The Suffragette Scandal (The Brothers Sinister) (14 page)

T
HERE WERE NO MEN PRESENT,
only the half-dozen or so female employees who had remained to run the printing off the press. Cambridge, with its fire engines, was a full half-mile distant. By the time Edward had made his way out of the door of the press, it was already too late. Smoke had begun to seep out of the door of the small house down the way in light wisps.

He opened it anyway. A wave of heat hit him, followed by an outpouring of choking, eye-stinging smoke. Gray clouds billowed in the front room; fire crackled. He looked up; flames were already eating into the beams of the ceiling overhead. There’d be no putting this out on time to save the structure. There was no sand and only a few buckets.

Free was right behind him. She squared her shoulders and shoved past him.

He grabbed hold of her wrist, yanking her back.

She pulled against his grip. “We can put it out.”

“We can’t,” he told her. “I’ve seen more fires in my life than you could dream of. The smoke will kill you if you try.” His throat was already irritated, and he’d only been standing on the threshold.

“But—”

“Is there anything in there that is worth your life? Because that is what it will mean if you go in now.”

“My Aunt Freddy’s letter.” He could feel her whole arm trembling in his. “She left it for me when she died.”

“Would your Aunt Freddy want you to risk your life for a piece of paper?”

“No,” she whispered.

Her eyes were watering. If anyone ever asked him, he’d say it was the smoke irritating them. He didn’t think that Miss Marshall would be willing to admit to tears.

He took off his cravat and handed it to her. “Wet this and wrap it around your mouth and nose. It’ll help. We’ve work to do.”

She’d not taken the time to put on a hat; her hair was coming out of its bun and trailed down her back like an angry braid of her own fire.

She took the cravat from his hands. “I thought there was nothing to be done.”

“For your home? There isn’t. But we need to set a firebreak to make sure the flames don’t spread to the press.”

It had been years since he’d been on the fire brigade; he’d thought the memory of those weeks had hazed together into nondescript forgetfulness, but it was all coming back to him now. That tree, there—they’d have to lop the branches back, and then dig a line in the turf.

Her shoulders heaved one last time. But by now, the flames were waist-high in the room beyond, and even she must have known it was hopeless. She turned away, marching back to where the women were coming out of the press.

“Melissa, we need shovels, or anything like shovels you can find. Caroline, you must go fetch help. Phoebe and Mary, start with the buckets.”

Edward found a shovel himself and had started to mark off a perimeter when his brain finally caught up with his body. He looked up—at the women scattering in all directions, off to do battle against the blaze—and his mouth dried with a sudden realization.

This wasn’t the fire that his brother had been talking about.
This
was the distraction.

He had no time to think. He left the shovel in place and ran back to the press building. The doors were open wide, but the press floor was empty. But the overpowering smell of paraffin oil assailed him. The floor underfoot gleamed in iridescent colors.

He looked around, saw nobody about.

There had to be someone here. The arsonist must be inside; the place needed nothing more than a match to go up. He crept forward, checking under a table, behind a chest of drawers. He came to the other side of the room—the wall where the glass window spilled light into Miss Marshall’s office. Her door was ajar. And there, in the darkening shadows under her desk…

There was a boot tip poking out from the other side.

Emotion, he told himself, would be nothing but a burden now. He needed to act, and act quickly. And yet he could not dispel it. His stomach seemed full of rage.

He stalked into her office, grabbed hold of the man by the foot, and hauled with all his might. He was so angry he scarcely even felt the mass of the other man, even though the fellow must have weighed at least fifteen stone.

The man kicked out, knocking Edward’s grip loose. Another kick targeted Edward’s knees, and he crumpled to the floor. The arsonist scrambled to his feet, dashing to the door of Free’s office.

Edward lunged for him, grabbing for his ankle. He had it—but the man stomped, and his boot found Edward’s hand. Somewhere, pain registered. But in the moment, with the smell of smoke and paraffin overwhelming his senses, Edward felt nothing.

He reached up and grabbed the man by the collar with his other hand, twisting, cutting off air.

“You idiot,” he said darkly.

The sound of wood striking against sandpaper—the brief smell of phosphorus—brought him back to himself. For a moment, he felt fear, and with it, every other sensation returned: the sharp pain in his hand, the burn of his lungs.

“Let me go,” the other man said. “Let me go or I’ll drop this now.”

Edward’s attention focused on the flare of the match, that perilous dancing flame. Hell, the fumes in this room were thick enough that they might ignite.

“Stop being an idiot and put that thing out,” Edward growled. “You’ll kill us both.”

The man’s hand trembled. Edward reached out—his hand didn’t seem to be working properly—and crushed the flame with his glove.

His heart was beating like the wings of a flock of birds. The man kicked out once, twice—uselessly, now, because Edward had hold of him and was not letting go.

He could tell the moment the man gave up—when his limbs came to rest and he looked into Edward’s eyes, his lips pulling into a resigned frown.

“Oh, yes,” Edward said in a low growl. “You should be afraid. You are in a heap of trouble.”

B
Y THE TIME NIGHT FELL
, the last remnants of Free’s home—charred and blackened embers, scarcely holding together in the shape of a building—had almost stopped smoldering.

It was gone. Her home, her place of safety… But that had been an illusion, too. Her hands were streaked with soot; her dress smelled of paraffin. But her press was still standing. Victory, of a sort.

Some victory.

She trudged back to her knot of tired, bedraggled employees. They’d all worked hard. She wished she could send them home. There was no time to be weary, though. There was too much to be done.

The most important of those things needed to be done quickly. “Amanda,” Free said, “you’ll need to leave now, if you wish to catch the night train to London.”

“But—”

“We can’t take even an instant to sit still and lick our wounds,” Free said. “Every moment we spend combating this is a moment lost to a larger, more important fight. If something else happens, you need to be in London, where you can commission another press to print our paper.”

More importantly, if something else was planned for tonight, if something happened to Free, she needed to make sure Amanda survived to carry things on. But she didn’t say that; if she spoke it out loud, she might lose her nerve altogether.

She didn’t have to. Amanda’s chin quivered, but she nodded.

“Melissa, make sure Amanda gets safely to the station. While you’re in town, let them know we have someone here that the constables will need to take into custody.” That had to be done; if they had any chance of presenting this affair to the public, they’d have to be seen to play by civilized rules.

She didn’t feel very civilized. She turned away, before she lost her nerve and begged her friend to stay. She didn’t see Amanda off. There was too much to do, after all. She had a response to finish, a paper that needed to be out on the 4 a.m. train. There was no time to stop now.

“All right, everyone,” she said in a carrying voice. “We have paraffin to clean up.”

And while they were doing that, she had a story to uncover.

Mr. Clark had bound their captive at the wrists and feet and tied him to a chair. The man was stowed in the archive room. She needed to know who had sent him, what he’d been tasked with doing. And she needed to know it
now—
in time for her to write that story, before the constables came.

There was no time for anything but swift answers. And she had a scoundrel here, after all.

She took a deep breath and went to find Mr. Clark.

He was in the archive room. The space was small and dark. With an extra chair and the desk still in place, she and Mr. Clark were almost elbow-to-elbow, facing that bound man.

“What have you learned?” Her voice sounded shaky to her own ears. A bad sign, that. She struggled for control.

Mr. Clark turned to her. “His name: Edwin Bartlett. But unfortunately, he doesn’t know who hired him. There was at least one intermediary, and I would guess more.”

No. She refused to believe that. She had hoped that it would all be simple—that the arsonist would give up James Delacey at the first instant, that he’d be able to describe him perfectly.

It would have been some compensation for losing her home—to be able to place the blame publicly at his door.

Her voice shook when she spoke. “He’s lying. He has to know more.”

That was met with silence. She couldn’t see Mr. Clark’s face, and he didn’t turn to her.

“He has to be lying,” she said. She
needed
him to be lying. “Don’t you have…” Her stomach turned at the thought of asking for more. The very idea made her feel ill.

“Don’t I have what?”

“Some way.” Her hands were shaking. “To encourage him.”

“Encourage him.” He made a rough noise in his throat, almost a growl. “Miss Marshall, I don’t think you want me to say, ‘Here, now, Edwin, there’s a good chap.’ Maybe you need to clarify what you mean by
encourage him.”

No.

They didn’t have time. The constable would likely be here in forty-five minutes, and in any event, with the deliveryman coming at half past two… She had little more than half an hour to get whatever else he knew, if she wanted to have this story in the next paper.

“He’s scared as it is,” Mr. Clark told her curtly. “Frankly, I doubt he’s got the strength of mind to tell lies at the moment.”

She breathed out. “Maybe we need to jostle his memory. Isn’t there something you can do?”

“I don’t know nothing,” the arsonist put in, his voice a whine. “I’ve said it all, told all the details. It was a man from London who hired me, a big man. Bald head.”

She felt sick.

She couldn’t see much of Mr. Clark. But his silhouette straightened and he turned toward her. “You don’t know what you’re suggesting,” he said. “You can’t even say the word aloud. You want me to torture him.”

Said out loud, that ugly word—
torture
—seemed to fill the room. She didn’t want it. Every part of her rebelled at it. But there was that small corner of her that wondered. He’d burned down her house. He might know more. Wouldn’t it be only fair if…?

Mr. Clark made a rude noise. “God. I forget, sometimes, how naïve you really are.”

It felt like a slap in the face.

“I’m not naïve. Just because I can’t say the word.”

“Oh, you’re naïve to even think of it.” She’d heard him angry before, had heard him amused. She didn’t know what this emotion he expressed now was. Something darker, something more real than she’d ever heard from him before. “You don’t torture a man to get the truth, Miss Marshall. Didn’t you read your history of the Spanish Inquisition?”

Free took a step back from that intensity. Her back met the wall of the room. “I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t understand. You’ve read a story, no doubt, where a man had information. Someone wielded a well-placed knife to make him divulge his secret in time. Good prevailed, and they all lived happily ever after.”

She felt sick.

“That was a tepid piece of fiction written by some man who sat at a comfortable fire, inventing a barely plausible tale for a gullible audience. You don’t torture a man to find out the truth, Miss Marshall, no matter how the stories sound. Any
real
scoundrel will tell you as much. You torture a man to make him into someone else. True pain is like black ink. Enough of it can blot out a man’s soul. If you’re willing to use it, you can write whatever you wish in its place. Want him to swear to Catholicism? Hand him off to the inquisitors. Want him to believe the sun sets in the east, and the moon is made of green cheese? Ready the hot knives. But once you spill that ink on his soul, you’ll never get it out. He’ll say anything, be anything,
believe
anything—just so that you’ll stop. You’ll ask him about Delacey, and he’ll invent any story you wish to hear, just to spare himself the pain. But it won’t hold up under observation, because it won’t be true.”

She swallowed.

“So no, Miss Marshall. I won’t give you your easy answer. It doesn’t exist. Go write the messy, difficult story. Write the tale without a happy ending. We’ll not get any other sort tonight.”

It was a good thing it was dark; she didn’t think she could look him in the eye.

She turned on her heel and stalked out of the room. The light in the main pressroom was blinding after the darkness of the archive room. The women—
her
women, women whose children she knew, whose hopes she’d listened to—were bustling about. Spreading sand to soak up the oil, shoveling that into buckets, and then scrubbing tables with soap and washing away the last of the residue with vinegar. Already the smell was beginning to dissipate.