A Study in Silks (68 page)

Still, Sherlock Holmes was alone, and he was not the imposing figure Nick had expected. The Great Detective was swathed in a silk brocade smoking gown, looking bloodless and weak, but his eyes glittered with the kind of focus Nick had seen in birds of prey. Evie said Holmes had been shot, and he believed it. Every so often, the fine skin around her uncle’s eyes contracted as if he managed a wave of pain.

She marched Nick forward, a bit like a mother presenting her child. “This is my friend Nick.”

Friend
. He had been more than that, it seemed, the night they’d called the devas. Was there ever going be a chance for truth between them?

The man’s uninjured fingers drummed briefly on the arm of the chair. “The Indomitable Niccolo.”

“The world’s greatest consulting detective, I presume.” Nick’s side throbbed. He had been stitched and bandaged, but he was running a fever and the colors in the room were a little too bright.

Holmes studied him, and Nick looked back. There was a family resemblance between Holmes and Evelina, something in the shape of the eyes, but he had to look for it. The bigger resemblance was in their circumstances. They were gentry. He was not. His envy tasted bitter on his tongue.

Holmes flicked his fingers, as if dismissing preliminaries. “I asked you here because you knew the man they called Magnus better than the rest of us.”

Evie released him, stepping back until she found a chair to sit on. Keeping a safe distance between them.

That left Nick standing like a prisoner in the dock. “I did a bit of work for him, that’s all.”

Holmes lifted a brow. “My niece is very discreet, and avoids telling me a great many things I already surmise. Magnus threatened her, so I will agree for now that you worked for him, and had nothing to do with his death.”

Nick kept his face utterly still. Evie remained immobile as the potted fern in the corner, her expression worried.

Holmes nodded, as if this was no more than he expected. “Magnus was, for want of a better term, an inventor. What was he working on? I understand he has made clocks and automatons, but what else?”

Nick brought the town house with its massive library into his mind’s eye. “A lot of things. He had electric light. Chemical experiments. He had plans for an airship.”

“The police found no such plans in Dr. Magnus’s possessions. It was the one thing I had expected them to find.”

Once more, Nick kept his face perfectly still.

“May I see them?” Holmes asked. He beckoned impatiently. “Come, come.”

The plans were incriminating, stained with his blood and fresh from the house of a dead man. Nick had been afraid to leave them with his gear at the circus, just in case anyone went through his things, so he’d kept the plans inside his coat. He should have thrown them in the fire, and would have to eventually, but they were too beautiful to destroy. Slowly, he drew out the mechanical scroll and unlocked the mechanism.

“Please unfold them,” Holmes asked, nodding ruefully at his injured arm.

Nick did as he was asked. The brass arm unrolled in sections and unfurled the silk drawings from what seemed an impossibly small space. “This seems a long way from a dead kitchen maid.”

“But it is all of one piece, and this is perhaps a closer link than most.”

Evie rose, moving to the other side of her uncle’s chair. The three of them studied the plans.

“There has been much talk about Athena’s Casket and its special powers,” Holmes said. “Mycroft first brought the rumors to my attention when word got about that Schliemann had discovered where it had been buried. The casket seems to be a mythical beast-machine that holds the secret of limitless power by uniting magic with gears and pistons. But the one fact that keeps getting ignored is what Athena’s Casket was actually used for.”

“What do you mean?” Nick asked, forgetting about whom he was talking to and falling into the beauty of the neatly drawn airship plans.

Evelina tucked a strand of dark brown hair behind her ear. “Wasn’t it for navigation?”

“If you believe the approved texts. Possibly more, if one accepts sketchier accounts.” Holmes scowled at the plans. “And here we are. This ship has no power source.”

“But that’s the boiler there.” Nick pointed. He could read and Striker understood mechanics. Together they had figured out most of what was on the scroll.

“The boiler is not big enough for significant propulsion. Furthermore, this has a large balloon, but it’s not enough to lift a gondola this size. It would need an alternate source of lift.” Holmes indicated a spot at the very front of the ship. “Here. All the power, lift, and navigation needed. An air deva.”

Nick and Evelina both looked at him, startled. Nick found his voice first. “Pardon me, sir, but what would the likes of you know about that?”

Holmes’s voice was sharp. “I have no affinity or understanding
of the magical sciences. That does not mean I do not know of their existence, or of the theories surrounding certain inherited abilities.” He gave them a significant look.

Evie opened her mouth, then closed it again when Holmes lifted a quelling finger.

“For now,” he said, “all I need to know is that Magnus and others gave credit to old legends. So did Archimedes of Syracuse, who wrote the first accounts of flying ships and devices with the speech of men.”

Nick’s pulse quickened, which set his wound throbbing even harder. “But other men—here and now—want the casket, don’t they?”

“An airborne war machine that requires next to no fuel? One with native intelligence?” The detective barked a laugh. “I can safely say that talk of it extends clear to Bohemia. Armed airfleets exist, but nothing with this potential. The steam baron who acquires the knowledge to create such ships will possess the nucleus of an unstoppable invasion force.”

“Magnus said he wanted to put a spoke in their wheels.”

“Dr. Magnus was a madman who would have used our outrage at the barons to open the doors to his own invasion.” Holmes gave the plans back to Nick. “You had best keep these safe from official eyes. There is no telling who might wish to make use of them.”

“Where is the casket?” Nick asked. “Do we have any idea?”

“You tell me.” Holmes indicated a table with a lazy wave of his good hand. A book lay upon it, open to an engraving of a small chest richly decorated with gems and carved owls.

Nick shook his head. “I don’t remember seeing anything like this in Dr. Magnus’s things.”

Holmes leaned back, clearly tired. “He never found it. An archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann excavated it in Greece and shipped it to London. It was closely guarded, but supposedly never arrived. What do you think happened?”

Nick couldn’t see why his opinion mattered, but he gave it anyway. “Who is to say that is true?”

“Precisely,” Holmes replied. “I am beginning to suspect
that the entire operation was an elaborate scheme to harvest the gold from the artifacts. No one took the casket from the warehouse, because someone on the inside—someone with no idea what the casket could do—melted it down to nothing.”

“Not quite,” said Evelina.

Both men turned to look at her.

“The gold was just for show.” She gave a sly smile. “They threw the insides out as scrap.”

EVEN JASPER KEATING MUST HAVE KNOWN THE OLD AXIOM
that the show must go on. With or without Athena’s Casket, the gallery with his show of Greek treasures was due to open that night. Fashionable London was invited to experience the glory of the Gold King’s archaeological bounty. Or, as Imogen quipped, booty.

The Roths—minus Lady Bancroft—went on ahead while Evelina got into a hansom with her uncle and Dr. Watson. No one except Sherlock Holmes thought he should be going anywhere, least of all his long-suffering doctor, but the game was afoot.

“I arranged for a wheeled chair to meet us there,” the doctor said in a grumpy tone. “Lest the game no longer be afoot but prostrate.”

“Did you bring it?” Uncle Sherlock asked Evelina, ignoring his friend.

“I did,” she said, patting the basket in her lap. “Gold, gems, device, and decoded letter.”

“Excellent,” he said. “This should be most entertaining.”

Evelina wasn’t so sure. “What will happen to the casket?”

Holmes closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the cushions of the cab. “I imagine it will find its way into a ship. That is why it was originally created, after all.”

“But do we really want to give such a marvelous thing to someone like Jasper Keating? What about armies of invading airships?”

“Holmes?” Dr. Watson piped up.

Her uncle didn’t reply, but put on his inscrutable face and opened one eye.

“I would think that if the casket were designed to fly,” said Watson, in his kindest voice, “it would yearn for the skies. It would be unkind to keep it locked in a museum.”

Evelina gave him a grateful smile. The doctor had known almost nothing of devas until that afternoon, but was keeping up with the conversation like a trooper. “What about the gold and the letter?”

“I mean to expose a theft. You are holding the evidence. Athena’s Casket is only one of many missing items.”

“I follow the part about melting down the ancient objects for the gold,” Watson said. “That explains why the maid had raw gold and jewels on her person. But wouldn’t the melted objects be missed?”

“No,” said Uncle Sherlock. “I surmise that Keating will see every item in his collection except the casket. That was too unusual a piece, with all its working parts, to replicate, but of all the pieces, it was the largest and most valuable. That made it far too tempting a prize for our thief to ignore, and so it was pronounced lost.”

“Are you saying Harriman took it for himself?” Evelina asked.

“Assuredly.”

“You say the other pieces were replicated. Replicated how?” asked Watson.

“I have my theories. I have but to test them.”

“You’re being cryptic again, and it’s tiresome.”

Sherlock closed his eye again. “I can promise you a good show, Watson. Mr. Keating will be one very angry man.”

“But won’t innocent people be hurt by that anger?” she asked, thinking again of Imogen and Tobias.

“Truth is impartial,” her uncle replied evenly. “Even so, I will do my best to keep as many of your friends as I can
from harm’s way. I am not without my methods. You have my word on that.”

That was somewhat reassuring, although she had no idea how her uncle would manage the Gold King. Evelina was starting to form an idea of what might happen, but it was like squinting through mist. There were outlines, but no details.

Lestrade had come by after Nick had left and reported that he had followed up on the matter of the Chinese workers. It turned out that Mr. Markham’s observant tailors were a wealth of information. One had chanced to speak with a worker who had been allowed outside the warehouse to repair a window. He had said that the workers had been hired by Harriman. Their foreman—one of their own countrymen—kept them in virtual slavery. The most interesting fact was that some of them were goldsmiths.

The cab arrived at the gallery just as the sky was turning to indigo dusk. Evelina alighted, the basket over one arm. Keating’s gallery wasn’t in a large building on its own, just one door along a curving row of Georgian storefronts. The facade was pale stone, flanked by Corinthian pilasters. Through the door she could see a large open space, dotted with marble plinths holding statues and other objets d’art.

The streetlights were on, washing the front of the building in the gold light of Jasper Keating’s empire. Her uncle waved away the wheeled chair and walked her toward the door. He moved slowly, but steadily.

Lestrade waited inside, his sharp face full of anticipation. “You’re just in time,” said the inspector. “The gang’s all here.”

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” her uncle said. “I have one small detail to attend to.”

“Right you are.”

Sherlock led her down a side corridor that opened onto a row of offices. One door was marked Curator. The room was empty, although the desk looked like someone had been there recently. Letters and invoices littered the surface.

“Wait here,” he said, and left.

Evelina set her basket on the desk and looked around. The
cube had been curiously silent since the code had been solved, as if its work was done. Now she pulled aside the cloth she had wrapped it in, and slid her hand onto the cold metal surface.

“Do you want me to leave you here?” she asked it.

At first, she felt nothing. Then there was a faint stirring of consciousness, like a breeze rippling across a pond.

Then suddenly Evelina was in the clouds, mist and free air all around her. It was the first time she’d truly connected with its essence.
It is an air deva, all right!
Weightless, she soared, land and water an insignificance below. Wind tickled her feet, bouncing her gently as she surfed along its waves. All she had to do was wish herself higher and she could climb the brilliant beams of sunlight …