Hounds of Autumn Read online

  The carriage stopped as it reached the police horses and their driver called out. An officer looked up and waved.

  Miss Haynes craned her neck to see out the window, and even Mr. Frick looked interested. One of the officers walked toward the carriage and spoke to their driver.

  “Hey there, Mr. James! Can you get past the horses all right?”

  “I expect so. But what happened? Who is that?”

  Three words had Chloe up from her seat and out the carriage door in a single motion: “Camille Granger” and “murder.”

  Ambrose leapt out after her and grabbed her hand.

  “It’s her. It’s Camille!” cried Chloe, one hand in Ambrose’s and the other gripping the skirts of her traveling dress. “I have to go.”

  “Come, Chloe, you don’t need to see this.”

  “But it’s her. She was my—I know we never met in person—but she was my friend.”

  The officer and Mr. James were still talking. Mr. Frick and Miss Haynes were now out of the carriage as well, and Miss Haynes put her hand on Chloe’s arm.

  Ambrose relaxed his grip and Chloe yanked free and rushed down the small rise and toward the bog. Her shoes were not designed for hiking and the ground was soft, like a wet sponge, but she did not pause. Her eyes were fixed on the form lying on the ground. She stopped short before she got too close to the body, paused for a moment and forced herself to move closer.

  Camille Granger’s heavy skirts were blackened with mud. The top of her body was encased in a heavy dark jacket, which was buttoned up to her throat. The white skin on her face and hands was streaked with bog slime and her hair, which looked like it had once been blonde, was a dark matted mass pressed close against her head. Her blue eyes, open and staring at the sky, were dull and flecked with mud.

  She was gone, and her body was just a lifeless object, lying on the cold earth. Her friend, her colleague, was dead. Chloe blinked involuntarily, as if her own eyes were also gritty with dirt.

  The officer who had stayed by the body, a stout, short man with thick wet lips, stepped in front of her. “This is no sight for a lady,” he said, looking to Ambrose, who was still approaching, to perform his husbandly duty and remove her from the scene. Chloe was sickened, and her heart was beating fast in her chest. She took a final look at Camille Granger and turned aside. Perhaps the men were right. Despite the cold, she had broken into a sweat and she felt light-headed. She did not consider herself a woman of delicate sensibilities, but in this case, she had to agree that this was no sight for a woman.

  Ambrose took Chloe’s elbow and gently turned her away. She did not resist. The four barking dogs had mostly quieted, and their master made eye contact with Chloe. The man was short and wiry, his skin wrinkled and toughened by a life outdoors.

  “Excuse me, but did you find her?” Chloe asked.

  “Ah, no. My dogs did. They got out and I found them here, barking something terrible. Then I found poor Mrs. Granger.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Oh yes. She’s Charles Granger’s wife. Lives over that way.” He kept hold of two of the wilder dogs and nodded his head in the direction in which the Aynesworth family lived. She had known that the Granger and Aynesworth households were in the same area, but not that they were neighbors. “I’m glad I don’t have to tell her husband she’s been killed.”

  “Why is that?” said Chloe, her stomach tightening.

  The man shrugged and looked away.

  “Did she fall into the bog?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, and whistled for one of the dogs that had wandered too far afield. “When I came by, only her arm had come out of the bog. The police pulled her the rest of the way out from under the moss. It looks like the back of her head has been bashed in by something.” He stopped, becoming aware that this revelation might upset a lady of gentle birth. He wiped nervously at his face with a grubby sleeve and turned away to tend his dogs.

  They took a few steps and Chloe felt Ambrose pause as he studied the ground.

  “What’s that then?” she asked, leaning forward with him to look at the strange prints on the ground. They looked like animal prints, but were thin and spidery with four front prongs and a center pad that was a perfect oval.

  “What strange tracks,” said Ambrose.

  Both constables approached, eyeing the ground. Ambrose showed them the tracks and the officers exchanged a dark look. “The hound,” one of them said to the other as Ambrose led Chloe back to the carriage.

  From this direction, facing away from the bog, Chloe could see a small bank of rocks close to the crossroads. It was like a half-cairn, built into the side of the hill, about waist-high and twice as wide. Dark holes gaped around the stones, the perfect dwelling places for mice or snakes. Something about it drew her eye.

  Miss Haynes, Mr. James and Mr. Frick were waiting. Mr. Frick held his crisp gray bowler over his chest in respect for the deceased. Miss Haynes’s eyes were downcast, her arms folded loosely across her midsection.

  Ambrose was frowning, and Chloe could not bear to put him out further. She followed him to the carriage. Wordlessly, Ambrose handed Chloe inside and Mr. James drove gently around the police horses and in the direction of Aynesworth House.

  Ambrose tried to distract her, pointing out a tor sitting atop a hill in the distance, its giant stones eerily stacked upon one another as if an enormous child was playing with his blocks. The moor was littered with such natural formations, as well as ancient man-made stone circles and the remains of a number of equally ancient circular stone huts. They passed hills covered in bracken fern and chunks of granite, varying in size from small boulders to great stones the size of an airship engine.

  “I can’t imagine that Camille would have any enemies,” said Chloe. “Do you think it was because of her research? Perhaps there was a competitor who wanted to patent a similar design.”

  Miss Haynes’s head jerked up. She was not only Chloe’s lady’s maid, but was regularly drafted into assisting with experiments and prototypes. She was both intelligent, patient and could manage to dress Chloe’s unruly copper penny hair, all of which made her an ideal employee.

  When Ambrose didn’t answer, Miss Haynes said softly, “Perhaps someone would have been threatened by her work and killed her to get rid of potential competition. One of the coal companies perhaps?”

  “I doubt it,” said Mr. Frick. “They were just early designs, right, mum?” He looked at Chloe who nodded. “No need to commit murder for that.” He settled back into staring glumly out the window.

  Ambrose reached into Chloe’s satchel, pulling out Giles and turning him over to find his power switch.

  “No, leave him for now,” she said, though she did take the still form and place it in her lap. She stroked his patchwork cloth cover and thought of the sheaf of papers in her satchel. Along with various notes and diagrams were a few of the many letters she and Camille had exchanged.

  After Chloe had discovered Mrs. Granger’s academic paper on cadmium and nickel batteries, she had written to Cambridge University, the publisher of the paper, with a request to forward her letter to the author. She had signed the letter C. Sullivan and waited.

  A few months later, the two inventors had developed a regular correspondence. After a few weeks of silence from C. Granger, Chloe had received a short letter from Mr. C. Granger stating that it was “not seemly” for a married woman to have a male correspondent. Chloe was bewildered at first, as the handwriting of this C. Granger was more stiff and angular than the soft, flowing script of her friend. In moments, her confusion turned to delight when she realized that her C. Granger was a woman.

  She had immediately jotted off a note to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Granger, explaining her gender and her hope of reinstating their regular correspondence. After two weeks, another letter, this one in Mrs. Camille Granger’s handwriting, arrived, including sketches for one of her prototypes.

  And then, a month ago, one of Camille’s letters ended wit
h a troubling paragraph.

  “Do not respond to this part of my letter, as my husband reads my correspondence. I feel, now that I will meet you in a few weeks, I can confide that our regular communications have made my existence bearable. Though confined most of the time, I feel my mind and heart could fly free, even if for a short while. I am looking forward to finally meeting you in person and collaborating with you on some new designs.”

  Chloe had wondered at the time if Camille’s “confinement” was because she was with child. She had not mentioned it in any other letters, and surely something of that magnitude would have warranted at least a line. The only conclusion she could draw was that Mr. Charles Granger kept his wife under close watch. How then could she have ended up on the moor alone?

  It was a miracle that Camille’s body had been found at all in the thousands of miles of bogs and marshes. As they passed tors and hills, Chloe was grateful for Ambrose’s warm shape by her side. She was not given to flights of fancy, but as the sun moved behind the gray clouds, she understood how people could imagine seeing a phantom hound in this vast terrain. The shadows thrown by the boulders and tors certainly inspired thoughts of ghosts and spirits and she had heard that at night, the mist could become so thick as to make it impossible to see a person standing directly in front of you.

  Ambrose muttered something and scratched with his pencil in his notebook.

  “Pardon?”

  “Drosere Rotundifolia,” he said. “A small colony. Just there.” He pointed to a spot beside the road.

  “Was that a featherbed?” Chloe asked.

  “What are you talking about? It’s a colony of Roundleaf Sundew,” he said. “I’m noting the location for later.”

  “I meant the bog.”

  “Ah, yes.” His voice was almost inaudible. “That type of bog was a featherbed.”

  “What is a featherbed?” asked Miss Haynes, eyes wide.

  A bright green carpet of moss had covered the bog. It was smooth and certainly looked thick enough for someone to be trapped beneath. Ambrose flipped his pad closed and put it and the pencil in his jacket pocket.

  “It’s a type of bog. You can get halfway across before falling in,” he said. “It’s spongy, but you can walk on it. Falling through the top is like sliding under a featherbed.” At Miss Haynes’s squeak of horror, he paused. “It weighs you down, pushing you under. All you can do is hold your arms out from your sides and wait for someone to come and help you. Struggling is useless. To do so would simply pull you down quicker.”

  Miss Haynes nodded and pulled her shawl tighter around herself.

  They passed a large rock that from this angle reminded Chloe of a face, and she thought again of Camille Granger’s body. Her dress, which may have been a light blue or lavender for all she could tell, was now darkened by bog slime. She pictured Camille’s pale face, her lips white, the teeth grayed by mud. Her blank eyes had stared at the sky.

  She had been murdered.

  Chloe had never seen a dead person before, and her stomach turned at the thought of this woman being hit over the head, her body discarded in a bog, like refuse. No doubt the killer had hoped the body would never be found, but the farmer’s dogs had smelled her, even through the thick, wet odor of the mud.

  Had she been fleeing her killer? Was that why the blow was to the back of her head? Or was it someone she knew, and she trustingly turned her back?

  Ambrose placed his hand on hers and squeezed gently. She reached under Giles to locate his power switch.

  Chapter 3

  Chloe watched from the window as the carriage rounded a green and russet hill and the Aynesworth house came into view. It emerged from the land as if a part of it. Heavy, ivy-covered stone walls rose three stories over the surrounding land, with wild plants growing right up to the short stone wall that served as a barrier between wild moor and civilization. Moss grew on part of the roof, from which numerous brick chimneys stood against the overcast sky. The original house must have been symmetrical, but a small, newer wing jutted sideways and back from the main house, giving it a lopsided appearance.

  That was most likely where William, the patriarch and the widower of Ambrose’s sister, would have his rooms, Chloe thought as they rode up the curved driveway. His four children would occupy the rest of the house. If she remembered correctly, only one, Alexander, was married. Ian, the oldest brother was not, nor was the only sister, Dora. The youngest brother, Robert, was only sixteen.

  Ambrose’s sister, Rose, had died of a fever when Robert was still an infant. Ambrose had adored his younger sister though he spoke of her seldom. The look that would come across his face on those occasions broke Chloe’s heart.

  Ambrose was of the opinion that if Rose had married and stayed in London and had not lived in what he considered the wilderness, she would have been able to receive proper medical care. He would not go so far as to say that the country doctor who had attended her in her last hours was incompetent, but he and William had exchanged sharp words after Rose’s death. Taking a girl of Rose’s constitution and city upbringing out to live on the moors was folly, he said. But Rose had adored William, and was so much in love with the moors, that her parents had consented to the match.

  Back at their home in London, Chloe had mentioned her desire to meet Camille Granger, but had not held much hope of actually doing so. Ambrose had gotten a faraway look when she mentioned Dartmoor. She understood why her husband had not been back to visit the Aynesworth family since Rose’s funeral. But she also understood when, one evening after his brandy, he had leaned back in his stuffed chair, his research books scattered on the side table at his elbow, and declared that it was time for him to pay the family a visit.

  “There’s just no sense in me staying away any longer,” he declared. “Enough is enough.”

  She knew the look of determination on his face. It did not come often, but when it did, there was nothing that could deter him. And because he had asked to visit in order to study the local flora, he would save face and not appear to be asking for forgiveness.

  Chloe put Giles in her satchel and they alighted from the carriage. The group crunched up the gravel path toward the house, taking care not to slip on patches of wet leaves. A heavy stone overhang protected the ancient wooden front door. Before Ambrose could knock, the door burst open and a grinning man stood in the doorway.

  Ambrose took his proffered hand, shaking it heartily and then turned to introduce Chloe to his nephew, Alexander. He was a very good-looking man of about thirty years, his dark hair tidy without looking fussed over. He was tall, but well built, unlike the man behind him who was also tall but too thin.

  “We were worried about you,” Alexander said, escorting them into the foyer and making room so Mr. Frick and Miss Haynes could shut the door behind them. “The drive from the station normally does not take quite so long.”

  “There was a slight delay,” said Ambrose. “We should discuss it later.”

  Then she understood. Ambrose would tell William, Ian and Alexander, and let them handle breaking the news to the family and servants. There was no need to create an unnecessary fuss immediately upon their arrival.

  Miss Haynes and Mr. Frick, ever the proper servants, showed not even a flicker of emotion on their faces.

  Alexander looked puzzled for a moment. “I apologize for not coming to meet you, but I was caught up.” He smiled. “I see you’ve made it safely though. I trust your trip was pleasant? Which airship did you travel on?”

  “The Queen Anne,” said Ambrose.

  The long thin man moved forward. His face was set in a frown, but Chloe saw no animosity in his deep-set brown eyes. Ambrose clasped his hand.

  “Ian, so good to see you. So good.”

  “And you, Uncle.”

  Ian’s face became gentle as he took Chloe’s gloved hand. “A pleasure, Mrs. Sullivan.”

  Chloe felt a gentle squirming against her hip, and pulled Giles from her satchel. Within seconds, his visual
sensors adjusted and he pointed his feet down in anticipation of being set on the floor. Chloe obliged and he circled her once, sitting obediently a few inches from the hem of her dress. He swiveled his ears and tilted his head, watching.

  “I’ve heard of those,” said Alexander. “Is that one of the companion mechanicals that I’ve read about?”

  “It is. But not exactly like the ones they’re selling in the shops,” said Chloe. “He’s a bit more complex.”

  “He can walk and follow you?”

  “And more than that.” She was always eager to discuss her creation. “He’s built to—”

  “Oh, I really must order one for the ladies. You have to tell me where you purchased it.”

  “I didn’t purchase him,” she began. But Alexander had already turned to move past the butler.

  The butler took their hats, coats and Chloe’s satchel and hung them on the short coat rack bolted atop a nearby mechanical. This was a doorway mechanical, common in both city and country and one of the more popular models. Like all mechanicals, it had a very limited range of skills. A doorway mechanical was able to open and close doors, place coats, hats and umbrellas in a pre-designated location, and the newer models could sweep the entryway steps. This particular example was shining and well-maintained, Chloe noted with approval. She was of the firm opinion that a person’s treatment of animals and mechanicals was an indicator of his or her character. Of course, treatment of people was important as well, but anyone could be kind to a being who could speak.

  She noticed that one of the four jointed legs made a very slight squeaking sound as the mechanical hissed and stomped off, coats swinging from its hooks. Also, the tiny puff of smoke from its exhaust tube looked a tad thicker than it should have been. She would offer later to take a look at the machine. Repairing and possibly improving any household mechanicals was the least she could do for her hosts who were accommodating them for an entire month. She would just have to be careful not to make any modifications that the local mechanical shop could not maintain or replicate.