A Cold Legacy (The Madman's Daughter 3)

We ran by another door with a light glowing behind it and I paused. “Which room is this?”

“Your friend in the chains. He used to say your name in his sleep. Now he calls for Miss Lucy. She visits him late at night even though he’s sick and never knows she’s there. She stole the key from Valentina.”

I started. Had Hensley been spying on all of us? But then I disregarded my worry. He was only a child, and surely it was just innocent fun. I followed him down a passageway so narrow I had to twist to pass, and at last he pointed to another metal grate. I slid the viewing panel back, peeking within, and found a plain wooden room with a metal bed and dresser. A servant’s room, one of the bigger ones with windows on two sides. Clothing was strewn about haphazardly. One long white glove rested on the floor.

“This is Valentina’s room?” I asked.

He nodded.

I pushed on the latch until it opened. The hinges had to be ancient but didn’t groan as I opened them—they’d been freshly oiled. Valentina must have been more familiar with the passageways than she let on.

I crawled through the small fireplace and came out into her bedroom. Hensley followed me in, dusting off his little hands. There was a half-open trunk in the corner filled with belongings. I took a step toward it. At the same time, the bedroom doorknob jiggled from the other side, and I jumped.

“Juliet?” Montgomery’s voice came from the far side of the door. “Did you make it inside?”

“Yes,” I called back, and tried the door. “I’m with Hensley. I can’t unlock the door from this side either without a key.”

“Carlyle’s here. We’re going to remove the hinges. Do you see any sign of what happened to her?”

I glanced back at the trunk, taking another step closer. Hensley wandered to the side table and opened a box that let out the rich tobacco smell of her Woodbine cigarettes.

“When did you last see her, Hensley?” I asked as I knelt next to the trunk.

“After dinner night before last. She was angry, and I was worried she’d hurt my rat so I hid from her. She was writing in a book. And crying. And saying words Mother says we mustn’t say.”

The trunk held all manner of strange belongings a maid shouldn’t have, even one with as high a position as Valentina. A holster for a pistol—though the firearm itself was missing. Dozens of leather coin sacks, also now empty of money.

At the door, a hammer pounded as Montgomery and Carlyle tried to remove the hinges.

“There,” Hensley said, pointing into the trunk. “That’s the book she was always writing in.”

I took out a small leather-bound book. A journal, though a handful of pages had been ripped out. The few that remained were dated months ago, and chronicled Valentina’s progress at educating the younger girls and some of her plans for improving the efficiency of various projects. And then the rest of the pages were torn out in an abrupt fury. I checked the date of the last entry: the day before I arrived at Ballentyne.

“Hensley,” I called, feeling uneasy, “Check the fireplace, will you? See if you can tell if any papers have been burned.”

He poked his little fingers eagerly through the ash and came back with a few curled edges of charred paper that matched the rest of the journal. “Just a few scraps. All the bits with writing burned.”

I ran my lip between the hard edge of my teeth, thinking. I flipped back to the last page of the journal, and then the fresh one after that part she’d ripped out. In the light from the window, I could make out faint grooves. When I ran my fingers over them, I got an idea.

“Hensley, fetch some charcoal from the fireplace.” I hurried to the desk, where I snatched up a thin piece of paper and lay it over the blank journal page. Hensley handed me a piece of broken charcoal, and I started running the flat edge along the paper. “Have you ever taken a rubbing of a gravestone?” I asked him. “The charcoal will mark the paper but leave a blank where the lettering is. I think we can use the same principle here.”

He watched as, like magic, an imprint of her last words appeared on the paper. Valentina had clearly been writing furiously, because the letters had gone through several pages. This resulted in a jumble of random words that at first made no sense.

4 Whitehall Place . . .

. . . can’t run a manor . . .

. . . Juliet Moreau will ruin everything.

Seeing the scribbled imprint of my own name, written even harder than the rest, stilled my heart.

“What’s this, Miss?”

Hensley had drifted back to the box of tobacco, bored already with my work, and had unearthed a worn piece of paper that had been hidden among the loose tobacco. There was something strangely familiar about the folds, and I pulled it open.

My face drained of color.

It was the special memorandum poster announcing a reward for my capture. The one Montgomery had carefully hidden. Valentina must have stolen it.

In that instant, the poster, and the address, and the scribbled writing all made sense. Before I could scarcely get a word out, the door splintered as Carlyle wore through the hinges. Hensley leaped back, pressing his rat tightly to his chest to protect it.

I looked up and met Montgomery’s eyes through the broken door. He darted into the room.

“What is it?”

I held up the poster. “Valentina must have found this last night. I think she’s going to the police in London. There’s an address written in her journal—she burned the pages, but I made a rubbing. I think it’s Scotland Yard. She’s going to turn us in.”

I held out the poster with my own inky face looking back.

He ripped the memorandum from my hand. “The hell she is. She won’t make it as far as Dundee before I get my hands on her.”

FIFTEEN

“I CAN TRACK HER,” Montgomery said. I could barely keep up with him as he stormed down the main staircase. “I tracked every beast on your father’s island, and they were far more stealthy than a twenty-year-old maid. Balthazar will come with me. His nose is better than the keenest hunting dog.”

“Wait!” Hensley jogged down the stairs behind us, clutching his rat impossibly tight, with Carlyle following at a distance. “You promised me a story!”

Montgomery paused just long enough to give me a look that said we couldn’t be slowed down by such nonsense. I ran back up the stairs to pat Hensley on the head. “I shall tell you one, I promise, but not right now.” I spotted Lily and Moira at the bottom of the stairs, come to look for us, and pushed him in their direction. “Lily has a story for you, I’m certain.”