She drew an oval, which was the actual shape of the Round Pond. “So here you are at its eastern edge. Where is the bench Mr. Finch took?”
Livia put her finger where she estimated the spot to be. “Ten paces away.”
“On the north side of the pond, facing south?”
“Yes.”
“You are sure?”
Livia nodded. Unfortunately, she knew exactly where he had been sitting.
“And you said Lady Ingram, her children, and their governess were coming from the south?”
“Yes.”
Miss Redmayne made a small, sharp sound, as if she’d sucked in an abrupt breath.
“How did Lady Ingram look, by the way, when you saw her?”
Livia shrugged. “How she usually appears these days. Beautiful and rather aloof, I’d say.”
“She didn’t look weary or unhappy or . . . surprised?”
“Not that it was apparent.”
“Did she see you?”
“She nodded at us. Very regally.”
“And how closely did she pass by you?”
“Fifteen, twenty feet, thereabout.”
Charlotte closed her notebook. Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Charlotte blew out the pocket lantern and murmured, “A difficult couple of days for you?”
The gentleness of her voice . . . Livia wanted to burst into tears. Oh, you have no idea!
She had elided over her encounter with Mr. Finch as much as possible. In reality, he hadn’t immediately confessed that he was her brother—she hadn’t wanted to begin their conversation with all the serious questions. Instead, they had spoken for a good quarter of an hour in great animation, laughing together more often than not, and she had been walking six inches off the ground.
Or perhaps it had been six miles. For the crash to earth had shattered everything.
“It was shocking, that was all,” Livia managed, grateful for the darkness that followed the extinction of the lantern’s small flicker.
She reached for the door. Charlotte put a hand on her sleeve but didn’t say anything.
After a moment, she let go.
Thirteen
WEDNESDAY
It was already raining by the time Charlotte reached Kensington Gardens, the sky heavy, the gust cold—another English summer day. Charlotte, in Mrs. Watson’s first-rate mackintosh and rubber boots, felt as water-repellent as a duck, marching past those trying to hold open their umbrellas against a wind that changed direction every two seconds.
She arrived at a Round Pond that was largely empty, except for a nanny as well equipped as she and a boy who looked to be the sort to regard a day stuck inside as divine punishment.
Up close, Round Pond possessed the shape of an ovoid mirror with a somewhat ornate frame. At the eastern end, a straight edge roughly one third of the width of the pond met the grassy avenue that gave onto Long Water, a quarter mile away. A bench sat at either end of this straight edge, where the banks of the pond began to curve again.
Charlotte placed herself behind the bench to the north, where Mr. Finch had sat. Farther away there were trees, but the pond was situated in the middle of a clearing, surrounded by manicured lawns that did not in the least impede the view.
Given the distances Livia had described, it was extremely difficult to imagine how Lady Ingram and Mr. Finch had not seen each other. Mr. Finch would have been looking south toward Livia, and Lady Ingram would have been headed northeast and—
Unless their line of sight had been blocked by Livia, Lady Avery, and Lady Somersby and their parasols?
Unlikely, but not impossible. And Mr. Finch wouldn’t have been staring in Livia’s direction all the time, as he wouldn’t have wanted her to think of him as rude or potentially dangerous.
Not impossible, but at some point, the likelihood of a scenario approached so close to zero that it merited no further consideration.
They had seen each other.
Then what? They were in public. Lady Ingram had her children and their governess with her. And even if she could order the governess to take the children home, she couldn’t possibly have approached Mr. Finch then and there, not with the two most infamous Society gossips standing nearby.
Was that what had motivated her subsequent note, practically begging for his address? Because the sight of him had sent her into an inward frenzy and those chaotic emotions would not stop wreaking havoc until they had a proper face-to-face?
And Mr. Finch, what had been his reaction? It seemed not to have affected his encounter with Livia. But the next evening he had left town abruptly. Could his departure have been a result of his seeing Lady Ingram? A guilty conscience after all?
What about Lord Ingram? Where had he been? Sunday afternoons he was usually the one taking the children out for small expeditions. Was he still away on the crown’s business, risking life and limb for queen and country while his wife accidentally encountered the only man she’d ever loved?
She must stop bringing Lord Ingram into her deliberations, Charlotte thought. Her reasoning was still valid. What could he do even if he knew? Forbid civilized contact between Lady Ingram and a friend of long standing?
He could despise you, pointed out the part of her that did, from time to time, take human emotions into consideration.
And that, in essence, was her problem.
After leaving the Round Pond, Charlotte stopped by the newspaper office. She had a note that she wanted to place in the papers, or at least, in the one to which her parents subscribed.
CDAQKHUHAAQDYNTVDKKJSGHMJNEYNT
It was a simple cipher that she and Livia had devised together when they were little girls, which consisted of replacing the letter B with the letter X and pushing all the other letters down a place. They called it the Cdaq Khuha, for Dear Livia.
DEARLIVIAAREYOUWELLITHINKOFYOU
Livia had not been well the night before. She had been on the edge of hysteria, clutching white-knuckled on to her composure. Public gatherings tried her. Under the current circumstances, they tried her even more. But that she was at a ball where she was having no fun wasn’t enough to account for her jagged distress.
Even an encounter with their illegitimate brother ought not have affected her that much.
“There you go, miss.” The clerk came back with a receipt. “Your message will be in the papers tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” said Charlotte. “And can you tell me, if I wish to put a notice in the paper without coming in person, how that can be achieved?”
“You can write or cable us with your message, the dates you want it to run, and send a postal order with the correct fee. As simple as that.”
“If I wish to put a different notice every day, should I write daily then?”
“I wouldn’t advise it. Then every day you’d need to pay poundage on a different postal order, wouldn’t you? Better to send in all your messages at once.”
“But what if I don’t know what I wish to say ahead of time?”
The clerk regarded her quizzically. “Then you must do as you see fit, miss.”
“Is there anyone who does that in practice? Send in a different notice daily?”
“No.” The clerk shook his head decisively.
She supposed submitting notices in batches made sense in Lady Ingram’s case. She wouldn’t miss the pennies for extra poundage, but it would be easier for her to manage the deployment of messages if she did so once or twice a week, instead of every day.
Charlotte pulled out her pocket watch, a man’s watch; watches made for women, though prettier, tended not to keep very good time. A quarter past nine. A lady made or received calls in the afternoon. During the Season there were also plenty of other functions—at-home teas, rowing parties, drives in the park—to keep her post meridiem hours scheduled to the minute.
But she
had some time in the morning.
The two most recent notes from Lady Ingram had not been sent by courier but from the Charing Cross Post Office. A sensible place, as she could call for letters there, too. And if she had recognized Mr. Finch but was unable to speak to him because the place had been too public, wouldn’t she be calling for letters at every opportunity, in case Sherlock Holmes decided to part with Mr. Finch’s address after all?
Luckily for Charlotte, there was a tea shop diagonally across the street from the post office. She took a position by the window. Her view of the post office door was partially blocked by a hapless sandwich board man trudging back and forth in the rain, advertising hair pomade. Still, a good enough vantage point, better than standing on the drenched street—or attempting to loiter inside the post office.
Surveillance was boring work. And surveilling Lady Ingram made no sense, unless one was prepared to accept the very damaging theory that she didn’t actually know Mr. Finch at all. Charlotte was eminently prepared to accept any theory that fit all the facts, even the seemingly preposterous ones.
But if she didn’t know Mr. Finch, why would Lady Ingram be looking into his whereabouts? For that Charlotte had no good, or even halfway coherent, guesses. But first, she must see for herself whether Lady Ingram was truly upset, when she wasn’t in front of Sherlock Holmes’s representatives.
She asked for a fresh cup of tea and slowly took another bite of her crumpets. Even for someone with her robust appetite, limits existed as to how much she could ingest in one sitting. She was approaching those limits. Not to mention, the chair was rather uncomfortable. And she was beginning to long for a trip to the water closet.
She blinked. She recognized the person passing in front of the window: not Lady Ingram, but the woman pointed out by Lord Ingram as the one watching Mrs. Watson’s house, the day they stumbled across the murder in Hounslow.
Should she follow the woman? Goodness knew she didn’t have much experience in these things. And unlike the previous time she performed surveillance—at Claridge’s trying to spy on the Marbletons in the middle of l’affaire Sackville—she didn’t have a widow’s veil on hand to keep her identity hidden.
The woman went into the post office.
On the other hand, Charlotte had Mrs. Watson’s mackintosh, which she wouldn’t be obliged to remove in the post office. And in order to fit under the raincoat’s hood, she had worn a hat so small and undecorated it was practically nonexistent.
Not to mention, she did have a letter to Livia in her handbag.
She exhaled, left money on her table, and hurried out. It took longer than she wanted to cross the street, but her luck held at the post office: The woman, standing before the counter, had her back to the door. Charlotte slid over to the stand where telegram forms had been placed for the patrons’ convenience and pretended to compose a cable.
A clerk returned from the sorting room and handed a letter to the woman. The woman left the counter and went to the form stand across the room from Charlotte. Charlotte continued to doodle lightly on her form.
The woman finished with hers and approached the next available clerk. Charlotte couldn’t hear what she said, but she did hear the clerk’s reply, asking for a shilling and two pennies. She was purchasing a telegram. The cost of telegrams had been reduced the year before. It was now sixpence for the first six words, and one penny for each two additional words. The woman had bought a maximum of twenty-four words.
A bit long for a cable, though not extraordinarily so.
Charlotte waited until the woman left before hurrying over to the stand where she had written out the text of her cable. The surface of the stand was not in terribly good shape. The wood had become pitted and grooved. The woman would have put her form on top of a few other forms, so that her pencil didn’t poke through the paper.
Ah, here it was, the form that had been directly under hers.
Alas, it was difficult to make sense of the faint indentations on the paper. She went outside, where the light was stronger. Still she could only be sure of two words, the Lord.
Charlotte wasted no time before queuing up to the window where the woman had sent her cable. When it was her turn, she said, with some anxiety, “I do apologize, sir, but my aunt thinks she might have made a mistake in the cable she sent just now. She sent it to the Illustrated London News, but she actually meant to send it to the Times instead.”
“If you are speaking of the woman who sent the cable for a shilling and two pennies, you may rest easy, miss. She did send it to the Times.”
“Oh, wonderful. My goodness, you wouldn’t believe how panic-stricken she was—she was too embarrassed to come and check herself.”
“That isn’t a problem at all, miss.”
“Just to be sure, we are speaking of the one with the biblical verse, yes?”
“Yes, miss.”
“Thank you. You’ve been so helpful.”
She turned around, only to see someone else she recognized: Mott, the Holmes groom who had been instrumental in getting Livia and Charlotte’s letters to each other. And she was right about his nearsightedness: He wore a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.
This was her day for unexpectedly running into people she didn’t mind coming across. Mott appeared equally astonished at the sight of her but did not need her to gesture a second time to meet her at the telegram form stand, putting away his specs as he did so.
“Do you have anything from my sister for me?”
“No, Miss Holmes. I’m just here to see whether there’s anything for her from you.”
“There is, but I haven’t put it in the post yet.” She pulled the letter from her handbag and gave it to him. “She can use the stamp.”
“I’ll give it to her.”
“How is she?”
“She is . . . carrying on,” said Mott, rather diplomatically.
“And Miss Bernadine?”
“She I don’t see. And I don’t hear much about her. I can ask for you, next time I’m in the servants’ hall.”
“Will you do that? Thank you.”
She gave him some money for his trouble, walked out of the post office, and returned to the tea shop.
She saw Mott again, leaving a few minutes later, hunched under his mackintosh. But she did not see Lady Ingram, not then, and not for the remainder of the hours she spent at the tea shop, staring out.
Charlotte arrived at Mrs. Watson’s house shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon—and for the first time in her life believed that she not only didn’t need lunch, but could also do without tea.
She climbed up to her room, closed the door, and sat down heavily before her writing desk. From the beginning she had believed there was something wrong with the state of affairs between Lady Ingram and Mr. Finch. Now, everything felt wrong.
The purely logical part of her wanted to investigate both Lady Ingram and Mr. Finch equally. In practice, she must concentrate on Mr. Finch. He was the unknown entity, the one who kept eluding her, the key to making sense of all the incongruities of the situation.
The evening before, when Miss Redmayne asked what she planned to do, she had said that she wanted to take a look at Mr. Finch’s room. Now she needed to examine Mr. Finch’s room. She needed to understand exactly what was going on.
Perhaps a bit of Lady Ingram’s hysteria was rubbing off on her. Or perhaps it was some of Livia’s wretchedness. An urgency escalated in her that had no rational basis—yet felt all the direr and most ominous.
She found Mrs. Watson in the afternoon parlor, reading the paper. “Ma’am, did you mean to tell me last night that Mr. Lawson was once an expert lock picker?”
Mrs. Watson rose, the paper clutched in her hands. “Surely, Miss Holmes, you don’t mean to—”
“I do,” she said quietly. “Every time we learn anything about Mr. Finch, it only serves to make
the situation more incomprehensible. I don’t wish to proceed piecemeal any longer. The time has come to find out the truth.”
Fear darkened Mrs. Watson’s beautiful eyes. Her jaw worked. The paper crinkled under the pressure of her fingers. And then she squared her shoulders and said, “It isn’t what I would have advised or wished for, but I’ve grown more and more uneasy, too—my innards feel like a spring that’s been wound up too tight. If you are sure it can be done safely . . .”
“I can’t make any promise about the risks—I know nothing of such things. All I know is I fear picking Mr. Finch’s lock a great deal less than what I might learn next if I didn’t.”
Mrs. Watson exhaled audibly and tossed aside the crumpled newspaper. “Then let’s not waste any more time.”
Mrs. Watson took it upon herself to speak with Mr. Lawson, Charlotte in tow. The groom and coachman had a healthy fear of going back to prison again. But when Mrs. Watson mentioned the amount of the reward she was offering, in exchange for the risks he would take, his eyes widened and his decision was made. He asked for exactly the types of locks they were to encounter, then asked for the rest of the day to prepare. “Haven’t done anything illegal in years—not even betting, mind you, mum.”
Charlotte spent the remainder of her afternoon acquiring an outfit, in a shade of dark blue-grey, that allowed her to move freely—no fashionable narrowing of the skirts at the knees.
At dusk, the rain stopped, but a peasouper rolled in, turning London into a sea of vapors. Charlotte took this as an auspicious sign: A peasouper would keep both pedestrians and carriages off the streets and send people to bed early.
She and Mr. Lawson left Mrs. Watson’s shortly after midnight, driven by Mr. Mears, who would also serve as their lookout, even though one was scarcely needed under the current atmospheric conditions. At Mrs. Woods’s, Charlotte guided Mr. Lawson to the service door, which he opened after a quarter of an hour.
The basement was dark and quiet, the service stairs equally so. Charlotte felt completely unafraid—she had not lied when she told Mrs. Watson that she didn’t fear picking Mr. Finch’s lock. Certainly it was a great deal more criminal, but in essence the act was no different from stealing into her father’s study when he was away.
A Conspiracy in Belgravia Page 19
