At dusk the wharf buildings became great blotters sipping ink from the street. Night engulfed their lower stories but couldn’t yet reach the rooflines that leapt into the indigo sky.
Tom moved as naturally in darkness as in daylight. He unlocked the warehouse and led me, swiftly and silently, through the black maze of storage to the secret interior door. In the laboratory he lit a lantern and held it aloft. Then he cursed. He plucked something from the counter, opened a cabinet beneath, and cursed again.
“W-what is it?” I bent to look, but he caught my waist to hold me back. On the shelf was a small glass jar filled with a pale yellow syrup.
“You wanted proof ? Here it is, then.” He opened his palm and showed me a short copper cylinder with a wax seal. A length of cotton wicking was coiled round it. “This is a blast cap, packed with fulminate of mercury. When it meets a spark it burns in an instant, hot as lightning.
“And that”—he pointed to the jar of syrup, one arm still protectively across my torso—“is enough nitroglycerin to send half the city up in flames. Thornfax lost an entire ship last year to a single ounce.” He shook his head in disgust. “How easily I was gulled into believing they were finished with this!”
“This is what D-Daisy carried on the t-train?”
Tom nodded grimly. “Watts mixes it with clay to make it more stable, but it’s still unpredictable as hell.” He set the lantern on a hook and gingerly closed the cupboard door. “My greatest fear was that it would find a spark from somewhere other than my ignition device before Daisy was safely away. The fear was misplaced, of course. It was Thornfax I should have feared all along.”
I looked round the lab. The low light flickered across the marble and steel surfaces, illuminating the rows of apothecary bottles like votives in a cathedral. Except for the jar of syrup concealed in the cabinet, the room was perfectly orderly and benign. And couldn’t there be a plausible explanation even for the explosive oil? Nitroglycerin was being tested as a treatment for heart patients, after all; I’d heard Daniel discussing it with his colleagues. Tom was wrong, I thought. What we’d discovered was no proof—at least none that would incriminate Mr. Thornfax.
“Records,” I said. “Where is Dr. D-Dewhurst’s journal?”
Wary of the explosive, Tom had me stand in the doorway while he made a search. The medical diary was gone, and there were no other papers or records in the room.
“Mr. Thornfax’s d-desk,” I remembered. “The drawers!”
I held the lantern while Tom took out his wallet of picks and crouched over the lock. It took nearly fifteen minutes of careful effort, and then we found only duty bills, sales slips, and banknotes. The fact that Mr. Thornfax was importing opium and profiting enormously at the Mincing Lane auctions was not in dispute, however. We needed something more, something to tie him directly to the explosions.
Tom opened the second drawer more quickly. I marvelled, watching him probe with the picks, at how his deft fingers had learned, and were now remembering, the delicate mechanism of the lock.
In this drawer was a box of fresh stationery. I knew at once what it was, and my hand trembled as I lifted the top sheet of paper. White, with a fine black border. A tiny black glove-print at the top.
Tom’s eyes widened, and he returned my smile. “Ah, Miss Luck,” he said. “Clever girl.”
“Mr. Rampling. Just the man I hoped to see tonight!” Mr. Thornfax’s voice came from directly behind us. And behind him, their rumbling voices echoing in the dark warehouse, were Watts and Curtis.
Tom planted himself in front of me. I shut the drawer with my hip and crammed the sheet of paper into my coat pocket next to the music box. Then I turned to face my fiancé.
Mr. Thornfax’s face registered only the briefest flicker of surprise as he recognized me. He smiled, showing his white teeth. “Miss Somerville. What an amazing coincidence! I spent the last hour making excuses for your abrupt disappearance from our engagement party. And not ten minutes ago I had the most heated discussion with your brother-in-law. The good Dr. Dewhurst was under the impression that I’d spirited you off for some malevolent purpose and kept demanding to know where I was keeping you.”
He sounded so cordial and genteel that, when he held out his hand to me, my fright and shock moved me automatically to take it. Tom squared his stance to block me from stepping forward.
“Of course,” Mr. Thornfax went on, as though Tom weren’t present, “I assured him with blameless conscience that I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.”
With a single stride he closed the distance between us. Before I saw Mr. Thornfax lift his fist he’d already hit Tom—a hard punch to the jaw that sent Tom’s body thudding sideways into the panelled wall.
I cried out and knelt beside the slumped form, but Mr. Thornfax snatched my arm and hauled me back to my feet. “Curtis, help the poor lad up,” he said.
Tom was lifted. His head lolled, and Curtis yanked at his hair and slapped his cheek to rouse him.
“My darling Miss Somerville,” Mr. Thornfax crooned. “Would it bother you so terribly much to be parted from this boy? I hate to think you’ve developed an inappropriate affection for him.”
At that moment, I think, I could still have fooled Mr. Thornfax. I could still have managed to convince him I was in the warehouse by happenstance or innocent folly, and I could have calmed him, flattered, and cozened him into delaying whatever vengeance he was planning against Tom. Instead I panicked. “D-don’t hurt him!” I cried. “He didn’t want to c-cross you. He acted only to s-save D-Daisy’s life!”
Mr. Thornfax laughed, and the sound raised gooseflesh across my arms. “Ah, yes. Daisy. The Juliet to his Romeo, isn’t that right, Rampling? I am sorry that your efforts to save your sweet little dope-fiend failed so miserably.”
“How dare you!” I said. “You m-m-murderer!”
“Leo, stop,” Tom begged. He turned to Mr. Thornfax, hands raised. “Please, milord. She has nothing to do with any of it.”
“‘Leo,’ is she? You are on familiar terms.” He turned to Watts and Curtis. “I believe we’ve found our abductor and seducer, gentlemen.”
I moaned with fear as Watts drew a revolver from under his coat. “Daniel w-will know where w-we are—” I tried.
“No, he will not know.” All pretense of civility suddenly dropped like a discarded cloak from Mr. Thornfax’s voice. He drew me tight to him, pressing until I struggled for breath. “And even if he suspects, he will not act. Dr. Dewhurst is a mild man who hates a confrontation more than anything.
“Curtis!” he barked. “Find some rope and bind her.” He hurled me into his desk chair.
“No! I am accountable, not her.” Tom tried to hold Curtis’s arm and was tossed backward against Watts, who wrapped him in a chokehold and pressed the gun to his ribs.
“Indeed you are accountable, as you declare with such chivalry,” Mr. Thornfax told him. “Fortunately you will have an excellent chance to make the account square.”
Curtis tied my wrists together behind me and knotted the rope to the chair. I was weeping now, trying to stifle the sounds so Tom would not feel even worse. Curtis did not look at me as he worked.
Mr. Thornfax gestured toward the laboratory next door. “Mr. Rampling. Watts here will supply you with the materials he has prepared. In forty minutes’ time he will be an eyewitness to a great catastrophe at the British Parliament. We will all witness it, for it will light up all London like Christmas!” Mr. Thornfax’s smile managed to convey boyish excitement as well as bloodthirstiness, and his men sniggered in response.
Watts shoved Tom toward the lab. A moment later they reappeared, and Tom had a fresh welt on his cheek. Watts held a newspaper-wrapped cylinder and the copper lightning cap with its coiled wick. “The cap were in his pocket, sir. He’d stole it already,” he reported.
Mr. Thornfax drew out his pocket knife.
“S-stop!” I cried.
He cast me a look of great disdain. “Miss Somerville, I intend no violence. I mean only to ensure against sabotage.” Taking the blast cap from Watts he unwound the wick and cut it to a length of four inches. Then he handed it back to Tom.
“He’ll be k-killed!” I said.
“He will have only seconds after he lights the fuse,” agreed Mr. Thornfax, “but he will die happy to have secured your safety. That is, so long as we see the evidence of his work within the specified forty minutes.”
“Lord Rosbury.” Tom stood straight, ignoring Watts’s gun. “No one will be inside Parliament tonight except guards and clerks. Shouldn’t we make more ... more of an impact if we wait until morning?”
Mr. Thornfax clasped Tom’s shoulder. “Ah, my boy. I do appreciate your strategizing on my behalf, truly. Your impulse to wait is wholly selfless, wholly in the service of the Black Glove, I am sure. And yet I am decided. Parliament, you see, is largely a symbolic target. ’Twill confirm suspicions that the very fabric of our society is threatened by the lawlessness of the opium gangs, and that passing the ban is the nation’s only hope.
“But your cause needn’t be so involved as all that. For your motivation I think you need only look there.” He jerked his chin toward me, and Tom’s tortured gaze followed. “She will be freed when it is done, and killed if it is not.”
Watts thrust the explosive and lightning cap into Tom’s hands. Then he took out his gun and prodded Tom into motion.
“See him as far as the Embankment, then take your distance,” Mr. Thornfax ordered.
When they had gone he turned to me and shook his head. “Your silence. That is all I ever wanted from you. Your pretty face, your respectable name, and your silence.”
“Who c-could be s-silent?” I sobbed, “when you are a m-m—”
Mr. Thornfax put his shoe to the corner of my chair and tipped it onto two legs so that I hovered, gasping and off balance. “Or in lieu of silence, the ravings of a madwoman,” he said. “Who would ever believe talk of conspiracy and murder coming from the lips of Mad Miss Mimic? I was perfectly safe, you see?” He released the chair, and my head snapped forward on my neck as the legs hit the floor. “But you thought of a way to interfere anyhow.”
Mr. Thornfax gripped the chair’s arms and leaned into my face. “I am going home, Miss Somerville. After Mr. Rampling has completed his task Curtis will take you home, too. Tomorrow I shall call early at Hastings House—frantic for your safety, having searched half the night and slept not a wink—and we shall be joyously reunited. In two weeks we shall be married. And then I think my new wife will be more than ready to begin a course of Dr. Dewhurst’s experimental medicine.”
He gripped my head with both hands and kissed me. I felt his hard breath in my throat. His lips and teeth pressed into my flesh until I tasted blood and whimpered with the pain. When he released me he was grinning, and his eyes gleamed with cold elation.
Mr. Thornfax gathered his hat and gloves, motioned Curtis into the warehouse, and closed the secret door. I heard their muffled voices and a single pair of footsteps receding. I was left a prisoner under guard.