by Andrew Lane
‘But Uncle . . .’
Sherrinford frowned and held up a thin hand. ‘No,’ he said with finality, ‘I will discuss this no longer. It will never be discussed again.’ He sighed. ‘I would ask you how far you have got with the cataloguing of sermons, but I find myself tired. I will rest for a while, here in the peace of my sanctum sanctorum.’ He gazed at the disarrayed books on the shelves and on the floor. ‘Later I will do some tidying up. I would normally ask a housekeeper to do that, but under the circumstances . . .’
Quietly Sherlock retreated from the library. He could hear his uncle murmuring to himself as he closed the door behind him.
Mrs Eglantine was in the hall, and he stayed in the shadows, watching her. She was speaking to one of the maids.
‘Tell Cook that I will be joining her shortly. The menus for the meals this week are totally unsuitable. They will need to be changed. Tell her that I will not be happy until they are completely revised.’
As the maid scurried off, and Mrs Eglantine stood motionless for a moment, lost in thought, Sherlock found his thoughts pulled in an audacious direction. Mrs Eglantine apparently felt free to search the entire house, looking for something. What if he was to search her room while she was occupied? Maybe he could find some clue as to what she was looking for. If he could find that, and then locate the hidden object before she did, then there would be no reason for her to stay at the house any longer. Even if he couldn’t find out what she was looking for, he might be able to work out what power she had over his aunt and uncle. If he could free them from that, then he would have paid them back for all their hospitality.
Mrs Eglantine moved towards the back of the house, presumably to what was going to be a rather fraught meeting with Cook. Sherlock felt a twinge of sympathy. He liked Cook; she always had a slice of bread and jam or a scone and cream for him if he passed through the kitchen. She was the only one of the servants who could stand up to Mrs Eglantine.
With his uncle in the library and his aunt presumably in the sitting room sewing, as she normally did in the afternoons, Sherlock knew that he was unlikely to be disturbed by his immediate family. He also knew that the servants’ schedule meant they would be cleaning out the fireplaces in the main bedrooms at that hour. Nobody would be up on the top floor, where the staff quarters and Sherlock’s own bedroom were located.
He reached the top floor without seeing anybody. His bedroom was the first one leading off the landing. Next to that was an empty room that would normally be occupied by a butler, if the family could afford one. Around the corner was Mrs Eglantine’s room and those occupied by the various maids and the lads who worked in the stables and the gardens, as well as the back staircase, which they used to move through the house without being seen. Only Sherlock and Mrs Eglantine were allowed to use the main stairs.
He turned the corner. The rest of the landing was empty, of course. Mrs Eglantine’s door was closed, but not locked. That would have been a terrible breach of the unwritten contract between employee and employer. In theory the servants’ rooms could be entered by Sherlock’s aunt and uncle at any time, for any reason, and even though that right theoretically extended to Sherlock he still felt his heart accelerate and his palms become moist as he reached out for the doorknob.
He turned it quietly, pushed the door open and entered the room, closing the door quickly behind him.
The room smelled of lavender and talcum powder, and faintly of some heavier floral scent that brought to mind decaying orchids. A threadbare rug was set in the centre of the otherwise bare floorboards. The bed was neatly made, and any clothes had been hung in the narrow wardrobe or folded in the chest of drawers. Apart from a hairbrush on the windowsill, a framed print of a landscape hanging on the wall and a Bible on a shelf by the bed, the room was bare of ornamentation.
There was something so impersonal about the room that it was difficult to believe that anyone actually lived there, slept there, on a daily basis. Given Mrs Eglantine’s aloofness, her almost inhuman stillness, Sherlock could imagine her walking into the room late at night, at the end of her working day, and just standing there, like a statue, unmoving until the sun rose and it was time to start working again. Switching off her fake humanity until she had to pretend again.
He shrugged the thought off. She wasn’t a supernatural creature. She was as human as he was – just a lot nastier.
Sherlock pressed his back against the door. The thought crossed his mind that Mrs Eglantine might have stood just like this in his room before searching it, and it made him angry. If she’d searched the house, as she had said, then she must have searched his room. Damn the woman! What was it she was searching for, and what was it that made her invulnerable?
He quickly memorized the positions of everything he could see – the hairbrush, the Bible, even the way the framed print was hanging at a slight angle and the distance between the top sheet on the bed and the pillows. Given Mrs Eglantine’s eye for detail, Sherlock had a feeling that she would notice if anything was disturbed. He had to make sure that everything was returned to its original position before he left.
He started with the chest of drawers, quickly sorting through the clothes in each drawer. He quelled the sense of guilt he felt by telling himself that Mrs Eglantine had almost certainly done the same to his clothes. When he found nothing, he ran his hand across the floorboards beneath the chest, just in case something had been slid underneath. Still nothing.
He turned away, and then turned back as a sudden thought struck him. Quickly he pulled each drawer completely out and felt underneath it for bits of paper or envelopes that might have been attached there, then looked into the hole left by the drawer for anything that might have been pushed inside, but apart from dust, spider webs and an old lace handkerchief he didn’t find anything.
Leaving the chest of drawers, with a final check to make sure it still looked as it had before he arrived, he turned to the wardrobe, but a noise from outside made him freeze. His heart thudded painfully. Had that been a creak of a floorboard? Was someone standing outside, listening for him in the same way he was listening for them? Had Mrs Eglantine finished her meeting with Cook and returned to her room for some reason?
The noise happened again: a scratching sound, difficult to place. Sherlock looked around wildly for somewhere to hide. Under the bed? In the wardrobe? He took a half-step, hesitant, fearing that a board would creak beneath his feet and give him away.
Before he could move again he heard the noise for a third time, and he recognized it with a rush of relief. It was the sound of ashes being scraped from one of the fireplace grates downstairs with a shovel, echoing through the chimneys. He relaxed, and let his hands unclench.
Now that his attention had been drawn to the fireplace, Sherlock moved across to it. He ran his hands through the cold coals in case anything had been hidden there, and even craned his neck to look up the chimney, but there was nothing to see.
He turned back to his search of the room, checking under the bed, but apart from an empty suitcase there was nothing there. The wardrobe was occupied by a number of dresses on hangers and two hats on a shelf – all of them black, of course. Sherlock wasn’t sure if it was just a housekeeper thing, or whether Mrs Eglantine spent her entire life wearing black. She was a ‘Mrs’, which meant that she was either married or widowed, but Sherlock could only imagine her walking up the aisle in church wearing a black wedding dress. He shivered and pushed the grotesque thought away.
He stood in the centre of the rug and looked around. He’d checked all the obvious places. The room was small enough and neat enough that he could see virtually every hiding place, and there was nothing unusual, nothing that he wouldn’t have expected to see in a housekeeper’s room.
If he was hiding something in his room, where would he put it?
On a sudden thought he stepped to one side and pulled the rug back. Nothing underneath but floorboards. He wasn’t expecting there to be – Mrs Eglantine was nothing if not
clever, and hiding something beneath the only rug in the room was too simple and too obvious – but he had to check anyway, just in case.
Looking at the floorboards prompted him to test them with his foot, looking for any looseness. Maybe she’d levered up one of the boards and hidden something underneath. If she had, then she’d fastened it back too well for Sherlock to detect. He’d need a crowbar to lever them up, and that would leave traces.
The picture on the wall kept attracting his attention. For a minute or two he dismissed it, thinking that it was just the way it was hung at an angle that disturbed his ordered mind, but his thoughts kept circling back to it. It occurred to him that something might have been hidden behind the picture. Gently he eased it away from the wall and turned it so that he could see the back.
Only a pencilled price mark.
He sighed and put the picture back at exactly the same angle he had found it.
Hands on hips, he surveyed the room again. If there was a secret in the room, then it was particularly well kept.
If, in fact, the secret was in the room to start with.
On a whim he crossed over to the narrow window that looked out over the gardens to the back of the house. He couldn’t see anybody, so he was safe from observation. The window was open a crack. He pushed it further open and leaned out.
Something was hanging from a piece of twine that had been wrapped around a nail stuck in the wood of the window frame – a package that dangled a couple of feet below the level of the windowsill. It was small enough that it would have been almost invisible from the garden below, unless someone knew exactly what they were looking for.
Sherlock hauled it in and rested it on the windowsill. The twine was tarred to make it weather-resistant, and the package was wrapped in oilcloth. It left a reddish powdery residue on the windowsill. It looked to Sherlock as if the oilcloth had been rubbed with brick dust to make it even more difficult to see from outside. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to hide this package.
With a momentary hesitation, and a shiver of anticipation, he untied the twine and unwrapped the package.
Inside was a folded mass of paper. Sherlock wiped his hands on a handkerchief before unfolding it carefully, making a mental note of which layers were on the inside and which ones were on the outside. It was bad enough that he was in her room; he certainly didn’t want Mrs Eglantine knowing that he had found her hidden papers and was riffling through them.
The papers unfolded into two large sheets. The top one was a set of plans of Holmes Manor – architect’s drawings showing all the rooms on all the floors, all to scale. Many of the rooms had been crossed off in red ink. Most of them had scribbled notes written in them, or arrows pointing to particular features with question marks attached. One particularly thick wall between the dining room and the reception room had a note written beside it which said: ‘Check for secret compartments in the wall. Could be accessed from either side.’
The second sheet was slightly smaller than the first. It was a set of words and phrases written in the same handwriting as the notes on the architectural plans. They had boxes drawn around them, and the boxes were linked by lines and arrows in a kind of network. It looked as if Mrs Eglantine – assuming it was her – was trying to connect up a series of disparate elements, discoveries or thoughts into a coherent pattern – and failing. Sherlock scanned through some of the notes and found names of members of the Holmes family, as well as names that he didn’t recognize, alongside places that he thought he’d heard of and words that just seemed to be randomly chosen but presumably meant something to Mrs Eglantine. In the centre, like a spider sitting in the middle of its web, the words gold plates had been circled twice in an emphatic hand.
Gold plates? Was that what she was looking for?
Reluctantly Sherlock folded the papers up again, careful to make sure that he used the same fold marks in the same order as he had unwrapped the package. He wished he could keep them for further study, but that would be risky. He couldn’t even copy them – there was too much information there, and it would take too long. He knew more than he had earlier, but he wasn’t sure he was any the wiser.
He wrapped the papers up in the oilcloth, retied them with the twine and carefully lowered them out of the window, first checking that the garden was still empty.
Finally, he closed the window, remembering to leave it open a crack.
He took a last look around the room, partly for anything he might have missed and partly to see if he’d left any traces. To both questions, the answer was no.
After listening at the door for a few moments to check that the coast was clear, he left Mrs Eglantine’s room and slipped along the corridor. For a moment he considered going into his own room, but there was nothing for him to do there apart from rest for a while, and think, and he had other things to do. He headed downstairs.
The heavy oak door leading out into the drive and the gardens thumped closed as he entered the hall. Someone had just left the house. Through a narrow window Sherlock could see a black-clad figure walking to a waiting cart. It was Mrs Eglantine. She had put on a coat, which meant that she was probably going into town. She must have finished her conference with Cook, and a shiver went through Sherlock as he realized how close a call he’d had. If she’d kept her coat upstairs instead of in the kitchen, then she might have found him.
The cart clattered away and vanished through the gates to the road. Sherlock turned and headed back towards the kitchens.
‘Master Sherlock!’ Cook called as he entered. She was a large woman, her cheery face usually red from the heat of the ovens and her hands covered in flour, but today she looked pale and the skin around her eyes was creased as if she was trying to stop herself from crying. ‘I just got some bread in the oven. Come back in a while and you can ’ave a nice hot slice wiv butter fresh from the churn!’
‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but I was looking for Mrs Eglantine.’
Cook’s face seemed to age five years in as many seconds. ‘She’s gone to town. And good riddance too! ’Parently the quality of the vegetables I’ve been preparin’ for this household is not up to the standards she expects.’ She sniffed. ‘Anyone’d think she was the lady of the house, rather than Mrs ’Olmes, and this was some swanky ’otel rather than a country ’ouse.’
‘She’s certainly a difficult person to please,’ Sherlock said cautiously. He’d learned from Amyus Crowe that general statements, left hanging like that, normally encouraged talkative people to talk even more, and Cook was one of the most talkative people he knew.
‘She is that. I never known such a person to find fault, and ’er tongue’s as sharp as a butcher’s knife. I worked with ’undreds of ’ousekeepers over the years, but she’s got to be the most hoity-toity and the most unpleasant.’
‘What made my uncle and aunt employ her in the first place?’ Sherlock asked. ‘I presume she must have had a good set of references from her previous jobs.’
‘If she did, then I never got to ’ear about them.’
‘I keep seeing her around the house,’ Sherlock said. ‘Just standing there, not doing anything apart from watching and listening.’
‘That’s ’er all over,’ Cook confirmed. ‘Like a crow, just standin’ on a branch waitin’ for a worm.’ Colour was coming back into her cheeks now. She sniffed again. ‘Soon as she arrived she turned this kitchen upside down. Moved everythin’ out into the garden and ’ad the walls an’ the tiles scrubbed. Give ’er credit – she did it herself. Shut the door an’ worked for a whole day, she did. Said she’d ’ad experience of ’ouses wiv mice an’ rats an’ she wanted to make sure there weren’t none ’ere. The nerve of the woman! As if I’d let a mouse in my kitchen!’
‘She’s a strange woman,’ Sherlock confirmed.
‘I got some biscuits I baked earlier,’ Cook confided. ‘Do you want a couple, to keep you goin’ before tea?’
‘I’d love some,’ he said, smiling. ‘In fact, I’d happily miss tea an
d just eat your biscuits.’
‘It’s nice to ’ave someone who appreciates my cookin’,’ Cook said, beaming. She seemed more cheerful now.
After wolfing down three of Cook’s biscuits, Sherlock headed back into the house. He wasn’t sure that he’d made much progress, but he seemed to have established that Mrs Eglantine had somehow blackmailed her way into the house and that she was searching for something. The gold plates that had been mentioned in her notes? He supposed it was possible, but it sounded a little unlikely. Why would there be gold plates, of all things, in his aunt and uncle’s possession? What would they want such a thing for? He’d been living there for over a year now, and he’d never seen any plates apart from the porcelain ones that were used every day and the bone-china ones brought out on Sundays and when anyone visited. Neither of those sets of plates had any gold at all on them, not even gold-leaf edging.
Suddenly he couldn’t face the prospect of staying in the house for the rest of the day. It seemed to be weighing down on him like a heavy coat. He had to get out. For a few seconds he thought about heading over to see Amyus Crowe – and Virginia – but he felt as if there was more that he could do concerning Mrs Eglantine. If she was in Farnham, sourcing fresher vegetables than Cook had got, then perhaps he could find her and watch her for a while from hiding. After all, perhaps the vegetables were just an excuse. Perhaps she had a different reason for going into town.
He left by the front door and headed for the stables, where his horse was kept. He thought of it as his horse, although he’d effectively stolen it from the evil Baron Maupertuis, back when he’d first arrived at Holmes Manor. Fortunately the Baron hadn’t appeared to ask for it back, and the horse seemed perfectly happy to stay with someone who looked after it and rode it regularly. He’d named it Philadelphia, as a kind of joke. The horse didn’t seem to mind.
