The Vanishing Thief(4)

“Wait, miss,” the conductor said, blocking my path as he signaled the driver to stop.

After a dozen years, I’d finally seen the monster again. I pushed the conductor aside and was off before the horses came to a halt. Heavy traffic flowed around me, blocking my way to the sidewalk. Knowing the man I sought must have a minute’s head start on me, I was braver than usual, dodging behind a brewer’s cart and a hansom cab. After close misses with a carriage and horse waste in the road, I was on the sidewalk, pushing past people in my hurry.

There were top hats in front of me as far as I could see. Which one was his?

As I strode down the sidewalk, looking each man in the face as I passed, being shoved aside by taller, heavier bodies, I was once more a powerless seventeen-year-old. My parents were newly dead. I suddenly had no one in this world to care about me. Tears again welled up with the grief and the terror. That horrible day was never far from my mind.

I had been helping my mother dust the shelves, since we’d just opened for the morning, and this immaculately well-tailored man was our first customer.

My father came forward to greet the man when he entered our bookshop. The man took off his top hat as he entered but left his newspaper under his arm. His hair was a white blond or silver and his stance proclaimed him a man of power and status. The man talked in a low voice to my father, who took a step back and said, “We don’t have anything like that.”

The man grabbed him by the collar with his free hand and said, “I know better. Don’t lie to me.”

Then he threw my father to the side and forced his way behind the counter. My father’s mouth opened and shut twice without any sound emerging, as he grabbed at the man’s sleeve. The man began to search through the antiquarian volumes but didn’t find what he wanted. In his fury, he knocked books and papers off the counter, which my father kept trying to catch.

Then the man removed a gun from inside the newspaper and pointed the barrel at my father. My father raised his hands as an antiquarian volume he’d caught slid from his grip and fell to the floor in a cascade of pages.

My mother gasped. The man said, “If you want to see your husband alive at the end of the day, do as I say, Mrs. Fenchurch. You, too, Miss Fenchurch.”

His gaze on me made my skin feel like I’d fallen in a coal furnace, stabbing hot and falling away from my bones. How could I forget the wide brow, the long nose, the thin lips, the cruel eyes?

Unable to find what he was looking for, he forced us all outside into his well-kept black carriage. We left civilized London for the emptiness of the small farms just north of town. And all the time we huddled together, he kept his pistol aimed at us.

My father tried to talk to him, to bargain with him. “We don’t have a Gutenberg Bible. We don’t have anything that expensive. Why don’t you let my wife and daughter go? You can have anything you want—”

“I want your Gutenberg Bible.”

“I don’t have one,” my father wailed.

The look the man gave us—cold, ruthless, unyielding, indifferent—stopped all further talk.

I couldn’t find a chance to unlock the door and jump from the carriage, so I spent my time memorizing his details. His boots were polished. His linen was sparkling white and not frayed. He wore a cravat tied in a high, elegant flourish.

When the vehicle paused and we climbed down, he sent the unmarked carriage off with just a gesture and marched us into an isolated cottage. Work was being done to the building and some of the interior walls were gone. Construction debris was everywhere. But there was no one around, inside or out, whom we could call to for help.

Several steps in, my father turned on the man, although he was taller and heavier than my father. My mother shoved me toward the door as I saw the fiend hit my father in the face with the butt of the pistol.

I ran.

Dear Lord, how I ran, sides aching, legs wobbling by the time I reached the suburbs and an omnibus line. I was lost, and it took three buses before I found an area I recognized. All that time, I knew that monster had my parents. What would he do to them?

It was midafternoon by the time I arrived, weary and tearstained, at the home of my father’s partner in the business, Sir Broderick duVene. He was in his thirties then, an Oxford graduate, fencing enthusiast, and antiquarian collector. Since I thought I could lead him to the farmhouse, he secreted two knives on his person and hired a carriage to follow my directions. They were jumbled directions, and twice I got lost.

On the way there, I told him every detail I could think of. The man’s expensive tailoring. The unusually pale shade of his hair and side whiskers. His fearsome glare.