Chapter Four
The tour of the house continued.
Mr. Elstree made sure to point out that after the murder, the master’s and the mistress’s apartments had been stripped and refurnished entirely. Miss Charlotte asked several times to ascertain that the rest of the house had not been substantially altered or refitted, except for new wallpapers put up ahead of its sale to a family of nabobs who still had not returned from the Subcontinent.
The staff at the time of the murder had since scattered and Mr. Elstree didn’t know their current whereabouts, with one notable exception: The gardener who had discovered Victor Meadows’s body had left domestic service and now owned a newsagent’s shop three railway stops away, in the direction farther away from London.
Which deterred the ladies not at all from heading there as soon as they were finished with Garwood Hall.
Mr. Elstree had mentioned that Danny Stow, the former gardener turned newsagent, had married a woman who made locally famous pies. As the train pulled into the station, a mouthwatering aroma of hot water crust pies cooking to a bubbling finish wafted in through the windows.
Danny Stow handled the rush of customers with aplomb and sent them back to the train laden with not just pies but newspapers, magazines, and small packs of homemade boiled sweets.
The Yardley “mother and son” waited until the train had departed the station. Danny Stow, now a man in his mid-thirties, wiped his brow with a sleeve, took out a broom, and swept up the detritus from around his shop. Then he washed his hands with water from a pitcher.
“Mr. Stow? One each of the missus’s marvelous pies, please,” said Owen Yardley.
Danny Stow showed little surprise at being addressed by name by a stranger. He only said, “Indeed, sir. Excellent choices. The missus recommends them one and all.”
His straw-colored hair was thinning and his otherwise lean build beginning to pad out in the middle—nothing yet, compared to Owen Yardley’s proud girth. But he had a boyish face, and it was easy for Mrs. Watson to imagine him as a much younger man, climbing up that ladder, self-conscious under the gaze of the entire Meadows household, apprehensive yet anticipating not at all the bloodbath that he would find.
According to the police report, the ladder from the garden had been slightly short, and Danny Stow had pulled on the ivy on the exterior wall and hung by his fingernails in order to get up to the open window. And once he was inside the chamber, he’d taken a look, turned around, and called to the crowd below, There’s—there’s blood next to the bed!
But where is my brother? Ephraim Meadows had shouted back. Mrs. Meadows, still unaware of her new widowhood, swayed and murmured, No, surely not. Surely not!
I—I think the master might be under the—the covers, had been Danny Stow’s halting answer.
Urged to pull back the covers, he had disappeared from the window. When he reappeared, he had been unable to speak for a minute, and then said, I’ll open the door. You’d best come see yourselves!
The crowd, rushing back in, had found him standing outside the now-open door of the master’s bedroom, trembling, after having pulled back the bedcover to reveal Victor Meadows with his throat cut.
Present-day Danny Stow wrapped up Miss Charlotte’s purchases in brown paper and took out a spool of twine. “Dare I presume, sir, ma’am, that you’ve just come from Garwood Hall?”
A good number of visitors Mr. Elstree squired about Garwood Hall must not be serious prospective tenants at all, but those looking for a shiver down the spine by touring a former murder scene. Did Danny Stow think that was what they were, too? Mrs. Watson’s cheeks prickled with embarrassment.
Miss Charlotte was beyond such minor chagrins. “Indeed, that is so. We had heard some unfortunate rumors concerning the estate on our rail journey this morning. Mr. Elstree, after offering his reassurances, said we could speak to you, if we still felt in need of a greater understanding,” she said, sounding just like an earnest, prudent Manchester linendraper who had no idea that he might be deemed a seeker of unseemly titillations.
Danny Stow paused in the unraveling of the spool of twine. “Greater understanding, sir? I’m afraid all I can give you is a description of what I saw on that Christmas Day.”
“Good gracious, my dear fellow, why would we make you relive that harrowing memory? No, I wanted to ask if you know whether Mr. Meadows had the habit of sleeping with his windows open in winter.”
The shopkeeper blinked, taken aback by the query. “I had a pint with a footman from that time a few years ago. He mentioned that Mr. Meadows himself must have kept the window ajar. He didn’t like a room too warm, Mr. Meadows, and the house was new back then, everything flush and plumb. Maybe if he didn’t open a window, the room would’ve been too stuffy.”
“You think the murderer gained access to the room from the window?” asked Miss Charlotte.
“The house was locked up every night, and those locks weren’t disturbed.” The former gardener, deep in thought, slowly wove a net of twine around the wrapped-up pies. “It had to have been the window.”
“But getting in through the window would still have been the easy part,” mused Miss Charlotte. “From what I understand, the duvet had absorbed almost all the arterial spray from the cutting of Mr. Meadows’s throat. This meant that the murderer had climbed onto the bed, pulled the covers above Mr. Meadows’s head, and then reached a blade under to do the evil deed. Odd that Mr. Meadows didn’t wake—I understand there was no sign of any struggle.”
Stow shrugged. “His older brother said that after dinner on Christmas Eve, the two of them finished off a bottle of brandy, reminiscing over old times. Mr. Meadows could have been in a bit of a stupor going to bed.”
That had been the police inspector’s opinion also, that the victim had been too inebriated to respond to mortal threat.
“Do you think it was an outsider?” Miss Charlotte continued her unhurried questioning.
“I do,” answered her interviewee without a moment of hesitation. “The ladder that I used? It wasn’t where it should have been. It was moved during the night and tossed back somewhere in the garden. And the ivy around the window was loose—someone used that to help pull themselves up from the top of the ladder, the same way I had to.”
“Oh my,” said Mrs. Watson, rubbing a hand over her sleeve as if she felt chilled by the prospect. “But in a place as isolated as Garwood Hall, wouldn’t strangers in the neighborhood have been noticed?”
“If they’d come off the train at the village station, maybe. But we were only twenty miles north of Bolton—and that was no small place even fifteen years ago. If someone hired a carriage there, they could have easily covered the distance to Garwood Hall at night and been gone before morning.”
“But to accomplish that,” mused Miss Charlotte, “the so-called rabble-rousers from the factories would have needed to be fairly organized.”
Stow completed the twine netting he’d made around the paper-wrapped pies with two loops that served as a pair of handles. A few travelers had arrived and were milling around the platform, waiting for the next train. He glanced around and lowered his voice. “I don’t know more about the murder than anyone else, Mr. Yardley, but I don’t think it was perpetrated by rabble-rousers. For one, the timing was perfect: Christmas Eve might be the only time when nobody pays attention to a carriage careening down a country road—folks would think that’s just other folks rushing home for Christmas.
“For another, look at the way the murder was carried off. Well, I suppose the snow that night was pure luck—those several inches covered up all the tracks any outsider might have made coming to and leaving the house. But other than that, it was all planning and skill. The deed was done so fast Mr. Meadows was probably dead before he knew what was happening. And other than the blood that dripped to the floor, there was no splatter anywhere else.
“At that point it would have been easier for the murderer to leave by going through the house. But did he do that? No, he left via the ladder again. True, he didn’t put the ladder back exactly as he ought to have—his one oversight—but by locking Mr. Meadows’s doors and leaving the window open, he had us, everybody in the household, do the work of trampling the area under the window for him, destroying any signs he might have left behind. Not to mention, no murder weapon was ever found.”
He shook his head. “The police inspector, I remember him, he was patient and conscientious, but he could find no clues, absolutely nothing to go on.”
“I see you have done some serious thinking on the matter, Mr. Stow.”
Stow gave a bitter smile. “Believe me, Mr. Yardley, the last thing I wanted, all those years ago, was to ever think about the murder again. I didn’t even care who did it—I just wanted to stop seeing Mr. Meadows in my sleep. Thankfully that did stop, after a while. But because I’m linked to the murder, people asked me about it. By and by I found myself turning it over in my head. I even brought it up with other members of the staff, when we were at the housekeeper’s funeral a few years ago.”
“Did you learn anything?”
“Not really, except the bit about Mr. Meadows not liking his room too warm, from the footman I mentioned.”
Miss Charlotte, as Owen Yardley, stroked the beard on her face. “Mr. Stow, judging by everything you’ve said, you must believe the murderer to be a professional criminal—an assassin for hire, even. But such a person would have harbored no personal enmity toward the late Mr. Meadows and would have been acting only at the express desire of his paymaster. Do you have any opinion on the identity of that shadowy character?”
Stow expelled a breath. “The missus would be cross if she knew the direction of our conversation. And she’s right—the purpose of my life isn’t to speculate on Mr. Meadows’s murder. We’ve got each other, we’ve got the boys, and we’ve got plans to expand the pie business so we can give the boys a proper education.
“Mind you, she knows there’s no stopping people coming up to me asking about the murder—just make sure they buy enough of everything to make it worth your time, she always says. And most of the time, the folks who are interested, they only want the gory details. Or they want to tell me what they think happened—and I only need to listen and nod.
“It’s hardly ever that I’m asked about my theories. So I must beg you, Mr. Yardley, Mrs. Yardley, to please let this go no further than the three of us.”
Mr. Yardley raised a hand. “You have our solemn promise.”
Stow looked around again. More travelers had arrived on the platform—some were even eyeing the pies from not too far away. He lowered his voice further. “I think the person who did the hiring was most likely Mrs. Harcourt, Mr. Meadows’s sister, the one he gave everything to.”
With a soft gasp, Mrs. Watson’s hand came up to her lips. She herself had raised that possibility to Miss Charlotte on the rail journey this morning, but Owen Yardley’s mother could scarcely be unmoved by such a sensational scenario. Her “son” gripped her by the shoulder even as he placed a hand over his own heart.
“I’m from hereabouts,” Stow went on. “But some of the indoor staff, they worked for Mr. Meadows in his Manchester town house and they knew more about his business. Before he died, I heard a good deal about troubles at his factories. But afterwards, those troubles went away, which tells me they could have been ginned up to pin the murder on labor agitators and whatnot.”
Mrs. Watson, obligingly, gasped again.
Stow shook his head and chortled. “But you know what the missus said? She said maybe the sister raised wages and improved conditions and the workers simply had far fewer causes to protest. And who is to say she isn’t as likely to be right about it?”
?They thanked Danny Stow profusely and left on the next train out. In Manchester, the ladies parted ways temporarily. Mrs. Watson, having sent a cable the day before, visited the archives of the Manchester Guardian to see what the local newspaper had to say about the Christmas Eve Murder. Charlotte had the more pleasant task of calling on Miss Longstead in Berkshire.
The previous winter, Miss Longstead’s uncle had been shot dead, and Charlotte had worked to clear Inspector Treadles of suspicion for that crime. Despite, or perhaps due to, the inauspicious circumstances of their meeting, the two young women had forged a strong trust.
Since then, Charlotte and Mrs. Watson had come to rely on Miss Longstead, a talented chemist, to supply them with formulations that imitated the texture of skin, essential for more involved disguises.
Because Charlotte still had on her masculine veneer, to avoid causing unnecessary gossip she did not ask the trap driver to deliver her to the estate Miss Longstead inherited from her uncle but to a nearby church of some renown.
From the church it was only fifteen minutes on foot along a secluded path to reach the side gate of an unoccupied property that belonged to Miss Johansson, Miss Longstead’s neighbor and mentor in chemistry.
Miss Longstead was already waiting and quickly admitted Charlotte.
Earlier in the year, before her voyage on the RMS Provence, during the months when she’d kept out of sight following her “death” in Cornwall, Charlotte had already visited Miss Longstead dressed as a man. So her appearance today earned only a small chuckle from her hostess.
Miss Longstead had a well-sprung dogcart waiting. They climbed up, and Miss Longstead shook the reins.
“I am both envious that you get to wear disguises and worried about the necessity that drives you to it. Have you been all right, Miss Holmes?”
Her gold-flecked green eyes peered at Charlotte. The afternoon sun shone on her wide-brimmed hat, which protected her gleaming light brown skin and lovely features from the elements.
Charlotte nodded slowly. “I’m all right. More tired than anything else—there has just been so much to do.”
“At least after you see the laboratory, it will be one less task on your list.”
The laboratory, too, belonged to Miss Johansson, who was currently teaching at a women’s college in America. In her absence, Miss Longstead kept an eye on her small estate.
Prudently enough, the laboratory was in a separate building from the converted farmhouse that served as the main dwelling. Inside, it teemed with beakers, test tubes, flasks, and more Bunsen burners than any one person could possibly need. A strong smell shot up Charlotte’s nostrils, at once metallic and acidic.
Miss Longstead took out a key ring and unlocked a glass-front cabinet. “You see? There used to be four bottles of the stuff in here. Now there are only two.”
“You should put the last two bottles somewhere safer,” said Charlotte. “And just in case, it might be better for you not to come near this laboratory for some time, until you hear otherwise from me.”
Miss Longstead bit her lower lip. “Are you sure everything will be all right?”
Charlotte took a deep breath—the odor of chemicals grew harsher, more pervasive. She glanced around at the breached laboratory. Uncharacteristically, her heart thumped a few times, with a sudden surge of nerve.
“I hope so,” she said. “But there is more uncertainty than ever, and only time will tell whether our work will bear fruit.”
?Miss Longstead’s place in Berkshire, and Ravensmere, the estate that served as Lord Bancroft’s prison, were about the same distance from London. But the former was situated due west of the great metropolis, the latter north-northwest. To call on Lord Bancroft after her meeting with Miss Longstead, Charlotte had to take the train into London and then head back out.
A generation ago, Ravensmere would have been entirely outside London, a house in the country that was convenient for a well-to-do man of the city to repair to at the end of his working week. But London’s inexorable growth had devoured most of the fields and pastures that had once formed a green barrier between the estate and the capital.
The present-day villa was not exactly on the doorstep of industry—it was far from any major bodies of water that could effectively carry away effluvia. But the tiny hamlets that used to be its nearest neighbors had sprouted tracts of development that encroached in its direction, some of those tentacles almost near enough to brush up against the villa’s boundaries.
Charlotte detrained at one such hamlet and hired a trap to take her the rest of the way. When she arrived, the last of twilight had faded. The high-walled estate was eerily silent; not even a cricket chirped.
The path that would allow her inside passed directly under the arch at the center of a slate-roofed gatehouse. Unlike the usual ornamental gates meant to show off the beauty of the grounds, this gate was solid metal and fitted close to the limestone of the arch, giving no glimpse of the landscape beyond.
As she alit, a small window on the gate slid open, revealing a pair of eyes under bushy brows and an unfriendly gaze.
Charlotte stopped several feet away. “Evening. Sherrinford Holmes at your service. I’m here to see his lordship.”
The face glanced down. “Yer name isn’t on the list.”
This was not the answer Charlotte had anticipated. The previous day, before she boarded the train for Manchester, she’d sent word informing Lord Bancroft that she had received his letters and would be calling this evening. “What about Charlotte Holmes?”
The permission she had been granted applied to both Sherrinford and Charlotte Holmes.
“Not on the list either, and you are no Charlotte Holmes.”
“Indeed not. Did his lordship perhaps make a mistake and think I would be visiting on the morrow?”
“Tomorrow’s list will be given to us tomorrow. Now, since you’ve no business here, sir, you’d best be on your way.”
?Lord Ingram, due to his service to the crown, could have compelled Lord Bancroft to receive him. Charlotte had no such powers—yet. She had no choice but to go back to the village railway station and take the next train to London.
It was past dinnertime, yet she was not hungry. True, she dined so regularly that she rarely experienced true hunger, merely a sweet anticipation for her next meal. Still, to stare at Mrs. Stow’s curried chicken pie and her rhubarb-mulberry tart and not be tempted?
Charlotte looked out of the window of her compartment. A gas lamp–dotted landscape slid backward as the train trundled toward Euston Station. On the way to Ravensmere, the man who had shared her compartment had barely refrained from offering dermatological advice as Charlotte had scratched and scratched at her beard. She was sure that her face still itched from the glue used to hold the beard in place, but now she barely felt it.
What was Lord Bancroft up to?
He was the one who had repeatedly written her, expressing a desire to renew their acquaintance. He knew that Sherrinford Holmes was none other than Charlotte Holmes. Why had he not received her tonight?
From Euston Station she took a hansom cab. The cab drove past a hole-in-the-wall that sold fried pies. The smell of pastry dunked in hot oil should have made her peckish even if she’d just eaten a full meal, but tonight she remained indifferent.
No, she grew slightly repulsed.
The last time she’d lost her appetite outright had to do with Lord Bancroft. Was her stomach trying to tell her something? That it sensed—and was bracing for—imminent danger?
She asked to be deposited some distance from her hotel. There had been no time to ready Mrs. Watson’s house, which had sat empty for nearly half a year, for habitation. Fortunately, with most of the Upper Ten Thousand having already decamped for the countryside, it had been easy to secure a suite of rooms with its own street entrance, so that they did not need to pass through the hotel’s sometimes still-crowded foyer.
That street entrance flew open before Charlotte was even close enough to take her keys out from her pocket. A wild-looking Mrs. Watson bridged the fifteen feet or so that separated them, grabbed Charlotte by the elbow, and dragged her inside.
Charlotte nearly tripped on the threshold.
Mrs. Watson shut the door hard, throwing her shoulder against it as if a battering ram had been deployed on the other side. She opened her mouth, but no words emerged.
It was Miss Redmayne, standing at the door that connected the vestibule to the parlor, her silhouette backlit, her face in shadows, who said, her voice shaking only a little, “Miss Charlotte, they have Miss Bernadine. Lord Bancroft’s men have your sister.”