“But in truth, this life is taken up with more mundane decisions than I could have imagined. Stern Hollow has an excellent staff. Still, the staff deal with routine matters. Anything out of the ordinary gets passed up. And since Lady Ingram had very little interest in the running of the estate, everything eventually came to me.
“In the beginning I welcomed all the decision making. But after a while . . .”
The carriage turned. The lanterns at the front swayed. Light spilled across Lord Ingram’s features, then he was sitting in darkness again.
“About eighteen months ago, I was informed that one of the estate’s gates was in bad shape and should be replaced. I could barely recall such a gate—I had to be shown its location on a detailed map. It was in a remote corner, where the land was a great deal rougher, and inaccessible except by foot or on horseback.
“I said to go ahead and replace the gate. But my estate manager told me that it was the second time the gate had to be replaced in a decade.
“If we replaced one indifferent gate with another, warned my estate manager, we would need to replace it yet again in a few years. We rode out and looked at the thing. He was right; everything was falling apart, not just the gate. So we decided to improve the entire boundary, fences, gate posts, gate. And because wooden gates had proved useless, we agreed that a wrought iron gate would be a much more satisfactory option.
“But how should this wrought iron gate look? I fancied myself a proficient draftsman, so I set about creating designs, only to then learn that some were too fanciful to execute and others too easy to climb over. And while he had my attention on the matter, my estate manager brought up a whole slew of other deficiencies near the gate, everything from a derelict woodsman’s cottage to footbridges that were too rotted for safe crossing.
“Before I knew it, I’d spent three weeks perfecting a part of the estate I would never visit again—not to mention creating and discarding dozens of sketches to finally arrive at an acceptable design for the new gate.
“When it was all done, I felt little gratification. Not even relief. By and large I was stunned that I’d spent so much time on absolute minutiae. On things that I didn’t care about and which made no difference to anyone, except my estate manager, who derived a Calvinist satisfaction from scratching off every last item on his to-do list.”
“Ah, I see,” said Fowler, after a minute. “Undiluted joys are difficult to come by in life.”
Lord Ingram inclined his head, as if in gratitude at being understood. “The chief draw of life in the country—or so my younger self had thought—was family and friends, away from the noise and distractions of the city. But at Stern Hollow, what family life there existed had been a divided one. And what functions we held never without an undercurrent of strain.
“As beautiful as my estate is, and as much as I take pride in looking after it, in and of itself it has given me very little joy and certainly none of the undiluted variety.”
No one else spoke. Treadles squirmed on the inside. What could anyone say when a man laid bare the truth of his life?
Of course Lord Ingram needed, absolutely needed, to strike Chief Inspector Fowler as candid, with nothing to hide. But surely, this was going a little too far.
And then Treadles remembered the person sitting beside Lord Ingram. He hadn’t been addressing the policemen, he’d been speaking to her, specifically and entirely.
She had listened with the quietness of good soil soaking up the first drops of rain. And even now, when he had stopped speaking, she was still listening.
To the sound of his breaths?
All at once Treadles felt a pang of longing for Alice, for her slightly honking laughter, her sweet-smelling hair, and the wink she always gave him when she brought him a sip of whisky, because she would have brought herself a larger one at the same time.
He missed her. He missed her so much. He missed—
It occurred to him, with a reverberation of shock, that she hadn’t gone anywhere. That she hadn’t turned out like Lady Ingram, to have married him for any kind of gain. That she hadn’t even been cold or distant—all the formality and aloofness had been on his part alone.
They were near their destination when Fowler spoke again. “When we questioned ladies Avery and Somersby earlier today, they said something rather interesting. They said, in so many words, that you are in love with Miss Charlotte Holmes. Are you, my lord?”
Treadles sucked in a breath, the sound mortifyingly loud in the otherwise impenetrable silence.
Did Lord Ingram tense? Did he brace himself for what he was about to say? “I have not thought in that direction.”
“That is hardly something that requires thinking, is it? Either one is in love or one isn’t. Are you, my lord?”
With no excitement or unease that Treadles could sense, Charlotte Holmes turned toward her friend, a man being forced to expose the deepest secrets of his heart.
He glanced out of the carriage, at the cottage they were rapidly approaching, golden light spilling from every window. “Yes, I am. I am in love with her.”
15
“Sherrinford Holmes” did not disappear into the bowels of the cottage, then to reemerge as her true self.
Instead, they met a gamine-looking young woman in the parlor. “A good friend of the family,” said Charlotte Holmes, “Miss Redmayne.”
Miss Redmayne cheerfully shook hands with all three men. “Good to meet you, Chief Inspector Fowler. I have heard of you from Sherlock, Inspector Treadles. And my lord, it is good to see you again.”
“Always a pleasure, Miss Redmayne,” said Lord Ingram, with a smile.
“How is the great savant?” asked Charlotte Holmes.
“Cranky, as usual.”
“The Good Lord ought to consider making non-cranky geniuses, for a change.”
“At least he is a genius. Plenty of men are cranky without the least bit of brilliance for excuse. Gentlemen, do please sit down.”
A maid came in and brought a considerable tea tray. Miss Redmayne poured for everyone. Charlotte Holmes and Fowler each accepted a biscuit.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Treadles heard himself say, “is Mr. Holmes’s sister not here today?”
“She has been in Scotland, visiting friends. Part of the reason Sherlock is rusticating in the country, instead of solving cases in London.”
“And part of the reason I came here,” said “Sherrinford” Holmes. “Someone has to be the great genius’s eyes and ears and able interpreter.”
“Exactly,” echoed Miss Redmayne. “This past summer Miss Holmes was also away from London for some time, and dear Sherrinford couldn’t be spared, so I stepped in to help for a fortnight.”
Fowler set aside his tea. “To help as . . .”
“I told clients I was Sherlock’s sister,” said Miss Redmayne. “I thought it would be something fun to do, a change from dissecting cadavers, and—”
“I do beg your pardon, Miss Redmayne. Did you say, dissecting cadavers?”
“Yes, I’m a medical student at the Sorbonne. I’m afraid by now I’ve more than a nodding acquaintance with human anatomy.”
“I see,” said Fowler, taken aback.
“As I was saying, I was home on holiday and thought it would be a lark to receive Sherlock’s clients, pour tea, and listen to their problems. Little did I know Lady Ingram would turn up at our door, seeking help.”
It made sense, using someone else in the role of Sherlock Holmes’s sister, as Charlotte Holmes was known to Lady Ingram.
Lord Ingram rose. “I believe I will take a stroll outside.”
Fowler waited until the door had closed behind Lord Ingram. “Mr. Sherlock Holmes did not refuse to help Lady Ingram after learning of her request, even though Lord Ingram is his good friend?”
“I was both astounded and a little dismayed, I must admit,” said Miss Redmayne. “But Sherlock’s view was very much that just as I wouldn’t refuse to treat Lady Ingram, if she
came to me bleeding and in need of medical help, he ought not to turn her down simply because she was the estranged wife of a friend.”
“Lady Ingram bleeding to her death and Lady Ingram wanting to meet the man she once loved—those are not equivalents,” Treadles said, less to Miss Redmayne than to the other woman in the room, the one calmly turning her biscuit on a plate.
After Lord Ingram had admitted that he loved her, Fowler had asked whether his sentiments were reciprocated. And Lord Ingram had said, after a moment, I cannot tell. Sometimes I am not sure that she understands the full spectrum of human emotions.
And here she was, demonstrating precisely that lack of understanding. Even if she’d felt nothing in the summer, shouldn’t she be racked with guilt now, for going behind his back like that?
“Nevertheless,” said Miss Redmayne, “we took on Lady Ingram as a client.”
Her account accorded with what Lord Ingram had said, that they had been making progress when Lady Ingram suddenly called off the search. “We were relieved but also suspicious, which was why we finally decided to tell Lord Ingram, in case unfavorable changes were coming his way.”
Treadles had no idea who Miss Redmayne was, in truth, but he found that he believed her. Had he been wrong about Lady Ingram not loving any man enough to run away from her entire life—or was there something else at work?
“How did he take it?” asked Fowler.
“As well as anyone could be expected to take such news.”
“And this would have been . . .”
“The day before the ball in honor of Lady Ingram’s birthday.”
“During which she disappeared.”
“During which she departed,” corrected Miss Redmayne, amiably yet firmly.
“Did Sherlock Holmes predict this . . . departure?”
This question was addressed at “Sherrinford” Holmes, who said, “I wasn’t on hand for the case, but I don’t believe he was surprised that she left.”
Fowler finished his cup of tea. “Would it be at all possible to speak with the great consulting detective in person?”
“Outside of his intimates, Sherlock hasn’t received callers since his unfortunate accident,” said “Sherrinford” Holmes. “But he understands this is no ordinary visit on your part. Please come with me and please excuse the dimness of his room—he cannot tolerate strong light.”
So it would be a counterfeit then, passed off with the help of smoke and mirrors. Treadles breathed a sigh of relief.
He shouldn’t have been so worried in the first place—until she had investigated Lady Ingram’s murder to her satisfaction, Charlotte Holmes needed all the illusions she’d built around the character of Sherlock Holmes to remain intact.
Which begged the question of why he had fretted so in the first place.
You are irrational at times—more so than you want to admit.
He didn’t pursue that thought—it was a discomfiting one. And because they had now arrived before Sherlock Holmes’s room.
He held his breath. Would this deception pass muster?
The corridor already smelled medicinal. When the door opened, the odors of camphor and carbolic acid immediately rushed out. Inside the room it was indeed dim. Treadles’s eyes were first drawn to a lamp that had been placed on a shelf, which was crowded top to bottom with bottles of tinctures and compounds.
And then his gaze came to rest on the man on the bed—and he very nearly gasped aloud.
The man’s face was a horror, a crisscross of deep welts that made Treadles think of red clay soil that had been drunkenly plowed. One scar cut straight across his nose. Another pulled back his upper lip to reveal missing teeth.
Beside Treadles, Chief Inspector Fowler, who must have seen no end of disturbing sights in his life, seemed barely able to hold his revulsion in check. Even Treadles, who knew that it was all playacting, couldn’t help some very real twinges of fear and pity.
This was powerful theater, not something pulled together without both forethought and expertise. It made Treadles wonder what else had Miss Holmes arranged.
What else had she prepared for.
“Sherrinford” Holmes went to the man’s bedside. “Sherlock apologizes that he is no longer able to communicate except via touch, in a simplified Morse Code. He offers his greetings and asks whether there is anything he can do for you.”
“We are most grateful that he has received us, and sincerely sorry to disturb his repose,” Fowler managed. “If he has some insight he would like to share with us, we would be most appreciative.”
“Sherrinford” Holmes took the hand of the man on the bed and waited for some time. “Cisterns. That was his message.”
“Would he be referring to the cisterns at Mrs. Newell’s house that broke, sending her guests to Stern Hollow?” asked Fowler.
“That is correct,” confirmed “Sherrinford” Holmes.
“Thank you, Mr. Holmes,” said Fowler. “Now, if I may ask one more question. We have spoken to both Lord Ingram and Miss Redmayne about Lady Ingram’s case. But neither, thus far, has mentioned a name. Surely, Lady Ingram must have given you a name for you to begin your investigation.”
As she had done before, “Sherrinford” Holmes took the man’s hand. After half a minute, she glanced at him, a brow raised.
Then she turned back to the policemen and said, “According to Sherlock, the man’s name is . . . Moriarty.”
“Sherrinford” Holmes bade the police good night in the parlor. “I will remain with my brother tonight.”
When Chief Inspector Fowler and Treadles emerged from the house, Lord Ingram was waiting for them under the porch, in the company of a young copper who had been dispatched from the local constabulary. Lord Ingram was not smoking, but the scent of cigarette lingered.
“I apologize for keeping you away from your friends, my lord,” said Fowler. “Will you care to say a few words to Sherlock Holmes? We can wait in the carriage.”
Lord Ingram shook his head. “Sherlock Holmes is already doing what he can. He knows my situation and he knows my gratitude.”
As they climbed into the coach, Treadles couldn’t help but wonder whether, all things being equal, he himself would be as grateful. After all, would Lord Ingram be under as much suspicion if he hadn’t been seen with Miss Holmes in the summer? If the fact that he was in love with her didn’t carry such weight against his struggle to prove his innocence?
As if he heard Treadles’s thoughts, Fowler said, “We have already sent a message to be published in tomorrow’s London papers. We hope Miss Holmes will come forward promptly.”
“I’m sure she will,” said Lord Ingram. “When you meet her, do convey my regard.”
“Have you, by any chance, confessed your more tender sentiments to Miss Holmes, my lord? Or have you any plans to do so in the near future?”
“No. And no.”
Treadles winced.
“In which case, I must apologize,” said Fowler, sounding not at all sorry. “It is unlikely that we will be able to keep it a secret, as we will be speaking to her on that very subject.”
“I dare say she already knows,” answered Lord Ingram. Then, more softly, “I dare say she’s known it for years. For longer than I have, if anything.”
Charlotte, free of all disguises, regarded herself in the mirror.
“Oh, your skin is red from the glue.” Miss Redmayne tsked, fussing over her. “Here, I have some rose water. Pat it over your face. That should calm it down. Some chamomile tea also wouldn’t hurt.”
Charlotte puffed up her cheeks and moved her jaw left and right. The worst wasn’t the glue, but the modified orthodontia she’d worn for most of the day. If she never put them in her mouth again, she would consider herself blessed.
“I haven’t had the chance to thank you yet, Miss Redmayne, for coming so swiftly.”
After Charlotte had some time to think the day before—had it been only a little more than twenty-four hours since they’d received Livia
’s distraught note?—it had been easy to predict that several things would happen.
One, Lord Ingram would be forced to tell as much of the truth as possible, most likely relying on the surface version of Lady Ingram’s search for her lost lover, in order to avoid touching on the fact that her perfidy had cost the lives of three agents of the Crown.
Two, the account of her search would lead to a call on Sherlock Holmes, the one who had undertaken the endeavor for her.
Three, the police would wish to speak to Charlotte Holmes, whose rapport with Lord Ingram would become a central line of inquiry in a case that gave them little else to go on.
Charlotte didn’t mind speaking to the police, but Sherlock Holmes was a different matter. They would need to see a man. She could not meet them both as Sherlock Holmes’s sister and later as herself. And Mrs. Watson, needed for other things, couldn’t be expended on this occasion.
So among the tasks she had entrusted to Mrs. Watson to accomplish had been a cable to Miss Redmayne, begging the latter to make haste and return to England. Mrs. Watson, confident, capable Mrs. Watson, had of course executed everything perfectly.
“Don’t thank me for coming,” said Miss Redmayne. “I would have been upset if you hadn’t informed me right away. And I would have caught the first train to Calais even if you’d told me I wouldn’t be of any use here.”
She sighed. “I wish I’d been able to speak more to Ash. Poor thing, he looked—I mean, he looked fine but he seemed . . . heavyhearted.”
There was the weight of his wife’s murder—and the uncertainty of his own future. But was part of the heaviness there because he had been forced to speak truthfully of his sentiments to Charlotte, a woman he wasn’t sure understood “the full spectrum of human emotions”?
“It will be all right, won’t it, Miss Holmes?” asked Miss Redmayne.
The Hollow of Fear: Book three in the Lady Sherlock Mystery Series Page 20