Tasha Alexander - A Crimson Warning

I squeezed her hand. “Of course not. But he may not have realized there would be this sort of danger.”

Cordelia clutched the case to her chest and sat on the edge of her bed, tears streaming down her face. “I miss him so very much.”

I longed to be able to erase her pain.

She set down the box, ran her hand over its smooth top, the surface of which was inlaid with an elaborate pattern of mother-of-pearl, and then unlocked it with a slim key. It opened with a click and she pushed up the lid. Inside were several small boxes and a bundle of letters. The boxes contained items she’d collected while on walks with her fiancé: brittle pressed flowers, a dried leaf that hadn’t lost its bright autumnal red, and a soft, white feather. She didn’t meet my eyes when she reached for the letters.

“Do you need to read them?” Her cheeks flushed red.

“I don’t want to,” I said, frowning. “It doesn’t feel right. But it would be worse if we missed something.”

With a sigh, she passed them to me.

“I promise you I shall keep these absolutely private,” I said.

“Unless you discover something that matters.”

“If we discover something of significance, I shall copy out only the pertinent information. It can’t be anything obvious, or you would have already noticed it. No one should have to see the actual letters.”

“Just the decoding of a code?” she asked.

“If we’re lucky enough to find one.”

We were not so lucky. Mr. Dillman’s letters revealed him to have a kind heart, an occasional ear for poetry, and a touching affection for his fiancée, but nothing suggested he had embedded mysterious messages in them. One of them I read repeatedly, as its postscript implored his fiancée to keep it always, but I could pull nothing useful from it. I asked Cordelia if anything about it stood out to her, but she only sighed and shook her head. The other item left in the box was a slim guide to objects in the British Museum.

“Did you go there together?” I asked, holding up the volume. The museum was one of my favorite places on earth. As a little girl, wandering through the galleries with my father, I used to wish I could run away and live there. As an adult, I’d become a patron of the institution and spent countless hours studying objects in its collections.

“Innumerable times,” she said. “When the weather was not good enough to sit in the park, we’d go there instead. Michael preferred it, in fact. We used to play a game, a scavenger hunt of sorts. He’d give me two clues. One was the beginning of an artifact’s museum number, and the other revealed something about it, like what it was made of, or a quote that was pertinent in some way. I’d comb through the galleries until I found the answer.”

“That must have been difficult.”

“Not always,” she said. “Many of the catalog numbers start with the initials of the department. And once I was in the right gallery, I could generally home in on what he’d selected, but that wasn’t the end of it. Once I’d found the proper artifact, I’d have to figure out how it was connected to a book in my father’s library. So when we’d come home, I’d search until I found the book, and either in it or behind it, there would be a little treat.”

“Is there any chance, Cordelia, that Mr. Dillman left a last set of clues for you?” I asked. “Perhaps in a manner more oblique than usual?”

“I honestly don’t think he did,” she said. “I would have recognized clues at once, no matter how oblique he tried to be.”

“Do you think it’s possible he might have hidden something in the books without leaving a clue? Would he have thought you’d know to look if something happened to him?”

“He might have done,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

We went downstairs and spoke to her father. Mr. Dalton immediately ordered his staff to pull down the books from his library shelves.

“We can’t risk missing something,” he said, joining the servants in their work, as did Cordelia and I. We removed every volume and leafed through each in case something was inside. Once they were empty, we inspected the shelves for anything that might have been hidden on them.

But we turned up nothing. Defeated, I started for home, taking a detour to Mr. Dillman’s house in St. James near Green Park. I knocked on the door and was greeted by a tall butler dressed in impeccable mourning livery.

“Madam?” he asked.

“I’m Lady Emily Hargreaves, a friend of Miss Dalton’s,” I said. “And, as you can imagine, I am deeply concerned about all that’s happened. I wonder if you can help me? Miss Dalton is in danger—from the same people who killed Mr. Dillman. They believe, erroneously, that she’s in possession of some information he had. If you could assist me in finding it, we could give it to Scotland Yard and Miss Dalton would be safe to grieve in peace.”

“What sort of information?”

He seemed an honest, forthright man, and met my eyes with an even stare. “I’ve not the slightest idea,” I said. “But I’d like to think, between the two of us, we’d recognize the sort of thing that could inspire a man to murder.”

He nodded. “Mr. Dillman was a good man and an excellent master. I can’t do anything much for him now. But if you think this would help bring his killer to justice…”

“I can’t promise you anything, but we can certainly try.”

“Why are you here instead of your husband?” he asked.

This surprised me. “My husband?”

“I’ve read of his many accomplishments and am honored to meet his wife,” he said. “I know you were wounded in the line of duty, and that your investigative skills are to be admired as well.”

I blushed. Several of the papers had covered the story of our various exploits, but I’d not before encountered someone who’d read them and considered my role praiseworthy.

“You couldn’t possibly have thought I would even consider your request if I didn’t know of the reputation of the Hargreaveses,” he said.

I was rather pleased to learn I had a reputation. This sort of a reputation, at any rate. But I was also embarrassed. I’d expected to be able to talk my way into the house, because I had assumed a servant could be easily persuaded by a person of my rank. Yet here I stood, speaking to a man who judged me by my accomplishments rather than by my father’s title or my husband’s fortune.

“Thank you,” I said. “It honors me more than you can imagine to have earned your respect.”

“Please, come inside.” I followed him through a wide marble corridor and then into a dark room. This was another house whose curtains remained closed in deference to mourning. “This was Mr. Dillman’s study.” He lit a lamp and stepped back.

The room was smaller than I would have expected. Red silk covered the walls in a wide, geometric pattern. Walnut bookshelves rose a third of the way to the ceiling along one side. Across the room from them row after row of portraits hung from brass chains attached to long, matching rails, which stretched the length and height of the wall. Three sets of French doors would have provided a spectacular view of the park if their curtains were pulled back, and an elegant, neoclassical desk filled one corner. I motioned to it.

“Shall we start here?” I crossed the room and pulled open the desk’s center drawer.

“You’ll want these, too.” The butler reached down a neat stack of leather-bound notebooks from the top of a bookshelf. “All his business and personal records.”

“Thank you.” I sat down and started to pore over the notebooks. Most of them were ledgers, filled with financial transactions, and some Mr. Dillman had filled with sketches of flowers, birds, and other wildlife. Remembering Cordelia’s treasures, I wondered if he’d had the habit of sketching while they were sitting in the park. The last in the pile was harder to decipher. The first pages contained lists of bills that had gone before Parliament, with numbers and symbols scrawled next to each of them. Following that were page after page of what appeared to be personal notations—reminders of things Mr. Dillman needed to do. All of them had been crossed out save the final seven. The remainder of the book was blank.