A Restless Truth (The Last Binding #2)

Chapter 2

2

Maud knew Mrs. Navenby was dead as soon as she opened the door.

She wasn’t sure how she knew, precisely. She’d never been in the same room as a corpse before. It was not a situation that a baronet’s daughter might frequently expect to encounter in the course of her life.

Nevertheless, certainty hit her like a pail of flung water.

Mrs. Navenby lay sprawled on the floor. Her eyes were open and the look on her waxy, unmoving face was not something that Maud wanted to look at for more than a few seconds.

“Oh my heavens, ” Maud heard herself squeak, and sagged back against the door.

She felt a ludicrous pang of disappointment. Firstly, that she had squeaked . Secondly, that she hadn’t seized the opportunity to say Fuck . She’d never been game enough on any lesser occasion, and surely this was the most obscenity-deserving situation she would ever find herself in.

“ Whaaaat? ” said Dorian.

A giggle like a mouthful of vinegared wine spilled from Maud.

“My thoughts exactly,” she told the parrot, and that broke the cold bind that held her paralysed against the door.

Maud flung herself across the room. She promptly tripped and caught herself on one knee as the floor shrugged and one shoe caught in her skirt. Her sea legs hadn’t returned yet, and the captain had told them to expect a choppy start to the voyage.

She felt for a pulse. She had no idea if she was feeling in the correct place. There were no marks on the visible skin, and no blood—Maud winced, feeling gingerly at the back of the dead woman’s head—in the hair. She could have died of a sudden apoplexy. Her heart could have given out.

But a few hours ago, Mrs. Navenby had been hale and well. And magic didn’t have to leave marks when it killed.

At a Suffragette meeting in London, Maud had once met a Miss Harlow, who was studying medicine at the Sorbonne and who told vivid tales of gory injuries and learning anatomy from examining the dead. Maud, much as she longed to attend university, did not think her stomach was lined with the exact sort of grit required of a physician. Miss Harlow had passed around a human skull. Maud had run her fingers along the sockets of the eyes and wondered what colour those eyes had been in life, and then she’d felt queasy and passed the skull on to Liza.

And when her parents died, it was in a motorcar accident. There had been no question of Maud being asked to identify the bodies. Robin had done that, while Maud shut herself in her bedroom so that nobody would see her failing to cry. All their lives Robin had done the unpleasant things so that Maud didn’t have to worry about them. All their lives he’d protected her and had never failed her.

And now she’d failed him, at the one enormous vital thing she’d sworn to him that she could handle.

Mrs. Navenby was dead, and that meant someone on this ship knew that Mrs. Navenby had an object of immense and dangerous potential power in her possession, and they wanted it.

The old woman had refused to tell Maud which of her belongings was her piece of the spell-made-solid known as the Last Contract. Safer that way, she’d said, in her snappish no-argument tones.

And now Maud had a corpse at her feet and a full six days of the Atlantic crossing ahead of her, trapped on a boat with at least one magician willing to kill, when Maud had no magic of her own and no idea what she was protecting, or even if it had already been taken—

Maud rubbed her hands over her face. Stupid, stupid.

She made herself focus as she looked around the room. She’d partly unpacked Mrs. Navenby’s luggage while they were still in the harbour. The room didn’t look as though it had been searched, but enough things stood half-open that it would be hard to tell.

Maud inspected the dresser through a pinkly acidic pulse of panic. Boxes of brooches and rings. Knickknacks. What was missing? Anything? There was a parlour game: one stared at a tray of objects before it was taken away, adjusted, and placed back in front of one’s eyes. Some things added. Some things removed.

Robin was excellent at that game. Maud was… not.

But she’d set everything out on the dresser that very day, and then spent a good quarter hour adjusting things according to the old woman’s finicky taste, and—

The mirror. There had been a silver hand mirror in a matching set with a hairbrush, both heavy and ornate. They were missing.

Recognition calmed Maud’s heartbeat. She managed to pick out some more missing things: a bangle of beaten silver featuring elephants in an Indian design. A small silver bottle like a gentleman’s hip flask, which contained one of Mrs. Navenby’s favoured scents.

Silver. Silver. The first piece of the contract to be recovered—and then lost—by Robin and his partner, Edwin, had been three silver rings that became a single silver coin. Maud hadn’t asked if the cup, Mrs. Navenby’s piece, was made of the same substance.

Silver.

A single glance confirmed what had prickled at the back of Maud’s mind when she was lifting the corpse’s head to feel for blood. The locket was gone. Heavy and oval-shaped with a design of sunflowers on the front, Maud had never seen Mrs. Navenby without it hanging on a chain from her neck. She had noted the woman’s attachment to it and had already begun to form some private suspicions.

So. A few silver items missing, and plenty of valuable jewels left in plain sight.

It was murder, and by someone who knew precisely what they were looking for.

“Fuck,” said Maud.

“ Fuck, ” agreed Dorian.

“Are you sure we can’t fetch you some water, Miss Cutler?” asked the master-at-arms. “Or a cup of tea?”

“No, thank you, Mr. Berry.” Maud smiled weakly. “But it’s so kind of you to offer.”

The head of security for the Lyric had a sturdy figure and a kind face with a reddish moustache that was doing its best to engulf his upper lip, as though he’d inherited it from a larger relative and was waiting to grow into it. He eyed Maud with the familiar alarm of a man unsure if the girl in front of him was about to burst into tears.

He decided to err on the side of assuming that Maud was too upset and too feminine to know what she needed, and directed the nearest steward to bring a cup of tea at once.

Maud concentrated on keeping her expression neutral. “What will happen to her now?”

“I dare say it may seem morbid to a young thing like you, Miss Cutler, but the White Star Line is well prepared for tragic occurrences of this nature. This isn’t the first time one of our elderly guests has passed out of the mortal world and into a better one during the course of the voyage.” Mr. Berry touched the point between his collarbones where a cross might sit on a chain beneath his shirt and uniform jacket. “We’ll see to it she’s treated with respect, and kept where she won’t—forgive me—spoil.”

“Oh, goodness. I hadn’t thought of that.” Maud bit her tongue on asking if they had a secondary ice room set aside specifically for dead bodies, and if not, if the first-class passengers were aware that the ice used for their desserts was also being turned to such a purpose. Mrs. Navenby would have found that amusing.

“Was her passing… very unexpected?”

As a matter of principle, Maud hated to lie. She was aware that to a young woman currently travelling under an assumed name and about to embark on an undercover detective investigation, this principle was as much use as a pincushion in a boxing ring.

Nevertheless. The truth was a flexible reed of a thing. One could weave it into all sorts of shapes, depending on what one needed it to be.

What Maud needed was for nobody else to be conducting a murder-robbery investigation in any official capacity. That would stir up alarm and get in her way and put Maud’s enemies—who at this moment were likely congratulating themselves on their success—on their guard.

Besides: Maud read detective stories. She had discovered the body; if there was a whiff of foul play in the air, she would be questioned, and she was, after all, travelling under an assumed name. If someone started doing inconvenient things like telegraphing back to New York or on to London with enquiries, there was a risk of said someone discovering that Mrs. Navenby’s distant and impoverished cousin, Miss Maud Cutler, was a complete fabrication.

“Mrs. Navenby was… very aware of her age. She wanted to come home, to England, as a matter of some urgency.”

Mr. Berry nodded. He’d seen illness in the shape of those sentences, and it suited him.

“Even so.” He patted Maud’s shoulder. “No matter how expected, losing those close to us is always a blow.”

Maud’s eyes filled with hot tears. It was a waste. It was a bloody stupid waste, and she had failed her brother, and Mrs. Navenby should be alive. People should not be allowed to kill other people simply because they got in their way, as if they were no more than things .

The master-at-arms opened his mouth and was interrupted by an outraged squawk. The returning steward had bumped Dorian’s cage in passing. Everyone present winced. Dorian gave another squawk, this one softer, and went to the floor of the cage to plunge his head indignantly into his water bowl.

“Mrs. Navenby was very attached to her bird,” said Maud in apology.

“Charming creature, I’m sure,” said Mr. Berry. “Now, perhaps you’d like to retire to your own room and have a lie-down. I’m sure we can arrange—ah, there we are, the tea. Rogers, send word to the kitchens that Miss Cutler will take her meals in her cabin for the next few days.”

“No,” said Maud quickly.

Eyebrows rose. To cover, Maud took a fortifying sip of the tea. Now she needed to truth-weave her way out of any expectation that she would stay languishing in her room when what she needed was to be out looking for answers. And murderers. And the stolen piece of the Last Contract.

“That is—thank you for your concern, but I think some bright, cheerful company will do me good. Distract me. I must confess, Mr. Berry, I didn’t know Mrs. Navenby very well. I’d spent only a short time as her companion, and she was not the easiest of employers.” Maud gazed down into the saucer, where some tea had sloshed. She called up not Mrs. Navenby’s short temper and acerbic tongue, but a memory of her own mother. Whose tongue had never been anything but sweet, even as the words that dripped from it settled in your mind and choked there.

Maud said, “You must think me awfully callous.”

“Not at all,” said Mr. Berry at once, and the hovering steward made a distressed noise of assent. Maud peeked up at him from beneath her lashes. Rogers was not much older than herself, with a prominent neck and a spotted chin, and he turned pink when he met her eyes.

“Thank you both so much,” she said meekly. “I shall go and lie down until dinner.”

Her adjoining room was smaller than the main chamber, with a narrow bed tucked against the wall and less distinguished furnishings. Many of the staterooms had such arrangements, for families with children or those travelling with personal servants. Maud’s own role of companion was a step up from servant, but not by much.

She closed the door between the rooms and leaned against it. In the sudden quiet, the lack of eyes upon her, the sway of the ship found her again. This time Maud planted her shoes and imagined herself an anchor lodged in the sand of the seabed, among the weeds.

She had failed. She was alone. But she would not return home to her brother, in six days’ time, and have that be the story she told him.

Maud went to her trunk and retrieved the notebook from where it was wedged between two books near the bottom. She flicked through the pages scattered with short paragraphs in Robin’s careless writing, with occasional annotations in Edwin’s neater hand. At the centre of the book was a sketch of a woman’s face: a long nose and a decided chin, the fairness of her hair obvious in the dearth of pencil lines in the top half of the page.

There were some advantages when one’s older brother had visions of the future.

Maud grasped her anchorness. She would make things right. She would find the magician—or magicians—on this ship and discover which of them had killed Mrs. Navenby. She would get those stolen objects back, every one of them. She would find those people who didn’t yet know that they were her allies, and she would enlist their help.

And she would step off the ship in Southampton in triumph, and Robin would be proud of her, and it would be the first important and worthwhile thing that Maud Blyth, baronet’s daughter and baronet’s sister, would have done in her entire short useless life.