Chapter 16 #2
Now they were waiting to speak to Mrs. Newell again. Chief Inspector Fowler having gone to use the commode, Treadles was alone in the foyer when Charlotte Holmes came out from the white drawing room.
On her way to the front door she passed him and nodded. “Good day, Inspector.”
“Mr. Holmes,” he said. “A moment, please. I have a question for you.”
“Yes, Inspector?”
He didn’t know why he had stopped her. And now that he had, he had no idea whether he could condense all the whirling thoughts in his head into a single question.
“I have, or so it would appear, offended Miss Olivia Holmes greatly.”
She waited for him to continue.
“I seem to have a knack for giving such offenses. Not to ladies like Miss Holmes usually, but to . . .” He paused, unsure how to phrase what he was about to say.
“But to women who are thoroughly lacking in respectability, with the very respectable Miss Holmes affronted on behalf of her disgraced sister.”
He thought of Mrs. Farr, with the possibly dead missing sister.
He thought of Mrs. Bamber, the publican he had encountered a few months ago.
He preferred to believe that they were exceptions, and perhaps they were.
The problem was, he could too easily think of others, scattered throughout his career, like sand in a bowl of grain.
“I am a police inspector. I will need to speak to many more women in the course of my work. A tendency to provoke is . . . not a personal asset.”
She waited again. When it became apparent he had confessed as much as he could bring himself to, she said, “Should I assume that you do not entirely understand how—or why—your words give rise to such unfavorable responses?”
He nodded stiffly, already regretting the conversation.
“I can’t speak for other women, but perhaps in the case of Miss Holmes, I can offer some explanation.
Her sister Charlotte had always understood, from an early age, that she was ill-suited for marriage.
She had an agreement with her father that if by her twenty-fifth birthday, she still hadn’t changed her mind, he would sponsor her to attend school and receive training, so that someday she might become headmistress of a girls’ school, a respectable position with respectable remuneration attached.
“When the day came, her father reneged on his promise. Charlotte Holmes was faced with the choice of either entering into a marriage she did not want or remaining forever under the roof—and thumb—of a faithless father.”
Treadles had no idea of the circumstances surrounding her disgrace. He couldn’t imagine any good reason for her to have done what she did, so he’d decided that she’d slept with a man as nothing other than an amoral lark.
“Neither was acceptable to her. So she strived to create a third alternative. She would get rid of her maidenhead and use that loss to blackmail her father into coughing up the funds for her education.”
Treadles’s shock and dismay must have shown in his face, for her expression became ironic.
“Yes, a terrible idea, but she had no other resources to call on. Women of her class are molded to be ornaments. She was willing to work for her own support, but she had few skills worth mentioning. And she was not so naive as to think that she could toil her way up from the floor of a factory—factories don’t pay women enough to live on, the reason many must prostitute themselves besides, to supplement that meager income. ”
Treadles couldn’t stop his brows from rising. He knew about the likelihood of female factory workers also being prostitutes—but had always assumed that it must be because factories attracted a less chaste class of women.
“In the end, Charlotte Holmes went ahead with her plan, which had seemed to her the least terrible of all choices. Things went awry. She found herself faced with a new set of undesirable choices: to be confined for the rest of her life—or to run away and take her chances in the wilds of London.
“Thanks to the kindness of friends, she did not starve. Today one might say she is faring rather tolerably. All the same, what she did was a desperate gamble at a desperate moment, when she felt as if she would never again have any say in her own life.
“Miss Olivia Holmes does not blame her sister for either her initial choice or what happened subsequently, because she herself feels that same desperation daily, the sinking sensation that what will happen to her is entirely out of her hands.
“When you brought up her sister’s sins before her, it was with an intention to shame. Perhaps you yourself were not aware of that—perhaps you thought of it as merely pointing out the facts—but it’s nevertheless true.
“For Miss Olivia Holmes, who knows the entire story, to hear it reduced to one single choice, shorn of all context, and casually judged as degenerate . . . I believe to her it felt unjust. And acted as a painful reminder of the narrow confines of her own life: She can either continue to live in accordance with her parents’ demands—and wither a little every day—or she can defy conventions and be called a shameless hussy for the rest of her life. ”
Miss Holmes spoke calmly, without rancor. But Treadles’s ears burned—and his face, too. He wasn’t sure he understood everything she said, but he did understand now why he had asked her the question in the first place.
Not to find out why the women had reacted as they had, but in the hope that she, with her uncompromisingly logical mind, would tell him that they were but being unreasonable.
Hysterical, even.
“Thank you,” he said numbly.
“I’m sorry. I do tend to tell people exactly what they don’t wish to hear.
” She sighed softly. “I might as well add, since we are on the topic, that perhaps some of the women’s reactions have to do with your face.
You have an open, amiable mien, which might lead those speaking with you to expect understanding.
And yet your judgment is such a pointed, implacable thing, as if you are the personification of the larger world they have known, the one that has thwarted them at every turn. ”
He might have mumbled something in reply. She bade him good day and walked out of the front door.
“Was that Mr. Holmes?” said Chief Inspector Fowler a minute later, startling Treadles.
“Yes, that was.”
“Hmm,” said Fowler, studying Charlotte Holmes’s retreating back. “There goes a man far more dangerous than he looks.”
Mrs. Newell did not pretend to be pleased that she must speak to the police again. Faced with her aloofness, Chief Inspector Fowler dispensed with small talk. “Ma’am, I understand that you yourself gave the order to send ice to Stern Hollow. Why?”
“Lord Ingram asked me to. He said that one of their freezing pots is missing, if I wouldn’t mind sending one from my kitchen, so that my guests would be able to enjoy the cold dishes that they are accustomed to. And would I not mind sending some ice along with the freezing pot.”
Treadles went cold. What reason could Lord Ingram have for requesting ice from a neighbor, when he had several tons of perfectly good ice waiting in his icehouse?
“Did he mention why he wanted you to send ice?”
“He didn’t. But I was delighted to oblige, since he was doing me the far larger favor by taking in all my guests. My kitchen staff already had a block of ice in an ice safe and it was very little trouble to send it along with all the food that would have otherwise gone to waste.”
“Why did you not mention this when we last spoke?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Mrs. Newell, withholding evidence from the police, in the course of a murder investigation, is a serious offense. I didn’t ask because I didn’t know enough to inquire in that particular direction, but you knew the significance of what you were not telling us.”
The old woman wrinkled her nose. “Why should I volunteer information that might send an innocent man to the gallows?”
“What makes you still think that he is innocent?”
“What makes you think he is guilty?”
“Simply from what you’ve told us, it’s obvious that Lord Ingram was hiding something. He requested for you to supply the ice so that none of his servants would need to go near the icehouse.”
There could be no other conclusion, yet Treadles still cringed to hear it said aloud.
If Lord Ingram killed his wife, then he could never again appear before Miss Holmes.
Mrs. Newell had said that, Mrs. Newell who was obviously biased in favor of Lord Ingram. But Treadles clung to that statement, to the implied integrity of Miss Holmes.
Mrs. Newell, unlike him, was not disheartened by Fowler’s charge. “If that were the case, wouldn’t Lord Ingram have made sure no one entered the icehouse the next day as well? Why would a servant be able to waltz in a mere twenty-four hours later?”
“Perhaps he underestimated how much ice the kitchen needed. Perhaps he thought the amount you supplied would be enough to last the entirety of your guests’ sojourn at Stern Hollow.”
Mrs. Newell scoffed. “Would you make such assumptions, Chief Inspector, if you had your wife’s dead body lying in a structure that is sure to be visited at some point by members of your staff?
Lord Ingram is not stupid. And any inference of guilt that starts with him doing something stupid is, by default, a line of reasoning that must be rejected. ”
The fog was still rampant when they left Mrs. Newell’s house but had begun to clear by the time they reached Stern Hollow. Instead of calling for an interview with Lord Ingram, Chief Inspector Fowler requested to speak to his valet, Cummings.
They had already spoken to Cummings once, when they had interviewed all the other servants. When Treadles consulted his notes, he saw that Fowler had already written, in the margins, Need to question this man again.
“Mr. Cummings, do you recognize these boots?”
Cummings, a small, neat man, examined the contents of the boot box, which had been taken from Lord Ingram’s dressing room the evening before. “They belong to Lord Ingram.”
“You have seen them before?”