A Conspiracy in Belgravia

by Sherry Thomas

  “How can you guarantee his safety? You can’t even guarantee your own.”

  “And yet we are still alive, still more or less in one piece, after years of being wanted by Moriarty. Who else is better positioned to help him keep body and soul together?”

  That much might be true. Mr. Hayward-cum-Jenkins certainly hadn’t been able to live as long after quitting Moriarty’s service.

  “Speaking of keeping body and soul together . . . what happened to Miss Marbleton?”

  “We went back to my place tonight at Mrs. Woods’s. After your midnight visit, her first thought was that it was Mr. Finch. She sent me a cable the next day. As she was trying to slip back into the house, she saw you speaking with Mrs. Woods. Since it was only you, we didn’t think there would be that much danger in going back. In fact, our main concern was to avoid being seen by Mrs. Woods.

  “We wouldn’t have anticipated the ambush at all. Fortunately, Dr. Vickery arrived home from an evening out and entered his room while we were waiting in the service stairs for the passage to clear. That was when we saw our door open and close from the inside.

  “We still thought most likely it was either you or Mr. Finch. But at least our guard was up . . . Long story short, we were able to shake our pursuers loose, eventually.”

  “You are sure about that?”

  “It happens to be our specialty.”

  She certainly hoped so, since they were already on Mrs. Watson’s property. “Why did you come here, then?”

  “I saw the letter my mother wrote you, toward the end of the Sackville affair. She is an excellent judge of character. If she trusts you, then I can trust you, too.”

  “You weren’t concerned that this place might be watched?”

  “Tonight Moriarty’s minions are watching the railway terminuses, since they expect us to flee.”

  “I take this to mean that you’ve been to a railway terminus and found it under surveillance.”

  “Precisely. Besides, I wanted to ask you a question.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why are you looking for Mr. Finch?”

  “I sought him on behalf of a client, an old friend of Mr. Finch’s with whom he had a standing appointment.”

  Mr. Marbleton raised a brow. “Who’s the client?”

  “I’m not at liberty to disclose that information.”

  “And the client doesn’t know you are related to him?”

  “That I can’t be one hundred percent sure. Did Mrs. Marbleton know that Sherlock Holmes was related to Myron Finch when she came to see me?”

  “She called on you for a completely different matter.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “No, we didn’t know. But afterward, when we learned of the connection, we were certain you weren’t harboring him, at least not here, as we’d checked the place top to bottom. And it would be demented to hide him at Mrs. Watson’s, when you have an empty house here.”

  Charlotte nodded, checked on the tea that had been steeping inside the teapot, and poured him a cup. “You have one more question, don’t you?”

  He looked at her a minute. “I suppose I do. Is your sister well?”

  “How many times did you meet with her?”

  He added sugar to his tea. “Thrice.”

  “More than necessary.”

  Did he color a little? “Perhaps. Is she well?”

  “Life is not easy for Livia—it has never been. She is an intelligent, discerning woman who believes her intelligence and discernment to be of no value.”

  “You must have felt the pressure to believe the same.”

  “Not at all. It took me a great deal of effort to understand that such pressure exists—I am not sensitive to the opinions of others, individually or as a collective. But Livia is. She is excruciatingly aware of what she is expected to be and how different that is from who she is. Not for a moment does she not feel her shortcomings.”

  Stephen Marbleton took a sip of his tea—he held the cup with both hands, as if he were feeling cold. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “So that you understand she is fragile, if you do not already realize that. She will not perish from a little flirtation, but she will suffer.”

  “Are you warning me away from her?”

  “No, but it behooves me to point out the likely consequences, so that should you choose to proceed, you do so in full awareness of them.”

  She rose. “You must be weary. I will see myself out.”

  Eighteen

  SATURDAY

  Charlotte rose early, took a basket of foodstuff from the kitchen, and called on 18 Upper Baker Street. She wasn’t surprised to see her uninvited guests gone, but she was rather impressed at how neat and untouched the place looked.

  A note had been tucked under Sherlock’s pillow.

  Thank you for your hospitality. We hope to meet again under more auspicious circumstances.

  The day Charlotte learned that the woman who had watched Mrs. Watson’s front door had cabled a biblical verse to be advertised in the paper, she had sent in a request to consult the archives of the Times. The permission had at last been granted.

  She had expected the place to be thunderously loud. But the printing presses weren’t in use at the moment and the offices of the paper, while bustling, were far quieter than a drawing room on the night of a dinner party.

  A large, well-lit editorial room anchored the entire operation, with a sizable oak table at the center and smaller desks arranged along the walls, furnished with every tool and implement to facilitate the act of writing. Next to the editorial room, according to the clerk who led the way, was the editors’ dining room.

  The archive, just down the passage from the dining room, held every edition of the Times since the paper’s inception. Charlotte was given brief instructions and then left to browse.

  She had assumed the biblical verses would appear weekly. Instead it was three times a month, always on the same dates. She checked the papers from three years ago, but the verses weren’t there. When she looked carefully, however, she found a weekly cipher that decoded into a roman numeral, followed by a number. VIII, 260, XI, 81, XIV, 447, and so on.

  They did not appear to be referring to the Bible. Charlotte got up and walked into the next room, where a dozen proofreaders were working, surrounded by hundreds of dictionaries and encyclopedias. She located the Encyclopedia Britannica, volume 8, page 260. The entry was England.

  The other ciphers also each yielded an entry—if that was what they signified.

  But what was the point of all this?

  She thought for some time, then took herself to the house on Portman Square and left Lord Bancroft a note.

  When, exactly, was the Vigenère cipher you gave me sent as a telegram? The information will be much appreciated.

  Mrs. Burns, true to her word, was back at the soup kitchen, peeling carrots. Mrs. Watson tied on an apron and attacked a pile of vegetable marrows.

  “Sometimes we have other ladies coming in here to help. But they’re finicky. Don’t want to do anything too dirty, heavy, or hot. You’re all right, Mrs. Watson,” said Mrs. Burns, after almost an hour had passed.

  Mrs. Watson laughed. “That’s probably because I’m no lady, Mrs. Burns. I was a musical theater performer. Even if I married a duke, actual ladies would turn their noses up at me.”

  Mrs. Burns stopped what she was doing. “You aren’t making fun of me, are you?”

  “If I wanted to make fun of you, Mrs. Burns, I’d be telling you how respectable I was, instead of the other way around.”

  “So you were really on stage, singing and dancing?”

  “As described.”

  “And gentlemen on their knees at your stage door, begging for your favors?”

  Mrs. Watson laughed again. “N
ot on their knees. But yes, there were a few gentlemen here and there who wanted introductions and whatnot.”

  “Whatnot, eh?”

  “Oh, you know it.”

  Mrs. Burns raised a brow, but her expression was delighted, rather than scandalized. “I hope you had the pick of the litter.”

  “I had my way of managing that aspect of the business,” Mrs. Watson said modestly.

  Mrs. Burns shook her head and resumed peeling. “Never thought I’d meet an actress at the soup kitchen.”

  “I’ve run into old acquaintances in bookshops, railway stations, and once while walking in the Pennine hills. We aren’t that rare—especially not in London.”

  Mrs. Burns shook her head a little more. Then she looked at Mrs. Watson and said, “I was always interested in the theater. Not in appearing on stage, mind you—wouldn’t want all those strangers staring at me. But it’d be . . . freeing, wouldn’t it, to be in a place where everybody is, well, I don’t know how to say it without giving offense, but—”

  “Where nobody is, strictly speaking, all that respectable,” Mrs. Watson finished for her, smiling.

  “And therefore respect has to be earned, because everyone starts on the same footing.”

  “If you are looking for an egalitarian profession, I’m not sure the theater is your answer. And the amount of jostling for position is as fierce as anything you see in Society at the height of the Season. But I liked it. There’s a certain magic to performing and you can achieve great camaraderie, even if there’s plenty of ugly madness, too.”

  Rather like life itself.

  Mrs. Burns didn’t reply. In the kitchen, knives thudded on chopping boards and steam hissed from kettles.

  Mrs. Watson thought Mrs. Burns’s curiosity had been exhausted until the latter said, “Part of the reason I keep thinking of the theater from time to time is because of someone I used to know. He’s, well, of a particular persuasion, as they say.”

  “You mean, his romantic interest lies not with women.”

  “Yes, that persuasion. He had half a mind to join the theater—thought they wouldn’t be so repelled by his kind there.”

  “He’s not altogether wrong. There are more of his kind in the theater than in the general population, I’d say. He’d have found it less lonely—and less dangerous. But that isn’t to say he would have been treated well by everyone, or that stagehands wouldn’t call him ugly names or make crude gestures when he walked by in his costume.”

  “No utopias anywhere, eh?”

  “I’m afraid not. This is all we’ve got.” Mrs. Watson let a beat pass. “And you, Mrs. Burns, I don’t mean to be forward, but you’re a beautiful woman. Has there ever been trouble for you in service?”

  Mrs. Burns shrugged. “Frankly, I don’t think it matters whether a woman is all that good-looking when it comes to these things. A man doesn’t suddenly decide, in front of a beautiful woman, that it’s his due to have his hand up her skirt. If he’s that kind, maybe he’s more likely to do it when the woman is pretty. But even if she weren’t, he’d have done it anyway to please himself.”

  A good answer, but not the one Mrs. Watson was looking for. “No trouble on that front with your master, I hope?”

  “No, he’s all right, Dr. Swanson. Talks more than I need him to, but he’s all right.”

  “What if he falls in love with you someday and comes with a marriage proposal?”

  Mrs. Burns chortled. “Oh, there’s a thought. If he does that, I’ll tell him I prefer looking after him for money to looking after him for free.”

  “Surely there must be other advantages to being a prosperous physician’s wife. You can lord over that annoying daughter of his, for one thing.”

  “Tempting, but not tempting enough—I’d rather not see her face at all. Besides, I’ve got someone.” Mrs. Burns leaned in. “Her name is Gabrielle—she works for a rich widow with three daughters who want to be countesses. And one of these days we are going to retire to the south of France together.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Watson. “So the poor doctor has never had a chance.”

  Mrs. Burns chortled again. “Now if he were a duke, maybe I’d have considered. I know duchesses go around and take lovers. But a doctor is going to expect me to be all prim and proper. Mind you, I am. There’s never been anyone for me except Gabrielle, but old Dr. Swanson would have an apoplectic attack if I told him I’d rather sleep with her than him.”

  “Or he might ask to join you. You never know.”

  Mrs. Burns gaped at Mrs. Watson before breaking into giggles. They laughed together for a minute, then started on a basket of potatoes.

  “Hmm, the plot thickens—or does it thin?” asked Penelope. Her aunt was taking a nap and Miss Holmes had given a concise account of what Aunt Jo had learned at the soup kitchen—never a dull moment in the Sherlock Holmes business. “If Mrs. Burns isn’t the least bit interested in Dr. Swanson, then was Mrs. Morris deluding herself after all?”

  “She hasn’t complained about her health since she first came to me,” said Miss Holmes. “On each of the subsequent occasions we met, she appeared to be in robust shape and glad for it.”

  “So what do you plan to do?”

  “I’ll call on Mrs. Morris again and ask a few more questions.”

  Penelope shook her head, relieved it wasn’t her problem. They spoke a bit about the de Blois ladies, who had already sent two postcards from their travels. Then Penelope decided she’d put in enough small talk.

  “Do you really carry suspicions concerning Lord Ingram, Miss Holmes?”

  Miss Holmes’s face was Madonna-like in its serenity. “Not particularly.”

  “But yesterday you told Aunt Jo that you thought it was possible that the man asking around after Mr. Finch could be him.”

  “It could still be someone he sent.”

  “Surely you don’t think he did away with Mr. Finch?”

  “I don’t. But how can I be certain that he hadn’t tried to learn everything he could?”

  Penelope tried to imagine Lord Ingram skulking about, secretly gathering information on Lady Ingram’s former swain. She couldn’t—but like Miss Holmes, neither could she completely dismiss that possibility. He might not love Lady Ingram anymore, but she was still his wife and the mother of his children. Who, except the person in those shoes, could be certain of what he had or hadn’t done?

  “My father considers himself a clever man,” Miss Holmes went on, “and he believes my mother to be of mediocre intelligence. So he signaled his affairs to her in some subtle way. But as far as I can tell, she always knew well before he bothered to send those signals.

  “A household can hide many secrets. But Lord Ingram is observant. Perhaps Lady Ingram has been able to conceal everything from him before this summer. But given her frenzy of activity in the wake of Mr. Finch’s disappearance, it’s not outlandish to suppose he has some idea that all is not well.”

  “But that man we are talking about—the one you think Lord Ingram could have sent—he visited Mr. Finch’s village a month ago. And Mr. Finch’s disappearance was more recent than that.”

  “Lady Ingram is not to be entirely trusted on her version of events. She said she knew nothing about where to find Mr. Finch. But her visit to my father’s solicitor showed that she knew more than she told us. If she lied about one aspect of the case, she could very well have lied about other aspects, too.”

  Penelope sighed. “I wish I could be sure Lord Ingram wasn’t involved.”

  “And he may not be—not actively in any case. But no matter what, if his wife is involved, then he, too, cannot escape entanglement.”

  Telltale signs of disappointment must have crossed Penelope’s face, for Miss Holmes said, very charitably, “Miss Redmayne, I have a medical question. Do you think you might be able to help me?”

  It had
been years since Lord Ingram had last stepped into his wife’s bedroom in their town house. There had been changes—the new clock on the mantel, two small seascapes he didn’t remember being there earlier. But overall, the room felt so familiar, he almost expected to meet her gaze in the vanity mirror as she brushed her beautiful hair, a delighted smile on her face.

  No, the delighted smiles were from earlier in their marriage. The last time he had stepped into this room, she had smiled, but the smile had been perfunctory, almost forced.

  He had wished to make love to her, hoping that physical closeness could bridge the distance that stretched between them, a distance that he could not close, no matter what he did. But in the end, he left after saying good night and little else, so unwelcome had he felt in her private space.

  The next week his godfather had passed away unexpectedly. And he had told her that he had inherited only a five-hundred-pound annuity, rather than the fortune that was in his godfather’s will. And she had flown into a rage. She had married him because of the expectation he would be a very wealthy man, she’d shouted, and now she had married him for nothing. Now her children had Jewish blood for nothing.

  At first he was encouraged by her anger—anger was solid, anger was real, anger was something he could investigate and find out more about. Anything was better than the polite remoteness that made him despair.

  What she’d actually said took minutes, hours, days to sink in.

  To become real.

  They’d never spoken again, except by necessity.

  Why, then, was he here, in her room?

  His action was the answer he was reluctant to put into words. Half ashamed yet inexplicably compelled, he searched the room with a thoroughness that should be reserved only for those suspected of selling the crown’s secrets.

  When her room yielded nothing, he searched his study, which he knew she sometimes used when he wasn’t home. When that turned up no clues—alas that typewriter ribbons did not retain a legible record of the text last prepared on them—he looked carefully at his collection of books. The maids did dust the books regularly, but it was not part of their daily routine, and it should be possible to tell whether any given volume had been recently taken off the shelves.