A Conspiracy in Belgravia

by Sherry Thomas

  “Yes.”

  She added cream and sugar to her own tea while gazing at him with her usual lack of facial expression, which was almost always misinterpreted as a look of sweet hopefulness.

  He took a sip. “But of course the situation is still highly irregular.”

  She remained silent, stirring her tea.

  “Ash tells me that you have been to the house near Portman Square.”

  Ash was what Lord Ingram’s intimates called him. Recently, when 18 Upper Baker Street had suffered from a bout of housebreaking, they had met, along with Inspector Treadles, at the house Lord Bancroft referred to.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “He also tells me you had a positive impression of it.”

  The place had boasted the most . . . exuberant interior she had ever come across, a combination of color blindness and willful abandon—and she would have liked it just fine if its excesses had been pared back by a half dozen or so orange-and-blue cushions. “There was much to admire about the decor.”

  It was a gaudy zoo, and she enjoyed gaudy zoos.

  “I had once hoped we would dwell there as husband and wife.”

  And so it begins. He would now propose that they dwell there as man and mistress.

  “I still entertain the same hope,” he said.

  Her teacup paused on its way to her lips. In fact, she had to set it down altogether. Had she heard him correctly? “My lord, I am no longer eligible.”

  “You are no longer welcome in Society, but as you are of sound mind the Church can have no cause to consider you ineligible for matrimony.”

  Matrimony. It wasn’t easy to surprise Charlotte, but Lord Bancroft was coming dangerously close to flabbergasting her. “You are most kind. Nevertheless, I remain ill-suited to marriage.”

  “But you are not ill-suited to me. I would be happy to never be invited anywhere again—you would serve as a good excuse. I would be happy to never indulge in small talk again—I have a feeling you share that sentiment. And I will be busy and away from home a great deal—not something most brides look for in a groom, but for you it would count as an added attraction, no doubt.”

  Whatever his faults, he was an intelligent and honest man.

  “I am not a rich man, but I can provide comfortably for a wife. By marrying me, you will not rehabilitate your reputation completely. But at least you will be received by your family again. That must count for something.”

  She didn’t believe in being grateful for marriage proposals—men did not pledge their hands out of the goodness of their hearts. Even so, she found herself inclined to consider this particular union, at this moment in time, on sentimental rather than rational grounds.

  With a small shake of her head, she pulled herself back to reality. “I am honored by your gesture, sir. But I take it you would require me to give up my friendship with Mrs. Watson, as well as my practice as Sherlock Holmes.”

  “It will not be necessary to cut Mrs. Watson. She was an acquaintance of our father’s. Ash is on excellent terms with her and even I have crossed paths with her on occasion. She strikes me as a sensible woman, not one to exploit your position to promote her own. I do not see why you shouldn’t be able to call on each other in the future, provided it is done discreetly.

  “As for the business with Sherlock Holmes, I understand Mrs. Watson has invested in the venture. If you feel that she has not received a sufficient return against that initial outlay, I will be more than happy to compensate her as a part of our marriage settlement.”

  In other words, she was to discontinue as Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective. “I thank you most warmly, my lord, for the honor of—”

  He raised a finger, forestalling the no, thank you part of her answer. “However, given that mental exertion gives you pleasure, I shall be happy to supply the necessary exercises. After all, I come across them on a regular basis.”

  He opened a leather portfolio he had brought, extracted a slender dossier, and set it before her. “These are but a small sprinkling of items that make their way to my desk. Do please examine them at your leisure.”

  And with that, he rose and saw himself out.

  Two

  Charlotte and Livia Holmes approached life very differently.

  Livia viewed everything through a lens of complications, real and imaginary. From where to sit at a tea party, to whether she ought to say something to the hostess if her table setting was missing a fork, her lugubrious and plentiful imagination always supplied scenarios in which she committed a fatal misstep that destroyed any chance she had at a happy, secure life. For her, every choice was agony, every week seven days of quicksand and quagmire.

  Charlotte rarely resorted to imagination—observation yielded far better results. And while the world was made up of innumerable moving parts, in her own personal life she saw no reason why decisions shouldn’t be simple, especially since most choices were binary: more butter on the muffin or not, run away from home or not, accept a man’s offer of marriage or not.

  Not necessarily easy, but simple.

  But Lord Bancroft’s proposal . . . She felt like a casual student of mathematics faced with non-Euclidean geometry for the first time.

  Her marriage would be a boon to her family. Her parents might be deeply flawed individuals who could not be made content by any means, but her continued status as an outcast certainly increased their unhappiness, both now and in the long run. They cared desperately about their façade of superiority—and as shallow a façade as it was, to them it remained infinitely preferable to being seen for their true selves: two middle-aged, less-than-accomplished people in a loveless marriage, their finances in tatters, and without a single child they could count on for comfort and succor.

  Henrietta, the eldest Holmes sister, had distanced herself from her family almost before she returned from her honeymoon. Bernadine, the second eldest, had never been able to look after herself. Livia despised both her parents. And Charlotte, of course, had delivered the worst blow, a sensational and salacious fall from grace.

  Should Charlotte regain her respectability, even partially, her parents would be able to walk around with their heads held high again—or at least without an overabundance of shame.

  And it wasn’t only her parents. Charlotte’s infamy affected Livia’s chances at a good marriage. Livia had scoffed at the idea, declaring herself the biggest obstacle to matrimony that she would ever face. But Charlotte could not be so blithe about it.

  Moreover, if she did marry Lord Bancroft, then she could provide shelter for Livia, who would no longer face daily belittlement from their parents. And Bernadine, too, if at all possible—she couldn’t imagine that the atmosphere at home was conducive to Bernadine’s well-being.

  On the other hand, marrying Lord Bancroft would make her Lord Ingram’s sister-in-law, a situation so fraught even Livia’s imagination might prove unequal to the ramifications. Not to mention, he clearly required her to give up her fledgling enterprise—and she was rather attached to the income it generated.

  She bit down on another slice of pound cake, her appetite for rich, buttery solace even greater when faced with intractable dilemmas.

  Suppose she persuaded Lord Bancroft to settle five hundred pounds a year on her . . . She would have an independent income—enough to look after Livia and Bernadine. She would still be able to see Mrs. Watson. And if he should indeed prove the wellspring of intriguing and diverting cases . . .

  She picked up the dossier he left behind.

  It contained six envelopes. She unsealed the first envelope and pulled out a sheet of paper.

  In 18__, Mr. W., a young widower whose wife had perished in childbirth, traveled to India to take a civil service position in the Madras Presidency. A few weeks after his arrival, he attended an afternoon tea party. Taxed by the heat—even though the rainy season had arrived and tempe
ratures were cooler than they would otherwise have been—he sat down on the veranda and closed his eyes for a nap.

  The party dispersed. As the family dressed for dinner, a servant informed the mistress that a sahib was still on the veranda, asleep. The lady of the house went to rouse him and, much to her shock, found him dead.

  Mr. W. had no connection to power, prestige, or fortune. He held no position whereby his removal—or his cooperation, for that matter—would have given anyone any noticeable advantage. And in his personal life, he was vouched to have been timid and trouble-averse—no criminal tendencies or unwise dalliances.

  How and why did Mr. W. die?

  India. Monsoon. The answer seemed much too obvious.

  Charlotte dug further into the envelope and found a folded strip of paper that said Clue on the outside and a smaller envelope marked Answer.

  The clue read, Mr. W.’s death was declared an accident.

  Well, that settled it. She opened the Answer envelope.

  The physician who examined Mr. W.’s body found puncture marks on the latter’s wrist. Common kraits, highly poisonous snakes indigenous to India, sometimes enter dwellings to keep dry during monsoon months. Mr. W. was not the first, nor would he be the last, to be bitten in his sleep and never wake up again.

  Snakebite, as she’d thought. She studied the sheets of paper and the typed words. The case might be old, but the construction of case-as-puzzle was recent. And it was meticulously done.

  Not by Bancroft, obviously—he was too busy for that. A minion, then, one with access to the archives. What had been Bancroft’s instruction? Reach in and grab the first few records?

  She shook her head. She was being unfair. Bancroft dealt with real life, and real life seldom made for particularly intriguing puzzles. Not to mention, the construction of puzzles was an art. A minion who had no prior experience in said art—and who had never met Charlotte Holmes—could very well consider Mr. W.’s case, as it was presented, a first-rate conundrum.

  She opened the next envelope.

  On the last Sunday of January 18___, the S___ family did not attend Sunday service. Mr. S. was a laborer, Mrs. S. a housewife who took in washing. They were poor but devout. Neighbors knocked on their door after church, concerned that they might have fallen ill. No one answered.

  When the neighbors at last entered the dwelling, they found the entire family—husband, wife, and three children—dead in their beds.

  What was the cause of death?

  Where were the S___ family? Had they been in England, Charlotte would hesitate longer, but if they lived on the Continent . . .

  This case also came with a clue, which read, The S___ family resided in Minden, Germany.

  A guinea said that they perished from carbon monoxide poisoning.

  The incident took place in a cottage, which happened to be the end house in a row of cottages, located directly above a disused mining shaft. All five members of the household, along with two cats and a caged songbird, died overnight. In the cottage opposite, also an end house, the occupants also fell ill, and they, too, lost family pets that night, though the humans eventually recovered.

  The theory is that harmful gas from the mine shaft seeped upward through the dirt floors of the cellars. The cellars were fitted with doors that opened to the outside, but in the case of both houses, they had remained closed during the preceding weeks—it was winter and the families did not want cold air coming up into the house. The neighbors, when questioned, recalled that members of both families had complained of headache and nausea for a while. It then came to be viewed as a matter of luck. Similar conditions, similar dangers. One family succumbed, the other survived.

  Charlotte would have thought it was simply due to insufficient ventilation for the stove—the composition of coal on the Continent made it more likely to emit carbon monoxide as a by-product of under-aerated combustion.

  So . . . slightly more interesting, but hardly stimulating.

  She had the next envelope in hand but made herself put it down. There were only six envelopes. No point finishing everything at once.

  Instead she went to the bow window and picked up the slender volume that lay on the window seat. A Summer in Roman Ruins, Lord Ingram’s account of those adolescent days he spent exploring the remnants of a Roman villa on his uncle’s estate. It contained an oblique reference to their first kiss, but that wasn’t the only hint to her presence.

  There was also, for example, this particular passage:

  One day, I unearthed a stone object, nearly three feet across and a good ten inches thick, perfectly circular except for a protuberance that appeared to be a handle, except it was far too short.

  Clearing the encrusted dirt from the surface of the object revealed a groove that had been etched around the circumference of this large disk, and straight down the center of the protuberance. Not a millstone then, as I had originally supposed.

  The function of the artefact baffled me, until someone better read came along with a copy of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and pointed to references of vineyards in olden times: It was a grape press—and the protuberance the spout from which grape juice would flow into a receptacle.

  Grapes? He had frowned. Here?

  She showed him the exact paragraph where the Venerable Bede described vines growing in various places in Britain.

  What happened to all those vineyards?

  Perhaps the climate or the soil turned unsuitable. Perhaps the plague wiped out everyone who knew how to work vines. Or perhaps French wines were simply better and cheaper, and it made sense to uproot the vine stock and grow something more profitable.

  He was quiet for some time. My godfather owns some vineyards in Bordeaux. I’ve visited them. Hard to imagine that landscape here.

  Did you frequent any patisseries when you were in France?

  Don’t think so—don’t like sweet things. He glanced at her. You like French pastry?

  I like the description of them. But I’ve never had croissants or mille-feuilles or cream puffs.

  You still wouldn’t have tasted them even if I’d visited every patisserie in Paris.

  But at least you would have been able to describe them.

  I’ve had croissants. They aren’t bad. But I don’t remember anything particular about them.

  She’d sighed and picked up her book again.

  But two days later, she’d walked into her room to find a box of croissants, mille-feuilles, and cream puffs.

  Neither of them ever mentioned the pastries, but this was the next paragraph in the account:

  I hadn’t much cared for the consumption of books, preferring sports and the more physical aspects of excavation. But that moment I realized ignorance would ill serve me—and that if I wished to continue in archaeological endeavors, I must study the history passed down on library shelves, in addition to that evidenced by objects left behind by the long departed.

  She closed the book softly.

  No, she didn’t wish she’d married him—she was ill-suited to marriage, after all—but she did wish he hadn’t married someone else.

  That he hadn’t married the former Alexandra Greville.

  The doorbell rang. Charlotte raised her head. Mrs. Watson and Miss Redmayne would not yet have returned from church. Lord Bancroft had left nothing behind. And she herself had no other clients scheduled for the day. Who could it be?

  A courier stood on the doorstep, an envelope in hand. He respectfully inclined his head. “I’ve a letter for Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

  “I’ll take it to him.”

  The courier tugged his cap and left.

  The envelope was of a familiar weight and material, the linen paper crisp yet strong. Charlotte also recognized the typewriter that had been responsible for the name and address on the front—typewriters, especially those that had been in use
for a while, produced letters almost as identifiable as those written by hand.

  Lord Ingram. They’d spoken in person only the evening before. What could have compelled him to send a letter by courier so soon afterward?

  Dear Mr. Holmes,

  I apologize for interrupting your day of rest, but I am in desperate need of help.

  I beg you will receive me at four o’clock this afternoon.

  Mrs. Finch

  The handwriting on the note was not Lord Ingram’s. Nor was it one of the scripts that he, an accomplished calligrapher who had taught Charlotte everything she knew about the forging of penmanship, had developed.

  Her spine tingled. There was someone else in Lord Ingram’s household who could have legitimately used the typewriter in his study and the envelopes that had been ordered from London’s best stationer.

  His wife.

  “Papa, have you ever danced all night?” asked Lucinda, Lord Ingram’s daughter.

  Lord Ingram smiled, amused by her question. “No. I’ve danced half the night, but never all night.”

  They were in the nursery, back from church, and about to have their Sunday dinner together. Carlisle, his younger child, was playing intently with a boxful of wooden blocks. Lucinda enjoyed the blocks as much as Carlisle did, but for the moment she was not yet done with her plants.

  Small terra-cotta pots crowded the sills of the nursery’s three windows, holding a dozen different seedlings. Lucinda had been observing them for the past week, measuring their height, counting the number of leaves, and making drawings in her notebook to help her better recognize the plants at different stages of growth.

  She wrote down the numbers of leaves for a sunflower seedling. “Why haven’t you danced all night?”

  “Because dances and balls usually don’t last that long. By three o’clock in the morning most people want to be in bed, even those who love dancing.”

  Lucinda counted leaves on another sunflower seedling, the last of her experimental subjects. “I want to try dancing all night. Miss Yarmouth said I could once I’m married—she said I could do anything I wanted once I’m married—but Mamma said it was all nonsense.”