The Smoke Hunter Read online

  The greatest library of the most powerful empire in the world made it a point to keep the most up-to-date atlas on hand. The volume below her would display every landmark of any significance that had been discovered and reported in recent history.

  Her hand on the cover, she hesitated, aware of an overwhelming fear. What if she looked inside, only to find that her city was already mapped and surveyed?

  Then there would be no use wasting any more time about it, she thought, and opened the book.

  She stared down at the broad, beautifully inked pages, and the spread of carefully labeled towns, rivers, and plains representing a part of the world she had never much thought of before that afternoon. It had just become possibly the most important place on earth to her, because there, where the abbot’s map said her city must lie, was a vast expanse of mountains across which ran a single miraculous word.

  Uncharted.

  It was still a long shot, almost certainly an exaggeration, a case of seventeenth-century gold fever overblowing the story of a few natives squatting in a set of ruins no different from the places already marked on the pages before her.

  But if it wasn’t.

  If it was what it claimed to be—the last surviving outpost of the Mayan world, pristine, hidden, and still waiting to be discovered—then what, exactly, did she propose to do about it?

  The question made her collapse into her chair. The obvious answer was to report her suspicions to the British Museum, or perhaps write a letter to the Royal Geographical Society. She would, of course, be expected to turn over the map and the medallion, and it would be questionable whether either organization would think the abbot’s message worthy of further investigation. After all, both the museum and the society surely received countless such leads. They couldn’t possibly follow up on all of them. Even if they did decide this lead was worthy of their attention, where would that leave Ellie?

  She would, at best, be thanked for the initial discovery, then brushed aside as her map was handed off to some more seasoned explorer.

  Some more seasoned man.

  The notion almost made her want to toss the psalter and its contents into the Thames, but the idea that no one would ever put its promises to the test was equally unbearable. Surely there had to be another solution, one that didn’t involve destroying her find or being left out in the cold.

  And like that, the solution came to her, as elegant as it was audacious.

  She would go.

  It was not so impossible an idea. She had a map. She had money—five years of her eighty-pound annual salary, to be precise, or the greater part of it. It was more than enough for steamer passage, a guide, and equipment.

  She would travel light, move quickly. She just needed to get there. To survey the site, make a record of it. And if she did? Then there would be no man alive who could tell her she was any less capable an archaeologist than the rest of them. She would elbow her way into their world by making one of the greatest discoveries of the age: the last living city of the Mayan civilization.

  And after all, she was now unemployed. What else did she have to do?

  2

  CHARLES HENBURY CURSED AS he sifted through a pile of documents for the fourth time. It had to be there somewhere. It had to because Henbury had realized he was very uneasy about how the man he was supposed to meet would react were he to tell him that the promised item was no longer available for purchase.

  Perhaps it was what he deserved for offering to sell one of Her Majesty’s records, though it was hardly a state paper. If anything it was a misfile, packed in with other evidence filed in a trial against a gang of unlicensed privateers taken prisoner off the Azores. No one had ever even opened it, not until that idiot Johnson. If they had, it most certainly would not have been left to gather dust amid a pile of depositions.

  Johnson had thought it a practical joke. Henbury wasn’t sure he was wrong. But it had looked real enough to make him think it might be the sort of thing someone would be willing to pay for. And Charles Henbury was not the sort of man to give up on a winning ticket, should it happen to fall into his lap.

  He had made inquiries—rather sloppily, he recalled with a wince. But after he’d been laughed or terrified out of a few of the more disreputable taverns, his luck had turned. Someone had come to him.

  The man called himself Jacobs. He was thin and dark but spoke with a flawless English accent despite a physical appearance that seemed suspiciously foreign. From his look, he might have been some East India Company officer’s by-blow or, even worse, an Arab.

  That hint of some less civilized heritage was the only thing untoward about him, but the man had terrified him on the primal level a mouse might feel when confronted with a hungry cat.

  Well, he was a criminal, or Henbury assumed he must be. How else would he have heard about the map? Henbury had very little experience with criminals, but he supposed it was possible that all of them exuded that same cold-blooded aura. He vowed to himself that he would make it a point to avoid the type from here on. Just as soon as this little bit of business had come to a close.

  It had all sounded simple enough. Henbury was merely to hold the artifact until Mr. Jacobs returned with someone to authenticate it. The sum Jacobs agreed to consider was more than Henbury had hoped for, and the risk—besides further contact with the unsettling man—was minimal. No one was going to miss what they had never known was there. And Johnson was a blessedly thickheaded man who had likely forgotten the whole thing already, the brunt of his attention taken up by the latest football scores.

  But the day appointed for their next meeting had arrived, and Henbury had gone and lost the blasted thing. He did not want to imagine what Mr. Jacobs might be like when disappointed.

  As though summoned by Henbury’s thoughts, Johnson appeared, poking his head into Henbury’s office after a brief rap on the door. He let out a low whistle at the sight of the disarray.

  “Looks like someone robbed the place,” he quipped cheerfully.

  “How many times must I tell you—do not come into my office without knocking!” Henbury said through gritted teeth.

  “I did knock,” Johnson pointed out, stepping inside without waiting for further invitation.

  “After knocking, you’re supposed to wait for permission. Did I give you permission, Mr. Johnson?”

  “A bit late for that now, I’m afraid.”

  Henbury forced back his temper. “What do you want?”

  “I was just letting you know I was heading home for the night. Everyone else has already left. Are you missing something?”

  Henbury put his hand to his temple, feeling the threat of a headache. “A book. I’ve misplaced a book.”

  “If you’re a bit more specific, I might be able to help.”

  Henbury doubted that, but at this point he was willing to try anything. “It’s a seventeenth-century psalter. The one you brought to me a couple of weeks ago.”

  “The one with the clever little whatsit hidden on the inside?”

  “Yes, Johnson,” Henbury confirmed tiredly, looking underneath a pile of folders for the twelfth time.

  “I saw it this afternoon, as a matter of fact,” Johnson said, perking up.

  Henbury stopped, looking up at the younger man with flat surprise.

  “What?”

  “Miss Mallory was looking at it just before I left for lunch.”

  “Miss Mallory?” Henbury stammered. “Bloody woman…” He pushed past Johnson, hurrying down the hall. He stopped halfway down, turning suddenly.

  “Johnson?” he called.

  “Yes, Mr. Henbury?” Johnson replied from Henbury’s doorway.

  “Go home.”

  “Yes, Mr. Henbury,” Johnson agreed, putting on his hat and turning in the opposite direction as Henbury nearly jogged the rest of the way to the archivists’ office.

  He pushed through the door into the room, which was dim with twilight. He turned on the electric lamp and moved to Eleanora Mallory�
�s elegantly tidy former workstation. It took only a moment for him to riffle through the neat stack of documents on the desk, and the drawers were almost entirely empty. He closed the last of them with a rap, then drummed his fingers on the maple desktop.

  With a satisfied grunt, he moved down the hall toward the office that held the building’s personnel files. Each one included the employee’s name, résumé, yearly review—and, of course, home address.

  Florence and David Fairfax had lived in their rooms on Golden Square for as long as Ellie could remember. Certainly long before she lost her parents and came to live with them. The square had changed much over the years, its population shifting from black-suited clerks like her uncle to a still respectable but rather more colorful group of inhabitants. It had become a center for the better-off of some of the city’s immigrant communities, and on warmer nights, music and laughter flowed easily from the opened windows.

  Ellie loved it, but to her aunt, it meant Golden Square was becoming dangerously unfashionable. She had set her sights on Mayfair, clipping out advertisements from the real estate pages of the Times, or dropping not-so-subtle hints over tea in the afternoon—“The Robertsons have gotten themselves a lovely set of rooms near Berkeley Square at a very nice rate.”

  Her uncle would simply grunt and turn the page of his newspaper. He couldn’t care less about the social acceptability of his neighbors. He didn’t want to move a block farther from his offices on Fleet Street, where he served as chief accountant with the firm of Wesley and Black.

  That was fine with Ellie. Golden Square was as much home as she had ever known, which was why she approached it with her guard comfortably down even though the sun had almost completely set and the lamplighters had yet to make their way to her quiet little corner of the city. Her mind was absorbed by thoughts of crumbling temples and untranslatable glyphs as she climbed the steps, so much so that she registered the sound of voices only once she was already inside, hanging her coat on the hook.

  “I expect that’s her now,” she heard. The drawing room door opened and Aunt Florence leaned into the hall.

  “Eleanora, darling, there are some gentlemen here to see you.”

  The thrill of alarm was instinctive, and her first thought was to laugh it away. It was true that she rarely had any callers at all, and certainly wouldn’t have expected anyone Aunt Florence would refer to as a “gentleman.” For all she knew, it could be nothing more than the representative of a charity canvassing the local spinsters to see whether any would donate their time to his cause.

  So why was her heart pounding away in her chest like a steam engine?

  Ellie forced herself to remain calm.

  “I’ll be right in,” she said, and watched as Aunt Florence turned away. She slipped her valise behind the potted fern in the hall, pulled off her gloves, and unpinned her hat. She hesitated only one moment longer, taking a deep breath, and stepped into the room, a polite smile fixed to her face.

  Uncle David sat in his customary chair, the evening edition of the Times held before him like a shield. The cat, Admiral Nelson, an ancient and lethargic tabby, snored at his feet. Beside them, on the chintz settee, were two men Ellie had never laid eyes on before.

  The first was older, a man of middling height and build. Both his hair and beard were pale gray, with hints of lingering ginger. He sat awkwardly on the settee as though aware he did not belong there.

  The other stranger stood behind him. He was taller, lean and well-built, with dark hair and eyes and a deeper tone to his skin that looked foreign, though not in any way that Ellie could clearly place.

  It was the first man who spoke, however, rising hurriedly from the couch and offering a quick bow.

  “Miss Mallory,” he said.

  “Good evening,” she replied coolly.

  “Eleanora, this is Professor Dawson and his colleague, Mr. Jacobs,” Aunt Florence said. Ellie could hear the disapproval in her tone. The hour was unfashionably late for calling, and Aunt Florence was a stickler for custom.

  “We came hoping you could help us with a misplaced document. A missing book, actually,” Dawson clarified. “An antique psalter. It was last seen in Assistant Keeper Henbury’s office. He thought perhaps you might have borrowed it to examine and forgotten to replace it.”

  How did they know?

  She tried to maintain an expression of polite confusion as her brain spun wildly. How did they know about the psalter? She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, had kept it concealed under her papers even on the table in the library. So how had these two strangers sitting in her living room discovered its existence?

  And how had they known where she lived?

  The younger of the pair, the one Aunt Florence had called Jacobs, was staring at her with the focus of a hawk. It occurred to her that he was analyzing every nuance of her face and posture. He was watching for a lie, and she felt an unsettling certainty that he was very good at detecting them. She prayed her meager skills as an actress would be up to the challenge.

  “A psalter, was it? I’m afraid that’s not the sort of thing I usually handle.”

  “One of your colleagues at the Public Record Office—a Mr. Johnson—claimed he saw you handling this one earlier this afternoon.” Dawson wiped a line of sweat from his forehead, though the room was, if anything, slightly cool.

  “Then Mr. Johnson must have been mistaken.” She smiled apologetically. “I’m afraid you’ve wasted a journey.”

  Dawson glanced back at his companion as though for instruction. Jacobs said nothing but continued to regard Ellie with unsettling attention.

  “I realize this must seem highly irregular,” Dawson said, stumbling a bit over the words. “But would you mind terribly if we took a look in your valise? Perhaps you mistook the book for something else and removed it by accident. The document in question is actually quite important. I’m afraid we have to pursue every possible line of inquiry until it is found.”

  She felt a brief flash of doubt. What if the book hadn’t just been a misfile? Henbury might have been holding on to it for some other reason, and perhaps the strangers in her living room had a legitimate claim on its contents.

  The notion sparked a flash of anguish. She didn’t want to let the map go, she realized desperately. She already thought of it as hers. To come so close to a dream she had very nearly given up on, only to have it snatched away from her was unbearable.

  No, she thought, forcing herself to be rational. That couldn’t be right. Henbury only handled public records. These men were trying to intimidate her into giving herself away.

  Well, they wouldn’t find it that easy.

  “My valise? Of course,” Ellie said agreeably. “I entirely understand. I’ll fetch it for you.” She turned to the door, then paused. “I’m sorry—but what branch of the office was it you said you worked for?”

  Dawson looked at her blankly, then glanced to Jacobs, who merely raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m just a little curious, you see. I’m quite certain I haven’t seen your faces before, and I thought I knew everybody in the building.”

  “We’re not actually employed by the office,” Dawson said.

  “You aren’t?”

  “No. We’re just—ah—lending some assistance with this particular incident.” Dawson lifted a cup of tea from the tray on the table and sipped it. Ellie had the distinct impression that he wanted to hide behind the porcelain.

  “I’ll just go fetch my bag,” she said, and, keeping a deliberately normal pace, stepped out into the hallway.

  She picked up the valise and plucked the psalter from inside it. Without a moment’s further pause, she slipped the book into the Chinese umbrella stand beside the potted palm, then walked calmly back into the room.

  “Here you are,” she said pleasantly, handing the valise to Dawson. It took him only a moment to examine the contents. When he closed it and returned it to her, he looked relieved. But behind him, Jacobs gave her an unsettlingly easy smile that dis
pelled the tiny flame of triumph Ellie had begun to allow herself.

  “Thank you, Miss Mallory,” the professor said, standing and wiping his sweating palms on his trousers. “We’re sorry for disturbing your evening. You have been most helpful.”

  “I’ll show you out,” Aunt Florence offered, and rose, leading the pair back to the hall. Ellie heard the door close a moment later, and Uncle David returned to his paper with a harrumph.

  “Inconvenient hour for calling,” he muttered.

  Aunt Florence ducked into the room. “I’ll see if dinner is ready,” she said, then moved away again.

  Acting on instinct, Ellie hurried up the stairs to her room, which looked out over the square. There, in the light of the gas lamp across the green from the house, two figures stood talking. Ellie could see the professor gesturing vehemently. Almost—to Ellie’s eyes—pleadingly. She saw Jacobs, apparently unmoved. He turned toward where she stood, and despite the distance, she could see the cool, assessing look in his eyes.

  The realization was like a blow to the stomach—a sudden certainty that he knew. He knew she had what they were looking for. He knew she had lied to him, and he didn’t care. Jacobs’s look was that of a man who had no doubt that he would achieve his aim and was indifferent as to the method.

  He would be back. And Ellie suspected that those methods would be something less scrupulous next time. Whoever the pair were and however they had found her, there was an aura of danger around them that she felt certain wasn’t imagined.

  She knew what the sensible course of action should have been. She should have simply handed them what they were looking for. Or if not them, then she should have returned it to Henbury, whose desk she had gotten the blasted thing from in the first place.

  The idea repelled her. Henbury didn’t deserve it. Neither did these strangers, whoever they were. Perhaps the book wasn’t technically hers, but in that moment her instincts told her with utter certainty that Professor Dawson and Mr. Jacobs had no real right to it, either.