Chapter 10 #3
“My lord, why did you choose this pangram to write repeatedly?”
“I didn’t. Miss Holmes came up with a number of pangrams. Don Quixote jokes flippantly at windmill, vexing Bach and Mozart. Volcano erupts liquidly, spewing marzipan, pate à choux, and breakfast jam. So on and so forth. I used them all at some point.”
“Nevertheless, this is the one Lady Ingram kept. Do you think she resented that you wrote another woman’s name two dozen times on a single page?”
“Lady Ingram would have had to feel a sense of possessiveness toward me in order to harbor any twinges of jealousy. No, I don’t believe she had ever viewed Miss Holmes as a romantic rival.”
“And yet according to Mr. Holmes here, Miss Holmes was not a friend to both yourself and Lady Ingram, only to you.”
“A woman can dislike another for reasons having nothing to do with a man. I daresay Lady Ingram’s antipathy toward Miss Holmes stemmed not from her friendship with me but her ability to resist the pressure to accept a proposal of marriage.”
Fowler’s eyes narrowed. “I am not sure I understand.”
“Miss Holmes’s background isn’t all that different from Lady Ingram’s, a penurious respectability. But whereas Lady Ingram buckled under and married after her first Season, Miss Holmes long held firm on her disinclination to marry and turned down any number of proposals.
“Lady Ingram prized strength above all else. From the beginning, she sensed in Miss Holmes a strength greater than her own, both of mind and of character. That was what she was jealous of. That was what prevented any possibility of friendship: Simply by existing, Miss Holmes made her feel inferior—and angry at herself.”
“Miss Holmes’s name is beginning to ring a bell,” mused Fowler. “I remember someone by this name connected with the Sackville case. Are we speaking of the same Miss Charlotte Holmes, who disgraced herself last summer and is now no longer received in polite company?”
“That would be the very same Miss Charlotte Holmes,” said Lord Ingram.
Nothing at all had changed about his tone, yet Treadles felt as if his answer had been a rebuke.
They had never spoken of Miss Holmes, not openly, in any case. But Lord Ingram’s steadfast support of and admiration for this fallen woman—Treadles did not understand it. And it made him realize that he did not understand Lord Ingram either. Not at all.
Fowler gave Lord Ingram a speculative glance. “To return to the subject of your ability to write in many different hands, sir, why do you suppose Lady Ingram would have carried that piece of paper with her?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. But it behooves me to tell you now that I have written letters in Lady Ingram’s hand to her friends and our children.”
Oh, this would not look good at all to a jury. Or in the court of public opinion.
“You had no choice, of course,” said Miss Holmes gently. “Her disappearance would have been that much more incomprehensible if she hadn’t written from her Swiss sanatorium.”
“Do you have any of those letters that had been written to your children?” Fowler, for all his experience and sangfroid, sounded excited at this prospect.
Treadles’s heart sank further. Anything that excited Chief Inspector Fowler was bound to be bad news for Lord Ingram.
“The children took the letters when they left with my brother—they wished to hear them read every night. But I have one that I had been working on, before all this happened.”
Lord Ingram went to his desk, opened a locked drawer, pulled out a portfolio, and handed it to Fowler. When opened, the left side of the portfolio held a menu and the right side, a half-finished letter, which read,
My Dearest Lucinda and Carlisle,
Thank you most kindly for your loving thoughts, as penned by Papa. I am slightly better, but alas, still not well enough that the doctors are willing to release me.
It is turning cold here, much colder than at home.
But I find the cold tolerable, since the air is dry and the weather clear.
From my balcony I can see a lake halfway down the mountain, surrounded by soldier-straight fir trees, with a tiny island at its center and what looks to be an even tinier chapel on this island.
You asked about the food that is served here. Well, that depends on which cook is on duty, the one from the German-speaking part of Switzerland, or the one from the French-speaking part.
Fowler pointed at the menu. “And this is an example of her ladyship’s handwriting?”
“Correct.”
“You do an excellent imitation.”
Lord Ingram made no reply.
The next few questions concerned Lord Ingram’s whereabouts during the past forty-eight hours and—the past fortnight. “Given her state of inadvertent preservation, it might be impossible for us to determine her time of death with any accuracy,” said Fowler.
Lord Ingram, blank-faced, pulled out an appointment book and answered accordingly.
“I understand you are a busy man, sir, so I will not take much more of your time. But there is one question that I must ask: Do you know of anyone who wished to harm Lady Ingram?”
Lord Ingram shook his head. “She did not instill widespread devotion, but neither did she inspire enmity. Her death benefits no one.”
“I hate to ask this, but it must be done, so I beg your forgiveness in advance. Are you certain that her death benefits no one? Are you certain that you yourself do not stand to reap rewards?”
Lord Ingram raised a brow. “By being suspected as responsible for her death?”
“Nobody would have suspected anything if her body hadn’t been found. If she had died somewhere else—overseas, for example—would you not have then been rid of an unloving wife, and would that not have been an advantage?”
“I have long coexisted with an unloving wife—were she to live to a hundred it would not have further injured me.”
“But it would have prevented you from marrying someone who does love you. With Lady Ingram no more, in six months’ time you will be able to marry again. This Miss Charlotte Holmes, for example, and rescue her from her disgrace.”
Miss Holmes appeared unmoved; Lord Ingram, equally so.
“I will not take umbrage on my own behalf, Chief Inspector—it is your professional obligation to suspect everyone. But you are operating under an entirely mistaken assumption of who Miss Holmes is. She has no use for a husband and would not have accepted any proposal from me, should I be so thoughtless as to tender one.”
Fowler waved his arm in an expansive gesture. “She wouldn’t wish to be the mistress of all this?”
“If she wished to be the mistress of a fine estate, she could have achieved that easily. Half of the largest landowners in England had proposed to her.”
“Really?” Fowler sounded almost impressed.
Treadles was confounded. All those fine proposals—and she threw away her respectability over a married man?
“Or perhaps it was one-quarter of the largest landowners.” Lord Ingram turned to the subject of the discussion. “Does that sound about right?”
“Even one-quarter is a highly exaggerated figure,” said Miss Holmes.
“It’s true that she received proposals from two gentlemen with considerable landholding, but one was deep in debt and the other elderly and in search of a fourth wife.
On the other hand, there had been an industrialist, who, if he had been accepted, would have been able to purchase for her an establishment equal in scale and refinement to Stern Hollow, without feeling too great a disturbance in his pocketbook. ”
Lord Ingram gave his friend a baleful look. “I have never heard of this industrialist.”
“They met during your honeymoon, from what I understand.”
“Huh,” said Lord Ingram.
“Very foolish girl, that Miss Charlotte,” said Miss Holmes, with wry amusement.
“Huh,” repeated Lord Ingram. He turned to the policemen. “And there you have it, gentlemen.”
Fowler, however, was not so easily satisfied on the subject. “The last time you were an eligible man was a long time ago, my lord. That Miss Holmes wouldn’t have entertained an offer of marriage from you then doesn’t imply she wouldn’t have changed her mind during the intervening years.”
“Whatever the state of her mind, I didn’t propose to her then and I will not propose to her now.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” Lord Ingram chortled, a derisive sound. “First, I am deeply disenchanted with marriage in general. Astonishing, isn’t it? Second, I am not bold enough to wed Miss Holmes, even if she were to prostrate herself and make an impassioned argument for our union.”
The woman in question whistled softly. “Now that’s a sight I’d pay good money to see—Charlotte Holmes on her knees, begging you to marry her.”