Chapter 23 #2
One side of Lady Ingram’s mouth curved down, the side where her beauty mark had been.
A woman on the run couldn’t afford such a distinguishing characteristic; now there was only a slight dent.
The dent on Constantina Greville, at the same spot, must have been to disguise the fact that she had never had a beauty mark.
“Are you not going to thank me?” Lady Ingram said, her voice slightly less strident than it had been. “You only look good to him compared to me.”
“I can thank you if you need me to,” Charlotte said. “But really all he needed was time to grow up.”
Lady Ingram set a severely sleek hat on her head. “You have a very high opinion of yourself.”
She regarded her reflection with the scorn of someone who did not have a very high opinion of herself. Who had, in fact, never cared for the person in the mirror.
Into Charlotte’s lack of a response she said, “He will disapprove of you. You know he will.”
Of course he would—he’d always made it plain when he disagreed with her. But disapproval was not the same as obstruction and he would never stand in Charlotte’s way.
She smiled a little. “I’ll let Lord Remington know you are ready.”
The invitation from Sherlock Holmes had filled Treadles with a strangely elated presentiment. I think Chief Inspector Fowler is going to suffer a public debacle, he’d told Alice over breakfast. I just don’t know how yet.
The discovery of the bomb should have given Fowler pause.
But he was adamant that the bomb was irrelevant, that they had enough to get a conviction in court.
Treadles had found his excuse repugnant.
Their first commitment should be to the truth, not to whether their evidence could be spun into a hangman’s noose.
He was hampered by both his lower rank and his friendship with Lord Ingram—anything he said could be construed as a display of personal bias.
Nevertheless, he had made a carefully deferential argument for more police work, which Fowler dismissed in its entirety.
So one might say that Treadles rather wanted for his superior to suffer a public debacle.
And how oddly fitting that Sherlock Holmes should be the one to administer that dressing down.
They arrived to their rendezvous with the consulting detective at a St. James’s tea shop only to realize they were to be seated at the same table as Lady Avery and Lady Somersby.
“Chief Inspector, Inspector, what an unexpected pleasure,” declared Lady Avery. “Are you also here at Sherlock Holmes’s invitation?”
Fowler eyed her warily. “We are, my lady.”
“Excellent. Now I’m even more excited for what we are about to learn.”
Treadles’s pulse accelerated. Whatever it was, Sherlock Holmes meant for the news to be splashed all over town before the end of the day.
A man came and sat down at a nearby table. He looked familiar, somehow. Like a bigger, more rough-hewn version of Lord Bancroft. Could he possibly be another one of Lord Ingram’s brothers?
Before Treadles could ask the gossip ladies, Lady Somersby made a choked sound. “Oh my—my goodness gracious! Caro, look. Look!”
She was pointing at the door. Lady Avery glanced up. The policemen turned halfway around in their seats.
Lady Ingram was headed directly for them. Lady Ingram, not a corpse, but a woman very much alive, if rather pale and tense, with an expression of distaste on her face.
Her antagonism is a broad and catholic entity, Charlotte Holmes had once said, aimed at no one in particular. Even so, Treadles wished he were out of its swath.
Too late. She came to a stop next to him. Remembering that they had been formally introduced by her husband, he scrambled to his feet.
“Lady Ingram, I am—I am overjoyed to see you in good health.”
She nodded regally. “Inspector.”
“May I present my colleague, Chief Inspector Fowler, the lead detective on your murder case.”
Fowler remained where he was, agape. Treadles had to give the man a nudge on the shoulder for him to come out of his chair. Even then he was capable of only a haphazard bow.
“Charmed, I’m sure,” said Lady Ingram coolly. “Lady Avery, Lady Somersby, we meet again.”
Lady Somersby’s recovery was quicker than Fowler’s. “Lady Ingram, we thought your husband had killed you.”
Lady Ingram rolled her eyes. “That man is so sanctimonious he probably wouldn’t even let himself think of such a thing.
No, I had left him for another man. But the situation was .
. . complicated, so I decided to take my twin sister’s place at a private asylum in Gloucestershire.
She was removed from home at four and committed to an asylum eight years later.
“Moriarty, the man I left my husband for, had taken on the care of Miss Constantina Greville. But he chose to murder her to frame Lord Ingram, and that is something I cannot countenance.”
Lady Avery blinked. “You left Lord Ingram for a murderer?”
“It would appear that I did,” answered Lady Ingram, seemingly unmoved, but Treadles caught sight of her hand tightening into a fist. “Anyway, I thought the police should know. And as enjoyable as this meeting has been, I regret I cannot stay much longer. Now that I’ve exposed Moriarty, I myself am no longer safe. ”
“Wait, we need to—” Fowler began.
Lady Ingram cut him off. “Ladies, by the way, this may not have been in the news but the police can confirm that my sister was with child. I understand you take an interest in exposing and righting injustices. In which case, allow me to point you in the direction of one Dr. Connelly at her former asylum. Good day.”
She turned and marched out.
Lord Ingram embraced his children again and again.
He took them to the park, bought them boiled sweets, and had both tea and dinner in the nursery. They, of course, excitedly told him about seeing their mother earlier in the day, even as they were saddened that she had to leave again.
Remington had promised her that the Crown would no longer pursue her for her earlier collusion with Moriarty, which had led to the death of three agents, and see her safely out of the country, if, in exchange, she took responsibility for her sister’s death.
She had asked to see her children in addition, and there had been a harried reunion before she set off for parts unknown.
But Remington had been surprised by the choice she’d made to point the finger at Moriarty. He was one of the true culprits, of course, and she had not been forbidden to mention his name. But still, by speaking the truth she had announced her break with Moriarty and put herself at risk.
We may not see her alive again, Remington had warned.
I hope you are wrong, he’d replied.
She was still the mother of his children and, for their sake, he wished her well.
“I will still be here,” he promised them. “Mamma will come when she can, but I will always be here.”
After they went to sleep, he would have liked to call on Holmes. But she was no longer in London: Mimi Duffin’s body had been found, and Holmes and Mrs. Farr had left for Derbyshire together.
So he made a less pleasant visit.
Bancroft had been put up in quarters much superior to Lord Ingram’s jail cell. But no one had brought him a basket from Harrod’s. And judging by the plate of half-eaten food he’d set aside, the cooking was not to his taste.
“In my shoes you would have done the same,” said Bancroft, without any preamble.
He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t have sold state secrets in the first place.
But that one sentence from Bancroft let him know that he would get nowhere with his brother, this stranger.
So he asked only, “When you proposed to Charlotte Holmes this summer, after her exile, I’d thought you more enlightened than I’d given you credit for.
But it was only so that you could get close to Mr. Finch through her, wasn’t it? ”
Bancroft said nothing.
No denial on that front, then. And when he had withdrawn that offer, it would have been because he realized that his secrets would be far less safe, if he were, in fact, married to Holmes.
Without another word, Lord Ingram rose and saw himself out.
Lady Ingram’s revelations—and the fact that she wasn’t dead—shocked Society.
No less breathtaking, however, was Lord Ingram’s subsequent petition for divorce.
Livia was most astonished, however, to receive an invitation to Stern Hollow: Lord Ingram was hosting a small gathering of family and friends, Mrs. Newell would be present to serve as her chaperone, and a suitable woman would be sent to accompany her on her travels.
Who turned out to be Mrs. Watson in glasses and a sack of a dress, speaking in a broad Yorkshire accent, devoid of all glamour—but still warm and delightful, once they had a train compartment to themselves.
Livia asked about what had happened with Lord and Lady Ingram, and the answers she received astounded her.
Lady Ingram had become the eyes and ears of a dangerous man named Moriarty.
She’d had to leave when Charlotte found out what she was doing.
Lord Bancroft, fearful of what secrets Mr. Finch might know, had done everything in his power to apply pressure to Charlotte, including via Lord Ingram—and that Moriarty had played the spoiler in his plans.
It was almost too much to take in. Almost.
But not so much that she didn’t eventually get around to the one participant in the drama that Mrs. Watson had not mentioned yet. “The young man who pretended to be Mr. Finch, ma’am, do you know who he was? And why he had tried to pass himself off as someone else?”
“About him, your sister plans to speak to you herself. But between you and me”—Mrs. Watson winked—“I find him rather adorable.”
Livia prayed that she hadn’t flushed a splotchy shade. “Do you also know him then, ma’am?”
“Not to any great extent, I’m afraid.”
“But he isn’t a confidence artist or anything of the sort, is he?”
“I would say not.”
“Then . . .” Realization struck Livia; as always, a slap of dismay. “He is this Moriarty’s man.”