Chapter 20
Stern Hollow, three days earlier
“Be careful what you say to me. I have not in the least eliminated the possibility that you are the one who killed Lady Ingram, accidentally or intentionally, when she came to abduct the children.”
Silence.
How far he had fallen, thought Lord Ingram, that Holmes suspected him of manslaughter—and possibly murder.
Then again, for her, nothing was unthinkable.
“She did not come to abduct the children and I did not kill her.”
“Where are your children?”
“They are exactly as I’d told you, with Remington.”
She studied him. He held her gaze: He had nothing to hide from her. Except, if he must be completely honest, certain sentiments—and that was only for the sake of his pride.
“I was in your apartment earlier tonight. There was a pair of boots hidden in a corner of your dressing room that has coal dust encrusted in the soles. Years ago, in one of your letters, you wrote about a tunnel that was opened up under the house at your suggestion, between the coal cellar and some boilers for the glass houses in the gardens. What were you—”
She paused.
“I see. You want somebody to think that your children are still here. Why? Has there been an attempt at abduction?”
He let out the breath he had been holding. Until her suspicions lifted, he hadn’t realized how heavily they had weighed on him. “The would-be abductors set a fire as a diversion, but they didn’t succeed.”
“When was this?”
“A month ago.”
“When did Remington come?”
“A few days later. He’d actually visited Stern Hollow earlier, but this time he came at my request.”
She propped her chin on her hand. “I had trouble believing you’d actually let your children out of sight. I’m sure others might have had the same doubt.”
“That’s what I’ve been hoping for. I’ve been keeping both the story cottage and the tunnel appearing as if they’ve recently housed children.”
She nodded slowly, swirling her spoon in the Bavarian cream from the charlotte russe. Then she broke apart the sponge cake base. Bad enough that she wasn’t eating her dessert, but dismantling it? The relief he’d felt evaporated.
You should be terrified, she’d told him earlier that evening. I am.
He had already been swimming in anxiety and distress; her statement had perhaps not made quite the impact it ought to have. Now it dawned on him that although his life was at stake, it was possible he still had only the most superficial understanding of the situation.
She looked up from the disassembled charlotte russe.
“There’s still something you aren’t telling me.
Livia wrote about the ordeal of meeting with you this afternoon.
At first she could only bring herself to mention the icehouse.
She reported that you appeared weary but steady.
It was only when she brought up Lady Ingram’s that you became stunned.
Which leads me to ask, did something else happen at the icehouse? ”
Trust her to be able to deduce something like that from nothing more than her sister’s account of how he had reacted.
He told her then about the man who called himself George Barr, who might or might not have been a common thief, and whom he had kept in the icehouse, pending an investigation into the man’s true identity.
“Lady Ingram must have already been in the ice well when I stood in the second antechamber, wondering how George Barr had managed to escape. But I didn’t go forward because outside each inner door there is a large latch, and the one on the next door was perfectly in place.
When Miss Holmes first started to stammer about the icehouse, I thought to myself, what an idiot I had been not to check more thoroughly.
If Barr had an accomplice, and if that accomplice thought Barr had become a liability, there was every chance that he would kill the man and put him deeper into the icehouse to delay discovery. Instead . . .”
She pressed down at the ruins of the charlotte russe with the back of her spoon. He grabbed her wrist. “Stop that. I am terrified now.”
He felt the tension in her arm, as if she might yank away. But a long second later, she set down the spoon and flexed her fingers.
He exhaled and let go. “I’ve told you everything. Now you tell me what you have kept back.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Of everything that’s happened today, the most inexplicable has been your reaction. You are never so terrified that you are unable to eat. What is going on?”
“Can I not simply be concerned for you?”
“Holmes, you ate half a dozen macarons while you told me that my wife had become an agent of Moriarty’s.”
“Yes, I did, didn’t I? They were excellent macarons.”
“And this”—he pointed at the dessert carcass—“was an excellent charlotte russe, something you would have had two helpings of, on any other day, after you’d had the cake Mr. Walsh served.”
She stared at the blight on her plate. “Very well. There are a few things I don’t understand yet, but I would say, on the main, that someone is trying to frame you.
Had it been anyone else in the icehouse, the suspicion would have immediately fallen upon Lady Ingram—at least among those of us who know the truth.
In fact, even though you tell me it’s Lady Ingram herself in there, I daresay that a part of you is still convinced that she has somehow masterminded all this. ”
She was exactly right about that.
“I know you wonder whether she hated you enough to spite you this way. I am more than convinced that she wouldn’t have minded seeing you dead, but not enough to throw her own life into the bargain. So we must take her out of the role of the mastermind.
“She was a pawn—the most important piece on the board, perhaps—but this is someone else’s game. Which leads me to ask, what is the ultimate objective of this game that Lady Ingram was used as the opening sacrifice?”
He had been eating as she spoke—he hadn’t had any food since luncheon. But now the game pie congealed in his stomach, as heavy as a cobblestone. “What?”
She rose from the table. A kettle of water had been provided for the room. She swung it into the grate. “That it’s Lady Ingram in the icehouse muddies the waters. But if I must name a motive for this scheme, I would say it’s Mr. Finch.”
“Your brother, Mr. Finch?”
She nodded.
Mr. Myron Finch had once been an underling of Moriarty’s but had chosen to leave the organization. Lady Ingram, pretending to be Mr. Finch’s star-crossed lover, had asked Sherlock Holmes to find him, knowing that he was Charlotte Holmes’s illegitimate half brother.
“Don’t you think this is a bit extreme, simply to get back a renegade?”
She came back to the table. “It depends on what he stole from Moriarty.”
Holmes had told him that according to Stephen Marbleton, when Mr. Finch left, he had taken something of great value from Moriarty.
“What can it be? Plans to assassinate the queen at next year’s Jubilee celebrations?”
“Mr. Finch was Moriarty’s cryptographer. I think he left with something he was deciphering, which might have been more personal in nature.”
She took a strand of her hair and let it fall through her fingers.
At its current length, her hair was just long enough to begin to curl.
He would have thought, if he were asked to imagine how she looked shorn of most of her locks, that she would appear somewhat boyish.
Instead, the paucity of hair only seemed to emphasize her eyes and her lips.
“I didn’t have the opportunity to tell you this yet,” she went on, “but on the day I last saw you in summer, I also met Mr. Finch.”
“You found him after all?”
“You and I were, in fact, both in the same room with him a few days prior, but at the time I hadn’t realized his true identity yet.”
A few days prior he had met her at the office of her father’s solicitor.
Four other men had been present, their goal to forcibly abduct her and return her to the high uncomfortable bosom of her family.
“You mean the groom your father brought? The one who had been helping you and Miss Olivia pass letters to each other?”
“Mr. Finch, in the flesh. I asked him about what he took and he declined to tell me.”
“You are sure he remains free to this day?”
“I have reason to believe so. Although on the night we met, he was almost taken. If it weren’t for Mr. Marbleton’s timely appearance, I’m not sure what would have happened.”
“You don’t mean to tell me you were accosted by Moriarty’s people? My God, Holmes—”
“I’m fine. Nothing happened to me. Mr. Finch is still on the loose—that’s the most important thing.”
“What about since? Have Moriarty’s agents plagued you since?”
“I don’t believe so. But”—she pointed at her hair and her men’s clothes—“I began to learn, with some urgency, how I may pass myself off as a man. Mr. Marbleton came to us dressed as a woman—most convincingly so. And we all went on our way that night in some form of cross-dress.”
“I was wondering how—and why—you had come by this proficiency, since you aren’t—” He stopped. “I must have missed something. Why would anyone frame me for a murder to get their hands on Mr. Finch?”
She didn’t say anything.
After a moment, he said, “You mean to tell me that they think you know, and that by placing me in jeopardy, you will somehow deliver Mr. Finch into their keeping?”
Again she said nothing.
“Are they correct?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t know where Mr. Finch is.”
“You know what I mean. Are they correct in pressuring you via me?”
This time her silence lasted even longer.
“Our unseen opponents are counting on that to be the case. So we must do two things. First, we must further bolster their belief that they are correct in that assessment. For that we should become lovers as soon as possible—and please believe me I am not proposing this solely, or even mainly, to take advantage of you.”
He snorted, but the somberness of her voice prevented any other attempts at levity.
“Two, we might have to sacrifice you at some point. In fact, we must. Not your life, no, but your freedom—at least temporarily. I don’t believe our opponents would show their hand unless and until you are in police custody for the murder of your wife and possibly that of the poor village idiot.”
He felt a haunting need for a cigarette, to clear his head and steady his nerves.
She, whose head never needed clearing and whose nerves never needed steadying—or so he would have still believed, if only she’d polished off the damned charlotte russe—observed him, as if she could hear the pounding of his heart and the rushing of his blood.
“I have been worried for a while that something like this would happen,” she went on.
“I didn’t anticipate Lady Ingram’s death, nor that the pressure would come from your direction.
Only that somehow this pressure would come, because I was careless enough to reveal Mr. Finch’s location, however momentarily.
That if those seeking him did not find him on their own, I would become the last lead they had on his whereabouts.
“What I feared most was that they would get hold of my sisters, especially Bernadine, who cannot defend or even look after herself. To that end I poached her from my parents, by creating the illusion of a secluded private asylum, with help of Mrs. Watson’s friends in the theatrical profession, including one who had married into respectability and loaned us the use of her country house as setting. ”
Even given the magnitude of the day’s news, this astonished him. “You have Miss Bernadine now?”
“At the cottage. And I must not be away from her for too long—she has deteriorated considerably since I left home.”
“Does Miss Olivia know?”
“Not yet. If I told her the truth about Bernadine I would have also needed to warn her that she herself might be at risk for abduction. Livia is anxious as it is; I didn’t want to overwhelm her.”
The water in the kettle boiled. He made tea and poured for them, his hands not yet shaking. Not yet. “But in the end, they didn’t choose to hold your sisters over you.”
“Or Mrs. Watson, for that matter. Which tells me that our opponents do not value friendship or sisterly bonds. But at least they seem to have experienced romantic love—or perhaps even sexual obsession.”
He recalled what she’d told him, that Moriarty was still on the hunt, all these years later, for the wife who’d had the temerity to leave him. “And Moriarty is the sort who becomes obsessed over a woman?”
“Mr. Finch told me Moriarty has been thrice married. When a man volunteers himself for the altar that many times, either he has absolutely no idea what to do with himself—or he does value romantic companionship to some extent.”
They drank their tea in silence.
“What do you think of what you are being asked to do here?” she asked, tenting her fingers underneath her chin.
It took him a moment to grasp the thrust of her question. “Oh, I will go to jail before I give up my virtue, you may depend on that.”
She smiled a little, a sight that never failed to do worrisome things to his heart. He set aside his tea. “That said, I still don’t think you have told me everything. Far from it.”
She gazed at him for some time. “You are right. I have not told you everything.”