Nettleblack, page 49
She broke off, gasped a breath. “Elvira already wants to ruin us both. To strip me of my reputation and you of your employment. And Adelaide will be all too eager to assist her. It was my arrangement that brought the two of them together – whatever she does will be my fault – ”
She stopped. Heart swollen in my gullet, I waited. A matter of seconds, and then the silence would snap, as it always did, shattered at the feet of Edwina’s composure. I’d heard it only days ago, when she chided Rosamond. She would break apart the quiet and rebuild herself above it, and when I was sure her panic had calmed I could slip away without –
But the silence held.
And Rosamond wasn’t coming back – and I couldn’t just –
“She won’t.”
I saw the movement in a daze, my soul swung out of my limbs and hovering level with the drawing-room chandelier. That velvet-lapelled creature beneath me – which could, against every scrap of logic, have only been myself – shoved the door open and hurled the words at Edwina with all the twitching swagger of another being. My sister was stood at the murky mantelpiece, with Lorrie hunched over his knees on Rosamond’s chaise, and it was entirely impossible to discern which of them looked the more profoundly bewildered.
“Because,” I added hastily, before either could stiffen into an incredulous exclamation, “If everything proceeds according to plan tonight – she – ah – well – both of them – are about to get quite trapped in their own criminal activity. Quite.”
“Henry?” Lorrie gasped. “But – I thought you were – ”
Edwina’s head jerked from me to him and back again, one hand brushing at the edges of her eyes. I knew the movement – I had traced it myself, but – figs – Edwina didn’t cry!
“Where have you been? What happened to you? Are you hurt? What – ?”
Not now. Not with the Director waiting.
“With all due respect – erm – I quite can’t stay. I don’t have long at all – I – I don’t know how much longer the Director can stall them – ”
“Who’s getting stalled?” Lorrie burst out. “Lady Miltonwaters? And this Adelaide girl? They’re at the Div?”
Edwina cleared her throat with vigour enough to set the curtains trembling. “Wait! Henrietta, I insist that you explain yourself. I cannot have you leave and tell me nothing – I do not think I can bear it again – ”
“I’m sorry!” – and I haven’t the faintest what wild desperation managed to thicken the reed of my voice, but it shocked her silent. “I – I promise I’ll explain – I just – I can’t at this exact second! You – erm – you would like Lady Miltonwaters and Adelaide Danadlenddu to be stopped, yes? Their suddenly being caught in the midst of some dastardly plot against the Division – that – erm – that would be convenient for you and Lorrie – quite?”
Edwina’s jaw dropped. “I – but – how do you know – ?”
Lorrie, I noted, was valiantly endeavouring to become one with the chaise.
“I – I simply wished to – ensure that you were – well – to reassure you – that your fears may be cut off before they’ve begun – but that entirely relies upon you trusting me now – because I’m quite going to do my job, with or without your permission!”
It clambered up my throat and burst out in a shriek before I could catch my voice, my nails sunk in my palms, every edge of me shaking fit to crack the floorboards. After that, I could hardly hold her gaze for my sheepish coda –
“So if I could possibly – erm – borrow your signet ring – yes – that would be – erm – very helpful – quite – ”
She folded her arms, drew herself up where the shock had slackened her, arched one pale yellow eyebrow. “You wish to represent the family? Why?”
I swallowed. “It – it might do someone else some good – at least, someone far cleverer than me seems to think so – and – if that’s her plan, I quite don’t intend to scupper it. But – I really do have to go now – so if you don’t want to give it to me, please do say – ”
It was consummately insane of me to expect that she would offer it. In the wake of the bravado that had tipped me through the door, I was wilting with every new second into a horrified realisation of quite what I’d done: the time that was being wasted with every question, the anger to which I must have been stirring my all-powerful sister, the awkward questions that would cluster about Lorrie. But I was closest to the door, and the bicycle was just outside. If I had to sprint, they wouldn’t catch me. The faint echo of Rosamond plucked at my sleeve, furrowing the rich fabric, urging me away. Edwina clearly won’t accept help from either of us – you’ve got things you don’t want to lose – don’t let her leech them out of you –
Then I blinked. Edwina’s face was set, a tight inscrutable scowl down at her hands – but she was slipping the signet from her fourth finger, jutting it out to me.
“I will need it back,” she added curtly. “But it seems you need it now.”
I stared at her. Lorrie did the same, though the little I could catch of his expression wasn’t startled in the slightest. He was grinning, nudging her on as she stalked across the rug and shoved the ring into my hand.
“I – erm – thank you – this will – yes – right – very helpful – good night – ”
“You must promise me that this discussion is not over, Henrietta.”
Edwina called it after I’d backed away, when I was halfway through the door with the signet shunted precariously up my index finger. “Lady Miltonwaters may have proved herself a disaster narrowly avoided, but you might still have a chance elsewhere if we act quickly. There may be others – ”
I set my teeth. As Septimus might well say: right.
“Thank you – erm – for your concern – Edwina – but I – I – I quite don’t want others. I – I can only apologise if I’ve not – erm – made that clear. But – I – well – what I do want is for you to respect my decision – and stop trying to arrange pheasant-based betrothals for me. I’ve entirely no intention of being a married woman – in fact, neither of those words fit me in the least. And – erm – I really should have said before – but – whilst it’s all springing forth – my name is Henry. Just that. Now – if you’ll excuse me – I have a part to play.”
I didn’t dare glance back. The front door was before me, and my task with it.
My second plan for breaching the Division was, at least, wildly better than my first. Devoid of Septimus’s map and battling my skirts, I cycled a demented loop, improvised from the scraps and recollections of my every trudge round the town: a weird parallel route along Dallyangle’s outskirts, where the fields lay flat and silent in the moonlight and a seam of housefronts masked me from the market square. I sliced a triangle of cobblestones between the Division and Checkley’s – the tavern was threadbare to its last waifs and strays, none of whom looked up from their shivering chats as I wheeled the bicycle past. I had to abandon it at the dormitory’s back door, still cricked open at its furtive angle.
I swallowed a gasp. Knelt, shadowed between the door and the gloom beyond, to ease my boots off. Uncurled myself into the first trembling step.
The floorboards inside were quite as cold as I had anticipated, a cold so sharp it seeped through my stockings like water. I had my boots pinched in one hand, my paper and pencil in the other, both arms splayed to force my balance steady as I skirted the boards’ creaks. The bolts over the windows hadn’t been pinned up, and sickly streaks of yellow street-light cut up the floor. Around me – beside me – behind me, as I crept further in – the dormitory beds were as disordered as they were deserted, sheets heaved back in crumpled huddles, blankets slumped over mattresses to trail on the floor. Gertie, Millicent and Oliver hadn’t been back, hadn’t had time to make them up.
Yet. But finding them was Mr. Adelstein’s responsibility.
“You truly imagine any more ledgers would alter my mind?”
I stifled a shriek with my fist, nearly stunned myself on the boots in my hand. Even with a door between us, that voice was horrendously impossible to mistake. Lady Miltonwaters, unfurling a sneer as heavy and stretched as a hallway rug.
“Do you really not understand what I am telling you – have been telling you for – goodness, over an hour? Are your stunted faculties so incapable – ”
Adelaide Danadlenddu’s voice knifed under the door, and the temperature shrivelled with it. “They understand you perfectly, Milady. This – this busybodying with the ledgers is simply a design to infuriate you.”
“Tush, child, they wouldn’t have the wit,” Miltonwaters scoffed – before her voice rose to a swell, atop a sudden clatter of footsteps. “You! Girl! What are you and your witless daughter trying to show us now?”
A tremendous thump set Gertie’s jug rattling in its ablutions bowl. I could have slumped for sheer relief to hear the Director – hoarse, a little breathless, her voice draped in the ragged remnants of her old serenity, but alive. “As you requested, Lady Miltonwaters – ”
Adelaide hissed. “She didn’t request – ”
“ – here, the Divisionary records for July of this year!”
Cassandra’s voice slipped in beside her mother’s, all the sarcasm scraped out, her words light and skittering over a nervous tremor. “And why shouldn’t Lady Miltonwaters request, Adelaide? Milady’s quite right – as a member of the town council and the niece of our nearest whole entire marquess, she’s of course entitled to examine our proceedings and receipts in the most scrupulous detail – ”
“She doesn’t care about your ridiculous receipts, Cassie,” Adelaide snapped. “Whatever you’re playing at, it isn’t going to change her mind.”
Lady Miltonwaters cleared her throat. “I think you are forgetting your place, Danadlenddu. Of course I still want the Division disbanded – I told them so, didn’t I? – but it shan’t hurt to gather even more evidence of their flagrant incompetence, and if these ignorant girls wish to offer it up to me – ”
Anger knifed through Adelaide’s retort, the most I’d heard my terrifying relation express. “With all due respect, Milady, you have been trawling through the Division’s receipts for the best part of an hour, a procedure which is entirely unnecessary when you intend to extract a resignation from its leader. What do you imagine you are going to find – new information to shake your resolve?”
“And what do you imagine you are about, speaking to me in such a tone?” Miltonwaters tossed back, her voice curdling. “You have done well, my little sham-governess, but you are still my servant, and I will not tolerate any further insolence. I have already been obliged to overlook your despicable ancestry this week – ”
“I am the heir to the Nettleblack fortune, Milady!”
“Precisely,” Miltonwaters snarled. “And the Nettleblacks are whores and witches unfit to manage any fortune whatsoever.”
Enough of this. The Director – how to get a signal to her? – to let her know that I’d deciphered it, that I was here, that it was time for her to pluck a confession out of the culprits for me to transcribe –
But anything I did – stuck in the shadows, behind a door, without even a window to gesture through – all of them, they’d spot it in an instant!
Silence again. This time, Adelaide wasn’t retorting.
“Very well,” Miltonwaters declared. “I will examine your ledger, but it shall be the last one I look at this evening. I trust, Mrs. Ballestas, that I have given you plenty to think on.”
Cassandra’s voice was a frantic blurt. “You’re not leaving just yet? We’re only at July, Milady – if you wanted to wait – ”
Sweet nectarines, but her panic was infectious, a visceral thing, seizing me by the hair and shoving me forwards. I quite didn’t think. I just unclenched my fist and launched my boots to the floor.
The shoes ricocheted into the yellow-streaked gloom, past my elbows, clattering to rest under Millicent’s bed. I flung myself flat to the side of the door, hands and paper and pencil all pressed to my mouth. Out in reception, the stalling prattle and snappish remarks had fallen silent, giving way to stomping footsteps. The door was creaking open, spilling gaslight over the beds, a shadowy silhouette splattered in cameo against the floorboards. If I had calculated wrong – if Adelaide’s unblinking stare peered round the door’s edge – she’d snatch me at my velvet lapel and drag me into the light, and all that effort with the ledgers would shatter like –
Cassandra blinked at me.
She was hollow-eyed and feverish-looking, her scarf pulled tight to her neck. Exhaustion simmered on every edge of her: in the straggly curls that slumped over her eyebrows, the sag in her hunched shoulders, the tremble of her fingers on the doorframe. Her gaze narrowed to a frown, pinched over everything in my hands – figs, the pencil and paper. Quick as a gasp, she rolled her eyes.
Then she turned away, casting about the shadowy room. Stalked for Millicent’s bed, scooped up my boots from underneath and ferried them to the doorway. Her voice was sharp, dour, not a scrap of that frightened syrup left in it. Greengages, but it was easy to conjecture who she was looking at.
“These fell off a bed,” she announced. “The bed itself’s in a state. Looks like Henry Hyssop’s.”
If there were immediate responses, I couldn’t catch them – she slammed the door so violently that my heart rattled in my ribs. I was shaking fit to dislodge veins, but even I had sense enough left in me to recognise her plan. Like it or not – and I’m not sure she did like it – she’d just proffered me my cue.
I sunk down, gently as I could manage, until I was on my knees at the door’s edge. My fingers crawled over the plastered wall – mercifully, it wasn’t damp – before I pressed my first page of paper flat to it, the pencil crooked across my palm.
“Perhaps Lady Miltonwaters is right, Cassandra,” the Director declared suddenly. My pencil sprinted after her, the faintest rustle of an echo. “She is not under obligation to read any more ledgers than she wishes to. But – before you go, Milady – would you remind me precisely what it was you wanted of me?”
At which juncture, it seems only fitting to give way to the moment, as it were, and offer you up what I actually transcribed.
Transcript, Saturday, November 4th, 1893, Dallyangle Division
Keturah St. Clare Ballestas – K. B.
Cassandra Ballestas – C. B.
Elvira Miltonwaters – E. M.
Adelaide Danadlenddu – A. D.
K. B. Perhaps Lady Miltonwaters is right, Cassandra. She is not under obligation to read any more ledgers than she wishes to. But – before you go, Milady – would you remind me precisely what it was you wanted of me?
E. M. Good heavens, girl, must we pace you through your situation again? And my council deemed you such a clever little rarity, in your exotic way! As I told you, before you began to deluge us with your blotchy paperwork, I have come to advise you in the strongest possible terms to announce your resignation, and the disbanding of the Dallyangle Division.
K. B. On what grounds, Milady?
E. M. Saints preserve us! On the grounds of your incompetence!
A. D. You can’t deny that you’ve done a rather shoddy job of chasing up every criminal currently operating in Dallyangle.
K. B. Adelaide – if you felt this way, you ought to have spoken to me. Why did you see fit to involve Lady Miltonwaters? Were my family not good to you?
E. M. She was never working for your family, you fool. Danadlenddu is my maid – has been since that gauche trollop Edwina Nettleblack palmed her off on me. I only hustled her into your household to keep an eye on you – to make sure you couldn’t destroy the very fabric of Dallyangle any more than you already have!
A. D. Milady –
K. B. I let you care for Johannes. I trusted you with my son.
E. M. You should consider it a mercy she didn’t do worse. She was only there to spy, after all. It was terribly audacious of you to expect that she raise your children for you, whilst you unsex yourself stealing work from the police!
K. B. Startled as I am, Milady, to learn that you deem me sufficiently important to require surveillance, I don’t see why that should have any impact on my Division’s ability to solve these cases. We are the only organisation that has even come close to apprehending the Sweetings, and as for the Head-Hider –
E. M. Oh, I wouldn’t go thinking you can stop the Head-Hider.
A. D. Milady, perhaps not –
K. B. For all its ghoulish sensationalism, the Head-Hider is nothing more nor less than another case.
E. M. Are you not listening to me, you overreaching slattern? The Head-Hider is not like any of your grubby criminal cases, born from the undeveloped wits of disaffected yokels. You may try all you like, but you will never be able to solve the Head-Hider – and as you continue to fail, the town will grow more and more sensible of your Division’s deficiencies.
A. D. This is a kindness, Mrs. Ballestas. You can still resign honourably before it has to go any further.
E. M. Before you dredge any more effort out of us, you ought to say! I never imagined it would require this much work to get rid of you all – and I certainly don’t intend to let it exhaust my energies any longer!
K. B. Your energies, Milady?
A. D. Milady simply means that –
E. M. Milady shall speak for herself, thank you very much!
K. B. I confess, I am struggling to understand why you should be so certain that the Head-Hider is a lost cause –
C. B. Because she’s the Head-Hider. Both of them are.
E. M. Ha! Topsy speaks!
K. B. That is a very strong accusation, Cassandra –
C. B. Sweet Lord! Can we all just stop tiptoeing around it? It’s the pair of them. Adelaide moves the head on Lady Miltonwaters’s orders.
