A Conspiracy in Belgravia

by Sherry Thomas

  “You know I have no bosom bows eager to receive gossip from me. But very well, I won’t tell anyone. What is it?”

  “I have heard that before she made her debut, Lady Ingram had been in love with someone else. Someone unsuitable.”

  Livia sucked in a breath—and was almost sad she didn’t have a group of lady friends before whom she could dangle this juicy tidbit. “How unsuitable?”

  “As unsuitable as our brother would have been.”

  “We don’t have a—” They did have a brother. Charlotte had found that out. But it was one of those things that Livia tried to forget: She knew the kind of man her father was, but before such tangible evidence, she still felt as if she’d been punched in the kidney. “Who told you that?”

  “I’m not at liberty to reveal that right now. I understand that ladies Avery and Somersby still seek you out to ask for my news. If you see them again, will you please ask whether they know anything of Lady Ingram’s romantic past? Subtly, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you.” Charlotte came forward and squeezed Livia’s hand. “I must leave now. But don’t forget, I’ll look after you—and Bernadine.”

  After she was gone, Livia stared at the door for a good long while.

  She wanted to believe that Charlotte could fulfill that promise, but everything stood in the way.

  Everything.

  Charlotte had seen the burned letter the moment she walked into Livia’s room.

  The problem with her parents treating their servants with scant respect or consideration was that the servants returned the favor by doing as little work as possible. In better households, even during warmer months, when no fires were laid, the grates would be swept out daily. But not so in the Holmes residence.

  And so the carbonized remains of Livia’s letter had stayed in place, the original curled mass having since crumbled from gravity, small ash-edged bits blown about the grate from the daily airing of the room.

  What had she written about? Their parents? Bernadine? Charlotte failed to see any reason why concerns about either should give Livia such pause as to destroy the letter altogether. And Livia’s despondency had felt both newer and keener than her usual gloom.

  So it was something that affected her personally, something that upon reflection she couldn’t, after all, bring herself to tell Charlotte.

  Livia’s reaction had confirmed Charlotte’s hypothesis. That Livia should have met a man who piqued her interest—well, it was what she was in London to do. The problem lay in what she’d said.

  I haven’t been introduced to any man.

  Society was structured to prevent young ladies from meeting men who hadn’t been first approved by those around them. It was not a watertight system, but by and large it did what it was supposed to do. Charlotte, while she retained her respectability, had never conversed with a man who hadn’t been vouched for by a known third party.

  And as far as she knew, neither had Livia.

  So where had this man come from? And what did he want?

  From her parents’ hired house, Charlotte made her way to the laboratory of London’s best chemical analyst and delivered Mrs. Morris’s biscuits. That afternoon, she met another client at 18 Upper Baker Street. The rest of the day she again devoted herself to the odious Vigenère cipher. It was past one o’clock in the morning before she held in her hand the completed table of distances and could conclude with confidence that the keyword was five letters long, given that the vast majority of the distances between repeated sequences of letters had been multiples of five.

  There was little satisfaction in the discovery. Her eyes felt gritty, her head light—as if she’d been drinking. But she had no intention of stopping, even though she needed to get up the next day for work.

  The unsettling sensation in her stomach about Mr. Finch’s nondisappearance. The pointed guilt she felt toward Lord Ingram. The pressure to marry Lord Bancroft that had, all of a sudden, reached a crushing point. Livia was not well. And Bernadine, Bernadine had regressed to an appalling degree. Charlotte had but to say one word and everything would improve drastically.

  One word.

  She bent her head to her notebook and began the next step in the deciphering.

  Seven

  THURSDAY

  Penelope let herself into the house, humming bits and pieces of remembered tunes.

  A light was on in the afternoon parlor. Was Aunt Jo waiting up for her, after all? Penelope had told her not to do so: After the performance, she and her friends would repair to the de Blois ladies’ hotel and enjoy a late repast.

  The clock on the wall told her that it was two minutes past midnight. Yes, she was late, but two minutes was a negligible amount of time, under the circumstances.

  She poked her head into the afternoon parlor, except it wasn’t her aunt who sat there, but someone with a loose blond braid and a cream dressing gown heavily embroidered with poppies and buttercups.

  “Miss Holmes, you are up late.”

  Miss Holmes turned around. “Miss Redmayne, did you enjoy Mikado?”

  “I did. I think Mademoiselle de Blois enjoyed it even more, though. She was afraid her English wouldn’t be good enough to understand everything, so she purchased a copy of the libretto ahead of time. I was worried that might ruin the fun, but she loved it.”

  “Always surprising, isn’t it, what people enjoy?”

  “But you never appear to be surprised at all.”

  “It’s my face—takes rather a great deal of feeling to move it. Shock, rather than surprise. And while I’m frequently surprised, I’m not usually shocked.”

  Now Penelope was curious. She had no idea Miss Holmes could be shocked. “So what does shock you?”

  Miss Holmes thought for a moment. “I’m surprised when people are not me. I’m shocked when they are not them.”

  “You mean, we are so much who we are that it’s staggering when we do something truly out of character.”

  “Yes. Normally when people are shocked by someone, it’s because they didn’t know that person sufficiently well. We are asked to judge one another on such things as parentage, attire, and demeanor, as substitutes for character. So we know others primarily by how they present themselves in public, which is often the furthest thing from who they are.”

  Penelope opted to be cheeky. “So when you ran away from home, the only people knocked speechless were those who’d had no idea who you truly were.”

  Miss Holmes did not appear at all offended. “Exactly. And those who had every idea of my character were no less dismayed, but probably thought—seethingly—Stupid woman. I knew this would happen.”

  “Lord Ingram. Would he have thought that?”

  Her aunt would be appalled at her forwardness. But Penelope had long ago decided that while the meek might inherit the earth, the nonmeek enjoyed far more interesting conversations—to say the least.

  Miss Holmes’s lips curved. “I’d be shocked to the core if he didn’t.”

  “Speaking of Lord Ingram . . .” Penelope walked up to the desk and tapped her fingers on the paper. “Is Lady Ingram still sending coded messages to Mr. Finch?”

  Miss Holmes flipped the open notebook on the desk a few pages back, then nudged it toward Penelope. “I keep track of all the coded messages among the small notices. These are hers.”

  The top of the page gave the construct of the cipher: Numbers 1–26 correspond to letters. Resultant letters need to be left-shifted seven places in the alphabet. Below that, each day’s coded message had been copied down and deciphered.

  M, I still await your answer. A

  M, I will not give up. A

  M, please give me a signal. A

  M, are you all right? A

  “What’s in the rest of the notebook?” Penelope asked. “The other coded messages?”
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  Miss Holmes nodded. “So I’ll know when a new one comes up—in case Mr. Finch responds.”

  “That must have taken a great deal of work.”

  “It consumed some time, especially in the beginning. But the codes tend to be unimaginative.”

  The latest edition of the paper was on the desk, opened to the small notices, which had been carefully marked. The majority of them were not in code and almost all of those had a small dot next to them, likely indicating that no further investigation was warranted. One coded message had the letter A next to it—from Lady Ingram, presumably. Most of the other coded messages had small squares to the side, which probably marked that they were “unimaginative.”

  Three notices, however, were unusual enough to merit question marks. “What’s unusual about this one?”

  “The plaintext of the cipher is in German. It may not mean anything—but it’s different from the others, so I keep an eye on it.”

  The second listed five different kinds of flowers. “And this one?”

  “My guess is it’s code for which horses to bet on.”

  The third notice was also in plaintext. And many among them shall stumble, and fall, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken. “Is that an actual biblical verse?”

  “Isaiah 8:15.”

  “You know that from memory?”

  Miss Holmes shook her head. “I consulted a reference book that indexed all the verses in the Bible.”

  “And why is the verse in the paper in the first place? Did the fire-and-brimstone crowd pay for it?”

  “I can’t say.”

  Penelope went to the sideboard and poured herself a glass of soda water from the gasogene. “Now I wish I’d paid closer attention to the notice columns. So much eccentricity and clandestineness in that space.”

  “My sister Livia has long been a devotee. She was the one who first taught me about substitution ciphers. But she doesn’t have the patience for more complicated codes.”

  “Patience is an overrated virtue. It’s much more fun to have what you want now—especially since there is no guarantee that a longer wait will produce better results.”

  Miss Holmes was quiet for some time. “Do you see Lady Ingram as the patient kind?”

  “No. Well, I didn’t, in any case. But I suppose she has proved herself extraordinarily patient, at least in one sense. An entire year’s wait for one fleeting look? That is downright painful.”

  Penelope took a sip of her soda water—she liked how the bubbles tickled the roof of her mouth. “Although it could be said that her arrangement was dictated by circumstances, rather than temperament. Still, if it were me, I might have grabbed Mr. Finch by the lapels when he passed by and compelled him to give me his address and whatnot.”

  “I meant,” said Miss Holmes softly, “do you think Lady Ingram will wait calmly and uncomplainingly while Sherlock Holmes works?”

  Penelope laughed ruefully. “Ah, that. Well, I don’t see it. She is posting daily notices in the papers, even as Sherlock Holmes works.”

  “In her position I would, too. The papers have far greater reach, empirically, than does Sherlock Holmes, whose only advantage is that he is obliged to report his findings, unlike Mr. Finch, who can ignore the notices until the presses run out of ink.” Miss Holmes carefully folded the paper. “But this makes me wonder. How does Lady Ingram manage all these notices? Surely she can’t be going every day to the papers.”

  “She can do it easily via cable. Text and money can both be wired.”

  “But that would still require her to make daily trips to the post office. A woman like her attracts attention. She can’t keep going to the same post office, and she can’t use the locations most convenient to her—her code isn’t difficult to break and she would hardly want word to get out that she’s sending desperate pleas via the papers.”

  “She can send her personal maid,” suggested Penelope. “She must have one.”

  The lady’s maid enjoyed a closer rapport with her mistress than most of the other servants, given that her services were of such a personal nature. And since she typically did not follow the lady around on her calls or errands—that was the purview of the pair of footmen matched in height, for the households that could afford them—she could act with a far greater degree of anonymity.

  “The lady’s maid she had when she first married had served Lord Ingram’s mother for many years,” pointed out Miss Holmes.

  “Hmm, that would present difficulties, if the maid feels greater loyalty to him than to her.”

  “Then again, I don’t know whether she still has the same maid. It was years ago. But in any case, does Lady Ingram strike you as the kind to trust a servant with matters that are so personal?”

  Penelope drained her glass. “Not really. But we’ve learned, haven’t we, that we don’t really know her, which makes it difficult to say what would be in character for her, and what wouldn’t be.”

  “You are right,” said Miss Holmes slowly. “At this moment we can’t say anything with certainty.”

  SATURDAY

  The table of distances was, in fact, the easier part of the deciphering. Once Charlotte settled on the length of the keyword—five letters, in this case—she still had to test each of the five positions. To test a given position, she started with T, the most commonly used letter in the English language. Working backward from that, she decoded every fifth letter in the cipher text, then recorded all the letters and their frequencies, to see whether they conformed to the relative ratio of letter usage for the English language.

  It wasn’t easy in theory and it was ten times more troublesome in practice, as this particular piece of text had noticeably fewer O’s than she would have expected, skewing the general proportions.

  But in the end she managed. The keyword was TRUTH. After punctuation had been inserted, the deciphered text read:

  MUCH THAT REMAINED IN THE ANCIENT VALLEY HAD BEEN RANSACKED BY RAIDERS IN LATER CENTURIES. THE RUINS WERE A SAD SIGHT, DECREPITUDE SANS GRANDEUR, AN INSIPID PAST THAT INSPIRED LITTLE BEYOND A GLOOMY SIGH. WE WERE GLAD AS WE DEPARTED, LEAVING BEHIND MOUNDS OF RUBBLE AND THAT GENERAL AIR OF MOURNFULNESS. ONWARD! LUCKY FOR US, OUR NEXT DESTINATION, A THOUSAND YARDS EASTWARD AS THE HAWK FLIES, WAS AS MAGNIFICENT AS THIS ONE WAS INFERIOR. THE GRANITE EDIFICE MUST HAVE BEEN A PALACE IN ITS HEYDAY AND THE TREASURES WITHIN MUST HAVE BEEN ASTONISHING. MY FRIEND, PRAY EXCUSE MY BREVITY. LET ME DIG INSTEAD AND WRITE AGAIN WHEN I HAVE UNEARTHED ARTEFACTS AND OTHER ARCHAIC GEMS.

  Her work matched with the answer that had been provided. But since no background information had been given, she had no idea what she was looking at. She could only hope there had been actual “archaic gems” involved, their worth in thousands of pounds. Otherwise the work involved in the encoding would have been a pure waste, a manifestation of paranoia rather than any true need for secrecy.

  She would have liked to take a nap—it was only eleven o’clock in the morning but she felt as if she had been awake for more than forty-eight hours. The de Blois ladies, however, had arrived for a call. Twenty minutes later, Charlotte, Mrs. Watson, Miss Redmayne, and their visitors were out in Regent’s Park for a promenade, taking advantage of clear air and bright sky after several days of intermittent drizzle.

  Mrs. Watson cast fretful glances in her direction once in a while. Charlotte had kept to her room a great deal, even taken her suppers there once or twice. And when she did appear for meals, she had been happy to let Miss Redmayne take charge of the conversation, and spoke rarely unless first spoken to.

  Mrs. Watson no doubt believed she had been preoccupied by thoughts of her half brother’s disappearance, Lord Ingram’s marriage, and the connection between the two. Certainly, from her perspective, it should be difficult for anyone to think of anything else.

  But at the moment Charlotte wasn’t thinking of those things at all.

 
The decoded text of the Vigenère cipher. Something about it compelled her to examine it more closely. This minute.

  “If you will excuse me, ladies. There is something I must attend to.” She barely remembered to shake Madame and Mademoiselle de Blois’s hands, before pivoting around for Mrs. Watson’s house.

  In her room, she took out the deciphered text again. What was it that kept scratching at the back of her head? Ah yes, the words as the hawk flies. If the author wished to convey that the place was a thousand yards distant in a straight line, then why not say as the arrow flies? Or as the crow flies, since hawks wheeled and circled, but crows were said to take the shortest path?

  Not to mention, no one measured distances in thousands of yards.

  The noticeable lack of O’s came to mind—instead of constituting around seven point five percent of the letters, the O’s in this passage accounted for just under three percent. What if hawk had been selected because the writer of the message hadn’t wished to put a word that contained the letter O at that particular point in the passage?

  She picked up a pen and underlined all sixteen of the O’s. They seemed most heavily clustered around the middle of the passage. But if there was a significance to the pattern of their distribution, it wasn’t obvious. She stared at the passage for several more minutes, then took a blank sheet of paper and copied the text, but this time all in lowercase.

  Sometimes a different perspective helped. Not this time.

  She tried various methods—it wasn’t as easy to hide a hidden message in plaintext, but it could be done. She examined the cross bars on the t’s and the dots on the i’s to see whether they formed legible Morse code. They didn’t. She looked at the punctuation marks she had added and varied them to see if they signaled anything. They signaled nothing.

  She got up and walked about the room. When that failed to trigger any fresh perspective, she went down to the kitchen. Madame Gascoigne was pulling a batch of madeleines from the oven—a treat for the ladies when they returned from their walk.