He bent next to her but didn’t bother to inspect her wounds. He grabbed her shoulder instead. “Where were you going?” he demanded. “You veered off the road to London. If not to Scotland Yard, where?”
“Montgomery, she’s dying!”
He ignored me and fixated on Valentina instead, but she just coughed more blood, and then let out a joyless laugh. “You might have stopped me, but I’m not alone. Someone is very desperate to find you, Miss Moreau. All of you.”
“Who were you going to meet with?” Montgomery demanded.
She convulsed once, twice, her lips stained with blood, and then she sagged against the wreckage.
I put a hand over my mouth. “She’s dead.”
Balthazar removed his cap out of respect. Montgomery leaned over, letting his loose hair hide his face, and then he took a deep breath and tossed his hair back. He started going through her dress pockets.
“Montgomery, must you do that?”
“She was planning on meeting with someone. We need to know who. She was going to have you arrested, Juliet, so don’t spare her any sympathy.”
He dug through her coat pockets and came up with nothing, then picked up a leather satchel strapped across her chest. He freed the strap with his knife and pulled out a handful of telegrams.
“Let me see those,” I said.
There was a blank where a telegraph operator would normally type the address of the sender; Valentina must have sent it from Quick but specified that she wanted her location kept confidential.
Her first telegram read:
RESPONDING TO THE SPECIAL MEMORANDUM
KNOW WHEREABOUTS OF JULIET MOREAU
INQUIRING ABOUT REWARD
I felt a burst of panic. She’d already contacted Scotland Yard? I hurried to read the next few telegrams.
REWARD 10,000 POUNDS
PRIVATE INVESTIGATION DO NOT GO TO THE POLICE
WHERE IS YOUR LOCATION
I paused. A private investigation led by someone who didn’t want the police involved? That was even more frightening. Who would want to find us, without the police’s knowledge?
Valentina’s response read:
YOUR IDENTITY IS ANONYMOUS
SO IS MINE
WANT TO MEET TO DISCUSS TRADE
The final telegram read:
MEET AT STONEWALL INN NEAR INVERNESS
ON THE EVE OF SAINT TIMOTHY’S DAY
“What do they say?” Montgomery asked.
“It isn’t the police looking for us, at least not in any official capacity,” I said in confusion. “There’s someone else behind it all paying for the police to run a private investigation. She was going to Inverness to meet with them.”
“Not the police?” Montgomery said. “Then who? We killed all the King’s Club members who would have attempted any kind of retribution.”
“We must have overlooked someone,” I said. “Or perhaps a member of Dr. Hastings’s family.”
A crow cawed overhead and I jumped.
“We have to go to that inn near Inverness,” Montgomery said. “We have to know who she was meeting. It’s never going to end, not unless we know who’s behind this search.” He looked up at the sky, where the sun was getting low. “It will be another few hours to Inverness. If we don’t leave now, her contact might leave.”
“What about her body?” Balthazar asked. “It isn’t right to leave it here.”
“I know, my friend,” Montgomery said. “The Christian thing to do would be to bury it, but I’m not feeling very Christian at the moment, and time is running out. We can say a prayer for her on the road.”
Balthazar whined low in his throat, unhappy to leave her body amid the crows, but he followed Montgomery obediently back to our pony trap.
I rested a hand on Balthazar’s shoulder. “Someone will find her horse,” I said softly. “They’ll follow it back here and give her a proper burial.”
Montgomery cracked the reins. I looked overhead, where the sun was murky behind a film of thin winter clouds. A gust of cold wind chilled me and I took a swig of the brandy Elizabeth had given me. It sat in my belly, stickily warm, like a sense of foreboding.
Who were we going to encounter at that inn, I wondered, and why were they so desperate to find me?
INVERNESS WAS A MODERN industrial city, dirtier than London and substantially colder. The pony trap must have made for an odd sight, but no one spared us a glance as they huddled in their coats, hurrying to go about their day and head home. We stopped to ask directions and learned the Stonewall Inn was the city’s grandest hotel. As we pulled up and saw the palatial inn’s lights, my sense of foreboding grew.
“Whoever her contact is, he must have plenty of money to stay here,” I said.
“I should imagine so,” Montgomery said. “Paying off Scotland Yard doesn’t come cheap.”
We climbed out of the pony trap in an alleyway between two millinery shops. “We’ll have to be cautious,” Montgomery said. “They’re sure to recognize you if they see you, Juliet, and chances are our mysterious pursuer knows my identity as well. Perhaps even Balthazar’s.”
I peeked around the edge of the shop at the gentleman and ladies climbing out of their carriages in front of the inn. All of them were dressed in finery, a stark contrast to our drab northern clothes. “I have an idea,” I said. “There’s more than one way to blend in. Balthazar, you stay here with the horse and be ready to make our escape. Montgomery, come with me.”
We silently climbed the inn’s garden gate and slipped into the hotel’s rear entrance, where grocers were unloading boxes of cabbage. I signaled for Montgomery to pick up a box so it looked like we belonged there. We entered the kitchen, which was in the midst of hectic preparations for the feast of St. Timothy’s. That was fortunate for us—no one gave us a second glance.
I tugged my hair lose from its chignon and pulled it back into a simple braid, then tapped the shoulder of the youngest-looking kitchen girl. “I’m supposed to start today, but they haven’t given me my uniform yet.”
The girl barely glanced at me as she strained under a casserole dish. “Second door there,” she said, jerking her chin toward a hallway. “And hurry, we need all the help we can get.”
I grabbed Montgomery and pulled him down the hallway into the linen room. He already wore dark pants, so all he needed was a crisp white serving shirt and an apron. I changed into a kitchen maid’s dress.
“Trust me, this will work,” I said, fumbling with the apron ties. “I spent years as a maid. No one makes eye contact with you. You might as well not even exist.”