lanterns.
As she gave no sign that her magnificent languid grace upon the water was the artifact of concealed frenetic activity, she also gave no sign that within her elaborately painted and gilded bulkheads, there lay a dead man. But that was why Garrett was coming to her on this brisk spring night, a sharp wind lifting the hairs at her nape and blowing her long skirts around the shape of the blue velvet carpet bag she braced between her boots. It was only the presence of a dead man that had stayed The Nation on her route upriver to Albany even this long.
Garrett stepped back from the rail as they came up alongside. She crouched to pick up her carpet bag, avoiding being poked by her stays as she dipped with the expertness of long experience. The stiffness of her wand rested in its sheath along her left forearm—a minor reassurance.
A moment later and two members of the tug’s crew were steadying her on the rail as she lifted her bag up to the waiting hands of The Nation’s roustabouts. They lifted her after, dark hands and pale supporting her with surprising gentleness as she jumped up and was caught. The tug’s bumpers grated against The Nation’s oaken side; neither vessel ever quite stopped moving.
Despite their care, Garrett’s temporary lack of self-determination nauseated her with apprehension as the paddleboat’s crew hauled her over its higher rail and onto the deck. They made a point of bundling her skirts tight about her legs. Their expertise was no surprise. Steamers didn’t stop at every landing along the route between New Amsterdam and Albany. If there were only a passenger or two, a few bales of cargo—they’d be tossed on or off board while the vessel was still moving, to shave a few minutes off the route time.
The crewmen set Garrett on her feet and—once she had twitched her skirting smooth—handed over her carpet bag. She lifted her chin and was about to go in search of the vessel’s master when a cultured tenor interrupted her. “D.C.I. Garrett, I presume?”
“Captain O’Brien,” she replied, after a pause to adjust the cuffs of her gloves that was really a pause in order to collect herself. “So, who’s dead?”
The brim of O’Brien’s hat tilted along with his head. Despite the name, he had no brogue—his accent clearly said Connecticut, and the coast of it. “I would have expected you to have been briefed.”
She smiled. “I was pulled from my supper and told that I must report here. That it was a matter of utmost delicacy and urgency. And that The Nation could under no circumstances be further delayed, despite the fact of a murder, and so I would have to do my work enroute. But the name of the victim, or his apparent manner of destruction? No, these things were not considered essential to my performance. And so I am here before you, with barely the tools of my trade and the clothes I stand up in, ready to detect, to investigate, to draw conclusions, sir.”
He contemplated her for a moment before nodding. “Very well,” he said. “How about if I let you draw your own conclusions, then, since you’re here already? I’ll be happy to share my…” He weighed several words “…observations with you once you feel they will no longer be pejorative.”
“Can you at least tell me if it’s a thaumaturgical case?” Normally, she would only be called for those—or ones where there was a suspicion of black magic…or where the victim was a person of sufficient import that their death interested the Crown. In a symbolic but by no means unreal manner, Garrett was the King’s own hand and eye turned to justice for his people. It was her duty to protect his interests, and to serve them.
“I am afraid I am not qualified to judge that,” O’Brien said. “But the Duke specifically required that you be involved in the investigation before he’d allow us to leave New Amsterdam’s jurisdiction.”
That was interesting. And it would be very like Duke Richard not to find a way to alert her to his suspicions or desires. He’d just expect her to know, through sorcery…or telepathy.
O’Brien didn’t look down, and despite herself, she felt the corner of her mouth curve upward. She had come here prepared to wrestle politics and permissions. Confronted with this plain-spoken and obviously weary working man…she felt a spark of hope.
Captain O’Brien was slim and wore his modestly creased uniform with—nevertheless—elegance. A blond