Chapter Twenty-Eight
The estate at Ravensmere had a ten-foot-high outer wall running around its entire periphery. Within those boundaries, there was a solid secondary wall topped with glass shards that secured the large French garden. Near the manor itself, the garden was divided yet again by a wrought iron fence across its entire width, which made for three sets of obstacles altogether if one approached from the front.
But from the back one did not need to deal with the wrought iron fence, only the two sets of walls.
Bancroft’s instructions were specific. Sherlock Holmes and company were to provide him passage over those two walls and transportation to a spot of his choosing—and they were to be ready at quarter past one in the morning.
There was no surveillance beyond the outermost wall, so they put up a ladder. Lord Ingram, his back laden, climbed up and waited, his hands tight on the ladder’s side rails.
“Nice, isn’t it?” said Bancroft, barely twenty years of age. He had been handsomer then, and laughed more.
“It’s wonderful!” exclaimed a seven-year-old Lord Ingram, his heart bursting with pride and happiness as he beheld the model railway that took up an entire dining table. “I don’t think I’ll ever love anything more. Thank you, Bancroft!”
“Of course. Anything for my little brother.”
He closed his eyes and listened.
There were three guards patrolling the grounds, one within the wrought iron fence, one in the French garden, and a third between the two sets of walls.
The heavy footfalls of the third guard thumped past after fifteen minutes. Lord Ingram had walked along the peripheries outside the walls and estimated that at the guard’s current speed, it would take him thirty minutes to come back to the same spot. He let three minutes pass, then carefully lowered himself to the ground on the other side of the wall.
In the wide corridor between the two walls, there was only short grass. He crossed to the second wall, helped by the darkness of an overcast night.
Here his task became trickier. On the other side of the wall was the manor. The guard in the area immediately outside the manor had the least ground to cover. He made a round every five or six minutes, and would hear any loud noises.
The guard trundled past. Lord Ingram unfastened the items on his back and imitated a nightingale’s warble. No replies came, but shortly after the guard went by again, he heard a soft thud. He made the nightingale call again and this time, after fifteen seconds, an answering call came from almost directly opposite him on the other side of the wall.
He tossed a thick mat above the embedded glass shards atop the wall and threw over a rope ladder. Immediately the ladder tautened and pulled. A darker shadow appeared atop the wall. Bancroft.
As soon as Bancroft lowered himself to the ground, Lord Ingram retracted the rope ladder and yanked down the mat. Without a word, they marched to the outer wall. Bancroft sounded out of breath, his footsteps uneven, but he kept up.
When they reached the spot where Lord Ingram had entered Ravensmere, he again tossed the rope ladder over. On the other side, Holmes’s and Mrs. Watson’s combined weight would anchor it. The brothers scaled the wall, Lord Ingram last, gathering up the rope ladder as he stood atop the other ladder before descending to the ground.
Mrs. Watson, who held the ladder, hugged him briefly. Could she feel his heart pounding? Inside Ravensmere he had felt strangely nerveless. But now that Bancroft was free, he was sick to his stomach.
Holmes took the rope ladder from him, Mrs. Watson the mat; he hefted up the ladder. They were about to depart when Bancroft whispered, “Give me all your firearms.”
They glanced at one another and submitted four pieces, one revolver apiece from Lord Ingram and Mrs. Watson, and one derringer apiece from Mrs. Watson and Holmes.
Holmes began walking. Everyone else followed in single file, with Bancroft bringing up the rear, a revolver in each hand. Lord Ingram, directly in front of Bancroft, felt the presence of those revolvers, their muzzles a pair of metallic eyes boring into his back.
?They walked for more than a mile before they arrived at a cabin in a clearing by a stream. Lawson was there, waiting, a pair of lanterns next to him. “Ma’am, Miss Holmes—”
Bancroft preempted him. “Where is the balm I asked you to bring?”
Mrs. Watson handed him a tin, thoughtfully opening the lid as she did so.
“I’ll need some whisky, too.”
Mrs. Watson gave him a flask, again with its lid removed. Bancroft took two large draughts, then removed his gloves and dabbed the balm on his hands, hissing in pain as he did so.
Holmes had told Lord Ingram that Bancroft looked different. He did. The shadowy light illuminated a bitter old man.
“Your change of clothes and shoes are inside the cabin,” Holmes told him. “There are sandwiches, too, if you need sustenance.”
“We will leave as soon as I change.”
Lawson had the carriage ready. Bancroft emerged from the cabin a few minutes later, clad in a country squire’s summer tweed and boater hat, the small satchel of extra clothes and essentials they had prepared for him in his hand.
The sandwiches, on the other hand, had been left behind in the cabin. Bancroft had not become less suspicious with captivity, but really, he was suspecting all the wrong things.
Holmes, who had not wasted a single crumb since her outcast days, packed up the sandwiches in a small basket.
“Well,” she said to Bancroft, her tone uninflected, “good-bye and good luck in your freedom.”
“But it’s not time for good-byes yet.”
“Oh? But you asked to be dropped off at the abbey, and Lawson here will do just that.”
“And you, Mrs. Watson, and my brother will accompany me. Otherwise, how can I be sure you will not go back to Ravensmere to let them know where I am headed?”
Lord Ingram’s heart thudded again, a slow, difficult motion smothered by the despair in his chest. Why could this not be good-bye? Why couldn’t freedom be enough for his brother?
“Very well,” said Holmes. “We will come with you.”
?Lawson drove carefully in the pitch-black night. They had five miles to cover, and it took close to an hour.
As they approached the ruined abbey, birds startled into flight, their wings thrashing loudly. Owls hooted. In the deeper recesses of the derelict edifice, other creatures shuffled and slithered.
The moon came out from behind the clouds as Bancroft leaped off the carriage. He had been silent since they left the cabin and had looked out the window in tense watchfulness. Now, as he stretched and loosened his limbs, for the first time he seemed genuinely excited by the end of his incarceration.
Are you interested only in the things of long-dead people, Ash? What about those long-dead people themselves—ever think about them?
That, too, had been in summer. Bancroft had been in his mid-twenties, and they had been walking across a moonlit glade that twinkled with fireflies.
Pain stole upon Lord Ingram like a mist, hazy yet all-enveloping.
“How does it feel, little brother, that you of all people had to break me out of captivity?”
His words pierced Lord Ingram like a knife of ice. “Now that you’re here, I assume good-byes can commence?”
“Not yet. I am ever so slightly early to my rendezvous, so you might as well remain my companions a little longer.” Bancroft spun around slowly, the revolvers he had taken from Lord Ingram and Mrs. Watson in his hands. “Well, have you no questions for me, Miss Holmes?”
Holmes, just then alighting from the carriage, thought about it. “Hydrochloric acid?”
“You mean, how I managed to remove the iron cage from my window. Why, yes, young lady.”
“So for all that you gave me a veritable dissertation on how impregnable Ravensmere was, you long ago pinpointed the one great weakness in its security: If you could remove the bars on the windows, then there would be very little to prevent you from a quick dash to the outer walls.”
Bancroft chortled. “Worked that out finally, did you?”
At the smugness in his tone, Lord Ingram’s hand closed into a fist. “How did you obtain hydrochloric acid in Ravensmere?”
“Simple. The charwoman needed money and could be bought. And she’s been there so long the guards no longer bother to check her basket anymore. Even if they noticed something, they would have assumed that it was a bottle of booze she was smuggling in for someone.”
Holmes rubbed her lower back. “I’m assuming Mr. Underwood did not participate in any of this? Remarkable how much you were able to accomplish without him, my lord. You really didn’t need him after all.”
“He was disposable, like everyone else.”
“Such as Mrs. Kirby, the counterfeit Mrs. Claiborne?”
Bancroft raised a brow. “So you found her out? Well, women are especially disposable.”
Lord Ingram forced his breaths to remain even. He had never met Mimi Duffin or Constantina Greville, the other woman killed so that there would be a corpse that could pass for his then wife, but their fate would always haunt him.
“I feel bad for her,” said Holmes quietly. “I feel worse for Mr. Underwood, since there were indications that he died trying to warn me.”
“The wages of disloyalty. I would have suffered him to live after we caught him, but he tried to escape. And those mercenaries guarding him had no understanding of subtlety.”
“Would you really have suffered him to live—or did you merely not want to deal with his corpse for a while? After all, in this weather, a body would not keep very well, and one thrown away willy-nilly would quickly end up in police custody. You knew that I would not have neglected to check new unclaimed bodies that came in.”
Bancroft sniffed but made no reply.
“Did it displease you when I stumbled upon his body?”
“Sometimes the meddlesome are unaccountably lucky. His body would have been in that coal cellar mere hours before being removed. But you had to happen upon it.”
She shook her head slowly. “You invited me to ask questions, my lord, but now that I ask questions, you don’t seem too pleased.”
Lord Ingram almost chortled aloud. Bancroft invited questions because he wished to gloat, but the questions Holmes asked were hardly conducive to that.
“In that case, I might as well eat a sandwich. Are you sure you still don’t want any?” She sat down on a large round stone and held out the basket toward Bancroft.
“I am sure,” he said frostily.
“And you, my lord Ingram, anything for you?”
Lord Ingram’s stomach was wound tight. Still, he walked toward her. “What do you have?”
“Cheese sandwiches and butter-and-jam sandwiches.”
“I’ll take a cheese sandwich.”
She gave him a paper package. He opened the package and sniffed the salty sharpness of cheddar. It was nice, sitting shoulder to shoulder with her in the moonlight, sandwich in hand, as if they were a pair of children who had run away from home—but not too far—for a nighttime adventure.
She didn’t eat her sandwich but only drank from her canteen. “Mrs. Watson? Lawson?”
They declined. Lawson remained by the side of the carriage; Mrs. Watson stood close to him.
Bancroft resumed his ambling. At one point he ventured a few steps into the ruins and set a hand on a still-standing arch. He even hummed for a while. As time passed, however, he fell silent.
“Are you still early for your rendezvous?” Holmes asked, after another quarter hour.
The night had become cool, the spill of moonlight on blades of grass white as frost.
Bancroft did not answer.
“Or is the party you are meeting running late?” Holmes continued, perfectly—or perhaps deliberately—oblivious to the irritation Bancroft radiated.
“Things don’t always run according to schedule.”
“We managed despite the very short notice, Mrs. Watson, Lord Ingram, Lawson, and I,” said Holmes. “Those tardy folks, were they the ones originally entrusted with your escape from Ravensmere?”
Bancroft sounded as if he spoke through clenched teeth. “They have, by and large, already fulfilled their end of the bargain.”
“Only to abandon you in the middle of nowhere?”
Lord Ingram wanted to laugh at the frustration on Bancroft’s face, but he didn’t dare. He didn’t dare tempt Fate by laughing too early.
They could still show up, the people Bancroft was waiting for. And if they did, then Sherlock Holmes and company would be in greater trouble than even Holmes’s cleverness could handle.
“I wonder what has delayed them, your allies,” murmured Holmes. “I wonder.”