The Transference Engine (28 page)

In that arcane manner I could never quite grasp, Jimmy had communicated with his tribe. The young groom from the camp met me on the village green with two horses and a crowd of villagers eyeing the fine horseflesh. He escorted me back to London. Jimmy and his balloon were long gone and I wondered if I'd see him any time soon. My life felt rather empty and devoid of friends at the moment.

I'd no sooner dismounted than the groom gathered up my reins and headed out of town. The horses' hooves made no sound on the cobbles. Of course they didn't. They were Romany horses and knew the value of muffling stealth.

Shaking my head to clear it of a thousand images and details, I descended the back stairs to the kitchen and let myself in with my key. Emma and Philippa were cleaning the kitchen. Mickey supervised Lucy as she counted the day's take.

Everything looked normal.

And yet it wasn't.

“Mickey, please send for Inspector Witherspoon. Tell him I need some additional information regarding a man with a withered hand.” I stared down the interior stair toward the bathtub.

“I knew it!” Mickey chortled. “He's up to no good, ain't he?”

“Probably. Emma, when you finish, would you bring me clean clothes and a cup of hot tea.”

“Aye, Missus. We had a good day. The shortbread biscuits with icing and a half cherry sold out twice,” Lucy said.

“Good thing you taught me to make a decent shortbread,” Emma said. She pulled the plug on the washbasin and toweled her hands dry. “Philippa, you be careful putting away the china,” she called to the girl.

Philippa frowned deeply. “I knows. I knows. No need to keep reminding me.” As she spoke, a crockery bowl slipped from her hands to crash against the tiles.

I sighed and retreated to the bathtub before Emma could take a rolling pin to the girl. They'd work it out.

For the first time in many years I found the problems of the kingdom more important than running my own tiny kingdom. Crisis loomed, and I had run out of ideas.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“A
RE YOU CERTAIN THAT Lord Ruthven is at the center of the plot and his target is the archbishop?” Witherspoon asked as he sipped milky tea and wolfed down three jam scones as if he hadn't eaten in days.

For that matter, the dark circles of exhaustion around his eyes suggested he hadn't slept in that long either.

“I'm not certain of anything. But I followed the logic.” Rigby had pushed me through to that logic. Did I trust him to lead me down the proper path?

“Well Ruthven has gone to ground, that's for certain. I've had my boys out looking for the lord and his amanuensis with the black leather gloves that never come off. Nowhere in London. Nor the beggar with the withered hand.”

“Does Lord Ruthven maintain a house in London?”

“Don't think so.” Witherspoon looked longingly at the empty plate in front of him.

I ignored his silent suggestion. Then my own stomach growled from lack of sustenance. “Oh, well, we might as well both eat. We'll find something in the kitchen.”

“You asked for a private consultation, Madame Magdala,” he reminded me. Still, he got to his feet and held the door of my parlor open for me.

“My employees have access to more information than your entire army of runners,” I said blithely and led the way down the broad staircase to the center of the café.

“And so does that library of yours.”

“The most obvious place to start is the most obvious.” I reached down a battered copy of Debrett's
Peerage
as we passed and continued down the stairs to the kitchen.

While Witherspoon thumbed through the pages of the thick book, I put together a tray of cold meats, cheeses, the last of this morning's bread, and some sticks of vegetables. The aroma of new bread rising in the brick cubby beside the oven that stayed warm long after the oven fires died away sharpened my appetite.

“Are you certain he's a peer?” Witherspoon asked. He shoved the open book toward me as he took possession of the cold collation. “If he's not well known in London, he could easily invent a country title and few would suspect. Except those with an up-to-date copy of Debrett's.”

Before I even glanced at the page, I repossessed some of the food. “Tea will be along in a minute,” I said around a mouthful of sliced mutton, cheese, and bread.

Then I looked. Backward and forward. I checked indexes and cross references.

No mention of Ruthven at all. Not a past title or a current one. No record of the name or place at all.

“This can't be,” I muttered. “He was introduced to me by . . . a dear friend. And confirmed by a respected Oxford don.” I flipped to the page showing Sir Andrew Fitzandrew as the first baronet of Fitzandrew with a home seat in Lancashire. I'd viewed that page many times over the years, wishing I'd taken the opportunity to visit his home, even if I had to go clandestinely and view it only from the outside.

Finally, I drew out my reading glasses and donned them. Details jumped out at me. Details I didn't want to see.

Witherspoon didn't bat an eye at the unflattering addition to my accessories.

“Someone has removed that page with a very sharp blade. I have no way to determine if Ruthven is the family name or the name of the estate, or if they are one and the same. I have no geographical references to even find the estate.” I thrust the book away and attacked my food.

“Got another copy of that book hidden below in your fancy library?” Witherspoon raised his tufted eyebrows and bit into his bread, now spread liberally with butter and jam.

I stilled a moment. “This is the most recent. Debrett's is updated frequently to mark the changes as old men die and younger men assume the titles, or everything reverts to the crown.”

Therefore, I must have older copies stashed away in the stacks of books in the basement, the walls, the attics, in the next building connected by cellars, and anywhere else the great machine knew about. I took my food with me back up the shallow stairs to the café proper. After a few minutes of fiddling with the keys I had a search working for the three previous versions of Debrett's.

The machine barely hissed or rotated at all before sending three books down the chute.

“That's one good thing about having the majority of books hidden away,” I said. “Only the most current and popular books remain available to anyone wandering the café. Destructive hands can't get to the older versions. Even I don't know where to find most of the volumes I own.”

The oldest of the previous versions revealed only the name Ruthven as both family and title. Estate not mentioned. But the title had reverted to the crown after a seven-year search because Adam Blackwell, heir presumptive to his great uncle the eighth baron, had gone to India and not returned.

India, the home of the Thuggees and their death cult honoring Kali. The purple crystal known as the Eye of Kali. India was also a place where a man of small income might make a large fortune. Ruthven seemed to have a great deal of money if he purchased an oversized black hot air balloon and outfitted it with a cannon that shot green light.

Coincidences began to fall into place.

The next volume said that Adam Blackwell-Ruthven, ninth baron, had returned from India and reclaimed the title and the estate. Not much of an estate—three hundred impoverished acres of land, a house built upon older foundations during the Restoration, and a seat in the House of Lords. Income estimated from the land was only about one thousand pounds a year—mostly from sheep—hardly enough to keep the roof from leaking and the servants fed. One shouldn't expect more after being abandoned and neglected for seven years.

Then I noticed in the older version that the land and title came with an endowed curacy and a seat in the House of Commons. Both of those positions could be sold outside the parish for more than they were worth. But the Reform Act would have moved both positions elsewhere and out of Ruthven's hands.

“Where is the manor?” Witherspoon asked as I read.

“Devonshire. Hard upon the coast.” Jane had said that Violet was headed toward Devonshire when they saw each other at the train station.

“Smugglers' caves,” Witherspoon said on a nod.

“A proposed rail line through the village,” I mused. Then I went in search of a map.

Fortunately, I have a bad habit of not returning books to the stacks or even the shelves in the café. My atlas of historic maps still rested on my reading table. I fetched it forthwith.

Old maps of Devonshire showed the Ruthven estate before Cromwell, and the rebuilt manor as mere dots near a no-name village. Only the most recent map showed the proposed railroad running north of the village and a wagon track—a thin squiggly line—connecting the two. This map was five years old. More and more rail lines were constructed every year.

“We need a newer map,” I said.

“I'll be back here tomorrow morning at opening with the latest. We at Bow Street need to keep these things on hand.”

“Best we both get some rest.” I showed him out by the back stair. Then I lay down on my bed for just a moment before changing into one of my beggar disguises to prowl the streets.

The next thing I knew, Emma was creeping down the stairs to set the bread to baking at dawn.

Curiously, the new maps showed the rail line had diverted south to run through the village now named Ruthven Abbey Downs.

Abbey?

That sent me looking for listings of abbeys and other church properties dissolved during the early reformation.

It took some time and three books until I found a line drawing of a small square building from about 1500. The travel guide mentioned the three hundred acres supporting the Dominican chapter in residence. I surmised that inside the square two-story building lay an open courtyard with a covered, possibly partially enclosed, walkway—the cloister. A square Norman tower dominated one corner, the chapel. Standard. Nothing unusual. The new manor was reported to be built on the same square, but rose three stories plus attics and a modern tiled roof. No open cloister.

But the foundations were original. Ancient churches, monasteries, convents, and
abbeys
always included a crypt to bury their own dead and possibly those of local nobility and donors of large sums of money to the order.

The Ruthven family or whoever bought the property from Henry VIII after the dissolution might have been burying their own dead in the same crypt.

A crypt in an area with a lot of natural caves and cliffs on the coast. The builders would not have to dig deep before stumbling on a natural hollow within the rock.

A crypt. Jeremy had mentioned Ruthven's fascination with Crusader bones. How much more power would he attribute to centuries' worth of bones of people who lived day in and day out with a deep and abiding faith?

“I have to go there,” I told Inspector Witherspoon when my brain had run through to the conclusion.

“I can't protect you there. I have no jurisdiction,” he replied.

“I have my own cohorts to take with me.”

Which of my information gatherers? The constantly changing list ran past my inner eye. Young faces. Clean faces. Filthy faces. The littlest ones, like nimble-fingered Maggie, might be useful wiggling into tiny places, like hidden entrances to caves, or trapdoors in and out of wine cellars. Mickey would eagerly go with me. But I'd come to value the boy more than he knew—or I'd summon him right now. The older girls needed to stay here, protected by the law as well as the constant stream of customers guaranteeing they were never alone.

That left middling boys, those who had learned discretion and invisibility on the street.

Kit Doyle, the orphaned son of a longtime servant of Lady Byron. She'd taken him on as one of her charities, but he rebelled, blaming the lady for his mother's death. So he ran wild. His loyalty to me existed only as far as the coins and food I gave him. He drifted away from me as he learned the value of violence while living on the street. I had only a narrow window of time when I must either break him of these tendencies and find him an apprenticeship, or cut him loose. I doubted I'd tame him.

Today I would use him. Tomorrow I'd let him decide if he stayed in my service or he made his own way.

“I have my resources, Inspector. I promise to share whatever information I gather.” I excused myself from our table by the window and went about serving the growing line of customers. What I needed to do, I would do best toward the end of the day, when shadows crept long and no one looked too closely at an old beggar woman walking alleys in parts of town polite society ignored.