Chapter 10
A plentiful tea awaited the party back in the library.
Treadles hadn’t expected much of an appetite, but the cold of the icehouse and the wind-buffeted walk led him to gulp down two cups of tea and three tartlets.
Chief Inspector Fowler, who appeared to have no interest in sweet things, heaped praise on the finger sandwiches.
“Flavorful and substantial—not like eating air and bubbles, as is so often the case.”
Lord Ingram, who again took up a position next to the fireplace, did not touch anything except a cup of black tea. Mr. Holmes, who didn’t touch even that, sat sprawled in a nearby padded chair, legs splayed, head tilted back, eyes half closed.
Treadles stared at him. How many friends named Holmes did Lord Ingram have? And how many did he trust to find out the truth behind his wife’s death?
“As you might have expected, my lord,” said Fowler, “we will need to ask you some questions.”
Lord Ingram appeared resigned. “Certainly.”
Fowler glanced at Mr. Holmes. “Some of these questions could prove uncomfortable in nature.”
“I have no secrets before Mr. Holmes,” said Lord Ingram.
Was there an edge of reluctance to his tone, a wish that he had been able to keep a secret or two to himself? All the same, it was very much the master of the house who had spoken—and let it be known that Mr. Holmes wasn’t going anywhere.
Mr. Holmes appeared not to have heard this tussle over his presence. Presently he poured himself a cup of tea and eyed the variety of refreshments on offer.
There was something oddly familiar about the way he contemplated cake.
“Mr. Holmes is a privileged friend indeed,” said Fowler, pulling out a typed transcript of the interview between Lord Ingram and Sergeant Ellerby.
Treadles readied his notebook, even as his face heated from secondhand mortification. He had read the transcript, a story only the power of the Crown could make a man divulge, let alone repeat.
A sound came like grains of sand thrown against the window—it was raining, high wind driving a storm into Stern Hollow. In the grate, fire hissed, but otherwise the library was silent. Fowler continued to scan the transcript, each flip of the page as loud as the cracking of a whip.
Treadles braced himself. No one was better at winding up a suspect than Fowler. Make them wait. Make them guess. Make them wonder how much they’d already given away.
“The apple cake looks rather appealing,” said Mr. Holmes to Lord Ingram, his words so incongruous Treadles almost laughed. “The apples come from Stern Hollow’s kitchen garden?”
“Indeed, they do,” replied Lord Ingram with the sort of grave courtesy appropriate to a question of pastry.
When a man wasn’t the prime suspect in the murder of his wife.
Mr. Holmes bowed his head slightly. “I must try a slice then.”
Chief Inspector Fowler did not glance up from the transcript but he looked irritated. Mr. Holmes’s little aside had broken the tension, cracked it like a spoon to an eggshell. And there was no guarantee he wouldn’t do it again, were Fowler to re-escalate the silence—and the pressure.
Support, both moral and practical, Lord Ingram had said about his friend’s purpose at Stern Hollow. Was Mr. Holmes here to sabotage Fowler’s effectiveness?
“Lord Ingram,” began Fowler, “you allege that your wife ran away from home on the night of her birthday ball.”
It would have been a stronger opening had it come at the end of a prolonged silence—and if Fowler had been able to pitch his voice slightly lower. Still, the statement arrived like a battering ram upon the gate of a castle.
Lord Ingram left the mantel to pour himself a glass of whisky. “She did.”
“There is talk of her childhood sweetheart. But I find it difficult to believe that a woman of Lady Ingram’s station would abandon everything for a love affair.
It is my understanding that, in the upper echelon of Society, affairs are conducted under civilized rules.
Why would she have run away when she could have indulged in a liaison, while retaining all the comfort and prestige to which she had become accustomed? ”
Lord Ingram considered his glass, as if wishing he could down its entire contents in one draught. In the end he took only a sip. “Civilized rules require a state of civility, which was not a characteristic of my marital union.”
“You mentioned a curtailment of affections but did not give a reason.”
“I would prefer not to discuss it.”
“I understand your reluctance. And I deplore intruding on another man’s privacy,” said Fowler, evincing no such reluctance whatsoever.
“But your wife, whom no one had seen in months, was found dead on your land. Reticence, which I otherwise admire as a manly virtue, will not work to your advantage here.”
This time Lord Ingram did pour back half of the whisky. Treadles winced inwardly. In happier times, he had shared meals and animated conversations with the man, and Lord Ingram had never imbibed except in exceedingly modest quantities.
He knew he should view his friend as the prime suspect, but he couldn’t help a surge of sympathy. And a scouring of misery, that he himself, viewed as enviably married, was also, on the inside, in anything but an enviable state.
Glass in hand, Lord Ingram walked to a window and stared out. The wooded slopes behind the house had turned red and gold, a beautiful tableau. Treadles wondered whether he saw anything at all.
“Immediately after the reading of my godfather’s will, I told Lady Ingram that I would receive five hundred pound per annum instead of the preponderance of his fortune, as was, in fact, the case.”
The words emerged slowly, as if they were dragged across knife and fire.
Fowler set his chin in the space between his thumb and forefinger. “Does this imply you already harbored doubts as to the validity of her affection?”
Lord Ingram’s hands clasped behind his back. “I knew when we met that her family was poor. I was more than happy to be their knight in shining armor. At the time it had seemed highly romantic, that our paths should cross when she came to London in search of a well-situated husband.
“I was young and vain—and likely believed myself a prize even without the attraction of my future inheritance. That the woman I loved perhaps wouldn’t want to marry me . . . Such a thought never crossed my mind.
“That Season she stayed with a cousin in London. I didn’t meet her family until after my proposal had been accepted. The lack of warmth she evinced toward her parents—and even her brothers—should have put me on alert. But I was blinded by love and freely discarded what I did not wish to see.
“In time I came to understand that a similar distance existed between us. I thought we had everything we needed to be happy—health, security, beautiful children. But she grew only more distant, more unreachable.
“That was when I learned that she had loved another, a man rejected by her parents because he was in no position to help her family. Everything began to make horrifying sense. She despised her parents because they refused to consider her personal happiness. She was remote toward me because she did not love me. Because she never would have married me, except for the fact that I was rumored to be my godfather’s heir apparent. ”
Treadles dared not put himself in Lord Ingram’s place. He didn’t even want to imagine disillusionment of this magnitude.
“I didn’t want it to be true. But I also needed to know.
My godfather died soon thereafter and I made up my mind.
If she loved me, then she would be disappointed that I would remain only a moderately well-off man rather than become a very rich one, but it would not be a fatal disappointment. If she did not love me . . .”
He’d been speaking faster and faster, as if hoping simple momentum would carry him through the worst part of the story. But now he came to a stop. His head bowed. His fingers gripped the edge of the windowsill.
When he spoke again his voice was quiet, barely audible.
“Her anger was beyond anything I could have imagined. My godfather was Jewish, and it is rumored that I am his natural son. She told me, in exactly so many words, that without this inheritance, she had married me for nothing. And her children had Jewish blood for nothing.”
Outside, wind howled. A sheet of rain pelted the windows.
Inside, the silence was excruciating. Treadles didn’t dare breathe, for fear of betraying his presence.
He wanted Lord Ingram to believe that he was speaking to an empty room—it would be the only way he himself could have managed to relive such painful memories.
“There was no attempt at reconciliation, then?” Fowler was unmoved, his question cold and inexorable.
“As ruptures go, ours was thorough—and as final as an amputation. I imagine the truth came as a relief for her, an end to all pretenses.”
“And for you?”
“On my part, I at last perceived her clearly—and I saw the greatest mistake of my life.”
Another silence fell. Fowler polished his spectacles with a handkerchief. Mr. Holmes picked up the slice of cake that had been sitting beside him and gave it a quarter turn on its plate.
For a moment, something about him again seemed strangely familiar.
And then he looked in Lord Ingram’s direction, his expression entirely blank.
Treadles almost cried out. That expression, as if he viewed the pain and suffering of others from a great remove, as if he himself never expected to experience such frailties—Treadles had seen that expression before.
On a woman.
On Charlotte Holmes.
Despite the foppishness of his appearance, Mr. Holmes did not look…feminine. He didn’t even look effeminate. And certainly not at all pretty. While Miss Holmes was very pretty and extravagantly feminine—Treadles still remembered the endless rows of bows on her skirt the first time he met her.
But now that the idea had come into his head…