The Hollow of Fear

by Sherry Thomas

  “She said it would be nothing of the sort, that she’d already helped this gentleman before. She said he thought well of her ideas—which worried me even more.

  “She was tired of depending on men to photograph her, you see. They don’t pay much and some of them want favors besides. She was going to buy her own equipment and learn how to do everything herself, from pulling the shutter to developing the negatives. She wanted to have a stable of the best girls in the business. And someday she wanted to own a printing press, too.”

  Mrs. Watson looked uncomfortable. Charlotte felt no particular dismay. Pornography would exist as long as the human race did. If a woman didn’t mind appearing on a risqué postcard, she might as well maximize her control over—and profit from—the entire process.

  “I see,” she said. “Commendable entrepreneurial spirit on her part.”

  Mrs. Farr had looked defiant as she narrated her sister’s plans. But Charlotte’s comment seemed to have rattled her, as if she’d expected anything except a compliment. “I—I thought so, but I didn’t believe her gentleman thought the same. When a man first claps eyes on a girl on a postcard, the chances of him ever seeing her as anything other than flesh—” She shook her head. “Anyway, we had words. I told her she oughtn’t go. And she told me that she looked after herself just fine and didn’t need a one-eyed old woman ordering her about.

  “When she didn’t come for my daughter’s birthday I thought maybe she was still angry with me. But the next day I thought, no, that’s not my Mimi. She doesn’t hold a grudge. And she loves her niece and thinks the world of her. I went ’round to her room, but her landlady already let the room to someone else because she’d been gone more than a week and hadn’t settled her account.

  “Her friends didn’t know what to think. She promised them that she’d start her own studio as soon as she returned, and she wasn’t some flighty girl who made promises she didn’t keep. I went to Scotland Yard and begged to speak to somebody. And this hoity-toity inspector told me that it was hardly unheard of for girls like Mimi to hole up with a man and not be seen for a while.

  “I told him that maybe he knew nothing about girls like her. Because girls like her have family and friends they see on the regular, and rooms and appointments to keep. Girls like her have mementoes that mean something to them—she knew her landlady would sell her belongings wholesale to some rag dealer, if she left them behind. And what kind of arrangement with a man wouldn’t give her half a day to come back to see to her things and tell her family and friends that she now had an arrangement?

  “But I might as well have talked to a statue—men like that have ears but nothing goes in. I kept going back, but it was no use. There was one nice sergeant who told me I ought to write to Sherlock Holmes. I did but he was out of town and I still don’t know anything more about Mimi.”

  “Sherlock is my brother and I’m here on his behalf. For the past few days I have been occupied with a difficult case, but it would seem that you and I are fated to meet after all.”

  “Is that so?” Mrs. Farr sounded doubtful.

  “That is so. Have you or any of your sister’s friends seen this gentleman of hers in person?”

  Mrs. Farr shook her head. “None of them. And not me either.”

  Charlotte asked a few more questions, but Mrs. Farr could tell her nothing else about the man. And she was becoming impatient. “I’ve told you everything I know. Now what can you tell me?”

  Her question was a near growl. Surprising how much authority a woman who begged on the streets at least some of the time could pack into a few words. Then again, Mrs. Farr was not an ordinary down-on-her-luck mendicant—Charlotte had already deduced that after their first meeting. She might exist on London’s underbelly, but she was not lost in it. In fact, she might have carved out her own small fiefdom there.

  Charlotte did not recoil this time. “I’m afraid all I have concerning your sister is bad news.”

  “I’ll take bad news. I’ll take any news.”

  Since she’d become Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, Charlotte had made her share of unwelcome announcements, but this might be the most brutal one yet. As hungry as Mrs. Farr was for news—any news—hers was a despair still shot through with strands of hope. Now Charlotte would snip every last filament of that hope.

  “Unless there are more than one young brunette with a beauty mark who’s been missing for exactly as long as she has, your sister is most likely dead.”

  On an otherwise blandly pretty face, the beauty mark had served as a punctuating feature, bringing focus to Mimi Duffin’s pert chin and bow-shaped mouth. And it had been the cause of her misfortune. Mrs. Farr was right; the gentleman hadn’t been in the least interested in Mimi Duffin’s ideas or ambitions.

  Mrs. Farr clamped her fingers over the arms of her chair. The veins on the backs of her hands rose in sharp relief. “What happened? Where is she?”

  “Her body hasn’t been found yet. It might take some time to surface, as there was incentive to move it some distance from the site of the crime. As for what happened, she bore a resemblance to someone else, someone the gentleman wanted others to think of as having been murdered.

  “He probably saw her face on a postcard and realized she could make for a fairly decent approximation to the body he wanted. He found her, cultivated her, and then had her transport herself to where he intended to kill her.”

  “And where is that?” Mrs. Farr’s voice turned harsh.

  “At the moment I’m not at liberty to divulge that. I apologize, but the man who did this is wily and dangerous and I have put everyone here at risk in seeking Miss Duffin’s identity. The less you know, the better. But I promise you that as soon as possible, I will tell you more. And I will not consider the matter finished until your sister’s body has been found and returned to you.”

  Mrs. Farr sat still and silent. Mrs. Watson brought her a glass of brandy. Mrs. Farr drank with shaking hands. When she was done, she set down the empty glass, rose, and walked out.

  Mr. Marbleton got to his feet. “I’ll see that she reaches home safely.”

  “Thank you, sir,” murmured Charlotte.

  Only then did she allow herself a moment to deal with the memories the sight of Mrs. Farr had brought to the fore—and the associated panic that still rippled in the back of her mind.

  * * *

  Mrs. Watson left with Mrs. Farr and Mr. Marbleton. She didn’t say why, but if anyone could give comfort to Mrs. Farr right now, or at least not have her presence despised, it would be Mrs. Watson.

  “There’s food in the larder,” said Miss Marbleton, rather standoffishly. “And an Etna stove that you can use.”

  “Thank you,” said Charlotte. “And thank you for all your help, Miss Marbleton.”

  Miss Marbleton pursed her lips. “You know I’m against our involvement, Miss Holmes.”

  “And I have told your brother I will speak no kind words on his behalf to my sister.”

  “She would not last a minute in the kind of life we lead.”

  “You might be surprised at the strength of the fragile. And for some people, it is ordinary life that is most challenging, not so much the extraordinary.”

  In a way, Livia’s greatest strength was that she was so overlooked and underestimated. Within seconds people decided who she was, and what she was and wasn’t capable of. But no one was so easy to sum up, least of all a someone like Livia, who yearned to be more with every fiber of her being.

  “That said, I hope she never decides to find out for herself. I expect you heard from your father that he and I met?”

  “I took a few days to recuperate and everyone decided to throw all caution to the wind,” said Miss Marbleton, who was clearly the enforcer of rules in her family.

  “Did he tell you that he introduced himself as Moriarty?”

  Miss Marbleton
shrugged, a gesture almost French in its resigned disapproval. “He was born a Moriarty. It’s his prerogative to introduce himself however he pleases.”

  “It must gall James Moriarty to no end that his wife absconded with his brother.”

  Miss Marbleton only shrugged again, an even more eloquent gesture.

  “If I may be so forward, is Mr. Stephen Marbleton your brother or your cousin?”

  “We are not related. Mr. Crispin Marbleton is my stepfather.”

  A neat sidestepping of the question. Did she know the truth of his parentage? Did Stephen Marbleton himself know? In either case, it would be highly dangerous for Livia to become better acquainted with him.

  Charlotte sighed. “Your brother should stop sending my sister gifts and messages, but I’m sure you have already wasted your breath saying the same.”

  “He has been needlessly obstinate, refusing to make any promises not to contact her again. Would you please tell her that he’s too young for her?”

  Charlotte could scarcely admonish Livia about a man she had never admitted to having met, let alone having fallen in love with. “I will see what I can do. Before you go, there is something else I need to ask.”

  “Yes?”

  “Last night, when Mr. Stephen Marbleton played the part of Sherlock Holmes, he told Scotland Yard the man Lady Ingram was involved with was Moriarty. Other than the fact that Lady Ingram did not have romantic feelings for Moriarty—as far as I can tell—that claim was largely correct. But all the same I was surprised that the name Moriarty came up and that he wanted the police to hear it.”

  Miss Marbleton shrugged into her coat. “On that front, at least, Stephen did not do anything rash. We discussed this as a family and the decision was unanimous. If Scotland Yard does not know Moriarty’s name, they should learn it. If they already do, then it is high time they pay him more attention.”

  Eighteen

  Departing Oxfordshire. A. Greville sends his regards. Holmes.

  There were hundreds of things Lord Ingram needed to keep in mind and dozens of tasks to finish, but he stood in place and read the cable again and again, thoughts of Holmes overriding everything else.

  They had not spent a great deal of time together, not in years. Even when they had been much younger, passing long stretches of silence in each other’s company, he occupied with some minor excavation, she burrowing through two brick-like books in a single afternoon—those had not been regular occurrences, but had come only when they both happened to be at his uncle’s or Mrs. Newell’s estate at the same time.

  He had a very clear memory of the day she told him to write her. It was the summer of the Roman villa ruins. She had blackmailed him into kissing her—and afterward had visited the ruins as she pleased, with him by and large ignoring her. Or, rather, he had not spoken to her, but had furtively observed the utterly incomprehensible girl.

  And had remembered the kiss more often than he wanted to, when he lay in bed alone at night.

  I’m leaving in the morning, she’d said one afternoon, with no preamble. Here’s my address.

  Out of politeness, he’d taken the slip of paper, while thinking ferociously, I won’t.

  But two months later he had, from his room at school, with cricket practice canceled and a thunderstorm raging outside. And it had been a far longer letter than he’d intended. Nothing personal, a rather dry encapsulation of the lessons he’d learned from working on the ruins of the Roman villa, and the improvements to both record-keeping and excavation methods that he intended to make.

  Her reply came sixteen days later—yes, he’d counted—and was almost identical to his in tone, a summary of books she had read in recent months on pedagogical theories and practices, and then the casual conclusion that she believed she would make a fine headmistress at a girls’ school.

  He wrote back and told her that he’d never met any girl who made him think less of a headmistress, followed by his observations, only partially related to the subject, on how boys in a resident house organized into factions and cliques.

  She admitted in her next letter that she wanted to be a headmistress less out of a desire to influence young minds than because a headmistress could command up to five hundred pounds a year. And by the way, she did not understand people as well as she ought to and found his anthropological account of the behavior of boys very helpful.

  After that they wrote weekly. It had come as a minor shock, when he’d met her in person again, to realize that their regular and sometimes voluminous correspondence would not translate into conversation, that silence would still be the order of the day. But sliding back into silence had not been difficult or uncomfortable.

  That correspondence continued without interruption—even when they were together, they would hand each other letters—until their quarrel over the future Lady Ingram, with Holmes warning darkly against believing in the illusion of the perfect woman. He’d stopped writing until he’d returned from his honeymoon, euphoric in the knowledge that he was about to be a father.

  In subsequent years, their epistolary exchange remained regular as clockwork, but without a single reference to his inner turmoil, not through the disintegration of his marriage, and certainly not with the suddenly piercing understanding of what he felt for Holmes—what he had always felt for her.

  The correspondence faltered again when she ran away from home. And after Lady Ingram’s departure. He had stared at a blank page many times, with no idea what to write, now that his hesitation was the only thing that held them back from becoming more than friends.

  Now they were more than friends.

  Now every hour without her was an eternity.

  Wait, he told himself, staring into the night. Patience.

  But he had already exhausted a lifetime’s supply of patience. Had already held himself back for ages beyond count. And he had no more restraint left, no more willpower.

  Only need.

  * * *

  It was past midnight, when Inspector Treadles arrived in London. The house he walked into was dark, silent. Lately it had not seemed quite his own, as if it no longer belonged to him, or he it. But tonight— tonight he felt as if he’d come home.

  Alice was already in bed, asleep. He lay down beside her and stared up, Charlotte Holmes’s words echoing in his ears. 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.

  Did this also happen to his own wife? Frustrated with her father, who, though a good man, an excellent man, had refused to ever entertain the idea of giving her the reins to Cousins Manufacturing, she had fallen in love with a man she believed to be different, only to realize that of the two, her father had, in fact, been far more broad-minded.

  When had she realized that?

  It struck him that she had known it for a while, for a long time, possibly since before she married him—and that was the reason she had never mentioned her erstwhile ambitions.

  Then why had she married him?

  She loved you, you idiot, said a voice inside him.

  Perhaps she’d convinced herself that they could still be happy together. Perhaps she’d believed that since she would never helm Cousins Manufacturing, he would never see—or disapprove of—that side of her. Or perhaps she’d thought that if they dealt well for some time, he would come to trust her enough to see that ambitions or not, she was still the same woman he loved.

  But she had been mistaken.

  And how had she lived with his judgment, which he’d thought he’d kept to himself, but which, as Charlotte Holmes had pointed out, was anything but discreet or subtle?

  His misery was like shards, cutting through every organ and nerve. He felt as if he didn’t know anythin
g anymore—as if he’d never known anything at all.

  In despair he turned to Alice and placed an arm around her.

  She had her back to him. They used to sleep all entangled in each other, but as distances had grown elsewhere, the same had happened in bed, until they each slept facing a wall, a trench of empty space between their backs.

  He laid his forehead against her shoulder and breathed in the scent of her skin. Alice, who had realized he was not the man she had hoped he would be, and loved him anyway.

  She sighed and turned toward him.

  The next moment they were kissing, as wildly as if this had been their wedding night.

  And everything that followed was just as untrammeled.

  * * *

  Livia was an early riser. Though it was still dark outside, she’d already been at her desk for hours, wrestling with the second part of her Sherlock Holmes story.

  The nameless young man’s eagerness to read her work didn’t make the work any easier. But it did make her more willing to bash her head on that particular wall a few more times.

  She’d just finished a new précis of the plot when a commotion erupted on the floor below. Mrs. Newell herself came knocking on her door.

  “Oh, my dear, I’m afraid that I’m once again the bearer of ill news.”

  Livia’s ears rang. Lord Ingram. No! “What—what’s going on?”

  “You will not believe this, but they discovered a bomb in the coal cellar.”

  “A what?”

  “Not to worry, we aren’t in any immediate danger. The bomb is in the kitchen’s coal cellar and that’s a fair distance from the house.”

  “Oh,” said Livia, but her hands still shook.

  In the past few years, Irish republicans had placed dozens of time bombs all over Britain, especially in London—explosions as a form of political expression seemed a permanent fixture of modern life. But all the ones Livia had heard of, whether they’d gone off or been defused, had targeted places of strategic importance. Military barracks, railway stations, newspaper offices, and such. In the only instance she could recall of a private home as a target, the home had belonged to a member of parliament who strenuously opposed Irish Home Rule.