A Study in Sable (2 page)

1

I
T
was just after luncheon, in a neighborhood that mostly catered to working-class people. The buildings were all three and four stories tall here, several had little shops on the ground floors, or the offices of those professional men who could not afford more prestigious neighborhoods. A very few were still the dwellings of single families who could afford several servants. For the most part, however, the place was chock-ablock with reasonably priced flats—reasonably priced if one was doing well as a shopkeeper or a rising clerk, and if one was not, well, one could always find someone to share the flat with.

This was certainly the case with the gentleman who was about to interview the two young ladies who were outside a greengrocer's establishment. “Well,” said Nan Killian, gazing across the busy street at the very unprepossessing front of a purely residential building. Tall and narrow, like most buildings in this part of London, it might have been the home of one of those single families, with a kitchen on the ground floor and servants' quarters in the attic, but it was, in fact, carved up into flats presided over by a landlady who resided on the ground floor and provided meals and charlady services to her lodgers. There were three flats; their goal was the middlemost one.

“Well indeed, and well enough,” Sarah Lyon-White replied, flashing an impish smile at her tall friend. “Shall we go beard the dragon in his den? It would be a shame to have come all this way to show the white feather and run away, besides being a great disappointment to Lord A and Master M.”

“
Mister
M can go stuff—” Nan began.

“Nan!”
said Sarah, in pretense of shock.

“—his hat up a drainpipe for all I care,” Nan continued smoothly. “But I would never like Lord Alderscroft to think we were too cowardly to deal with a mere mortal man. Even if, up until a few days ago, we thought he was merely a literary construction. All right then. On we go. After all, it's only an interview.”

Suiting her actions to her words, Nan checked the oncoming traffic for runaway hansoms and inconsiderate carters and strode across the London street, with her much shorter friend Sarah half-skipping along beside her.

Not troubling to wait for the landlady to answer a knock, she opened the door to the narrow, tidy, but sparsely furnished entryway, and spotted the staircase leading to the first floor and flat “B.” Still leading Sarah by a few paces, she ran up the stairs and knocked briskly on the door. It was opened almost immediately.

The gentleman in the dark gray suit who opened it raised one sardonic, heavy eyebrow. “Very prompt, I see. You would be—”

“Miss Killian. And this is Miss Lyon-White,” said Nan, taking the open door as an invitation to come in, which she did. Sarah was right on her heels.

“Indeed. Would you take a—” the man began, but Nan strode across an untidy room packed with all manner of curious objects and smelling strongly of tobacco and faintly of gunpowder and chemicals, and threw open the window that overlooked the street.

“I hope you are not some manner of fresh air fiend, Miss Killian,” the gentleman said, without showing a flicker of surprise that Nan had made so free with his window. “I am sorry to say that the air on this street is not the most salubrious.”

“Not at all, sir,” Nan replied, half-turning from the window. “But
as you are well aware, Sarah and I are only half of the quartet you are to interview.” A swiftly moving shadow flashed between the light and the window, and there was a sound of flapping wings as an African grey parrot suddenly landed on the sill. “Ah, here is the third of the party,” Nan said calmly, offering a hand to the parrot, who stepped up onto it, then used it as a launching point to take a shorter flight across the room to come to rest on the back of the chair Sarah had taken at the invitation of their host.

A much larger shadow interposed in the next moment, and an enormous raven replaced the parrot on the sill.

“And here is the last of us,” said Nan with satisfaction. The raven leapt ponderously to her shoulder with a flap of his wings and she closed the window again. With the raven balanced precisely on her shoulder, she took her place in the armchair next to Sarah's, closer to the fire. The raven transferred himself to the back of her chair. The gentleman took his own seat on the settle opposite them, and silence descended as they took stock of one another.

Nan knew what he would see as he looked at them; she wondered if it surprised him, amused him, or merely entered into his calculations. Two young women in their early twenties, regarding him with direct and unwinking gazes, as direct as if they had been young
men,
and not women. The shorter, Sarah, had the sort of face that could have graced a Professional Beauty, if she had cared to travel that route, surmounted by a slightly untidy coif of masses of blond hair piled up in an approximation of a pompadour hairdo. She wore no hat, largely because she had a tendency to lose them. As for Nan, she had a face that could charitably be called “strong” and which she privately thought of as “horsey,” and her own hair was confined in a very tidy French Roll under a small, neat, unadorned round felt hat. They were both wearing gowns of dull colors—grays and blues for Sarah and browns for Nan—which might be described as “dowdy” (although Sarah could never look dowdy in anything). However, the knowing eye would recognize their gowns as Ladies' Rational Dress, a mode of non-fashion that allowed the wearer almost as much freedom of movement as if she were in
a bloomer suit. Nan rather thought their interviewer had already recognized that.

And, of course, their interviewer could not possibly overlook the birds perched on their chairs, who were eyeing him with great interest.

As for Nan . . . well, she found herself facing a man no one could call “handsome”—but no one would ever forget, either. It was not his costume that made him unforgettable. Men, of course, could wear the same suits for decades—perhaps even wear the suits their fathers passed down to them—and so long as they were not visibly worn or shabby, they would pass muster virtually anywhere. So there was not much to be learned by studying his suit except that he was as neat and clean as a well-cared-for housecat, in surprising counterpoint to the untidiness of his sitting room. Then again, a man who makes his living by examining the clues other men leave behind or carry about on their persons was unlikely to leave many clues on
his
.

He was very tall, and very thin, so thin he seemed taller than he was. The neatly cut hair was very black, as were his bushy eyebrows. Sharp, piercing gray eyes gave the correct impression that he was taking note of absolutely everything. His thin, hawklike nose was of a piece with his thin face. He had very fine, graceful hands—the hands of a musician, which he was, although not professionally.

Observation was merely putting the cap on what he had already learned. Nan was perfectly sure that he had uncovered all sorts of information about
them
before they ever arrived here
,
though she was also fairly certain he had dismissed a good half of what he'd learned about them as “superstition” and “twaddle.”

This interview was for one reason only, and it was up to Nan and Sarah to pull off a coup. To prove to him that his assumptions were wrong.

She lowered those mental shields that Karamjit had taught her so well how to put in place, and allowed herself to reach out to the gentleman's mind.

It was as tidy and orderly as his sitting room was untidy and
chaotic, and as busy as one of the great factories where mills whirred and clattered and produced goods at a dizzying rate.

“You're thinking that I have managed to conquer my background as a street urchin to an astonishing degree. You're marveling at how there is no trace of the guttersnipe in my speech, and you wonder if I've lost the East End brat entirely, or just learned the Queen's English as if I was learning a second language.” Her mouth quirked a little. “Oil roight, guv'nor, wat'cher thinkin' naow?” She continued as his eyes widened for just a fraction of a second. “Now you are thinking the world lost a talented actress when I declined to try the stage. Thank you for that flattery, but an ear for language is not the same as a talent for acting. I shall continue, with your permission.” She didn't wait for it. “The last item you smoked before we arrived was your cherrywood pipe, your usual shag tobacco, although you had been considering a cigar, and now you are thinking I must have the same nose for tobacco products that you have; I assure you that I do not. To me they all smell alike. You were rereading some unsatisfactory letters from would-be clients as you were waiting for us. One was a tedious whinge from a gentleman who is certain his wife has taken a lover. One was a man who wants you to find his lost watch, another who wants you to find his lost hat, a third who wants you to find his lost dog and an attorney who wants you to find an heir. The only one that showed any signs of being interesting was the letter from the parents and fiancé of a missing girl; it is interesting to you largely because the young lady's sister is the operatic diva, Magdelena von Dietersdorf, and the missing girl had accompanied her sister to London, then apparently vanished. There are aspects of this case that were initially intriguing, but you are wondering now if it is worth your while; you have made some slight enquiries at the opera house to gather gossip, and Fraulein von Dietersdorf asserts that her sister ran off with a young man to Canada, not having the courage to dismiss her affianced to his face, and that seems more likely to you than a mysterious disappearance.”

Now I have your attention!

She saw his right hand twitch a little, and she added, “Don't
bother to look at the papers again. There is nothing in them that I could have gleaned about this case.
Fraulein
does not want a scandal to spoil her operatic debut here in London, and it seems she rules her parents, rather than the other way around. Nothing of this has been released to the press, and the parents have come to you rather than the police in order to keep things as quiet as possible. You have seen them in person once, since you first received their letter.”

She glanced over at Neville, who was observing the gentleman with narrowed eyes. “Neville thinks you should take the case. He believes that the parents' instincts are correct.”

The raven nodded gravely. So did the sylph who suddenly showed her dainty self just over the gentleman's shoulder, hovering in midair, wings vibrating so fast they were a blur. Nan ignored the sylph. The gentleman did not believe in them, and it was not in her best interest right now to mention the Air Elemental.

The gentleman had recovered his composure so quickly only someone like Nan would have known he had ever lost it in the first place. “These are clever conjuring tricks, Miss Killian,” he said dismissively. “I get dozens of letters from tedious people with equally tedious problems they wish me to solve, most of them are alike, and it takes no great effort to imagine what those problems might be. And as for the Von Dietersdorfs—you could easily have read the first page of the letter from where you sit, as it is pinned to the mantelpiece with my pocketknife.”

“But the second, third, and fourth pages, sir?” Nan retorted. “I think not. I got that information from your own mind. The Von Dietersdorfs wrote you from Berlin before arriving in London. The father's written English is excellent, and his spoken English nearly as good. You know Herr von Dietersdorf wrote this himself rather than employing a professional translator because he occasionally made the mistake of putting the verb at the end of his sentence, which no professional translator would ever do. The letter was written on stationery from the Hotel Berghof, which you yourself have stayed in, and know to be an establishment that caters to the wealthy merchant class. When you stayed at the Berghof last, which was about a year
and a half ago, your room was on the west side of the fourth floor; you engaged it because it had an excellent view of a room directly across from it so that you could follow every movement of a man you were tracking, for purposes of your own which you did not divulge to anyone. Shall I go on?”

The slight dilation of the gentleman's pupils showed she had hit the mark squarely;
no one,
not even his closest friends, knew he had been in Berlin at that time, much less what hotel and what room he had stayed in, or for what purpose. He had, indeed, not told anyone
why
he had been there—or half a dozen other places that year.