“And then Lady Ingram arrived in secret. Perhaps things had gone awry with the man of her dreams. Perhaps her return was only for the sake of her children, all three of them. But she knew that you’d explained her absence as a visit to a Swiss sanatorium, which could be easily enough reversed. And she wished now to come back home, mother her children, and raise her future infant in respectable circumstances rather than ignominious exile.
“This enraged you, you who were beginning to consider letting the truth be known, so that you could petition for divorce on grounds of desertion. So that you could carry on with the rest of your life, preferably with Miss Charlotte Holmes as the next Lady Ingram. You pretended to be amenable to Lady Ingram’s plea, gave her a quantity of laudanum—the pathologist found that in her as well—and then injected her with absolute alcohol.
“Now that the deed was done, you wondered how to turn the situation to your advantage. It would be best if you could manipulate things so that it would appear to the general public that she had passed away while abroad. For that you would need her body to be shipped back in a casket and a funeral held.
“But how to get her to the Continent to be shipped back? Arrangements must be made. In the meanwhile, she must be preserved, in a way that would be convenient to whatever chronology of events you chose to fabricate. You remembered the fellow in the icehouse. The icehouse, you realized, would be the perfect place to keep her from spoiling—or spoiling your future.
“Which then, of course, means that poor Mr. Barr, who witnessed you dragging in Lady Ingram, must now be forever silenced.”
It was with great effort that Treadles didn’t stare at Fowler with his mouth open. This was a ghastly interpretation of the known facts, but the worst thing about it was that he could see a jury being convinced of such a scenario.
“I had no idea Scotland Yard employed novelists these days,” said Lord Bancroft coldly. “Of the penny dreadful variety, no less.”
Treadles, who until now had felt only a respectful wariness toward his friend’s brother, began to harbor warmer sentiments. Lord Bancroft was no doubt the kind who had no reservations about eviscerating men he considered his lessers, but at least now he’d done it on behalf of someone Treadles wished to defend but couldn’t.
Fowler was not chastised. “Truth is often stranger than fiction, my lord.”
“If everything happened as you claimed, Chief Inspector, then why would I put back the original lock on the icehouse, with an estate full of guests and a kitchen that was certain to require ice?”
Lord Ingram’s tone was calm, far calmer than Treadles’s would have been, under the circumstances.
“Sir, with all due respect, we have no evidence at all that you are the one who put the original lock back. It could very well have been someone else who discovered that the wrong lock was on the door and rectified the situation.”
“Ridiculous,” said Lord Bancroft. “You are saying that my brother did all this while the estate swarmed with guests?”
“It is a great deal less ridiculous than the version of events peddled by Mr. Sherrinford Holmes, which would have me believe that outsiders did all this while the estate swarmed with guests.”
Against that, even Lord Bancroft had no proper retort.
Treadles glanced toward the door of the library. Why was Charlotte Holmes not marching in, the true culprit following meekly in her wake? He would declare Sherrinford Holmes’s stupid mustache the most beautiful sight he’d ever beheld if the damned thing would only materialize.
This very moment.
Lord Ingram, too, gazed at the door. Then he looked back at his nemesis. “Are you here to arrest me, Chief Inspector?”
“No, not yet, my lord,” said Fowler, the barest trace of smugness to his voice. “But I ask that you will please remain in the manor, pending further notice.”
* * *
Mrs. Watson read Miss Holmes’s telegram, changed in record time, and rushed out of her house. Luck was with her. She encountered no congestion of carriages on the way to Somerset House, where she employed every last ounce of her charm and finished her search in what must also be record time.
She next traveled with breakneck speed to Paddington station, where Miss Holmes was already waiting on the platform.
With her Sherrinford beard on, it was difficult to gauge how close—or far away—she was from Maximum Tolerable Chins, the hypothetical limit at which Miss Holmes began to watch how much she ate. But Mrs. Watson very much suspected that her appetite had not recovered. She didn’t look very different, but she felt slighter—and very, very weary.
They clasped hands briefly.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” murmured Miss Holmes.
Mrs. Watson, who tended to fret even in the normal course of events, had been lying awake every night, well into the small hours, trying to wrestle her mind into some semblance of tranquility. Alas, every time she succeeded, a few minutes later she would find that she had but started down a different path of contemplating how everything could go horribly, irrevocably wrong.
“Well enough,” she said. And that was a truthful answer. Compared to Lord Ingram, they were all faring spectacularly well, cocooned in good luck and blessings.
But perhaps the tide was about to turn for him as well. Certainly the work Mrs. Watson had put in this day must rank among some of the most worthwhile of her life.
“How did you know?” she asked Miss Holmes. “How did you know what I would find at the General Register Office?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t think in that direction until this morning, after I learned that the pathologist, in the course of the autopsy, discovered that Lady Ingram was with child.”
Mrs. Watson gasped. “What—what does that mean?”
“That’s what I hope to find out in Oxfordshire.”
As if on cue, the waiting train whistled.
Mrs. Watson was still reeling. “Does Lord Ingram know? What does he think of it?”
“I imagine he must, by now—Lord Bancroft attended the autopsy. But I have not met him since I heard the news from Scotland Yard.”
“Oh, the poor boy. What an intolerable situation.”
“Well,” said Miss Holmes. “That situation will change soon.”
“I hope so!” Mrs. Watson said fervently.
“Be careful what you wish for, ma’am,” said Miss Holmes, a hint of apology to her voice. “It could change for the worse.”
* * *
The past summer, while in Oxfordshire trying to find the whereabouts of one Mr. Myron Finch, Charlotte had passed by Lady Ingram’s ancestral estate. At the time, she and Mrs. Watson had peered in at the gate but not called upon the inhabitants.
Now she did, or at least Mr. Sherrinford Holmes did, on behalf of Lord Ingram.
The house struck Charlotte as well maintained, well decorated, but lacking a sense of history. She could imagine Lady Ingram’s parents, upon being lifted out of decades of penury, getting rid of all their old things in a hurry—the ones they hadn’t been able to pawn, in any case—in order to acquire new and more presentable possessions.
As she waited for the master of the house to be informed of her arrival, she closed her eyes. She was both weary yet uncomfortably alert, an awareness that flooded her with too many sensory details.
This was something she’d learned from a very young age: Her senses sharpened on an empty stomach, occasionally to such an extent that she needed to cover her eyes and stick her fingers in her ears; but a small degree of overeating dulled those senses to a more tolerable level.
As a toddler, she had despised raisins. But the family cook had specialized in plum cakes, which required half a pound of currants apiece. And such had been the palliative effect of an extra slice of plum cake that over time she had come to associate raisins with a feeling of comfort and relief.
After her adolescent years, the oversensitivity had become less intense. A day or two of water and very small quantities of plain toast would not reduce her to a quivering mass of frayed nerves. Still, she had reached a point when a fifteen-course meal would be a pleasure from beginning to end.
If only her stomach would cooperate.
Even plain toast made it mutiny. And along with a sharp nausea would come waves of fear—the dinner with Lord Bancroft had been an exercise in misery.
The fear was utterly unnecessary, she’d told herself. She had prepared; she understood the circumstances; she was determined to be careful and vigilant. She didn’t need any additional fear to channel or guard her.
The fear had roiled on, irrational but palpable. And the only way to reduce its impact was to keep her stomach as close to empty as possible.
She hoped this meeting would help. If it didn’t, the mountain she must climb would become much higher.
“Mr. Holmes,” said the footman, “Mr. Greville will see you now.”
Charlotte shoved aside her discomfort and donned Sherrinford Holmes’s jollity. “Ah, excellent.”
Mr. Alden Greville, the older of Lady Ingram’s two younger brothers, received Charlotte with an anxious keenness. “Please tell me my brother-in-law is carrying on tolerably. I wished to go to Stern Hollow right away after I learned the news, but he specifically instructed me to stay put. He thought it would be too distressing for me to be there. But it’s been awful sitting here biting my nails and waiting for a word, with the papers printing every sort of unkindness imaginable.”
Charlotte accepted a cup of tea, which she drank black—a lump of sugar and a spoonful of cream would have been enough to set off a fresh revolt in her stomach. “He is holding up all right. But I must warn you, any day now he could be charged with your sister’s murder.”
Mr. Greville turned a deathly pallor. “No, that cannot be! He would never have done such a thing.”
“Alas, the body of circumstantial evidence is overwhelmingly not in his favor. And the police will very much desire a conviction in such a prominent case. Our only hope is that they won’t wish to make a mistake in the matter—which would result in a prominent debacle. For that reason and that reason alone, we might still have a little time.”
Mr. Greville knotted his fingers together. “I cannot tell you what a blow that would be. Obviously, it would be catastrophic for Ash and the children. But for Hartley and myself, it would be— I can’t overstate what Ash means to us. I know the one we should be grateful to is Alexandra, who married him to better our lives. But to tell you the truth, my sister never much cared for us, and it was always Ash who took the time to listen and to help, with money yes, but above all with kindness.
“My brother worships Ash even more than I do, if that’s possible. He would be devastated if anything was to happen to him. We were both horror-struck at the rupture between Alexandra and him, when we thought we would lose his affection. It didn’t happen, of course, thank goodness. But to think that now he might lose his—”
Mr. Greville swallowed, unable to continue.
“As Lord Ingram’s friend, I share your concern,” said Charlotte. “I want to make sure that the worst doesn’t happen to him. That’s why I came to you, Mr. Greville. Will you help me?”
“Of course! What can I do? Please tell me. I will do anything in my power.”
His eyes shone with a desperate wish to help. Despite the seriousness of the situation, Charlotte felt pleased for Lord Ingram. He had been unable to spark love in his wife, but the affection he inspired in others was deep and genuine.
“There are some things I need to find out about your late sister. Most likely you will not be able to offer the answers yourself, but somewhere in this house we should be able to locate what I need.”
Mr. Greville leaped up. “Then let us proceed!”
As he led the way to the study, Charlotte asked when Lady Ingram had last visited. Apparently it had been after their parents passed away, to go through some records.
“Once she left, she didn’t come back very often. Almost not at all,” said Mr. Greville, a little apologetically.
And that absence translated into scant traces of Lady Ingram in this house. Charlotte had caught sight of an oil portrait and several large photographs of Lord Ingram—and only one picture of Lady Ingram, as part of a group. It was almost as if he was a favored son of the family and she only a distant cousin.
Mrs. Watson had once relayed to Charlotte an opinion on an adolescent Lady Ingram, by a woman who had worked for the Grevilles. Her main impression of Lady Ingram at that age was one of frustration. A frustration that approached rage, at times.
Lady Ingram hadn’t been angry because she’d wished to marry a different man, as Mrs. Watson had thought at the time, but because her life hadn’t been her own.
Charlotte did not pity Lady Ingram—the woman played no small role in her own fate. But she sometimes thought of the former Miss Alexandra Greville, brought to London and told to smile, told to be happy that an eligible man loved her, told that upon marriage she would have everything a woman could desire.
When it should have been obvious to all who knew her that such a life would unravel her. Yet they’d pushed it on her with all their might—and made it plain that for her to do anything else would be a gross betrayal to her family.
Perhaps she had always been a monster, but even the lady monsters of the world couldn’t escape the expectations that came of being women.
* * *
It was past eleven o’clock when Charlotte’s train pulled into Paddington station again. She hailed a hansom cab to take her to a small house in St. John’s Wood, the address of which Mrs. Watson had given her earlier in the day.
Mrs. Watson herself opened the door. “I think we have done it,” she said in a whisper.
“This house looks exactly the kind of place for a kept woman,” Charlotte whispered back.
Mrs. Watson smiled. “Glad to oblige, my dear.”
Behind Mrs. Watson stood Frances Marbleton, Stephen Marbleton’s sister, though Charlotte had never been entirely convinced that they were, in fact, siblings.
“Come,” said Miss Marbleton.
In the parlor, a woman sat rigidly in a high-back chair, dressed in somber clothes that were neither new nor fashionable but hardy of material and well made. At Charlotte’s entrance she looked up: One of her eyes was an ethereal blue, the other milky and blind.
In the first days after Charlotte ran away from home, she’d come across a beggar woman and her child and had been so moved by their plight that she’d given them some of her scant coins. Only to realize later that her pocket had been picked during the encounter.
This was that woman.
Stephen Marbleton, who had been seated across from the woman, rose. “I hope your journey has been a pleasant one.”
Charlotte found her voice—or, rather, Sherrinford Holmes’s voice. “It has been, thank you.”
Even so the woman stared at her, as if trying to recall where she’d heard her before.
Charlotte was not very often unnerved, but she sensed in herself a strong quiver of apprehension.
“This is Mrs. Winnie Farr,” said Mr. Marbleton.
A notice had gone into the papers the evening before, seeking those with a young, dark-haired sister or daughter who had been missing for more than a fortnight. And Mrs. Winnie Farr had answered, Mrs. Farr, who had already written Sherlock Holmes for help with her missing sister.
Except Sherlock Holmes had been too preoccupied of late to take on any other case.
“Sherrinford Holmes, at your service, Mrs. Farr,” Charlotte said to the woman who stole a solid pound from her. “How do you do?”
“Your man said you can find out what happened to my sister.”
Her voice had a heavy quality, as if wo
rds had to be dredged up from her larynx. Her expression was almost as heavy. But her good eye was alert and piercing, and Charlotte found herself having to take a deep breath.
The reverberations of alarm were only partially brought on by Mrs. Farr’s presence. They were echoes of a difficult time, of the closest Charlotte had come to the edge of desperation. The loss of one pound had been disastrous; the loss of hope, far worse.
But she was in a different place now. And this was no time to lose her concentration, because a primitive part of her mind was too busy wallowing in old fears. She owed Mrs. Farr her undivided attention. She owed Lord Ingram her utmost effort.
She owed herself the clarity to know when she was in danger and when she was not.
“We may be able to help,” she answered. “Did you bring photographs?”
Mrs. Farr opened a shabby handbag and took out two small pictures. When Charlotte held them in hand, she realized that they were not photographs but postcards—or, rather, a young woman’s face cut out of postcards.
Postcards came in many varieties: some scenic, some sentimental, and others highly risqué. There was no need to ask which category these ones fell into.
The young woman in the postcard was full of vitality, her eyes mischievous, her hair shiny even in the grainy print.
“How old was she at the time these photographs were taken?”
“They were taken this year. She’s twenty-five. Twenty-six January next.”
Which made her close in age to Lady Ingram. “And you said she has been missing a little more than three weeks?”
“I last saw her almost a month ago. She told me she’d be out of London for a day or two, but that she’d be back in time for my daughter’s birthday. I didn’t want her to go. Sometimes, postcard girls are invited to stag parties in the country—and those parties don’t always go well for the girls.
The Hollow of Fear Page 24
