Five minutes passed in just this unproductive way, and Victoria chewed on her bottom lip, beginning to feel the first stirrings of apprehension. She looked about the hallway, wondering where Willie was and whether or not she should search out the housekeeper as a sort of reinforcement before daring to enter the library on her own.
But Willie was always entrenched in the kitchen at this time of the morning, industriously scrubbing the very bottom out of some inoffensive pot, or shining an innocent piece of brass to within an inch of its life. She had her routine, Wilhelmina Flint did, and Victoria was loath to interrupt it. Besides, Willie had a habit of over-reacting, and Victoria didn’t feel up to dealing with the possibility of having to dispense hartshorn or burnt feathers at this particular moment.
Also, the Professor might be sick, or injured in a fall from the small ladder he used to reach the uppermost shelves of his bookcases. What a pother that would create. For if the Professor was hard to deal with when healthy, as an invalid he would be downright unbearable!
Victoria gave herself a mental kick, realizing she was only delaying the inevitable. She had hesitated too long as it was; it was time she stopped hemming and hawing like some vaporish miss and acted. So thinking, Victoria straightened her thin shoulders, turned the knob, and pushed on the door.
The room thus revealed was in complete disorder, with papers and books strewn everywhere the eye could see—which wasn’t far, as the Professor’s huge, footed globe was lying tipped over onto its side, blocking the heavy door from opening to more than a wide crack.
“Willie will doubtless suffer an apoplexy,” she joked feebly, wondering if she herself was going to faint. No, she reminded herself grimly, only pretty girls are allowed to fall into a swoon at the first sign of trouble. Plain girls are expected to thrust out their chins and bear up nobly under the strain. “Just one more reason to curse my wretched fate,” she grumbled under her breath, pushing her spectacles back up onto the bridge of her nose, taking a deep breath, and resigning herself to the inevitable.
Putting a shoulder to the door, she pushed the globe completely aside with some difficulty and entered the library, blinking furiously behind her rimless spectacles as her eyes struggled to become accustomed to the gloom. The heavy blue velvet draperies were tightly closed and all the candles had long since burned down to their sockets.
“Oh, Lord, I don’t think I’m going to like this,” she whispered, trying hard not to turn on her heels and flee the scene posthaste like the craven coward she told herself she was. Victoria could feel her heart starting to beat quickly, painfully against her rib cage, and she mentally berated herself for not having had the foresight to have acted sooner.
“Pro—, er, Professor?” she ventured nervously, hating the tremor she could hear creeping into her voice. She then advanced, oh so slowly, edging toward the cold fireplace to pick up the poker, then holding it ahead of her as she inched her way across the room, her gaze darting this way and that as she moved toward the front of the massive oak desk.
The Professor wasn’t behind the desk; he didn’t appear to be anywhere. Lowering the poker an inch or two, Victoria walked gingerly round to the rear of the desk, as she had decided that the intruder—for what else could possibly have caused such a mess except a house-breaker?—was long gone.
She looked up at the ceiling thoughtfully, for the Professor’s chamber was directly above the library, and wondered if he was still abed, and as yet unaware of the ransacking of his sacred workplace. “Wouldn’t that just be my wretched luck? I most definitely don’t relish being the one landed with the duty of enlightening him with this marvelous little tidbit of information,” Victoria admitted, grimacing as she cast her eyes around the room one more time.
“Oh,” she groaned then, realizing at last that the stained, crumpled papers that littered the floor at her feet constituted at least three months of her painstaking labor, now ruined past redemption. “The only, the absolute only single thing in this entire world that could possibly be worse than having to transcribe all those boring notes is having to do them twice!”
She flung the heavy poker in the general direction of the window embrasure in disgust, not caring in the slightest if her impetuous action caused more damage.
“Arrrgh!” The pain-filled moan emanated from the shallow window embrasure, and the startled Victoria involuntarily leaped nearly a foot off the floor in surprise before she could race to throw back the draperies, revealing the inelegantly sprawled figure of the Professor, his ample body lying half propped against the base of the window seat.
“Professor!” Victoria shrieked, dropping to her knees beside the man, who now seemed to have slipped into unconsciousness. For one horrifying moment she thought she had rendered him into this woeful condition with the poker, until a quick inspection showed her that it had come to rest on the tip of his left foot, which must have been sticking out from under the hem of the draperies all along, if only she could have located it amid the mess.
Running her hands inexpertly over the Professor’s body, she didn’t take long to discover that there appeared to be a shallow, bloody depression imprinted in the back of his skull. As she probed the wound gingerly with her fingertips, Victoria’s stomach did a curious flip when she felt a small piece of bone move slightly beneath her fingers.
“The skull is broken,” she said aloud, then swallowed down hard, commanding her protesting stomach to take a firm hold on her breakfast and keep it where it belonged.
“Ooohhh!” the Professor groaned mournfully, moving his head slightly and then opening one eye, which seemed to take an unconscionably long time in focusing on the woman kneeling in front of him. Reaching out one hand, he grabbed her wrist painfully hard before whispering, “Find him! Find him! Make him pay!”
“Professor! Are you all right?” Even as she asked the question, Victoria acknowledged its foolishness. Of course he wasn’t all right. He was most probably dying, and all she could do was ask ridiculous questions. She may have long since ceased feeling any daughterly love for the man now lying in front of her, but she could still be outraged that anyone would try to kill him. “Who did this to you, Professor?” she asked, feeling him slipping away from her.
“Find him, I said,” the Professor repeated, his words slurring badly. “He has to pay…always…must pay…promise me…can’t let him…”
“He’ll pay, Professor, I promise he’ll pay. I won’t let him get away with it,” Victoria declared dutifully, wincing as the hand enclosing her wrist tightened like a vise, as if the Professor had put all his failing strength into this one last demand for obedience. “But you must tell me who he is. Professor? Professor!”
The hand relaxed its grip and slid to the floor. Professor Quennel Quinton was dead.
CHAPTER ONE
AS HE WAITED for the reading of the will to begin, the only sounds Patrick Sherbourne could hear in the small, dimly lit chamber were intermittent snifflings—emanating from a woman he took to be housekeeper to the deceased—and the labored creakings of his uncomfortable straight-backed wooden chair, the latter bringing to mind some of his least cherished schoolboy memories. He lifted his nose a fraction, as if testing the air for the scent of chalk and undercooked mutton, then looked disinterestedly about the room.
That must be the daughter, he thought, raising his quizzing glass for a closer inspection of the unprepossessing young woman who sat ramrod straight on the edge of a similar wooden chair situated at the extreme far side of the room, placing either him or her in isolation, depending upon how one chose to look
