Charles put his pipe back in his pocket, unlit. “And how about Vladimir Rasnokov?” he asked. “Is he one of yours?”
Wells blew out a stream of smoke. “Now, Charles,” he said in a tone of mild rebuke. “You know the rules as well as I do. I can’t discuss personnel matters, even with you, old boy.”
Charles coughed apologetically. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind putting in a call to Fritz Ponsonby, then. He offered to make introductions, but I didn’t like to trouble him.” He gestured at the telephone on Wells’s desk. “He may be reached directly. His number is-”
“Damn,” Wells said under his breath. “It’s like that, is it?”
“Yes,” Charles said regretfully, “it is like that, I’m afraid. I did not choose the assignment, as you might guess, but having been handed it, I am doing what I can. Special Branch has not made my job easier, I fear. An inspector named Ashcraft has complicated things quite unnecessarily. Bombs, it would seem, have been found everywhere, and three men are being held on explosives charges.”
Wells raised both eyebrows. “Ah, Ashcraft has been sticking his finger in it, has he? A rather obsessive fellow.” He made an elaborate gesture. “I suppose, then, that I had best answer your questions. What was it you wanted to know?”
“Rasnokov,” Charles repeated. “Is he one of yours?”
Wells sighed. “It’s a long story,” he said. “Will you have another cup?” Without waiting for an answer, he raised his voice in a bellow. “Dinsmore, more tea!”
A half-hour later, Charles was back in a cab and on his way to Sibley House.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Emile
Around eleven that same morning, Kate asked Richards to obtain a hansom for her. It was raining, and she wore a dark serge dress that would not show the splashes, a matching jacket and close-fitting hat, and carried with her an umbrella. She had at least two errands in mind, perhaps others, and planned to be out for most of the day.
Brantwood Street, as Kate soon discovered, lay to the south of Regent’s Park, in a decaying residential neighborhood, once quite fine, that had been invaded by pawnshops, markets, and the roving wooden push-barrows of fishmongers, butchers, and booksellers. She left the cab at the corner, put up her umbrella against the rain, and walked down the block until she found Number 12, a narrow, three-story house wedged between two identical houses. Its red-brick facade was blackened with a century of soot and grime, and there was a square of weed-grown garden behind a rusty metal fence that served mostly to catch the rubbish that blew across the sidewalk. The sky was dark and a fine mist dampened the pavements, adding to the pervasive gloom that seemed to have settled over the street.
Kate lowered her black umbrella, climbed the stone steps, and confronted a door inset with a large oval of beveled glass, curtained on the inside to screen the view from the street. To the right of the door was a painted wooden sign that announced that CLEAN ROOMS TO LET were AVAILABLE WITHIN, GENTLEMEN ONLY. Kate knocked on the door then, hearing no answer, knocked again, with a greater authority. She was rewarded with the sight of the tattered curtain slightly pulled to one side, and a large brown eye peering out.
A bolt was drawn, a chain rattled, and the door opened an inch. “Can’t yer read the sign?” a woman demanded in a high, cracked voice. “Gentlemen only.”
“I’ve not come about a room,” Kate said quickly, inserting her umbrella into the opening to keep the woman from shutting the door.
“Then wot’re ye ’ere fer?” the woman asked.
Kate straightened her shoulders and said, “I’ve come to see Mrs. Conway, on a matter of some importance.”
“What matter?” the woman shrilled.
“It’s about her daughter, Charlotte.” Kate took a breath. “She was staying with me for a few days, but she’s disappeared. It’s important that I find her.”
“Move yer ’brella,” the woman said, “an’ I’ll go an’ see.”
Kate removed her umbrella and the door was shut. She stood quietly, while behind her on the street, a delivery boy on an old-fashioned penny-farthing bicycle pedaled past, whistling shrilly, while a small dog yapped ferociously at the wheels. On the other side of the street, a pot-hatted man in heavy gray tweeds loitered in the doorway of a small tobacconist shop. Kate turned to find him watching her, but when she returned his stare, he tipped his hat onto the back of his head, thrust his hands into his pockets, and sauntered nonchalantly down the street. Kate couldn’t help smiling, for the man looked so exactly like a Scotland Yard plain-clothes detective that he was almost a parody of himself.
The door opened again, and the old woman, now revealed to be short and leather-faced, her hunched shoulders draped with an old black lace shawl, beckoned Kate in. Taking the umbrella and poking it into an umbrella stand, she closed the door and locked it. Then, still saying nothing, she padded silently down a dusky hall, lit only by a flickering gas jet. The air was stale and stuffy, as if the place had not been aired in a decade, and a distinct odor of boiled cabbage seemed to arise like a malodorous fog out of some nether region.
Kate followed through the shadows, her curiosity mounting by the minute. She remembered that Mrs. Conway had published the Clarion until five years ago, when she fell ill and her daughter had taken it over-out of a sense of duty, Miss Conway had said. Kate frowned at that, thinking that Anarchists were not supposed to act out of a sense of duty, since they owed no obligation to anyone but themselves-at least, that’s how they were presented in A Girl Among the Anarchists. There was a puzzle here.
At the back of the house, Kate’s guide took a narrow, uncarpeted stair to the second floor. The odor of cabbage was overtaken by the odor of cigars, and Kate guessed that this floor contained the CLEAN ROOMS let to GENTLEMEN ONLY. They traversed the long hallway again, this time to the front of the house, until they came to a closed door. The old woman knocked three times, slowly, as if the knocks were a signal. At a brusque, “Come in,” she pushed the door open, shoved Kate into the room, and closed the door behind her.
Inside the room, Kate stood stock-still. The rest of the house had been dark and gloomy, the rooms she had glimpsed through open doors uncarpeted and sparsely furnished, with only the most utilitarian furniture. It had been chilly, too, so cold that despite her jacket, Kate had shivered. But this room, this boudoir, was suffocatingly hot and lavishly opulent, the walls hung with embroidered draperies, the floor covered with carpets, the canopied bed draped in billowy white gauze, the windows covered with blinds of the thinnest bamboo and draped with some exotic fabric in an Oriental pattern of pinks and golds. The air was heavy with the musky scent of sandalwood incense, and a canary spilled a melody from a gilded cage beside the window, which was banked with palms and exotic plants. Arranged in front of a fire in an ornate fireplace were two chairs upholstered in the same patterned fabric of pinks and golds, and a mauve-velvet divan. And seated on the divan, looking like some Oriental empress, was the largest woman Kate had ever seen.
“Well, don’t just stand and stare,” the woman snapped. Her voice was low and hoarse. “Come here and let me see you. What’s your name?”
Kate went to stand before the divan. “Kate Sheridan,” she said, trying to conceal her astonished consternation. The woman was grotesquely, preposterously obese, like the Japanese sumo wrestlers whose photographs Kate had seen. Her pale flesh ballooned shapelessly, her arms were like stuffed pillows, and her puffed cheeks squeezed her eyes into narrow slits. But in those eyes there was a sharp, shrewd look, more than a little mad in its focused intensity, that made Kate shiver. The woman’s scanty reddish-brown hair hung in limp, old-fashioned curls around her ears, and she was draped from her chin to her ankles in a sort of Turkish caftan. She wore Moorish sandals on the swollen feet that were propped on a velvet footstool in front of her. She was smoking a cigarette in a long ivory holder, and daintily picking chocolates out of a box with fat fingers, each one of which bore a flashing ring. Kate knew that the woman must be Charlotte Conway’s mother, although whatever physical resemblance there might have been between the two was buried in a mountain of flesh.