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 edges 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 laid 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 cigarettes, bored already with my work, and had unearthed a worn piece of paper that had been hidden there. 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 get a word out, the door swung open as Carlyle pushed it free of its 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 Edinburgh 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’s.”
“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.”
He narrowed his eyes, his face turning angry red. He might have the strength of three men, but he was still just a headstrong little boy, and I could hardly be bothered with reading stories now. I caught up with Montgomery in the foyer as he was breaking open the manor’s rifle cabinet.
Elizabeth heard the noise and ran in, with Balthazar and Lucy just behind her.
“Balthazar,” Montgomery said, “hurry out to the barn. Tell me if any of the carriages are gone.”
“Are you mad?” Elizabeth said, watching Balthazar leave. “Don’t you think that’s the first thing we checked, when she went missing? And what on earth do you need a gun for?”
“We broke into Valentina’s room,” I explained. “We found evidence that she’s planning on turning us in to the police at Scotland Yard.”
Elizabeth’s face went slack. “Valentina? I’d never have imagined her capable of this.”
I held out the notebook. “Her journal. I made a rubbing of some pages she ripped out. From what I can tell, she didn’t trust me to run Ballentyne and thought turning me in to Scotland Yard would get me out of the way.”
Elizabeth let out a curse as she unfolded the poster I’d tucked into the journal. The front door slammed as Balthazar lumbered back inside.
“The hackney coach is missing,” he said. “Someone had covered blocks of hay with a tarpaulin to disguise the theft. The horses are out to pasture, but I didn’t see the bay mare anywhere. She’s the only one big enough to pull the coach.”