A Study In Scarlet Women

by Sherry Thomas

  “Certainly, my lord.”

  Inspector Treadles did not mean to delay his friend, but at that moment he remembered his other purpose for being at Burlington House this evening. “If it isn’t too much trouble, sir, may I ask you to convey a note to Holmes? I’m most grateful for his assistance on the Arkwright case and wrote a few lines to that effect.”

  “I am afraid that would be impossible.”

  Inspector Treadles almost took a step back at his friend’s expression: a flare of anger that bordered on wrath.

  “I understand that you are engaged this evening, my lord,” Treadles explained hesitantly. “My note requires no haste and needs be relayed only at your lordship’s convenience.”

  “I didn’t make myself clear,” said Lord Ingram. All hints of rage had left his countenance. His eyes were blank, the set of his jaw hard. “I can’t—nor can anyone else—convey any notes to Holmes. Not anymore.”

  “I—I don’t—that is—” Treadles stuttered. “Has something terrible happened?”

  Lord Ingram’s jaw worked. “Yes, something terrible.”

  “When?”

  “Today.”

  Inspector Treadles blinked. “Is . . . is Holmes still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank goodness. Then we haven’t lost him completely.”

  “But we have,” said Lord Ingram, slowly, inexorably. “Holmes may be alive, but the fact remains that Holmes is now completely beyond my reach.”

  Treadles’s confusion burgeoned further, but he understood that no more details would be forthcoming. “I’m exceedingly sorry to hear that.”

  “As am I, to be the bearer of such news.” Lord Ingram’s voice was low, almost inaudible.

  Treadles left Burlington House in a daze, hounded by dozens of unhappy conjectures. Had Holmes leaped from a perilous height armed with nothing but an unreliable parachute? Had he been conducting explosive experiments at home? Or had his brilliant but restless mind driven him to seduce the wrong woman, culminating in an illegal duel and a bullet lodged somewhere debilitating but not instantly lethal?

  What had happened to the elusive and extraordinary Sherlock Holmes?

  Such a tragedy.

  Such a waste.

  Such a shame.

  Two

  “The shame. Oh, the shame!” Lady Holmes screeched.

  From her crouched position before the parlor door keyhole, Livia Holmes glared at the young maid peeking around the corner. Back to your duties, she mouthed.

  The girl fled, but not before giggling audibly.

  Did no one understand the concept of privacy anymore? If there was any spying to be done in the midst of a reputation-melting scandal, it ought to be left to a member of the family.

  Livia returned her attention to the sturm und drang in the parlor. Her view through the keyhole was blocked by her mother’s skirt, a ghastly mound of heliotrope silk that shook with Lady Holmes’s outrage.

  “How many times have I told you, Sir Henry, that your indulgence of the girl would prove to be her undoing? How many times have I said that she ought to have been wed years ago? Did you listen? No! No one heeded me when I warned that letting her reject perfectly suitable gentlemen one after another would only serve to make her unfit for marriage and motherhood.”

  Her mighty bustle oscillated from side to side as she lurched forward. She lifted her arm and brought down her hand. An explosive thwack reverberated. Livia flinched.

  She and Charlotte, the recipient of this resounding slap, had once discussed their mother’s talents, or lack thereof. Livia was of the view that a segment of the population was inherently middling. Charlotte, of a more charitable bent of mind, believed that even those who appeared incurably undistinguished must possess some hidden skills or aptitudes.

  Livia, not convinced, had brought up Lady Holmes as an example of utter mediocrity, a person who was unremarkable in every observable trait. Charlotte had countered, “But she has an extraordinary technique at slapping, the backhand especially.”

  Now Lady Holmes produced just that, a dramatic backhand the force of which wobbled the lace trimmings on her skirt. “The worst has happened. No one will marry her and she can never show her face in Society again.”

  It was the eleventh time she had spat out these lines this evening. Livia’s neck hurt from the strain of crouching so long before the keyhole. How many more iterations before Charlotte would be allowed to escape to her own room?

  “You haven’t only caused your own ruin, Charlotte. You have also made us laughingstocks the rest of our lives.” Lady Holmes was still plowing through the remainder of her tirade, though her voice was becoming hoarse. “You have perpetrated a crime against Livia’s chances at a decent marriage. If Henrietta hadn’t already secured her Mr. Cumberland we would have nothing but a passel of spinster daughters.”

  The contempt in Lady Holmes’s voice—spinster daughters might as well be thieving whores. Livia lived with that scorn daily, a woman of twenty-seven, eight Seasons under her belt and no marital prospects whatsoever. Still she winced.

  If history was any indication, Lady Holmes would storm toward where her husband sat and berate him some more. Then the entire diatribe would begin again.

  Lumbering bustle in tow, Lady Holmes marched on, clearing the line of sight from the keyhole to Charlotte.

  It never failed to astonish Livia that, after having known Charlotte all her life, sometimes she was still surprised by her sister’s appearance. Especially at moments like these—well, there had never before been a moment quite like this, to be sure, but Charlotte had been dumbfounding her family for as long as Livia could remember.

  When Livia was six and Charlotte four, one cold but clear Saturday afternoon on a family stroll around the village green, they’d come across a drawing that had been pinned to the noticeboard. There were four images on the piece of paper: a well, a horseshoe, the Virgin, and a kitten that was only half the size as the other images, a round, quizzical head floating on the top half of the paper.

  Lady Holmes had sniffed. “How strange.”

  “Rather interesting, I should think,” replied her husband.

  “But what is it?” asked Henrietta, the eldest of the Holmes girls, her voice high-pitched and whiny.

  “It’s a message, of course,” Livia told her impatiently. “Must be something about the children’s Christmas party.”

  “What about that party? I don’t see how that can be.”

  How anyone could live to be ten years old and still remain so thick Livia had no idea. “The Virgin gave birth to baby Jesus at Christmas. The other drawings are games that will be there.”

  Henrietta looked doubtful. “What kind of games?”

  Before Livia could enumerate her guesses, Charlotte said, loudly and clearly, “It isn’t about games. It’s a proposal.”

  All attention immediately turned to her.

  Charlotte did not speak. In fact, their mother had been fretting for some time that Charlotte might turn out to be the same as Bernadine, the second oldest Holmes girl. At nine, Bernadine was no longer taken on family outings: She’d become too disconcerting, a lovely child who paid no attention to anyone or anything. If she had any thoughts at all, she never shared them with a single person.

  Charlotte, with her blond ringlets and big blue eyes, resembled Bernadine almost exactly. But whereas Bernadine was rail-thin—nothing Cook made ever agreed with her—Charlotte was a roly-poly dumpling, her cheeks full, her limbs round, her hands adorably chubby.

  A cherubic girl, one who was as silent as the small hours of the night. She nodded, shook her head, and pointed, if necessary. Cook insisted that one time, in answer to the question How many pieces of apple fritter do you want, Miss Charlotte?, the girl had given a beautifully enunciated Twelve. But no one else had ever heard her say so much as Mamma.


  One time Livia had overheard Lady Holmes weep about her family being cursed. Not only can I not have sons, but half my daughters are imbeciles! Livia had come away feeling both relieved that she herself wasn’t an imbecile and heartbroken that Charlotte, whom she found darling and hilarious—she never failed to smile at the sight of Charlotte attacking her food—might someday become as unreachable as Bernadine.

  But now Charlotte had spoken her first full sentences. Livia would have been indignant had anyone else corrected her so unceremoniously, but Charlotte had spoken and Livia had—no, not butterflies, but a whole stampeding herd of wildebeest in her stomach. With everyone else still dumbstruck, she shook Charlotte’s mitten-clad hand, which she held in her own, and asked, “Do you mean a proposal of marriage, Charlotte?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Livia,” Lady Holmes scoffed. “She doesn’t know what that is.”

  “Yes, a proposal of marriage, Mamma,” Charlotte answered. “I know what that is. It is when a gentleman asks a lady to become his wife.”

  Again, stunned silence all around.

  Sir Henry got down on one knee, a feverish gleam in his eyes. “Charlotte, my dear, why do you say these images constitute a proposal of marriage?”

  Charlotte cast a critical eye at the picture, her expression amusingly grown-up. “It isn’t a very good one, is it?”

  “Maybe not, poppet. But why do you say it’s a proposal in the first place?”

  “Because it says Will you marry me. Actually, it says Well you marry me.”

  “I can see a well. And I can see that the horseshoe opens up and looks like a U. And the Virgin’s name is Mary,” said Sir Henry. “But how is the cat ‘me’?”

  “Exactly,” Henrietta joined in. “That makes no sense.”

  Livia would have liked to shove a snowball deep down the front of Henrietta’s frock. But Charlotte didn’t seem to mind. “The cat is in the middle of a meow. But since there’s only half a cat, it’s half a meow. And half a meow is ‘me.’”

  Henrietta pouted. “How do you know half a meow isn’t ‘ow’ inst—?”

  “Henrietta, shut up.” Sir Henry placed his hands on Charlotte’s pink cheeks. “That is remarkable, poppet. Absolutely remarkable.”

  “Are you sure?” said Lady Holmes. “She might be making things up and—”

  “Lady Holmes, kindly shut up, too.”

  “Well!” Lady Holmes sputtered. But she wasn’t as easily silenced as Henrietta. “But you must tell Charlotte that since she is able to speak, she may no longer be so rudely silent.”

  Sir Henry sighed. “Do you hear your mother, poppet?”

  “But Papa, why should I talk when I’ve nothing important to say?”

  Sir Henry barked with laughter. “Why, indeed. You’re wise beyond your years, my dear poppet. And you have my blessing to be as silent as you’d like.”

  This was said with a glance at Lady Holmes, the corners of whose lips turned down decidedly. With an exaggerated half bow, Sir Henry offered his wife his arm; she flattened her lips further but took it. Henrietta grabbed his other arm. Livia and Charlotte resumed walking hand in hand.

  The next day was Sunday. After the sermon, the vicar announced from the pulpit that Miss Tomlinson had made him a very happy man by consenting to be his wife. Soon news was all over the village that those odd pictures on the noticeboard had been the vicar’s way of proposing, as he and Miss Tomlinson were both fond of puzzles and rebuses.

  Sir Henry pranced around the house, looking delighted and smug. Livia was happy for Charlotte, a little jealous that she wasn’t the one to decipher the message, and strangely despondent. It would take her a long time to understand that the asphyxiated feeling in her chest had nothing to do with Charlotte but everything to do with their parents.

  Sir Henry disdained his wife as Lady Holmes disdained her daughters. They weren’t happy together but Lady Holmes was the far unhappier one.

  It had been frightful for Livia to understand this. Her mother had seemed immensely powerful, an Olympian figure striding about her fine country house, emanating command and superiority. But she was impotent before her husband’s contempt.

  Nor was she, in the end, the kind of household authority figure that Livia had first believed. What control Lady Holmes exerted was largely illusory, maintained tenuously and with frequent outbursts of anger and violence—that extraordinary slapping technique had not come about without assiduous practice. The servants despised her, Livia barely tolerated her, and Bernadine’s condition was always worse when she was near. The only one with whom she got along was Henrietta, who happily flattered and even emulated her.

  Once in a while Livia came upon this domestic despot sitting by herself, in a corner of the parlor, looking pale and lost. But then Lady Holmes would see her and shout at her for being a disagreeable sneak who never knew when she wasn’t wanted and Livia’s sympathy would evaporate as she broiled in humiliation.

  She was twelve when she realized that the same could happen to her. That she, too, could marry a handsome, well-liked man and still be miserable.

  That very same week Charlotte made her observation about Mrs. Gladwell.

  Mrs. Gladwell was the widow of Sir Henry’s cousin, a stylish, vivacious woman in her late thirties. She lived twenty miles away and occasionally called on the Holmes household. Mrs. Holmes didn’t care for her. She sniffed whenever Mrs. Gladwell’s name was brought up and deemed her “common.” “Vulgar,” even, sometimes. Sir Henry, however, always insisted that Mrs. Gladwell be made to feel welcome, since she was family.

  Mrs. Gladwell spent part of the year in Torquay, a balmy seaside resort. Upon her return she would call upon the Holmes girls, gifts in tow. For that reason, even Henrietta, otherwise a reliable ally for Lady Holmes, couldn’t disapprove of Mrs. Gladwell with any kind of sincerity.

  In the course of that particular visit, Henrietta, who loved her wardrobe, received a chic new straw boater. To Livia, who wrote copiously in her diary, Mrs. Gladwell gave a handsome journal with an image of the Devon Coast on the cover and a bottle of novelty ink that was a beautiful lilac. And Charlotte, whose one true love was food, but whose diet Lady Holmes carefully watched for fear she would balloon to an unacceptable size, got a scrapbook of preserved seaweed, with dozens of delicate feather-like specimens ranging from pale green to robust maroon.

  That evening, the girls were home alone with their governess, Sir Henry and Lady Holmes having gone out to dine at Squire Holyoke’s. While Miss Lawton was supervising Bernadine at her bath—Bernadine suffered from occasional seizures and could not be left alone in a tub of water—Charlotte had taken Livia by the hand and pulled her into Sir Henry’s study.

  “We’re not supposed to be here!” Livia had whispered, her heart thudding. She liked a minor dose of the forbidden as much as the next girl, but Henrietta was home and Henrietta lived to snitch.

  “Henrietta is changing,” said Charlotte.

  “I guess that’s all right then.” Henrietta, at sixteen, dined with their parents when the latter were home and otherwise alone at the big table. She loved the ritual of changing into her dinner gown and could be counted on to spend forever coiffing her hair and trying on different petticoats until she found one that best complemented the shape of the dress. “But why are we here? What do you want to show me?”

  Charlotte lifted a paperweight from Sir Henry’s desk and held it out toward Livia.

  “I’ve seen it.” Livia, too, sometimes snooped around Sir Henry’s study. “He got it from that place he went to in Norfolk on the trip with his classmates.”

  Twice a year Sir Henry went on a gentlemen-only excursion with old boys from Harrow. He’d returned from the latest one three days ago and Livia had peeked in on the paperweight when it was still sitting in a box that declared A gift for you from Cromer is within.

  “Look closer,�
�� said Charlotte.

  Charlotte was no longer the mute she’d once been, but still she didn’t utter much beyond what was required, the “Morning, Vicar” variety and the occasional “How do you do?” to people she was meeting for the first time. So when she did speak, Livia paid attention.

  She gazed down to the photographic image at the bottom of the glass paperweight, which depicted a large building, several stories tall. “Isn’t this the hotel he stayed at when he was in Cromer?”

  Charlotte pulled out a postcard from the pocket of her blue frock. “I found this in the book of preserved seaweeds.”

  On the postcard was a near replica of the image in the paperweight. The Imperial Hotel, Torquay, said the caption. Livia sucked in a breath. That Mrs. Gladwell had such a postcard was hardly surprising, since that was where she’d holidayed. But for Sir Henry to have come back from his trip with a keepsake smacking of Devon, when he should have been several hundred miles away on the coast of the North Sea . . .

  “How did he get a souvenir from Torquay?”

  “Either he was given one by someone who had been there or he was there himself.”

  “Why did he put it in a box that said it was from Cromer?”

  “Why does Henrietta lie about finding a length of ribbon in her trunk when she bought it?”

  Livia’s stomach rolled over: It was because Henrietta knew she was doing something she wasn’t supposed to.

  “But what was Papa doing in Torquay? And why didn’t he take us there with him?” Insight burst into Livia’s head with the force of an explosion. “Good gracious! He was there with Mrs. Gladwell.”

  Charlotte didn’t appear in the least surprised. Livia realized that her sister had already come to that conclusion and that was why she had wanted to show Livia the evidence.

  “You mustn’t tell Mamma, Charlotte. You understand?”

  “I won’t say anything, but I think Mamma knows. Or suspects, at least. You know she rifles through Papa’s study, too, when he’s not home.”