Chapter Twenty-Seven
Mumble and Jessie were now awake enough to leave. As Lord Ingram and Miss Charlotte helped them out, with Mrs. Farr hovering close, Mrs. Claiborne took Mrs. Watson aside.
“I’m a little worried for Mrs. Farr,” she said. “After she learned that Mr. Underwood knew something of her sister’s death, she became excitable and impatient. She had her foster children over frequently—not just Mumble and Jessie but that young man—”
She tilted her chin at the hackney and the cabbie who had taken Miss Charlotte’s message to Mrs. Farr and then brought back Mrs. Farr and Mrs. Claiborne—Mrs. Watson would guess him to be Robert Epping, the man who, on paper at least, owned the house in which Mumble and Jessie lived. “And also a young woman who owns a bakery. They were discussing things and making plans at all hours of the day. But tonight, after news came that you had Mumble and Jessie, it was as if something inside Mrs. Farr collapsed.”
Mrs. Watson knew what she meant. Even on the night Mrs. Farr had learned of her sister’s death, she had not appeared so overwhelmed.
So broken down.
“And you must be careful, too,” continued Mrs. Claiborne. “You and Miss Holmes and everyone else here tonight. I believe that you are the ones Lord Bancroft wanted to entrap—the ones Mr. Underwood wanted to warn. Please…”
Please don’t let anything happen to you, not when Mr. Underwood lost his life trying to save yours.
Mrs. Claiborne did not finish her sentence. She only nodded at Mrs. Watson and hurried to join Mrs. Farr and her foster children in the hackney.
Mrs. Watson exhaled. Of course they were the ones Lord Bancroft meant to entrap. They hadn’t always been 100 percent sure what roles Mr. Underwood and Mrs. Claiborne—real and sham—played in the scheme, but about Lord Bancroft’s malice there had never been any doubt.
Mrs. Watson, Miss Charlotte, and Lord Ingram returned to the parlor. Miss Charlotte yawned. Mrs. Watson’s mind still raced, even though her eyes felt gritty and her head woolly.
“My lord,” said Miss Charlotte, rubbing her arm that had been sorely tried in combat with Jessie, “we didn’t have time to discuss this earlier, but you showed the counterfeit Mrs. Claiborne’s picture to your liaison inside De Lacey Industries?”
The dear young man had been keeping strange hours of late. Perhaps for that reason, tonight he looked no worse for wear, clear-eyed and alert. “I did. The counterfeit Mrs. Claiborne—what did the real Mrs. Claiborne call her? Mrs. Kirby? She had been seen there.”
De Lacey Industries belonged to Moriarty’s organization. Mrs. Watson sucked in a breath. “So Lord Bancroft really did form an alliance with Moriarty. But if he must blame someone for his downfall, Moriarty was almost as much at fault as Miss Charlotte here.”
“Holmes, however, would never seek to cultivate my brother,” said Lord Ingram, gathering up used cups and plates from the tea table. “But Moriarty must look upon a disgraced Bancroft as someone potentially useful, a wellspring of highly sensitive intelligence, if nothing else.”
“Does that mean the men holding Miss Bernadine and my staff hostage are Moriarty’s minions?”
Lord Ingram, carrying the dishes on a tray, walked toward the door. “I’m inclined to agree with your initial assessment that they are mercenaries. Moriarty and his lieutenants have had to rely on mercenaries of late, since they themselves are short of personnel.”
Miss Charlotte held the door for him to walk through.
“But mercenaries must be expensive,” said Mrs. Watson. “Will Lord Bancroft have to become Moriarty’s minion, too, to pay him back? I hardly think he’d subject himself to the sort of control Moriarty likes to exert over his underlings.”
“Nor do I,” answered the great detective. “Which means Lord Bancroft would have needed to put up something valuable in exchange for Moriarty’s help. One moment, please.”
She, too, left the parlor and came back a minute later with a photograph.
“Do you remember, ma’am, the cache of photographic plates we took from Chateau Vaudrieu?”
In an effort to save Mrs. Watson’s old friend—and former lover—the Maharani of Ajmer from blackmail, Sherlock Holmes and company had inadvertently burgled none other than Moriarty’s stronghold outside Paris. Mrs. Watson had never examined the loot in detail, but she knew that Miss Charlotte had gone through all the photographic plates to make sure that there had been nothing incriminating concerning the maharani or her family members in those images.
“Lord Bancroft was captured in one of those photographs. I don’t think he was the intended subject of the photograph—which was a group of men I didn’t recognize—but he’d been caught in the periphery.”
Miss Charlotte handed the photograph to Mrs. Watson. The picture was barely half the size of Mrs. Watson’s palm. And there he was, a miniature Lord Bancroft, seated on the terrace of a café, one ankle on his knee.
“By the time I came across this, Lord Bancroft was already confined to Ravensmere. All the same, I alerted Lord Ingram to the existence of the photograph, and he took a look before he committed our entire cache to a safe-deposit box in Paris.”
Miss Charlotte now handed another photograph to Mrs. Watson, this one much larger.
“Why, it’s the exact same place!” exclaimed Mrs. Watson.
Except this photograph had been taken from a higher vantage point, and there was a milliner’s next to the café, rather than a tobacconist’s.
“Being better traveled than I, his lordship immediately recognized the place in the photograph as Bruges. And in January of this year, he traveled there and took this second photograph from a nearby hotel.
“Lord Bancroft, on the other hand, is not much of a traveler. I believe he undertook a standard grand tour in his youth, but did not stray much from these shores in recent years. It’s quite possible he went to Bruges to conduct some of the illicit business that led to his downfall.
“But our dear lord Ingram, being the enterprising gentleman he is, walked around the district in Bruges, located several financial institutions, and inquired at each about the hiring of safe-deposit boxes. One bank didn’t offer such services, but the other two did.
“And as he never ceases to amaze us, he broke into the bank managers’ offices, checked the records, and found one box leased to a name that he recognized. Not Lord Bancroft’s own, of course, but an alias he had used in his youth, when he didn’t want his father to find out that he had opened a line of credit at an expensive establishment.”
Mrs. Watson’s jaw hung open. “So you know what the crown has failed to find out. You know where Lord Bancroft’s ill-begotten gains are.”
“But we don’t have the key to it,” said Lord Ingram, back from the kitchen in the basement and still drying his hands with a handkerchief. “And the bank’s strong room is highly secured, with a steel door that’s quite beyond my lock-picking skills.”
“Which is really too bad. Had we known then what troubles he would create for us, we’d have dug a tunnel under and picked the box clean,” said Miss Charlotte, rather savagely for her.
“And now Moriarty has the loot,” lamented Mrs. Watson.
Certainly they hadn’t found anything remotely resembling a key on Mr. Underwood.
“Well, I don’t think that money was ever meant to be ours,” said Miss Charlotte. “But it’s a shame I can’t show these photographs to Lord Bancroft and taunt him that we already have his hoard.”
“Without showing the photographs, you can still hint that to Bancroft,” said Lord Ingram. “That thought should make Bancroft lose sleep, especially if he has already promised the money to Moriarty.”
That prospect made Mrs. Watson lie down with a smile on her face.
?She slept until about eight. Lord Ingram had already left. She and Miss Charlotte dressed and returned to their hotel to wash and change. When they arrived, however, they found that an urgent telegram had come overnight from Paris.
Penelope had been barred from visiting Miss Bernadine the previous evening. Even young Fontainebleu had been kicked out. And they had been told in no uncertain terms that they would not be allowed back inside again.
There was also a typed, unsigned message, which could only have come from Lord Bancroft: If they wanted to see Miss Bernadine alive and well again, they must assist in his escape from Ravensmere.
Tonight.