Warden Street was strangely empty when Zan got back to her feet. Caradon had wordlessly accepted her hand to be helped up. He winced, when he stood and automatically grabbed hold of his bleeding arm with his other hand. She noticed that Caradon’s gloves, like her own, were torn at the tips.
The driver had gotten up from the ground as well and he briefly wavered where he stood. A dark smudge ringed his left eye. It would be quite bruised before evening fell. “You’re injured, sir! I’ll take you to the hospital.”
Caradon gave a brief shake of his head. “Thank you, but no. It is not as bad as it seems. All I need are disinfectant and bandages.”
“You’re as stubborn as I am when it comes to seeing doctors, aren’t you?” said Zan as the three of them walked up the front steps and through the door. The interior of her house was eerily quiet. “Simkins? Mrs. Philomon? Isadora? Boreas?”
Her calls to her staff were answered by faint shouts in the vicinity of the kitchen. Zan directed Caradon and his driver to the sitting room and told them she would be back shortly with the medicinal supplies. Quickly, she sprinted towards the kitchen and slammed open the door only to find her entire staff tied into their chairs next to the kitchen work table. Simkins blubbered apologies while Boreas ranted about a ruined dinner. Isadora had been crying.
“Well, it’s time you got back!” said Mrs. Philomon imperiously.
Zan simply shook her head and began untying their hands which had been bound behind the backs of the chairs. The knots, compared to Caradon’s, were quite clumsy, but they were good enough to do the job. “What happened?”
“There was a knock at the door and I had thought you had come back from your outing with Mr. Garrou and Mrs. Felis-Ackert,” said Simkins. “I should have looked through the window first to see who was visiting. I would have prevented this entire debacle. As you can imagine, these two ruffians barged in demanding to see your laboratory. I didn’t say where it was, but they had threatened all of us with a pistol and tied us up.”
“Most awful!” wailed Isadora.
“Now, now,” said Zan. “I’ll see to the damage. Meanwhile, Mr. Caradon and his driver are in the sitting room. If one of you would take out some medicinal supplies to them—disinfectant and bandages and some hot water—I would be much obliged. The driver has taken a facer and Mr. Caradon has been shot.”
Mrs. Philomon visibly paled. “Dear heavens.”
Isadora cried harder.
“I’ll get the bandages,” said Simkins as he got out of his seat and headed to the rest of the house.
Boreas rubbed his wrists and declared, “I’ll get the hot water.”
“I would give you a handkerchief,” Zan told Isadora, “except I’ve forgotten my reticule and keys outside.”
“We shall retrieve them,” said Mrs. Philomon, pulling a sobbing Isadora with her.
With her staff now busy, she immediately retreated from the kitchen and headed towards her basement laboratory. Once she arrived at the bottom of the stairs to the lab, she forced herself to swallow the lump in her throat. The entire place was decimated—broken glass, various materials thrown out of the shelves, drawers pulled out and ransacked. She hurried toward the table at the center of the laboratory and found that the materials that she had meticulously gathered to test for their electric potential, their triboelectric effect on each other, were scattered on the floor.
The notebook that she had been making notations in was missing. So were her uncle’s notes that she had been studying.
She crouched on the ground and found a clear spot to sit down. Zan picked up a tattered piece of silk and squeezed her eyes shut. A trickle of wetness ran down her cheek. Who on earth would wish to destroy all that she worked for? Who wanted so badly to get their hands on her uncle’s last work? And what sort of bastard would steal her uncle’s notes, the last bit of connection that she had still had with Elliot Waterstone?
She took in a ragged breath and opened her eyes. Her vision bleary, she wiped her face against her sleeve and then glanced about her. The housebreakers had stolen the hardcopy of the notes, but they hadn’t taken the knowledge she had about the notes and what she was using them for out of her head. Time would be wasted cleaning up the laboratory first, but that would have to be done. Her staff could help her out there. And while that was happening, she had the hunch that she would have to bully out the answers that she wanted.
Someone was after what her uncle was getting at before his death. She had a strong feeling that she had to find out what that thing was first before the person or persons behind the ransacking of her laboratory figured it out.
Stiffly, she stood up and took a slow tour of the room to survey the damage more closely. Glass crunched beneath her heel. Almost all of the empty glassware were broken and a distillation apparatus smashed against a wall. Some of the vials containing chemicals were also broken, the contents spilling out onto the floor. She wrinkled her nose at the strong smells and put an overturned chair upright to stand on to open some of the basement windows.
The equipment could be replaced. She would start over. Zan jumped off the chair and made her way toward the stairs. As she took her first step, something grated along the bottom of her left shoe. She looked down and saw something odd and black.
Zan picked up a string of shining black beads. She fingered it and listened to the beads softly clack against each other. It looked like a rosary except most of the rosaries she saw were made of light colored stone like rose quartz or amber and had a cross at the end made of the same stone or of a precious metal like gold or silver. These beads were made of some dark stone—jet or obsidian, she guessed—and the cross at the end wasn’t like any of the crosses she ever saw in the Church or those worn by the devout. This cross was made of the black stone and had equal length arms like a plus sign circumscribed by a ring of silver. Zan didn’t own any rosaries and to her knowledge, neither did her staff. Whoever had left it did not live in her house.
She made her way upstairs. In the hallway, she saw Simkins, the driver, and Caradon turned toward the front door. Simkins was clutching a roll of bandages and a bottle of ethanol. Caradon was holding his stained coat, and his right shirt sleeve was rolled up to reveal a strong arm lightly sprinkled with dark hair. A white bandage was wrapped neatly around the upper arm where he had been shot.
“Mr. Caradon, where do you think you’re going?” Zan said, startling the three men.
Caradon turned his head slightly to acknowledge her. “If you recall, I have an appointment with one of the captains of my cargo ships…”
“No.”
“Excuse me, Miss Hu?”
“You’re not going anywhere. You’re going to stay right here until you’ve recovered your nerves from the recent incident.”
“My nerves?” He sounded like he was trying to contain a laugh. “I’m perfectly all right, I assure you. It was only a flesh wound. The bullet simply grazed my arm.”
“Your employee will understand your absence is due to extraordinary circumstances. Simkins and your driver will agree with me, don’t you gentlemen?”
“Miss Hu,” said Simkins as he glanced from her to Caradon uneasily and the driver hemmed and hawed, “Your patron does have an appointment.”
Caradon only grinned. “Perhaps you are right, Miss Hu. Perhaps I do need to recover from my nerves. I suppose a bit of restraint from any further activity is sound advice.”
Simkins and the driver looked confused, but Zan flushed. “What an idiotic thing to say. Restraint from any further activity as sound advice, ha!”
