A Study In Scarlet Women

by Sherry Thomas

  “I called on your sister this afternoon, by the way,” said Lord Ingram.

  Her fingers tightened around the half-eaten madeleine in her hand. “How is she?”

  “Doing her best to hold herself together.”

  Oh, Livia. “She knows about our father’s quarrel with Lady Amelia?”

  “Everybody knows.”

  Was there a more terrifying phrase in the English language than “unintended consequences”?

  “Did you see him?”

  “He wasn’t at home. And your mother was not receiving visitors.”

  Meaning she had taken to her bed—after another hefty dose of laudanum, no doubt.

  “But Miss Livia did ask me to tell you, should I run into you, that she is grateful for what you have done. She emphasized that you couldn’t possibly have foreseen that—”

  “That by connecting the deaths of Lady Amelia, Lady Shrewsbury, and Mr. Sackville, I would double the number of Holmeses suspected of homicide?”

  “Inspector Treadles will find something tomorrow.”

  She almost dropped the madeleine in her surprise. He was consoling her—and he’d never consoled her in all the years they’d known each other. “You don’t believe it.”

  “I often question your actions, but rarely your reasoning. And this isn’t one of those rare instances.”

  She took a deep breath: She had fallen so far that he of all people felt the need to comfort her. “Thank you. Very kind of you.”

  Mrs. Watson stuck her head out from the bedroom. “Beg your pardon, miss, but Mr. Holmes, he’s fast asleep. Do you still need me to keep an eye on him?”

  “That won’t be necessary, Mrs. Hudson. Thank you.”

  Mrs. Watson bobbed a curtsy and left, galumphing down the stairs. When the house was quiet again, Lord Ingram asked, “Is that the actress who took you in?”

  His voice was carefully neutral, but nothing could disguise disapproval of this magnitude, so she pretended not to have heard it. “She’s very convincing, isn’t she? And she’s the one who identified the inspector’s origin by his accent. I must have her train me to better hear the differences in regional accents.”

  “I don’t like this arrangement. You know nothing about her.”

  At least now he was sounding more himself. “I happen to think I know a great deal about her.”

  “That you can deduce someone’s circumstances doesn’t mean you can read all their thoughts and intentions. Ask yourself, if this had happened to someone else, to Miss Livia, for example, wouldn’t you point out that she is enjoying an unlikely amount of luck?”

  “Sometimes luck is just luck.”

  “And most of the time, what seems too good to be true generally is.”

  Disagreement, their usual state of affairs. A bittersweet sensation, this familiarity. Sometimes it was more sweet than bitter, but not tonight.

  She rose and walked to the desk at the back of the parlor. “What would you have me do? Leave my benefactress?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then what?”

  “Let me help you,” commanded her old friend who had become so proper and decorous, every inch the future pillar of Society. “You always said you wished to be the headmistress at a girls’ school. You can still achieve that.”

  “How?”

  He joined her at the side of the desk. “Move to America. You can invent a new identity and start a new life there, with nothing to prevent you from going to school, receiving training, and ultimately finding a good position.”

  “With you bearing all the expenditures in the meanwhile?”

  “Pay me back once you are self-supporting. With interest, if you’d prefer.”

  “But there will be no consequences whatsoever if I do not or cannot pay you back. Am I correct?”

  He did not answer.

  The direction of his gaze: somewhere over her right shoulder. The placement of his hand: braced at the edge of the desk. The rise and fall of his chest with every breath—beneath his dark grey coat, his waistcoat was silk jacquard, silver tracery upon the blue of deepest twilight.

  “I assume you’ve heard from Mr. Shrewsbury?”

  His jaw tightened. “I have.”

  “Did he offer me the position of his mistress?”

  “He did.”

  “I hope you didn’t decline on my behalf.”

  At last he looked directly into her eyes. “I would not presume to speak for you.”

  His dark eyes were solemn, almost antagonistic. Yet heat prickled her skin and charred her nerves. She set the last bite of madeleine on her tongue. “Aren’t you going to ask whether I will consider it?”

  His gaze dipped to her mouth before meeting hers again. “I won’t presume otherwise. You have demonstrated that you will consider—and do—just about anything.”

  She tilted her chin up. “Are you angry with me?”

  He again did not answer, but looked at her as if taken aback at how close she was to him, even though they were separated by a chair.

  “I’m sure you would prefer for me to remain with Mrs. Watson,” she murmured, “rather than take up Mr. Shrewsbury’s offer?”

  The direction of his gaze: the pulse at the base of her throat. The placement of his hand: a hard grip on the back of the chair. The fine white linen of his shirt rose and fell with every quickened breath.

  The next moment he was ten feet away by the grandfather clock, standing with his back to her. “And when have you ever taken my wishes into consideration when it comes to making your choices?”

  She exhaled slowly, unsteadily. “I won’t apologize, you know. Going to Mr. Shrewsbury was the only choice I could live with, the only way to break through this wall that my family would keep around me all my life.”

  “Have I asked you to apologize?”

  “No, but you are angry with me. Furious.”

  He turned around halfway. If glances could take physical form, his would have speared her to the wall. “There isn’t a single person with the slightest interest in your well-being who isn’t furious with you, Charlotte.”

  “But I’m fine now.”

  “You are not starving in the streets, but you are not fine. You are a lady’s companion, for God’s sake—there is no one worse suited to being a lady’s companion. Today you may rejoice in escaping worse misfortunes. Tomorrow, too, perhaps. But in a week you will be bored out of your mind.

  “When you were living under your parents’ roof, at least you had the possibility of an independent future to look forward to. What do you have to look forward to now? Let me be generous and attribute only the best of motives to this Mrs. Watson. Still it remains that now you are an employee at a position that provides nothing of what you seek—no independence, no intellectual stimulation, and certainly not anywhere near five hundred pounds a year.

  “How long can you last? How long before it sinks in that you have exchanged one cage for another? How long before your mind rebels against listening to the same anecdotes for the fifty-eighth time?”

  She leaned against the desk, needing its support. “You make it sound so bleak.”

  “What did you think it would be? A rich and fulfilling life?”

  This time it was she who did not answer.

  He exhaled. “I will see myself out.”

  He was retrieving his walking stick from the stand when she said, “I will let you sponsor the cost of my emigration and education if you will agree to one condition.”

  “No.”

  “But you haven’t—”

  He set a hand on the door. “I may not be able to tell what your mother had for lunch yesterday by the color of your hat ribbons, but that doesn’t mean I can’t extrapolate what you are about to demand. It will be the same . . . service you tried to extort from me by threatening to go to
Roger Shrewsbury if I failed to provide it.”

  She slanted her lips. “You should have heeded that threat. We’d all be much better off if you’d come off your high horse and done some yeoman’s work.”

  “No, we’d all be much better off if you’d stuffed your idea exactly where I told you to.”

  “I can’t live the way you want me to, all bottled up and pretending that everything is all right.”

  “It’s how the rest of us live. Why can’t you?”

  This debate was inching dangerously close to the lines of their previous conversation, which had flared into a heated argument, and ended with her shouting that no, they really would have all been much better off if he’d taken her advice and never proposed to his wife, an I-told-you-so she had refrained from lobbing at him for six long years.

  They had not parted on the best of terms.

  She sighed. “Fine. Don’t take me as your mistress then, even though you want to.”

  He set his hat on his head. “Good evening, Miss Holmes.”

  She hated it when he called her Miss Holmes in a private conversation. Hated the distance it implied. The gulf that he would not cross.

  “I apologize for being such a trial when you are only trying to help. I’m sorry.”

  He was quiet for a long moment. “You don’t try me, Charlotte. You discomfit me. You make me question things that I would otherwise have happily accepted as given. But that is not your fault. Not the preponderance of it, anyway.”

  He opened the door and left. By the time she reached the stair landing, he was already halfway down. “Now I’m safe with Mrs. Watson,” she called after him. “You don’t need to have me followed anymore.”

  He stilled—and answered without turning around, “Miss Holmes, I have no idea of what you speak.”

  Charlotte opened A Summer in Roman Ruins to her favorite page.

  My aunt delighted in the entertainment of her progeny and not infrequently hosted children’s parties that were almost bacchanalian in their duration and intensity. The energy and volume of two dozen boys and girls did not bother me—I had been guilty of spurring them to ever greater levels of boisterousness. But that summer I slept fitfully, worried that one fine day a gaggle of youngsters with too much cake and orangeade in their bellies would break away from the vicinity of the house and stumble upon my wondrous and fragile site.

  In fact, a reprobate thirteen-year-old preyed on my apprehension by threatening to do exactly that: drive a herd of wild children across the estate to descend upon my dig, wreaking as much havoc as Hannibal had done in Italy with troops and elephants brought across the Alps.

  What I had to do to preserve the integrity of my site, I wish upon no one.

  What memories. An excellent day’s work, blackmailing his fifteen-year-old self into kissing her.

  I don’t want a genteel peck, she’d told him cheerfully. I want you to live up to your scabrous reputation.

  He’d scowled. Do you even know what scabrous means?

  Indecent and salacious.

  That’s the kind of reputation I have?

  He was usually spoken of as “that troublesome young Lord Ingram.” And the other children whispered about him as if he had horns and a forked tail: He had been smoking cigarettes since he was nine; he had caused a dozen governesses to be dismissed; he had got a serving maid into terrible trouble during his very first year at Eton.

  Charlotte didn’t consider any of the rumors credible, except the smoking part—a hint of Turkish tobacco clung to him, not an unpleasant scent for a glowering boy.

  Yes, that’s your reputation.

  He looked at her askance. And you want an indecent and salacious sort of kiss?

  Is there any point to any other kind?

  This last she might or might not have said out loud: the kiss that followed caused a minor malfunction in her brain. She didn’t remember their exchanges afterward either, if anything at all.

  Present-day Charlotte sighed softly. They’d contemplated each other with so little regard on the day they had first and last kissed, he as a target to exploit for her, and she as merely a very strange girl for him.

  If only they could have seen the future.

  “Miss Holmes, you mustn’t worry so much. Everything will be all right,” said Mrs. Watson.

  They were at the tail end of a late supper and Charlotte was eating without her usual gusto.

  She sometimes thought of her mind as bearing a certain resemblance to the post office, a complex system that sorted and conveyed packets of information with speed and efficiency. But at the moment her most prized asset was more comparable to an automobile, a machine liable to break down every few miles and strand the hapless motorist by the side of the road.

  She smiled weakly at Mrs. Watson. “I never used to fret about anything—and didn’t understand why anyone would. If there was something that needed to be done, that was different. Worrying about outcomes over which I have no control is punishing myself before the universe has decided whether I ought to be punished.

  “Now I realize that in my former life I worried about nothing because I feared nothing. That equanimity, which was but a false sense of security, evaporated the moment true consequences appeared. I was unnerved by what might happen to me. Or my sister. And now, my father.”

  She dipped her spoon into a bowl of fruit compote. “You’re right, Mrs. Watson, I mustn’t worry so much. But at the moment I don’t know how to stop.”

  “You are looking at me with hope, Miss Holmes.” Mrs. Watson sighed. “It’s all I know how to do, saying ‘you mustn’t worry so much.’ I haven’t the slightest idea how to nip useless fretting in the bud. In fact, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and worry, even though I am in circumstances that I would have considered enviable in my youth.”

  They fell silent for some time. It was still raining, the rain drumming steadily upon the roof.

  Charlotte speared a morsel of peach and pushed it around in the syrup. “In any case, much uncertainty will be removed tomorrow. Inspector Treadles will let us know the moment he learns of anything.”

  Mrs. Watson likewise stirred the contents of her compote bowl. “Now that you’ve met the inspector in person, what do you think of him?”

  “I like him. He is more or less the man he ought to be, though I hadn’t expected he would be so deferent to his ‘betters.’ Perhaps he conducts himself in such a manner because he doesn’t want it said that he forgot where he came from. Or perhaps he sincerely believes in the validity and authority of the hierarchy in which we live.”

  “In other words, you believe you were right in continuing the pretense that Sherlock Holmes is a man.”

  “Yes.”

  Inspector Treadles was most respectful to Charlotte. But it was a respect that stemmed from gallantry, the kindness the strong owed to the weak, not the regard one held for an equal, and certainly not the admiration he felt for Lord Ingram, whom he clearly considered his superior.

  “What about your friend, Lord Ingram?” asked Mrs. Watson. “He must know that you have no brother named Sherlock Holmes. Yet he seems to have no trouble accepting your powers of reasoning.”

  “He’s long been a victim of my powers—he’s grown inured.”

  “I’ve seen him at polo matches. The ladies are always fanning themselves—some men have that effect on women, even if they aren’t classically handsome.”

  “Well, he’s married.”

  Her statement sounded more like a grievance. An accusation.

  “But not happily so, from what I understand.”

  His marriage was his great mistake. But now that someone who only knew him via gossip had commented on his private life, Charlotte felt obliged to defend that mistake. “Happiness has never been the goal in a Society marriage.”

  “Oh, I have long observed
that. They are very much business arrangements, sometimes absolutely cold-blooded ones. But occasionally one comes across a union that has no reason to exist except for love and that overwhelming optimism love inspires. It’s for those matches that I hold my breath. And it is when they do not succeed that my heart breaks a little, for what might have been.”

  Would there have been a might-have-been in Lord Ingram’s case? If Charlotte hadn’t warned him before his wedding that a perfect woman did not exist except in a man’s imagination, if she hadn’t pointed out that anyone who took the trouble to appear flawless must have an ulterior motive, would he have tested his wife, upon his godfather’s passing, by telling her that he received only a five-hundred-pound annuity, instead of the fortune stipulated in his godfather’s will?

  For it was certain that had he told Lady Ingram the truth, she would have been overjoyed, rather than cold with disappointment and then hot with rage, blurting out that she only married a man known to have resulted from his mother’s affair with a Jewish banker because of what he stood to inherit. Why else would she have sullied the bloodline of her own children?

  The question Charlotte asked herself concerned the weight of her own words. Had they planted the seed of doubt in his mind—or would the same suspicions have formed by that point in the marriage, regardless of whether Charlotte had said anything years before?

  She took a deep breath. “His children are lovely, at least.”

  Mrs. Watson ate a piece of strawberry from the compote, chewing thoughtfully. “Have you ever been in love, Miss Holmes?”

  “No.”

  It would probably have been more convincing if her answer hadn’t been as quick or emphatic, but Mrs. Watson only nodded slowly. “Sometimes that is a blessing, Miss Holmes. A blessing.”

  Fourteen

  At noon the next day a cable arrived for Charlotte, sent to 18 Upper Baker Street.

  Dear Mr. and Miss Holmes,

  I am beyond pleased to inform you that the supply of strychnine at both Dr. Birch’s and Dr. Harris’s had indeed been compromised. The bottles contained no strychnine at all. We now have a case of clearly premeditated murder.