she had them. The murmur of side conversations faded; even the table playing euchre at the back set down their cards.
Garrett reached into her sleeve and drew Gisela’s pen from its temporary place beside her wand. O’Brien, having consulted briefly with one of the Mr. Manley—who was not holding Carter’s sleeve—came back and whispered behind his hand, “He’s not a listed passenger. A stowaway, and in plain sight! Bold as brass.”
“Well,” Garrett whispered in return. “Mr. Sisters couldn’t very well stay in the trunk once he was breathing again, could he?” She raised the pen and said, “This is Gisela von Dissen’s fountain pen. You cannot see this, because of the cap, but the nib is broken. I had at first suspected that she might have stabbed her assailant with it, and that I might be able to use the connection between pen and nib to locate her killer. Alas, it was not to be…but then I realized what I could do. Because someone—I assume it was Mr. Carter—took her handbag. And while I imagine that theft was only to confuse the issue…it seems likely that a traveling woman’s handbag contained a vial of ink. It might not be too much to hope that that would be the same ink used to fill this pen. And that Mr. Carter might have handed the bag and its contents off to his employer.
“A dead woman would not have been entertaining herself with a book in her cabin—but a man staging a death might very well have laid a book and pen about the place, to go with the overturned cup of tea. And a man who had intended to delay a steam ship, and who found a better way to do it than some act of sabotage, might very well sacrifice his own booking on that vessel in order to conveniently smuggle a corpse aboard!”
She was looking directly at the man in the green waistcoat—and he was looking directly back. Now she lectured to him alone. “The principal of sympathy states that two portions of the same object will sustain an affinity for one another. So the ink in the pen and the ink in the vial, though contained in separate reservoirs, remain—thaumaturgically speaking—the same object…”
She laid the pen flat across her palm. For all its reticence on the previous attempt, now it shuddered and tumbled from her hand, bouncing on the carpeting before rolling toward the man in the green waistcoat as if drawn on a string. He started from his chair, backing away from the pen as if from a snake—
“Grab him!” O’Brien shouted.
Garrett yelled, “Eugene Sisters! Stop in the name of the Queen!” and fumbled for her wand, but Sisters was too nimble. He shouldered past the steward and two passengers, ducked O’Brien, and vanished through the saloon door as Garrett was still struggling silver-tipped ebony from inside her sleeve.
She might have shouted, “After him!” but the door was already jammed with crew and passengers giving chase.
***
Sisters obviously intended to swim for it, as he pushed his way through the startled main cabin passengers toward the stern doors with O’Brien and two stewards in pursuit. He had the advantage of surprise, however, and there were too many people in the way—jostling her, shoving one another aside, shouting in confusion—for Garrett to use the stasis spell in her wand.
She waded into the chaos anyway, her wand brandished overhead in case she got a clear angle on the fugitive. If worse came to worst, she’d cast the spell into the crowd. Divided between subjects, it wouldn’t do more than stun and disorient—but that might slow him down enough for O’Brien to lay hands on him. Of course, there were the innocent bystanders to consider: nobody really wanted to be on the receiving end of a stasis spell. They were normally harmless enough, but Garrett has stood for enough of them during her training to know how unpleasant it could be to feel one’s heart grinding in one’s chest. And if Sisters were to plummet into the river while stunned…well, the odds of saving his life would not be high.
Still, allowing him to escape—the rising mist would hide him. If he was a strong enough swimmer to survive a plunge into the spring-frigid North River…he’d be away clean before a boat could be launched to look for him. The sky might just be graying with dawn, Albany only an hour or so upriver…but the mist would cancel any advantage of the light.
Garrett