Page 73 of The Affair of the Mysterious Letter
Ms. Haas retrieved her packet of Valentino’s Good Rough Shag,packed her pipe, and lit it. “Then that, surely, is our first deduction. The perpetrator is somebody we hitherto had no reason to suspect.”
“That would seem,” I ventured, “to narrow our list down from five to everybody in the universe.”
“That is certainly a starting point, if—as we shall see later—a flawed one. But consider the other facts. When you analysed the letters, you saw no evidence that they had been handled by anybody but you, Eirene, and myself. The blackmailer clearly knows Eirene intimately, having shown quite startling knowledge of her personal habits and history. They expected, further, that Eirene would have similar familiarity with them, hence you will recall the effort made to disguise their handwriting.” Ms. Haas paused to take a puff on her pipe. “But throughout this whole affair the miscreant has demonstrated an utterly idiosyncratic and very specific set of motivations. They seem to want one thing, and one thing only, which is for Eirene to end her engagement to Miss Beck of her own free will. Furthermore, they have gone to quite considerable lengths to ensure that no peripheral harm befalls either party.”
I took an absentminded sip of tea and then immediately regretted it. “I confess that all of these details serve only to make the case more confusing to me.”
“Then let me add to your confusion. It must have been the blackmailer who intervened in our defence on the Austral Express. But although they wore the guise of a Repairer of Reputations, Mr. Lawson’s contacts confirm that no Carcosan agent was involved and, if you think carefully, you will realise that the details of the mechanism by which they disguised themselves as a guard do not match the magics employed by the Repairers in their adoption of false personas.”
“I’m afraid none of this is proving helpful to me.”
“Then”—Ms. Haas wagged her pipestem in my direction—“I shall give you one last clue. You said that our list of suspects had beennarrowed down from five to everyone in the universe. As ever, your thinking is too limited. Now come, we should go find Eirene and set this matter to rest.”
We called a hansom and set off into the night, Ms. Haas staring idly out of the window and smoking, while I did my best to sift through the clues she had laid before me. But, for the life of me, I could not imagine how my companion had pieced them together to discover the identity of the blackmailer.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
The Final Piece
Miss Viola hadlodgings above a haberdasher’s in Little Carcosa. She did not seem eager to speak to us, and it took a significant amount of hectoring on the part of Ms. Haas before she would consent to admit us. Once within, we found the lady’s demeanour quite different from that to which I had become accustomed. While she had often displayed a somewhat tempestuous spirit, she had always presented herself with care and modesty. She greeted us now with her hair unbound and wearing nothing but a yellow silk dressing gown. Her room, which was small but decorated with a tasteful, feminine sensibility, was presently littered with empty wine bottles and reeked of cigarettes.
“Forgive the informality of my appearance,” she said with a sigh, “but I appear to be utterly ruined.” She did not say “ruined.”
Ms. Haas clasped her hands to her breast. “Oh, Eirene, how I’ve missed you.”
Miss Viola gave a reply that I cannot commit to print, and then cast herself tragically onto the bed, dislodging a sizable revolver from beneath a pillow as she did so. Given the lady’s attire, I averted my eyes swiftly out of concern the situation would otherwise descend from inappropriate to salacious.
“So,” said Ms. Haas, in a tone that I personally considered rather mean-spirited, “I take it the fishmonger isn’t happy.”
“She needs some time.”
“Yes, dear. In my experience, that’s code for ‘I had no idea who you were, and now I know I am disgusted by it.’”
I risked looking up and saw, to my relief, that Miss Viola had wrapped herself in a blanket, thus preserving her modesty and my equilibrium. Ms. Haas was sitting beside her, patting her shoulder with a tenderness at variance with the sentiment she had just expressed.
Not seeming to appreciate the gesture, Miss Viola shrugged her off. “She said it wasn’t the affairs, or the stealing, or the...” And here she listed a catalogue of transgressions of increasing severity that, for the sake of the lady’s reputation and my readers’ comfort, I shall elide. “... or even that I’d nearly got her killed by a vampire, but—”
“Let me guess,” interrupted my companion, rolling her eyes. “She said it was thelying.Darling, that’s what they always say. It’s a convenient excuse that ordinary people fall back on when they realise we have dared to do things they lack the courage to even imagine.”
This assertion on the part of Ms. Haas provoked a predictably intransigent response from Miss Viola and I have not to this day decided to my satisfaction whether that was, indeed, my companion’s intent. “Just stop it, Shaharazad. You won’t understand this, but I have actually been happy recently.”
“Do you really want so little out of life?”
“You know”—Miss Viola stared wistfully at the ceiling—“it turns out I do. I’ve spent the past decade running from something or for something and—”
Ms. Haas laughed bitterly. “If you tell me you’ve realised that you had everything you needed all along, then I shall take up that gun”—she indicated Miss Viola’s discarded firearm—“and shoot both of us.”
“On the contrary, I realised I had nothing. Just stories and enemies. I mean, you’re one of my closest and oldest friends, and we barely speak, I frequently hate you, and you’re transparently a terrible human being.”
“Is this the part where I remind you that, for the better part of this month, I’ve been risking my life and that of Mr. Wyndham entirely for your benefit?”
Miss Viola reached out and put her hand over Ms. Haas’s. “I know, and I’m grateful. I really am. It’s just right now it doesn’t seem to have done me much good.”
“Oh, come on, Eirene. You persuaded Lady Evangelina to take you back after she caught you in bed with both her sisters; Ambassador Tan carried on seeing you for six months after you told her that you were in the pay of Yue; I forgave you after you pushed me off the roof of the Vedunian Royal Opera House; and the high priestess of Thotek the Devourer discovered that you had seduced her only in order to steal the jewelled eyes of her altarpiece and let you get away without sacrificing you. You can certainly talk round a fishmonger, especially one who even I can see is disgustingly in love with you.”
“Maybe I could, but”—and here Miss Viola pulled the blanket over her head, a gesture that exposed rather more of her ankles than I was comfortable with—“if we don’t catch the blackmailer my whole past becomes public knowledge and Cora loses everything. I could never do that to her.”
“Darling, wehavecaught the blackmailer. Didn’t I mention?”
