Chapter Twenty-Five
Charlotte stood outside the street entrance of her hotel suite, Mrs. Watson’s parting words still echoing in her ears.
Be careful, the dear lady had said. These days, they were always saying that to each other.
Charlotte looked around and made a left turn. Several streets away she got in a hansom cab and asked to be taken to Great Russell Street.
The most notable landmark in that part of the town was the British Museum. At this time of the night, even with the establishment’s extended summer schedule, the last museumgoer had departed hours ago.
Despite streetlamps and lights that illuminated the fa?ade of the museum, the area was shadowy and starkly empty. The houses that surrounded the great institution stood as silent as stone sentries around a mausoleum, all shut doors and blind windows: It was late enough in summer that those headed for the country had already departed and those remaining in London had gone to bed at a reasonable hour.
Charlotte marched past the museum’s front gate, swinging her cane a little. She turned right, then turned right again. Behind the museum it was even quieter. Her footsteps echoed. The tapping of her cane on the pavement, inaudible in the rush of the day, boomed in the nocturnal silence, loud as a door slamming.
She barely saw the shadow swim toward her on the ground. Spinning around, she lifted her weighted cane just in time to intercept a strike of her attacker’s umbrella. The clash was muted by the umbrella’s neatly rolled canopy, only a dull thump that barely rippled the air.
The impact, however, jolted Charlotte’s shoulder. She had not neglected her canne de combat practice with Mrs. Watson; still, it felt as if her cane had met with a sledgehammer. She stumbled backward. Her attacker’s umbrella swooped down almost before she could parry again.
The cane had a steel core—yet it seemed to have cracked upon this second strike. Charlotte gave more ground and ducked her attacker’s next swing to the side. She attempted a whack at the attacker’s shoulder blade, but the attacker spun around and smashed the umbrella toward Charlotte’s shin.
Charlotte hopped off the pavement into the street. Like a jungle cat, her attacker pounced. Back Charlotte went, step by step. She panted. Her arm hurt. The cane was now the weight of an anvil. She barely avoided tripping over the curb on the other side of the street.
She tried to at least pivot, so she could retreat along the length of the street, but her attacker boxed her in, forcing her toward the wrought iron fence of a mansion, at which point there would be no further retreat.
Hurry, hurry!
She blocked the next onslaught inches from her nose. Dear God, she really liked her nose.
Hurry!
She slashed outward, but her attacker was the superior combatant, and the dreaded fence was now directly against her back.
“Stop and step away, Miss Ferguson. I have Mr. Waters,” said Lord Ingram.
The attacker froze. Charlotte wasted no time in striking her across the shoulder and scurrying away.
Lord Ingram stood on the other side of the street, the granite hulk of the British Museum behind him. He held a limp, masked Mumble, his hands and feet bound.
Jessie, her hand clamped over where Charlotte had thwacked her, hissed, “Don’t you dare hurt him.”
“Oh, I dare,” replied Lord Ingram, his tone glacial. “Drop your weapon. On your knees, and put your hands where I can see them.”
?“It is preferable, of course, not to be a damsel in distress in need of saving,” said Charlotte to Lord Ingram. “But once in a while, a stylish rescue is quite refreshing.”
She held Mumble by the latter’s inert feet, while her lover walked backward, gripping the young boxer under his arms. He snorted. “In what way was this a rescue?”
True, the whole thing had been a ploy, using Charlotte to lure Mumble and Jessie into an attempted kidnapping. A few paces before her, a young man Lord Ingram had brought along carried Jessie on his back, with Mrs. Watson beside him, keeping an eye on the girl.
Mumble had been unconscious because the “mask” over his face had been a cloth doused with chloroform. Jessie, after being bound hand and foot, had also been subjected to the same treatment. But she was still struggling, albeit weakly.
“It was a rescue in that I was overawed and would have been hurt had my inauspicious struggle against Miss Ferguson gone on for much longer.” Charlotte smiled at her lover. “You were very convincing as a knight in shining armor.”
He glanced down at himself. He was dressed much like a London cabbie, his jacket ill-fitting, a hole in his hat, his electroplated watch fob scabbing and peeling. “Thank you, Holmes. I’m never happier than when I’m being a knight in shining armor.”
He was jesting, but it also happened to be God’s own truth.
“I can’t always promise you quests as glamorous as tonight’s—watch out for the curb!—oh, please excuse me.”
She’d dropped one of Mumble’s feet and had to bend down to pick it up before they could continue.
“I, too, could do with a few less glamorous tasks,” murmured Lord Ingram.
They loaded Mumble and Jessie into the vehicle they’d brought. Lawson had already located the carriage waiting for Mumble and Jessie several streets away. Lord Ingram informed the driver that if Mrs. Farr wanted to see her foster children again, she had better come right away to the house where she had first met Sherrinford Holmes and bring her houseguest—and only her houseguest—along.
Mrs. Watson’s house near Regent’s Park and 18 Upper Baker Street, her property that served as Sherlock Holmes’s office, were both available. But those were addresses known to their enemies, and they hadn’t wanted to take chances. So Lord Ingram had volunteered a place he had quietly bought earlier in the year, a house in St. John’s Wood that Sherlock Holmes and company had once hired for an investigation.
More memorably, it was the first place outside Stern Hollow where Lord Ingram and Charlotte had made love. Less memorably, they had not done so in this particular room.
The rest of the house was staid enough. The parlor immediately next, all dark blue wallpaper and rose damask upholstery, was the very exemplar of respectable décor. Yet this—Charlotte could think of it only as a boudoir—featured an enormous divan piled high with cushions and decorative pillows, enclosed by a diaphanous rose-colored canopy.
Mumble and Jessie currently occupied this heavenly divan.
“I like this place,” Charlotte said to her lover.
“I knew you would.”
“Are you embarrassed to own it?”
“Not as much as I thought I would be.”
She chortled. She wanted to say something more to him, but Mrs. Watson called from the next room, “They’re here!”
The dear lady ran down, the late Dr. Watson’s service revolver in hand, to reinforce Lawson, in case Mrs. Farr tried anything unwise—or brought a larger contingent than Lawson could handle.
Charlotte left Lord Ingram to keep an eye on Mumble and Jessie and reached the ground floor as two visitors were admitted to the house, Mrs. Farr and a woman with a scarf pulled across her face.
Charlotte nodded at a stony-looking Mrs. Farr. Then she addressed the veiled woman. “My deepest condolences, Mrs. Claiborne.”
?The autumn before, when Holmes and Mrs. Watson—and even the Marbleton siblings—had met Mrs. Farr, Lord Ingram had been stuck at Stern Hollow, facing a murder investigation. He had, therefore, only seen her image in the photograph taken by Mrs. Harcourt.
Holmes had told him, emphatically, that she no longer looked anything like her old self. But such was the power of first impression that he couldn’t help staring at the ravage writ large on her face, her once stately beauty now only bent lines and tattered angles.
Had she paid any attention, she might have taken offense at his involuntary reaction—even though he quickly remastered himself. But she rushed to her comatose foster children and didn’t give him a second glance.
She didn’t hasten to feel their foreheads or check their pupils, but bent over the side of the divan and gazed upon their features, as if they were sleeping infants and she the mother who had prayed long and hopelessly for their arrival, her tenderness completely at odds with her otherwise harsh aura.
“As you can see, not a scratch on them,” said Holmes, who had come to stand beside Lord Ingram.
At her words, Mrs. Farr stiffened. She touched Mumble and Jessie briefly on their faces and walked out of the boudoir. Holmes, with a similarly brief touch on Lord Ingram’s arm, followed. Mrs. Watson, after serving coffee to their guests, came in and took up a spot at the foot of the divan.
Lord Ingram moved a few feet to his right so that he straddled the doorway and could keep an eye on both their captives and the newcomers in the parlor.
He had seen the counterfeit Mrs. Claiborne’s photograph in the locket. The real Mrs. Claiborne was in her mid, rather than early, thirties and, despite her currently splotchy face and swollen eyes, possibly even more ravishing.
When Mrs. Farr took a seat next to her, Lord Ingram realized with no small shock that the two black-clad women were, in fact, not that far apart in age, Mrs. Farr being only a few years older. Yet she could have passed for Mrs. Claiborne’s stern, gaunt-looking aunt.
His chest constricted at the cost of her survival.
Holmes sat down with her profile to him. She had donned men’s attire tonight, not those suits tailored for a sizable paunch, nor the form-revealing jacket and trousers she had sported once to practice canne de combat with him—which had been very distracting—but loose-fitting garments that managed to obscure most of her curves while retaining some sense of structure and style.
“My apologies,” said Holmes to Mrs. Claiborne, “for breaking the news of Mr. Underwood’s passing in so abrupt a manner. But I had to break it to you.”
“It—it could not be helped. It would have been the worst news no matter how it was delivered,” replied Mrs. Claiborne.
She managed to have barely any accent and yet sound smoothly and indubitably French.
“I believe you can see it now, too, Mrs. Farr, why I had to go into your house. Before Mr. Underwood entrusted Mrs. Claiborne to your care, he must have cautioned her against saying anything, anything at all, that could put her—or you, for that matter—in danger’s way.”
Mrs. Farr gave no sign of any such understanding. In fact, she gave no sign that she’d heard Holmes.
Mrs. Claiborne, despite her grief, was at least able to concentrate on the conversation. “But how did you know that I was there, Miss Holmes, at Mrs. Farr’s, when even she didn’t know, until mere days ago, that Mr. Underwood had any knowledge of Miss Mimi Duffin’s death?”
“We were engaged by Lord Bancroft Ashburton to look into Mr. Underwood’s disappearance.”
The mention of his brother’s name was a barbed pang in Lord Ingram’s chest. Sometimes he felt nothing toward Bancroft. And sometimes there was anger enough to burn, confusion enough to drown.
As if sensing his agitation, Mrs. Watson glanced at him. He gave her a small smile. She smiled back, then went to take Jessie’s wrist to check the girl’s pulse.
“Lord Bancroft provided us, essentially, only two pieces of information,” continued Holmes. “One, that Mr. Underwood had connections with boxing, and two, his mistress’s address. I take it you know of this counterfeit Mrs. Claiborne?”
The real Mrs. Claiborne nodded.
“When we met her, the counterfeit Mrs. Claiborne spoke more prettily and for longer than Lord Bancroft did, but in the end probably told us even less. One detail that stood out was her mention of the scent of perfume on Mr. Underwood’s person, a scent that she herself did not use.”
“What?” Mrs. Claiborne cried softly.
“Something else that we found strange was that she had called on Lord Bancroft regularly, under the guise of conjugal visits.”
“What?” Mrs. Claiborne’s voice now rose half an octave. “That is a despicable claim. I never visited Lord Bancroft at Ravensmere. I haven’t seen him since the day we parted ways.”
Mrs. Watson, now checking Mumble’s pulse, exhaled, as if relieved by Mrs. Claiborne’s declaration, even though she already knew it was a different woman who went to see Bancroft.
“Rest assured, I believe you—the guard at Ravensmere recognized the counterfeit version. I only bring it up because the initiative she displayed in visiting a former protector did not accord with the image she presented of a woman who was maladroit at mistressing and who longed for nothing more than the simplicity and security of married life.”
“Is that so?” the real Mrs. Claiborne murmured. “I did long for companionship that wasn’t based on buying and selling, but I had no idea I was so inept at my own line of work.”
She hadn’t touched her coffee; Holmes poured her a glass of water. Lord Ingram wondered why in the world he had believed, when they were children, that Holmes wouldn’t know how to look after others—was it because she had never been interested in catering to his every whim?
“Due to these incongruities,” said Holmes, “and because everything we know about the counterfeit Mrs. Claiborne came from the counterfeit Mrs. Claiborne herself, we did not place our entire faith in what she said. But when I examined the locket that was found with her body, it began to appear far more likely that something had been fabricated entirely: The locket was too new and handled too little.”
“I would not have worn a locket—it’s practically an invitation for people to wonder who matters enough for you to keep their image near your heart,” said the real Mrs. Claiborne quietly. “My photograph of Mr. Underwood is in the handle of my hairbrush, and his of me is inside the back of his watch. We decided that no one would be looking too closely at those items.”
In the boudoir, Mrs. Watson shook her head. She was near enough that Lord Ingram reached out and held her hand. She smiled rather tremulously at him, raised their combined hands, and rubbed the side of his palm against her cheek before letting go to straighten the pillow under Mumble’s head.
Holmes tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Now that Lord Ingram was accustomed to how her short hair framed her features, he wondered that more women hadn’t adopted the style.
“Because of these inconsistencies presented by the counterfeit Mrs. Claiborne,” said she, “I was at a bit of a loss. If the woman who had introduced herself to us as Mrs. Claiborne wasn’t in fact Mrs. Claiborne, who could verify that? Mr. Underwood? The servants that the real Mrs. Claiborne had already dismissed a while ago—records of whom had disappeared from the domestic offices at the villa? And it was possible, indeed even likely, that the counterfeit Mrs. Claiborne had brought up a second woman in Mr. Underwood’s life just so that if her house of cards started to fall down, she could always claim that in fact she was Mrs. Anderson, who really truly had Mr. Underwood’s affection.
“The bigger question, however, was, if she was not the real Mrs. Claiborne, then what had happened to the real Mrs. Claiborne? She could have died; she could have fled the country; she could have left Mr. Underwood for less perilous pastures—and I had no evidence for any of it.
“But when I learned of the close ties between Mrs. Farr and Mumble and Jessie, a new likelihood arose. Assuming that Mr. Underwood knew himself to be in danger, assuming that he was terrified for Mrs. Claiborne’s safety, too, and assuming that—if it had so happened—they had missed the best opportunity to send her abroad, where could he trust her to be safe? And who could he trust not to betray her—and him?”
Tears rolled down Mrs. Claiborne’s face. Belatedly she reached for her handkerchief and wiped the moisture away. Mrs. Farr remained unresponsive, as if what was going on in the parlor had nothing to do with her—except, after a while, in an abrupt motion, she glanced toward the boudoir. Mrs. Watson, who could not have seen that look, nevertheless took a handkerchief and patted Jessie’s slightly perspiring forehead.
Holmes was the calm center of the maelstrom. As a boy Lord Ingram had found her calmness unnerving, but now he understood that it was not an absence of feelings but more an unruffled acceptance of other people’s emotions. “Would you say, Mrs. Claiborne, that before Mr. Underwood took on Mr. Waters and Miss Ferguson, he investigated them thoroughly?”
“Yes. He wanted only the best companions for Johnny.”
“And in that process, he learned that Mr. Waters and Miss Ferguson had been fostered by Mrs. Farr. He subsequently learned that among a certain subset of the population, Mrs. Farr is known to provide temporary refuge to those in dire straits, especially women and children. Am I still correct?”
“Yes.”
“But he went one step further, didn’t he? To ensure that you had Mrs. Farr’s personal attention, when you met her, he had you give her a letter. The gist of the letter promised that crucial information concerning Miss Mimi Duffin’s murder would be revealed to Mrs. Farr if she kept you away from all unfriendly gazes.”
Mrs. Claiborne nodded, even as another tear dropped down her face. Lord Ingram took a shaky breath. Sometimes people failed because they hadn’t prepared adequately. But no one could say that Mr. Underwood hadn’t done everything possible. And yet in the end, that still hadn’t been enough.
He, Holmes, and everyone—they, too, were doing everything possible. But what if their preparations still fell short? What if Destiny had its thumb on the scale and they could only ever toil in futility?
“Of course, upon reading this letter,” continued Holmes, “Mrs. Farr immediately questioned you. But you weren’t able to tell her anything—because you sincerely knew nothing, because Mr. Underwood forbade you to mention either himself or Lord Bancroft, or both. In any case, Mrs. Farr, whose desire for vengeance burned harsher with each passing day, had to wait, as you did, for Mr. Underwood to return and fulfill his promise.
“But then something made you defy Mr. Underwood’s strictures and confide in Mrs. Farr, at least to the identity of the letter writer.”
Mrs. Claiborne tucked away her handkerchief and glanced at Mrs. Farr. Lord Ingram was wary of Mrs. Farr, but in Mrs. Claiborne’s gaze there was no fear, only admiration and sorrow.
“My birthday was ten days ago,” she answered. “Mr. Underwood had told me that if by then I still hadn’t heard from him, I should go to Southampton and use the passage we’d bought for Freetown. But I couldn’t simply go. What if he needed help?
“I knew I’d only make a muck of things if I went about looking for him, but Mrs. Farr was no ordinary woman, and she was clearly prepared to go to great lengths to avenge her late sister. So I told her that Mr. Underwood had been the one who sent the letter; Mr. Underwood, well-known to Mrs. Farr’s foster children.
“As it turned out, Mrs. Farr had not allowed his sponsorship of her foster children without first looking into his background. She had managed to learn that he worked for the crown, in a capacity that ordinary subjects were not to know. And that had seemed respectable enough for her. She did fret that his house—mine, that is—seemed a bit too grand, which she knew because she had Mumble follow him home once or twice. But she approved of how he treated Johnny, and felt that he did want the best for his boxers.”
An unhappy presentiment came over Lord Ingram: He had an idea now how Bancroft had found Mimi Duffin.
“Mrs. Farr,” Holmes asked, “Mr. Waters said he saw Mrs. Claiborne once, when she delivered something to Mr. Esposito’s house on Mr. Underwood’s behalf. He never identified Mrs. Claiborne to you?”
Mrs. Farr’s only response was to rise out of her chair and head for the boudoir. Lord Ingram stepped back to allow her inside. She drew up short at the sight of Mrs. Watson gently prying Jessie’s braid from underneath her shoulder, so the girl wouldn’t yank on her own scalp if she were to roll on her side. But when Mrs. Watson looked up uncertainly, Mrs. Farr sat down on the floor beside the divan and placed a hand on Mumble’s knee.
In the parlor, as it became apparent that Mrs. Farr would not return immediately, Mrs. Claiborne cleared her throat and replied for her. “Mr. Waters and Miss Ferguson were not involved in how I sought and found refuge with Mrs. Farr. And after I moved into Mrs. Farr’s house, I made sure to always remain in my room when she had visitors. But this time I was trying to keep young Eliza focused on her reading and chased her down the stairs when she wriggled too much…”
Holmes nodded. “So Mrs. Farr set things into motion to look for Mr. Underwood. But alas, it was too late.”
“You are absolutely certain, Miss Holmes, that he is no more?” Mrs. Claiborne managed.
“I saw his body with my own eyes, I’m afraid,” said Holmes with that same calm authority.
Mrs. Claiborne’s lips quivered, but she accepted that as the final truth.
“Mr. Underwood’s death, among other things, led me to call on Mrs. Farr,” continued Holmes. “And Mrs. Farr, who initially was only too happy to eject me from her house, realized after my departure that perhaps I could be a source of intelligence concerning her sister’s murder.”
Without turning around, she added, “All you had to do was ask, Mrs. Farr. Perhaps you’ve become accustomed to harsher methods, but really, there was no need to kidnap me. No need to put your devoted foster children in harm’s way.”
In the boudoir, Mrs. Farr flinched, as if Charlotte had struck her. Her hand, on Mumble’s knee, trembled.
Mrs. Watson, who had been watching her closely, hesitated a moment, then rounded the divan and touched her on the shoulder.
Mrs. Farr jerked. Mrs. Watson yanked her hand back. But she set her jaw and settled her hand on Mrs. Farr’s shoulder again. This time, Mrs. Farr only removed her hand from Mumble’s knee and gripped the counterpane.
“Mrs. Farr, do you still wish to know what happened to Miss Mimi Duffin,” came Holmes’s voice from the parlor, “and who was ultimately responsible for her murder?”
A teardrop fell from Mrs. Farr’s blind eye. Her mouth opened, but no words emerged. Mrs. Watson glanced at Lord Ingram and then took Mrs. Farr’s arm and helped her get up.
Together they trudged back into the parlor.