arvis was lighting lamps as Raven descended the stairs from his room, darkness already falling in the late afternoon. He encountered Sarah almost sprinting along the second-floor landing, laundered sheets piled so high in her arms he wondered how she could see where she was going. Raven halted her course before she could trip over David and Walter, who were huddled in her path as they waged an imaginary war down upon the carpet.
‘What is your rush?’ he asked.
‘I am trying to discharge my duties swiftly so that I have a little extra time on the errands I must run before dinner. I wish to factor in an errand of my own while I am out.’
‘You mean Beattie. You may not find him at home,’ Raven warned. ‘I am unsure of the hours he keeps.’
‘Then I will make time to return each day until I have the truth from him.’
‘After which you will have another problem – that of what to tell Mina.’
‘Let us cross that bridge when we come to it,’ she said, brushing past him to resume her work. ‘I cannot tarry.’
Raven was full of admiration for Sarah’s loyalty and sensitivity. He knew she often found Mina a trial and at times rather demanding, but nonetheless, she was prepared to go to great lengths to prevent any harm coming to the woman. The pity was that if Sarah unmasked Beattie as a fraud and a rogue out to take advantage of her, Mina might never forgive her for it.
Nonetheless, he was relieved that Sarah was busying herself with this quest right now. She had frequently insisted upon being involved first-hand in his investigations, but his mission today was taking him into more hazardous territory, and was best carried out alone.
Since their discovery at Duncan and Flockhart, Raven had asked himself how he might best investigate Adam Sheldrake, and the principal answer he had come up with was this: very carefully. He was a man with a great deal to lose, and that made him dangerous. It was possible he had already murdered Rose because of what she might reveal about him. Even if he had not, then his confederate surely had, and with Spiers’s killing Raven had witnessed what she was prepared to do, without hesitation, in order to protect herself.
Since the encounter at the dockside, he had worried over how quickly the midwife had recognised him. He searched every face in his memory but still could not think of where they must have seen each other before. This was inclining him further towards the belief that Madame Anchou was an alias for someone else. Did Sheldrake know her real identity, he wondered? Had Spiers? She had murdered him as soon as she calculated he was a liability. Was her true name the thing she feared he might reveal?
Raven and Sarah had speculated that Rose might have been poisoned because she had discovered this forbidden knowledge too. However, if Sheldrake was secretly working as an abortionist, then the dentist had reason of his own to silence his housemaid after her plight led her to the King’s Wark.
Perhaps they were both capable of murder: each as ruthless and deadly as the other.
Raven had enquired as to the location of Sheldrake’s dental surgery. Though he also did home visits, he spent several hours each day offering a clinic wherein patients might attend. Raven’s intention was to follow him unseen to discover where else he went once these clinics were over, because at some juncture he would have to resume meeting his partner in these dark arts.
The surgery was on the edge of the New Town, on London Street, not half an hour’s walk to the Leith tavern. The clinic was likely to finish within the hour, so like Sarah, Raven had no time to tarry.
Raven opened the front door and promptly felt the ice-cold January wind sting his cheeks. He closed it again and looked covetously at Dr Simpson’s coat, hanging up just inside the hall. The professor was home for the evening now, busy upstairs in his study. He surely wouldn’t miss it for a couple of hours.
Raven looked around for Jarvis, who had disappeared into the drawing room. He slung the coat about his shoulders, its weight pleasingly heavy. He felt transformed, like a knight in armour better equipped to face his foe, even if his foe was merely the weather. He only wished that he could take on the professor’s mantle so easily as donning his sealskin.
As he stepped through the front door, the coat swirling about him like a cloak, a number of disparate fragments swirling at the forefront of his thoughts coalesced at once into a visible whole.
He saw the figure in the cape, walking towards him on Leith Shore.
Someone pretending to be what they are not.
Each as ruthless and deadly as the other.
A French midwife who may not be French.
A person transformed by a single garment.
‘Such an arrangement would allow a doctor to practise this dark art without the risk that would attend advertising such services.’
Sheldrake was not in league with Madame Anchou. Sheldrake was Madame Anchou.
He saw it all now. Sheldrake’s already feminine face, disguised beneath powder, peering out from the shadows of a hood. And how much easier to hide your true voice when speaking in another language or accent. It was the perfect way to protect his reputation while carrying out his illegal but lucrative sideline.
Raven’s head spun with it as he stepped onto Queen Street, which was why he failed to notice the three men rapidly approaching, their eyes fixed upon him. In this moment of revelation, he was heedless of the danger until it was too late.
Two of them grabbed him from either side and bundled him into Dr Simpson’s carriage, the third knocking the protesting coachman to the ground and seizing the reins.
Raven did not recognise them, but it took only one name to tell him all he needed to know.
‘A Mr Flint humbly requests your attendance, sir.’