I found it difficult to concentrate on Wilde's journal as the hansom made its way to the very same intersection which Wilde and I visited not even three hours ago, though it felt far longer. It was not simply a matter of my worry and sense of responsibility, though those burdened me down to an extent I cannot adequately describe; it was the ride itself. I had offered the horse pulling the cab a guinea if he could get me to my destination in less than a quarter hour, and he was enthusiastically working himself into a lather setting such a rapid pace that all of the many irregularities in the cobbles of the road sent harsh vibrations through the cab.

Nonetheless, though the words shook before my eyes, I began to take a clearer picture of some of Wilde's motivation. I believed that I understood why he had chosen to stop at Dorotka Lutrinaski's fish and chip shop, for among the various clippings that were part of the journal was the bill of lading for the Darling Dorotka, the cargo ship which her husband captained. The manifest included an array of items, all neatly identified in some careful clerk's perfectly legible script, and Wilde had circled a pawful of them. It was obvious to me why he had circled the line item for the lock box of gold, but I could not guess why other items had caught his interest, which included a crate of mining supplies, part of a shipment destined for the national armory, a load of fine marble, and copper cookware. Also included were rather crude and somewhat blurry cyanotypes of the deed to the Darling Dorotka and its mortgage paperwork, showing that Captain Lutrinaski made his payments to Lemming Brothers Bank itself.

I frowned as I looked up from the journal and out the window, where the buildings were going past at a truly remarkable speed. It seemed logical to conclude, from the information that I had, that Wilde had suspected that Aleš Lutrinaski might have been responsible for the theft of the gold. Certainly if he owed a great deal of money to the bank for his ship's mortgage, he might be inclined to steal from them. Had our visit to the captain's wife allayed or confirmed that suspicion? I cast my mind back to the fish and chip shop, trying to remember anything that might have been relevant to tip Wilde's mind one way or the other. As I recalled, Dorotka had intimated that Aleš was already back out at sea, which I supposed meant that it was unlikely that he could be behind Wilde's kidnapping. I was struck again, however, by the unfortunate thought that Wilde's kidnapping might be totally unrelated to the missing gold, in which case my actions would be ultimately futile. I did not believe for a minute Trunkaby's theory that my flatmate could be involved in the theft, but I would admit that it seemed all too possible that there could be some other nasty business in the fox's past that had caught up to him. I knew not his history with Weaselton, but it was obvious from observing the two mammals together that the weasel, at least, had some cause, real or imagined, to bear the fox ill will.

I shook my head and returned to my consultation of the journal. It would not do to leap at every possibility, and thereby accomplish nothing; I could very well be wrong in suspecting Weaselton, but if nothing else I had to read through Wilde's assembled notes first. Returning my focus to the relevant pages, I noted that following the information concerning Captain Lutrinaski's ship were a variety of other notes that must surely be related to the Darling Dorotka, including a crew manifest and a list of its last ports of call. As expected, I saw that it had arrived in Zootopia on Monday, the tenth of October; it appeared that the ship had spent at least the previous six months simply traveling between Zootopia and Furis. As both cities were major seaports, it made sense enough to me that such a consistent route could be an adequate source of income.

There was also, tucked in between the pages of the case in the journal, a scrap of blotting paper that had a number of notes in Wilde's careful writing, which appeared to my eye to be calculations of some sort. There were no words to give the numbers context, however, and I turned the scrap over to see a neatly drawn table of rows and columns. I caught a whiff of something unpleasantly astringent; in between the borders of the table Wilde had evidently placed droplets of some chemicals unknown to me, which had stained the paper in a variety of shades of red and gray. Like the other side of the scrap, however, there was nothing to indicate what the table meant, and I wondered if Wilde had simply taken for a bookmark something entirely unrelated to the case. Certainly my search of his room had uncovered a surprising volume of utterly worthless media, and it did not seem completely implausible that Wilde had re-purposed a useless bit of waste from some other case.

The remaining pages in the journal devoted to the case showed that it was not only the key that Wilde had taken from the crime scene. He had one of the shipping labels that had been on the remains of the crate that the lock box had been in and a sliver of wood from the same. Otherwise, the only other material in the journal on the pages related to the case were the names of five different secure courier services and their associated addresses. My knowledge of the city was not sufficient to determine where in the city the couriers were with any degree of certitude, but I thought that they were all within the same general location, near the harbor where it would be logical for such companies to place themselves within access of their major source of freight from ships.

Having reached the end of the pages, I tried to puzzle together what everything meant in aggregate. Wilde had claimed, shortly after our visit to Weaselton, that he believed that he had narrowed down the possibilities of how the crime had been committed to a mere three options, but I could not for the life of me guess what they were. Perhaps Wilde had the critical instinct to be able to hunt down mysteries in the way his ancestors would have stalked prey, but I felt woefully out of my depth and a rather stupid bunny besides, that I could not figure it out even with Wilde's notes. Still, I thought that I had divined the purpose of at least a part of the contents of the paperboard box; surely both the book on mortgage loans and the book of maritime law must be related to the Darling Dorotka and Captain Lutrinaski. Once again, I came to the question as to why my companion had gone to the fish and chip shop. I did not know whether the books would confirm the sea otter's guilt or rule him out entirely, and I found myself anxious for the cab ride to end and allow me to question Weaselton so that I could at least reduce the avenues of investigation before me.

I did not have long to wait, as the horse pulling the hansom had narrowly made the time limit I had imposed for the reward of a guinea above and beyond the fare owed. He collapsed against the street, great sheets of perspiration staining his shirt and pants, his muzzle white with froth. "I cannot explain how much you may have helped," I said gratefully, pulling forth the coins I owed, "But could I trouble you to wait for me here? There's another guinea in it for you, should you be able to get me back to Barker Street so quickly as you got me here once I have completed my errand."

The horse wiped away the foam from his muzzle with a grimy handkerchief before accepting the coins gratefully. "Certainly, ma'am, certainly, so long as you're not too quick about your errand. I could do with a bit of a rest, you understand," he said, his great barrel of a chest heaving.

I nodded. In truth, I did not know where I would next need to go, but it seemed prudent to have a hansom held for me so that I would not need to waste any time once my business with the weasel was concluded. I hurried down the twisting route of Mustelid Street as fast as my bad leg would allow, paying no mind to the filthy puddles or refuse that littered the street. When I reached the alleyway at which Wilde had previously stopped, I stopped myself, realizing that I had completely forgotten about the arrangement that the fox had made. The little ferret kit selling matchsticks was still in her alley, and I hoped that she might have something of value to tell me. She had been most shy with Wilde, it was true, but he was a fox and I was a bunny; certainly I was the far less threatening of the pair of us, both with the fox and the ferret. Though I was taller than the kit at present, I thought it likely she would be at least my height upon becoming an adult.

"Pardon me," I called, "Molly, was it?"

The ferret looked up at me and nodded tentatively. "Do you remember me?" I asked gently, "I came this way with Nicholas Wilde, not three hours ago."

She nodded again, but had made no motion to stand, apparently content to sit on the filthy cobbles of the alley. I slowly brought myself into a crouch to bring us to eye level, stabilizing myself with my cane as I did so. "He said you would keep an eye on Weaselton for him," I said, "Has he had any visitors? A moose, perhaps?"

Molly eyed me warily, but did not speak. "Please," I said, "Please, Wilde needs my help, and I need yours. He was abducted by a moose and I must know if Weaselton was responsible."

The little kit's eyes widened in surprise, and her paws flew into a flurry of motion that meant nothing to me. As she did so, my vantage point of being eye level with the ferret afforded me a view that I had not caught in the gloom of the alleyway when first we met. Molly was wearing a rough scarf, but it wasn't quite wide enough to completely hide a twisted and bald patch of scar tissue on her neck, which in conjunction with her rapid sign language made me realize that the ferret was mute, not shy.

The ferret's paw signs came to a halt, and she looked at me expectantly. I wondered if it was another of Wilde's talents, to be able to understand sign language, but it was not one that I shared. "I don't understand," I confessed, "Has Weaselton had any visitors?"

Molly held up three fingers. I nodded. "Was one of them a moose?"

She shook her head, then held up two fingers before standing and launching into a bit of pantomime. She snarled noiselessly, her lip pulled back from her teeth. She raised her tiny paws, her fingers curled, the delicate little claws towards me. She wrapped her paws around her torso and shivered, and then looked down at me in the eye, apparently waiting for me to guess. While I struggled to catch her meaning, she held up one finger, then acted out another little bit of theater. This time, she held out one paw, and gestured around it with the other, as though she were holding something a few inches around. She then reached around and grabbed hold of her tail, then gestured with the other a significant length beyond its end. Once more, she looked me in the eye, apparently waiting.

I could have attempted to divine her meaning, but I was still in a great hurry and supposed that it did not matter overmuch who the mammals had been, so long as they was not a moose among them. Even if I understood her perfectly, all it told me was that Weaselton could not have directly instructed the moose, but it did not rule out one of the three mammals being an intermediary. I nodded slowly. "Weaselton has not left his shop, has he?"

Molly shook her head. "These three mammals, are they still in the shop?" I asked, my urgency giving my voice a desperate tone that the ferret must have well understood, for when she shook her head again she did so with such vigor that her entire little body moved.

I pushed myself to standing fully upright again with my cane and pulled a half-crown from the beaded purse, but before I offered it to Molly I was struck by an idea. I had earlier bemoaned my inability to be in multiple places at once, but I saw that the solution stood before me in the form of a grubby little ferret. Wilde had apparently made great use of Zootopia's street urchins, and I realized that I could do the same, should they let me. I dropped the half-crown back into the purse and scooped out a guinea's worth of coins and held them before me. "Molly, could you gather your fellows and meet me at the flat on Barker Street?"

The ferret froze, eyeing the coins distrustfully, and I wondered if she thought I was playing some kind of cruel joke on her. She had seen me in the company of Wilde before, but I supposed she had little enough reason to trust me. I could not guess the source of the injury to her throat that rendered her mute, but I did not think it much of a stretch to imagine that life as an urchin had not been particularly kind to the little kit. Wilde had been gentle enough with her, and I hoped that she did have some measure of trust in the fox. "Please, Molly," I implored, my voice thick with emotion, "It is my fault that Mr. Wilde is in this mess, and I cannot rest until I pull him from it."

I hoped again that I was on the right course of action, and not ruining the result of the errand Wilde had set Molly upon. I swallowed my doubts and kept the coins out. The little ferret reached for them slowly, as though expecting me to pull it back before she could take it. When at last her fingers closed around the little pile, I felt the gentle scrape of her claws against my palm as she quickly withdrew the coins and made them vanish into a pocket of her dress. She smiled up at me, then held up her fingers and flashed them in rapid sequence. I had no trouble understanding her meaning on this occasion; clearly she meant to be at the flat within twenty-five minutes, and I nodded my approval. Before setting off, she gave me a significant look, then turned her neck and looked at the door to Weaselton's pawnshop before looking back at me. She raised two fingers on her paw and pointed them first at her eyes, then grasped one of her ears and pulled on it. Again I caught her meaning; I had every intent of being careful indeed inside Weaselton's shop. My right paw dropped to the pocket of my jacket and I felt the reassuring weight of my service revolver before I gave the ferret my answer. "I will be most careful while having words with Mr. Weaselton," I said grimly, and Molly scampered off to her task as I made my way to door of the pawnshop.

I took a great breath, but my heart and paws were steady. It was similar to the feeling I had gotten before the battle that had ended my career as an army surgeon; it was not fear that ran through my veins, but anticipation, the knowledge that my skills would soon be needed and it was my duty to perform to the best of my ability. My vision and hearing seemed preternaturally sharp, and in that moment I felt totally aware of everything around me. It was not a feeling of invincibility; my war injury would certainly have disabused me of any such notion had common sense not done so long ago. Rather, it was the sense that success or failure rest entirely on my shoulders, and I knew, to the depths of my heart, that I was prepared. I boldly opened the door and walked in.

Author's Notes: If you've ever wondered why blueprints are blue, the cyanotype process is the reason why. The cyanotype process was invented in 1842 and uses specially prepared paper to make a copy where the dark sections of the original appear white and the light sections appear blue. For documents, such as architectural drawings, the sheet to be copied is placed over photosensitive paper and exposed to UV light, historically from the sun. The ink on the original blocks the photosensitive solution on the copy paper from being exposed to light, while sections without ink do not block it and turn blue. For an overcast day, 20 minutes would typically do it, and then the cyanotype could be developed and the photosensitive solution that did not react to light could be washed away.

The cyanotype process was a great help to architects, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th century when buildings were becoming increasingly complex, because it allowed the accurate reproduction of complicated line drawings, albeit as a negative image of white lines on a blue background. The process requires a translucent original to work; for architectural drawings, which were typically made on high quality cartridge paper, it was necessary to first copy the image onto tracing paper. However, documents printed on vellum, such as important financial and legal documents, are translucent enough for the process to work.

In the world of Victorian Zootopia, I doubt that they would ever have used real vellum, which is made from animal hide, since it would make anything printed on it as creepy as the Necronomicon to them. Instead, they would use paper with a high cotton content, which is what most papers referred to as vellum are in the present.

That's a lot of words to say that yes, in 1881 it was possible to make a copy of a page. People in the Victorian era even had the ability to transmit signatures by telegraph in a crude predecessor to modern faxes; the scanning telephotograph was invented in 1881 and its successor, the teleautograph in 1888, quickly became widely used by banks, hospitals, and train yards to transmit critical signatures and messages that were accurate reproductions of a handwritten original. Incidentally, the "fax" part of a fax machine is short for facsimile, meaning a copy that is true to the original source. A cyanotype isn't a true facsimile because it is at best an inverted color copy, though it can accurately reproduce the lines of the original.

There's a lot more detail in this chapter about Wilde's notes; I'll refrain from commenting on them any further to avoid potential spoilers. It is true, though, that Wilde did say he had the crime down to three possibilities for how it occurred in chapter 10.

Horses really are one of the few mammals, other than humans, that sweat as a primary means of cooling off, and they can also make a frothy saliva as the result of exertion.

English sign language has existed for hundreds of years, and British Sign Language began to become significantly more standardized in the 19th century. Interestingly, both then and now, American Sign Language and British Sign Language are far more different than the spoken English language of both countries. Dr. Hopps's complete lack of understanding of sign language is a little reference to the movie where Judy can't understand Nick's nonverbal instructions for dealing with the asylum guards; in the Victorian setting I imagine consulting detective Wilde is perfectly capable of communicating in sign language.