Chapter Eighteen
Four days ago
Charlotte stood by the manor at Ravensmere, looking at the back wall of the garden. Elsewhere the garden wall was seven feet high, but behind the manor, its height rose to a solid eleven feet.
She turned around and studied the iron bars outside the windows. The bars were each half an inch thick, spaced three inches apart. Unlike prison bars, installed directly into the masonry of the window opening, here at least some thought had been given to appearance. At each window, the bars bowed out and formed a decorative grille that was bolted at its four corners into the exterior of the manor.
“What brought you here today, Miss Holmes?” came Lord Bancroft’s voice.
He wore the same unfortunate orange-brown suit—or perhaps a different one cut in the exact same fashion—and he did not appear remotely pleased to see her.
But he did extend his arm, and after a moment she placed her gloved hand on his sleeve. They strolled around the periphery of the small side garden in which more privileged prisoners were allowed to take their daily exercise.
“I found Mr. Underwood and he is dead,” she murmured, once the guards were far away enough.
Lord Bancroft’s hand balled into a fist—so forcefully that the leather of his glove rasped. “How?”
“Shot in the back. I found him in the coal cellar of Mrs. Claiborne’s new place. I would say that at the time he’d been dead less than twenty-four hours—a closer estimate is beyond my expertise.”
“He was killed there?”
“I do not think so. We found no sign of a struggle and no indication that bloodstains and such had been wiped away.”
Lord Bancroft was silent for some time. “No condolences?”
Charlotte glanced at her adversary. His skin was papery; thin blue veins showed at his temples. “Are you saddened by his passing, my lord, or only inconvenienced?”
His expression turned frosty. “My lieutenant is dead. I hope you have not come to gloat over my misfortune.”
“I have come because I have completed my assignment: I have found Mr. Underwood. It is time you removed your mercenaries from Mrs. Watson’s house in Paris.”
Lord Bancroft stared straight ahead. “Your task was to find him, if he was alive, and if he was no more, to find out what happened to him. I need to know who killed him and why—and then we will discuss the situation in Paris.”
Charlotte looked up—but from under her parasol, there was no sky. “You do not wish for the police to handle the matter?”
“No.”
“What about his body then?”
“If you’ve seen all you need, then you need no longer concern yourself with it.”
Unlike Mrs. Watson, Charlotte had not repeatedly expressed her gladness that she had refused to marry Lord Bancroft. But she was. Oh, how she was.
She inclined her head. “I take my leave of you, my lord.”
“How do I know that you did not, in fact, kill Mr. Underwood?” He spat out the question as she turned away.
She glanced over her shoulder. “How do I know you did not have him killed, my lord?”
Lord Bancroft’s jaw worked. “So I was in a position to get rid of one of the very few people I trusted?”
“And I am in a position to deliberately prolong my sister’s tenure as your hostage? If you don’t have other instructions, my lord, I will be on my way.”
Mrs. Watson kept rearranging the display on the mantelpiece. The figurine, the glass box, the vase with the peacock feather—she went on changing their order, left to right, right to center, switching the two on the outside, then switching them back again.
The memory of Mr. Underwood’s pale, lifeless face against the dark blue pile of the carpet beneath him, the smell of coal dust and the beginning of putrefaction, the trembling in her arms as she and Miss Charlotte pushed him over, so that the girl could get a good look at where he had been shot.
He had been running away was all that Mrs. Watson had been able to think. Then and now. He had been running away.
From whom? And how safe were any of them, just when they believed themselves meticulously careful and properly safeguarded?
At the sound of a key turning in the street entrance, she rushed into the vestibule to embrace Miss Charlotte.
When she let go, the young woman, uncharacteristically enough, took her arm as they walked into the parlor together. “Are you all right, ma’am?”
Mrs. Watson exhaled. “Not entirely, I’m afraid. But I shall be better once we’re out of this pickle. Once we’re safer.”
Miss Charlotte did not say anything, but unpinned her plain toque from her head.
Mrs. Watson knew then her trip to Ravensmere had not yielded any hoped-for results. Not that she’d hoped for anything, really, but still, Mrs. Watson’s ire rose. “He won’t do the honorable thing, will he? The bastard!”
This was strong language for Mrs. Watson. Strong language for anyone.
Miss Charlotte did not bother to pass judgment. “I might need to talk to Mumble and Jessie again. And it would be good if Mrs. Claiborne surfaced. How did your inquiries go, ma’am?”
“The villa is indeed under Mrs. Claiborne’s name. But interestingly enough, it was never in Lord Bancroft’s name. Before the deed changed hands three years ago, it was owned by an old widow who left it to a charity in her will. The charity sold it after her passing. There is no record on who leased it from the old widow earlier, so there is nothing to trace the house to Lord Bancroft.”
More indication that Lord Bancroft had known even then that if anyone scrutinized his finances, it would become apparent that he had too much income.
“As for the town house in which Mrs. Claiborne received us, it is leased to a Mr. Overhill, of course. Three months of rent paid ahead of time.”
Miss Charlotte took off her wig and dug her fingertips into her scalp.
“It does make sense, not to use either her own or Mr. Underwood’s name on the lease,” continued Mrs. Watson, “if they wanted to keep her new location hush-hush. And it also makes sense, I suppose, that Lord Bancroft kept his name out of any documents to do with the villa, if he didn’t want the crown to notice the extent of his personal assets.”
With Lord Ingram’s hamper of foodstuff on a diplomatic tour in Paris—perhaps having already perished in the line of duty—Mrs. Watson had acquired a few tins of biscuits. Miss Charlotte opened a tin on the sideboard and took one out.
But she only held it. The sight made Mrs. Watson uneasy. She was much more accustomed to the girl eating and thinking at the same time, not staring through a perfectly good disk of butter, sugar, and flour.
“Do you think we can find Mrs. Claiborne, given that we know she stopped to post a letter in Sittingbourne?” she asked.
They had mounted a similar search in Cornwall earlier this year. Well, perhaps not entirely similar, but they had prowled a number of railway stations up and down a branch line and eventually found a carriage they had been looking for. Except this time they weren’t looking for a carriage, liable to be parked for hours, even days, in the same place. But a person—a person in hiding, no less.
Miss Charlotte shook her head. Her face, reflected in the mirror above the sideboard, was grave, almost grim. “I’m not sure we should pursue Mrs. Claiborne’s whereabouts. We know now that Mr. Underwood was in real danger, and it behooves us to think twice before running the risk of bringing those who might wish to harm Mrs. Claiborne to her doorstep.”
A year ago, when Miss Charlotte had been new to both detection and the greater dangers of the world, she had inadvertently brought a tail to her half brother’s doorstep.
Mrs. Watson immediately nodded in accord and regretted that she’d made the suggestion without thinking the matter through.
“But that isn’t the only reason I am unlikely to search for her,” said Miss Charlotte’s reflection in the mirror. “She could have had something to do with Mr. Underwood’s death.”
Mrs. Watson, who had just opened a biscuit tin herself, snapped the lid shut again. She was still not accustomed to think of a pretty, seemingly helpless woman as a perpetrator. “Right,” she mumbled. “There’s that also.”
“And—” Miss Charlotte began, but she was interrupted by someone at the street entrance.
The lively knocks were followed by a woman’s happy voice. “Mrs. Beaumont, are you home? It’s Miss Harcourt!”
?It took Mrs. Watson a moment to remember Miss Harcourt. The Christmas Eve Murder. The victim’s niece.
“Shall we pretend that no one is home?” whispered Mrs. Watson to Miss Charlotte.
The latter glanced at the clock. “We can receive her, but I’ll need to change my clothes and hair to look older.”
The Mrs. Beaumont who had visited Miss Harcourt in Oxfordshire had been a woman in her mid-thirties, her age set to be a few years younger than Mrs. Meadows’s so that Miss Charlotte, who had learned a great deal from Mrs. Watson, could embody her without resorting to heavy makeup or prosthetics.
“All right,” said Mrs. Watson. “I’ll let her in and tell her you’ll be back soon.”
Miss Harcourt, instead of feeling disappointed that Mrs. Beaumont hadn’t come back yet, was delighted to be admitted. “It’s much too forward for me to call without prior notice, but I happened to be due in London anyway, and I really wished to see Mrs. Beaumont!”
Mrs. Watson, having in short order taken on the identity of Mrs. Beaumont’s companion, rang for tea and explained that she’d have traveled with Mrs. Beaumont to Miss Harcourt’s estate the other day had Mrs. Beaumont not given her leave to visit some elderly relatives.
After a while, their topic turned to Mrs. Meadows, the vanished widow who had long fascinated the Harcourt women.
Mrs. Watson decided she might as well give in to her nosiness. “Thanks to Mrs. Beaumont, I have now become highly intrigued by Mrs. Meadows. Mrs. Beaumont has fretted over whether her friend was satisfied with her marriage—whether she loved her husband. But do you think, Miss Harcourt, that Mr. Victor Meadows loved his wife?”
Miss Harcourt’s countenance lost some of its native cheer. She glanced in the direction of the street entrance and said quickly, “Because of Mrs. Beaumont’s recent visit, I went into the box of diaries my mother had left behind and found something I didn’t know existed—a notebook in which she kept a record of everything having to do with the murder.”
“Oh my,” murmured Mrs. Watson.
“She was most knowledgeable about the murder, my mother,” said Miss Harcourt. “In fact, she used to wonder why the police inspector didn’t investigate her more thoroughly, as she was the only one who benefited from it.
“But I digress. The final entry in the notebook came five years after the murder, when my mother was getting ready to sell the factories she’d inherited from my uncle Victor. She had to spend a great deal of time sorting through years of paperwork related to the business and, in that effort, came across evidence that my uncle Victor might have been in part responsible for Mrs. Meadows’s father’s bankruptcy.”
Mrs. Watson covered the lower half of her face with both hands. The possibility had occurred to her and to Miss Charlotte, but it would have been staggering to Mrs. Beaumont’s companion.
“I was appalled,” continued Miss Harcourt, her voice tight. “But the evidence was inconclusive, and I really shouldn’t have said anything—in fact, I mean to keep it from Mrs. Beaumont. She adored Mrs. Meadows.”
“Oh, my dear, but you adored her, too.”
“I know.” Miss Harcourt gripped her hands together. “Which is why I’m desperately hoping for that not to have been true but only another theory born of my mother’s fertile imagination.”
Mrs. Watson removed her hands from her face only to gasp aloud. “But—but wouldn’t that undermine the premise that Mrs. Meadows had no reason to kill her husband?”
“That was my first thought, too, but my mother wrote that she didn’t believe Mrs. Meadows would have known it. After all, my uncle Victor had no reason to ever tell her, if he’d indeed committed such an insidious act.”
“Oh, that poor woman.”
“I know,” said Miss Harcourt quietly. “She deserved better. She deserved so much better.”
Mrs. Watson didn’t say anything—it always saddened her when women had scant control over their lives. Gradually the silence turned heavier.
The sound came of a key being inserted into the street entrance.
“Oh, that must be Mrs. Beaumont,” cried Mrs. Watson in relief.
Miss Harcourt shot her a beseeching look. Mrs. Watson nodded—were this real life, she absolutely would have kept the worst news from Mrs. Beaumont.
But the older, rounder version of Miss Charlotte who walked in needed no such protection. “Why, Miss Harcourt,” she exclaimed. “What a wonderful surprise!”
Miss Harcourt leaped up. “I did want it to be a surprise for you, Mrs. Beaumont. Guess what? I found the photograph!”
Miss Charlotte hopped in place. “May I see it? May I?”
Miss Harcourt extracted an envelope from her handbag and tilted it. A photograph slid into her palm. She studied it for a moment. “Pictures can be such lifeless things, everybody all stiff and clench-jawed. But not this one—it captured the essence of my aunt Meadows. Not just her beauty but her strength of will.”
She chuckled, a sound at once amused and nostalgic. “Enough strength of will to keep my mother at bay. Believe me, no one else was ever able to resist her offers of friendship.”
Miss Charlotte, in her guise as Mrs. Beaumont, eagerly accepted the photograph. Mrs. Watson looked down into her tea. The romantic in her still hadn’t given up and was spinning ever battier possibilities. Perhaps Victor Meadows had been awful but Ephraim Meadows only pretended to be? Perhaps he and Mrs. Meadows had indeed eloped and found happiness together somewhere far away.
“How beautiful she had become,” murmured Miss Charlotte. “Would you like to see my friend and her sister, Miss Wicks?”
Mrs. Watson, still caught in her own reveries of a good life for Mrs. Meadows, almost didn’t recognize the name she and Miss Charlotte had decided for her twenty minutes ago. “Oh, yes, of course.”
The image had been taken in an ordinary parlor. Everything was tinted reddish-brown. It was hard to tell the colors of wallpaper and upholstery; they could have been blue and white or green and yellow. But the woman in the image seemed to be covered in black crepe, even though, according to Miss Harcourt, enough time had passed that she no longer needed to wear full mourning.
She was beautiful indeed, sitting at an angle to the camera, looking not at it but straight ahead. Her three-quarter profile could have served as that of Diana the huntress’s—her beauty was not delicate or seductive but cool and angular, meant to be captured in marble.
Mrs. Watson goggled. And then she goggled at the girl beside Mrs. Meadows. Unlike her sister’s carven stillness, Miriam looked as if she were on the verge of jumping up from the settee to twirl in the center of the parlor, a girl full of irrepressible verve and energy.
“I also found a photograph from her wedding, of the entire wedding party,” said Miss Harcourt.
She handed over another photograph and helpfully pointed out the unsmiling bridegroom, his fleshy, beady-eyed brother, and her own very handsome parents. Mrs. Meadows looked so impossibly young, and Miriam, held by a seven-year-old Miss Harcourt, a dumpling of a toddler.
Miss Charlotte looked again at the photograph of just the sisters, taken ten years later. “I do wonder,” she said wistfully, “what has become of them.”
Mrs. Watson stared down at her hands, for fear that the shock and grief on her face would otherwise be all too evident.
She recognized both sisters. Miriam was now dead, murdered in her prime, and Mrs. Meadows was no longer beautiful, her face ruined by life.
“I keep imagining running into my aunt Meadows somewhere,” said Miss Harcourt equally wistfully. “I wonder whether she’ll recognize me. I know I’ll recognize her.”
Oh, you would not, thought Mrs. Watson. You would not.
?Mrs. Watson displayed her usual quick recovery. She praised Mrs. Meadows’s beauty and the late Mrs. Harcourt’s skill as a photographer. And then, in that discreet manner of ladies’ companions, she mentioned an upcoming appointment.
Miss Harcourt got the point and started to take her leave. Charlotte, as Mrs. Beaumont, bemoaned the fact that rendezvous with solicitors had been the bane of her existence of late. But what could she do when there was her aunt’s estate to be disposed of?
As the door closed behind Miss Harcourt, Mrs. Watson spun around, her hand clutched around her throat. “I have always wondered about that woman.”
For eight Seasons, Charlotte had been simply another eligible young lady on the London Marriage Mart, albeit one with a reputation for eccentricity.
Unbeknownst to most people, she had been waiting for the arrival of her twenty-fifth birthday. Her father, Sir Henry, had promised her that should she turn twenty-five and still prefer to become the headmistress of a girls’ school rather than a gentleman’s wife, he would sponsor the education and training necessary for her to embark on that path to independence.
But Sir Henry had reneged on his word. And Charlotte, in an attempt to retain some control over her destiny, had made an unfortunate error in judgment that had resulted in her expulsion from Society.
Before her parents could escort her back to the country, there to lock her up for the rest of her life, she ran away from home. Life was not friendly to a young woman with no particular skills and very little money, but her worst moment had come at the hands of a mother-and-daughter pair of beggars.
The mother, blinded in one eye, an empty husk of a woman, had evoked in Charlotte such a stab of compassion that she’d given her child a sixpenny bit and her luncheon. Only to later realize that the child beggar had stolen the one-pound note Charlotte had stowed in a hidden pocket, reducing her already-meager reserves by a whopping 40 percent.
The incident had so shaken Charlotte that she had experienced an uncharacteristic surge of panic when she had come across the woman again a few months later.
But by then, she had been doing well as Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective. And the woman, going by the name of Mrs. Winnie Farr, had been desperately seeking to find her sister.
At the time, Lord Ingram had been the lead suspect in the death of his wife. Charlotte, investigating the case on his behalf, discovered that Lord Bancroft had attempted to frame him, using a body that bore a certain resemblance to Lady Ingram’s.
And the body had belonged to Mimi Duffin, Mrs. Farr’s sister, who had been of a similar height and build to Lady Ingram, with brunette hair and a very similar beauty mark by the corner of her lips. But because her face had otherwise looked nothing like Lady Ingram’s, her head had been bashed in, her features rendered unrecognizable except for the crucial mole.
Charlotte, as Sherrinford Holmes, had traveled with Mrs. Farr to identify the body. Mrs. Farr had barely spoken that entire day. Her face, a face that should have been immortalized on a coin, had seemed to be made of wood instead, wood that could only withstand so much wind and storm before cracking and crumbling altogether.
And that devastated, street-roughened woman had once been the genteel and beautiful Mrs. Meadows. Throughout the tumultuous changes in her life, the only constant had been the sister she had raised. Yet that sister she had kept safe all these years had met a violent end just so Lord Bancroft could mount his pernicious stratagems.
“Well, now we’ve found our vanished Mrs. Meadows.” Mrs. Watson paced back and forth, fanning herself vigorously. The painted lovers on her blue silk fan flirted on in a blur of powdered wigs and beribboned pannier dress. “I hate to say this, but that woman is certainly capable of killing a man who had wronged her.”
“We have not found our vanished Mrs. Meadows,” replied Charlotte slowly. “She wrote to Sherlock Holmes from a poste restante address.”
A poste restante address was not a residential address but the location of a post office where letters were held and called for.
Mrs. Watson massaged her forehead. “You’d think I’d remember—I was the one who wrote back to her.”
“But she also took her worries about her sister to Scotland Yard. There she spoke to our friend Sergeant MacDonald. Perhaps he would have a better address for us.”
Mrs. Watson stopped moving; even the lovers on her fan seemed to have pulled apart. “My goodness, what if you run into Inspector Treadles at the Yard and he asks you whether you’ve made any progress on the case he gave you to investigate?”
“I will tell him the truth: that Mrs. Meadows is the same Mrs. Farr who tried and failed to obtain help from the police concerning her missing sister.”
“But what will happen to Mrs. Farr?”
“There is no more evidence against her now than there was fifteen years ago. A woman whose husband died an unnatural death is perfectly at liberty to move to London and become poorer.”
Mrs. Watson snapped her fan shut. “Very well, then. Let me locate the letters that we received from her.”
The dear lady kept excellent records of all the correspondence Sherlock Holmes had ever received in her house near Regent’s Park.
They were putting on their hats and reaching for their parasols when Mrs. Watson suddenly gripped Charlotte by the arm. “I forgot to tell you this, my dear. When Miss Harcourt and I spoke, she said that there was a chance Victor Meadows had deliberately bankrupted Mrs. Meadows’s family so that she would have no choice but to marry him.
“Lord Bancroft and Mr. Underwood were responsible for Mimi Duffin’s death, were they not? If the woman Mrs. Farr had once been killed her husband for his nonlethal treachery, what are the chances that she hasn’t been seeking, all this while, to avenge her sister’s murder?”
Wordlessly Charlotte pulled on her gloves. With the photograph Mrs. Harcourt had taken all those years ago, had they, in fact, discovered the identity of Mr. Underwood’s killer?
Mrs. Farr, Mrs. Meadows—Charlotte still had trouble thinking of the two as the same person. The Christmas Eve Murder had seemed so remote in both time and effect, a purely intellectual exercise.
No longer. Now everything could hinge upon it.