“They seemed to know the estate rather well for strangers,” Lord Bancroft pointed out.
“Mrs. Watson and I toured the grounds a few days ago, before the imbroglio with Lady Ingram. We were given a map of the entire estate and its walking paths, and on the reverse side was a smaller map of the house, the garden, and the outbuildings. Perhaps the men who put Lady Ingram in the icehouse had done a similar tour earlier, which would have given them all the familiarity necessary for their task.”
Great country estates often permitted sightseers on the grounds—some even allowed the public rooms of the house to be viewed, when the family was away. And it was not uncommon to have maps at hand for the tourists, so that they would know how to proceed.
“But why did those men choose the icehouse? Why not dump her body in the gardens? And is the icehouse even labeled on this map you speak of, the one handed out to tourists?”
Lord Ingram and Charlotte exchanged a look.
“You are right. It may not be,” said Charlotte. “I don’t recall seeing the icehouse on the map.”
“Then why?” Lord Bancroft murmured, as if to himself.
“You were out in the afternoon, did you find out anything?” Lord Ingram asked his brother.
“I went to see the body. Couldn’t quite believe it until I’d seen it with my own eyes. The pathologist is arriving tonight—Scotland Yard wanted their own—and the autopsy has been scheduled for the morning. We’ll see if we learn anything. What do you suppose she did to turn Moriarty against her?”
“I thought it was simply a case of his having no more use for her. But Holmes disagreed. She thought a woman such as Lady Ingram would be highly valuable, even after she had lost her proximity to you.”
“I agree with Miss Holmes. Which makes the entire matter even more incomprehensible.”
No one said anything else for some time. Charlotte ate doggedly. It was enough that her lack of appetite had struck fear in the hearts of Mrs. Watson and Lord Ingram. She didn’t want Lord Bancroft also to wonder about her current state of mind.
Lord Bancroft broke the silence. “Those are excellent garments, by the way, Miss Holmes.”
“Thank you, sir. Men’s clothes are far more interesting than I first assumed. I have now made a rather thorough study. Do feel free to inquire,” she said solemnly, “should you find yourself with questions concerning the latest fashions in gentlemanly attire.”
“I will be sure to take advantage of your expertise, if and when the need arises,” the perpetually stylish Lord Bancroft answered with equal gravity. “Have you been handling cases that necessitate dressing as a man?”
“Not yet. But Mrs. Watson and I both thought that it wouldn’t hurt to be prepared. It would be only a matter of time before such a case arose.”
“What made you think that you’d need men’s garments for a two-week stay in the country?”
“I didn’t think so, but they are rather like new toys. I didn’t want to part with them.”
“You’ve also had practice speaking and acting as a man.”
“Mrs. Watson was a professional actress—and her butler had been on the stage, too. They make for excellent tutors.”
Charlotte, who didn’t have a high voice to begin with, had learned to pitch it much lower. She didn’t need to drop it a whole octave for Sherrinford Holmes—no one expected that gentleman to have a gravelly voice—but she could, if necessary.
“Quite a bit of practice. I thought you were an odd fellow, but until Ash mentioned Sherlock Holmes, I didn’t think you were Charlotte Holmes.”
“Why, thank you, my lord.”
“My point is, you didn’t arrive overnight at this level of proficiency. And I can’t see you putting in this much effort for a mere nebulous future need. What is going on that I don’t know about?”
Charlotte glanced at Lord Ingram, who took a bite of his filet of leveret, and seemed to concentrate on only his chewing.
“Well, before this unfortunate incident with Lady Ingram, Ash and I were discussing taking a trip abroad after Christmas. While under my parents’ roof, I rarely set foot outside of Britain—something I wish to rectify. And Ash, of course, could use some time away from Society.
“My reputation is beyond recovery, but he still has his to think of. And since the children would have come along, we must conduct ourselves with some semblance of propriety. If I could pass for a man, well, then, problem solved.”
Lord Bancroft was in the middle of slicing through a vol-au-vent of chicken. He stilled. “Where were you thinking of going?”
This question was directed at Lord Ingram, who took a sip of his wine and said, “Warm places, since we would have left in the middle of winter. Spain, Majorca, Egypt, the Levant. By the time we reached India, it would probably have been unbearably hot in the plains, but the hill stations should still have been pleasant.”
His eyes locked with Charlotte’s, a small smile animating his lips.
“I see,” said Lord Bancroft, whose courtship of Charlotte had twice ended without her hand in marriage, his tone remarkably even.
Charlotte served herself oeufs à la neige, poached quenelles of meringue in a bath of crème anglaise. “These are delicious. And not too sweet.”
“They are made by the undercook trained by the pastry chef Bancroft poached from Stern Hollow,” said Lord Ingram.
“Do you still have that pastry chef in your employ, my lord Bancroft?” Charlotte asked.
She had heard herself described as difficult to read. Lord Bancroft’s face must be on a par with hers in its opacity. She could decipher little in his features beyond a concentration on his food.
He looked up. “I do. And before I left to present myself at Eastleigh Park, he made me a most excellent citron tart.”
Charlotte turned to Lord Ingram. “I like citron tarts.”
“Then you shall have them.” His gaze again lingered over her. “Now if you are done, Holmes, we must be going. Enjoy your dinner, Bancroft.”
* * *
“Now why do you suppose Lord Bancroft didn’t believe that I would invest some time and energy to gain the ability to pass myself off as a man?” asked Holmes, when she and Lord Ingram were alone in the coach. “It’s a valuable professional skill.”
“Because, for all that your mind is a thing of wonder—and terror—you are not particularly industrious. When need be, yes. Otherwise you could easily pass for a Punch caricature of a lady of leisure, eating bonbons and reading novels on the chaise, except you’d be reading The Lancet or a Patent Office catalogue.
“For you to set aside that book, get up from the chaise, put on the padding, the clothes, the wig, the orthodontia, the beard and mustache, and practice passing for a man—why should Bancroft believe this would have happened under normal circumstances?”
“Do you think he believed I would do it to travel abroad with you?”
He shrugged.
It was, as ever, difficult to guess what Bancroft might be thinking. But he would have liked to believe that. He could so easily see them standing shoulder to shoulder at the bow of a ship. It didn’t matter what kind of seas they sailed, warm, cold, smooth, or choppy. It didn’t matter where they were headed, empty wilderness or teeming metropolises. It mattered only that they were together at last.
She was right. He was still the same romantic he had always been.
A bittersweet thought, more bitter than sweet.
He wanted to ask whether such a voyage might be possible, one of these days. But she was a woman who made no promises of the future. And he . . . deep down he still wanted all the promises.
Or at least clarity and certainty.
He glanced out of the window, at the murky night and the rain that seemed determined to drag on for the remainder of the year. After a while she placed her gloved hand on top of his.
Her
words echoed in his ears. Why can’t things become simpler?
No, no complicated relationship ever became simpler by the addition of physical intimacy. But at least now, when they ran out of words, he could turn to her—and kiss her.
So he did.
* * *
Treadles had not expected to see “Sherrinford” Holmes in the coach—he thought she would have already gone to their destination to prepare for her role as Sherlock Holmes’s sister—or God forbid, Sherlock Holmes himself. But she—and Lord Ingram—greeted the policemen cordially.
Chief Inspector Fowler led the way with small talk. Treadles waited for him to steer the conversation to the bodies in which “Sherrinford” Holmes had expressed an interest. But whether he was genuinely uninterested or merely wished others to think so, he instead concentrated his questions on the running of a large estate.
Treadles had attended Lord Ingram’s archaeological lectures. The man had no trouble keeping an audience spellbound. Here, although the topic was much more mundane, Treadles found himself fascinated by what he had to say about the myriad responsibilities that fell upon his shoulders.
“Do you enjoy it, your estate?” asked Fowler.
The question met with almost half a minute of silence, before Lord Ingram said, “My godfather, while he yet lived, had strongly hinted that Stern Hollow would be mine upon his passing. I liked the idea exceedingly well—the wholesome, peaceful life of a country squire seemed everything I could possibly hope for.
“But in truth, this life is taken up with more mundane decisions than I could have imagined. Stern Hollow has an excellent staff. Still, the staff deal with routine matters. Anything out of the ordinary gets passed up. And since Lady Ingram had very little interest in the running of the estate, everything eventually came to me.
“In the beginning I welcomed all the decision making. But after a while . . .”
The carriage turned. The lanterns at the front swayed. Light spilled across Lord Ingram’s features, then he was sitting in darkness again.
“About eighteen months ago, I was informed that one of the estate’s gates was in bad shape and should be replaced. I could barely recall such a gate—I had to be shown its location on a detailed map. It was in a remote corner, where the land was a great deal rougher, and inaccessible except by foot or on horseback.
“I said to go ahead and replace the gate. But my estate manager told me that it was the second time the gate had to be replaced in a decade.
“If we replaced one indifferent gate with another, warned my estate manager, we would need to replace it yet again in a few years. We rode out and looked at the thing. He was right; everything was falling apart, not just the gate. So we decided to improve the entire boundary, fences, gate posts, gate. And because wooden gates had proved useless, we agreed that a wrought iron gate would be a much more satisfactory option.
“But how should this wrought iron gate look? I fancied myself a proficient draftsman, so I set about creating designs, only to then learn that some were too fanciful to execute and others too easy to climb over. And while he had my attention on the matter, my estate manager brought up a whole slew of other deficiencies near the gate, everything from a derelict woodsman’s cottage to footbridges that were too rotted for safe crossing.
“Before I knew it, I’d spent three weeks perfecting a part of the estate I would never visit again—not to mention creating and discarding dozens of sketches to finally arrive at an acceptable design for the new gate.
“When it was all done, I felt little gratification. Not even relief. By and large I was stunned that I’d spent so much time on absolute minutiae. On things that I didn’t care about and which made no difference to anyone, except my estate manager, who derived a Calvinist satisfaction from scratching off every last item on his to-do list.”
“Ah, I see,” said Fowler, after a minute. “Undiluted joys are difficult to come by in life.”
Lord Ingram inclined his head, as if in gratitude at being understood. “The chief draw of life in the country—or so my younger self had thought—was family and friends, away from the noise and distractions of the city. But at Stern Hollow, what family life there existed had been a divided one. And what functions we held never without an undercurrent of strain.
“As beautiful as my estate is, and as much as I take pride in looking after it, in and of itself it has given me very little joy and certainly none of the undiluted variety.”
No one else spoke. Treadles squirmed on the inside. What could anyone say when a man laid bare the truth of his life?
Of course Lord Ingram needed, absolutely needed, to strike Chief Inspector Fowler as candid, with nothing to hide. But surely, this was going a little too far.
And then Treadles remembered the person sitting beside Lord Ingram. He hadn’t been addressing the policemen, he’d been speaking to her, specifically and entirely.
She had listened with the quietness of good soil soaking up the first drops of rain. And even now, when he had stopped speaking, she was still listening.
To the sound of his breaths?
All at once Treadles felt a pang of longing for Alice, for her slightly honking laughter, her sweet-smelling hair, and the wink she always gave him when she brought him a sip of whisky, because she would have brought herself a larger one at the same time.
He missed her. He missed her so much. He missed—
It occurred to him, with a reverberation of shock, that she hadn’t gone anywhere. That she hadn’t turned out like Lady Ingram, to have married him for any kind of gain. That she hadn’t even been cold or distant—all the formality and aloofness had been on his part alone.
They were near their destination when Fowler spoke again. “When we questioned ladies Avery and Somersby earlier today, they said something rather interesting. They said, in so many words, that you are in love with Miss Charlotte Holmes. Are you, my lord?”
Treadles sucked in a breath, the sound mortifyingly loud in the otherwise impenetrable silence.
Did Lord Ingram tense? Did he brace himself for what he was about to say? “I have not thought in that direction.”
“That is hardly something that requires thinking, is it? Either one is in love or one isn’t. Are you, my lord?”
With no excitement or unease that Treadles could sense, Charlotte Holmes turned toward her friend, a man being forced to expose the deepest secrets of his heart.
He glanced out of the carriage, at the cottage they were rapidly approaching, golden light spilling from every window. “Yes, I am. I am in love with her.”
Fifteen
“Sherrinford Holmes” did not disappear into the bowels of the cottage, then to reemerge as her true self.
Instead, they met a gamine-looking young woman in the parlor. “A good friend of the family,” said Charlotte Holmes, “Miss Redmayne.”
Miss Redmayne cheerfully shook hands with all three men. “Good to meet you, Chief Inspector Fowler. I have heard of you from Sherlock, Inspector Treadles. And my lord, it is good to see you again.”
“Always a pleasure, Miss Redmayne,” said Lord Ingram, with a smile.
“How is the great savant?” asked Charlotte Holmes.
“Cranky, as usual.”
“The Good Lord ought to consider making non-cranky geniuses, for a change.”
“At least he is a genius. Plenty of men are cranky without the least bit of brilliance for excuse. Gentlemen, do please sit down.”
A maid came in and brought a considerable tea tray. Miss Redmayne poured for everyone. Charlotte Holmes and Fowler each accepted a biscuit.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Treadles heard himself say, “is Mr. Holmes’s sister not here today?”
“She has been in Scotland, visiting friends. Part of the reason Sherlock is rusticating in the country, instead of solving cases in London.”
> “And part of the reason I came here,” said “Sherrinford” Holmes. “Someone has to be the great genius’s eyes and ears and able interpreter.”
“Exactly,” echoed Miss Redmayne. “This past summer Miss Holmes was also away from London for some time, and dear Sherrinford couldn’t be spared, so I stepped in to help for a fortnight.”
Fowler set aside his tea. “To help as . . .”
“I told clients I was Sherlock’s sister,” said Miss Redmayne. “I thought it would be something fun to do, a change from dissecting cadavers, and—”
“I do beg your pardon, Miss Redmayne. Did you say, dissecting cadavers?”
“Yes, I’m a medical student at the Sorbonne. I’m afraid by now I’ve more than a nodding acquaintance with human anatomy.”
“I see,” said Fowler, taken aback.
“As I was saying, I was home on holiday and thought it would be a lark to receive Sherlock’s clients, pour tea, and listen to their problems. Little did I know Lady Ingram would turn up at our door, seeking help.”
It made sense, using someone else in the role of Sherlock Holmes’s sister, as Charlotte Holmes was known to Lady Ingram.
Lord Ingram rose. “I believe I will take a stroll outside.”
Fowler waited until the door had closed behind Lord Ingram. “Mr. Sherlock Holmes did not refuse to help Lady Ingram after learning of her request, even though Lord Ingram is his good friend?”
“I was both astounded and a little dismayed, I must admit,” said Miss Redmayne. “But Sherlock’s view was very much that just as I wouldn’t refuse to treat Lady Ingram, if she came to me bleeding and in need of medical help, he ought not to turn her down simply because she was the estranged wife of a friend.”
“Lady Ingram bleeding to her death and Lady Ingram wanting to meet the man she once loved—those are not equivalents,” Treadles said, less to Miss Redmayne than to the other woman in the room, the one calmly turning her biscuit on a plate.
After Lord Ingram had admitted that he loved her, Fowler had asked whether his sentiments were reciprocated. And Lord Ingram had said, after a moment, I cannot tell. Sometimes I am not sure that she understands the full spectrum of human emotions.
The Hollow of Fear Page 20
