“Sorry if I’ve brought us on a wild goose chase,” apologized Sheffield. “I was sure that we would find—”
“Let’s try the other door.” The candle flame sputtered as Wrexford grabbed the lantern, then flared into a red-gold blaze. He watched it sway, its color deepening as the shadows flitted across the room. “Have faith, Kit. Taviot is clever, but we’re tenacious.” The earl turned for the corridor. “He’ll make a mistake, and then we’ll have him.”
The door didn’t yield to his touch, which drew a smile. “As A. J. Quill is wont to say, no secret, however well-guarded, is truly safe.” After passing the light to Sheffield, he crouched down and set to work.
“You need to teach me how to pick a lock,” said his friend, observing the subtle probing of the earl’s metal probe.
“The Weasels have been pestering me about that as well,” he replied. “Heaven forfend that I unleash such mayhem and mischief on my own head.”
Sheffield raised his brows. “Are you implying that I would be so childish as to misuse such a skill?” A pause. “Though the thought of gaining access to your wine cellar would be tempting. Riche has been surprisingly stuffy about revealing where he keeps the key.”
A grunt . . . and then a click. “Forget about my brandy. We have more sobering matters to occupy our efforts.”
Like the adjoining room, this one had a small window on the rear wall, and the faint glow of starlight filtering in revealed that they may have found Maitland’s private lair.
Wrexford paused in the doorway to study the room before rushing in.Scientific detachment, he reminded himself. Tiny details mattered.
An oak desk and chair dominated the center of the space. Several stacks of books surrounded an inkwell and a jar of pens, while a ghostlike glimmer of white atop the dark leather blotter drew his eye to a disorderly sheaf of papers. A bookcase made from rough-sawn planks was set against the right wall, its shelves filled with an assortment of scientific journals. To the left was a fireplace, a tiny tendril of smoke curling up from the ashes in the grate.
“Someone was here not long ago,” observed Sheffield. Shifting his stance, he darted a look back into the corridor.
The earl was already moving. “Close the door behind you, then have a look at the bookcase while I examine the desk and its contents.” He took a seat in the chair and started with the books. The first group was technical treatises on steam engines. A number of torn scraps of paper protruded from the pages, clearly serving as placeholders. The second pile was much the same, with a few mathematical texts mixed in.
“What am I looking for?” asked Sheffield as he crouched down to look through the lower shelf.
“I’m not sure. But you’ll know it when you see it,” answered Wrexford. He didn’t bother to check any of the bookmarked pages, sensing that the key to unlocking whatever grand secret lay at the heart of the mysteries within mysteries lay elsewhere.
He hurriedly skimmed the rest of the spines.Nothing out of the ordinary.
Muttering an oath, the earl pulled the lantern closer and started shuffling through the papers. They were all blank. He was about to move to the drawers when he noticed the small trash pail beneath the desk. Inside were several crumpled papers, which he fished out and smoothed on the blotter. At first the sheets appeared to be covered with disjointed scribblings—a few sentences, which were then scratched out and a new thought begun. But as the scattering of words sunk in, he realized that it was the rough draft of a speech.
Today I shall share a momentous moment in human progress, lost for centuries until now. That was crossed out with a black slash of the pen.Today I shall reveal a momentous intellectual achievement, a highlight of human ingenuity in the form of a manuscript, hidden for centuries but now rediscovered by our consortium....
He stared in puzzled silence. Did the manuscript really hold some momentous secret? Or were Maitland and Taviot using it as the distraction that Sheffield had heard them mention—a puff of smoke with which to blind potential investors to the fact that the consortium was merely a clever scheme to defraud them of their money?
“Hell and damnation,” he whispered, after reading the next sentence.
Sheffield shot to his feet. “What?”
Wrexford read it aloud. “With the invaluable insight of the great Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci at our fingertips, we have picked up the torch of his brilliant thinking and used it to make another giant step forward in mastering the world around us.”
“But . . .” Sheffield made a face. “But according to Cordelia, da Vinci’s manuscript shows no great revelation.”
Like Tyler, Cordelia had given up on trying to understand Bernoulli’s book on fluid dynamics after the first few chapters, as she was unfamiliar with that area of science. And while she and the valet agreed that da Vinci and Bernoulli seemed to have shared a keen interest in moving water, neither of them could see how that translated into a momentous engineering innovation.
“So it would seem,” answered Wrexford. “It’s still unclear whether the consortium is a fraud.” He carefully folded the paper. “Be that as it may, this draft of a speech proves that Taviot and his co-conspirators stole the da Vinci manuscript, which directly links them to Greeley’s murder. In the past, Taviot may have been clever enough to elude justice, but this time he’s going to discover that his evil has grave consequences.”
* * *
“Sorry.” Raven shrugged in apology as he finished peeling off his filthy jacket and letting it fall to the floor. “We were hoping not to wake you.”
“Pffft—surely you don’t think I was sleeping.” Peregrine pushed the door of his adjoining bedchamber all the way open. “In fact, I was . . .” He slipped into the room. “But never mind that for the moment. Did you and m’lady discover anything?”
“Yes and no,” answered Raven. A muck-encrusted boot thumped onto the rug, followed by its mate. “We tracked down a friend of the murdered arsonist, and it turns out that he got a glimpse of the man who paid for the fire to be set. However, he couldn’t give m’lady much of a description.”
“Save for the fact that the varlet had reddish-brown hair with no trace of silver. So it couldn’t have been Lord Taviot,” added Hawk.
“The arsonist’s friend also said the fancy cove who paid for the crime had Satan-dark eyes that made his blood run cold,” mused Raven.
