Page 107 of By Any Means

Chary didn’t come straight back down the stairs, so August must’ve in fact been in residence in his reclaimed northwest balcony room. A door shut quietly in the distance. Laurie figured that was enough confirmation for him. Sure as hell he wasn’t Raberding, jealous of a man’s relationship with his own brother.

He had his priorities, though. He did go down to the kitchens. There he briefly cleaned up from their dinner—Saturday night began Mrs. Simon’s Sunday rest—and was rewarded: under some heavy bowls he found a number of carefully-wrapped Eccles cakes: pastries stuffed with currants. They had Hiram’s name practically written upon them.

“Can’t hide from me, H,” he said thickly. “Knew you were here somewhere.”

He pocketed three or four more cakes—restraint, because he was actually fond of his office partner and didn’t wish him to starve—and walked out, through the breakfast room, into the foyer. He contemplated stopping by the not-a-butler’s wooded cabin to deliver them, dusk or no dusk. Zero professional curiosity there, all taunt.

But Chary, of course, was a greater draw. However long he took.

At the foot of the front stair, he had to stop abruptly; he was nearly bowled over by Sarah, the housemaid, coming down in a hurry. Chary would’ve called it a frightful hurry.

With a mouth full of Eccles cake, Laurie stared. He hadn’t known she was still there. She ran with the tiny, mincing steps women seemed to have perfected: around the newel post and toward the carriage entrance. She had a hand shoved deep into an apron pocket.

“Sorry, Mr. Tulley!” she called over her shoulder.

He swallowed, then narrowed his eyes. “Hmm.”

He knew he was a good share more observant than most. A whole life of changing his behavior according to surroundings had done that. He also knew it made him more careful than most.

It had nothing to do with the fact that the cellar entrance was in the back of the greenhouse nave—and the entrance to that was just through the carriage entrance. And certainly, pockets didn’t hold keys, no. Keys that would make telltale noises when running if not held.

Housemaids did not get keys. She was there very late.

Unless he was leaning in to his bias yet again. What little interaction he’d had with Sarah had been pleasant. There was really no reason.

And yet.

Yes, there: the groan of a hinge. Hinges on the door to the glass greenhouse nave, perhaps. Only two somebodies had keys to the greenhouse nave: Chary and Brasher.

And now Sarah?

He followed, quick and quiet.

She’d left the greenhouse door open. That wasn’t surprising; it was heavy, nothing but leadlight glass and iron, and would’ve shattered if she’d slammed it in her haste. Now it flapped in the wind that gusted through the tunnel of the carriage entrance, swinging wide and back again with long, loud complaints.

Laurie steadied the door carefully in its threshold. He didn’t latch it.

In the greenhouse nave, streams of setting sun threaded in from behind him, making leafy, monstrous shadows splay upon the leadlight. Chary would know the name of the one that looked like daggers. He was sure it was innocuous.

The steel cellar door she had not left open, but the padlock was opened and tossed aside.

Bias or no, that was plenty damning. She was somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be, at the frantic behest of someone else who surely wasn’t Chary. In the presence of something both brothers wanted kept safe.

Laurie crept over. He picked up the lock, hooked it through the fastenings, and clicked it shut. The woman wasn’t trapped—the cellar had a second fire exit that latched from the inside only, because though Chary was a millionaire industrialist, he was the rare one with a thought for safety—but it might buy him some time in confusion.

With his theory practically confirmed, he stamped down remorse, turned, and ran. He had his priorities, and neither the cellar nor the machine inside it was one of them.

They were, however, Tjofabier Raberding’s. And given a choice of leverage between Chary and Brasher—August’s brother versus August’s lover—he knew which Raberding would choose. From whence those keys had come. Upstairs.

Laurie jogged through Chary’s beloved greenhouse, across the mansion foyer. His thoughts screamed speculation at him as he went.

Raberding, being known to be “hands-off” in the business but in truth wanting the rival glass heir, wanting trade secrets, wanting a merger, wanting the semiautomatic bottle machine. Raberding, who was not actually “hands-off” at all. Not in the least.

Raberding, negotiating with the flint glass workers’ union: a union beneath the heading of the biggest federation of labor in the country, a union with practically a monopoly of labor on every glassworker he needed to stay in business.

Raberding, being the first one he’d interviewed, the first one to know he, Lawrence Tulley, was looking into August’s death. Irving Sawyer and his “odd jobs.” Irving knowing Laurie on sight, his surname, his occupation; Irving being conveniently at a Brooklyn haunt for normal workingmen. Irving feeding him information that wasn’t false but wasn’t quite true. Irving, not working on behalf of the Local #68 but instead as a labor spy, working for Raberding. Doing the rich man’s bidding.

If Raberding was a murderer this whole time. If Laurie hadn’t been completely off base with his theorizing in the original article. If Raberding had had those men killed, for whatever self-serving reason, and then had tried to have Chary killed, too, not as a gaffer of Wright Glass, trying to unionize, but as Chary himself? As August’s brother?