A Study in Silks (74 page)

Evelina was suddenly disoriented. “How did you get here?”

“For you, I climbed out a window and caught a cab. I’m not helpless, you know. You left without saying good-bye.” Imogen’s gaze went to the paper in her hand. “What’s impossible?”

Wordlessly, she handed over the note. Imogen read, her hand coming up to cover her mouth as her eyes got wider and wider. “Dear Lord in Heaven. How is it possible he lived?”

“There are all kinds of death magic, and he’s a sorcerer. Or this is just a vicious joke.”

Without warning, Imogen flung her arms around Evelina in a fierce embrace. “Oh, don’t go.”

Evelina squeezed her eyes shut, forcing back another wave of tears. “I have to.”

Imogen held her tight, her shoulders starting to shake with grief. “You’ll leave me behind.”

Evelina swallowed hard. “No I won’t. I stick like tar, you’ll see.”

Then Imogen started to cry in earnest, her words crumbling at the edges. “If you go, that means we’re at the end. My parents will marry me off to someone horrible and you’ll go to school and I’ll never see you. I’ve already lost one sister. My family is going mad. I don’t want to lose you, too.”

Evelina buried her face in Imogen’s golden hair, hurting for her friend. Hurting for herself.

A young woman had been seduced and killed, and the killers still roamed free. The two young men she loved had been proven innocent of that crime, but were guilty nonetheless—and she had played a part in their fall. And now the dead were sending her letters, tempting her more than she cared to say. Evelina might have been dismissed from Hilliard House, but she wasn’t walking away from anything.

“This isn’t the end,” she whispered to Imogen. “Not by a long shot.”

THE DOOR TO 221B BAKER STREET OPENED AND A BODY
hurtled over the threshold, causing Evelina Cooper to skitter backward. The body landed with a wheeze on the hot sidewalk, arms and legs sprawling.

In her haste to back up, Evelina stepped into the street itself and narrowly avoided collision with a speeding steam cycle. With a silent curse, she caught her balance against the wrought-iron post of a gaslight, wondering what sort of a mood her uncle was in. Projectile clients were never a good sign.

The man on the sidewalk moaned. One hand groped awkwardly, as if seeking any solid object to cling to, and fastened on her right foot in its gray kid boot. As the only weapon Evelina had was her parasol, she swiped at the importunate fingers, delivering a smart tap with the furl of pale pink silk.

“Sir, unhand my toes.” She frowned. That hadn’t sounded quite right.

The man didn’t move, instead emitting another groan. She studied him for a moment, the August sun warm against her shoulders. His limbs appeared to bend in the usual places and no blood was pooling around the prone body, but he lay perfectly still. Delicately, she pushed his fingers away with the ivory tip of her parasol and wondered whether she should send for Dr. Watson. The good doctor had married and moved out of Baker Street, but he always came at once when her uncle required his services—which seemed to be with disturbing regularity.

Evelina’s shoulders hunched. Passersby were giving her
strange looks. As she looked up, a lady with a perambulator crossed the street, obviously avoiding the strange tableau.

“Spare him no sympathy, niece of mine, he is but refuse tossed into the gutter.” The voice came from the doorway. Evelina turned to see Sherlock Holmes glowering out at them. Tall and spare, his black-suited form was an exclamation point in the doorway. The long, lean lines of his face pulled into a frown. He jerked his chin toward the sprawling form. “That individual is engaged in a perfidious plot. I suggest you step away from him at once. Quickly.”

They hadn’t seen each other for months, and one might have expected a hello or a polite enquiry about one’s health—but Evelina knew better than to expect social niceties from Holmes when there was a villain adorning the front walk. “A plot to what end?”

“Come inside and I’ll give you the details.”

“What about him?”

“I’ll call a street sweeper,” Holmes said mordantly.

Evelina caught a glimpse of movement from the fallen man, but her attention didn’t stay on him. Suddenly the house rumbled, and then a cloud of thick black smoke belched from the upstairs study window. There was a female shriek behind Holmes.

“Mrs. Hudson!” Evelina cried, and Holmes turned to check on his landlady.

The man on the ground chose that moment to spring to life. He rolled away from Evelina, coming to his feet in a practiced move. She saw the shape of a gun as his coat swung wide with the motion. Acting on instinct, she thrust the point of her parasol into his spine, the force of the blow splintering the wooden handle of her makeshift weapon. He staggered forward with a grunt, but then he used the momentum to sprint toward the door, drawing the gun as he ran.

Panic bit hard and fast, freezing a cry of outrage deep in her throat. Evelina grabbed for the man, but her fingers just brushed the back of his wool coat. She followed as quickly as a bustle and corset would allow, skirts swinging like a bell, but he was already through the door. She grabbed the
frame and hauled herself forward, narrowly avoiding a fall as her heel caught on the sill. She skidded to a stop in the dim light of the front hall. She was alone.

Her uncle had vanished, as had his attacker. Evelina turned slowly, taking in her surroundings. Smoke hung in the air like stinking black breath, but there was no damage she could see. The explosion—for that was surely what had caused the disturbance—had been confined upstairs. And where was Mrs. Hudson?

For a moment the only sound was the clamor of voices outside. A man with a booming voice was explaining that the detective who lived upstairs was a chemist, fond of smelly experiments. An old gent with a wheezy tenor was sure the radicals had struck. No one barged in with offers of help.

“Mrs. Hudson?” she asked in a stage whisper.

“I’m here.” The housekeeper materialized at the door leading to the lower apartments. She was still a handsome woman, straight-backed and neat as a pin, but now her face was ashen. “That man chased your uncle up to his study.”

Evelina edged toward the foot of the stairs. Pausing for a moment, she listened to the sudden, ominous silence. Her brain wanted to lunge forward, but her feet were obstinately glued to the carpet. Evelina didn’t like the fact the armed man had the higher ground and the staircase offered no cover, but there was no alternative—except to do nothing.

A gunshot cracked overhead, echoing ferociously in the tiny front hall. Somewhere on the second floor, a window smashed. Evelina looked up at the sweep of the staircase that led to her uncle’s suite. Feet thundered overhead. Evelina grabbed her parasol more tightly, and then noticed its splintered handle. It drooped like a wilted tulip. She tossed it aside and picked up the no-nonsense broom that Mrs. Hudson had left beside the door.

“You’re
not
going up there, young lady!” Mrs. Hudson announced, grabbing Evelina’s arm. “I’m fetching the constables.”

The landlady was being perfectly reasonable, but the voices inside Evelina were not. She had lost her parents, and
Holmes was the one remaining relative who had shown her any understanding. She wasn’t about to squeal and run away in a flutter of ribbons—and after growing up in a circus, she had more skills than the average debutante. “You go. I’ll do more good here.”

“Miss Cooper!” the landlady protested.

“I’ll be fine.” Evelina heard her voice crack with doubt, but somehow speaking the words broke her stasis. Lifting her skirts in one hand, she took all seventeen stairs in a single silent rush, the broom poised for action. She crept toward Holmes’s study door, staying close to the wall. The smell of gunpowder was thick enough to make her nose run.

Crack!
She heard a bullet hit the plaster on the opposite side of the wall, from within her uncle’s study. It punched through the wall just above her head and dust rained down, tickling her face. Evelina hurried the last few steps to the study entrance, peering around the carved oak of the door frame. A quick glance told her the path to Dr. Watson’s old desk was clear. Watson had always kept his service revolver there. She wondered whether her uncle, who adapted to change with as much ease as rocks learned to fly, had replenished the firearm drawer when the doctor had left.

But the thought went by in an instant, pushed aside by the tableau directly ahead. Holmes knelt on the bearskin rug before the fireplace, facing Evelina. The stranger stood with his back to her, his gun aimed at Holmes’s head. Swirls of black particles sifted through the air, eddying on the warm August breeze and settling on the litter of papers and other debris scattered across the floor. The room—never exactly tidy—was in a terrible state, but she didn’t take the time to thoroughly catalogue the damage. That could wait.

“We were having a conversation before you threw me out,” the man growled at Holmes.

Evelina noticed the accent sounded neither working class nor quite gentry. That made him one of the many in between. These were hard times for men like that, so many trying to scrabble upward while most slid farther behind. And that fit with his clothes—tidy, but inexpensive, his shoes in need of patching. In any other circumstances she might have taken
him for a clerk or a lesser type of tutor—almost middle-aged, nondescript, and the type one would pass without a second look. Of course, that might have been the whole idea.

Holmes said nothing, his entire body as communicative as the fire screen behind him.

“There’s no point in keeping quiet.” The man shifted his grip on the gun, as if his hand was growing tired. At the same time, he was using one foot to move the papers around on the floor, taking quick glances to see what they were. More correspondence had landed on the nearby basket chair, and he picked up a handful, quickly scanning the letters and tossing them aside. Clearly, he was looking for something.

At least that meant he was fully occupied. Silently balanced on the balls of her feet, Evelina eased into the room. She saw a minute tightening of her uncle’s mouth, but he gave no other indication that he saw her.

Now what?
She took another glance around the room. Some of the furniture had tipped over in the blast, but other pieces, like the table and desks, were still miraculously upright. Watson’s desk was directly to her right, just past the dining table. If she moved in utter silence, she could open the drawer, grab the gun she hoped was there—and loaded—and shoot the intruder before he shot her or her uncle. If she remained utterly silent and if she were fast enough, her plan might work.

Or she could creep up and knock him unconscious with the broom handle. She might get shot that way, too, but the whole scheme sounded simpler.

“Even if you think your way out of this with that big head of yours,” the man went on while throwing more papers to the floor, “someone else will come. I won’t be your only visitor, I can promise you that. The Steam Council is on to you.”

The Steam Council? That was what the men and women who ruled the great utility companies called themselves. She had met one of these steam barons—Mr. Jasper Keating, the one they called the Gold King after the yellow-tinted globes he used to mark all the gaslights his company
supplied. They all indicated their territories like that—the Blue King, the Violet Queen, and the rest. At sunset, the multicolored globes turned London into a patchwork glory of light. It was a beautiful sight, even though it was evidence of the stranglehold the council had on London and all the Empire.

So what did the steam barons want with her uncle? As far as she knew, Holmes was in favor with Keating after he had exposed a forgery scheme that had robbed the Gold King of a fortune in antique artifacts. If they survived the next hour, she would have to ask.

Lifting the broom high, Evelina ghosted forward, walking slowly so that her skirts didn’t rustle.

“Your brother knows who the members of the shadow government are. But he is a hard man to catch outside the walls of his home or club.”