Treadles was slightly uncomfortable with sitting at a table in public with a woman—or two, for that matter. Things were changing, of course, but for men and women to dine together in public—suffice to say he had never been at the forefront of such changes.
But it would be worth any amount of discomfort if Miss Holmes would give him a sign that all would be well. That Lord Ingram had not entrusted his fate to her in vain.
Not a flicker of recognition, however, crossed Miss Holmes’s features—Treadles remembered that by formal rules, they had never even met. The parties presented themselves. Miss Holmes introduced the older woman as Mrs. Watson. “My patroness, for whom I serve as companion.”
The men exchanged a look. What lady would have a fallen woman as a companion?
Mrs. Watson smiled and said, “I was an actress and as such, not a very good fit for the very respectable young women who usually seek positions as companions. Miss Holmes and I, on the other hand, are a perfect match.”
Miss Holmes inclined her head toward her “patroness.”
Treadles had to marvel at the number of associates Miss Holmes could lay claim to. How did a young woman who ran away from home manage to establish a reliable network in such a short time?
Tea, sliced cake, and finger sandwiches were swiftly served. They spoke for a few minutes about the weather, and then Fowler got to work.
“Thank you for meeting with us, Miss Holmes. You have heard of Lady Ingram’s passing, I imagine?”
“What the papers had to say, yes.”
With a start, Treadles realized that until she gave this answer, he had not thought of her as Sherrinford Holmes, who had studied Lady Ingram’s body in the icehouse alongside the police.
“You didn’t hear directly from Lord Ingram?” asked Fowler, sounding dubious.
“He and I are not in regular contact.”
Miss Holmes was an extraordinarily efficient liar, every word delivered with naturalness and calm conviction. Gently but firmly, she fended off Fowler’s questions.
Yes, the meeting with Lord Ingram the past summer, at this very tea shop, had been a coincidence.
How likely was such a coincidence? No more unlikely than that the waitress who served them should in turn serve Lady Avery at a place hundreds of miles away.
Hostility on Lady Ingram’s part? Nothing to it. Not being liked by her was the norm—her antagonism was a broad and catholic entity, aimed at no one in particular.
Did Miss Holmes not feel distraught that her old friend was a prime suspect in the murder of his wife? No, she had complete faith that Scotland Yard would discover the truth.
“And if that truth should be unfavorable to Lord Ingram?”
“Then what could anyone do?”
Treadles could only hope this was not her true sentiment. As delivered, her words fell with a disheartening detachment.
Fowler leaned forward an inch. “Are you aware, Miss Holmes, that Lord Ingram is in love with you?”
Mrs. Watson sucked in a breath.
Miss Holmes, who had known this for days—if not years, as Lord Ingram had declared—remained unmoved. “He has something of a preference for me, certainly. But love? I would have thought he’d had enough romantic love to last a lifetime.”
Fowler sat back in his chair and regarded her, no doubt recalling Lady Avery’s comment on her oddness. Oddness, what an anodyne description for a woman who might not be entirely human.
“You are in difficult circumstances, Miss Holmes,” Fowler began again.
“Am I?”
This question gave Fowler even greater pause. She did not conduct herself as a woman in trouble. That extraordinary poise, for one thing. For another, Mrs. Watson, her patroness, was clearly a little in awe of this “companion.”
“As a result of your choices, you can no longer be part of your family.”
“You have not met my parents, Chief Inspector. I do not know of many who would want to remain a permanent part of their household.”
“What about your sister?”
“You contacted me via a cipher I created for the two of us, specifically. I assume you have already met her?”
“We have.”
“Did you receive the impression that she blames me for what happened?”
“No, I did not.”
“Then in what way am I in difficult circumstances, sir?”
Fowler couldn’t answer that.
“No doubt it will be difficult for you to understand, but my fall from grace has opened an entire new world for me. I enjoy my life far more than I ever have. I have the freedom to do as I wish. And I do not suffer from a lack of funds, thanks to dear Mrs. Watson here. Indeed, by my own estimation, I am a woman in an enviable position.”
Fowler gave his tea a stir. “Very well, then. But would your position not become even more favorable, were you to marry Lord Ingram?”
“How so? I do not care for Society. I have little interest in household management and even less in childbearing. I am my own mistress right now; why should I take on a lord and master in the form of a husband?”
“Does Lord Ingram himself not present any attraction for you?”
“He does, most assuredly. I have propositioned him three times.”
Even Fowler’s jaw dropped. “Not proposed, but propositioned?”
“Correct. I thought then and I think now that it would be a fine idea if he were to become my lover.”
“But you will not marry him, the surest way to turn him into your lover?”
“No. I want him for one thing and one thing only. That is no reason to marry a man.”
“And Lord Ingram knows that?”
Lord Ingram knew it emphatically, but Treadles was breathless to hear how she would answer that.
“He knows it better than anyone else. But it’s a moot point, whether I will marry him. He will not marry me.”
“Because you have propositioned him three times?”
Miss Holmes smiled slightly, as if she found Fowler’s question risible. “Because he does not trust that I will love him. And he is correct in that regard. I find romantic love a difficult concept to grasp—at least with regard to marriage. Men and women change. Sentiments change. Yet we are expected to make lifelong contracts based on fleeting emotions.”
“That isn’t what marriage is about,” Treadles found himself saying. “One goes into a marriage knowing that changes are always afoot. The point is to weather the vicissitudes of life together.”
“Is that so, Inspector? Or does one go into a marriage expecting everything to remain as it is on the wedding day? Most of the marriages I have seen close up do not inspire confidence, because always, at least one spouse rues the changes that have been brought on by the passage of time.”
She looked squarely at him, as if she already knew about the fragile new bond between him and Alice. As if she already perceived his fear that he would not be able to nourish this new bond as he ought to. And that it, too, will someday fray and snap.
He looked away, ashamed that he couldn’t say more to defend either his own marriage or the idea of wedded bliss as a whole.
Her gaze returned to Fowler. “No, Chief Inspector, Lord Ingram will not offer for my hand—not even for love.”
She paused and considered a moment. “Especially not for love.”
“Three times? Three times?” Mrs. Watson exclaimed, once they were inside her carriage.
Charlotte shook out her skirts. “Two and a half times, strictly speaking. The second time I needed only an instrument for the riddance of my maidenhead. He wouldn’t oblige.”
Roger Shrewsbury had obliged instead, in his largely incompetent manner.
Mrs. Watson let out a breath, as if she couldn’t quite believe what they were talking about, even as she herself drove the conversation. “If you’ll pardon my incurable nosiness, what about the other two times?”
A murder investigation was truly a unique phenomenon. Now there were two policemen
in London with intimate knowledge of the amorous history—or the longtime lack thereof—between Charlotte and Lord Ingram. And here was Mrs. Watson, quite justified in wanting to know a bit more about her friend and protégée than did a pair of coppers.
“The third time was at 18 Upper Baker Street—before you had your brilliant idea to monetize Sherlock Holmes’s gifts. He proposed to sponsor me to emigrate to America, where no one knew me, and where I could go to school and find respectable employment. I told him I would agree to those terms if he would take me as his mistress. He refused.”
Even though at that point he no longer needed to worry about compromising her, since she was already hopelessly compromised. The man could be needlessly stubborn.
“And the first time?” Mrs. Watson sounded a little breathless.
“Shortly before I turned seventeen. We’d known each other for a while by then, and I decided that he would make for a good—or at least interesting—lover.”
“But you were so young, practically children!”
For someone who had led a rather scandalous life, Charlotte reflected, Mrs. Watson was rather easily scandalized. At least by Charlotte.
“It’s hardly unheard of for girls to be married at sixteen. And he had already lost his virginity, so it wasn’t as if I threatened him with imminent deflowering.”
Mrs. Watson giggled. “And he said no to this non-threat.”
“After I wooed him with a beautifully wrapped French letter, no less.”
Mrs. Watson covered her mouth with both hands, scandalized anew. “Where did you even find such a thing?”
“I believe I have told you that my sister and I snooped in our father’s study whenever the opportunity presented itself?”
Mrs. Watson nodded.
Sir Henry and Lady Holmes had never told their children anything of true importance, such as the family’s near bankruptcy. Their two youngest daughters, who had always been each other’s greatest allies, had formed the habit of finding out everything on their own.
“I always read my father’s diary. Once he recorded the name and address of a store where he had been sold a condom. I wrote to the shop and asked whether they conducted any business by post. They were happy to assist. So I sent in a postal order and picked up my purchase at our local post office.”
“You did this when you were all of sixteen?”
“No, the year before. I was fifteen.”
“I’m surprised—and relieved—that you didn’t proposition his lordship then.”
“I thought about it. But decided I wasn’t yet curious enough.”
“Even though you’d already purchased a condom?”
“A condom, a sponge, and a syringe for flushing out any semen that hasn’t been blocked by the condom and the sponge—if you want the itemized list. For my expenditure, the shop sent me a copy of Fanny Hill, gratis.”
Mrs. Watson gasped. “And what did you do with that?”
“I read it. Then I sold it to Roger Shrewsbury, for twice what it would have cost him to buy.”
Mrs. Watson’s lips moved, but no words emerged.
“I know,” said Charlotte, shaking her head. “Mr. Shrewsbury was never the most enterprising of fellows.”
“Did Lord Ingram know that?” Mrs. Watson sounded slightly choked.
“He brokered the deal—and took a cut of the profit.” Charlotte smiled. “He wasn’t always as stuffy as he later became.”
She wasn’t sentimental about some mythical past version of him—he might have been more adventurous, but he’d also been naïve and arrogant. Adversity didn’t improve everyone—or the world would be filled with men and women of flawless character and sublime insight. Lord Ingram, however, had endured his misfortunes with grace and forbearance and had chosen to become a better man.
When Charlotte commented on his stuffiness, it was never about returning him to his former self—she liked him as he was—but from a deep-seated wish that he would let himself be happy.
Or at least less burdened.
And she had no idea if that would ever be the case.
“Does it really not make any difference that he loves you?” came Mrs. Watson’s soft yet fervent question.
Charlotte sighed. “It isn’t that love makes no difference; it’s that what he and I want out of life are diametrically opposite. It’s far easier for people who want the same things to fall in love than for people who want different things to remain in love.”
Mrs. Watson’s breath caught. “Are you—are you saying, Miss Holmes, that you are in love with him?”
Charlotte made no reply.
She’d already given answer enough.
Livia was proud of herself. Downright, heart-poundingly proud.
She had taken advantage of Mrs. Newell’s general distress about the bomb to refuse the offer of her maid for the way home. “You need her more than I do. I have traveled this route more times than I can count. There has never been any trouble in the ladies’ compartments. Don’t worry. My parents won’t know a thing.”
And she had prevailed, for once.
But as her hired trap drew abreast of Moreton Close, her warm self-confidence began to turn into something less sustaining. The garden had faded since her previous visit and little resembled the sunny, trim place she remembered. All the windows were shuttered—in the middle of the day! And not a bit of light seeped out from around the edges of the shutters, the way it would have if candles and lamps had been lit, as they must have been on this cold, gray day, if anyone at all were inside.
No one answered her summons. She pulled the bell cord again and again and made enough of a ruckus to rouse even Sleeping Beauty.
`Still no one came.
Remembering the path that led to the wrought iron gate, she ran down that way, pushed open the gate, and knocked on the door of a cottage. At last someone answered, a woman with flour-covered hands.
“Afternoon, miss,” she said tentatively.
“Good afternoon. Can you tell me where all the people in the house went, Missus . . . ?”
“Garnet. Everyone went to the south of France for the winter.”
The south of France, which Livia had always wished to visit. For a moment she was terribly envious of Bernadine, until she asked herself how likely was it that for the pittance her parents paid, Bernadine would receive trips abroad, above and beyond the already miraculous bargain of Moreton Close.
“All the ladies who can’t look after themselves went to the south of France?”
Mrs. Garnet looked confused. “There’s only one lady in the house and she looks after herself just fine.”
“Only one lady?”
“There are her husband and her sons, but she’s the only lady.”
Livia’s ears rang. “But I was here last week and I saw with my own eyes a houseful of ladies.”
“Last week the mister and I went to see our grandbaby. Maybe miss went to a different house?”
Mrs. Garnet’s tone was sympathetic, but that only made Livia’s voice rise faster. “It was this house!”
“Well,” said Mrs. Garnet apologetically, “the family went two weeks ago. I don’t know how the house could have been full of ladies last week. I really don’t know.”
Charlotte alit in front of the bijou house in St. John’s Wood where she’d met Mrs. Farr the evening before and stayed the night. She waved good-bye to Mrs. Watson, now headed to her own destination.
Inside the house she took off both her hat and her wig—a woman’s wig, this time—and sat down in front of the vanity table to massage her scalp. In the mirror she seemed thinner. Was she already down to only one point two chins?
Another face appeared in the mirror. “Counting your chins?”
“Me? How dare you accuse me of such rampant self-absorption!”
Lord Ingram smiled. “How was your meeting with the police?”
“It went as you would expect.” She turned around. He was very close to her, her favorite place for hi
m to be. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I know.”
She exhaled. “Tell me what has happened since I left—I assume you didn’t come just to sleep with me.”
He stepped even closer. “And you would be wrong about that.”
“I’m still unsettled to find myself in bed with you,” said Lord Ingram.
“I just find it strange that I’m abed in the middle of the day,” answered Holmes. “But I don’t mind.”
She was looking at him rather fondly—and that made his heart beat fast. They lay a few inches apart, he propped up on an elbow, she with her head on a pillow, a hand under her cheek. He brushed a strand of her hair back from her forehead, taking care not to touch her elsewhere.
“Is it true, what I once heard your sister say, that you don’t like to be embraced?”
She took some time to think. “Sometimes Livia needs to hold someone, and I’m the only suitable person nearby. When I was little, I used to wriggle out of her arms and escape to a corner of our room. But it wasn’t so much that I couldn’t stand being held as that I didn’t want to be held indefinitely. Later I taught myself to count to three hundred to mark five minutes—which helped me to realize that she needed only about half that time. I can take two to three minutes of being held. But Livia remains hesitant to this day—she’s still scarred by my bolting away from her embrace.”
He would be, too.
In fact, sometimes he felt scarred by her, even though she had never done anything except be an excellent friend.
She lifted her hand and hesitated for a moment—as if she expected to be brushed aside—before she reached across and touched the back of her hand to his jawline. “I know I’ve said this, but you shouldn’t have come.”
“I know. I’ve lost my mind.”
She tsked. “But I guess I can’t be entirely displeased, especially given that . . . What do you call that thing you did?”
“Madam, I did more than one thing to you.”
“You know the one I mean. I don’t think they did that even in Sodom and Gomorrah.”
The Hollow of Fear: Book three in the Lady Sherlock Mystery Series Page 26