“So how does one disarm multiple opponents at a distance while barely lifting one’s fingers?” she said after a while.
Lieutenant Atwood, who’d been glancing out of the window, turned toward her. “I wish I knew enough to tell you.”
No questions on how long she planned to wait.
She exhaled. They had better leave. Lord Ingram had been in worse situations than this, she was sure. He would find his way out and back to them.
“Shall we—”
Footsteps, running. Lots of footsteps. Had they been discovered? Why now?
She loosened her mantle, grabbed Lieutenant Atwood by his necktie, and yanked him toward her. “Quick! Pretend you’re my paramour!”
He stilled, not so much with shock as with unwillingness—or so it felt. But once he complied, his motion was swift and decisive. With one hand behind her, he maneuvered them so that she lay on the seat with him half above her. She pushed down her décolletage, exposing the top of her corset.
The carriage door yanked open. She shrieked as she sat up. And shrieked again as two burly men shone a bright lantern into her eyes. Pulling up her bodice ineffectually with one hand, while shielding her bosom equally ineffectually with her other hand, she stared at the intruders, gasping.
“Are you my husband’s men? Please, please, it’s not what you think it is. He—he told me that he can tell me things that will benefit Monsieur de Rochefoucault’s business. He did. I’m only here for my husband’s sake. You must believe me.”
The man in front looked past her still-masked face to stare at her bounteous breasts.
“She’s lying!” exclaimed Lieutenant Atwood. “She lured me out here. Please—please don’t beat me. I would never have anything to do with a married woman. She told me she was a widow!”
She almost laughed at Lieutenant Atwood’s fear and panicked regret.
The other man pulled at his companion. “Enough with these aristocratic degenerates. Let’s go.”
As they slammed the door closed, Charlotte screamed at Lieutenant Atwood, even as she pulled her mantle back up around herself, “Who are you calling a liar?”
He didn’t answer, but she thought she heard muffled laughter.
She waited for her heart to stop pounding—and for the men to be out of sight. “Do you think they are far away enough now that we can go?”
The door was again yanked open.
Her surprised squeal was genuine this time as she threw herself across the carriage into Lieutenant Atwood’s arms. “Please, Monsieur, you must save me from my husband. He will lock me in the attic and tell the world I’ve died.”
“And here I thought you didn’t even like Jane Eyre,” said Lord Ingram, closing the door behind himself and taking a seat next to Lieutenant Atwood. He was breathing hard.
She gazed at him. There was a strange sensation in her chest, as if her heart just fell back into place. “It was a terrible plot twist but still a sensational one,” she said, returning to her own seat. “Did you find Lady Ingram?”
“No.” He knocked against the roof of the carriage, which pulled out of its spot and turned onto the dirt lane. “I came to my senses instead. I don’t need to do everything for everyone, and I would do Lady Ingram a bigger favor by looking after her children.”
Well, sometimes they do learn.
Charlotte adjusted her mantle—and smiled to herself. “In that case, I think we can term it a productive evening.”
Nineteen
Lieutenant Atwood alit a few streets away from Hôtel Papillon—he would approach on foot and get in from a service entrance. When Charlotte and Lord Ingram reached the house, Livia, Mrs. Watson, the maharani, and Mr. Marbleton were in the foyer, waiting. Mrs. Watson rushed to the door and embraced Lord Ingram. Even Livia, usually a much more reticent person, took him by the hands and told him how glad she was to see his safe return.
His throat moved as he thanked them. Charlotte sighed inwardly. For someone who did so much for others, he was always surprised when anyone returned the care in equal measure.
She asked everyone to go to bed. But when they had done so, she joined Lord Ingram and Lieutenant Atwood, once again back in Forêt’s shoes—and clothes—not in the library, which had a number of entrances, but in the much smaller but similarly book-lined study, to sort through the loot.
It didn’t take her too long to locate letters from the maharani’s son. To be on the safe side, in case Moriarty’s subordinates had taken pictures of them, she picked up a few boxes of photographic plates and headed for the portable darkroom that Lieutenant Atwood had set up to develop images taken by Mr. Marbleton’s detective camera.
“The pictures, perhaps—perhaps—” Lord Ingram stopped when Charlotte looked up. He took a sip of coffee, which he’d made to help them stay awake. “What am I saying? If there is to be disturbing content, then you should be the one looking through them, since you are the one least likely to be disturbed.”
She inclined her head graciously. “I believe you are correct, sir.”
He came with her, carrying the rest of the boxes of plates, and put on the safelight for her. The plates weighed at least a stone. She opened the first box and saw that the size of the plates was two and three quarters inches by three and a quarter inches, instead of five and half inches by six and half inches as she’d supposed: they were stored in stacks of ten and four stacks to a box.
There were eight such boxes. She would be looking at more than three hundred images.
Lord Ingram came back then with her coffee. She smiled at him, truly grateful, drank half the cup, and set to work.
About half of the plates portrayed sexual acts. Nothing too outlandish in terms of the acts themselves, so the illicitness would be in the individuals involved in the trysts: There were all sorts of pairings, and groups of up to five people.
Under different circumstances, Charlotte might have spent a little more time working out what all five of the partners were up to. But tonight, since they had nothing to do with the maharani or her son’s letters, she set those plates aside after the three seconds she allotted for the study of each image.
The rest of the plates were, on first glance, much less scandalous. Those that did feature people had them fully clothed and not engaged in anything remotely carnal. And some shots had no humans in the frame, only land and buildings.
Charlotte found herself much more intrigued by what she could infer from these photographs. Was this group of men, none of whom she could recognize, but whose countries of origin she could easily deduce, not supposed to be meeting at all? The drays, so extraordinarily heavy, outside what looked to be a nondescript factory—what were they carrying?
Still, she set aside each after three seconds.
Until she came to one with a face she recognized; not one of the central figures meant to be captured, but someone on the periphery, very nearly lost in the crowd.
That one she stared at for an entire ten seconds.
She returned to the study to report that there was nothing related to the maharani in the images, only to see the men both wearing pained expressions, as if the papers before them had turned into a table full of swaying cobras, ready to strike.
“What’s the matter?”
Lieutenant Atwood gestured at the documents. “These are state secrets Moriarty has collected.”
“Of which states?”
“Britain, Germany, France, Russia, the Austro-Hungarians, the Ottoman Empire, and that’s just the top of the stack.”
“You are both agents of the British Crown, aren’t you?”
Lieutenant Atwood shrugged. “Neither of us ranks high enough for this—and I, frankly, never want to.”
“Give them to your superiors then.”
“My previous superior sold state secrets,” said Lord Ingram. “You exposed him, Holmes, if memory ser
ves.”
“Not to mention,” said Lieutenant Atwood, “if we gave these to anyone, we would be considered privy to the information, even if we didn’t glance past a few pages. Not necessarily a good thing for either of us.”
“Then buy a safe at Banque de Paris, deposit everything, and deal with it later.”
“I don’t want to deal with it later either,” said Lieutenant Atwood, rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s all games that empires play with one another.”
Lord Ingram sighed. “I’m beginning to come around to that view.”
“Hasn’t it always been like this?” asked Charlotte. “Haven’t they always been games that empires play with one another?”
“Maybe,” answered Lord Ingram. “But it can take a queen-and-country sort like me a while to work that out.”
At the resignation in his tone, she felt a pang in her chest. She almost wished he had a few still-intact illusions.
“Is there a safe in this house where we can stow everything for now?”
Lord Ingram nodded.
“Then let’s put these away and go to sleep. This night has been long enough.”
When they had done that, Lieutenant Atwood bid them good night and slipped away. Lord Ingram walked her to her room. Before the door, he pulled out a handkerchief bundle from his pocket.
“I don’t think you had anything to eat, did you?”
She thought back. They’d had a small supper before starting for Château Vaudrieu. And since then, nothing. And suddenly she was very hungry.
He opened the handkerchief to reveal two small puff pastries. “This one has chocolate inside. This one, pâté, in case you are still refraining from sweet things.”
“I am,” she said, eating the pâté puff in two bites. Then she took the chocolate puff. “But tonight I’ll make an exception.”
He looked at her, not speaking. He was a man who exerted a pull simply by standing still, a viscerally physical presence. Beneath the black cashmere wool of his evening jacket, and his still-pristine shirt, his chest rose and fell.
She had used to wonder what it would be like to lay her head upon his chest, to feel each expansion of his lungs. At the time she’d had to imagine the texture of his skin and the contours of his musculature. Now she knew how he felt to her fingers and her lips. But she still had never laid her head on his chest.
She lifted her gaze. Their eyes met.
Whenever they’d been in such proximity before, she’d always wanted more—everything that was forbidden to her. Perhaps it was the fatigue at last catching up with her, but this moment she was . . . content to stand close to him, doing nothing but that.
He folded his empty handkerchief and put it back in his pocket. “Good night, Holmes.”
“Good night, Ash,” she murmured, and watched him walk away.
She entered her room, closed the door, leaned against it, and ate the chocolate puff in the smallest bites possible, thinking, as she did so, not of more and more and more chocolate puffs, but of him.
Of them.
* * *
Over a late breakfast, Charlotte read about the gas explosions at Château Vaudrieu. Apparently the guards had first thought they were bombs, which prompted them to prevent the guests from leaving, in an attempt to locate the perpetrators. Once it was clear they were but gas explosions, all was well—or as well as could be with gas explosions.
Some at the château suffered minor injuries. But Herr Albrecht, the owner, was now on hand and all would be well. No mention was made of the château’s electrical plant, which obviated most of the need for gas. Or the ball’s hosts, Madame Desrosiers and her brother Monsieur Plantier.
Excellent fiction, better than some of the stories Livia had made her read.
Mrs. Watson and the maharani, still veiled, came in and sat down at the breakfast table. Charlotte slid over an envelope. The maharani, through her veil, perused its contents.
“Thank you, ladies.” She looked at Charlotte. “Obviously no contingency plan was needed last night, but I’m still curious as to what it would have been.”
“The Van Dyck that I saw in Château Vaudrieu on the night of the reception was a forgery.” Charlotte took a bite of her plain boiled egg. “The folds of Mary’s robe depict a brachistochrone curve, the path of fastest descent of a bead sliding from point A to point B under uniform gravity and with no friction.”
“A what?” said Mrs. Watson and the maharani together.
Charlotte took out a pencil and drew a quick diagram to show the ladies what a brachistochrone curve looked like, set against two other lines of descent, one straight, one polygonal. “This is more or less what I saw in the forgery, with three shadowy dots representing the three beads rolling down each line at different speeds.”
Mrs. Watson and the maharani glanced at each other, as if Charlotte had spoken in Etruscan.
“Van Dyck died in sixteen forty-one,” she explained further. “The brachistochrone curve wasn’t developed until more than fifty years after his death. Therefore the painting cannot possibly be authentic. Lord Ingram and I believe that the painting’s owner put it up for sale under duress. In that case, it made every sense that the owner would have hired an art forger and given the fake to Château Vaudrieu.
“So our ally called on the owner and asked to have the original by this afternoon—or risk exposure that he tried to sell a forgery at a respectable venue. But of course, given that there is no longer a need for the original, our ally has sent a cable first thing this morning and told the owner that he could keep his heirloom.”
“I see,” said the maharani, shaking her head a little.
She rose, went to the fireplace, and burned the incriminating letters. When she returned to the breakfast table, she took out an envelope of her own and set it before Mrs. Watson.
Mrs. Watson looked in the envelope and immediately pushed it back toward the maharani. “I said I wouldn’t take anything from you.”
The maharani wagged a finger. “No, you said we would discuss payments after I had what I want. And now I have it.”
“I didn’t do this for payment,” insisted Mrs. Watson, now looking insulted.
The maharani leaned toward her. “I know that. And I am grateful. But remember what you told me all those years ago? That women should be valued for their work and that women, especially, should not devalue the work of other women. I do not have twenty thousand pounds, but I can still defray your expenses and remunerate everyone for their time.”
“But—”
“Set an example for the young lady, Joanna. If you don’t let me pay you, I’m sure she won’t let you pay her. And everyone’s work here, especially hers, should be fairly compensated.”
Mrs. Watson, who’d made a point of teaching Charlotte not to let herself be undervalued, could not argue with that. She accepted the envelope.
The maharani turned to Charlotte. She’d set her hands together on the table, her fingers interlaced. Now her fingers flexed, as if she felt a twitch of nerves. “Miss Charlotte, allow me to extend an apology to you. I did not realize it then, but had Sherlock Holmes been able-bodied, I would probably have begged him for help, his lack of experience in robbing French châteaus notwithstanding.
“Whereas even after you revealed that you were responsible for Sherlock Holmes’s achievement and reputation, my first, second, and third reaction was still no, I could not entrust this task to a woman.
“I have, I believe, been an excellent ruler of my small realm. So I, of all people, should know better than to deny a woman an opportunity simply because she is a woman. But being a woman of power in the world of men has not always taught me the right lessons. I’m afraid that I’d begun to think that I came to be where I was because I was intrinsically exceptional, different from other women, and not that my particular circumstances afforded me chances that
they could not even dream of.”
She placed her hands over Charlotte’s. “I’m glad you made me see differently. But you shouldn’t have needed to. And for that, please accept my sincere regret.”
* * *
The maharani left first, to catch a steamer leaving Marseille for Bombay. Leighton Atwood would leave last, after he spread the news about the loss of a great many photographic plates in the gas explosions at Château Vaudrieu.
The rest of the company left that evening to cross the channel. The next morning they were in London. There Lord Ingram said good-bye to the ladies and Mr. Marbleton, and continued on to his brother’s estate.
A letter awaited him there, a letter he’d been hoping to receive. And when he’d read it, he closed his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief.
He met his brother and sister-in-law. He played with his children and theirs. And when his sister-in-law had gathered all the children for a special tea party, he summoned Miss Yarmouth for a private meeting.
This time she did not tell him not to answer her yet. She understood that he had made up his mind.
“My lord,” she murmured as she came into his brother’s study, which he’d borrowed for the occasion.
She closed the door. He left his seat, walked past her, and reopened it a crack. After all, Holmes considered him a stickler for propriety. He might as well live up to her opinion.
They sat down on two sides of a large mahogany desk, she gingerly, he, with every assurance.
“Miss Yarmouth, I have received a letter from Miss Potter. Miss Potter was my own governess, an excellent and admirable woman, and she has graciously agreed to come work for me and take charge of the children.”
“I—I see,” stammered Miss Yarmouth.
“I thank you for your proposal, but I do not intend to marry again after my divorce. At least, not in the near term. Therefore I must wish you the very best of luck in Australia. May you find everything there that your heart seeks.” He slid an envelope across the table to her. “And you will please allow me to contribute to your dowry, in gratitude for your generosity and kindness to the children.”
The Art of Theft Page 28
