Mr. Carrigan was the owner of the building where Mr. Wilson went to copy the Encyclopaedia Britannica every day for six weeks. He was an older gentleman, quite hard of hearing who carried an amplifying horn in one hand and a massive ring of keys in his pocket. There were six offices to let on a monthly basis, he explained to me as Jess loitered within earshot nearby, and four were currently occupied. The room in which Mr. Wilson had spent his days was let for two months and paid for in advance. The name on the lease was listed as A. Westfield, whose secretary had taken possession of the keys and then returned them in an envelope pushed under the door.
“What did the secretary look like?” I inquired of Mr. Carrigan. He put the amplifying horn to his ear and asked me to please repeat my question.
“The secretary who received the keys – what did she look like?” I said louder.
“Not often you find a female secretary, and a pretty one at that. Makes one wonder why there’s no husband to object.”
I bit back the twenty-first century response that statement deserved and concentrated on getting information. “How old was she?”
“Old enough to know better, I say,” Mr. Carrigan grumbled.
Right. I inhaled deeply to steady my temper and tried again. “Can you tell me how tall she was, or the color of her hair?”
“Her hair. Well, now, that was red – as red as raspberries. It was the brightest thing in the room, it was.”
Excellent. “And her eyes, her skin tone? Her approximate build?”
Mr. Carrigan made a brusque motion with one hand. “Who could notice anything else when that hair came in. She wore the mass of curls long, as a maiden might. It was downright distracting. I wanted to tie it up into a knot just so it would stop waving at me like so many snakes. If she hadn’t taken the keys from my hand, I might have forgotten I even had them, her hair had charmed me so.”
Well, that was new – distraction by hair. A woman, able to render men blind and senseless by virtue of a nest of writhing curls. It seemed a double-edged sword though – a man couldn’t describe a face he didn’t see, but the hair, spotted anywhere on the streets of London, would be unmistakable.
“Is there anything else you can tell me about the redheaded woman, Mr. Carrigan? Any detail, no matter how small?”
“Well, I don’t know how important a thing this is, but the woman came in a carriage with a crest on it. She seemed in a hurry too, as though it were just one stop of many that she had to make.”
“Did you, by chance, recognize the crest?” That seemed a foolish thing for the woman to do – to travel in an identifiable conveyance seemed the height of carelessness for one so seemingly clever.
“I did not. It was a letter M entwined around a stag’s horns.”
The man couldn’t see a female face in front of him, but he could identify the design of a crest on a carriage outside his building? It didn’t bear examination. Mr. Carrigan began rattling the keys in his pocket, his patience for my questions clearly at an end.
“Thank you so much for your time, Mr. Carrigan. I bid you a good day.”
Jess slipped up next to me as I walked away from the building. “’E was a right old codger, wasn’t ‘e?”
“I very nearly launched into a lecture on the rights of women, but I opted to seek information from him instead.”
She shrugged. “Would’ve been wasted breath. The information ye got was good and worth the bitten tongue.”
“Agreed. We need to find that crest.” I turned south and aimed us toward Queen Victoria Street. “I’ve never had occasion to visit the College of Arms. This should be interesting.”
“What’s the College of Arms?” Jess asked.
“It is technically part of the queen’s household, though it has a corporate charter and is overseen by the Duke of Norfolk. It maintains the records for all of the aristocracy of England, Wales, and Ireland. The library in the College of Arms houses every coat of arms, and the heralds who work there have been keeping genealogies and records for every noble family since the time of King Richard III.”
“So the toffs with titles ‘ave someone else keepin’ their family books?”
I nodded. “Probably only the male descendants though, since most hereditary titles can only pass through the men.”
Jess scoffed. “Doesn’t foster much need for daughters, does it?”
“It would rather simplify things if titles could be bestowed on the person best-suited to the duties rather than by virtue of birth order and gender.” I smirked and added, “Though it’s probably not wise to say so out loud on my way into the College of Arms.”
Jess looked up at the imposing, U-shaped brick building at which we’d arrived. She scanned the façade quickly, and then tapped my arm and gestured to one wing. “There’s a door for the ‘elp. I’ll go look for a way into the storage room in case we need it later?”
I nodded. “We’ll meet back here in one hour.”
She peeled off toward the service door in the east wing, and I marched resolutely through the gates to the front door. The reception room was paneled in beautiful wood and looked as though it had remained unchanged for two hundred years. An older man with a young one, whom I presumed to be father and son, stood near one wall speaking quietly amongst themselves. A portly young man, a few years older than I, entered the room and greeted me with a smile.
“How can I help you, sir?” he said to me brightly.
The trepidation I’d felt about asking to search the records of the peerage loosened its hold on my voice, and I matched my smile to his.
“A coat of arms was described to me, and I would like to discover to whom it belongs. How would I go about doing so?”
“I’d be happy to provide you with the scrolls Mr.—”
“Devereux.”
He shook my hand. “Mr. Devereux. I’m Percy Hunt, and it is my pleasure to serve here as an archivist. Would that be Archer Devereux?”
The question startled me with its unexpectedness. “No, it’s Ringo.”
I wasn’t normally in the habit of giving my first name, and I’d never before encountered someone who had mistaken me for Saira’s husband. Archer Devereux had given me his last name as my own, but he had left London some months before and was currently somewhere in the north of England. I didn’t have more than a moment to consider the coincidence that Percy knew my name though, because he was moving toward a staircase at the rear of the building.
“Come, Mr. Devereux, I’ll take you upstairs to a work room and bring some reference books for you to study.”
He led me up the winding steps, past several portraits of men I assumed must have been past heralds, to the third floor. The wood creaked beneath our feet as we moved down a long hallway lined with doors. Percy knocked lightly on a door. When there was no answer, he opened it and peered inside. A table and two chairs were the only furniture, with a large gaslamp suspended overhead.
“Please make yourself comfortable. I shall return in just a few minutes with the books of crests.”
I had just taken myself on a thorough tour of the room’s shelves, cabinets, and one hidden cubby under the table in which a forty-year-old half-finished love letter to Lady Dorothy lay forgotten, when Percy knocked lightly and opened the door. He carried two large, heavy, leather-bound books in his arms, which he maneuvered through the doorway and onto the table. He was huffing slightly, but the smile remained a regular part of his expression.
“There you go, Mr. Devereux. That should keep you busy for the next several hours, unless you get lucky and the crest you seek is one of the old families.”
“They’re arranged chronologically then?” I asked, eyeing the thick books with reluctance.
He grimaced charmingly. “Yes, I’m sorry. These books are merely the registers of the coats of arms. There was no other way to record them than in order of creation. Now if you had come in with a family name seeking the accompanying crest, that would be recorded in a different volume altogether.”
“The letter M is part of the design. Might that help?” I asked.
Percy thought for a moment. “I’ll just nip down and pull the alphabetically ordered book for the M’s then. I’ll be only another moment.”
Five minutes later he was back, with a sheen of sweat over his brow and a decided wheeze. “Here you go – the M’s.” He placed another, slimmer volume on the table, and then leaned against it to catch his breath.
“I truly appreciate your help, Mr. Hunt. Thank you so much.”
“Of course, Mr. Devereux. It is my pleasure. I’ve taken the liberty of recording the time and date of your visit in the logs of the coats of arms registers. When you are finished, you may leave them on the table and show yourself out. I shall return them to their place in the library after you’ve gone. If you are in need of any copies, you may bookmark those pages and I will have copies sent around to Grayson House.”
My eyebrows jumped. “You know where I live?”
Percy winked as he wiped the sweat from his forehead. “We’re archivists, Mr. Devereux. Every listing in our archives includes all known information, including homes, businesses, and families.”
I struggled to maintain my composure at such an intriguing resource. “I had no idea that I was listed in your archives.”
Percy looked incredulous. “Half-brother to Archer Devereux and fifth in line to the dukedom? Of course you are recorded at the College of Arms.”
I think I managed to keep a neutral expression on my face, though I actually felt like laughing – or crying – I wasn’t quite sure which. “Right. Of course,” I murmured.
“Well then, I’ll leave you to your search.”
Percy closed the door softly behind him and walked away down the hall toward the stairs. I was utterly impressed with, and completely flummoxed by, the results of his quick investigation of me. Apparently, the records in the College of Arms could be very useful if ever I were to need information on the nobility. Fifth in line, indeed. I snorted to myself and pulled the “M” book toward me.
There was a scratch at the door, as if a mouse were in the walls. “Come in, Jess,” I said quietly.
She slipped into the room and closed the door before I’d even finished saying the words.
She tossed her head in the direction of the stairs. “’E looked ye up in ‘is big records book. I ‘eard ‘im talkin’ to another toff, askin’ if ‘e knew when yer name ‘ad been added. The other one said Archer Devereux added ‘is brother a few months ago, and they just assumed ye must be the acknowledged get from the wrong side of the sheets.”
Archer had added my name to the records, obviously. No one else could have, but the realization that he had done this without ever telling me was like discovering that Santa Clause was real and coming to dinner.
“You found the archives themselves?” I finally asked, when I’d gotten past the rather large frog that had taken up residence in my throat.
She grinned. “Wasn’t ‘ard to find. There aren’t many people about either, so if ye ever need a book off the record …”
I shook my head at her with a smile. “Although my instinct is to sneak, I’ve learned it’s generally much easier and safer to go in through the front door.”
She snorted. “When ye’re big, and rich, and a bloke – sure.”
“Fair point.”
I handed her one of the two coats of arms books. “Are your hands clean?” I asked.
She made a face at me and held up her hands for inspection. They were, in fact, very clean.
“We’re lookin’ for an M wound ‘round stags ‘orns, yeah?”
“Right.” I opened the book of M-names and began turning the vellum pages. The book was beautifully illustrated with fine, hand-painted crests and calligraphy-inscribed family information. The first Duke of Marlborough, for example, had been John Churchill in the late 17th century, whose father, Winston Churchill was the ancestor and namesake of the man who would be prime minister in forty years. Marlborough’s sister, Arabella, had been mistress to King James II and mother to four of his children. I could get lost in a book like this for hours.
A scant one hour later, after countless pages of beautifully intricate artwork, and far more secrets about the nobility than most people realized could be found in the pages of a genealogical book, I found it.
“Morcar,” I said, more loudly than I intended to. I was surprised to see that name, but there was the beautifully curved M wrapped around the horns of a stag.
“The countess?” Jess asked, looking up from her book.
“The carbuncle.” I confirmed.
We stared at each other for a long moment before I rubbed my eyes and exhaled. “I think we need Conan Doyle.”