A Study in Silks

beneath pale skin. “You’ve been working too hard.”

“I’m sure Watson will write all about it,” he said derisively.

She let it go. If he didn’t choose to elaborate, pushing was a waste of energy. There was no point in arguing with a man who considered food and sleep an impediment to intellectual exercise. “I’m glad you came.”

He gave a quick smile that was almost a grimace. “Then let us get down to business. In the matter of this murdered serving girl, tell me again everything you remember, skipping nothing.”

Evelina flinched. “I thought you were working a case for the Gold King.”

He looked surprised—something she didn’t see often. “You are living in a house filled with danger. Do you honestly think I would ignore that, now that Lestrade has seen fit to enlighten me?”

“Keating is not a man who likes to be put off.”

“So evidenced by the many unhappy letters he has written this past week. Never mind, I will deal with Jasper Keating in due course. His mystery is nothing more than a matter of lost and found. Now, tell me what you know.”

She did, every tiny detail she could remember. The recital was almost therapeutic. Here was no complicated morass of emotion, no wrestling with decisions or choices. Everything was just cold, hard fact. Her job was to be a conduit, not an interpreter.

He absorbed her monologue with half-closed lids: Grace’s death, the gold and emeralds, the automatons, the grooms, the clue that had led her to the warehouse, Lord Bancroft’s conversation with Dr. Magnus, and Magnus’s description of the underground living quarters, and finally, his death. She mentioned nothing of her own use of magic or the true nature of the automatons.

“Fascinating,” he said after she had finished. “Athena’s Casket seems quite the desired object. Keating came to see me about recovering it. It appears my case and yours overlap.”

My case. Evelina felt almost breathless. It was silly and juvenile, but the fact he had not scoffed at her fumbling investigation thrilled her. “That seems to argue the casket is not in his possession.”

“Magnus thought Keating had it, Keating believed it stolen, and Bancroft was caught in the middle. All the aspects of a commedia dell’arte farce, which tells me we are missing a player.”

She looked at him in fascination. This was why he was the great detective. “We are? How do you know?”

“Find the holes in our story, and you will see the passage of our mystery player.”

“How?” She squinted up at the sun, guessing the time. She wished he’d come earlier, because this conversation could take hours. She would scream if this chance to work through the clues was cut short.

“What don’t we know?” He clasped his hands behind his back, assuming a professorial air.

“Who killed the Chinese?”

“And?”

“Where the casket is.” Unless I have it? But she couldn’t explain that the reason she suspected it was because the cube talked to her.

He nodded. “Good. And?”

“Why Grace was carrying gold, or who her killer was, if we believe Magnus was not the killer himself. He admitted to stealing the automatons as a threat to Bancroft.”

“Did you ever see him carry a knife?”

Ah, good point, pardon the pun. “No. I don’t know what kind of guns or knives Magnus favored.” He was a sorcerer, but that was a piece of information her uncle would most likely question— and that was a road she wasn’t ready to take. Not yet, at least. “We don’t know most things, in fact.”

Holmes shook his head, seeming almost irritated. “Not true. But you are missing several points: the voices you heard, or who was in the hallway, or who was the father of the poor girl’s child.”

Evelina laughed unhappily. “Just a few details.”

“Any luck with the cipher?”

“Sadly, no.” She felt utterly defeated.

“No matter. Believe it or not, you’ve done a passable job of assembling information. All that remains is to arrange it properly. I see the passage of not one, but two unknown parties.”

They had circumnavigated Beaulieu Square and were back in the gardens of Hilliard House. They stopped outside the door where Tobias had met Grace Child the night she died. Holmes crouched to search the grass, pulling out a magnifying lens to check every blade. Evelina stared down at him, a little incredulous.

“What are you looking for?”

“There is some interesting cigarette ash.”

Now there was an oxymoron. “There must have been fifty people at the garden party. At least half were men, and half of those smoked. There is no shortage of ash, interesting or otherwise. And it has been a week since the murder.”

Holmes rose, dusting his knees. “You are correct, sometimes ash is simply ash. I never know until I look. And I’ll have you know, most find that performance impressive.”

Evelina raised an eyebrow.

“However,” he said, putting away his glass, “let us return to the sequence of events for the moment. Grace Child was waiting outside until the young Mr. Roth let her inside shortly after half past twelve. Then she is discovered dead at approximately one o’clock.”

“Yes.”

“She had a candle, you say, that had dripped a quantity of wax on the floor?”

“Yes, where she dropped it.”

He raised a finger. “Why was she standing with a candle in the cloakroom? She wouldn’t have had one unless she went and got it once she was inside. Why didn’t she simply go to bed?”

Understanding dawned. “She was waiting for someone. A few minutes, in fact, if that much wax melted.”

Sherlock nodded. “Who was she waiting for? There are three possible candidates: an inmate of the house, the unknown who passed you in the hallway at twelve forty-five, or whoever was talking outside at eleven o’clock. The first is the most likely to have met with the girl. There is a good chance the second was her killer.”

“They aren’t the same person?”

“There is the fact that she still had the gold. I believe the person she meant to meet failed to show. Perhaps, while waiting, she surprised someone else.”

Evelina’s blood flared with excitement. “Of course! Magnus meant to steal the automatons! Could that have been him prowling the halls that night?”

Holmes shrugged. “Perhaps, and maybe more than perhaps. It will be easy enough to reconstruct the events of that night.”

“Then where do we start?”

He looked up at Hilliard House. “With dinner. I believe I smell an excellent leg of lamb, and perhaps it is high time I exchanged pleasantries with the other players in our little game.”

Chapter Thirty-seven

His father stared at him in open-mouthed shock, a look Tobias hadn’t seen on the pater before. It made him yearn to back out the study door, the way one would retreat from a savage dog.

“What’s this I hear about Holmes?” Bancroft rose from behind his desk, his snarl matching the stuffed tiger head on the wall above. “Here? Under my roof?”

The sun slanted low through the study window, glinting off the brass adornments on the desk. It gave the setting an extra dramatic flare, as if the place was about to catch fire. Maybe it was. “Mother just invited him for dinner.”

Bancroft sat back down abruptly, as if he had suddenly run out of steam. “All I asked of you was to distract the Cooper girl.”