A Conspiracy in Belgravia

by Sherry Thomas

  “Perhaps she’s been there since the night before and hasn’t left,” said Mrs. Watson. “But shouldn’t he be at work? You said it sounded as if she was addressing someone.”

  “What Mr. Finch may or may not be doing with another woman—or with any number of other women—isn’t what we have been engaged to find out,” said Charlotte. “Lady Ingram wished to know ‘whether he has passed away unexpectedly, whether he has married and no longer wishes to continue our acquaintance, whether he has been imprisoned or sent abroad.’ At this point we can answer all of her queries. He hasn’t died, been imprisoned, or sent abroad. He hasn’t married. But by his action it’s obvious he no longer wishes to carry on as they had.”

  “So do we let Lady Ingram know?” asked Miss Redmayne.

  No one answered.

  The question was settled for them when they went to the general post office and checked Sherlock Holmes’s private box.

  There was a letter from Lady Ingram and she wished to speak with them at six o’clock that evening.

  Mrs. Watson studied Lady Ingram’s upside-down image, taking note of her mounting distress.

  “I know this isn’t what you had hoped to hear,” said Penelope, concluding her account, “but it is what we found, Mrs. Finch.”

  Mrs. Watson flinched to hear Lady Ingram’s alias, now that she understood its significance. Even Miss Holmes, she thought, thinned her lips.

  Lady Ingram was silent for a long time. It was difficult to tell via the camera obscura, but Mrs. Watson thought she shook. Then she said, “No, I’m afraid this is all wrong. You must have found a different Mr. Finch.”

  “Even in a city of London’s size, there can’t be that many illegitimate Myron Finches working as accountants.”

  “But you never saw him. By your account you’ve spoken to his landlady and the servants who work in the residential hotel where he lives. But you never saw him with your own eyes.”

  “We are not acquainted with Mr. Finch,” Penelope pointed out. “And you have supplied no portrait or photographs. Seeing him in person would have made no difference to our investigation.”

  “But I know what he looks like. If you’ll give me his address, I’ll arrange to speak to this man myself. There must be some mistake.”

  “That is not what you asked of us, ma’am. We were tasked to discover whether he was dead, abroad, or otherwise detained in such a fashion that he could not get word to you.”

  Lady Ingram’s jaw moved. “I thought that would be enough for me. I thought that would be enough either way. But now that I know he’s well and nothing untoward has befallen him, now that all my frenzied worries have proven to be nonsense, I—I can’t simply let it go. We loved each other. And I love him still. I always will.”

  Unshed tears shimmered in her eyes. She looked at Penelope. “Please, Miss Holmes. I need to speak to him, face to face. I need to hear from his own lips that we are never to see each other again. I need this. And he owes me as much.”

  “Mrs. Finch, listen to yourself,” Penelope said sharply. “You are a married woman. You have a husband who has treated you with honor and kindness. And here you are, pining after a man who has happily moved on to other things. Nothing but further heartbreak and disillusionment await you down this path.

  “Go home. Reconsider. Stop grasping at a past that has already receded beyond all reach.”

  Lady Ingram bolted from her seat. “You have no idea what we had.”

  “But I know that you can never regain it, even if you do see him, even if he agrees to more meetings in the future, and even if you forsake your vows and become his lover. You are a different woman. He is a different man. The most you will achieve is a pale, corrupted echo of your youth, a mirage that will console you not at all.”

  The woman who would never be Mrs. Finch stood as still as a pillar of salt, her fists clenched.

  Miss Redmayne held out an envelope. “This is the fee you paid. There will be no charge for this consultation.”

  Eleven

  “My aunt tells me I was right in denying Lady Ingram any possibility of reaching Mr. Finch,” said Miss Redmayne softly. “But I’m not as sure of it myself.”

  They were back at Mrs. Watson’s house. Mrs. Watson was in her room dressing for dinner, Charlotte scanning the small notices in the back of the paper, Miss Redmayne circumnavigating the afternoon parlor, tapping her fingertips against table corners, mirror frames, and the luxuriant fronds of a large, potted fern.

  Charlotte looked at her. “No?”

  Miss Redmayne sat down on the piano bench, her back to the instrument. “I can’t decide whether I was truly motivated by principle, or whether there wasn’t some vindictiveness on my part, an instinct to punish the one who has made a good friend miserable.” She looked at Charlotte. “Would you have given her Mr. Finch’s address?”

  Charlotte thought about it. “Probably.”

  “And therein lies the difference. You don’t wish her to suffer, but I do, at least in part, and I don’t like that part of me.”

  Charlotte had no interest in seeing Lady Ingram suffer, but it was not out of any particular nobility of character: Whether Lady Ingram was in torment and how much did not affect the situation, or anyone else involved.

  “I wouldn’t have given her the address immediately,” Charlotte said. “I would have asked her to come back in seventy-two hours, if she still wanted it.”

  “Do you think she would have had the wisdom to change her mind? To realize that it’s a useless pursuit?”

  Charlotte shook her head. It required no powers of deduction to see that Lady Ingram was lost to the persuasion of reason—for now.

  Miss Redmayne looked up at the painting that hung opposite the piano: blue sky, blue sea, white marble, and languid, doe-eyed women—a present-day artist’s unrelentingly romantic view of classical Greece. “I remember seeing her at the Eton and Harrow game the year she made her debut. She was so beautiful. Truly a vision. But even then we worried a little, my aunt and I, that he loved her more than she loved him.”

  Her gaze returned to Charlotte. “Five quid says she barges into 18 Upper Baker Street in less than seventy-two hours and demands to know Mr. Finch’s address.”

  Charlotte would wager her last penny on that, almost as sure a bet as sunrise and London fog.

  She folded the paper neatly and came to her feet. “The time has come for me to speak to Mr. Finch in person.”

  Charlotte stopped for a moment as she passed a house in which a thé dansant was reaching its apogee. Strains of violin and cello spilled out, the eternally ebullient melodies of Herr Strauss’s Vienna. Brightly clad figures passed before open windows, champagne cups in hand. Laughter and the hum of animated conversation served as percussion to the music, with an occasional masculine voice rising above the din to lob a word of friendly mockery across the gathering.

  Charlotte didn’t go to many tea dances—they were not so fashionable these days—but the scene itself, this elaborate, stylized merrymaking, had figured prominently in her life for eight summers. And now she was a bystander, an outside observer of all that beauty and artificiality.

  She understood the charges of profligacy and shallowness pelted at the Upper Ten Thousand, at those whose entire lives revolved around endless arrays of entertainment. But she also knew that for those on the inside, it was the only way they had been taught to live.

  Few, in the end, ever truly defied the way they were taught to live.

  She resumed walking. It was almost eight in the evening. Mrs. Woods served a plain supper at seven; her gentlemen ought to have dined by now. Chances were, Mr. Finch would be at home. The woman might still be with him, but that shouldn’t preclude him from receiving his sister.

  Charlotte noticed herself slowing down as she drew closer to Mrs. Woods’s street. She wasn’t nervous about meeting Mr. Finch, bu
t she also wasn’t looking forward to it. In her place, Livia would hesitate because of Mr. Finch’s irregular birth. Charlotte had never understood the brouhaha over parentage—it was to the credit and blame of no one what their progenitors had been up to before they were born. Her reluctance stemmed from the indissolubility of blood ties—once the bond was claimed it couldn’t be repudiated—and she was not keen on granting a permanent place in her life to a stranger.

  She made the turn. Now she was halfway up the street. Three more houses and she would be knocking on Mrs. Woods’s door and announcing that Mr. Finch’s half sister had come to call. Two more houses. One more.

  A young woman bounced up the steps from the service entrance of Mrs. Woods’s place. Charlotte remembered her—the most talkative maid in the servants’ hall. Even though she didn’t expect to be recognized, now that she wasn’t wearing either a wig or a pair of spectacles, Charlotte turned her face and pretended to read the playbills stuck to a lamppost.

  The door opened again and out came Mrs. Hindle’s voice. “Bridget, can you take this basket back to the tea shop?”

  The maid went back. “Yes, mum.”

  “Good. When Mr. Finch comes back, tell him you returned it for him. There ought to be a copper in it for you.”

  When Mr. Finch “comes back”? From where?

  “There better,” said Bridget saucily. “It’s out of my way.”

  Charlotte followed her. She was sure she would be found out within a few steps, but the maid paid little mind to a woman walking behind her.

  At the service entrance behind the tea shop, she knocked and a waitress wearing a long apron opened the door.

  “I got you Mr. Finch’s basket. He won’t be coming ’round for a bit—got sent to Manchester for work, he is.”

  “Ah, you’ll miss him, won’t you, Bridget?” teased the waitress.

  Bridget giggled. “I will. I won’t lie. Such a sweetheart. And none of that nice-to-you-only-to-reach-under-your-skirt nastiness.”

  Charlotte slipped away as the two women exchanged their good-byes.

  She wasn’t familiar with the lives of accountants. Lawyers sometimes traveled for professional reasons, so it didn’t seem unreasonable for accountants to be sent to another city for work-related purposes. But Mr. Finch’s movements of the past ten days were beginning to appear calculated. He left on his holiday soon after Lady Ingram’s notices appeared in the paper. And even when he returned, it was only to leave again.

  One might almost conclude that he wished to avoid Lady Ingram.

  Charlotte sipped the tea—no doubt Mrs. Woods’s best Darjeeling served in her best Crown Derby china—and sniffed. “Really? Manchester? What sort of business?”

  She didn’t quite duplicate Henrietta’s nasal voice, but the sniff was rather spot-on.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know, Mrs. Cumberland,” said Mrs. Woods, wringing her hands, as if the fact that Mr. Finch failed to inform her of the specifics of his trip were a personal failure on her part.

  Charlotte emitted a small sigh, a whiff of air calibrated halfway between magnanimity and irritation, but not before she gave Mrs. Woods’s highly chintzed parlor a pitying look. “Of course you can’t possibly be expected to know everything. But this is vexing nonetheless.”

  “I’m sure it must be.”

  The landlady was nearly simpering—and at the outset she had not looked at all the simpering sort.

  Henrietta Cumberland, Charlotte’s eldest and only married sister, wielded an interesting kind of power over other women. The Lady Ingrams of the world parted the seas with their unassailable glamour. Other leaders of Society relied on their ability to cull an enviable guest list or pull off the event of the Season. Henrietta was neither elegant nor well-connected, and she presided over one of the cheapest tables in the history of dining.

  And yet she had the uncanny ability to put herself into the dominant position in almost any exchange, an inner aggressiveness that discomfited most other women. So they accommodated her and tried hard to please her, rather than risk any unpleasantness.

  “Do you know where he is expected to lodge in Manchester?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know that either.”

  “His date of return?”

  Mrs. Woods’s voice grew smaller and smaller. “No, ma’am.”

  Charlotte sighed again, an expression of open displeasure. “I imagine you also don’t have the address of the firm he works for?”

  “Oh, but that I do. It is listed on his application, which I have in my office. If you will wait a minute, Mrs. Cumberland.”

  Mrs. Woods rushed off. Charlotte relaxed her face from the expression of barely-held-back disapproval that was Henrietta’s trademark. Henrietta used this technique a great deal, demanding a series of items she knew she couldn’t have, each time responding with greater dissatisfaction, until the beleaguered other party leaped with relief at a chance to prove her own knowledge, ability, or authority.

  Mrs. Woods returned, holding two pieces of paper. “This is the list of references he provided. I have written down his employer’s address for you, Mrs. Cumberland.”

  Charlotte accepted the offering. “Let me see his references.”

  “Of course, ma’am.”

  Charlotte scanned the three items on the list. Besides the London firm, there was a landlady in Oxfordshire and a solicitor in the same town. “Thank you. I will see myself out,” she said, handing back the references.

  “Would you like to leave your address, ma’am, for him to call on you, in case he returns before you find him?”

  “No,” Charlotte said with Henrietta’s utter certainty, “I will not be leaving my address. Mr. Finch may be blood, but I cannot receive him at home. Good evening, Mrs. Woods.”

  “Only eight days since Lady Ingram came to us with her problem—and you are already a bona fide imposter, Miss Holmes,” said Miss Redmayne, in smiling approval.

  “Much must be sacrificed in the pursuit of truth,” Charlotte replied modestly.

  She expected Miss Redmayne to find her ploy entertaining—by and large Miss Redmayne still thought her involvement in the Sherlock Holmes business an amusing lark. Mrs. Watson, on the other hand, had always felt deeply uneasy about Lady Ingram and Mr. Finch—more so with each passing day. Her response to Charlotte’s account of her time at Mrs. Woods’s was a fretful silence, broken with a soft gasp.

  “I almost forgot,” said Mrs. Watson. “A letter from the chemical analysts came on the late post.”

  “Nothing from my sister?” asked Charlotte, without too much hope. Mrs. Watson would have already mentioned it, had there been a letter from Livia.

  Mrs. Watson shook her head, her gaze sympathetic. “No, only the chemical analysts. They conducted every test in their repertoire and Mrs. Morris’s biscuits came back negative on all accounts.”

  Charlotte wasn’t surprised—she didn’t think Mrs. Burns, the housekeeper, would have pulled such an obvious move on an already mistrustful Mrs. Morris. But she also didn’t think Mrs. Morris had made everything up. The latter had seemed a little sheepish in describing her robust constitution, but Charlotte suspected that she was secretly proud of that glowing health and took it as a sign that she had been favored in life.

  “Do you know what I think, Miss Holmes?” said Mrs. Watson. “Mind you, I haven’t had proper medical training, unlike our future Dr. Redmayne here.”

  From where she sat, Miss Redmayne sketched a bow.

  “But I was married to a first-class doctor and that was a bit of an education in and of itself,” continued Mrs. Watson. “To me the symptoms Mrs. Morris described sound like a case of severe allergy. Nothing less, nothing more.”

  “You could be right, ma’am,” said Charlotte. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Not all the biscuits Mrs. Morris had brought as evidence were s
ent for chemical analysis. Charlotte returned to her room, took out the one she had kept in a tin, broke off a small piece, and popped it into her mouth. A dessert biscuit, made with a substantial amount of butter in addition to the usual flour, sugar, and eggs. Charlotte was accustomed to dessert biscuits seasoned with ground ginger and cinnamon and liberally studded with currants, candied peels, and shredded coconut. Mrs. Burns’s dessert biscuit was much plainer, no spices, no confected fruits, only a hint of lemon zest.

  Charlotte ate another morsel of the biscuit, stale but still edible. She wasn’t a true gourmet—not yet, in any case. But she possessed a nuanced enough palate, which confirmed that her initial judgment was correct: There was nothing in this biscuit except flour, butter, sugar, eggs—yolks only, to be accurate—and a pinch of grated lemon zest.

  She finished the entire biscuit, scanning the rest of the post that had come for Sherlock Holmes. Nothing was the matter with her. She sat down before her vanity to brush her hair one hundred strokes. No incipient symptoms. She read the chapter on antimony in Poisons: Their Effect and Detection—A Manual for the Use of Analytical Chemists and Experts. And felt no different from how she normally did at this hour of the night.

  So, no noxious substances in the biscuits. She supposed Mrs. Morris could be allergic to one of the ingredients in the biscuits, but they were such common ingredients that Mrs. Morris would have ingested four out of five when she’d eaten a tuile during her visit to 18 Upper Baker Street.

  Could she possibly be allergic to lemons?

  Charlotte dashed off a note.

  Dear Mrs. Morris,

  I submit the chemical analyst’s report. In brief, they could not find any trace of contaminants in the biscuits.

  This does not, however, conclusively disprove your hypothesis.

  If it is amenable to you, I would like my sister to inspect the domestic offices of your father’s house, preferably when the servants are away on their half day.