Now he covered his entire face.
“You may know something of how he directs the day-to-day operations of his agents. Do you have the impression that they are being shortchanged in terms of remuneration or other necessary funds?”
Behind his hands, he shook his head.
She was breathing fast. Her hands were clenched together. She flexed her stiff fingers and forced herself to exhale slowly, quietly. “Whatever possibility remains, then, no matter how terrible it is, must be the truth.”
Lord Ingram shot out of his chair.
For a man in Bancroft’s position to have so much inexplicable income—if he wasn’t stealing from his office, there was only one other possibility.
He was selling state secrets.
Lord Ingram wanted to deny it. He wanted to shout that it was beyond absurd that such an accusation could be levied at his brother.
But truth, however absurd it seems at first, always possesses undeniable weight and solidity. Yes, Bancroft had been a valuable asset to the Crown. He was extremely competent and handled everything under his purview with aplomb. But he was also a man without true loyalties, except to himself. Lord Ingram wasn’t certain, now that push came to shove, whether Bancroft could even be called an honorable man.
Dear God, all this time, all this time when Bancroft had asked his subordinates to risk their lives for Queen and country . . .
He didn’t know whether he wanted to weep or to smash things. All he knew was that he gripped hard onto the mantel, feeling as if he’d never be warm again.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured next to him.
“It’s not your fault,” he said by reflex. “But what am I to do?”
“You protect yourself. And you protect me. Can you imagine what would happen if he were to guess that we suspected his worst secrets?”
He shivered, chilled from head to toe.
“There is still, of course, a chance that I’ve read too much into everything. That he is a bystander in all this. If he is innocent, he will do as he usually does, remain in the shadows himself and let others take care of everything.
“But I think he has something to do with what happened in that icehouse. He visited Stern Hollow five weeks ago. What reason did he give—that he wanted to make sure that there are no other traitors in your household?”
He gave a small, grim nod.
“While he was here, he would have familiarized himself with the geography of Stern Hollow—that’s how the abductors he’d sent knew to head directly for the nursery. Had he succeeded, had he your children in hand, he would have been in a stronger position to demand Mr. Finch in exchange. But that attempt failed and he knew that you were vigilant. So he switched to his contingency plan, and made it appear that you had murdered Lady Ingram.”
“But surely I would have learned of it, if he or his men had found her.”
“I don’t think he found her. I suspect the ‘maid’ who told Lady Avery about our encounter in the tea shop was involved in more ways than one. If I must guess I would say that she was of the same approximate height and build as Lady Ingram, with dark hair and a beauty spot in a similar position on her face. Bash in her face, put her in your icehouse, and who would that beauty spot identify her as?”
“But that wasn’t the body your sister—or I—saw in the icehouse.”
“That part puzzles me—I can only assume something went awry. But the important thing is, if my suspicions are correct and Lord Bancroft indeed orchestrated the icehouse incident—or part of it—then he would not stay away. He would send Mr. Underwood—and possibly even come himself to investigate. There are many questions to which he would need answers. How did the actual Lady Ingram end up in the icehouse? Where had that decoy gone? Who else was at work? Who knew enough of what he was doing to mock him so?”
The fire in the grate crackled. She sighed softly. “Should he or even Mr. Underwood arrive, you must take it as an admission of guilt and be careful. Above all else, do not let him guess that you know.”
Now he understood, viscerally, why she couldn’t eat. Now he was as afraid as she. Moriarty was a distant specter. But his brother, a man with just as much power and menace, was right here, moving among them.
She fell quiet. Exhaustion battered him—he could scarcely remain upright. But he knew what he needed to do.
He would protect himself.
And he would protect her.
The next day
The policemen vacated the library. Now he and Holmes were alone with Bancroft, who had been watching them from the recesses of the gallery.
Bancroft looked even worse than Lord Ingram remembered from his recent visit. But now he knew that this deterioration was not due to the loss of Holmes’s hand for a second time, but because Mr. Finch, in possession of his secret, was still at large—and his schemes to pry the man’s whereabouts out of Holmes had not gone as planned.
Lord Ingram’s eyes met Holmes’s. She rubbed her bearded chin. “By the way, Ash, you bowdlerized my pangram. I’m devastated.”
“I don’t know why you believed I would have ever committed the original in writing, in any of my scripts.”
He could scarcely feel a single muscle in his body, only a palpitating fear that somehow Bancroft would take one look at him and know everything.
He took a deep breath. “Will you come down, Bancroft, or should we join you up there?”
And so it begins.
23
“And so it ends,” murmured Lord Remington.
Society still remembered him largely as a wild young man, but in his years abroad, he had risen high in the Crown’s service. Lord Bancroft, he had told her, was being held in a secure location, pending a thorough investigation of everything he had done during his tenure.
And now Lord Remington and his men—who occupied a separate compartment—accompanied Charlotte on what she hoped would be the final journey for this case. She was bone-tired. And the sandwich she’d wolfed down before she boarded the train—Lord Bancroft being put away had restored most of her appetite—contributed a lethargy in addition to the fatigue that had accumulated for days.
The countryside sped by in the darkness, the train’s wheels thudding rhythmically. Before she knew it, Lord Remington was shaking her softly by the shoulder. “Miss Holmes, wake up. We have reached our destination.”
Outside the railway station, the company climbed into waiting carriages. She was almost about to doze off again when Lord Remington said, “Forgive me, Miss Holmes, I’ve only just now remembered the bomb. Was that also Bancroft’s doing?”
Charlotte rubbed her eyes and sat up straighter. “He chose the ice well as the place to leave Mimi Duffin’s body because he’d learned that in Lord Ingram’s household, not a great deal of ice was consumed. The icehouse must have seemed perfect—the body wouldn’t be discovered immediately after he left. But when no one came across it for days on end, I imagine he grew impatient.
“He and Lord Ingram had called on Mrs. Newell together, so he knew that Mrs. Newell was expecting guests. If he put a bomb in place, then her guests would need somewhere else to go. Stern Hollow, of course—its master could always be counted on to do the right thing. And once the guests arrived, the kitchen boy would be digging out ice from the ice well.”
“I see,” said Lord Remington. “What I still don’t understand is why did Moriarty choose get involved? And how did he even know what Bancroft was up to in the first place?”
“I’ve been pondering the same question. Perhaps Moriarty knew that the code Mr. Finch was breaking concerned Lord Bancroft but not exactly what it entailed. Perhaps he had other informants who learned that Lord Bancroft was still ardently seeking Mr. Finch’s whereabouts, with more intent and focus than he was putting into the search for Lady Ingram.
“And if Moriarty had someone observe Mr. Underwood, he would have seen that Lord Bancroft was up to something irregular. As for why Moriarty interfered—in the end, it might have been nothing
more than malice. Lord Bancroft was a powerful opponent. Why not throw a wrench in his plans? Why not see if this was his Achilles’ heel?”
“Moriarty killed a woman for that?”
“He killed someone he believed to be utterly without value. As did Lord Bancroft.”
The asylum came into view. At night, it would have been easy to mistake it for just another isolated country manor, if it weren’t for the walls that surrounded it on all sides. They drove through the gates into a courtyard. The main building was large and ivy-covered; behind several of the dark, barred windows, curtains fluttered.
A nervous-looking man of about fifty-five introduced himself as Dr. Connelly and conducted them inside. After a quick cup of tea, they were taken down long corridors to one wing of the house.
Dr. Connelly unlocked a door and lit a sconce. “Miss Greville, we have some visitors for you.”
The room was spartan. The woman inside sat at the edge of the bed in her dressing gown, holding a sharpened pencil as if it were a knife. She gave a look of pure loathing to Dr. Connelly but recoiled as her gaze landed on Lord Remington.
“Would you mind coming with us, Lady Ingram?” said her brother-in-law. “We have need of your help.”
“How did you find me?” demanded Lady Ingram, once she, Charlotte, and Lord Remington were all in the carriage together. “How did you know about this place at all?”
Charlotte had first believed, as had everyone else, that the woman in the icehouse had been Lady Ingram. But that woman had turned out to have been pregnant. Lady Ingram had never been interested in romantic love. How likely was it that she would take a lover when she was on the run for her life?
For a moment, Charlotte’s mind had moved toward darker possibilities—a woman didn’t need to be a willing participant in her own impregnation. But then she remembered what she herself had said, when Lord Ingram had expressed his disbelief at the sight of his dead wife.
Maybe that’s her secret twin sister in the icehouse. And the real Lady Ingram is waiting in the wings, cackling with anticipation.
He had said immediately that if she did have such a sister, no one knew about her.
But such sisters existed—Charlotte had one. She’d told him about Bernadine, but prior to her meeting with Mrs. Watson, he had been the only outsider with whom she’d ever broached the subject. To the rest of the world, there were only three Holmes sisters, Henrietta, Olivia, and Charlotte.
And this was true for a woman who had lived under the family roof until Charlotte had poached her away. What if Lady Ingram’s twin sister had a worse condition, one that required her to be institutionalized from an early age? Parents didn’t mention such children. Eventually, even their own siblings forgot about them.
Mrs. Watson had verified the existence of one Constantina Greville at the General Register Office, headquartered at Somerset House: There was a birth certificate for her, showing that she was born on the same day as Lady Ingram, but no death certificate. Lady Ingram might have discovered the existence of this twin sister when she had gone through some of the family papers after her parents’ deaths, or even known about her all her life. And when she’d needed a safe refuge this summer, a place to hide from Lord Bancroft’s wrath, she must have remembered this sister no one had ever heard about.
“We know because Miss Constantina Greville, who lived here before you displaced her, is now dead,” said Lord Remington.
“You are lying!”
Lord Remington handed her a newspaper. “It’s a long story, but in essence Moriarty killed her to frame your husband for murder.”
Charlotte did not fail to notice that Lord Bancroft’s name had been omitted.
“But he promised to look after her!” Lady Ingram cried, even as she yanked the paper from Lord Remington.
She read in the light provided by Lord Remington’s pocket lantern, her breathing growing more and more agitated. At last she crumpled up the paper and threw it aside.
The silence was harsh.
“Did Moriarty himself promise to look after Miss Greville?” asked Lord Remington.
“I’ve never met Moriarty. I dealt with a man named de Lacy.”
Charlotte remembered the name from her investigation this past summer.
“De Lacy wasn’t impressed when I went to him,” Lady Ingram continued, speaking as if through clenched teeth. “I was supposed to look after myself, he told me, not needing to be sheltered. Lord Bancroft was always going to be after me, how would I deal with that? In the end he challenged me to last six months out there by myself and I agreed.
“I thought it would be a brilliant idea to take Constantina’s place in the asylum. No one would ever find me. And when I told de Lacy my plan, he agreed to get me in and bring Constantina out, and to look after her in the meanwhile, in exchange for my emerald necklace.”
She laughed bitterly. “Maybe there really is no such thing as honor among thieves, and I’m just the last person to learn that.”
They spent the night at a railway hotel, with Lady Ingram carefully guarded by the men Lord Remington had brought. In the morning they took the early train into London and went to Lord Ingram’s town house, where Lady Ingram’s wardrobe, left behind when she’d fled, was still in her dressing room.
Charlotte, ironically enough, had served as Lady Ingram’s chaperone since the latter had been taken into custody. The interaction between the two women had been almost entirely silent, but as Charlotte helped Lady Ingram into a handsome travel gown, the latter said, “It’s your idea, isn’t it, to make me the scapegoat?”
“No,” said Charlotte. “You have Lord Remington to thank for that.”
She believed Lord Bancroft should be exposed for his crimes, but the Crown did not want the failings of its clandestine servants made known.
Perhaps Lady Ingram was getting her just desserts. Mr. Underwood would pay, too. But Charlotte wasn’t so sure Lord Bancroft himself would suffer the fall of the hammer. A man such as he, who dealt in secrets, could have easily set things up so that other powerful men’s shameful dealings became at risk of exposure, unless his own safety was assured.
“As it stands, you can’t touch de Lacy or Moriarty,” Charlotte went on. “But there is something you can do for your late sister. It was kept from the papers and, out of delicacy, Lord Remington hasn’t mentioned it either. But Miss Constantina Greville was with child at the time of her death and I think you have a fair idea who must have done it to her, she who could never have given consent.”
“That bastard,” Lady Ingram growled. “Connelly.”
“Did he try anything with you?”
“Oh, he tried. But one jab of the pencil and he ran out crying.”
A man who only preyed on the weakest of the weak.
“Here’s what you can do,” said Charlotte.
After she gave the contours of a plan, Lady Ingram scoffed. “You want me to speak to those hags?”
“I wouldn’t overlook potential allies simply because they haven’t been my allies before. But if you find that too distasteful—”
“No,” said Lady Ingram. “I’ll do it for Constantina. She deserved better.”
Charlotte nodded. “Should I tell Lord Remington that you are ready?”
One side of Lady Ingram’s mouth curved down, the side where her beauty mark had been. A woman on the run couldn’t afford such a distinguishing characteristic; now there was only a slight dent. The dent on Constantina Greville, at the same spot, must have been to disguise the fact that she had never had a beauty mark.
“Are you not going to thank me?” Lady Ingram said, her voice slightly less strident than it had been. “You only look good to him compared to me.”
“I can thank you if you need me to,” Charlotte said. “But really all he needed was time to grow up.”
Lady Ingram set a severely sleek hat on her head. “You have a very high opinion of yourself.”
She regarded her reflection with the scorn of someone who
did not have a very high opinion of herself. Who had, in fact, never cared for the person in the mirror.
Into Charlotte’s lack of a response she said, “He will disapprove of you. You know he will.”
Of course he would—he’d always made it plain when he disagreed with her. But disapproval was not the same as obstruction and he would never stand in Charlotte’s way.
She smiled a little. “I’ll let Lord Remington know you are ready.”
The invitation from Sherlock Holmes had filled Treadles with a strangely elated presentiment. I think Chief Inspector Fowler is going to suffer a public debacle, he’d told Alice over breakfast. I just don’t know how yet.
The discovery of the bomb should have given Fowler pause. But he was adamant that the bomb was irrelevant, that they had enough to get a conviction in court. Treadles had found his excuse repugnant. Their first commitment should be to the truth, not to whether their evidence could be spun into a hangman’s noose.
He was hampered by both his lower rank and his friendship with Lord Ingram—anything he said could be construed as a display of personal bias. Nevertheless, he had made a carefully deferential argument for more police work, which Fowler dismissed in its entirety. So one might say that Treadles rather wanted for his superior to suffer a public debacle. And how oddly fitting that Sherlock Holmes should be the one to administer that dressing down.
They arrived to their rendezvous with the consulting detective at a St. James’s tea shop only to realize they were to be seated at the same table as Lady Avery and Lady Somersby.
“Chief Inspector, Inspector, what an unexpected pleasure,” declared Lady Avery. “Are you also here at Sherlock Holmes’s invitation?”
Fowler eyed her warily. “We are, my lady.”
“Excellent. Now I’m even more excited for what we are about to learn.”
The Hollow of Fear: Book three in the Lady Sherlock Mystery Series Page 29
