Chapter Nine
Leaving Mrs. Claiborne’s town house, the two women went in separate directions. Mrs. Watson would join forces with Lawson, her groom and coachman who had not moved to Paris with the rest of the household, to look for Mr. Underwood’s boxing connections. Charlotte, newly acquired keys in hand, headed for Mrs. Claiborne’s original house, the villa on Prince’s Grove Close.
The location was suitably private, the last dwelling on a secluded cul-de-sac. The front gate opened to a rose garden in furious bloom, every single flower a perfect shade of sugarplum. The view was lovely, but Charlotte noticed the weeds pushing up everywhere, as well as the plethora of faded blossoms that hadn’t been trimmed.
The interior of the villa was dark—the windows had been shuttered and the gas lamps no longer supplied with fuel. Charlotte managed to find a candlestick and lit the taper.
Candlelight shone on muted gold wallpaper of Japanese six-point-star patterns. The upholstery was an ivory chintz printed with birds and stylized cherry trees. Had the windows been open and light flooding in, the room would have been airy and pretty.
Out of curiosity, Charlotte drew close to a wall and lifted the candlestick high to inspect the area above a sconce—near gas flames, it would have been difficult to keep such light wallpaper from discoloration. But Mrs. Claiborne had anticipated the problem and installed a miniature shelf that held a blue ceramic plate with Japanese wave patterns—much easier to clean than silk wallpaper.
Charlotte descended to the basement and began her inspection there.
The domestic offices, completely emptied of all papers, did not yield so much as a receipt for coal.
In the kitchen, all the food had been disposed of, not a scrap of bread or potato peel left to collect mold. The stove, the inside of which had not been similarly cleaned out, showed an inch of ash mingled with charred bits of wood.
Charlotte climbed up one story to the ground floor and looked in on the morning room, the dining room, and the study. Unlike most studies Charlotte had encountered in her time, this one contained only sixty or so volumes that barely filled one lonely bookshelf to half capacity. She didn’t know about Mr. Underwood’s or Mrs. Claiborne’s tastes in written material, but once upon a time Lord Bancroft had mentioned in Charlotte’s hearing that he read deeply on the history of art and was fascinated by the development of the Italian city-states from the tenth to the fifteenth century.
Most of the books on hand appeared to have been acquired for his benefit.
She had already examined the table in the dining room and the mantelpiece in the morning room, and those surfaces held six weeks’ worth of accumulated dust.
The bookshelf, upon first glance, had collected dust for much longer, months rather than weeks. Presumably Mrs. Claiborne, shorn of all staff since the previous autumn and faced with a house that was too much for one person to maintain, had retreated from the study early on.
Charlotte stared at the rows of books for a while, then loosened a bookend and picked up a tome.
The dust under that book told a different story. The first half inch or so of the narrow strip of shelf surface exposed by the removal of the book, the part that had lain beneath the spine, bore noticeably thicker dust than the surface near the rear of the shelf. She lifted another book; the same pattern held. Another, still the same.
The books had once stood farther back on the shelf. But someone had moved them—possibly recently—and had set them down closer to the edge, so as to hide a disturbance in the dust.
She checked each volume but came across nothing unusual. Whoever had been here before her, a thorough soul, would have gone through all the books. The only question was whether the intruder had found anything worthwhile.
The study’s desk drawers did not seem to have been disturbed—if one looked only at the drawer pulls. But Charlotte, with a pencil from her handbag, was able to open and close those drawers without touching the dust on the drawer pulls or leaving fingermarks behind.
On the next floor she at last came across signs of a hasty departure: In Mrs. Claiborne’s bedroom, the wardrobe doors hung ajar; half of the drawers in her dressing room remained pulled out. Charlotte assumed, given the care the clandestine visitor had taken, that this part of the house had appeared just so in the wake of Mrs. Claiborne’s flight.
Up in the attic, however, that care flagged. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that here it was nigh on impossible to conceal all traces of one’s presence.
The door to the attic was secured with a padlock that had been wiped clean—about three days ago, Charlotte would say. The clandestine visitor, who had not come equipped with keys, had picked the lock, and he or she could not have accomplished that without disturbing the dust on the padlock.
The corridor in the attic, uncarpeted, was so dusty that footmarks could not be concealed. Still, the secret explorer had not been willing to leave actual shoe prints. The dust had been—not swept but rearranged, possibly with a piece of cloth or an outer garment the intruder had dragged behind as he or she left.
The attic, with its cramped quarters for servants, held no other revelations. Charlotte relocked the door, descended, and took one more round on each floor, making sure that she hadn’t overlooked anything.
After that, she opened the back door and went out into the rear garden.
And there she found something interesting.
?As Charlotte approached the street entrance of her hotel suite, she spied an old man striding in her direction.
When she last saw him, the old man had been deeply unstylish, liver-spotted, and reeking of too much eau de cologne. As he marched past her today, the overpowering miasma was gone, the liver spots nowhere to be seen, and the garments only a few years, instead of a few decades, behind the forefront of fashion. He was still an old man but a spry one, with a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair and spectacles that gave him an air of quiet authority.
“Oh, sir! Sir, one moment, please!” she called out.
The most tempting old man this side of the English Channel stopped and turned around. He looked vaguely perplexed. “Yes?”
“I do apologize, but I found these on the pavement. They wouldn’t happen to belong to you, would they?” asked Charlotte, her eyes wide as she held out the pair of wire-rimmed glasses she used for her gentlemen characters.
He made a show of looking them over carefully. “Thank you, miss, but these are not mine.”
“Oh.” She made her best crestfallen face. “I will leave them at the reception then.”
“I wish you a good evening, miss.” He inclined his head and left without a moment’s hesitation.
Always playing hard to get, her lover.
It was too late for tea and too early for dinner. So Charlotte, back in her hotel suite, rang for both.
She had just changed into a home dress when a knock came.
Taking advantage of Society’s exit from London, Charlotte and her friends had booked three side-by-side suites at the hotel, each with a private entrance. Between Lord Ingram’s suite and the one occupied by the ladies was an even larger one, the only one at the hotel that connected to the suites on both sides, meant to host a very large family or dignitaries who simply demanded more space.
This suite was currently taken by none other than Lawson, who played the part of a Manchester man of business. But as Lawson preferred his own lodgings behind Mrs. Watson’s house near Regent’s Park, this very nice suite mostly served as a corridor between Lord Ingram’s and the ladies’ quarters.
“Do excuse me, miss,” said an elderly voice on the other side of the connecting door. “I hope I am not too previous in calling on you. But perhaps I should take one more look at the glasses you found. You haven’t placed them with the reception yet, I take it?”
Charlotte sauntered to the door, unlatched it, and admitted her lover. “My, what a proper old gentleman you are.”
He snorted, an incongruous sound coming from such an ancient paragon. “Would you prefer if I were the sort of old man who leered at young women? No, never mind that, I remember now: You prefer great beauties such as Mr. Gregory.”
Mr. Gregory, a fellow traveler on the RMS Provence, had indeed been a great beauty. Charlotte batted her eyelashes. “Do I detect a note of jealousy, my lord?”
“A note?” He scoffed. “I have composed an entire symphony of jealousy. This is merely the overture. In fact, this might be only the orchestra tuning up.”
She held back a smile. She was not the liveliest or most responsive woman, but he moved her to mirth rather easily. “Oh my. How wrong you are. I am not interested in the loverly Mr. Gregorys of the world. It has always been the prim, repressed Lord Ingrams of the world for me.”
“Huh,” he said, walking to the sideboard to pour himself a glass of water from a carafe.
“However, that old gentleman in Paris that I encountered in a carriage…I am fascinated by him, too. I wonder if Monsieur Lord and Master secretly enjoys being tied up in bed.”
Lord Ingram spat out his water. Then he thought for a moment. “He might. That could be why he’s so grumpy. He’s always felt as if something has been missing in his life, but didn’t know what. And his lady wife, instead of understanding him better than he understands himself—and sourcing the best silken cords in Paris—is too busy ogling Footman Pierre of the ham-sized biceps.”
The smile that had been threatening to erupt upon Charlotte’s face did so at last. “I see the orchestra has finished tuning up and now we are in the opening bars of La Grande Symphonie de la Jalousie.”
He set down his glass, closed the distance between them, and embraced her. “Are you all right, Holmes?”
She hugged him back. “I would prefer a case in which I had no personal stake—the little conundrum from Inspector Treadles, for instance. But I’m all right. How can I not be, in the company of handsome old men?”
“Huh,” he said again, at her use of the plural noun, and kissed her.
?“My dear, I’m back!” Mrs. Watson called out.
She pushed open the door to the parlor only to see Miss Holmes step back from the embrace of an older gentleman.
A choked sound emerged from Mrs. Watson’s throat. Before she could comprehend what was happening, the older gentleman half bowed and said, “Good afternoon, ma’am.”
He spoke in Lord Ingram’s voice. Mrs. Watson gasped again. She rushed forward, took him by the shoulders, and peered at his face.
The previous autumn, in experimenting with various makeup techniques that would result in a better disguise, she’d discovered that bits of crumpled tissue paper could be used to simulate wrinkles, when brushed over with a formulation made by Miss Longstead.
Miss Longstead, not resting on her laurels, made further modifications and came up with a new solution that could be layered onto the face in sufficient thickness to alter the shape of the nose or the height of the cheekbones. Which was what Lord Ingram had done, in addition to a sharp-tipped beard that suggested a different jaw structure from his own.
“My goodness, I couldn’t tell that it was you!” Mrs. Watson marveled.
Lord Ingram kissed her on both cheeks. “You should have seen me in Paris,” he said wryly. “My disguise there was exceptional.”
The food Miss Charlotte ordered came, and they sat down around the tea table. Mrs. Watson had little idea what she was eating. She barely even kicked herself for walking in on the young lovers. As soon as Lord Ingram had received an account of the meetings with Lord Bancroft and Mrs. Claiborne, she set down her silverware.
“My dear boy, do you think it’s remotely possible that your brother would do so much, including taking Miss Bernadine hostage, merely because he’s concerned for a henchman?”
Miss Charlotte, who was more interested in the small sandwiches that had come with the tea service, had given her dinner to Lord Ingram. He sliced a spear of asparagus into several smaller morsels and looked up with a frown. “The answer should be no. But I’m not the best person, ma’am, to give you that emphatic no you were looking for. I—I still think that under the right circumstances, my brother might do someone a great favor.”
Mrs. Watson’s heart ached. She herself despised Lord Bancroft with a great purity, but for Lord Ingram, it could not be so simple. She pushed aside her plate altogether. “You’re thinking of the drawing lessons he gave you when you were younger?”
Lord Ingram’s three brothers were all much older than he. He got on the best with Lord Remington, the next youngest. The current duke, the eldest, had always been too much of a second father—and far sterner than the old duke had ever been. And Lord Bancroft, that cold fish, had never been anyone’s favorite.
But Lord Bancroft, confined to the family estate for long stretches in his youth because the old duke didn’t want him out and about being profligate, had occasionally taken his baby brother under his wing.
Mrs. Watson, then the widowed old duke’s mistress, had spent a fair amount of time at Eastleigh Park. Lord Ingram used to show her his latest sketches and illustrations, pointing out where Lord Bancroft’s comments and examples had improved his technique and composition.
And of course it had been Lord Bancroft who had advised him to take up drawing in the first place, or at least drafting, to become a better archaeologist.
“I know the logical conclusion is that Bancroft was simply bored at Eastleigh Park,” said Lord Ingram, “and not that he was invested in me or my hobbies. One could even make the argument that he decided to be nice to me because someday I might inherit my godfather’s fortune.
“I would not dispute those theories. But it remains that I benefited greatly from the drawing lessons he gave me. And so, despite what he did later, I do not consider it out of the realm of possibility that he could do something nice for Underwood.”
Mrs. Watson touched him on the shoulder. Lord Bancroft did not deserve such tender opinions, but she could not fault Lord Ingram for seeing the best in him—it was what she admired so much about the dear young man.
He smiled at her. But when he glanced at Miss Charlotte, his eyes were troubled. “That said, do I believe that my brother is acting out of the pure goodness of his heart? No. In the search for Underwood, there must be either a gain he cannot pass up or a loss he must prevent.”
“What kind of gain? What kind of loss?” asked Mrs. Watson, both afraid and desperate to know.
He, too, set down his knife and fork. “The greatest gain, at this point, is his freedom. If there is a plot to spring him from Ravensmere, and Underwood happens to be the linchpin of the entire plan, then of course a missing Underwood must be found, or at least accounted for. As for the greatest loss, that would be his life. But do you see his life being in immediate danger, Holmes?”
Miss Charlotte took a piece of the fillet of sole that he had scarcely touched. “If my lord Bancroft doesn’t have his talisman of compromising royal letters, then maybe he ought to worry about his safety. But have you heard from anyone that those letters have exchanged hands?”
Lord Ingram shook his head. “No, and I don’t think he would have entrusted something that crucial to Underwood. Now it’s possible that Underwood knows where his money is—the money that the crown has been trying to recover. If Underwood’s disappearance means Bancroft no longer has his money, then finding Underwood also becomes a priority.”
He looked back at Mrs. Watson. “You’re disappointed, ma’am, because we have no definite answers?”
Mrs. Watson sighed inwardly. “I should be more accustomed to uncertainties, at this point. Yet because Lord Bancroft is someone we all know, I want a surer grasp on the situation.”
“If it makes you feel any better, when Holmes investigated the death at Stern Hollow, she did not eliminate me from consideration—not right away, in any case. By comparison, none of us knows Bancroft that well, so how can we say with any confidence his exact purpose?”
Miss Holmes had just served herself a scoop of berry fool. She did not dig into the fruit-swirled custard right away but glanced at Lord Ingram’s plate. “You haven’t eaten much.”
He smiled at her warmly, but with more than a trace of fatigue. “I’m still thinking about the situation in Paris. But don’t worry. Tomorrow I’ll be back in Stern Hollow, and Cummings will feed me properly.”
To maintain his convalescent fa?ade, he needed to make an appearance at home once in a while.
Miss Charlotte settled a hand briefly on his elbow. “Very well, then. Make sure you feast on the morrow.”
Then she turned to Mrs. Watson. “Have you made any progress, ma’am, in the search of Mr. Underwood’s boxers?”
?At quarter past two in the morning, the heat of summertime Provence had at last become gentler, like that of an oven that had baked its last loaf hours ago.
The man who lay crouched atop the roof, however, still perspired—not so much from the heat as from the height of the damned roof. He was five stories up and had absolutely no assurance that he wouldn’t slip off.
An upper-story window of the house across the street was still lit. All the other residents of the elegant boulevard had gone to bed, but this one still lingered, unable or unwilling to sleep.
Occasionally, the man on the roof thought he could make out a silhouette moving about behind the curtain.
He pulled the slingshot in his hand. The Cours Mirabeau was famous for its proportions: The town houses that lined its sides were exactly as tall as the boulevard itself was wide. He had practiced the parabolic trajectory needed for a pinecone to cover the one hundred forty feet across and knock very gently into the lit window, so gently that the sound would not be heard in any other rooms.
His first shot went wide. He swore, loaded the slingshot with another pinecone, and forced himself to wait until his pulse and breaths both slowed.
He let go. The pinecone sailing toward the window. Thankfully, the light emanating from behind the curtain was enough to show the change in the pinecone’s trajectory—it bounced off the window at an oblique angle.
His heart raced again, this time from relief.
In the end, it took ten attempts to hit the window seven times. At least he hoped it was seven times. The last one could have fallen a hairbreadth short or struck the pane just as its trajectory became spent.
He counted it as a success because his instincts deemed it so. In any case, in the morning there would be a small notice in the local paper—a paper known to be delivered to the house. And the notice would state, in code known only to a few, Seven.
The occupant of the room should understand. Or at least he would understand in a day or two, if he paid attention.
The light behind the window extinguished.
The man on the roof remained in place.
In a nearby street, a bakery was now lit, the boulanger busy at work. By the time the first loaves had been shaped and set to rise again, the man was long gone.