Page 19 of The Devil in Oxford
I took a step closer and rested my fists on the cool wood of the desk. “I’ve come to see my uncle.”
He laid the paper down, his palm obscuring the headline, but from the edge I could see that it was the same edition I’d recovered from the steps outside the Ashmolean.
“Uncle, Miss…?”
I racked my brain for a half second before spitting out the first thing on my mind and jutting out my hand in greeting. “Evangeline Mueller.”
Evangeline? Good God, Ruby, pick something a little more ordinary next time.
His gaze dropped to my outstretched hand as he tapped his fingertips on the newsprint, my pulse echoing the rhythm. “You’re Old Mueller’s niece?”
I snatched my hand back, folding my arms across my chest as the room tightened around me. The constable was scarcely out of boyhood and yet the way he watched me told me there was far more going on behind his eyes than he was letting on.
The words fell out of my mouth before I could think better of the lie. “I am. I saw in the paper what happened last night at the museum and am terribly worried for him. I wanted to come speak with him, offer my… sympathies.” I winced inwardly at the insipidness of my words—there was no way this young man would believe my sorry tale. I cursed Frederick Reaver and his conversation. The man had distracted me on our walk here. Granted, I’d learned a great deal about Julius Harker, but I’d entirely forgottento devise an actualplanon what I was going to do once I arrived at the police station.Mr. Owen would be ashamed of my lack of foresight.
The young constable sniffed and then glanced to the wall clock behind him. “I don’t see any harm in it.” He lifted the hinge on the long dark counter and gestured for me to follow him. “Come along, miss. You’d better hurry before Inspector Beecham gets back. He wouldn’t like to find you here. Not one bit.”
Stunned by my unexpected good fortune, I stammered out my thanks. “I don’t think I got your name.”
He flashed me a charming smile as a pang of regret settled in my stomach for tricking him. “John Price, miss. But everyone calls me Jack.”
Jack. A perfectly charming name for a very sweet-seeming boy. “You’re not from here, are you?”
“Nah, not me,” he began, as we started down the narrow dark stairway leading to the cells. The air here was damp and acrid with the scent of sweat, urine, and stale air—a stark contrast to the sterile, clean police station above. I wrinkled my nose, running my gloved hand down the smooth utilitarian banister. “My da is a dairyman up in the Dales.”
“That’s a lovely part of the world. It’s a wonder you left at all.”Keep him talking, Ruby. Keep his focus on himself, not on you, and you might just make it out. I summoned a light smile that I did not feel.
“Lovely, it is, aside from the fact you’re up before dawn milking and feeding and tending. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough, miss. That I can tell you. Compared to that, police work is a dream.”
I laughed, the sound hollow to my own ears. “I suppose I don’t blame you. What brought you to Oxford then? I suspect there are plenty of towns in Yorkshire in need of policemen.”
We continued down the narrow, damp stair before reaching the darkened basement. The electric lights struggled down here, andwhether real or imagined, the walls around me inched incrementally closer. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think.
If I was going to succeed in this task, I had to focus on the boy from Yorkshire leading me to the cells and not the vagaries of my own imagination.
“Same story as a lot of lads from the country, I suspect. The war.” He let out a small bitter laugh. “The summer I turned sixteen, I signed up.”
My voice cracked as I stared at a space between his shoulder blades, desperately grasping onto anything beyond the bubbling panic in my throat. “Weren’t you too young?”
He paused, shoving open yet another heavy wooden door with his hip, revealing the corridor to the holding cells. “Mmm, but they didn’t know that. I told you I was tired of the cows. Thought I’d get a chance to see the world—but found a lot more than I bargained for.” There was a heaviness there in his words as he gave me a rueful smile. “Well. Here we are.” He unlocked a small metal cell door and pushed me through, slamming it hard behind me.
“I’ll be back in ten minutes, miss. No more than that.”
“AND WHO MIGHTyou be?” Mr. Mueller asked. He sat defeated at the far side of the cell on a hard wooden slab beneath the small iron-barred window. White paint chipped from the bars, adding to the general sense of decay down here. Truthfully, they didn’t even need to block the window, as nothing larger than a house cat might slip through the opening. Fiachna himself would struggle to squeeze his heft through the tiny slit in the thick walls—there was no prayer that a full-grown soul might do the same.
Mr. Mueller’s back was pressed flat against the damp wall of the cell—no wider than I was tall and scarcely half again that long. Tiny hash marks had been picked on the paint, logging days from a previous occupant. Other walls bore other symbols.
Words.
Thoughts.
Names.
Echoes of innumerable lives altered by circumstance.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to will away the peculiar feeling rising in my chest. It wasn’t Mr. Mueller who brought about this conflagration within me—the man was clearly harmless—but rather the growing sense of being caged. Trapped like an animal in a snare.
I cleared my throat. “I am Ruby Vaughn.” There was no sense lying to him as I had to young Jack, the constable. We hadn’t the time for it. A small puddle of something wet and brown sat in the corner. “I am a friend of Leona Abernathy. She asked me to help you.”
