The door was opened by a footman. He was very tall and broad, wearing a uniform of military precision, his jacket the exact blue of a jay’s feather. You could have put a ruler to the crease in his trousers, and any deviation from the straight would be the fault of the ruler.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said, not bothering to hide his disdain. ‘Are you with the music-hall people? Downstairs and through the basement.’
He went to shut the door, but I put my hand against it. ‘No, I’m Mr Stanhope and this is Mrs Flowers. We need to speak to Sir Reginald urgently.’
‘I see.’
Something was nagging at me, chewing on my nerve endings and scratching at the palms of my hands. It was him. I recognised his voice and those calculating eyes. This was the man who’d attacked me at the pharmacy. I knew it. And what’s more, he knew that I knew it.
‘Are the children here?’ I demanded. ‘Do you have them?’
‘Whatever do you mean?’
He surveyed me from his great height, almost sneering, challenging me to take it further.
I didn’t know what to do. Even if I’d been able to beat the answer out of him, which I certainly couldn’t, it would hardly be possible here.
My only option was to beg.
‘Please. Was it you in the carriage? I only want to know if they’re safe, that’s all. Just tell me that much.’
He blinked and rubbed his face with his hands, before glancing over his shoulder into the house. He seemed to be struggling for the right words.
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he said, in a low voice.
Of course, he might have been lying, but something in his reaction suggested he wasn’t. His initial smirk had been deliberate and arrogant, but when I’d told him the children had been kidnapped, he’d been genuinely surprised. He didn’t have them.
‘Then it’s absolutely urgent that we speak to Sir Reginald. It cannot wait.’
‘All right, I suppose you’d better come in.’
‘Rosie.’ I stared at her intently, hoping she would take my suggestion as an instruction. ‘You should stay here.’
She blinked twice, fully understanding me and not giving a damn. ‘No, I’d rather not.’
Inside, the walls of the hallway were covered with dozens of small pictures of birds, butterflies and lizards, mostly hand drawn, but without any sense of the beauty or vitality of the creatures they depicted. They were anatomical, a product of science rather than art, and the birds, at least, were in something approaching taxonomical order, with eagles and buzzards nearest to me, thrushes and finches chasing each other up the stairs and woodpeckers perching over the door lintels. The whole effect was unsettling, like being trapped in the Hunterian Museum.
The footman indicated a room at the end of the hall. ‘You can wait in there with the others. I’ll call you if Sir Reginald becomes free.’
‘Very well, but I beg you to be quick.’
Through the open door I could see people moving about. A man was calling out instructions in an authoritative tone: ‘Higher! Higher! A bit more. Now hold it there. Right there. No, no, no! You’re drooping, man.’
I recognised the voice, and then saw the fellow himself, Peregrine Black, his attention fixed on something within the room.
‘The actors are preparing for their performance,’ scoffed the footman. ‘They’ll be entertaining members of the Board of Trade after dinner, so I’m told.’
The room turned out to be a substantial parlour with an elaborate gasolier hanging from the ceiling. There were Union Jack flags either side of the mantelpiece, and at one end a platform had been erected, perhaps eighteen inches above the level of the floor and three yards by two. Hanging over it was a banner bearing the legend: ‘The Calcutta Music Hall Touring Company’.
A slack-shouldered stagehand was trying to prop up the single piece of scenery – a fake tree – so the branches would drape attractively. Even at this he was failing, and the poor fellow was receiving the most frightful scolding from Black.
‘It must stand up on its own, you utter disaster! When did you last see a tree that couldn’t support itself?’
Black spun on the spot, overcome by the man’s incompetence. He was about to resume his hectoring when he saw us.
‘Mrs Flowers!’ he bellowed. ‘And … my word, is that you, Mr Stanhope? What on earth happened to your face?’
He approached us, stepping adroitly, for so large a fellow, between a man in a judge’s wig and a Chinese woman carrying a baby, which turned out, when she fumbled and dropped it on its head, to be a doll.
‘Why are you here?’ He appeared anxious, probably recalling his previous criticism of his employer.
‘Two children have been kidnapped. We have some questions for Sir Reginald.’
‘Is that how …?’ He rotated a finger around his face to indicate my injuries.
‘Yes. They were taken while in my care.’
It was the first time I’d said it out loud. I pinched myself under my armpit, where my cilice rubbed against my skin.
‘Have you seen anything while you’ve been here?’ asked Rosie. ‘Or heard any children’s voices? It’s very important.’
‘I haven’t seen anyone,’ he said. ‘But we only arrived an hour ago. My word, you do have an exciting time, don’t you? Did you find out who killed Dora Hannigan?’
‘You remember her name,’ said Rosie, and I could see what she was thinking: that it was odd for someone who wasn’t involved to retain that detail.
He waved a hand. ‘As I said before, it was in the newspapers.’
‘No,’ I said firmly. It didn’t matter that he was a big man and capable of violence. Nothing would get in my way now. ‘John Thackery told you about her, didn’t he? She was his governess when he was young.’
Black sighed and closed his eyes, speaking with them still shut. ‘Yes, that’s true. I didn’t know if you’d made that connection.’
‘He told me himself. She was the mother of the children that were taken. A boy and a girl.’
He put his hand to his mouth. ‘Oh, that’s terrible. She’s dead, her children kidnapped, and I haven’t heard from John in days. Have you seen him again?’
‘No. I’m sorry.’
Black gazed out at the garden, seemingly lost in thought. The grass was barren and brown, cast into shadow by a high, featureless wall at the far end.
‘He speaks of her often,’ he said. ‘She was the only one who was kind to him, when he was young.’
‘Yes, I heard his father didn’t like him.’
‘Sir Reginald used to shut him in a cupboard, did you know that? For hours. Isn’t that hateful? Who would do that to a child? Miss Hannigan used to get bread and honey for him and slide it under the door. She used to read to him too, he told me.’
I thought of Aiden and Ciara, and shuddered. They might be in just such a place, but with no kindly governess to show them pity. I pushed the thought away; if I dwelled on it, I would go mad.
‘That’s terrible.’
Black nodded, still staring out at the garden, his eyes following the paved path that led to a wrought-iron bench and an arch with plants growing up and over it. ‘He told me that when he was eighteen his father sent him to the Military Academy at Woolwich. He hated it and ran away.’ Black pointed at the featureless wall. ‘There’s a stable behind there, and Sir Reginald locked him in it for three weeks. He punished his own son until he did as he was told and went back to Woolwich. Can you imagine the humiliation?’
‘When did you last see him?’ asked Rosie.
‘Almost two weeks ago, I think. We agreed to meet on Tuesday night, after the performance, but he never turned up.’
‘This was for you to paint his portrait, was it?’
He smiled thinly at her. ‘Of course.’
Why hadn’t John Thackery kept that tryst? I thought back to the day I’d followed him. He had vanished in the square near his father’s house. Where could he have gone?
I didn’t have time to consider the question further. Sir Reginald came into the room and Black immediately made himself busy near the stage. Sir Reginald watched him go with an expression of revulsion and turned to me, briefly eyeing the sutures above my eyebrow.
‘Stanhope,’ he said. ‘I presume you’ve come to apologise. Do you have my guinea?’
‘No, Sir Reginald. I need to know, do you have Aiden and Ciara Hannigan? They’ve been kidnapped.’
‘What are you babbling about?’ He glared at Rosie. ‘And who are you?’
‘This is Mrs Flowers,’ I said. ‘She’s fully appraised of the situation. She’s helping me find them.’
She pursed her lips. ‘We’re finding them together.’
Sir Reginald barely acknowledged her. ‘Are you a cretin, Stanhope? How could you be so stupid? Come with me.’
He led us into a small room covered on all four walls with books, row upon row of them. There was no natural light, but a gas lamp was flickering above our heads. He turned it up using a brass knob on the wall, and as the glow blossomed I saw that most of the books were about science, with titles like A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation and Gunshot Wounds, The Anatomy of the Human Body and A Guide to Hydropathy, though some were about industry and government and there was a whole shelf full of journals. On a dainty table in the centre of the room, a monkey’s paw was mounted on a plinth, raised as if about to catch a ball.
Sir Reginald seemed sicklier than the last time I’d seen him, twice almost coughing, but somehow suppressing it, his knuckles growing white as he gripped the arms of his chair. It was the only one in the room, so we had no choice but to stand in front of him like naughty schoolchildren.
‘Do you know where the children might be, Sir Reginald?’
He looked at me as if I had lost my senses. ‘Me? What are you talking about?’
‘I was hoping that, since I didn’t do as you asked, you had taken the task out of my hands.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ His mouth twisted into a sneer. ‘I don’t kidnap people.’
I was watching him closely, desperate for some sign he was lying. ‘Your man, the footman, might he have done it? Perhaps believing it was what you wanted?’
‘My footman? I barely trust him to carry my chamber pot.’
‘But you are their father, aren’t you, Sir Reginald?’ I ignored his glower. Necessity was making me reckless. ‘That’s why you’re so interested in their welfare. Your son Peter resembles Aiden quite closely.’
‘Don’t be impudent, Stanhope.’ This was a simple instruction, issued without heat. I was so far beneath him I didn’t warrant his anger.
‘We’re only trying to understand all the possibilities,’ offered Rosie, in a conciliatory tone.
He stood up and pulled a book from the shelf: On the Origin of Species.
‘Charles Darwin,’ he said. ‘Have you read it?’
He was only addressing me. He seemed to assume Rosie hadn’t.
‘A little.’
There had been a copy in the vicarage, and I’d read the first few chapters. I had never wondered about that before; a clergyman owning such a book. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought my father open-minded.
‘Then you know what it says, what it means. That we progress and progress, and by that progression the strongest of us survive at the expense of the weak.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t say that’s exactly—’
‘It’s as clear as day.’ He licked his finger and turned a couple of pages. ‘It’s as much about economics as it is biology. Those of us who build something, create something, deserve to rise, and those who dilly-dally and whine about the good of the working man, whatever that means, deserve poverty.’ He shook his head, exasperated. ‘They’re planning a strike, you know, the men at the mill. They’re protesting against God knows what, risking their livelihoods out of pure envy. People like that don’t have the backbone to do anything for themselves.’
‘Like your son John, you mean?’ I asked.
He stopped, his hand shaking. ‘How do you know him?’
I thought quickly. I didn’t want to admit we’d been friendly, years before. It would encourage questions I didn’t want to answer.
‘Miss Hannigan had been his governess. The police spoke to him.’
Sir Reginald sat down again and opened a drawer in the little table, pulling out his spit cup and a bottle of laudanum.
‘Yes,’ he said, eventually. ‘Like John. Weak blood, you see.’
Rosie looked confused. ‘But he’s your son,’ she said. ‘Your blood’s the same.’
And then it came to me. John didn’t look anything like Aiden and Peter. And John had said his father hated him for existing.
‘Unless he’s not your natural son. Is that it? Is John adopted?’
Sir Reginald picked at his thumbnail and pulled at the skin with his teeth. All his nails were the same, bitten down, puffy and lacerated around the edges.
‘He’s the proof, if any were needed. I tried everything for him, but it was impossible. He left the army having never fought a battle or been promoted. Can you imagine that? He doesn’t come from my stock. His is a weaker strain.’ He tapped his finger on the pages of the book and started to read out loud: ‘“Each new variety, and ultimately each new species, is produced and maintained by having some advantage over those with which it comes into competition; and the consequent extinction of less-favoured forms almost inevitably follows.” Do you see? I have competed, and I have won.’
‘And yet you have a sickness, Sir Reginald. It’s obvious.’
‘I’m not talking about physical strength, I’m talking about mentality.’ He clenched his fist. ‘Intellect, diligence and determination. The power to lead. My line is strong, which is why it deserves to continue, while others die out.’
‘Die out? You truly think that?’
‘It’s science!’ He slammed his fist down on the table, making the monkey’s paw jump, and then stiffened, his face blossoming red and his chest heaving. He took a sip of laudanum and closed his eyes before continuing. ‘Adopting John was the worst mistake I ever made. I regretted it the instant I’d done it. He was a feeble boy and grew into an embittered man. No substance.’ He banged the table again. ‘He had the gall to threaten me. That’s why I instructed you to get those two children out of the way.’
‘You think John might have taken them?’
I hadn’t considered the possibility, and yet … at least it would mean they were safe. John had cared about their mother, and I couldn’t imagine him hurting them. Unless, of course, he’d killed Dora too, in which case everything I had thought about him was wrong. It occurred to me that I might have been overly influenced by my memories of him as a boy.
Sir Reginald nodded. ‘He’s got them somewhere, I’m certain, ready to reveal at the worst possible moment for me. He has no consideration for anyone but himself.’
That was true enough. John had chosen to blackmail me without a second thought.
‘Was that why you wanted them hidden under a false surname?’
‘Correct. But you proved incapable of doing the simplest thing.’
‘Do you know where John is now?’ asked Rosie.
‘I have no idea. And you must stop interfering. No good will come of it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because things are in motion. Things you don’t understand.’
‘What things?’
He stood up again, a signal that our meeting was over. ‘Follow my instructions this time, will you? It’s imperative that you do nothing. Lives depend on it.’