnestly. 'Only name it!'

'The Prince asks only one other,' Dacre looked about him again cautiously. 'It is that you alone and your most trusted lieutenants should know of this matter.'

'Our stronghold is safe enough,' said Snowden, taken aback.

'To be sure it is, sir, but the boxes must come and go. There might the danger lie. If all the world were honest, sir, I should not have to ask this. But it ain't, damme. It ain't at all.'

By this time, the three men were walking back down the marble staircase. Dacre had expected to be led politely off the premises but to his delight Snowden was obviously intent on showing off the security in which the royal treasures might be kept. Returning to the circular vestibule at the main entrance, they turned inward, following the sunken passageway to the secrets of the Mint itself.

The great steel doors were there, just as the plan had indicated. Painted in the pale grey of an ironclad, they stood open with an armed and uniformed guard at either side. The thickness of the steel was impressive, Dacre allowed that. He even glimpsed the little keyhole, no more than an inch high, which was shuttered by the steel plate and its time-lock from dusk until dawn. If anything, he had under-estimated the strength of these main doors. Once they were locked, almost airtight, across the vaulted passage, a ton of gunpowder might do no more than pit their surface. Behind him walked Morant-Barham and Willson Moore, the former replying with hums and murmurs to Moore's attempts at conversation.

They passed the weighing-rooms, where the bullion was entered in the records of the Mint. Another metal door opened at Snowden's touch and they stood before the searing brilliance of the furnaces in the refining shop. Four of these were set into the opposite wall, like square, open ovens, molten gold simmering on top of the crucibles inside, above its deposit of silver. The refiners in their shirtsleeves stood at each furnace with long-handled dipping-cups, scooping out the liquid gold and tipping it into zinc vats of water, like sparkling fire. Dacre's eyes filled at the white heat of the ovens, whose flames roared in concealment behind the ventilation grill. Yet through the haze of tears he noted the two furnaces which were unlit and knew that Charley Temple's informant had not misled him.

Beyond the refining-shop, with its hot metallic air, the corroding-house was laden with steam from the porcelain vats where the golden granules hissed in hot nitric acid. The fumes, which rose in a bright golden fog, were collected by an overhanging metal 'umbrella' and drawn into the upward draught of the chimney. Several men, in leather jerkins and hats to protect their hair from the fumes, stirred the bubbling acid with long wooden pokers. To one side of this, set back in a narrow recess, was a chimney-hatch, giving access to the flue. Dacre, nodding and making agreeable comments on Snowden's description of such ingenuities, gave his mind to plotting the intricacies of the next day.

After the refining process, the Mint assumed the character of any other engineering works. There was a casting-shop with a smaller, arched furnace, bricked into the wall, where the gold was melted again and poured into the empty upright moulds of the ingots, which stood in rows on low trolleys to receive the precious fluid. Beyond that was the great expanse of the rolling-room, with its massive mill powered by two broad iron wheels on each side, large enough to have driven a ship. Dacre watched in fascination as the brick-like ingots were drawn in by the broad-rimmed iron wheels and pressed into long slim strips of metal, thin enough for the coins to be punched from them.

The muffled thunder of the steam-driven rolling-mill gave way to the metallic chatter of the coining shop, where men who looked like clerks sat on high stools at what seemed to be church organs. Into the base of these, where the keyboard might have been, they fed the thin strips of gold, using their free hand to regulate the mechanical punch of the stamp. The metallic clatter and the trickle of blank coins into boxes rattled endlessly about the great shop. Finally came the subdued female murmur of the weighing-room, where the punched coins were checked by thirty or forty girls, each sitting at her little table with a pair of scales before her.

Snowden led the way to the far entrance of the room, through which no one but he and his confidants ever passed. Another steel door, as massive as those at the vestibule entrance, stood before them. This one was closed across the arched passageway and boasted no keyhole. There was a single knob projecting from the centre of the door, let in from the far side so that its screws and edging were inaccessible to any burglar. Dacre looked politely away as Snow den clicked the knob round, first one way and than another. He took hold of a bar across the door and, with an effort, opened it.

Inside this door was the stronghold, a dozen or more bullion boxes bound with iron bands and bearing a stamped seal across their locks. In one wall was an iron door with a large inset key-lock.

'Depending on the size of your boxes, sir,' said Snowden doubtfully, 'they might be fitted into the vault itself. But if they can't fit, would you find our stronghold here to be satisfactory?'

'More than that, sir,' said Dacre effusively. 'Why, sir, the jewels that lie in your stronghold shall be safer than in the Tower of London.'

'Without disrespect to your Tower, sir,' said Snowden with a polite smirk, 'we like to think such things may be as safe here.'

He led the way back through the various processes of coining and refining. Before the main steel doors, he paused while two uniformed guards patted him down in a rapid search. Director of the Mint he might be, but it was more than their jobs were worth to let him know that any man could leave the vaults with the contents of his pockets unchallenged. Dacre and Morant-Barham submitted to the same indignity, followed by Willson Moore whose honest, lightly freckled face coloured slightly at the very thought of being suspected.

'You see, sir?' said Snowden cheerfully. 'Even I am not my own master here. Merely the servant of the Treasury Department. And now, sir, I bid you good-day. I regret that I cannot be here tomorrow to receive you myself, but Captain Moore will attend to all your needs. I shall do myself the honour of waiting upon you when you return to collect His Royal Highness's treasures.'

Verney Dacre brought his heels together and ducked his head.

'Servant, sir!'

Morant-Barham imitated the same parody of acknowledgement. The two men took their leave, striding smartly and in step down the approach of the Grecian portico.

Inside the carriage, Dacre threw off his plumed hat, rolled back against the dark buttoned leather, and threw up his fists with a cry.

'By God, Joey! We're in! Devil take me if that crib ain't as good as cracked already! Huzzah for Charley Temple!

He never knew the turn he did us, but it's every inch the way his doxy showed it to be, walls, flues, drains, the whole damn show!'

'I do hope so, old fellow,' said Morant-Barham, his sunburnt cheeks flushing under his dark whiskers. 'I don't even care for standing in the beastly place. Gives a man a mouth that's dry as a whore's cranny for a pull of hock-and-seltzer.'

Dacre crowed in his delight.

'Dammit, Joey, but ain't it a prize? Did y' never see such yaller goold? Damn great lumps of the stuff, big as a dray-man's skull ? The smell and the touch of it! I don't care, old fellow, if I must be hanged for it. I can't cry off now, no more than you could jump off your handsome young Khan bitch when you know you must spend or be damned! There ain't a whore in the world that can pleasure a man in his mind with such beauty!'

For all his flushed excitement, it seemed that Morant-Barham was by far the cooler of the pair, Dacre's eyes now-glittering with an almost insane zeal.

'Joey,' he said, the whisper almost a hiss of madness, 'come tomorrow, y' may have to black your face if the worst happens. It ain't likely but y' may. I think, however, I was right. I'm in already. What I've got under the seat of this very cabriolet shall melt steel doors and burst time-locks in two. Damme if it shan't tell one number in a million on the figure-lock, and have the last gold coin out of the stronghold and into our pockets!'

'Oh?' said Morant-Barham sceptically. 'And what might you have there?'

Dacre reached down under the seat and gave an energetic tug. He handed to Morant-Barham a bundle of three old and rather dirty sacks.

By the time they reached the Florentine fortress of the Hotel Continental once more, all Morant-Barham's ill humour had vanished and he was roaring with delight at the scheme. 'Whores in hellfire!' he bellowed, deeply flushed, eyes swimming and mouth agape. 'Ain't it a tickler? Dear God, Dacre, old fellow, they're on the hip and they don't know it!'

The two men composed themselves in order to step out into the sunshine as tall, slim and dignified staff officers, marching briskly under the hotel canopy and disappearing into the cooler and darker interior. It was left to Cowhide, as coachman, to drive round the corner, strip the transfer of the royal insignia from the door panels, and return the carriage to the livery stables.

Dacre and Morant-Barham strode quickly across the blue-carpeted lobby of the great hotel, where travellers lounged on gilt sofas behind the
New York Herald
or the
Pennsylvania Chronicle,
gaining the broad flight of stairs with their polished mahogany rail and the ascending pillars of the gas-globes at either side. Such comings and goings had grown so frequent in the Continental itself that they were already less noticed. The two men strode up the curving stairway to the third floor, where 'Colonel Dempster's suite' lay at the end of a carpeted passageway and behind two sets of doors.

Lucifer, his pale effeminate face watching anxiously through the crevice of the doors, opened them at their approach. Neither he nor Cowhide was privileged to share the details of Dacre's plan. They knew only that it had something to do with bleeding Captain Willson Moore of his fortune by blackmail, which necessarily involved confronting him at his place of work. The suite at the Continental was, in effect, a length of one corridor, sealed off from the rest and self-contained behind its locked double doors. In its rooms, Maggie and Jennifer languished, under the constant care of Lucifer and two minor accomplices of the slave-dealer Hicks: Raoul and Bull-Peg.

Dacre hardly paused to look at Lucifer, striding on into his own rooms with Morant-Barham, stripping off the uniform and tossing its items on to the bed. Lucifer hurried after him.

'Well?' snapped Dacre, stripped to his shirt. 'Don't I pay my way, then?'

He tossed a small purse of gold coins to Lucifer, who caught it fumblingly.

'Keep it,' said Dacre, more civilly. 'The poor mark had nothing more in his pockets. He shall bleed rich, however!'

Lucifer shook his head.

'It ain't that, captain, it ain't that at all. Only he sent a note to you here that was given in not five minutes ago.'

Dacre snatched the envelope from Lucifer's hand and ripped it open.

Captain Willson Moore presents his compliments to Colonel Dempster and does himself the honour of looking forward to receiving Colonel Dempster's visit and instructions tomorrow in the forenoon. Captain Moore, standing engaged the latter part of the morning, would take it as a particular personal obligation if Colonel Dempster should find it convenient to call upon their mutual concerns before eleven o'
clock.

Dacre crumpled the paper in his hand in an ecstasy of triumph. He swung round upon Morant-Barham, his mouth distorted in a rictus of delight, and contempt for Willson Moore.

'The honest little sprat!' he snorted. 'Damned if he ain't took the bait and pin right into his gut! Only ask the desk-boy downstairs, Joey. I swear y' shall find a feller that would be in New York tomorrow night, to save young Miss Maggie from perdition, must be away from here at eleven in the morning to catch his train!'

Joey Morant-Barham smacked one fist into his other palm, joining Dacre's laughter.

'Trust me Joey - and see if it don't all go smooth as milady's rump!'

Later that evening, Dacre drew on his gloves. Morant-Barham opened a door to the room where the assistants of Lucifer and Cowhide kept watch. Raoul was sleek and swarthy, Bull-Peg a pink and white giant whose skull was smooth as an egg. To these rooms, in private suites with private servants, no hotel flunkey ever penetrated. Dacre had chosen this one as a luxuriously furnished cell.