3

“Do you think it’s Miss Meadows?” Jack asked, when they were safely away from the dining room, strolling the promenade. It was only a little past noon, so the sun was safely blocked from the long windows by the shadow of the airframe, and if anyone did harbor suspicions about Sebastien, it would do no harm for Sebastien to be seen by midday.

“One doesn’t find many of the blood in theatre.” Sebastien licked pale lips. “Matinees.”

“But she’s a motion picture actress–”

“And how might she explain an inability to shoot outdoor scenes in daylight?”

“Ah,” Jack said. He raked at his hair, pale curls stretching between his fingers and then springing back. “Besides, why would she turn to Mlle. LeClere when she has two travelling companions of her own?”

“Mrs. Smith was wearing an open-necked shirtwaist,” Sebastien pointed out.

In answer, Jack touched his own loosely-knotted cravat. He did not affect the London and Milan fashion of high collars, as Sebastien did. “Mrs. Smith may not be prone to bruising–”

“She is a very pale blonde.”

“–or she may be a more intimate friend of Miss Meadows’ than Mlle. LeClere, leaving the evidence… inobvious.” Jack finished, smugly.

“I am scandalized,” the great detective answered, a small smile warming his lips. They warmed further when Jack checked over his shoulder, and then brushed them with a quick peck.

“If not Miss Meadows….” Jack said, stepping back.

“You make assumptions,” Sebastien said. A cardinal sin, and Jack winced to be caught out. “If there is another of the blood aboard this ship… and if Mlle. LeClere is of her court” –the polite term, in preference to any of the myriad crass ones– “it would be the rankest sort of stupidity to murder an old woman.”

They turned at the wall, and began walking back.

“Because suspicion would naturally fall on any passenger discovered to be of the blood.”

“Prejudices die hard,” Sebastien said.

“I’ve known a few Jews,” Jack said. The dryness that informed his voice was no happenstance. He was one, blond curls and blue eyes and good plain English alias aside. “It’s the same everywhere. And it needn’t be your folk, Sebastien. A disappearance in the absence of any evidence suggests black magic to me. Teleportation, transmutation… what if someone turned her into a frog?”

“Or a green parrot? And us without a forensic sorcerer anywhere to be found.”

Jack cleared his throat. “We’ve seen the parrot and Madame Pontchartrain in the same place. So if it is one of yours, and not Miss Meadows, who?”

“Korvin úr,” Sebastien said, automatically. And then he checked himself. “At a guess.”

“Good guess,” Jack said. He lowered his voice; they were still alone on their side of the promenade, but below, in the dining room blurrily visible through the interior isinglass, Virgil Allen and Hollis Leatherby had entered and paused beside the drinks caddy. “I’m trying to remember if I’ve heard his name–”

“Have you?” The tone was sharper than Sebastien had intended. He did not care to be reminded of Jack’s past.

There were clubs in most cities, places where those who courted the blood congregated, and where those of the blood who were far from their courts and their courtesans could go, for sustenance and for companionship. Names were whispered in those places, and secrets traded.

It was in one such, in a basement in Budapest, that Sebastien had discovered Jack, a gamin child of eight or nine years, and where he–against his custom and better judgement, and in much the spirit with which one might haggle for a starved dog chained to a railing–had purchased the boy.

It was three hundred and fifty German marks Sebastien considered very well spent indeed.

Jack chewed his lip, and then shrugged. “It was a long time ago. I don’t recall.”

#

Jack was still tired from a difficult night, while Sebastien buzzed with energy. It had been unsafe attending to his needs aboard the Hans Glücker, but it would be more unsafe to spend three days and part of a fourth in human company with his skin cold and waxen and his hunger growing. Sebastien wondered if Korvin úr had found himself in similar straits. It was unusual for one of the blood to travel without a companion. Or three.

Or perhaps the handsome stranger to eye with suspicion wasn’t Lillian Meadows or Oczkar Korvin, but the pale and delicate Mrs. Phoebe Smith. Virgil Allen had a southerner’s bronzed glow, but that could be counterfeited with cosmetics…

Sebastien paused in the passageway and shook his head, leaning one hand on a cornerpost of the corridor wall. Those, at least, were solid enough to hold his weight, unlike the cloth stretched between them. He was committing the same sin he’d accused Jack of, speculating on small and circumstantial evidence, looking for a monster to explain away what was most likely mere human veniality. Speculation, rather than deduction, and that was no way to solve a crime.

Assuming any crime had been committed. Which, admittedly, seemed like a fairly safe assumption–but one assumption tended to lead to another.

He straightened up and squared his shoulders under his coat. The next step must be to interview the witnesses. Particularly, he thought, Mlle. LeClere.

He was halfway down the spiral stair to the day parlor, following her scent, when something else occurred to him. Her scent. In particular. It had been present in the cabin she shared with Mme. Pontchartrain. As, indeed, had the scents of Mme. Pontchartrain–both her own bodily aroma, and the funereal bouf of roses and chrysanthemums she habitually wore. But there had been no third person’s aroma, and, as Jack had noted, Mme. Pontchartrain did not appear to have even slipped on her nightdress.

So why had her bunk been rumpled? And not, he thought, rumpled as if someone had slept therein, but rather as if someone had stripped the covers back in hasty investigation, and then smoothed them carelessly.

That mystery distracted Sebastien to the bottom of the stairs, where he paused and cast left and right, sniffing delicately, for the aroma of lilies, powder, and warm girl that identified Mlle. LeClere.

Instead, he smelled lilacs and civet and a different warm girl entirely, the scent vanguarding a swish of sensible English wool. “My dear Mrs. Leatherby,” he said, and turned.

She startled, which had been his intention, and drew herself up short, her skirts swinging heavily about the ankles of her button boots. Gray kid-gloved fingers tensed on the handle of her reticule; there was a tiny snag on her left thumb, a little hole she hadn’t yet sewn up. “Don Sebastien,” she stammered. “I beg your pardon–”

“I have excellent hearing,” he said, stooping a little to offer her an arm. She accepted it, her fingers curling as convulsively on his sleeve as they had on her handbag.

“As it happens,” Mrs. Leatherby said in a small voice, “so do I. Which is what I wished to speak with you about, if you do not find me too forward, Don Sebastien.”

Her steps tarried so he must cut his own stride for fear of dragging her off her feet. He ducked his head to introduce the appearance of intimacy. “Do continue.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, shivering delicately. “I’m all aflutter. If there’s a killer aboard….”

“Quite.” He patted her arm, grateful of the long sleeves that would prevent her from noticing how his skin was chill.

“Last night–” She glanced over her shoulder, and he soothed her with a hand on her hand again. “Last night I heard voices. You must understand that Hollis is a very sound sleeper, Don Sebastien, and he snores quite dreadfully.”

“Indeed,” he answered, letting her annoying overuse of his name pass unremarked, though it led him to unworthy speculation on whether Mr. Leatherby had perhaps been less oblivious than he seemed to Jack’s shameless flirtation with his wife that first night in the salon, or if the sighs he had breathed had been of relief rather than jealousy. “And this is significant because?…”

“We sleep away from the other passengers,” Mrs. Leatherby said. “Out of consideration.”

A benefit of the nearly-empty passenger quarters. “You heard something?” Sebastien asked, understanding dawning. His hair slid down his forehead, and he tossed it back, taking a moment as well to consider the particular hell of a nervous woman with acute hearing paired with a heavy snorer.

“A man and a woman,” she said, her chin jerking in small, sharp nods. “Speaking French. I recognized the man’s voice as Mister Korvin’s, and is he really a viscount?”

“Vikomt, in Hungarian,” Sebastien said. “And I have not heard Korvin úr make such a claim. If only this were a sailing vessel, one could examine the peerage in the ship’s library.”

“Silly me,” Mrs. Leatherby said. “I’m sure you think me a right fool, but it’s so exciting, being abroad and meeting exotic personages with their European manners.” Her hand flew to her mouth, releasing his somewhat crumpled sleeve. “Oh, Sebastien, I’m terribly sorry.”

“It’s quite all right,” he answered. “No offense taken.” Released of her grip, he took a half-step toward the salon. She tripped after.

“But I haven’t told you the worst,” she said. Her voice rose, but she had the art of the breathless shriek, like so many Englishwomen, and it wouldn’t carry. He wondered when the pocket handkerchief would emerge, or if she’d skip directly on to the fainting spell.

“Indeed, Señora,” he said. Perhaps he should resort to his own handkerchief; the lilac was about to make him sneeze. “What did you hear?”

“I didn’t understand the words, of course, but it had the sound of an argument,” she said. “And afterward… there were other things.” Her lips made a moue of distaste.

“Ah,” Sebastien said. “Say no more. Did you recognize the lady’s voice?”

“They were speaking French,” she repeated, insistently.

“Of course,” Sebastien answered. With a great and distancing show of gallantry, he stepped forward and opened the door to the salon for her, sweeping an outrageous bow. “That does narrow the field somewhat, now doesn’t it?”

***

To be Continued…

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