A Study in Silks

through your nonsense and tossed you to the street. There was no means of gaining information from the curb, so you had to get back inside if you wanted to earn your pay. At that point, direct questioning at gunpoint had to do. Not very subtle, but what does one expect from someone who is little more than hired muscle?”

“I still don’t understand the bomb,” said Evelina. “Why blow up the very person or place that can provide information?”

Holmes waited, giving Jones a chance to answer for himself, but the man remained mute, holding his hand to his bloody nose.

“That is rather less clear to me,” the detective mused. “He was carrying a small amount of a strong sedative, which suggests that he might have attempted to drug me. That would allow him to search my rooms at leisure, find a list of rebel names or whatever else he dreamed would be among my possessions, leave, and set off the incendiary device. Effective, since it delivers a supposed blow to the rebels and covers his deception in the same stroke.”

Something didn’t seem quite right about that. “But what if you asked to see the figurine in the box?”

“The box might have been constructed to accommodate both a bomb and a prop for his masquerade.”

Jones made a noise that might have been agreement, but Evelina couldn’t tell. “Perhaps, though why risk setting a timer when there was no way to tell when his search would be over? It would have made more sense to set it once his search was done.”

She knew her uncle well enough to read the confusion under his insouciant mask. He didn’t know the answer to that question any more than she did. “Accident? Stupidity? You overreached yourself when you went up against me, Jones.”

Jones squeezed his eyes shut.

Perhaps he bit off more than he could swallow, but even fools kill people. Evelina’s skin pebbled with horror at what might have happened, and she looked down, thinking how easy it would be to pull the trigger on Jones right then and there.

And then, with a look of vague distaste, Holmes pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and tossed it to Jones to stanch the blood dribbling from his nose. As the man grabbed it from the air, Evelina noticed the smudges on his cuffs and understood the laundry comment her uncle had made earlier. “Gunpowder.”

“Precisely. Careless inattention to detail.”

Jones visibly cringed as he pressed the handkerchief to his face, but then he caught sight of Holmes advancing with the needle, obviously meaning to use it now. He made a low noise and tried to squirm backward. “Please, guv’nor, don’t kill me.”

Holmes was impassive. “You should have considered the consequences before you walked through my door with violence in mind.”

Evelina’s shoulders were in knots, the gun shaking in her hands. Elias Jones had tried to kill her uncle and had nearly blown her up in the bargain, but her insides still turned to ice. “Uncle?”

Wordlessly, Holmes caught Jones’s arm and began unbuttoning the filthy cuff and pushing up his sleeve. The man struggled furiously, making a choking sound of disgust and fear as Holmes jabbed the needle into his arm. Her uncle’s jaw twitched as he depressed the plunger, and Jones quieted at once, his eyes rolling back in their sockets. His silence disturbed Evelina almost more than his fear.

“Did you, uh …” she whispered, letting the gun droop.

“No.” Holmes narrowed his eyes. “Although that might be his preference by the end.”

Her mouth went dry. What the devil is going on?

There was a scamper of young feet on the stairs, followed by a heavier tread. A moment later, Wiggins burst into the room, followed by a man. He was about thirty, tall and lean, with curling, sandy hair and small wire-rimmed glasses tinted a pale green. As he surveyed the room, he wore the look of someone who was perpetually amused and slightly dangerous.

“Allow me to introduce the Schoolmaster,” Holmes said cordially, stepping away from Jones’s still form as if drugging a man senseless was an everyday event.

The Schoolmaster? Evelina had never met a man with a code name before, but in her uncle’s line of work she supposed such things occurred—and she would fall on her own parasol before letting on she was anything but au courant in the detecting game.

Holmes gave a brisk nod to the boy and tossed him a shilling. “Well done, Wiggins.” The lad caught it and was out the door again in a flash.

Then Holmes turned to the Schoolmaster. “Look what my niece has caught for you.”

“Indeed,” The Schoolmaster grinned appreciatively at Evelina.

His easy smile brought heat to her cheeks and irritated her all at once. She wasn’t in the mood for flirtation. “May I put this gun down now?”

Her uncle laughed. “And deprive my friend here of the spectacle of my lovely niece holding one of the prime villains of London at bay?”

“I will point out that I subdued him with a broom,” Evelina replied coolly. “If he is a prime villain, then crime in London is in decline.”

The Schoolmaster took the opportunity to flip Jones over and pinned his hands. Evelina stepped aside to give him room.

“Well, perhaps, he is a step or two down from prime,” Holmes replied, turning to the Schoolmaster. “You’ll be interested in this one. I had to confirm the identification, for I have not seen the man in the flesh for over a decade, but I recognized him. Moreover, I have current intelligence about his activities. Elias Jones works for the Blue King.”

Evelina recoiled from the man. The Blue King—better known as King Coal—was the eccentric steam baron who ran the worst parts of East London. He squeezed whatever he could from the impoverished residents of Whitechapel and Limehouse. Anyone who worked for him either had to be pitied or reviled. Looking at Elias Jones, lying bloody and unconscious on the floor, she decided it was probably both.

The Schoolmaster withdrew a set of handcuffs the like of which she’d never seen before. He snapped a heavy cuff on Jones’s right wrist, and then a tendril of steel automatically snaked out to catch the left. The steel was so many-jointed that it was almost ropelike, but it snapped shut with a sharp click. No sooner had the sound faded than another rope sprang out to catch the man’s waist, then more slithered down his legs to hobble his ankles. Evelina was transfixed.

“How do those work?” she asked. The need to know was almost a hunger. She loved all things mechanical, and the design of the manacles was elegant, even fascinating, for all that they made her shiver.

The man gave her a sly look, as if it were a secret he would die sooner than tell, and then turned back to Holmes. “Jones? I know this one’s reputation—a sly rat, if there ever was one. How long will he be unconscious?”

Holmes gave a slight shrug. “At least an hour.”

“Good.”

“He is really that fearsome then?” Evelina asked, still eying the manacles.

The Schoolmaster frowned, which she took as a worrying affirmative. “Why did the Blue King send him here?”

Holmes answered. “No doubt he wants what all men want from me—answers or silence.”

No, thought Evelina, it’s not that simple. Now that the crisis was past, her mind was churning out questions. She knew that her Uncle Mycroft had his carefully manicured fingers in a great many pies, both literal and figurative—and apparently at least one pie was volatile enough to interest a steam baron and to make Holmes hide that fact from Evelina. A shadow government? Baskerville?

The Schoolmaster glanced down at his prisoner. “Shall we take him in, then?”

She wondered where “in” was since she very much doubted that they were referring to the police. If her uncle had wanted Scotland Yard, he would have sent Wiggins for Inspector Lestrade. And who was this Schoolmaster? The steam barons would want to ask him a great many questions about those restraints. Makers weren’t allowed to ply their trade without the Steam Council’s approval.

Holmes looked critically at Jones. “We’ll need a cab. The closer to the back entrance the better.”

“I have a Steamer around the corner,” the Schoolmaster replied. He turned to Evelina, touching the brim of