Chapter Fifteen
“It’s so much warmer here than in Paris,” said Miss Redmayne.
The sun was behind rooftops, sinking toward the horizon. But stored heat from cobblestone streets, which had baked all day, rose and swirled.
Livia sweltered.
No one loved heat more than she did. But after Bernadine became Lord Bancroft’s hostage, Provence’s high register on the mercury began to make her feel parched. Fevered, at times.
She had been astonished to receive Miss Redmayne’s cable, informing her that she would venture south on Le Train Bleu, the express service that linked Paris and the C?te d’Azur. Except instead of going all the way to Nice, she would get off at Marseille and take another train to come to Aix-en-Provence.
Livia was thrilled to learn from Miss Redmayne that Lord Ingram wasn’t really injured after all. The two young women commiserated over their worries for everyone. And Livia couldn’t be more grateful that with everything else Miss Redmayne had to look after, she’d found the time to travel seventeen hours by rail to Aix-en-Provence, so that Livia could have a detailed account of what was going on in Paris.
But this couldn’t be the sole reason for Miss Redmayne’s long journey, simply to reassure Livia that everything had been done for Bernadine, up to and including the presence of the mysterious young Fontainebleu.
And when Miss Redmayne suggested that they dine at a place she had heard about, somewhere off the beaten path, Livia became even more convinced that she was up to something.
Miss Redmayne’s venue of choice took them north of the Cours Mirabeau, on streets that after a while acquired a noticeable upward slant. They found themselves in a small square where, turning around, they beheld the entire town spread out beneath them, all tall trees and ochre roofs, bathed in sunset.
Miss Redmayne asked her way to a tiny restaurant where the wife cooked, the husband served, and there were all of six tables, arranged in a little courtyard that had lanterns hung in the trees.
And there, waiting for them, was a man Livia immediately recognized. Forêt, the butler at the Parisian h?tel particulier that had hosted Sherlock Holmes and company when they had been in France last December to burgle Chateau Vaudrieu.
But Miss Redmayne introduced Forêt as Lieutenant Atwood. Livia shook his hand in astonishment. He smiled and told her that he was related to Lord Ingram on his mother’s side and that he was pleased to offer his assistance to their endeavor in Aix-en-Provence.
No explanation was given for his former identity as a very French, albeit very good, butler.
They drank a young red wine and ate grilled aubergines, stuffed tomatoes, and chicken that had been braised with rosemary, olives, and anchovies. Lieutenant Atwood, who was apparently stationed in India, of all places, offered anecdotes of life on the Subcontinent. Miss Redmayne found some humorous incidents from her time as a medical student that would not turn anyone’s stomach. And Livia, after listening without quite understanding what was happening—or why—for a solid quarter hour, eventually joined in and gave what she thought to be a rather rousing account of her voyages this past summer, especially that of the tackling of a murderer aboard the RMS Provence.
The night cooled enough to become pleasantly breezy. The stars were out; the lanterns in the trees twinkled. The entire courtyard hummed with conversation and laughter. Livia, slightly inebriated, her stomach uncharacteristically full of cake and ice cream at the end of the meal, thought it one of the most delightful evenings she’d ever spent.
But she still had no idea why they’d met Lieutenant Atwood.
And she said so to Miss Redmayne as they stood on the railway platform, waiting for the train that would take Miss Redmayne back to Marseille, where she would catch the northbound express service to Paris at half past midnight.
Miss Redmayne glanced at the gate of the platform, outside which Lieutenant Atwood waited to escort Livia to her hotel. “He is in charge of operations in Aix-en-Provence, and Miss Charlotte had a note she wanted me to give to him.”
A note so important that Miss Redmayne had come all this way…
Mr. Marbleton. Did Livia dare let herself believe that Mr. Marbleton was really here, that every day she passed underneath his window?
Without quite meaning to, Livia threw her arms around Miss Redmayne. “Thank you for coming. Thank you for all your help!”
Miss Redmayne hugged her back fiercely. “It will be all right, Miss Olivia. You’ll see. Everything will be all right.”
?Mrs. Claiborne’s town house, while cooler at night, remained completely airless. Charlotte fanned herself with a small notepad that Lord Ingram had brought. Her lover, meanwhile, bent over the typewriter in the house’s small study, scanning the row of keys in the light of a pocket lantern.
She loved observing him in a state of concentration. When they’d been children spending summer afternoons together at his minor digs—or to be completely accurate, when he had been excavating and she had been his uninvited guest—she used to look up from the book she was reading and watch him brush away encrusted dirt from all kinds of artefacts.
And then her gaze would travel to the forearms exposed by his rolled-up sleeves, the triangle of skin at the open collar of his shirt, and then back to his very serious, almost frowning face, this boy who radiated a palpable appeal she couldn’t quite understand but responded to in all-too-visceral a fashion.
For years she waited for that fascination to go away. Spending time alongside him, propositioning him when she’d been just a bit short of seventeen, even their long, fruitful correspondence—she did everything to gratify herself, but also in the logical expectation that familiarity would eventually lead, if not to outright contempt, as in the case of her parents, then at least to tedium.
Little could she have predicted that sometimes familiarity led to a more profound appreciation, or that their friendship would prove to be one of the great anchors of her life.
She studied his profile, something that at last she no longer needed to do surreptitiously. He was not in disguise, the contours of his young visage bold and sharp-hewn. Over the summer, his hair had grown longer and brushed over his collar in a way that made her want to place her hand at his nape to tickle the center of her palm.
“We are alone in a dark house, and we are not doing anything scandalous,” she murmured. “I am consternated.”
Her lover glanced at her, set down his pocket lantern, pulled her to him, and kissed her—but only a skimming of the tip of his tongue against hers. Then he pulled back and said, “Why consign scandalous acts to the dark? They can and should be committed in good light.”
Charlotte batted her eyelashes. “Is that a promise, Ash?”
He smiled, his teeth a flash of excellent enamel. “That, Holmes, is practically a threat.”
Charlotte smiled, then shook her head. She wouldn’t call it an empty threat, but given how infrequently they had been in the same place at the same time of late, and how much of that precious little time had been consumed by non-amatory concerns…
“And you are right,” said he, bent over the typewriter again. “This is the device that produced the notes Bancroft sent you.”
It made sense that Mrs. Claiborne had been the one to type up Lord Bancroft’s letters, as she had been the one to visit him at Ravensmere, and prisoners there were typically not allowed to communicate with the outside world.
Like Mrs. Watson, Charlotte did not trust Mrs. Claiborne entirely—or much at all. But if Mrs. Claiborne had lied about her flight, at least she hadn’t made the elementary mistake of still lurking about in the same house.
They had found an unmade bed in her boudoir, a half-finished glass of water on the nightstand, and half a bag of provisions in the kitchen—all consistent with a hasty, unplanned departure. And other than the attic and the coal cellar, all the other interior doors had been unlocked, which had made the search relatively straightforward—and Lord Ingram had made short work of the few padlocks.
Mrs. Claiborne was not here. And neither was Mr. Underwood, dead or alive.
“Shall we go then?” asked her lover.
They still had other places they needed to be.
On their way out, the final lines of his prewritten letter came to mind. Or maybe they’d never decamped but remained like a trio of country cousins in the recesses of a ballroom, awkwardly yet patiently waiting for the more prominent guests to leave so that they might have a chance to at last pay their respects to the host.
The man stared at the closing door.
The painting was finished some time ago, and he suspected that she knew it.
Where did that leave him then?
She had felt his astonishment and hers as a single reverberation. His, because he realized what it could be read as; hers, that it had come so early in a reunion.
Their circumstances dictated that they spent far more time apart than together. Upon partings that preceded long separations, they had made various confessions and pledges. But by tacit agreement, their subsequent letters never referred to those words of commitment. Then, after weeks or months apart, when they met again in person, that tacit agreement somehow held, a garment for their sentiments, so that they did not need to bare too often the naked heart.
But this had been an instance of exposed emotions on his part, when hers still had on not only corset and combination but a full promenade gown and a pair of gloves besides.
Perhaps he had felt mortified to be unshielded. She could not quite explain it, but she had been almost as self-conscious about her state of emotional overdress, her desire to shed a few layers running smack into her inexperience at this kind of disrobing.
She did not do that here either but asked a lesser question. “You haven’t said much about your Society summer.”
As little as a year ago, he had been dead set on maintaining the outward appearance of a man who had achieved all the mandated markers of manhood—marriage, children, property, and the respect of his peers. Now, even if his personal popularity had not diminished, he was in the curious and uncomfortable position of being a divorced man, one who had no intention to marry again.
He set his hand on the small of her back to steer her away from the sharp corners of a console table. “It’s odd, I will not deny that. But…in a way it’s not as discomfiting as I thought it would be. You know what I’m sometimes reminded of?”
“What?” She was genuinely curious.
“You. Or perhaps I should say, your life after you were expelled from Society. At the time, when you ran away, it seemed to me that your life had ended. That nothing could possibly go right for you ever again. But I was proved remarkably wrong. Being outside the confines of the Upper Ten Thousand had a salutary effect on you; you became happier and more fulfilled than you could have been otherwise.”
He stopped; they’d reached the back door. “I wasn’t ostracized by my peers to anywhere near the same extent. But still, because of your example, I wasn’t as bewildered as I would have been. I have something to look forward to: Perhaps I will thrive as a divorced man, as you have as a no-longer-eligible woman.”
She gazed up at this man she knew so well yet still found so engaging. Before he could open the door to peek outside, she pulled him close for another kiss, this one long and passionate—because it was easier to kiss than to find words for things she could not yet define. “To cement our lamentable new tradition of not doing anything scandalous in the dark.”
?Mrs. Watson buttered her breakfast roll mechanically. She hadn’t slept too badly, but doubts and concerns about Mrs. Claiborne had returned the moment she’d opened her eyes. The one she worried about the most, of course, was Miss Charlotte, working for an enemy who didn’t mean her well.
The private entrance’s doorbell rang.
Mrs. Watson shot to her feet. Could it be Mrs. Claiborne?
But the young woman who stood outside, in her modest Sunday best, was only about sixteen, plain and rather squarely built, hardly the ravishing Mrs. Claiborne.
“Are you Mrs. Hudson, ma’am?”
Mrs. Watson hesitated. “Yes?”
The girl curtsied. “My name is Sally Tompkins. And I work in the kitchen at Pettifer’s Hotel. Yesterday afternoon I was standing outside and this fancy-looking lady came up to me and told me to give this letter to you.”
Mrs. Watson sucked in a breath. “You’d best come in then.”
By the time tea arrived, Mrs. Watson already knew how long Sally Tompkins had worked at the hotel, where she lived, and her general family situation. It seemed that the girl was who she said she was, a kitchen maid, but Mrs. Watson would personally verify that with the hotel later.
“Tell me how you came to have this letter.”
The sealed envelope in Mrs. Watson’s hand was made of cheap brown paper, already wrinkled from time spent in Sally Tompkins’s pocket. To Miss Holmes and Mrs. Hudson was written in black ink on the front of the envelope.
The girl sat with her bottom barely on the chair, holding the cup and saucer Mrs. Watson had offered her with both hands. “Like I said, mum, I was standing outside for a bit—the kitchen was hot and I was feeling faintish. The lady ran up. She had a funny accent and talked fast. She said that she was supposed to meet you inside the hotel but she couldn’t anymore, and it was really important that you had this letter.
“And then she ran off, speedy as the Scotch Special Express, before I could tell her that we kitchen maids aren’t allowed in the front of the hotel—or to speak to guests.
“All the rest of my shift I thought about it. She gave me a whole crown, and I didn’t want to take that much money from someone and not do what they asked. So when my shift was over, I asked one of the waitresses if anyone in the private dining rooms waited for someone who didn’t show up.
“The one I asked was the one who waited on you, and she knew that you’d left your address with the reception in case anyone could tell you anything. She got that address for me, so I thought I’d best come, mum, and give this to you before church.”
Mrs. Watson urged the girl to have a slice of cake and at last opened the envelope.
Dear Miss Holmes and Mrs. Hudson,
I hope this note will prove to be an unnecessary precaution. But just in case…
If you have come to Pettifer’s at all, you must have received word I had sent earlier. At the time, I dared not set down the reason for my secrecy, lest my missives were intercepted by the wrong parties. Applying that logic here, I ought not write too much either. But I am confused and need your sage advice.
So here it is: I felt the need to leave the town house because I found it under surveillance last night. I believe there were two of them, one man and one woman.
And if all they had done was watch the house, it would still have been all right. But they approached the back door. By the service stairs Mr. Underwood had hidden a rifle. In my fright, I grabbed it.
I listened, my heart pounding, for the door to be breached. When I heard nothing, I slipped to the window and to my surprise saw the would-be intruders running away. Perhaps they had heard me loading my firearm. I could not tell—my blood pounded in my ears just then.
They must be young for they were fast and agile as they leaped over the low wall of the small rear garden. But come to think of it, maybe they were not a man and a woman—the night was too dark for me to make them out clearly. It was only that I had seen a man and a woman observing the house recently, sometimes together, sometimes singly, and immediately decided that it must have been the same two people.
I could be grossly overreacting. I do not know. I wish Mr. Underwood were here to advise me.
I cannot tell you how I long to hear your words of counsel.
Yours,
Mrs. ClaiborneOverhill
Miss Charlotte appeared then, clad in a cream-colored dressing gown embroidered with poppies and buttercups. She wore a large cap to cover her short hair, but her face still looked splotchy from all the beard-gluing of late.
“My dear!” exclaimed Mrs. Watson. Her partner had scarcely slept—she’d returned from her night’s work just as Mrs. Watson had woken up in the morning.
“Good morning, ma’am,” she said, her voice sludgy, her eyes barely open.
To Sally Tompkins, who had leaped out of her chair to curtsy, she nodded and gestured for the girl to sit down again. And then she extended her hand for the letter.
Mrs. Watson waited for her to read the letter twice. It was how Miss Charlotte took in important information—one quick perusal, followed by a more meticulous study.
After she was finished with the letter, Miss Charlotte appeared slightly more awake. “Miss Tompkins, is that correct?”
Sally Tompkins rose to her feet again. “Yes, mum.”
Miss Charlotte poured herself a cup of tea and took a sip. “Did the woman who entrusted this letter to you give you a name?”
“No, mum. She didn’t tell me her name. But I found out later, from my friend the waitress, that it was a Mrs. Overhill who didn’t show up.”
“What did the woman look like?”
“She was awful pretty—brown hair, blue eyes, nice figure.”
That sounded exactly like Mrs. Claiborne. Mrs. Watson glanced at Miss Charlotte, who again looked as if she could fall back asleep at any moment. But that did not stop her from continuing with her questions. “Do you remember what she was wearing?”
“I do, mum, something beautiful. It was a traveling costume, I think. Grey broadcloth with a few blue braids.”
“That does sound nice,” said Miss Charlotte, who never wore such understated outfits unless she was in disguise. “And did she tell you the reason she couldn’t come into the hotel?”
“She didn’t, mum.”
“Do you recall what she said exactly?”
Sally Tompkins nodded eagerly. “She said, ‘My dear, I have a great big favor to ask. Will you take this letter and give it to the ladies who are waiting inside for me? And this is for you.’ And then she gave me the letter and a crown and ran off.”
“She really ran? She sprinted?”
Sally Tompkins again nodded in complete certainty. “She picked up her skirts—I saw her stockings. She ran so fast she didn’t even hear me trying to tell her that I wasn’t allowed inside the dining rooms.”
“Did she look afraid?”
The question stumped Sally Tompkins. But after thinking about it for some time, her brow furrowed, she shook her head. “She sounded out of breath the entire time she was talking to me. I’d have said that she was in a huge hurry, rather than afraid. But me mum always says I hardly ever know what’s going on. Maybe she was afraid and I was too busy looking at her fancy handbag to notice.”
Miss Charlotte smiled a little, her lips dry and pale. “Or maybe you are right and she was only in a great big hurry.”
?Miss Charlotte’s conjecture was contradicted by the arrival of Mrs. Claiborne’s next letter, this time by post.
Dear Miss Holmes and Mrs. Hudson,
My deepest apologies! I feel wretched for not keeping to our appointment, but I also feel, well, competent—almost—for the course of action I did take.
This morning, after I proposed our meeting, I felt better for having done something. As I headed out in the afternoon, my spirits further buoyed—I was sure you would be able to help me.
But upon approaching the hotel, who should I spy but the man and the woman I had seen loitering outside the town house!
I felt dizzy and nauseous. But I kept moving and soon found myself in the alley behind the hotel. A girl in an apron stood there. I accosted her and begged her to give you the letter I’d prepared ahead of time.
And then I hopped in a hansom cab and shouted to be taken to the nearest railway station.
I have not wanted to leave London. Despite what I said about the smell of perfume on Mr. Underwood and the possibility he might have already absconded with someone else, deep in my heart I still believe him nearby, trying to resolve things in a manner that would allow us to have a wonderful future.
But now I am on a train rumbling toward Dover.
Once I finish this letter, I will get off at the next station and post it. But after that, ought I find a railway inn and sleep on the matter? Or should I proceed to the end of the line and buy a passage overseas?
I seem to have the vague notion that with postal orders one can purchase small notices in the papers from anywhere in the world. Which means that no matter where I end up, I can still inform Mr. Underwood of my whereabouts, in the code he taught me, a code he’d devised himself. And he can then find me.
If, that is, he still wants to—and still can.
Again, my apologies for the inconvenience I might have caused you. I beg your forgiveness.
Yours,
Mrs. Overhill
P.S. I remembered to sign my alias, but upon rereading the letter I noticed at least two instances where I used Mr. Underwood’s actual name. But I am too weary now for corrections—and goodness, I might have erred similarly in a previous letter, too. If I am but a fly caught in an invisible net, my every movement watched, then let me not make any more futile attempts to be clever or oblique.