A Conspiracy in Belgravia

by Sherry Thomas

  The first book that showed unmistakable sign of having been used lately—the dust on top had been flicked off—was a volume on matrimonial law.

  He had no particular interest in law. The set of treatises had been a present—and he could recall neither the occasion nor the gift-giver. The pages were entirely uncut, except the section concerning the dissolution of marriages.

  Was that what she was up to? Had she been discreetly inquiring into a divorce?

  Nineteen

  MONDAY

  “Miss Holmes, Mrs. Hudson, what a lovely surprise.” Dr. Swanson rose and warmly shook hands with Charlotte and Mrs. Watson. “Clarissa won’t be back yet for at least another half hour—she’s at the park, taking her morning constitutional. I hope that in the meantime, my company will serve.”

  Miss Holmes smiled. “It will serve perfectly well.”

  “Shall I ring for some coffee? Mrs. Burns is at home today and we can all enjoy some of her wonderful coffee.”

  “We won’t mind at all.”

  They passed time in small talk until a maid delivered the coffee. Dr. Swanson poured ceremoniously and his callers were generous with their praise for the beverage’s aroma and flavor.

  Miss Holmes enjoyed hers with an abundance of sugar and cream. Then she set down her cup, and said, “You must forgive us, Dr. Swanson—and your daughter, too—for not having been perfectly honest with you at our previous meeting. You see, Mrs. Morris did not meet us at the ladies’ knitting circle. Instead, we made her acquaintance when she arrived on our doorstep not long ago to consult Sherlock Holmes, my brother, because she was secretly distraught, fearing that she was being poisoned in her own home.”

  Dr. Swanson blinked at the name Sherlock Holmes. He recoiled at the word poisoned. “That poor child—I had no idea she was beset to that extent. But it’s only London. Our very air is noxious. Most are inured to it, but from time to time some become unbearably sensitized to pernicious particulates that are breathed in.”

  “That isn’t what Mrs. Morris believes. She believes that Mrs. Burns intends to get rid of her so she may better pursue you.”

  Dr. Swanson gaped at her. “But that’s ridiculous. Mrs. Burns isn’t that kind of woman at all. My goodness, that view is so utterly divorced from reality I haven’t the slightest idea how to address it.”

  Miss Holmes leaned forward. “The only way you can address it is to tell Mrs. Morris the truth.”

  Dr. Swanson stared at her. “I’m—I’m afraid—”

  “You’re afraid you know exactly what I’m talking about, Doctor. Your daughter believes that your housekeeper put something in the biscuits to make her ill. But it wasn’t the biscuits, it was the coffee she drank, which you had tampered with.”

  “I didn’t put any poison in the coffee.”

  “No, you wouldn’t do that to her. But you wanted her to be unwell enough to leave London. As things stood, Mrs. Morris’s hostility might cause Mrs. Burns to hand in her resignation, and you desperately did not want that to happen.”

  Dr. Swanson swallowed.

  “Your daughter has proclaimed to us a profound distaste for tropical fruits. Sometimes people dislike something because they cannot abide the taste. Other times, it’s because they react severely to even the minutest quantity.

  “My brother considered it a possibility that she is allergic to some variety of tropical fruit. But she avoids them assiduously—avoids even dried fruits that aren’t tropical in origin. How then, would it be possible to introduce such an allergen into her diet?

  “He was puzzled until I recalled to him that in the stillroom, which you are familiar with because you used to make your own coffee, there is twine made of coir, which comes from coconuts. It shouldn’t be too difficult for you to cut—or grind up—a small quantity so that it resembles ground coffee. The stillroom isn’t very bright and in any case Mrs. Morris should have no reason to suspect anything amiss with coffee she’d ground herself only hours ago.”

  Dr. Swanson gripped the arms of his chair. “Are you—are you going to tell Clarissa?”

  “Should we not?”

  “Please, please don’t. It would devastate her. I swear to you my purpose was not to hurt her. It was as you said, I’d hoped she would leave London.”

  “You saw how she suffered, yet you still did it a second time.” Mrs. Watson could hold herself back no longer. “What kind of father are you?”

  “You must understand, after my wife died, I began to think of myself as a man near the end of his life. An old man. I lost interest in things. I stopped reading the papers. I had to force myself to reply to letters when I’d always been a prompt correspondent before.

  “And then my old housekeeper retired and Mrs. Burns came. And . . . and suddenly I felt like a young man again. Whereas before I could only see the end, now I saw a future. She is beautiful and cultured. We could attend theater and lectures together. We could travel all over the world.

  “I sold my practice so I would have more time to woo her, but she is so proper and inscrutable. Finally I thought she was warming up to me. Then Clarissa came to visit—and never left. And I began to feel quite frantic. She is a gem, Mrs. Burns. What if the tradesmen who come to the house, what if one of them wins her hand instead? And then—and then I remembered Clarissa’s allergy . . .”

  It was an old man who looked beseechingly at Miss Holmes and Mrs. Watson.

  Mrs. Watson set her jaw. “Dr. Swanson, there are two things you need to know. One, you were never going to succeed with Mrs. Burns. She has someone and is fully intent on spending the rest of her life with that someone, as soon as they both leave service.

  “Two, your daughter is not going back to her husband. Sherlock Holmes had his suspicions. Miss Holmes and I, on his instruction, visited Devonport yesterday. We learned that Captain Morris had brought another woman into his household. Mrs. Morris obviously chose not to accept such an arrangement.”

  “That—that bounder!”

  “She has not been very fortunate in the men in her life,” said Mrs. Watson acidly.

  Dr. Swanson grimaced but did not dispute her claim. “I’ll look after her. Please don’t tell her.”

  “We won’t. You are right that it would devastate her—and I’m not sure at the moment how much more devastation she can take. But we will need a signed statement from you, which will be kept in a locked box in the Bank of England. And we plan to call on her regularly to make sure she is all right.”

  Dr. Swanson swallowed but did as they demanded. It was only as they rose to leave that he asked, “So what will you tell her?”

  “You may tell her we called and told you of the results of our investigation, which is that this particular batch of coffee beans had been stored with some coconuts. You confirmed for us that she is severely allergic to coconuts, and voilà, mystery solved.”

  “I still think we should have told Mrs. Morris the truth,” said Miss Holmes, as they walked out of Dr. Swanson’s house.

  Maybe she was right. But Mrs. Watson simply couldn’t bear to do that to the poor woman. She had nowhere else to go. The truth would only make her miserable for all her days, that the father she had counted on to shelter her from the husband who betrayed her had, in the end, also betrayed her.

  “I’ll use the service entrance here,” said Mrs. Watson.

  Miss Holmes nodded, not belaboring her point. “And I’d better head for the Times to keep my appointment at the archive.”

  After she left, Mrs. Watson sighed and tried to recall the occasions when they were able to help clients without breaking anyone’s heart, including her own. She’d been afraid at times, but this sorrow felt worse than any fear.

  You silly old woman, she told herself, as she descended to the service door. It’s only because you aren’t in any danger right now.

  Actually, that wasn’t quite true. Miss
Holmes had told her of the Marbletons taking refuge at 18 Upper Baker Street—and of Mr. Finch’s confirmed connection to Moriarty. There was danger in the air—and she’d simply stopped thinking about it.

  Mrs. Burns answered the bell herself. “Mrs. Watson? What are you doing here?”

  Mrs. Watson smiled ruefully. “If you’ll offer me a cup of your excellent coffee, I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Mrs. Burns listened to the story with an increasingly incredulous expression, but she did not interrupt once.

  “So that’s that. Theoretically, this case involves only father and daughter. But I believe you should know.”

  Mrs. Burns remained silent for some more time. “I did think Mrs. Morris was a bit of an idiot, but she didn’t deserve this.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “And Dr. Swanson, I never would have guessed that he had this kind of ruthlessness to him. How disturbing.”

  “I’m glad you don’t see it as romantic.”

  “Good gracious, no. It’s selfish, pure and simple.”

  “What will you do, then?”

  “I believe I’ll look for a new place.”

  “I’m sorry. I know that isn’t what you wanted.”

  Mrs. Burns smiled. “Don’t worry about me, Mrs. Watson. I know how to look after myself.” She saw Mrs. Watson to the door. “Thank you. I’m most grateful.”

  “And I’m happy to have been of service,” said Mrs. Watson, pulling on her gloves. “By the way, the friend you mentioned earlier, did he ever go into theater?”

  “Who? Oh, young Greville? No, his sister married a rich lordship and that was the end of his hope for a Bohemian life.”

  The only way to be sure that the newspaper notices Charlotte had singled out were giving keywords to Moriarty’s ciphers was to verify them. Now that Lord Bancroft had passed on the precise date the Vigenère cipher had been sent over the telegraph lines, she was at last able to perform the test.

  But first, she must find the newspaper notice from that particular point in time. She searched on and before the date she had been given. Because that was a decade in the past, another round deciphering all the coded messages among the advertisements was required. She finally found one that, when decoded, read C 2 5 7. A similar message from a fortnight earlier, when rendered into plaintext, said H 146 6 4.

  She stared at the letters and numbers for a minute. Then she went to the proofreaders’ room and asked whether they had a copy of Shakespeare’s works on hand. As it turned out, there were two on the shelves, a modern edition and one like Livia’s, a facsimile of the first folio.

  She looked in the facsimile. Comedies, page 2, line 5, the 7th word. Earth. That was not the keyword for the Vigenère cipher she’d solved. She tried the earlier message. Histories, page 146, line 6, the 4th word. Wizard. No, not that either.

  Was she completely wrong?

  Her theory was that almost all communications from Moriarty to his minions—and among the minions themselves—were in code. Such a practice had its advantages but also its share of drawbacks. The same cipher, used too often, became easy for others to catch on to. And when there were defectors, they could give away the secret wholesale.

  The solution, then, was to choose a highly sophisticated cipher, and then frequently change the keyword by which the plaintext would be encoded. Which presented problems of its own: Namely, how to broadcast the new keyword in such a way that everyone in the organization learned of it at roughly the same time.

  The newspaper took care of the dissemination. But those on the receiving end of the notices still needed a common reference, something that wouldn’t be too difficult for them to find. The Holy Bible. Encyclopedia Britannica. Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, otherwise known as the First Folio.

  Should a defection happen, those in charge simply changed the book of reference. The defectors could still catch the notices in the paper, but they would be quite at sea as to what the new keywords were.

  A complete system. A workable system. And if she were Moriarty, viewing it through the twin lens of paranoia and self-admiration, a near-perfect system.

  Then why was this not that system?

  She smacked herself on the forehead, attracting a bewildered and somewhat disapproving look from the nearest proofreader. Of course, even the most meticulously designed system was prone to human error. What if there had been a mistake on the part of the minion who was supposed to post the clue in the papers? What if some misfortune or inattention had caused a delay in the posting of the linchpin to the ciphers?

  She returned to the archive and searched the copies of the Times published subsequent to the sending of the Vigenère cipher diagram. A notice dated two days later deciphered to read T 44 7 9.

  Page 44 of the tragedies brought her to Titus Andronicus. She moved her index finger down to line 7. The ninth and final word on the line was . . . truth.

  And that, indeed, was the keyword to the Vigenère cipher.

  When Miss Holmes arrived home an hour after luncheon, Mrs. Watson leaped to brief her on what she had learned. “Mrs. Burns worked in Lady Ingram’s household—well, her parents’ household to be exact, during the time they lived in Oxford.”

  Miss Holmes paused only minutely in the removal of her hat. “I must head out soon after tea, ma’am. Will you mind telling me the rest while we practice canne de combat?”

  Mrs. Watson was taken aback. She and Penelope usually had to remind Miss Holmes, who preferred to remain seated, that she must take the time to hone her self-defense skills. This marked the first time Miss Holmes had taken the initiative.

  “Of course.”

  They changed and met in the gymnasium, where Mrs. Watson put Miss Holmes through the usual opening exercises.

  “Come at me a little harder,” said Miss Holmes. “And please continue with what you learned from Mrs. Burns.”

  Mrs. Watson swung her walking stick with greater force. Miss Holmes staggered.

  “Oh, come. Don’t let an old lady overpower you. Now where was I? Ah yes. Mrs. Burns had been working for Lady Ingram’s mother’s cousin at the time. The cousin had plans of going abroad for six months with her sisters and they didn’t want to take more than one maid, so Mrs. Burns was loaned to Mrs. Greville as a favor, since the Grevilles didn’t take their own staff with them to Oxford—didn’t want it getting out that they were living in relative squalor nearby, rather than off on a grand tour in Europe.”

  Miss Holmes parried strongly and ducked under Mrs. Watson’s next swing with a flash of agility that Mrs. Watson didn’t normally associate with the young woman. “Good! Move those feet!”

  “I move my feet. It’s the rest of me that doesn’t follow soon enough.”

  “So there Mrs. Burns was, in that odd household.” Mrs. Watson went back to her account. “The boys should have been in school but there was no money for it. Their father taught them as best as he could, but he’d forgotten most of his Latin and Greek. She said the boys were ignorant. The younger one didn’t care, but the elder one felt bad about it.”

  “And their sister? You must have asked Mrs. Burns about her.”

  “Mrs. Burns said that her main impression of Lady Ingram at that age was one of frustration.” Mrs. Watson hesitated a moment, almost exposing her weapon arm to Miss Holmes’s attack—the girl might be inexperienced, but she knew how to spot an opportunity. She barely sidestepped Miss Holmes’s stick. “A frustration that approached rage, at times.”

  “Lady Ingram would have been about sixteen or seventeen at the time?”

  “Seventeen, I think. It was the winter of that year.”

  Miss Holmes darted to the side and pushed off against the wall to avoid being backed into a corner. “When I learned that my father’s first fiancée had jilted him for having sired a child out of wedlock, I thought that fath
ering an illegitimate son in and of itself had been the cause of that rejection—even though most men are not held particularly accountable for such mishaps. It was only later that I realized what must have happened—that he had impregnated a servant while he was courting Lady Amelia Drummond and she rejected him for his faithlessness.

  “Given that he married my mother on the day he was originally supposed to marry Lady Amelia—Mr. Finch is at most a year older than Henrietta, my eldest sister. Which would have made him around twenty-three that winter.”

  Two young people, both hemmed in by their circumstances. “Do you think Lady Ingram was frustrated because she couldn’t be with Mr. Finch?” asked Mrs. Watson. “And do you think Mr. Finch allowed himself to be recruited by Moriarty because of the frustration of not being able to marry Lady Ingram?”

  “I don’t know when Mr. Finch decided to throw in his lot with Moriarty. Stephen Marbleton wasn’t privy to that information.”

  Miss Holmes lurched to the left, but not fast enough. Mrs. Watson’s stick connected with her upper arm. Miss Holmes winced.

  “You are tiring again, my dear. You need to develop stamina—which will only happen by devoting more time to exercise.” The more mischievous part of Mrs. Watson’s mind wondered whether she couldn’t stick out a foot and trip the young woman, but the more compassionate side decided that before she did so, she must add some paddings around the room. “Have you noticed, by the way, that in recent years, there has been an undercurrent of anger to Lady Ingram—which hadn’t been there when she first came onto the scene?”

  “There’s always been an undercurrent of anger to Lady Ingram—just as there has always been one to my sister Livia. Except that Lady Ingram disguised hers far better.”

  Miss Holmes threw up a hand to indicate that she needed a breather. She leaned against the wall, her shoulders drooping. “By the way, ma’am, would you happen to have a weighted parasol—or something similar to that?”