Lady Killer
“Comtesse Helèn DuPont held services for her beloved dog Wilimena last Monday. As in life, the corpse of Wilimena was dressed in a delicate pink tulle skirt—”
“No. Above that.”
Elwood’s eyes moved up the page. “Serena Mayhew became the Vampire of London’s most recent victim,” he read aloud, then met Clio’s eyes with a questioning look. “That one?”
“Yes.”
“But that happened three years ago. Why are you interested in it now?”
“Because, as you no doubt have heard, the Vampire of London is back.” She slid into the chair behind her desk, into the familiar relief of work. “I want you to tell me everything you know about him.”
Elwood frowned. “You are not proposing to find him, are you?”
“That is exactly what I am proposing. I already have a client. Why?” Clio looked at him challengingly, and her look was mirrored by Toast. “Don’t you think me capable of it?”
Elwood sank into a seat opposite her. “I think you capable of anything, Clio. It is just that the Special Commissioner will not like your involvement.”
“As a matter of fact, I have had a message from him this morning on that very topic.”
“Then he knows? And he does not mind?”
“Not terribly,” Clio said. Her eyes slipped away from Elwood’s and she went sort of sideways in her chair. Toast, deciding things were getting dicey, leapt from her shoulder to the bust of King Henry the Eighth that stood behind her, and sat on his head. “He said something about my ‘getting any help from his office’ I might desire, and him wishing me the best of luck if I should choose to undertake the inquiry.”
Elwood eyed her. “I assume the word that proceeded the phrase ‘getting any help from his office’ was ‘never’ and that his wishing you the best of luck was intended as more of a threat than an encouragement.”
Clio shrugged and tried to look innocent. “Who can say. Words are so tricky and I am just a stupid woman.”
Elwood sat forward, genuinely concerned. “Look, Clio, I know how you feel about the commissioner, but this is not the sort of investigation to undertake as a personal vendetta. I know he said some dreadful things to you—”
“He said that I was not fit to find anything besides puppies and even those might prove too taxing for me,” she quoted. “He said that women should stay at home and look lovely, and since I did not have a proper home and could not look lovely if I tried, then I should throw myself into the Thames.”
Elwood winced. “Yes. Well, you have to admit you provoked him.”
“By solving six of his last eight cases before he even had any idea where to look?” Clio demanded.
“I was more thinking of the part when you described him as a corrupt and contemptible cur—”
“I only did that because of what he said about the dogs,” Clio interrupted, sitting up straight.
“—whose powers of observation were worse than those of a tit mouse, and whose mind made caterpillars look intelligent,” Elwood finished the quote.
“I do not see how he could be annoyed with me for that. If he had an ounce of sense he would admit it was all true. Anyway, in the interests of not overtaxing what little mind he has, I thought I would direct my questions to you rather than him. He must be very busy.” She smiled convincingly at Elwood. Behind her Toast, who shared his mistress’s estimation of both the Special Commissioner and dogs, clapped approvingly.
Elwood cleared his throat and tried to seem stern in the face of her smile and the monkey’s encouragement. “What did the commissioner’s message say, Clio?”
Her shoulders sagged. “Everything I already told you, plus what you guessed about him never helping me, and, for added measure, that they had a ‘very good man, a very special man’ working on finding the vampire, who would work better and find the fiend faster without any ‘infernal assistance from foolish and meddling females.’ He closed by suggesting that there were probably puppies lost in London that needed my help finding their way home.”
Elwood pressed his lips together for a moment, deep in thought. Then he sighed, looked into her lovely face, and said, “What do you want to know?”
Miles had awakened with a pounding headache and a gnawing feeling of unease, neither of which he could recall acquiring. Nor was he quite sure how he found himself in bed. Or, for that matter, who was breathing deeply next to him.
He threw open the bed curtains and was blinded by a wave of brilliant sunlight. Squinting, he looked over at the adjacent pillow. Golden hair curled over a small face, from which one brown eye peeked at him. His companion seemed to smile, then started to pant.
“Corin,” Miles shouted into his room. “Corin, who put this bloody hound in my bed?”
“It’s not a hound, sir, it is a retriever,” Corin corrected in the tone of an authority. “And a very fine specimen; if I might commend my own self in selecting him.” He moved to the bedside, holding out a bowl filled with steaming brown liquid, which Miles grabbed and gulped down. “He crawled in by himself when I went out this morning. Although it doesn’t speak too well for his intelligence, I think he likes you.”
As if to prove the truth of this statement, the puppy climbed up on Miles’s bare chest and began licking his nose. Setting down the now empty bowl, Miles lifted him off gently and put him back on the bed, where the dog set to work on his fingers. “Would it bother you terribly to explain what the hell he is doing here,” he asked finally, but not as gruffly as he would have liked.
“He is to be a gift from you to Lady Mariana. Unless you want to keep him. I can find another. It seems that puppies are not much in demand today.”
“I do not want to keep him,” Miles said with only partial finality as the ball of fur nibbled playfully on his pointer finger. “I would bore him to death. And I think one will be enough in the household.”
“You might reconsider. It’s so rare to find someone who will put up with you.” Corin answered the look of death Miles sent his way with an innocent smile. Then the smile faded and he added in a more serious voice, “Besides, another one of your guard dogs was killed last night and we still can’t figure out how.”
Miles’s jaw clenched—that was the fourth one in two weeks—and his eye flitted to the wall behind Corin. To his left was the large clock that led to his attic offices and which showed the correct time. And to his right, on the mantelpiece of the fireplace, stood another clock, the duplicate of the one in the other room. This one’s hands pointed at three.
Corin noted the direction of his master’s gaze. “That is why I woke you. Something has come up.”
Miles was out of bed and half-dressed by the time Corin had the clock open. He finished dressing as they ascended, and was tying the last of the laces on his leggings when they reached the landing just below the roof. Without pausing, he followed Corin through an inconspicuous door into a large room, that, despite the absence of windows, was filled with light flooding in from the opaque glass panes that made up its ceiling. Those who had heard of the extraordinary knot-garden Viscount Dearbourn had installed on his roof to please his new mistress three years ago little guessed that the birds its plants attracted were carrier pigeons winging messages across England, or that many of the shrubs were elaborate fakes, below which lay a nerve center far more delicate and far reaching than any set of roots.
Eight desks were occupied by young men, all of them in the yellow and gold livery of the Dearbourns. They were dressed as footmen, but the papers over which they were poring were not instructions for the running of the household. They were instructions for the preservation of a kingdom. England.
This was the realm of one of the most trusted of Queen Elizabeth’s advisors. His official title was Lord High Commissioner for Security of the Kingdom but he was referred to by the few who knew of his existence only as “Three”—and then only in whispers.
The naval victory over the Spanish armada was widely credited to Sir Francis Drake, vice admir
al of the navy, and Lawrence Pickering, the hero, but both of them, and everyone at the highest levels of government, knew the real credit belonged to Three. It was Lawrence Pickering who sailed the H.M.S. Phoenix, but it was Three who mapped its course, Three who organized the deployment of the English forces, Three who—by spreading the word that England was five times stronger than she really was and vulnerable in two places that she really wasn’t—managed to lead the English to triumph despite being massively outmanned and outgunned by their enemy.
But while many English cheered their victory, those at the top knew that the war was far from over. Realizing that they could not outmaneuver the English at sea, the Spaniards had very cleverly begun undermining the country from within. Shortages of vital supplies from food to coal were natural during a war, and with such shortages came dissatisfaction. The Spanish took advantage of this, liberally distributing the gold they brought back from their American territories to anyone who would work for them within the borders of England, using it to sow discontent and encourage smuggling, particularly of high-quality English gunpowder. They thus created a second front to the war, and a much more difficult one. Unlike armor clad soldiers or ships of war, these enemies were difficult to spot, and, once spotted, even more difficult to subdue. For the past half year, Three’s attentions had been focused on this invisible war, a delicate game of chess whose board was the island of Britain and whose stakes were the life of a real queen and her subjects.
Three was not a spy—although he did occasionally venture out to collect his own information—but rather the man who decided what to do with the information Elizabeth’s spies procured. Three knew from personal experience that people believed what they saw and he designed the defensive strategy for England based on this knowledge, fortifying her against her enemies by working to create illusions of strength and weakness, preparedness and vulnerability. His men monitored sales of gunpowder and poison, carefully watching for any signs of instability within the kingdom of England. He was a problem solver, a strategist. And Queen Elizabeth’s most potent secret weapon.
Speculation about his true identity abounded among both those friends and enemies who were privy to his existence—he had discovered the week before that his enemies called him “The Wasp” in honor of the pain and destruction his work caused them—but only the queen and the men in this light-filled garret knew who he really was.
Miles Fraser Loredan, Viscount Dearbourn, the third person behind the queen in charge of England’s security, saluted each of his men as he passed by their desks on the way to an open door at the rear of the room. In the country the operation occupied the entirety of his wine cellar, but when he was forced to relocate to London because of his wedding, his headquarters were jammed into a much smaller space. Despite the somewhat cramped atmosphere, Miles felt an enormous sense of freedom as he entered, as if, only here of all the spaces in his vast town house—in these hot, crowded attics, stuck above even the most humble of his servant’s quarters—was he actually at home. He took a deep, satisfied breath, and looked toward the broad man with gray hair sticking out of his head like a bottle brush standing in the open door of his private office.
The man’s tan and the wrinkles around his eyes were his badges of honor from having served Her Majesty’s Navy for three quarters of his fifty years of life. They were the only such badges he had, being one of the most irascible seamen in that organization, whose most notable career achievement was having spent more time in the Brig than any other sailor alive.
Most men, even those unaware of his reputation, steered clear of Tom Furious on sight, but then most men did not know that Tom’s visits to the Brig were precisely timed, or that he was actually the brother of the current minister of war and closely related to seven other royal advisors, or that for thirty years he had been the Navy’s most confidential and successful courier of information.
When any of the “broken” clocks in Miles’s house pointed at three, it meant that his attention was needed urgently. And the presence of Tom Furious only confirmed the importance of the situation.
“Tom. It is not every week I get to see you twice,” Miles said as Corin directed him to a seat and began pulling shaving implements out of a dumbwaiter hidden behind a painting. “Has there been some new word about the smugglers?”
Tom shook his head. “No. Nothing there. Pickering is still working on it, even if he is a bit distracted just at present. Seems he ran into a bit of trouble last night and lost some of his men. But that’s not why I’m here.”
Miles took in Tom’s serious expression. “What is it, then? Did someone find Castillo?”
Tarquino Castillo was Miles’s most recent recruit, a high-level secretary to the Spanish ambassador who had lost faith in the honor of his sovereign after King Philip refused to discipline one of his favorite nephews for seducing and then abandoning Castillo’s sister. Their first meeting had been in an old Turkish bathhouse in Madrid, a locale Miles selected because, with the steam obscuring their faces but not their words, it allowed information to be passed anonymously. Since then they had continued to rendezvous at such places, and Miles had used his pre-betrothal ball visit to a bathhouse with his cousins the day before to schedule a meeting. But Castillo had not arrived. Which meant that there was a very good chance that somewhere in London, Castillo’s broken and tortured body was being circled by flies.
The thought of what had probably befallen his agent was a potent reminder for Miles of why he worked so hard to keep his cousins away from him, why he continued to isolate himself, why he had made himself into Three, a figure with no family and no friends, why the only companion he allowed to get close to him was a full decanter of wine. At least a decanter of wine could not get itself killed because of you. Even his damn guard dogs—
“I’m afraid there’s still no word from Castillo,” Tom said, interrupting Miles’s thoughts. “It is something else.” He handed a single page of paper crudely printed with thick black gothic letters and woodcut images in two columns to Miles. “I got this from the printer on the way over. The ink’s still wet.”
Miles cast a cursory glance at the paper, then, pushing Corin’s hand with the razor away, leaned over to study it. His eyes had a hard, faraway look in them when he was finished. “They are sure?”
“Aye. Special Commissioner certified it. That girl was killed by the Vampire of London.”
“Gardenia?”
“Yes, there was a gardenia. He is back, Three. No question about it. At first we thought it might be a stunt by the Spanish, but it looks like the real thing. And Queen E wants you to make finding him your top priority. She is worried that if people get nervous, there could be riots. Which is just the sort of instability Spain could take advantage of. Three, she is worried that if he is not stopped quickly, this could be the end.”
Miles nodded, but his eyes were still unfocused. “Of course. It is a matter of domestic security. Of protection.”
“Aye. She has told the Special Commissioner to give you all the information he has, everything, and his full assistance.”
Corin smirked and said, “I bet he was whistling with joy at that news.”
Tom nodded. “I’d say he was not exactly delighted, but he knows he’s in over his head.” He fastened his eyes intently on Miles. “Queen E asked if you might refrain from describing to him again the ten ways he reminds you of a caterpillar, Three, at least until you find the vampire.”
“That is going to be tough,” Miles admitted. “The resemblances are striking.”
“When you feel the urge to abuse someone, Queen E wants you to turn your attention on your own men. They are also there for support, but for the sake of secrecy we think it best if you undertake this as a private party. Shouldn’t be hard to account for since the last word on his lips before he went down before was your name.”
You’ll pay for this Dearbourn.
The smile that Miles’s contemplation of the Special Commissioner had started, vanis
hed. He looked grim. “I remember.”
“What Queen E is most concerned about,” Tom went on, “is this notion that the vampire gets stronger as the moon grows dimmer. Seems we are at half-moon now, and according to the astrologers, no moon in nine days. And when there is no moon it is supposed to be impossible to kill him. That means you only have—”
“I know what it means,” Miles interrupted.
“Right,” Tom confirmed. He was watching his boss closely. During the early days of their collaboration, Tom had thought that Miles’s cold, generic code name, Three, was perfect. Like a number, the boy had no heart, no personality, no humanity. He seemed to have extended his job of building defensive structures to his personal life, fortifying himself with an impenetrable psychological wall. But over the years of their working together, Tom had realized he was wrong, and had come to suspect that perhaps Miles was only too human underneath. The austere personal credo that he had caused to be carved into the molding above his office door—“Trust no one, believe nothing, the only certainty is death”—began to read less like the ideas of a cold investigator, and more like the words of a man who has been deeply and personally hurt. Tom had grown not only to respect, but to care deeply about the man called Three. He was also one of the few people who could see through his emotional armor, and right now he did not like what he was seeing. “Are you feeling all right, Miles?” he asked, his use of the name showing the depth of his concern.
“Yes. Fine.” Miles settled back into his chair and let Corin return to work on his face. “I want to meet with the Special Commissioner this morning,” he said to Tom. “In the meantime, give me all the information you have.”
Tom complied and Miles nodded thoughtfully as if he were listening, but all he really heard for the two hours of the briefing was This is your fault. You failed.
Chapter Five
“This is your fault. Do not think to shift the blame to anyone else. You did this yourself,” Lady Alecia reiterated needlessly, setting her ringlets aquiver. “You are wicked and evil. That is how your father was. And how you are.”