A Study in Silks

attempt to engage dangerous men in flirtatious conversation.

Well, Uncle Sherlock hadn’t said anything about kissing them.

Bancroft sat slumped behind his desk. With the garden party looming, he was trying to write a birthday letter to his wife, something he’d done every year in the early decades of their marriage. It was the sort of thing women liked—soft protestations of devotion—and something he hadn’t attended to in the last dozen years. He loved Adele, he supposed, as well as most men did their wives of nearly thirty years. Habit supplied what passion could not. Perhaps, with all the upset in the house, he missed that warmth a little.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t made it past the opening lines and had more or less given up. His mind was scrambling. The trunks he had ordered removed from the attics had not been delivered to their destination. There was no sign of the footmen or their cart, either.

Who even knew about the automatons? Bancroft had been careful. He’d let all of the Austrian servants go when he returned to England, hiring new domestics with no knowledge of his past. That left the family. Poppy had been a babe in arms when he locked the hideous things away. The other two children would remember them, though Imogen had seen more of them than Tobias. The dolls had first been built to amuse Bancroft’s sickly twin girls.

He shuddered, filtering the memories like a terrified child trying to look and cover its eyes at the same time. Imogen had lived. Anna had not. But his children would not know the full history of the automatons. Not even his wife knew their real secret—only Dr. Magnus. And he’d seen Magnus at the opera last night.

Bancroft had offered the police a reward if the trunks were returned unopened. That had been a mistake, sure to arouse curiosity, but he had been drinking when he made the offer. He knew alcohol made him take chances, but somehow that didn’t make him stop craving the taste. And the specter of Dr. Magnus made him even thirstier.

Now it was a waiting game. Why was Magnus in town? Would he try to use the automatons against Bancroft? Would Magnus even come at all, or did he have schemes afoot that had nothing to do with the Roth family?

There was a knock at the study door. Bancroft started, the skim of liquid left in his glass sloshing up the side. Annoyance clenched his shoulders. “Enter.”

Bigelow pushed open the door with an apologetic cough and extended a tray upon which rested a plain calling card of indifferent quality. “There is a Mr. Harriman to see you, sir.”

Could this day grow worse? Bigelow snatched the card from the salver and read it, misgivings building like thunderclouds.

John Harriman, Esquire

Warehouse and Shipping

Bond Street, London

Damnation. The only thing he could do was see the man and get rid of him as unobtrusively as possible. “Show him in.”

Bigelow vanished. Bancroft rose, put the whisky glass back on the tray and resumed his seat behind the desk. When the door opened a second time, the man who came in had much the same features as his older cousin, Jasper Keating, but in him they were expressed in a pale, watered-down way—his hair graying brown instead of white, his mouth a bit weaker, his nose a shade too long. Harriman had one redeeming feature. As Keating’s cousin, he expected to share in the man’s amazing wealth rather than to content himself with a modest position in the firm. Ergo, despite the family connection, he hated the Gold King and was quite prepared to rob him blind. That had made him easy clay for Bancroft to mold.

Without waiting for an invitation, Harriman dropped into the chair opposite Bancroft’s desk. “I must speak with you.”

“Apparently. Why do you need to do it here? You could have sent a note.” They had a perfectly good cipher to use.

“Word travels fast among servants. I heard about what happened.”

About Grace. Bancroft’s stomach cramped with hatred, loathing this coward who barely had the nerve to deal with his own workers. Mind you, he had hired some terrifying characters. Could it have been Harriman’s thug of a foreman who had followed Grace home and killed her for the gold? When Bancroft had approached Harriman at his club, he hadn’t bothered to instruct the man whose services to engage—after all, it was Harriman who had worked around the docks for years, not Bancroft—but maybe he should have managed him a little more closely. “Go on, then. Say what you have to say.”

Harriman shot a nervous glance at the door, as if he expected half of Scotland Yard to come crashing through the door. “I sent a note with—uh, her. Along with—what else she was carrying.”

“The police searched her body and found nothing.” One more time, he felt the sting of the loss like something physical. He’d been counting on the treasure Grace carried—not just to bolster the family fortunes, but because there were irons in the fire besides Harter Engines, and everything required cash.

“Then she was robbed.” It was an obvious statement, but an almost crafty look crossed Harriman’s features. It was gone too swiftly for Bancroft to give it much study, but something about it put him on alert.

“Was it the note that brought you here? A question you need answered?” Thank the gods they used an unbreakable cipher.

Harriman looked at the door again, clearly anxious. “The note hardly matters now. There are larger problems if proof of what we’ve done is in the hands of a killer.”

“I hardly think a thief and murderer will turn us in to the police,” Bancroft said dryly.

The man gave him an irritated look. Where Keating’s eyes were almost amber, his were hazel and too small for his head. “The gallery is opening soon. We need to finish up our enterprise, and quickly.”

Bancroft’s fingers twitched, as if grasping for all the gold he’d hoped to extract from Keating’s vaunted archaeological treasures. He’d needed to recruit four others besides himself and Harriman to put the plan in motion. Simple and elegant though the plan had been, when the wealth was split among so many, the proceeds hadn’t gone nearly as far as he’d hoped. “Are we done so soon?”

“You always knew it was time-limited.”

Heat flooded up Bancroft’s neck. “Of course I did. I arranged everything.” Each of the six partners had received four payments so far—each lot a bar of gold and some gemstones. Nothing so unusual that it couldn’t be taken to a bank and used as collateral or sold as old family treasures. “How many artifacts are left to process?”

“The last few crates came in two days ago.” They’d been expecting them, but hadn’t known what they contained. “Two were just pottery, but one was jewelry and plate.”

“Did you determine why they weren’t shipped with the rest?” Bancroft asked.

Harriman gave a slight shrug. “I suppose the sender didn’t have them packed up in time. They came by a different boat.”

Bancroft supposed that could be true. Schliemann’s treasures were shipped directly from Rhodes to Harriman’s warehouse, where he was unpacking the crates and readying the contents for Keating’s new gallery. The direct shipping route had been arranged to prevent loss, theft, or accident, and it did—right up until the priceless artifacts reached Harriman’s hands.

“At any rate, I was the only one there when they arrived,” Harriman added. “I never told Jasper that they came. In fact, I made a point of saying that they hadn’t.”

“Why the hell did you do that?” Bancroft frowned. “That’s not how I planned this would work.”

“I’d read Schliemann’s letters about what was supposed to be coming.” The crafty look was back. “It sounded like he might have saved the best for last.”

Bancroft studied Harriman suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

“One or two really large pieces. The crates were so late, I wasn’t sure we’d have time to make copies, so I thought if they were lost, who would be the wiser? If everyone thought the crates were lost, we could just keep the contents. So I hid them underneath the warehouse.”

A sick feeling swamped Bancroft’s entire body. He closed his eyes a moment, summoning patience. “If