Chapter Twenty-Three
Three days ago
Returning from Sittingbourne, Charlotte changed trains and headed again to Ravensmere.
This time, Lord Bancroft was already in the small side garden. At her approach, he tossed down the magazine in his hand.
Charlotte glanced at the magazine, a recent issue of Cornhill. “I hope you have sufficient reading material, my lord?”
“Hardly. I’ve already read this one three times,” he said impatiently. “Why have you come again, Miss Holmes?”
Charlotte, still dressed as a man, thrust a hand into the pocket of her jacket, leaving her thumb hooked over the double-welt opening. “I have further bad news: Mrs. Claiborne is also dead.”
Unlike the strong reaction he showed for Mr. Underwood, Lord Bancroft barely frowned. “She was irrelevant.”
Charlotte was hard-pressed to argue with that, at least from his point of view. If Mrs. Claiborne had mattered, it had been only to Mr. Underwood, who could no longer care about such things. And she couldn’t have been Lord Bancroft’s sole means of getting messages into the hands of his minions.
“On your way out, you might as well instruct the gate to remove her name from the list of permitted visitors,” said Lord Bancroft dismissively.
She knew him to be an unfeeling person; still, this was a strikingly callous response to the violent death of a woman who had shared his bed for years. But Charlotte made sure to relay his request to the guards at the gate.
“Ah, that’s a shame,” said one guard. “Such a beautiful woman, Mrs. Claiborne. Any reason we’re taking her off the list?”
“His lordship didn’t say, save that she would not come again.”
The guard kept shaking his head. “I should have had a better look at her three weeks ago, if I knew she wasn’t going to come around again.”
“Well, good sir,” said Charlotte, “this is your lucky day, as I happen to have a photograph of Mrs. Claiborne with me. Can’t compare to having her in front of you, but still, here’s another look for you.”
The guard eagerly accepted the locket. He smacked his lips. “Ah, what a beauty. So generous with her smiles, too. I shall miss those smiles. I shall.”
?The previous evening, before Holmes had sent a note to the chemist’s shop that seemed to have some connection to Mrs. Farr, she had first telephoned Lord Ingram. Lord Ingram, unable to get away just then, had dispatched someone else to watch over the chemist’s shop.
The agent had returned a few hours later and shamefacedly reported that while he had seen a young man come to pick up a message from the shop well after the shop had closed for the evening, he had not been able to follow the man for more than ten minutes before the man had turned a corner and disappeared into the night.
Lord Ingram had decided to replicate the experiment the next day. He wrote another note, in a decent imitation of Holmes’s hand, and dropped the message in the post. Postal delivery was remarkably frequent and swift in London—friends living in different districts could exchange correspondences several times in a day.
Experience indicated that he had two hours or so before his letter arrived at the chemist’s. He used that time to walk around the neighborhood, familiarizing himself with its alleys and back ways, before he started to patrol the chemist’s street up and down as a sandwich board man.
The community was far from wealthy, but it was composed of artisans, shop clerks, and others of modest but steady income. The street, one of the busiest in the area, made for a reasonable market for makers of cleaning soap, tinned goods, and such.
His simple disguise allowed him to loiter in plain sight but also to occasionally sit down with a small beer to quench his thirst as the day grew increasingly warm.
What he feared was not the heat but that given the special relationship between the chemist’s shop and Mrs. Farr, whoever came to take messages during the day might do so from the back door. So from time to time he crouched down near the mouth of the alley behind the shop, a biscuit in hand, with the air of a weary man stealing a moment of rest.
Except he didn’t need to pretend about being a weary man. He saw it in the mirror daily. That same fatigue was etched on Holmes’s face, too. Neither of them had slept much since she returned to England; a state of ill rest had not resulted from anything scandalous, or even remotely pleasurable.
And he missed his children fiercely. He knew they were having an excellent time with their beloved cousins, under the careful eye of both their governess and his sister-in-law. Still, he worried that the protective shield he held out before them was cracked and falling apart.
He had no idea how much of that anxiety stemmed from his personal circumstances, and how much was simply a by-product of parenthood. He wished there was time to sit down and talk with Mrs. Watson about how best to raise his children. He also wanted to reread the letter that he often carried with him these days, a recent one from Holmes.
I don’t believe that anything anyone says can alleviate your concerns, Ash, because yours are issues for which there are no perfect or even neat solutions. Miss Lucinda and Master Carlisle are children of divorced parents, and at some point, they will face prevailing attitudes.
But it is worth pointing out that they are extremely fortunate children. They are healthy, comfortably off, and cherished. No one can guarantee anyone’s happiness or success in life, but the effort everyone around them has put into that endeavor—what Livia wouldn’t have given to have been raised by you and Miss Potter. (Or even Lady Ingram, for that matter. I think Livia would not have minded a lioness of a mother who swooped in once in a while.)
Holmes did not excel at consoling people. But it was precisely due to this minor characteristic of hers that he found so much encouragement in her words. If she called his children extremely fortunate, then they must be, in some way.
He took a bite of a plum that he’d bought off a costermonger, and was just about to take a sip from his canteen when a short squat man marched past him, not from the alley but on the street. And in his hand was a mourning envelope.
Lord Ingram had used a mourning envelope, with a distinctive black border, in the hope that he might better see the note change hands from outside the chemist’s. But he would also gladly accept being lucky in ways he had not anticipated.
He slowly stood up, waited another second, then stepped into the street himself.
?It was past four o’clock in the afternoon when Charlotte arrived at the bookbinder’s shop, looking for Mumble.
She was met by the bookbinder himself, Mr. Rosenblatt, a slightly stooped, gentle-looking man. After she introduced herself and stated her purpose, he said, “Young Waters left early today, Mr. Herrinmore. Someone in his family isn’t well.”
She raised a brow. “I thought Mr. Waters was an orphan.”
Johnny had said that Mumble and Jessie had grown up as foster siblings, not that either’s parents had fostered the other.
Mr. Rosenblatt ran a wheeled embosser down the side of an already-bound leather volume, completing a rectangular frame on the cover. “Orphans can form families, Mr. Herrinmore. Young Waters and his foster sister are as much siblings as any two people born of the same parents.”
“It’s not Miss Ferguson who is unwell, is it?”
“Oh no. She’s fine. Strong as an ox, that one.”
The spine of the book he was working on showed a sharp crisscross pattern underneath—Charlotte recalled the vellum strips Mumble had been cutting the other day.
“You wouldn’t happen to have Mumble’s address, would you, Mr. Rosenblatt?”
The bookbinder, now rolling a different embossing wheel, shook his head. “I do not.”
Charlotte did not believe him, but she could hardly tell him that she suspected him of dishonesty. “Do you expect him back tomorrow?”
“I am not sure,” he said rather sadly. His embossing wheel traveled with the swift alignment of a beam of light, leaving behind a trail of delicately intertwined vines on the brown leather. “The patient he would be looking after is suffering from something serious.”
Charlotte’s eyebrow shot up again. “You have very liberal policies, Mr. Rosenblatt, to permit your apprentice to come and go at his convenience.”
“My son is no more, and my grandson is too young. Young Waters works here as a favor to me, not the other way around,” said the bookbinder rather cryptically.
Charlotte hesitated a moment. “In that case, would you tell him that I would like to see him, soon as could be. Here’s my address, and there’s a half sovereign in it for Mr. Waters should he come to see me.”
She would have preferred to speak to Mumble without giving him her current address, but needs must.
After she secured the bookbinder’s promise that he would pass on the message, Charlotte remained in the shop another quarter hour and bargained over a slender penannular silver brooch. It was likely Viking in origin, close to a thousand years old and nearly unscratched, with tiny but exquisite brambled terminals on its incomplete ring.
A nice little present for her lover.
“You have an excellent eye, Mr. Herrinmore,” said Mr. Rosenblatt as he wrapped her purchase.
Lord Ingram was the expert; Charlotte merely benefited from her proximity to him.
“Thank you,” she said.
As she slipped the package into the inside pocket of her day coat, her fingertips touched the envelope that held Mrs. Claiborne’s locket, which she had planned to show to Mumble.
She extracted the locket, opened it, and handed it to Mr. Rosenblatt. “By the way, sir, have you ever seen this woman?”
Mr. Rosenblatt put on his glasses and squinted at the small photograph. “Why, yes. She came into the shop about a month ago, not once but twice. We don’t receive much patronage from young ladies, or from young people at all. A beautiful young woman stood out.”
“Did she ask after Mumble?”
“Not in the very least,” said the bookbinder with great certainty. “On her first visit, she inquired into wedding stationery, and I told her that unfortunately we would not be able to assist her with bespoke invitations. She came back a few days later and said that she planned to ask all her guests for handwritten good wishes and could I help her turn the collection into a bound volume. To that I said yes—if she brought the pages, we could make an exceptionally handsome book.”
He shrugged. “But then I never saw her again.”
?Earlier, Charlotte had decided against going to the tea shop where Jessie worked: Not only would she arrive too late to catch Jessie, but she was still dressed as a man, and a man hanging about asking for Jessie would not have pleased the proprietress, who seemed to be the sort to implement strict rules concerning her female employees.
But after Mr. Rosenblatt’s disclosure, she changed her mind.
In décor and general atmosphere, Mrs. Hatfield’s tea shop was not very different from the many tearooms that had sprung up in recent years: clean, cozy places that smelled of sugar crust and baked fruit and catered to a female clientele, offering them a safe, welcoming place to dine in public.
But men, as it turned out, enjoyed tea shops, too. They did not always wish to deal with the noise and drunkenness of a pub or a tavern when all they wanted was a decent meal at a decent price.
Mrs. Hatfield’s tea shop, therefore, did not turn away male patronage, but had a reserved section to one side, with an older waitress who had salt-and-pepper hair. As soon as Charlotte showed her Mrs. Claiborne’s picture, she said, “Oh, I remember her. Mind you, sir, we have a great many pretty ladies that come in, but she was just lovely. I saw her only that once, but I think, from talking to the girl who served her, that it wasn’t her first time as a patron.”
Since Mrs. Hatfield would frown upon waitresses not assigned to the gentlemen’s section sidling over to chat with one, Charlotte passed a coin into the older server’s hand and asked her to speak to the one who had waited on Mrs. Claiborne.
The senior waitress came back some minutes later and reported that Mrs. Claiborne had heard about the reputation the tea shop enjoyed for its unadulterated breads, and so the server who attended to her had proudly boasted about how even fancy hotels were coming to them now, to order rolls and whatnot for their fancy tables.
“Did she ever ask about anyone working here?”
“Pauline didn’t say. And why would such a fancy lady know any of us? Even Mrs. Hatfield isn’t grand enough for her, if you ask me. But Pauline did say that the second time she came in she wanted to know which hotels ordered rolls from us and how the rolls were delivered.”
“And Miss Pauline knew that?”
“Oh, we all know. That would be the Dolphin’s Crown, the Round Oaks, and Pettifer’s. And we have a girl with a truly strong back. She’s the one who does the deliveries.”
Pettifer’s was the hotel where Mrs. Claiborne had asked to meet with Charlotte and Mrs. Watson, and where she had claimed to run into the young man and the young woman who had tried to break into her town house.
What were the chances that she didn’t know, when she proposed the meeting, that Jessie, on behalf of the tea shop, was a frequent visitor to the hotel?
?Lord Ingram returned to the hotel as Holmes and Mrs. Watson were sitting down to a simple supper. Mrs. Watson leaped up to embrace him. To his surprise, Holmes did likewise. Not that she never did, but certainly not in front of others—and so casually, too.
He was slightly embarrassed and exceptionally gratified.
Mrs. Watson, hiding her own surprise, pressed a plate of food into his hands, and told him what they had found out this day.
“You see, my lord,” she said as she sawed at her beefsteak, “Mrs. Claiborne told us a pack of lies about being ignorant of Mr. Underwood’s boxers. She even knew where Mumble and Jessie worked.”
“I caught Johnny just before he left work,” added Holmes. “Interestingly enough, neither he nor the construction foreman recognized her—though to be sure a month ago Johnny was working at a different site. After that I went to the Unicorn of the Sea. Mr. Mowlem, the publican, also said that he was sure he’d never seen her in his life.”
She turned her face to the side and yawned into her hand before digging into a jacket potato. He, too, felt like falling face-first into his plate.
Only Mrs. Watson still had the nervous energy to ruminate on the investigation. “All the lies would have made me cross with her, were she not already dead. What was she thinking, really, to allow someone into her parlor while she was on the run—very possibly in the middle of the night?”
Holmes sprinkled salt and pepper on her potato. “Perhaps she opened the door to Mr. Underwood?”
“But he was dead!” exclaimed Mrs. Watson.
Even Lord Ingram was taken aback by the idea. He took a bite of his sandwich and glanced at Holmes.
“We don’t know Mr. Underwood’s precise time of death,” said Holmes. “Or that of Mrs. Claiborne’s.”
“But why would he wish to kill her?” Mrs. Watson demanded to know.
Holmes shrugged. “Maybe he finally learned that she’d been holding conjugal meetings with Lord Bancroft?”
After all, those had taken place only after Mr. Underwood could no longer spend time at home regularly.
Mrs. Watson was incredulous. “Then who killed him afterwards? Lord Bancroft, to avenge his former mistress?”
Holmes took a sip of water. “My lord Bancroft was quick to declare his former mistress utterly irrelevant when I conveyed news of her demise.”
“Then what? Mrs. Claiborne killed Mr. Underwood, and Lord Bancroft killed her for Mr. Underwood?”
“This is a more believable version. If Lord Bancroft is willing to kidnap my sister to force me to help him locate Mr. Underwood, then presumably he would also be angry enough at whomever killed him to take vengeance.”
“Does he have the manpower to do something like that?” asked Lord Ingram. “It would require him to have had Mrs. Claiborne followed, wouldn’t it? And if he’d already deemed her irrelevant, then why would he squander such resources on her?”
Mrs. Watson rubbed her forehead, then she shot to her feet.
“Good gracious, my lord, do you remember that when Miss Charlotte visited the accountant, she learned that there had been a Mrs. Anderson who had asked about Mr. Underwood?”
She turned to Holmes. “Do you think, Miss Charlotte, that we haven’t been dealing with Mrs. Claiborne at all but with the other woman?”
?“Ash, are you thinking longingly of spending some time in Stern Hollow, with your ‘broken’ limb propped up, so that you don’t need to do anything at all from sunrise to sunset?”
Supper was finished and Lord Ingram had a rare few hours before he had to head out again. He had chosen to spend the time in bed with Holmes. But much as she had lamented earlier, they lay fully clothed, the sides of their heads touching, both half-asleep.
At her slow, slightly slurred question, he chuckled sleepily. “You’re speaking of yourself, Holmes, with your feet on an ottoman and a plate of cake by your side. I would like to do some riding, which alas I cannot at Stern Hollow, not as long as I’m still supposed to be recovering from my ‘accident.’?”
She chortled and then said, after a moment of silence, “We’re almost done with all our preparations. Can you believe that?”
“No, I cannot believe it. My eyes tell me I’ve crossed off almost every item on my original task list, but every day I come up with more things to check and to do.”
Because he could not accept that they could ever be adequately prepared.
“What if we manage to come out of this in one piece?”
He opened his eyes. “Do you remember the gate at Stern Hollow that gave me so much trouble?”
She turned onto her stomach and propped herself up on her elbows. “The one near the little cottage for your children? The remote wooden one for which you had to replace fifty feet of estate boundary and then design a new wrought iron gate yourself? The gate you never saw that ended up taking three weeks of your time?”
Holmes remembered everything one ever told her—even things one didn’t remember ever telling her. Therefore, she had to recollect that the subject of the gate had come up while he was being treated as a murder suspect, in answer to a question Chief Inspector Fowler had asked him about whether he enjoyed looking after his estate, acknowledged by all and sundry to be one of the fairest in the land, something worth cherishing.
But his answer, at the time, had been one of disillusionment. Not with Stern Hollow in particular but with his life in general. He had been foundering. The life he’d thought he wanted—and achieved—had turned out to be a mirage. And he had been going through the motions, fulfilling his obligations without knowing what to do next, when what he had thought to be the perfect path had led him straight over a cliff.
“I’ve seen the new gate a few times since, actually, since it’s rather close to the little cottage. And I’ve come to realize that I like it very well. It’s handsome and sturdy, and it opens and closes smoothly—it’s everything a gate ought to be.”
She listened attentively, no longer looking sleepy at all.
“So I’ve been thinking of late that if only troublesome gates were my biggest problems, I would be a very happy man indeed.”
Because he had found out, as she had, that sometimes one discovered a new world beyond the precipice, beyond the plunge. He was relieved to be divorced, relieved not to have to keep up appearances, relieved that he needed never again measure himself against any sort of perceived perfection.
He no longer felt tied down by his estate, because it was never the estate that had tied him down but his own unachievable expectations. Now he looked forward to his daily life—to the peace and quiet of Stern Hollow, the laughter and chatter of his children, and letters from Holmes several times a week, compact, reassuring little envelopes in his breast pocket.
And he looked forward equally to the less quotidian experiences.
“I’m glad you like the gate,” she murmured. “I’ve seen the gate, and it is a worthy gate indeed.”
?Her lover slept soundly, the travel alarm clock on the nightstand set to wake him up in an hour and a half.
Charlotte placed a hand on his sternum and felt the warm cambric of his shirt, the steady rise and fall of his chest with every breath. He had done so much. In the past few days, in addition to all his other tasks, he had searched deep into various archives for her and taken another trip to Torquay to make sure that old Mrs. Calder was still happy as a clam on her seaside holiday.
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 knew now how the story ought to go—how their story ought to go.
But…later.
Now he needed his sleep—and so did she.
?Lord Ingram, of course, had not come back to the hotel merely to dine and to rest for a few hours. He gave Charlotte an address, the place to which he had followed the man who had picked up the second letter from the chemist’s shop.
Charlotte, disguised as an old woman, reached the house midmorning the next day—she would have liked for it to be earlier, but other than milk deliveries and emergencies, people did not show up in front of one another’s doors at the crack of dawn.
The street was overpopulated—as was so much of London. The houses, worn but not yet dilapidated, were packed cheek to jowl, lines of washing flapping in the breeze. It was the kind of neighborhood where most everyone went to work, including the older children. As Charlotte walked by, only a pair of five- or six-year-old boys peered at her from the dirt they were digging up in someone’s tiny front garden.
As expected, her knocks at the door produced no reply. She proceeded to the next house down the street and then the next, until a frail-looking old woman holding a toddler girl answered the door.
“Do pardon me, missus,” said Charlotte. “I’m mighty sorry to bother you, I am. But I’m looking for Mrs. Trimmer. She used to live in number 17 over there.”
Lord Ingram, who never settled for being merely competent, had found out, via London’s municipal records, the identity of the house’s owner: Robert Epping, hansom cab driver by profession. As this was not terribly helpful, he further discovered the house mentioned in the annals of the city as the site of a neighborly spat eight years ago, with the resident at the time named as Mrs. L. Trimmer, fifty-six years of age.
“Oh, but you’re awful late, missus,” said the old woman. “Mrs. Trimmer passed away two years ago.”
“Dear me. I had no idea, and me living only five miles away! The poor dear—I hope her passing was easy.”
“It was, thank goodness. She developed pneumonia and went speedy quick.”
Charlotte bemoaned the abrupt volatility of life for a minute, and then, “Do you think, missus, whoever is living there right now—would they let me in to take a look at the front room where Mrs. Trimmer and I used to sit and chat?”
“I don’t see why not, except they are such busy people and hardly ever home.”
Charlotte made a wary face. “I do hope they’re not pretending to be working but whiling away the day in taverns and gambling houses. I had a nephew like that, and it was terrible for my sister.”
“Oh no, no worries on that. At number 17 they are excellent young people. You won’t find harder workers or better neighbors than Mumble and Jessie, you won’t, missus.”