The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) (18 page)

The butler opens his mouth to speak, and ...

‘Well, are you made of stone? My God, if my father were here he’d have lost his patience already; the army, you know, trains a man how to appreciate the good and the bad among the lower orders, distinguish between those who work to become more than they were and those who are, frankly, sir, idlers!’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Well, then? What
are
you waiting for?’

Thomas’s highly bred rudeness was too practised to be ignored. The unfortunate butler’s heels practically snapped together as he stood to attention and said in a rapid monotone passed on from perfectly nice butler if only you get to know him to the next perfectly nice butler, generation after generation, ‘Yes, my lord. Please, follow me.’

Thomas radiated well-bred insufferability as he swept down the hall of the house of Lady Diane Lumire, and into a party.

As the butler’s distant voice rang out with the promptness of someone who knows he’s just met power and money and is never going to have any of it, ‘His lordship, Thomas Edward Elwick . . .’ Lyle moved away, walking the walk of someone who has every right to be where he is, and tried not to smile.

 

And somewhere near by, more floors up than would please the vertigo-struck but not quite high enough to escape the enveloping fog, in a darkened room something very quietly goes
click
.

Silence. A shadow flashes across a large four-paned window, but there is so little light from outside that the shadow isn’t so much a darkening across the floor as a mere bending of the blackness that is already there; sensed, rather than seen.

There is a slow, gentle
whumph
. The window, which was shut, now opens, almost as if of its own accord. Fog hungrily trickles in, keen to explore this new and exciting place where a tiny tendril of warmth yet clings. Something slips in with it, landing soundlessly on the carpet below the window, and quickly closes the window again, sliding the catch back with another gentle
click
.

Out in the corridor, footsteps quickly pass and fade, along with a little hummed tune, sung without any particular melody or reason. ‘“
Oranges and lemons,” say the bells of St Clement’s
. . .’

The shadow drifts across the floor, past the foot of a neatly made but empty bed, turns a brass door-handle and peers cautiously out into the corridor one way, then the other. The singer disappears down the stairs at the end of the hall, and stillness settles. The door is very cautiously opened, and Tess slides out into the gloom, face tight with concentration, utterly silent. She passes down the corridor, trying each door-handle, until she finds one which doesn’t open. Peering at the lock, she feels in her pockets.

There is a faint sound at the end of the corridor. ‘Well, since I don’t do the linen cycle I hardly see how you can blame . . .’

Tess finds a slim pair of lock picks and slides them into the lock.

The voices drift nearer, and now there are footsteps shuffling along the carpet. ‘. . . after all, I do all the locking and all the candles every night, it’s Mildred who has to make sure that the beds are . . .’

The lock gives a faint, very faint,
click
, and Tess wiggles the lock picks with more urgency.

‘. . . although I suppose that since her ladyship isn’t that picky about her room it’s not too much to put . . .’

Tess jiggles the picks, glancing round now from side to side in trepidation, the dim orange gaslight across her face competing in her field of view with the blacker shadows.

The servant rounds the corner, and looks down the corridor.

 

‘Who the hell are you?’

The voice was rich, imperious, deep and immediately made Lyle want to throw himself on to the floor and beg for mercy. He’d been drifting through the servants’ quarters, peering through open doors and listening to chit-chat. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but was hoping something interesting would slip into his path. What had slipped into his path, almost inexorably, had been the basement kitchens, and, moreover, their formidable mistress. He managed to stiffen his knees before they jellified, stood up a little straighter, cleared his throat and said, wishing he was quite as good as Thomas at radiating pomposity, ‘Lord Elwick’s man, ma’am.’

The woman who’d spoken was about Lyle’s age, though somehow he felt immediately humbled before her. She wore a flour-covered apron, had white sleeves rolled up almost to the armpits, and carried a rolling pin upright in one hand in the casual manner of someone who spends most of their days hitting squidgy things with hard objects. She looked Lyle over with suspicious grey eyes. ‘You don’t look like a servant from a family as well renowned as the Elwicks.’

Lyle looked down at his snow-dusted coat and single travel bag. ‘I’m ... neglected?’ he hazarded.

‘What’s your master’s name again?’

Lyle felt ready for this. ‘Thomas Edward Elwick, ma’am, only son of Thomas Henry Elwick.’

‘And Lord Elwick . . . what’s he like?’

Lyle felt a suspicion of his own creep in. ‘You’ve . . . worked for his lordship, have you?’

‘Might’ve,’ the cook snapped back.

‘Well, then, ma’am . . . Lord Elwick is an intellectual buffoon with no sense of curiosity or wonder in any bone in his body. If only the world followed the pattern laid down by certain Eastern mythologies, he would be reincarnated in his next life as a particularly stupid broom handle, but is far more likely to be reborn as one of his stupid hounds. And his son, may I add, is thoroughly neglected, bordering on emotionally stunted, and it’s an incredibly noble and hardy achievement of any man to look after him, despite his obvious, if untrained, scientific potential and a certain confused power of perception.’

Lyle realized that not only the formidable cook, but also half the kitchen were staring at him. He smiled nervously. ‘That’s just my humble opinion on the matter.’

The cook turned to one of her juniors and barked, ‘Ellen? Does any of that sound true?’

The woman called Ellen shrugged. ‘Bit long-winded, but he sounds like he’s met the old toff sure enough.’

Lyle beamed. ‘Ladies,’ he said expansively, ‘you know my story now; please, share yours.’

And, aware that he was playing his trump card, Lyle put his bag on the kitchen table, opened it, and with a flourish revealed its contents.

As all eyes settled on the mass that had been compressed into the worn travel bag, twenty pairs of hands went to twenty mouths, and twenty tongues gave rise to a single note. ‘Awwww!’

And Tate, sticking his head up from the bag, ears drooping over the edge, looked round the gloomy, crowded and sweaty kitchen, the air in the corners wavering from the heat, and his eyes fell on bread and fish and meat and potatoes and vegetables and caramels and chocolates and coffees, and his already substantial eyes widened, and he started to feel a lot happier about his part in the bigger picture after all.

 

Thomas was not at all happy about his part in the bigger picture.

True, from the first moment when he was able to squeak, in his toddler’s dress, ‘Weather!’ he had been bred in the art of polite small-talk. But in recent months his interests had changed, and he kept having to fight an urge to steer the conversation towards topics such as the fascinating properties of a gas diffusing through a potential difference at low temperatures or maybe even . . .
even
. . . the derivation of Newton’s Gravitational Constant and its application between two point masses ‘M’ and ‘m’ with a radius square of ‘r’ and . . .

Instead he heard himself saying, and marvelled at how different his voice sounded in this company than when talking to Tess and Lyle, ‘Oh gracious, no, I haven’t met her ladyship yet, but I’m told she’s terribly influential in Suffolk.’ A lie, but one that he hoped would give immediate rise to a passionate argument about the benefits of shooting in Suffolk over shooting in Norfolk, and thus give him a little breather to rearrange his thoughts.

However, today fortune did not favour Thomas.

‘
Really?
How fascinating. I heard her money was from . . . well, I hardly dare say it . . .
manufacturing
.’

‘No, that’s not what I heard at all. She’s a great European beauty, they say, a widow; certainly I don’t see how she could have made all that money herself, although I suppose they do things rather differently over there . . .’

‘I wonder how many will go after
her
fortune tonight?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Several pairs of eyes turned on him, and he could see them matching his face with so many acres and so much a year. Interest started to rise among them proportional to their estimations of his income. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said again, ‘but when did Lady Lumire arrive in this place?’

‘This place?’ echoed someone, amused by Thomas’s choice of words.

‘As in . . . London. This mansion was Lord Moncorvo’s, wasn’t it?’

‘Oh, what a ghastly business!’

‘Such a charming man! And such a charming collection of friends! I can remember nothing but good about them.’

‘More than good! They were the essence of goodness and grace.’

‘Such a tragedy to hear about the accident . . .’

‘Oh, I rather heard he’d been appointed to India . . .’

‘No, no, Lord Lincoln definitely reassured me that Moncorvo had decided to follow in the footsteps of his father and join the army . . .’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Their eyes turned again to Thomas. ‘Yes?’ Impatience tainted the edge of the answer.

‘When did Lady Lumire arrive in London?’

‘Oh . . . almost immediately after dear Moncorvo left. She’s some kind of distant relative, I believe. I think Moncorvo might have left her the house in his will . . . or was it a gift of . . . well, it’s all terribly mysterious, if you ask me.’

Thomas remembered a storm, and the green eyes, and felt sick. He wondered if he could go and search for Lyle, to warn him of the terrible truth; but then a creeping doubt settled in his mind. He found himself looking round the high room, all marble floors and serpentine pillars, and noticed the metal buttons, candlesticks, clocks, effigies and frames that seemed everywhere, and remembered how the people with the green eyes, the Tseiqin who had thrown Lyle from the dome of St Paul’s and chased Thomas beyond the edge of his mind, had flinched from iron, and he wondered.

‘You aren’t as old as the rest of them.’

Thomas started, stared around for the source of the voice, and eventually looked down to where a small child, dressed immaculately in a suit far too brown for a creature with a face that round or pink, was tugging at his jacket, trying to get his attention.

‘Erm, no?’ he hazarded.

The child blew a fat raspberry. ‘You . . .
you
. . .’ It paused, looked Thomas up and down cautiously, with an almost calculating glare, daring him to be anything but what the child said he was. ‘
You
like the weather?’

‘Well, yes.’ Thomas found little reason to argue with a statement so accurately and profoundly rendered.

The child put its thumb on its nose and said, ‘I’m Arthur.’

Since etiquette had no guidelines for this kind of situation, and since the adults of the room had spontaneously and mysteriously all found something better to look at than the child, who’d clearly spent the evening endearing himself, Thomas mumbled, ‘I’m Thomas,’ and dreamt of inverse square laws and radial fields.

The interrogation wasn’t over. ‘You tell stories?’

‘Well, no, not really.’

‘What you do?’

‘Well, if you must know I’m . . .’ For a moment Thomas hesitated, thinking of all the possible things to say, such as, ‘I’m Thomas Edward Elwick, I’m to inherit my parents’ estate, I recite Greek verbs, I . . .’ and replied, ‘I’m a detective.’

The child’s face split into a delighted grin. ‘A detec . . . detect . . . one of them! What sort of . . . thing?’

‘I’m a . . .
scientific
detective.’ The fatal words rolled out. Thomas stood up straighter, stuck his shoulders back and his chest out and repeated, louder, ‘Yes! I am a scientific detective!’

‘What ’s ’at mean?’

This nearly stopped Thomas short, but he recovered quickly and declared, ‘I use science to detect things!’

The child flapped its arms impatiently, stamped its foot and announced, ‘I wanna . . . I
wanna
. . .’ then hung its head and mumbled, ‘I dunno what I wanna, but I wanna now!’

‘Science is very good at detecting things,’ went on Thomas, feeling his face start to turn purple now with the effort of keeping up this cheerful line of conversation. ‘It can detect whether blood has been spilt, even if you clean it up after! Or if it’s human blood, or whether there’s arsenic in something or if you drowned before or after being shot or if a gun’s been fired or . . .’

‘How’s it do that?’

Thomas stared into the round, pink, childish face, probably no more than five or six years old, staring up at him with big, bored, impatient eyes, and felt all the wonderful things slip out of his mind. ‘Well, I . . . it’s all to do with
elements,
you see. All you need is a little iron and a little lime water to pass the carbon dioxide through and then . . .’

‘
Why?
Why why why?’

‘It’s . . . well, you see, if you . . .’ Thomas stared into those uncomprehending eyes, and let out a little sigh. ‘It ’s elemental, really.’

The child thought about this, long and hard. Then put one finger in its ear and one in its mouth and mumbled, ‘I wanna be detective.’

Thomas couldn’t help feel that two scientific detectives with a grasp of the useful applications of lime water and carbon dioxide might be one too many, but found himself saying kindly, ‘Maybe if you work hard at it, Arthur . . . ?’