I nodded. “Yes, quite. A quick tumble amidst the collections is hardly fitting. Besides, we have other matters to attend to at present.”
“Yes,” he said heavily. “Like breaking into Lady Wellie’s desk to see what she was concealing from the inspector.”
I blew him a kiss and he retrieved his lockpicks. He treated me to a discourse on the ethical conundrum of burgling the private correspondence of a friend.
“It is not burgling,” I told him in a tone of indignance. “We shall not remove anything. We only wish to see it. Besides, what if we learn something of significance? What if we are able to piece together what worried her and provide some sort of resolution? She might very well awaken to discover that we have relieved her of that burden.”
He grunted by way of response, but neither of us needed to speak further. We both knew the real reason we were undertaking this bit of sleuthery. My denial of her last request had been both swift and severe. If I had the means to undo it, I would. Breaking into her desk and uncovering her puzzle to solve it for her was not for my own excitement. It was expiation.
* * *
• • •
It was a simple enough matter to gain access to Lady Wellie’s sitting room. A private woman, she never permitted the housemaids to clean her rooms unattended, insisting instead that Weatherby attend to the dusting and the scattering of damp tea leaves to brush the dust from the carpets. The austere lady’s maid stood guard over the footman who came to black the grate and lay the fire each morning, and if she were not at hand, he was instructed to wait until she was. And woe betide the bootboy who tried to collect her shoes for cleaning without Weatherby’s presence. She was also instructed to burn all of the blotting papers herself on the hearth, changing them hourly for fresh and destroying any correspondence that Lady Wellie directed be burnt. She was paid a handsome bonus for her additional duties, but I suspect she would have happily engaged in them without. I have never yet met a lady’s maid who did not enjoy a bit of intrigue, and who could blame them? Washing another woman’s corsets for a living was a shiversome prospect, I decided, and the occasional bit of skullduggery would certainly relieve the tedium. She was, mercifully, absent when we slipped into the room, although the lovebirds set up a fuss, wittering fluently as we worked.
Stoker bent to his task, fitting the lockpicks to the elaborate inlaid desk as I stood watch and soothed the lovebirds by crooning a soft tune.
“Veronica, for the love of Lucifer, stop singing to those bloody birds,” he ordered in a harsh whisper. He had eased open the lock and was pulling the center drawer open with careful fingers.
“Her diary,” I suggested. He drew out a large volume of dark blue kid stamped in gold with her initials and the year. He flicked through the pages until the book fell open to a place marked with a scarlet silk ribbon. Several loose items had been tucked between the leaves of the diary, and he skimmed them quickly.
“Well?” I prodded. It seemed wildly unfair that he had proverbial first crack at searching her things when the whole idea had been mine to begin with. And all because he was the one who knew how to break into things, I reflected bitterly, making a mental note to apply myself to learning the illicit arts of lockpickery.
Suddenly, he snapped the book closed and shoved it under his arm. He closed the drawer silently and locked it up again without a word. I opened my mouth to speak but he cut me off with a single sharp shake of the head. We slipped out of the room as quietly as we had come, and it was not until we were back in the Belvedere that he spoke.
“I know what was distressing her,” he told me. He opened the diary to the marked page and handed it over along with the collection of loose pages.
“Newspaper cuttings?” I asked. I thumbed through them. Each was from the Court Circular, a daily announcement of the whereabouts of the members of the royal family, everything from investitures to ribbon cuttings. There were those who made a habit of following along, but these were usually the folk who could be relied upon to buy commemorative plates bearing pictures of the royal family and to drape bunting from the lampposts. People sometimes made use of the circular for their own purposes—presenting informal petitions or the odd attempt at assassination—but they were by far in the minority. Every cutting was dated in the margins, each noted in her elegantly sprawling hand. I flipped through them again, narrowing my gaze.
“How very peculiar. They go right back through August, and she has scored under Prince Eddy’s name in every one of them, as if she were making notes on his movements and whereabouts on particular dates.”
“Keep going,” Stoker said grimly. Beneath the Court Circulars were a series of cuttings taken from the Daily Harbinger. Each of these had been dated as well, but in a different hand, the numbers thick and black, slashing at the page.
“Each is a précis of the Ripper murders,” I noted. “And not from the Times. Lady Wellie would never read the Harbinger.”
“She didn’t,” he told me, nodding towards the collection again. At the bottom was a single piece of cheap paper, marked with the same strong black handwriting, a few simple words in capitals. WHERE WAS PRINCE EDDY?
I looked from the dates marked on the cuttings to those of the Court Circulars, then lifted my gaze to Stoker. “The dates of the Whitechapel murders. Someone sent her this note and the Ripper cuttings to—”
“To suggest that dear dolt Eddy might be responsible for the most heinous crimes of the century,” he finished.
I tamped the pages together almost angrily. “Stoker, it is absurd. She could not believe him capable of such an atrocity.”
“Of course not,” he agreed. We fell silent a long moment, lost in our own thoughts.
“Unless she did,” I ventured finally. “She was cross-referencing his whereabouts on the nights in question.”
“It is the logical place to begin,” he agreed. “If there were the slightest possibility that he had some involvement, however tangential, establishing an alibi for him would be the first step.”
I looked at the cuttings again. “He has one. He is at Balmoral at present, which puts him quite out of the running for the murders on September 30.” The night that had driven Lady Wellie to send for us had been the setting of an obscene double event. Two victims, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, had fallen to the Ripper’s knife, and hysteria had gripped the capital—not just at the murderer’s ongoing reign of terror but at the notion that he seemed to be falling even further into butchery.
“Trains run to Scotland,” Stoker pointed out.
I frowned. “He is with the queen. I should think she would notice if he went missing.”
Stoker canted his head. “You are protective of him.”
I opened my mouth, then snapped it shut again. I counted to twenty in Mandarin, then spoke calmly. “I am not. I am merely pointing out the flaws in the case against him.”