at the sight of a scraped knee, to say nothing of … of this.”
Then whose shoe made that mark? She would have to find out where all the servants were tonight. She moved on to the next question. “Do you have any idea why Grace was in the cloakroom?”
A flush crept from the neat white collar of Dora’s uniform, turning her ears crimson. “I wouldn’t know that, miss.”
Obviously she did. Evelina softened her voice. “Was she going to meet someone there? After all, it is a quiet room, and no one was using it. A private place.”
“I don’t know, miss. She wasn’t a careful girl.”
“Careful how?”
“To hear her talk, you’d think her latest beau was the crown prince.”
“What do you mean?” Evelina asked, more sharply this time.
Dora suddenly looked very frightened. “I don’t mean anything by it, miss.”
“Was she someone’s …” Evelina trailed off, thinking about the fancy petticoat.
Dora tucked in her chin, resembling a turtle on the defensive. “If it were anything much, she wouldn’t have been peeling spuds all day, if you know what I mean.”
“But she was seeing someone who had money?”
A sidelong glance shot from under the maid’s lashes. “That would have been a bit of all right, but her bad stomach in the morning said there was trouble on the way.”
Evelina caught her breath. Grace had been about to be ruined. She would have lost her place. There weren’t many options open to an unwed mother, especially a poor one. Usually those stories ended with death or emigration. “Did she ever say who the father was?”
Dora shook her head. “She never said any names.” There was clearly more she wanted to tell, but she pressed her fist against her lips, as if to hold back the words.
“What, Dora?”
The maid shook her head again, tears glistening in her eyes. “Oh, miss, I saw Grace barely a half hour before Maisie found her.”
“Alive?”
Dora nodded in quick, jerky movements. “I saw her out the window. She was in the garden, as if catching a breath of air before coming in to bed.”
Evelina automatically calculated the hours. That narrowed down the time of death considerably. “Right after you left Imogen’s room?”
Dora nodded. “When I went to fetch the sleeping draft.”
That would have put the time at around twelve thirty. Evelina again remembered the voices she’d heard when she’d been outside. That had been much earlier, almost an hour and a half before.
“Alone?”
“No, miss.”
Evelina felt her scalp crawl. “Who was she with?”
The maid was silent, gaze falling to her hands, where they kneaded the fabric of her apron.
“Dora, I won’t repeat what you say. You know me better than that.”
That seemed to reassure her. Dora leaned forward, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Mr. Tobias.”
Evelina felt her jaw fall open, but couldn’t summon the presence of mind to close it.
Tobias chose that moment to walk out of the cloakroom, pausing to look her way. Dora stiffened, obviously sharing Evelina’s dangerous thoughts. His shirt and hands were pristine, free of blood, but the bruise on his face seemed darker in the shadows beyond the gaslight. Someone had fought him hard.
A paralysis came over Evelina, pinning her where she sat. Frustration bubbled up, a painful pressure in her chest. She wanted to jerk her chin away, to ignore the steady searching of his gray eyes.
They both had secrets. Even though he’d learned nothing about her girlhood in the circus, much less her magic, he knew other things about her—such as her unorthodox taste for science and mechanics, and that she understood far more of the world than any young lady ought to.
She knew more than was proper about his gambling and women. She didn’t need to be a detective for that—just have the eyes of a girl half in love. Neither of them ever spoke a word about what they saw in the other, and yet they both knew that the mutual knowledge was there.
Any other day, Evelina treasured that shared complicity as something that bound them together. Tonight, with so much suspicion in the air, it felt unsafe.
Tobias’s mouth twitched downward, as if he sensed her discomfort. He turned with a slight hitch in his shoulder—the merest suggestion of a shrug—and left the room. A moment later, Evelina heard his footstep on the stairs. Going to bed. Returning to bed, if one believed his tale, though how one got a black eye while snugly tucked beneath the covers beggared her imagination.
Yes, keeping his secrets forged a link between them, but it wasn’t at all the kind of intimacy she had dreamed of sharing with Tobias Roth. And for that merest sliver of time, she hated him for it.
Chapter Four
Let it be known that the Society for the Proliferation of Impertinent Events was formed this twenty-first day of September 1887, for the exploration of practical science. The charter members of this society are the Honorable Tobias Roth, Mister Buckingham Penner, Captain Diogenes Smythe, and Mister Michael Edgerton. Membership private and by recommendation only.
They have selected for their motto the phrase “Beware, Because We Can.”
—Official Charter of SPIE,
filed in the archives of the Xanadu Gentlemen’s Club
THE ROYAL CHARLOTTE THEATRE
In a just universe, a special circle of hell awaited bad opera singers. And lo, the self-appointed administrator of that justice was to be Tobias—but very few knew that just yet.
At four o’clock that afternoon,
From his throne in the balcony, Tobias scanned the horseshoe of gilt and velvet boxes. The Royal Harlot— er—Charlotte resembled a cross between a whore’s boudoir and a stale wedding cake. There was not a single surface that was not swagged, tasseled, or crusted in flaking gold paint.
Anyone who mattered in fashionable London was there, and the scent of overwarm humanity mixed with competing perfumes like an expensive fog. The heat was making Tobias itch wherever the flannel of his perfectly creased trousers touched his bare skin.
His companion, Buckingham “Bucky” Penner, lolled in his seat as if fatally shot, fanning himself with the program. “I rather like opera, but would say this
Tobias spared a glance for his friend. “We’re not here for the music. We’re here to win the bet.”
“Ever the general, with your mind on the plan.”
