The Cogspeare Conspiracy (The Cogspeare Chronicles Book 1) (28 page)

              “Cranes, Mrs. Cog.”

              “For luck, Mrs. Cog.”

              “You may need it, Mrs. Cog.”

              “Well, how sweet!” she exclaimed, claiming them and hugging each girl in turn.

              “Oh, Lord,” Declan sighed.

Chapter 65:

Mr. Jepsum, now an even smaller and more nervous man than he had been a week before, stuttered,

              “B-but that information is confidential, M-Mrs. C-Cogspeare. I-I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything.”

              Amidst the Sunday traffic it hadn’t taken Edwina, Declan and Twym long to find Hogarth Jepsum’s house. His address had been secreted in Twym’s notebook, and lead them to a small yet tidy affair in the West End, where they correctly assumed he would be since it was about dinner time. His housekeeper had been reluctant to let them in, but really hadn’t stood a chance in the face of a very determined and very sweetly persuasive Edwina. The housekeeper had stationed them in the parlour, and Jepsum had soon entered. When they had made their request for more information, he had dashed to his small secretary and clutched at the scrolls possessively.

              “Now, Mr. Jepsum,” Edwina twitched her cumbersome skirts out of her path and advanced on the quaking professional, “You say that you have to keep quiet for your client, but what about his victims? What about the miners who were injured in that explosion?” His quaking became outright shaking. “Would you be able to live with yourself if your information could have prevented that disaster? All those wives who lost husbands, children who lost fathers, mothers who lost sons?”

              Jepsum collapsed into a chair and began to sob. Declan saw his mother suppress a fiendish, triumphant smile, and instead went over to him and patted his shoulder.

              “There, there, I’m sure you did all you could,” she handed him a handkerchief.

              “B-But t-that’s the p-problem!” he wailed. “I-I did tell them, b-but t-they wouldn’t listen!”

              “Who?” Declan demanded, “Who wouldn’t listen?”

              “Lord Clinton and the rest of the board. I sent them so many reports about the unsoundness of the m-mine. And when I saw th-that storm coming I went to them in p-person. But they dismissed my concerns, and said I would be sacked if I mentioned any of this.”

              Edwina exchanged glances with her son and Twym.

              “And did you? Did you discuss this with anyone else?” Jepsum hung his head and nodded, mopping his face.

              “Yes. A reporter came by a week or two ago and was asking me these same questions, just like you. I told him all this as well.”

              “Was his name George Talliburn?” asked Twym. Jepsum nodded miserably.

              “And would you be willing to testify on all of this?” Edwina gave him a hard stare.

              “Yes!” he finally exclaimed after no more than a minute under her gaze. “I can’t take it anymore; Mother says the stress is killing me. I’ve already lost two stone in as many weeks. Just do what you will, and let me be.”

              The three visitors came together.

              “What does this mean?” Twym asked, a quill stub flying across a small scroll as fast as he could scribble.

              “It means that we know Clinton and his cronies knew about the dangers of the mine, and still continued with the operation. And that they tried to cover up their part in it afterwards. Dolt, idiot that he is, now has a witness that will corroborate it.”

              “And it means that we should get home now before the house blows up or dissolves.”

              “Can it do that?” wondered Twym as they took their leave.

Chapter 66:

Since he caught her on the pneumatic tube
plotting
, as he insisted on calling it, with his mother, Magnus and Minerva had been fighting, on and off, for three hours. When Erasmus’s tests had come to surprising conclusions, he and his father and brother had made their way downstairs. They had sat down in the drawing room and watched the barristers with extreme interest.

              “Did I miss anything?” asked Erasmus, returning from tubing the mews and giving the staff and his family the all-clear to return. He handed his father some more nuts.

              “Not much,” answered his twin, “though they’ve now begun quoting some obscure law book or some such. Why do they think that would help their argument?”

              “It’s quite obvious, my boy, that they’re in love, and the only way that they can adequately express their conflicted emotions is through the medium with which they feel most comfortable and eloquent.”

              The boys looked aghast at their father.

              “Well, I do listen to your mother occasionally.” They shrugged and turned back to the combatants, who were rather hoarse by this point.

              “And you co-opted my mother,
my
mother, my
mother
, into your scheme!”

              “You’ve already said that, Magnus, four times already. And I said I was sorry.”

              “Not for going behind the backs of the family that took you in-”

              “No, but for your stubbornness in continuing to represent Clinton.”

              “I am a barrister. He is my client. That’s what we do, though you could only conceive of that if you were a barrister.”
              “And so I would be if men like you didn’t hinder me at every turn!”

              “They wouldn’t hinder you if you could be objective and think, instead of just
feel
your way through a case.” She blinked as though he had slapped her. So she slapped right back.

              “And be like you, who feels nothing and acts like an automaton!”

              They were both breathing hard when Edwina, Sebastian, Declan and Twym burst in.

              “What is going on?” she exclaimed, “I heard raised voices. Is something wrong?” She looked at the couple and then slowly smiled. “Oh.”

              After a few beats, Erasmus rose and stated, “Now, if the matinee is over, or at least in intermission, I believe that we need to discuss our experiments.”

              “What is there to discuss?” asked Declan, sitting down gratefully after the mad dash across London on a day of supposed rest. “You sent us the all-clear that it’s safe.”

              “It is…more or less. You see,” he began, strolling over to the still-glaring couple and pushed them into opposite chairs, “since we didn’t have a pure sample of the spesium Craggs Junior or Senior were exposed to, we had to use the next best thing; a tissue sample.”

              “Tissue sample?” wondered Edwina.

              “His finger, Mother,” Amadeus translated. “We cut off his finger and ran some tests on it.”

              “Oh. And how did they do?” she asked of Cornelius, as though asking how her sons did on an exam.

              “Fine, dear, fine. I may have done it a bit differently, but then again, I’m a chemical physicist and Erasmus is a medical man, so I suppose differing methodologies can be permitted.”

              “Anyway,” Erasmus interrupted pointedly, “we did find that a subject must be exposed to the alternate spesium- which we’re calling spesium
2
– first hand. It can’t be passed from person to person.”

              “Thank God,” breathed Declan.

              “We also found that spesium
2
must be activated in very close proximity to the subject for the negative effects to be felt.”

              “So..?” Sebastian wondered, stroking L.B on the floor.

              “That means, Seb, that Craggs Senior must have had particles of spesium
2
on him when he came to London, probably got them from the dirty gear his son brought home. As death occurred so quickly, he must have been in generally poor health. He inhaled the particles, which were probably activated by the wet mist, and that caused his death. Now that the particles have reacted, they’re relatively benign.” They all took a moment to digest the sad, if relieving news.

              “But you said you found surprising conclusions. Was that it?”

              “Well…” Erasmus began, “This is going to sound very…odd, but as we were conducting tests on the specimen-”

              “-the finger,” Amadeus clarified.

              “Indeed. As we were doing that…the finger moved.” There was silence.

              “You insist on over-dramatizing everything, Erasmus.”

              “Everything in this house is over-dramatized,” grunted Magnus at his second brother. “Just what the hell are you talking about?”

              “Just what I said,” Erasmus replied sharply. “The finger moved in the dish. It began to twitch. It was obviously just the water in the cells reacting to the spesium, but-”

              “But it gave us one hell of a shock, didn’t it, boys? Not ashamed to say that I almost lost control of myself.” Erasmus rolled his eyes but continued.

              “We quickly went to the body, and though the spesium mist had since stopped oozing from it, it began to show signs of…movement.”

              “Movement!” exclaimed Declan, horrified, “Do you mean that it, he, was
alive
again
?!”

              “Absolutely not. We checked for signs of life, both physical and mental, but both were nil. We were afraid of how much further it would go, and since we knew that we were safe, we disposed of the body with acid. Steamins should be arranging for what’s left of it to be transported back to Cornwall.”

              “Nothing can be simple in this house, can it?” Magnus said. “The case that was going to make my career is actually going to end it. Assassinated at the hands of mother and my…Minerva.”

              “It always has to be about you, doesn’t it?” Minerva shot back. They were both back on their feet. Edwina leaned over and grabbed a handful of nuts, saying quietly, “It must be love if we just told them about a resurrected body and all they can do if fight.”

              “Reminds me of that time…” Cornelius began, but he was cut off when Magnus suddenly rounded on his mother.

              “
Et tu, mater
?”

              “I’m so sorry, dear, I do know how you value it, but it’s being repaired as we speak.”

              “You were helping her to help opposing counsel and- wait, what?”

              “Nothing, dear, do continue.”

              “No, tell me, what do I value so highly?” Edwina had the grace to look utterly abashed but confessed.

              “After I met Minerva in jail I just knew that you two should get better acquainted. But how could you possibly do that when you’re always working or alone in your rooms? I knew that you were about to lose your valet, so I gave him a little extra coin to flood your flat so that you would have to move back here, if only temporarily.”

              Magnus closed his eyes and hoped that this was a nightmare. But alas, everyone was still in the drawing room when he opened them again.

              “Mother,” he sighed, exasperated but not surprised except at how much less he felt betrayed at her subterfuge than at Minerva’s.  “Well, you have me here now, and Minerva and I certainly know each other very well.” He said the latter so harshly that Edwina had to hold back her tears. But Minerva was made of much sterner stuff, and simply said, with icy aplomb,

              “I think it’s time that I go and speak with Mr. Dolt.”

Chapter 68:

As much as Sebastian and Cornelius tried to enliven the group, dinner was an exercise in stony and awkward silence. It was a silence so palpable, even below stairs, that Bongout didn’t make the effort to cook his usual five-course meal, and instead gave them salad and trilobite terrine, and then he was mortified when they didn’t even bother to complain.

              Quintus had insisted on coming down, fully dressed in evening kit and looking little worse for being cut open by his brother. But it didn’t take much to convince him to lay down on the settee for a digestive.