A Conspiracy in Belgravia

by Sherry Thomas

  He gazed at her. “Did you know who she was before you agreed to see her?”

  She exhaled. “Yes.”

  “I thought so,” he said softly, almost inaudibly. Amazing how such quietly uttered syllables could contain so much condemnation. “Go on.”

  And from there, he did not say another word for the next hour.

  When he did speak again, after a silence that lasted twice the duration of the Hundred Years’ War, it was only to tell her, “I never thought I’d say this, Charlotte Holmes—or even think it. But I wish to God I’d never met you.”

  Charlotte hadn’t lied about it being a busy day. After Lord Ingram had gone, she traveled by rail to Oxford and called on Mr. Finch’s old boarding school, an establishment with no national renown but a modicum of local prestige.

  Since her visit to the Glossops’ the previous week, she had been corresponding with Mr. Finch’s old boarding school. As pretext, she concocted a ladies’ charitable society where several of the most admired matrons had sons who attended the school and had been on the cricket team together. The society wished to publish an article about the team’s accomplishments in its newsletter, as a surprise to the matrons. Could she, the one responsible for writing the piece, come and see what photographs the school might have?

  The response had been unequivocal: Yes, of course. We would be delighted to share our archival images.

  And now more than a hundred boys clad in frock coats and striped trousers gazed solemnly at her, from a decade and a half ago. “That was Jones,” said the headmaster sadly, pointing his finger at one particular boy. “I remember him, Archibald Jones. One of the best batsmen in the history of the school. A shame his father didn’t want to further educate him. He would have excelled on many a college team—perhaps even a university one.”

  Charlotte was busy scanning the tiny print at the bottom of the photograph, listing the names of the boys. There it was, M. H. Finch. Fourth row, ninth from the left. But before she could find him in the throng, the headmaster thrust another picture at her.

  “Here’s another one of Jones, the year he captained the school team.”

  Eleven boys in the team photograph and one face immediately leaped out at Charlotte. There were no names at the bottom. She turned it around. On the back was written in pencil, Standing, L to R, T. J. Pearson, M. C. Curthoys, O. A. Murray, G. G. Barber, M. H. Finch.

  Her stomach unknotted.

  It would appear that her brother was alive and safe after all.

  Lady Ingram exited the modiste’s shop, limping. The final fitting had been interminable. The seamstresses had used her as a dress dummy and now her lower back felt as if a spike had been driven deep under her skin.

  She didn’t much care for fashion—and she disliked spending so much money on fripperies even more. Unfortunately, others expected her to be on display in a new gown, at least at her own birthday ball, so she must waste both time and money to satisfy the demands of Society when she would rather—

  An envelope lay on the seat of the carriage. She glanced at her coachman. He stood with his eyes cast down respectfully, waiting for her to climb up. She did, grimacing—the muscles in her back tightened so much they yanked her backward.

  Her second confinement had been both quicker and easier. She had expected to recover fully in no time, but the back pain never went away. Nearly a dozen doctors consulted and no one had been able to do anything for her except prescribe laudanum and morphine—as if she would ever be so weak as to indulge in those.

  She didn’t even look at the envelope until the carriage had pulled away from the curb. And then only after she had lowered the shades on the windows.

  An unsealed envelope, no addressee on the front, a typed sheet inside.

  Could it be?

  She pressed it to her heart. After all this time, he had at last contacted her. She pulled a pencil from her handbag and busied herself deciphering the message as the carriage turned and swayed.

  Trust him to bring a smile to her face: He wanted to meet on the night of her birthday ball. Good thing she didn’t give a damn for that nuisance.

  She only wanted to see him.

  Twenty-one

  THURSDAY

  At one o’clock in the morning, during a rousing rendition of Strauss’s Du und du, Lady Ingram left her overcrowded house via the back service door. That exact moment, in the carriage alley behind the house, an unmarked brougham drew up, unmarked, that is, except for a piece of paper stuck to the inside of the window, with a drawing of a bird.

  Not just any bird, a finch.

  Her heart quickened. She got into the carriage, hoping to find him inside. But it was empty. Instead, there was an envelope on the seat, with a number on the front, and a key inside.

  The carriage took her to a hotel that catered to country squires and their lady wives who wanted to stay in London for the Season but didn’t want the fuss of hiring a house. It offered large suites of rooms with front doors on the street, so that one could enter and leave as if from a private residence.

  The carriage stopped right in front of the door the number of which was on the envelope. Her heart pounding, her bad back forgotten, she ran up the few steps that led up to the small porch and eagerly inserted the key into the lock.

  All the lights in the suite seemed to be on, every room brightly illuminated—and every room, from the vestibule inward, empty. Alone in the drawing room, one hand braced on the mantel, the other against the spot in her back that was throbbing again, she frowned.

  Just then the front door opened. She spun around and smiled at the man who entered.

  Her smile froze.

  Not him but her husband.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He, like her, was still in his evening finery. His expression made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end: She’d never seen such a look on him before, not vacant, not blank, only . . . empty.

  “I’m here to say good-bye.”

  “What good-bye?” Her voice was rising—she couldn’t control the volume of her speech. “Are you going somewhere?”

  “No, you are.” He dropped a velvet pouch on the console table just inside the door. “I brought your jewelry.”

  Through her stupefaction, understanding was beginning to seep through. He knew. He knew everything. It was all over. “How did you know?”

  “You haven’t been as careful as you should have,” he said blandly. “You thought I would never suspect you.”

  “How long? How long have you suspected me?”

  Her voice was still rising, while his remained quiet and even. She hated that almost as much as she hated being found out.

  “Does it matter? I know the truth. At least three people are dead because of you.”

  She heard herself laugh. “They’re dead because they chose to do dangerous things. And people who choose to do dangerous things sometimes don’t come home.”

  He sat down stiffly, as if his back, too, bothered him. “Several times when I was abroad, I almost didn’t come back. Were you hoping I wouldn’t?”

  “Does it matter now?”

  A trace of sadness shadowed his eyes. “No, you are right. It doesn’t matter now. Just go.”

  Just go? Did he not know her at all? She pulled out the pistol she’d brought in her handbag. “If I leave, you’ll never let me see my children again. Better I kill you and carry on as a grieving widow.”

  He seemed neither surprised nor discomfited at the sight of a firearm aimed at his forehead. “Nobody will believe you a grieving widow. Also, should a gunshot ring out, you’ll never leave this place except in custody. There are men stationed both on the street and on the other side of the door leading into the hotel. There are no other exits. You kill me, and our children lose both parents.”

  She chewed the inside of her lip.

/>   “Not to mention that Bancroft is on his way. You fall into his hands and there will be no public murder trial for you—you will only wish you had one. If I were you, I wouldn’t waste a moment.”

  The pistol shook. Was this really the end? Had she worked so hard and endured so much for this? “I have despised you for a long time. Everybody else understands a Society marriage for what it is. But you, nothing less than true love would do for you, would it? Well, I’ve had enough of your ‘gentlemanly’ reproach. Long may you rot in hell.”

  “The carriage outside is at your disposal,” he said, his tone as mild as ever. “I wouldn’t, however, try to go home and abduct the children. They are already elsewhere.”

  Her finger tightened on the trigger, the last bit of metal resistance giving away.

  He moved not a muscle. “Remember Bancroft. This is your only chance to flee. Once he has you, I will not be able to intercede on your behalf.”

  Her entire arm trembled. It would be beautiful, the sight of a bullet shattering that thick skull. What wouldn’t she give to see it.

  A scream left her lips.

  He only stared at her.

  She shoved the gun back into her handbag, grabbed the pouch of jewels, and ran out. She couldn’t allow herself to fall into Bancroft’s hands. She couldn’t. That would truly be the end of everything. As long as she still had her freedom, this would prove to be only a temporary setback.

  A minor defeat before the major victory to come.

  Lord Ingram slowly unclenched his hand from the revolver in his pocket.

  He, too, was now shaking.

  The children had been removed from the town house, that was true. But there were no men outside ready to leap to his assistance, and he would not inform Bancroft of her departure until twenty-four hours had passed.

  He owed her this much, the mother of his children.

  Twenty-two

  FRIDAY

  Charlotte sat before her vanity, pinning up her hair and counting her chins.

  The doorbell rang. Charlotte had risen an hour earlier than usual, in anticipation of Lord Bancroft’s visit. It would appear she had underestimated his impatience.

  “Please show him to the parlor at Upper Baker Street,” she instructed Mr. Mears, who came to announce their visitor. “Tell him I’ll be there in a quarter of an hour.”

  When she reached Sherlock Holmes’s parlor, Lord Bancroft stood before an open window, smoking a cigarette.

  “I didn’t realize it has become permissible these days to smoke in a lady’s parlor,” she said.

  “My apologies,” he said, defenestrating the cigarette and closing the window—though he didn’t sound particularly remorseful. “Tea? Your butler insisted on making it.”

  “Very good of him to adhere to civilized behavior. I’m glad he insisted on some muffins, too, so I wouldn’t be dragged out of bed at an ungodly hour only to starve.”

  Lord Bancroft pushed his fingers through his hair—and for the first time in her life Charlotte saw a smidgen of physical resemblance between the brothers. “Now that you have tea and muffins, will you please tell me what in the world is going on?”

  “What did Lord Ingram tell you?”

  “Only that you’ll explain everything.”

  “He must have said more than that.”

  “Very well. At this point, I can’t be telling you anything you haven’t already guessed.” Lord Bancroft sat down and drained a cup of the tea Mears insisted on serving. Charlotte had the sensation he wished it were whisky instead. “Recently we have lost good agents, two men and a woman. It appeared that there was a traitor in our midst, but we couldn’t be sure who it was. This morning my brother banged on my door at first light and told me that the traitor was not among our ranks but in his household. And that his wife disappeared the night of the ball, more than twenty-four hours ago.”

  “That’s all he said?”

  “And then he left. I have no idea where he is.”

  With his children, of course. It was the day after they lost their mother.

  Lord Bancroft regarded her expectantly. Charlotte, halfway through a muffin, had the feeling she wouldn’t get to eat the rest until she had told Lord Bancroft everything. But she supposed the man had been waiting long enough.

  “Very well then. Not too long ago, Sherlock Holmes’s name was in the papers, in a rather condescending article that insinuated that now all he did was domestic investigations of no consequence whatsoever. In fact, it was the day you kindly proposed.”

  “I see.”

  “Within an hour of your departure, a letter arrived at this address, delivered by courier. I recognized the envelope and the typewriter as Lord Ingram’s—but as he had no need to write Sherlock Holmes for a meeting, the letter had to have come from his wife. Which told me she had a highly private problem—most likely to do with a man.”

  “And you agreed to see her?”

  “Yes, I did. Or rather, Miss Redmayne did. Lady Ingram gave a heartrending story about a pair of youthful lovers—of which she was one—forcefully torn asunder by greedy parents and the expectations placed on a lady of good birth. And now her sweetheart was missing.

  “She told us that his name was Myron Finch and that he was a man of illegitimate birth working in the accountancy profession. I knew of such a man, my half brother, though we’d never met. I even had his address, from a letter he had written to my father earlier in the Season. It seemed a terribly easy case. All I had to do was to visit his place of residence and I would know whether he truly was missing or whether he had simply tired of seeing Lady Ingram only in public and only once a year.

  “From the very beginning, however, something about the case struck me as not quite right. I wondered about Lady Ingram’s story, about what she wasn’t telling us. In fact, after my sister informed me that she had seen Mr. Finch—or the man we thought to be Mr. Finch—and Lady Ingram within easy viewing distance of each other and neither appeared to recognize the other, I did not consider it impossible that Lady Ingram’s story had been pure hogwash.

  “She was spared further suspicion because that particular Mr. Finch turned out to be counterfeit. In which case, of course she wouldn’t have recognized him. And of course he wouldn’t have known to meet her for their annual glance of longing at the Albert Memorial.

  “But throughout it all, I never fully trusted Lady Ingram. I have always felt, from the very beginning, that she was not the kind of person to love deeply—not in a romantic sense, anyway. So there was always this tension between what I considered to be her character and the story she told of the impossible longing that contradicted everything I knew about her.

  “Then there was the question of her choice of private investigator. She didn’t go to someone else, she came to Sherlock Holmes, who had worked closely on an infamous case with Inspector Treadles, a man who is well known to her husband. How certain could I be that she didn’t know that I was Sherlock Holmes, and that Myron Finch was my half brother?

  “If she did know, it would have meant that I was specifically chosen for that connection. And if she knew of that connection, then it meant she knew a great deal more of Myron Finch than she admitted. But just because she was less than forthcoming didn’t imply she harbored ulterior motives. She might have feared that I wouldn’t help her if I knew she wanted my help specifically. She might also have felt herself incapable of facing the judgment of others were she to confess how much effort she, a married woman, had put into searching for a man who wasn’t her husband.

  “My reservations about Lady Ingram were shunted to the side while we tried to understand why Mr. Marbleton was impersonating Mr. Finch. That is, until Miss Redmayne and I spoke to my father’s solicitor and learned that Lady Ingram had been to see him. This meant she did know which family he was connected to—and probably a great deal more. But it wasn’t until th
e Marbletons sought refuge here, after having been ambushed at Mrs. Woods’s, that my suspicions concerning Lady Ingram began to solidify.

  “Lord Ingram first informed me that Mrs. Watson’s house was being watched. I had thought that it was Moriarty, on the off chance that our movements might lead him to the wife who had escaped his clutches. But now I began to wonder, what if it was someone connected to Lady Ingram, trying to see if following me would lead directly to Mr. Finch?

  “In the days after we first discovered that our movements were being watched, we acted with a great deal of care. As time passed, we became less careful. There was every possibility that the surveillance had been pared back when we were being deliberately evasive—and then resumed when we let down our guard. And that I had led Lady Ingram to Mr. Marbleton’s address without meaning to.”

  “You’ll remember that I had come to you with the theory that the Marbletons were impersonating Mr. Finch in order to get close to the Holmeses, to find out what they might inadvertently know—and that the real Mr. Finch was the man murdered in Hounslow. I had connected the Marbletons to Moriarty because of a similar scheme of codes that they used, and my theory was brought down when Lady Ingram definitively stated that the dead man wasn’t Mr. Finch.

  “But then Stephen Marbleton confirmed that at least some of my conjectures were correct—namely, that Mr. Finch had worked for Moriarty. That the dead man in Hounslow had been his colleague under Moriarty. And that together they had defected, taking something important from Moriarty at their departure.

  “It was quite a leap to consider that Lady Ingram might be tracking down Mr. Finch for Moriarty. On the other hand, she was perfectly placed. You have no one close to you, so in the short term, at least, she was their best bet, a highly intelligent woman who is bored by Society and antagonistic toward her husband, who happens to be not only your brother but your most trusted ally.”